Spiritual I: The Life's Breath

I've been arguing against using the word spiritual in relation to Buddhism for a while now. My contention is that the word has all the wrong connotations for Buddhism, we don't believe that humans have spirits, do we? One of the frequent counter-arguments is that spiritual simply doesn't mean what I say it does. In what I consider one of the most important essays I've written (Metaphors and Materialism) I identify the word spiritual with a tradition of ontological dualism and now I would link it another in the form of Vitalism. So is this fair?

Ancient Indian Buddhists had a practice of adding prestigious adjectives to names. It's still goes on today. VIPs, especially religious VIPs affix śrī to their names, sometimes more than once, e.g. Sri Sathya Sai Baba, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, and Sri Sri Sri Nirmalanandanatha Swamiji.

In early Buddhist texts one common prestige word, curiously, was brahman: brahmavihāra, brahmacarin, etc. It's curious because it's a word which can only have come from the Vedic context and derives it's meaning from Brahmanism. It refers to the cosmic essence with which the theologically minded Brahmin hopes to merge at death (a new idea introduced by the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad). Alongside brahman was ārya 'noble'. Before long Buddhist started to prefer ārya. Avalokiteśavara becomes Āryāvalokiteśvara; Tāra becomes Āryatāra. The Prajñāpāmitāhṛdaya becomes then Āryaprajñāpāramitāhṛdaya. And so on. And we know that mature tantra substituted vajra: vajraguru, Vajrasattva, vajra-everything. Nowadays the adjective is spiritual: spiritual tradition, spiritual community, spiritual practices, spiritual teachers, spiritual experiences, and spiritual awakenings.

The key adjective in all cases is used to mark out a conceptual space. It is not merely linguistic, does not merely rely on denotation, but also defines social and political roles and relationships. A spiritual teacher is a very particular type of teacher for example, with a very particular relationship to a student and a particular kind of role in an organisation.

In this and two subsequent essays I will try to excavate around this word spiritual to see how it became the religious prestige word of the moment. My argument is that just as the Dalai Lama has adopted the ecclesiastical title of a Pope, i.e. His Holiness, the word spiritual is one we Buddhists have adopted from Christianity and because of this it comes with all the connotations and entailments of the Christian world view. However the word spiritual had already begun to be used independently of the church when Buddhism started to become popular, particularly in spiritualist circles: the space defined by spiritual was already contested allowing us to stake a claim in it.

Part I, this essay, will begin with the etymology of the word, showing how the word draws on various words for 'breath' as a metonym for 'life' and is intimately tied up with Judeo-Christian ideas on the animation of inanimate matter (which I've already shown to be an anachronistic view). I'll show that 'life's breath' is very common way of understanding life in the pre-modern world, but is ultimately based on misunderstandings about how the world works and in particular how the human body works.

Part II will look at the word in terms of frames as described by George Lakoff and try to analyse the web of images and ideas invoked by the word. Part II will critique the applicability of these frames to the Buddhist project.

Having looked at how the word is used Part III will shift the focus onto who uses the word. Influenced by Michel Foucault Part III will look at the power relations implicit in the domain marked out by spiritual, or what we might call the politics of spirituality.

Etymology

Our usage of the word "spiritual" is tied up with translations of the Christian Bible, especially Genesis and the story of the creation of Man:

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. Genesis 2:7, King James Bible (Bible Hub)

Here, breathed and breath of life are distant translations of Hebrew words: way·yip·paḥ and niš·maṯ ḥay·yîm respectively. (Note that "God" here as elsewhere is ’ĕlōhîm which is the plural of El 'God'). (Bible Hub) In Biblical Greek "breath of life" was translated pnoín zoís from pneuma 'breath' and zōēs 'life'. Biblical Latin at first translated the pneuma part with words derived from anima, which also derived from a root meaning 'to blow, to breath' and is also equivalent to Greek psykhē (meaning something like animating essence) which itself comes from a from PIE root *bhes- 'to blow, to breathe'. In Augustan times translators settled on the Latin spiraculum vitae from spīritus 'to breathe' and vita 'life' (from vivare 'to live' and cognate with Sanskrit jīva). After being animated Adam is described as animam viventem 'a living soul'.

The word spīritus has a range of meanings:

'a breathing (respiration, and of the wind), breath; breath of a god,' hence 'inspiration; breath of life,' hence 'life'; also 'disposition, character; high spirit, vigor, courage; pride, arrogance.'

Of course we also find spīritus sanctus 'the Holy Spirit' playing an important role in Christianity. Spīritus derives from a Latin verb spirare 'breathe'. It can be further related back to a Proto-Indo-European verbal root: *(s)peis- "to blow, to fizz". If we start from the root and work forwards we find it at the base of a relatively restricted range of English words. The Indo-European Lexicon lists 'fart, fizz, fizzle' all via Germanic and 'spirit' via Latin.

Words derived from the Latin spīritus begin to appear in English in about the 13-14th century and may either have come more or less directly from ecclesiastical Latin or via Norman French. This period coincides with mature Middle-English as the language of most of England, representing the final merging of Norman French vocabulary into Old English (Anglo-Saxon) to produce a single language. It left English with a rich vocabulary for many domains, for example (see also table below):

breath (Old English bræð), quick
inspire, expire etc. (French)
spirit; anima (Latin)
pneumatic, pneumonia; psyche (Greek)

The noun spirit first meant 'animating or vital principle in man and animals' and derives from a French usage meaning 'soul'. Compare the modern French esprit. Online Etymology Dictionary. Thus we see that from the beginning spirit in English is a metonym for spiraculum vitae 'the breath of life', that which makes us animam viventem 'a living soul'. Our word spiritual is an adjective deriving from spīritus and primarily meaning 'of or concerning the spirit'. Spiritual is also used in the sense of 'pertaining to the church'.

There are several subsidiary senses of 'spirit' that help to shed light on what the word meant in Medieval times. From about 1400 spirit began to mean ghost - the disembodied spirit of a dead person; often in the sense of a spirit that has not (yet) ended up in either heaven or hell. The word ghost comes from PIE *gheis- "to be excited, amazed, frightened" (c.f. German geist). From about 1500 the word was used to suggest "a nature, character". This line of connotation developed so that spirit as 'essential character' appears by the 1680's and becomes common in the 1800s. Thus I can write in the spirit of Enlightenment scholarship or comment on the zeitgeist (the spirit of the times). The sense of 'divine, related to god' is attested in the 14th century. When we say someone is "spirited" we mean they are lively, energetic, courageous. This sense is attested from 1590, though Milton uses it to mean "possessed by a spirit." OEtD

This takes us close to the crux. For pre-modern people the difference between living and dead matter was breath. I think we've come such a long way that it's difficult to get our heads around this nowadays. What God did in creating Adam was gather up some dead matter, some dust, and "breathe life into it"; he animated it - indeed he inspired Adam. The metaphor is BREATH IS LIFE. Breathing is the activity par excellence of living beings. This metaphor is quite widespread in the ancient world.

The Life's Breath

In pre-scientific times to live was to breath; and die was to stop breathing. However, the ancients came to a very different understanding than we have today. We now know that when the diaphragm muscles contract it draws air into the lungs where oxygen molecules cross the membranes to enter the bloodstream and be captured by haemoglobin molecules for transportation around the body. At the same time carbon-dioxide crosses the membrane in the other direction so that our our breath contains less oxygen and more carbon-dioxide than our in breath. In the mitochondria of our cells oxygen takes part in creating an energy transfer molecule, adenosine-triphosphate (ATP) and is converted to CO₂ in the process.

In ancient India by contrast the arrow of causation between the bodily movements of breathing and the air entering the body was reversed. For them the movements of the air element (vāyudhātu) caused all bodily movements, particularly the movements associated with breathing and not the other way around. Vāyu takes in the movements created by the wind (leaves rustling in trees), the movement of the bodies limbs, and the movements associated with breathing. Vāyu in the body is called āna 'breath' and comes in various forms indicated by the prefixes: apa, ud, pra, vi, and sam. We have:

• apāna 'down-breath' (aka fart; Monier-Williams resorts to Latin at this point: ventris crepitus); 
• udāna 'up-breath' the breath involved in speech; 
• prāṇa 'fore-breath', but used in the sense 'breath of life'; 
• vyāna 'diffused-breath' (spread throughout the body); 
• samāna 'complete-breath' (?) circulates around the naval and essential for digestion (though digestion itself is a kind of fire, the food must move through the body); 

The Buddhist practice of āna-apāna-sati (Skt ānāpānasmṛti) involves watching the in and out breaths (though note the connotation of apāna in Sanskrit!).

In China we find a similar idea in 氣 qì (Japanese pronunciation ki) The Chinese etymology is blowing 气 qì (may have been a man blowing) on rice 米 mǐ. (Another more in-depth interpretation via Language and Meaning). The character has a wide range of meanings: "air, gas, the atmosphere, weather; breath, spirit, morale; bearing, manner; smells, odours; to be angry, anger;  provoke, annoy." In our context means 'vital energy'. It is this energy which gives the martial artists their control and power and which the acupuncturist believes they are manipulating. 

It's possible that the Sanskrit reflexive pronoun ātman 'myself; the body; soul') may derive from either √an 'breath' or √at 'move' though this is unclear. The Proto-Indo European Lexicon puts ātman alongside a very small group of Germanic words (e.g. Old Saxon āðom 'breath, vapour') that may derive from a form such as ēt-mén-. Monier-Williams links ātman to Greek ἀυτμή (= autmē) 'breath'. However these etymological connections look tenuous and ēt-mén- is too complex to be a root. So what is the primitive? (PIE) ēt- > (Skt) at > (Grk) aut > (Old Saxon) āð 'breath'? It's not entirely clear what lexicographers had in mind here. We might see ātman as √at-man 'animate' where the -man suffix forms neuter action nouns, e.g. karman (< √kṛ), dharman (< √dhṛ), though why has the root vowel been lengthened in ātman?  This would link ātman to the PIE root *at- 'to go' which gives Latin annum (dental plus nasal gives rise to a double nasal) and Germanic aþnam 'years'. I don't see how we can derive ātman from √an and there are no suggestive PIE forms either. Clearly there is considerable overlap in the semantic field, especially when we consider that movement is product of vāyu, but the etymology here is ambiguous at best.

Note 11 June 2014. Just discovered that in Ṛgveda the word tman signifies both breath of life and self. This suggests that ātman is not āt-man but ā-tman. And this also makes it unlikely to derive from either √an or √at. Also the use of ātman is not common in early Vedic and predated by the possibly cognate tanū in ṚV. Tanū is thought to derive from √tan 'stretch, extent'.

Thus spirit, and many related words and concepts are references ultimately to the spiraculum vitae or the élan vital of ancient Vitalist views on the nature of living things.

Conclusion

Despite being demonstrably mistaken with respect to human anatomy some people still take ancient views of what animates the body as accurate and relevant. There is nothing wrong with doing yoga, daiji or any of the other ancient techniques which purport to manage or manipulate the breath qua life-force. Most are beneficial in some way and thus may be recommended. However, while breathing and respiration is certainly essential to sustaining life, the view that breath, as an entity, animates the body is demonstrably false.

The view that breath causes the bodily movements and not the other way around is also demonstrably false. Ancient Vitalist views of bodily processes are false. If we are genuinely concerned with reality and want our views to align with reality, then we must reject these ancient Vitalist views, at least in the terms they present themselves.

The history of our word spiritual is inextricably tied up with ancient Vitalist views. In the next essay I will look more closely at what it means in the present day using a method drawn from Lakoff's analysis of language. I will try to show that modern usage is still tied up with Vitalism and will argue that this ought to make us think twice about identifying Buddhism as a "spiritual tradition".

~~oOo~~

Next Up: Spiritual II: Frames.

The linguistic domain of the "breath of life"

PIE	Greek	Latin	Sanskrit	Old English	Modern
aiu̯ (life)		aevus (aeon) vivus?	āyu		aye, age, world
*ane- (breathe)	anemos	anima	āna, prāṇa, udāna etc	eðian	animal
*bhes- (blow, breathe)	psykhē				psyche, psychosis,
*gweie- (live)	bio (one’s life) zōēs (animal life)	vivare	jīva	cwic	quick zoo
*gwhre-?(scent, smell)				bræð	breath
*gwhren? (diaphragm,mind, soul)		phrenia			frantic -phrenia
*gheis- (shock)			√hiṃs (harm)	geist	ghost, aghast
*pneu- (breath)	pneuma			fnora (sneeze)	snore, apnea
*(s)peis- (breathe)		spīritus, spirare			fart, spirit

English Words related to spirit:

aspire, conspire, dispirit, expire, inspire, perspire, respire, spiracle, sprightly, sprite, transpire.

Breath and Spirit in Arabic

Crossing the Line Between Death and Life

In discussing Vitalism and science I mentioned the threshold between living and dead matter. I've already written at some length about the idea of life after death. I've argued that we need to consider Buddhist afterlife beliefs in the context of other afterlife beliefs and to see the structural similarities that make it very similar to other afterlife believes. I've also discussed the problem of transmitting information from one like to another and how pratītyasamutpāda was modified to try to preserve the Buddhist doctrine of karma.

In this essay I want to explore the threshold between death and life, and particularly in this direction, more closely. It seems to me that our perception cannot help but be biased on this subject because of the way we experience life and death. I also want to touch on the state of the field of abiogensis, the study of how living cells might have been created from a combination of non-living components. Of we still don't have all the answers to this question, but we haven't been looking for very long, just a few decades. For most of human history we believed that God, in one form or another, animated dead matter to make living things. Note that the issue of an interim state (antarabhāva) between death and life will be dealt with in a forthcoming essay.

The Quick and the Dead

Our usual perspective on the distinction between living and dead matter arises out of seeing living beings die.  Often if we're with someone who dies and it's calm enough to make observations, we will see that they simply breathe out and never breath in - they expire. Perhaps this is why life is associated with the breath? With no more in-breath the functions of life swiftly stop. I will deal with the issue of the breath and vitalism in a separate essay.

We do not directly witness a "new life" starting in the sense of conception or embryos developing and until very recently did not even know about gendered gametes fusing for form a new zygote. Certainly most of us never see so-called "dead" matter turn into "living" matter since it happens out of sight. We eat food in the form of once living but now dead living things, but we don't see the process of how that "dead" matter is incorporated into our living bodies. We don't see iron being encapsulated in a haem and becoming haemoglobin and transporting oxygen around our bloodstream We might even understand that this does happen, but we never witness it.

Any explanation for life must not only account for large scale beings like humans, but also for microscopic life and even for single celled organisms. The amoeba is clearly a living thing. If matter can enter and leave a living organism continually without ever affecting the status of the organism vis-à-vis' living, then we can explain this in two ways. 

On one hand we might say that as a cell absorbs, say, a molecule of oxygen that has been transported in the blood by haemoglobin, that individual molecule is endowed with jīva, becomes alive, and participates in the collective life of the being. But this sounds a little implausible since oxygen does the same chemistry outside living cells. If every molecule has it's own nano-jīva or some infinitesimal portion of a cosmic jīva then all matter is alive (to some extent). And if all matter is alive then the transition of a living being from alive to dead is just a matter of perspective, since the matter doesn't die when the person dies. The idea of a single life force, splinters into billions of trillions of tiny life forces that add up to a living being. The question is how we would distinguish jīva from ordinary physical energy. Here jīva and energy both do something similar, i.e. animate matter. The argument here is that individual molecules or even subatomic particles must have some animating force. Even so, since matter can appear dead we're still left wondering what is different between a handful of clay and a mouse. We haven't solved the problem of the distinction between life and death at all.

On the other hand we can see life as a property of the cell and see the matter, which comes and goes, as just a building block or a container for a singular jīva. This view is compatible with Vitalism and (more or less) Materialism. But it does mean there is no real distinction between living matter and dead matter; there's just matter and the distinction only applies to larger conglomerations of matter. For the vitalism something non-material (i.e. not made of matter) is added to the cell to make it live whereas to the materialist what is added is energy in various forms particularly heat and stored in chemical bonds.

Either way it seems that matter itself cannot be alive or dead. Matter is just matter. There's no such thing as living matter and dead matter. However there living organisms and dead organisms. So life is not a property of matter per se, but only of organisms. Though of course organisms are complex structures built of matter. 

We used to imagine that something must enter the body at conception in order to make it living. But microscopy has showed that even before conception the zygote is a fully living thing. Sperm are produced as living things in a male's testes. Eggs are living in the ovaries of females from before birth. In the reproductive cycle there is never a time when a cell is produced dead and becomes alive. New living cells are formed from dividing old living cells. All of our cells are from lineages of cell division stretching back at least 3.5 billion years old. So if we never really go from being dead to being alive then what role could a jīva play?

The only time we really need a life force to explain anything is 3.5 billion years ago when the first living organisms came to life. 

Abiogensis

Our perspective on the threshold between life and death is almost exclusively focused on the transition from life to death because the transition the other way is invisible to us in every day life. However scientists have been able to "see" into this domain in new ways in the last century so - the field is called abiogensis meaning "originating from the non-living".

image: Duke

The classic experiment that kicked off this field recreated our best guess of the physical and chemical conditions in the earth's atmosphere 3.5 billion years ago. The Miller-Urey Experiment (1953) created a closed system containing a mixture of gases made up of water, methane, ammonia and hydrogen. The gases were subjected to a continuous electrical spark intended to imitate lightening. The experiment ran for a week and at the end it was discovered that a rich variety of organic molecules had been spontaneously synthesised. The products included many molecules essential to life including amino-acids that make up proteins.

Many subsequent variations of this experiment have been conducted and showed that by fine tuning the conditions almost all the molecules required for life might have spontaneously occurred on early Earth. New theories about the conditions on early earth have provided new avenues of exploration. In addition, analysis of meteorites has shown that they frequently contain organic compounds as well and may have seeded some of the important molecules to the "primordial soup". 

It's no longer beyond the scope of imagination for all of the required elements of life to have assembled spontaneously. Enclosed membranes made of lipids form under the right conditions; RNA molecules self-replicate and even noticeably evolve; amino acids occur in asteroids and meteors. It's only the last step that remains unknown. Just as quantum mechanics has broken down the barriers between physics and chemistry, the study of molecular biology is breaking down the distinction between chemistry and biology.

Life as a New Kind of Stability.

We've known for a long time that high energy systems are unstable and tend to find ways to shed energy and achieve greater stability. We understand this process as increasing the entropy in the system. Entropy can also be understood in terms of order: a highly ordered state has less entropy. With no external inputs systems tend to lower energy, less order, i.e. higher entropy states. So a drop of coloured dye in a container of water will diffuse until it is randomly distributed through out. A hot object will radiate heat until it matches the ambient temperature around it. If we add energy to a solid it will become a liquid then a gas (decreasing order) and vice versa.

Addy Pross, Professor of Chemistry at Ben-Gurion University, Israel, has suggested that living systems attain a new kind of stability that is different to the thermodynamic stability of minimal entropy states (Aeon Magazine). Over time the entropy of the universe increases. But living organisms bucks this trend. Living things at the molecular level is both high energy and highly ordered, indeed living things continually absorb energy rather than shedding it. In terms of thermodynamics living things ought to be unstable and short-lived. But living things are remarkably stable in thermodynamic terms. Pross calls this dynamic kinetic stability.

Pross argues that this dynamic kinetic stability is a feature of self-replicating molecular systems. For example, given the right conditions RNA molecules spontaneously self-replicate. But not always perfectly. All self-replicators will tend to exponential growth, but some variations replicate faster than others. The faster variants will come to dominate a system. A system of two RNA replicators which catalyse each other is even more stable.

Thus there seem to be two kinds of system stability: "one based on probabilities and energy, the other on exponentially driven self-replication." Mathematical of both kinds of system are relatively simple. Pross concludes: 

"This distinction does not trace the dividing line between living and dead matter precisely – but it does explain it, and many of the other riddles of life into the bargain."

The approach is explored in more depth and the state of the field of systems chemistry is reviewed in Ruiz-Mirazo et al. (2014) - see below. 

Conclusion

In trying to think about the distinction between life and death most of us are hampered by only having access to knowledge of the transition in one direction: living to dead. I would argue that even the conception process which involves the joining of two already living gamete-cells is rather abstract for most people. The bio-chemistry which describes the movement of matter into and out of living systems is opaque to non-scientists. Thus most of us are ill-equipped to understand the distinctions between living and dead organisms. Certainly many Vitalists still seek to frame the discussion in terms of living and dead matter despite this being anachronistic and inapplicable.

The science of abiogensis is far from providing a complete description of the systems that might have existed as precursors to living cells. The first serious attempts to recreate the conditions for living systems date only from the 1950s. It's easy to forget that it's only a few decades since such investigations began. It is relatively early days for this field and some significant progress has been made and there is no reason to believe that at some point a plausible set of starting conditions and pathways will not emerge. As Ruiz-Mirazo et al. conclude:

"Although chemistry operating on the prebiotic Earth must have been extraordinarily complex and heterogeneous, we believe it is not impossible to understand. A number of concepts and methodologies, developed over the past 30 years, are now mature enough to ensure a brilliant future for such an old and challenging endeavor of human beings: getting to know about their ancient origins from inert chemical matter."

The most important conclusion however is that there is no need to posit a life force which animates "dead matter". This aspect of Vitalism is entirely discredited. 

~~oOo~~

See also (updated 23 Apr 2015)

Attwater, James & Holliger, Philipp. 'A synthetic approach to abiogenesis.' Nature Methods 11, 495–498 (2014) doi:10.1038/nmeth.2893

Pross, Addy. 'Life’s restlessness.' Aeon Magazine. 

Ruiz-Mirazo, Kepa; Briones, Carlos; and Escosura, Andrés de la. 'Prebiotic Systems Chemistry: New Perspectives for the Origins of Life.' Chemical Reviews. 

Singer, Emily. How Structure Arose in the Primordial Soup. Quanta Magazine. (16 April 2015)

Wolchover, Natalie. A New Physics Theory of Life. Quanta Magazine. (January 22, 2014)

~o~

More essays in my series on Vitalism.

25 Feb 2016.

A very interesting view on the origins of life is the Alkaline Hydrothermal Vents Origin Theory. One of the leading proponents of this theory is Nick Lane (who was interviewed this week by Jim Al-khalili on his Life Scientific radio show). A full length (71 min) description of this theory can be found on YouTube. I highly recommend this lecture. This is the most plausible theory of the origin of life that I know of. It also critiques the Miller-Urey approach, which never got beyond creating amino acids, and shows how to improve upon it.