On the Nature of Experience

I'VE BEEN READING  a lot of Pāli suttas in Pāli lately and came across an interesting pair: the Uppādā Sutta (A 3.134) and the Paccaya Sutta (S 12.20). They're a pair because they apply two abstract qualities-- dhammaṭṭḥitā and dhammaniyāmatā--to their subjects: the three lakkhaṇas in the first case; dependent arising (paṭiccasamuppāda) and dependently arisen dhammas (paṭicca-samuppannā dhammā) in the second. In cross referencing my notes on the two a reflection flashed into my mind, which I will try to flesh out here.

As always my context is experience. Although the terminology remains a little vague I see dhammas as the objects of the mental sense - arising from mental objects directly, or through the mental objects created when we process sense consciousness arising in relations to sense objects.

S 12.20 is in the Nidāna Saṃyutta, and in Pāli it assumes that we have read and learned S 12.1 where the nidāna chain is spelled out in full. Subsequent suttas of this saṃyutta abbreviate the chain with pe which here means 'etc.' or 'ditto'. Note that here we find the standardised twelve nidānas, so this whole section of the Nikāya represents the mature Canonical thinking with all the wrinkles and differences ironed out. This is just a contextualising comment, not a polemic. It represents a particular stage in the development of this strand of Buddhist thought.

The sutta makes two main points. For reasons of space I will focus on the first, which is that dependent arising is the nidāna chain, and has the form of statements such as 'from the condition of birth, there is ageing and death' (jāti-paccayā jarā-maraṇaṃ). The form and the content of this statement are true if tathāgatas (plural!) arise or not. That is to say the authors believed that this observation is not a special revelation from the Buddha, but a fundamental truth about experience. I would argue that the mature twelve membered nidāna chain introduces some awkwardness into this process because it's become a little more than a model of experience. We have to wonder about the relationship between upādāna, bhava and jāti for instance. But leaving aside metaphysical problems for now, this process of experience is described as:

ṭhitā'va sā dhātu dhammaṭṭḥitā dhammaniyāmatā idappaccayatā

The first part 'this property (sā dhātu) is persistent (ṭhitā eva)...' is relatively straightforward (note that ṭhitā takes a feminine ending so it must be an adjective of dhātu). In the case of birth, everyone born will die. We don't need a Buddha to tell us this. Indeed even the idea that 'everything changes' is not specific to Buddhism. [see Everything Changes but So What?]. The rest of model is not going to be intuited exactly by non-Buddhists, but it's recognisable when explained. In the absence of a Buddha, Western psychologists developed models of experience which are not so different.

The next three terms do need some explanation. But before getting into the individual terms I want to make a comment on the form of this phrase (which itself is actually the second half of a sentence). The last three words are strung together without connectors, which tells us that they are also adjectives related to dhātu. Being a feminine noun, dhātu forces the pronoun (sā) and the adjectives to take feminine endings (-ā) also. It's quite common for the first adjective to precede the noun, and the others to follow it. The dhātu (element, property) is a property of paṭiccasamuppāda, has four characteristics: ṭhita (persistence, stability) and the other three. It will help to reinforce the fact that the context of this phrase that the first half is "whether tathāgatas arises in the world or not". So now to the other three adjectives.

This notion of conditionality is also described as dhammaṭṭhitā. We need to read translations carefully, because other translators do not read this as an adjective of dhātu but as a standalone statement with dhamma (often The Dhamma) as the subject. Hence Bodhi "the stableness of the Dhamma" (p.551). Thanissaro "this regularity of the Dhamma" (ATI). I can't go along with this, and neither does Buddhaghosa who sees dhamma- here as plural i.e. 'mental objects'; and tells us that conditionally arisen dhammas persist with that condition (paccayena hi paccayuppannā dhammā tiṭṭhanti), i.e. as long as the condition persists. Bodhi doesn't often disagree with Buddhaghosa, but here is an example. If we follow Buddhaghosa, and this time I do, then we must read dhammaṭṭhitā as 'the persistence of dhammas [in the presence of their condition].' This makes good sense. Confusingly Buddhaghosa commenting on the parallel phrase at A 3.134 glosses dhamma-ṭṭhitatā with sabhāva-ṭṭhitatā where sabhāva means ‘nature; state of mind; truth, reality’, most likely meaning ‘nature’. I think trying to make sense of this would take us too far from the main theme.

It's worth digressing to ask why two Theravāda bhikkhu's going against the Great Commentator here, to make persistence a quality of The Dhamma rather than of dhammas? Buddhists often want the Dhamma to be something cosmic; not (only) related to the nature of experience, but to the nature of everything. In other words Buddhists want to see Buddhism as providing a Theory of Everything. There are times when Buddhists appear to favour the idea that Buddhism is a revealed rather than an empirical religion, and that paṭicca-smuppāda is a kind of cosmic order to the universe. Perhaps this explains the situation?

We have a similar situation with the next term. Again Buddhaghosa helps as he says that dhammaniyāma refers to the way that the condition constrains the dhammas [that arise] (paccayo dhamme niyāmeti). Again Buddhaghosa uses the plural; and again compare Bodhi: "the fixed course of the Dhamma"; and Thanissaro: "this orderliness of the Dhamma"; both using the singular. Now look at an unrelated passage at M i.259 which explores this quality from the other side:

yaññadeva, bhikkhave, paccayaṃ paṭicca uppajjati viññāṇaṃ tena ten'eva saṅkhaṃ gacchati.
From whatever condition cognition arises, it is known as that kind of cognition.

Pāli Buddhism makes no allowance for synaesthesia: eye forms, and eye faculty only give rise to eye consciousness; never to ear, nose, tongue or body consciousness. This is a constraint (niyāma) of the Buddhist process of cognition. So dhammaniyāmatā refers to this kind of constraint which is a feature of dependently arisen dhammas, rather than a magical quality of The Dhamma. The tendency to translate niyāma as 'order' is one that I'm quite resistant to. Certainly paṭiccasamuppāda does seem to impose constraints (niyāma) on experience in the minds of the authors of this text; and this suggests that experience is to some extent orderly - but such order gives rise to constraints, so dhammaniyāmatā is not a reference to the order itself, though it could seen as assuming a fundamental order.

One little note on this word niyāma: my main source of Pāli is the 1954 Burmese Sixth Council Edition of the Tipiṭaka published (for free) by the Vipassana Research Institute, and it always uses the spelling niyāma. The PTS edition will sometimes have niyama in the same place. VRI modestly report: "The version of the Tipiṭaka which [the 6th council] undertook to produce has been recognized as being true to the pristine teachings of Gotama the Buddha and the most authoritative rendering of them to date."

The last of the four adjectives, idappaccayatā, posses less problem since it is a commonly used and understood term. In fact it is almost synonymous with the previous term. It means that each specific outcome has a specific condition: i.e. birth is the specific condition for ageing and death, while becoming (bhava) is the specific condition for birth. It is probably not significant that A 3.134 leaves this adjective out.

So mature Pāli sutta Buddhism sees this process of dependent arising as quite deterministic: this situation persists, the way that dhammas arise from conditions is always the same, the results are determined by the conditions, and nothing else. They see this process as independent of a living Buddha.

A 3.134 applies this same analysis to the three lakkhaṇas using the well known formulae (c.f. Dhp 277-279):

sabbe saṅkhārā anicca - All experiences are impermanent.
sabbe saṅkhārā dukkha - All experiences are disappointing.
sabbe dhammā anattā - All mental events are insubstantial.

Here saṅkhārā seems to refer to complex constructs of sense object, sense faculty, and sense cognition along with the resulting responses (vedanā, papañca etc.); that is to say [unawakened] experience in it's fullness. All experience, including the first person experience, is just the ephemeral coming together of conditioned processes; and because we fail to grasp this our expectations are distorted and all experience is disappointing; with the arising of experience nothing substantial (attā here in the sense of 'body, form') comes into being. In other words experience has no clear ontological status: 'existent' and 'non-existent' don't apply in this domain (c.f. the Kaccānagotta Sutta. S 12.15). Experience is just experience, nothing less (i.e. not just an illusion), but nothing more. Experience is neither real nor unreal, it is dependently arisen.

If paṭiccasamuppāda describes the nature of experience, then the lakkhaṇas are the consequences of that nature, with an emphasis on the consequences for those unaware of that nature. Our fundamental problem, according to my reading of the Buddhist tradition, is that we don't see the processes clearly, and therefore we don't understand the consequences. The traditional solution to this problem is to pay dispassionate, even minded, close attention to experience to see for ourselves how it actually works; and then to base our responses to sensations on the knowledge we have gained. Flinching from the flame is perfectly reasonable, but usually this is accompanied by stories both gross and subtle which are the dukkha that we cause ourselves. The authors of the Canon saw similar limitations on the processes and the consequences because they are two sides of the same coin.

We don't have to go along with the redactors of the Canon and see the 12 nidānas as the definitive model of experience; we don't have to accept the deterministic spin they put on it; we don't have to go along with modern exegetes deification of The Dhamma; but we can see that there are some useful principles here, and some practical outcomes.

We don't have to throw the baby out with the bath water, but we should be prepared to throw out the bathwater. If I can stretch this metaphor, Buddhists have been very reluctant, on the whole, to pull the plug on the bath, and have opted to just keep on adding more water; so that often the bathtub over-flows, and the baby is in danger of drowning. However in the West we all have indoor plumbing, hot water on tap, and (mostly) modern sewerage - pulling the plug is not such a big deal. Of course if we do pull the plug we are left holding the baby, but the baby will grow into an adult if we nurture it.

Rebirth & Buddhist Fundamentalism

Nullius in verba

Accept nothing on authority

Motto of the Royal Society

RECENTLY THANISSARO, the Theravāda bhikkhu of Access to Insight fame, published a forty page essay entitled The Truth of Rebirth and Why it Matters for Buddhist Practice. Thanissaro's essay is quite measured, and makes it clear that the Buddhist tradition has believed in rebirth since its earliest records of belief. To not believe in rebirth goes against a long record of believing. But as I've tried to show the evidence emerging from several branches of scientific enquiry make any afterlife belief seem implausible, but that this hardly matters to the majority of Western Buddhists. [Rebirth is Neither Plausible nor Salient].

It seems as though belief in rebirth is going to be a watershed issue for Buddhism in the modern world. Either we take rebirth on faith and believe, or we do not. And if we do not, we stand accused by Old Buddhism of being non-Buddhist. Though Thanissaro himself does not make this accusation, several of my readers have suggested that because my views are not traditional, they are not ipso facto Buddhist. Thanissaro himself takes a 'Pascal's Wager' approach to Rebirth (better to believe than not), and rather than dismissing the non-believer, he does suggest that we will not get the best out the Buddha's teaching if we do not at least "give [the Buddha's] statements on rebirth a fair hearing".

Faced with a forty page essay, filled with many citations from the texts, we may feel daunted. We may feel overwhelmed by the sheer mass of the citations from the Canon. One way to win an argument is just to keep talking until your counterpart gives in. We may grant to Thanissaro and other fundamentalists that the Buddhist texts are full of references to rebirth. Thanissaro himself is very familiar with the contents of the Pāli Canon, something of an expert, so he should know.

But we do not need to deal with Thanissaro's argument on the level of detail for the simple reason that his essay rests on a couple of false assumptions, indeed the whole stack of his citations is built on very flimsy foundations.

Citing Scripture

I too can play the "Citing Scripture" game. Perhaps not as well as Thanissaro, but well enough. In response to Thanissaro I ask readers to consider the Tevijjā Sutta (D 13). I've done this before, but let me recapitulate. In the Tevijjā Sutta many different Brahmins claim to lead out of saṃsāra and into union with Brahmā. But when the Buddha questions the students who have approached him, it turns out that none of their teachers, or their teachers' teachers down to the seventh generation, or any of the ancient ṛṣis who composed the mantras (under divine inspiration) have ever met Brahmā, or been to his realm personally. 'So if they have no personal experience how can they teach?' the Buddha asks. Their words are religious cant (appāṭihīrakata D i.239); indeed their words are just laughable, prattle, empty and worthless (hassakaññeva, nāmakaññeva, rittakaññeva, tucchakaññeva D i.240).

So my main question to Thanissaro is this: if he knows and sees for himself from personal experience why does he argue from scripture and lineage? If he does not know, and does not see, why does he teach? Or is he like the Brahmins in the Tevijjā Sutta: yaṃ na jānāma, yaṃ na passāma tassa desema. 'we do not know, we do not see, yet we teach'. My sense is that Thanissaro, and other Buddhists, do not argue that we should believe in rebirth because they know from personal experience that it is true, but from fear of the consequences if we cease to believe. They fear that without the supernatural elements Buddhism will cease to be meaningful. This is something I need to address separately, but for now let's just say that it's a poor foundation for a lifetime of renunciation (so it must haunt a bhikkhu). The situation is probably worse for someone who's life is predicated on being a "Buddhist Teacher" because in changing their story they'd have to admit they got it wrong all these centuries. Not easy.

Consider this: if our scriptures are to be taken literally, then why not other scriptures? By Thanissaro's underlying logic we should also take the Bible as the literal word of God and an accurate history of the times it discusses. I don't know Thanissaro, but somehow I doubt he would accept that God created heaven and earth in six days just 6000 years ago, and that we will only come to the Father through the Son, else go to hell for eternity. The Buddha's advice to the Kālāmas was not to base their behaviour on revelation, lineage, tradition or citations from scripture, but to act as they knew from experience to be good.

The modern evidence is very firmly against the plausibility of rebirth. Experience is telling us that rebirth is simply no longer plausible, whatever our texts say. I do not deny that this creates problems for us. But we'll just have to deal with them. Won't we?

Textual Authority

Thanissaro has a much, much deeper problem which is the naive assumption that the Pāli texts represent the actual thoughts and words of the Buddha, and an accurate record of the history of mid-to-late first millennium BCE India. There are some extreme positions on this issue - the most extreme seem to come from North American scholars who say that all of this is simply untrue. I try to take take a middle way and to see the value of the texts while seeing their limitations.

What we have, what the Pāli Canon is, is a series of parallel oral histories several of which coalesced and were translated into the dialect we now call Pāli thus becoming "the Pāli texts". Other streams manifested as other lineages in other languages, but most disappeared without a trace. With the Pāli texts we often find several re-tellings of stories with differences in the details (compare for instance D 27, M 95 and Sn 3.9). Where we have records of texts over time (such as when they reappear in Mahāyāna guise) we find that Buddhists have often made major changes to the texts. The example of the Samaññaphala Sutta is one that fascinates me. In the Pāli kamma is inescapable (c.f. Dhp. 127) and Ajātasattu is doomed to hell for killing his father. But this changes in later editions where the magical power of meeting the Buddha firstly mitigates, and then removes altogether the negative consequences of his parricide. The Doctrine of Karma in fact underwent very significant change outside of the Theravādin milieu - there's a long essay in this sometime.

We also see clear evidence of tampering with the texts by monks. For example in the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta we find, in section five, a discussion about pilgrimage places beginning at 5.8 (p. 263 in Walshe's translation). The discussion continues in 5.10-12, but 5.9 is just a diatribe against women. As that old curmudgeon Walsh mildly points out: "this small passage seems arbitrarily inserted at this point" (p. 573, n. 430). This means that monks, since it could not have been anyone else, have tampered with this 'sacred text'. The Therīgāthā verses of Bhaddā (Thig 107-111) give the lie to the bhikkhu's hatred towards women having a basis in the Buddha's own attitude (an idea found in many sutta passages, and most of the Vinaya). Reginald Ray has also shown that the story of Devadatta as an evil murderer has been clumsily superimposed on the story of Devadatta the arahant (Buddhist Saints in India p.162ff), probably by sectarian monks.

These are just some of the most blatant examples of tampering. What about the monks who were less clumsy, but no less bigoted or sectarian? How do we tell what comes from the Buddha and what comes from the monks? The answer is that we cannot know with any certainty!

And if you are reading a translation you are in an even worse position since the translators make a range of arbitrary decisions about what the text means when the translate - it's an arcane art. But something even worse happens in Pāli text translations. Frequently, and tacitly, a translator will simply translate the commentarial gloss rather than the text itself, usually because the text is so obscure the translator cannot make sense of it. I've caught most of the famous translators doing this. We don't know for sure that this has not happened from the first - that difficult passages have simply being changed, usually to fit the orthodoxy of the time. You'll never know unless you read the text in Pāli whether you are reading the supposed words of the Buddha or actual words of Buddhaghosa (who lived about 800 years later in Sri Lanka!).

Nor can we be absolutely sure of the period that the texts represent. I do not accept the arguments which say that there is no evidence at all of Buddhism before Buddhaghosa, or the slightly less extravagant version which says that there is no evidence before Asoka. I think these are extreme views that take too narrow a view of what constitutes evidence (literalism is no more attractive in scholars than it is in religieux). There is a middle ground that involves a careful reading of circumstantial evidence. It places the origins of Buddhism this side of the middle of the first millennium BCE, probably in the fifth century or thereabouts. One can quibble about this, but an argument from absence seems considerably less substantial than an argument from circumstantial evidence. There is a further problem in identifying the period of the Pāli literature. At best, if we accept that the form of the Canon became fixed in the first century CE, the Pāli texts represent a period of at least several centuries. Some of the Canonical texts are clearly written a long time after the Buddha - some centuries at least.

Some argue that the consistency in the Pāli texts points to a single founder and point of origin. However one could also argue that the inconsistencies point to an incomplete process of standardisation, as in the cases Devadatta and Bhaddā! Where a list exists in versions with 8, 10 and 12 items, we generally assume that monks added items as time went on. This phenomena of incrementing lists is a fundamental feature of the Canon - the texts remained relatively fluid for an unknown period of time. They do not represent a single written revelation like the Bible or Koran, but the collective working out, over several centuries, of what was understood of what was remembered, by a disparate group.

There is also the embarrassing fact we discover on closer inspection that in some cases we no longer understand the texts on their own terms. Some of the words, and passages can be explained, but when we dig we often find that these explanations originate in the commentary and it's clear that the commentator was also at a loss to understand the text. Important aspects of the Canon are in fact incoherent in ways that are hidden by the received tradition. The down side of learning Pāli and actually reading the scripture is that these problems start to become apparent almost immediately. Thanissaro's translation notes make this clear less often than Bodhi or Ñāṇamoli, but he also has to grapple with mysteries.

Thanissaro's section on "Modern Ironies" seems very dated indeed. I certainly don't think the "modern" arguments that he puts forward only to by refuted by scripture, are very convincing. They appear, ironically, to be tired old straw dogs from philosophers, rather than new arguments from scientists or historians. And I think the really devastating critiques of religion come from history rather than science! There is no answer to the charge of lack of personal experience on the part of Buddhist teachers. So called "scientists" interviewing young children notwithstanding, where are the Buddhist teachers who don't have to rely on scripture, Iron Age world-views, and Medieval dogmas; but who know from personal experience?

Don't get me wrong, I love the Pāli language and the Canon. I spend a lot of my time reading and studying the Canon. But one has to be realistic about what it represents, and Thanissaro, in this essay at least, is not realistic. The texts are not the source of authority he claims them to be. We pejoratively call someone who takes scripture literally a fundamentalist. And Thanissaro is taking scripture literally in this essay. At best we may say that in this essay Thanissaro is expressing a fundamentalist view of Buddhism. For a contrast Thanissaro's critique of Romanticism in Buddhism is really useful. My intention here is not to criticise Thanissaro personally, but to criticise the ideas expressed in his essay. I'm grateful to Thanissaro for his translating efforts.

According to the Tevijjā Sutta Thanissaro announcing the "Truth of Rebirth" is just like a man who has announced that he is going to marry the most beautiful girl in the land, though he doesn't any idea about her background, what she looks like, or where she lives; and in fact has never met her. "The truth about rebirth" is just an idea we read about in books.The irony is that the texts themselves give stern warnings about this approach to Buddhism.

What Danger Does Buddhist Fundamentalism Present?

I've already written about my attitude to Buddhist fundamentalism, but I want to take another look at it in the light of Thanissaro's essay. We might ask what danger Buddhist fundamentalism presents. Isn't it all quite harmless? What does it matter if, on the basis of a literal reading of scripture, someone forms a firm belief in rebirth? On the face of it Buddhists seldom go to war on the basis of what they read in their scriptures, and compared to fundamentalist Christians or Muslims they are relatively benign. Indeed I have argued that a blind belief in rebirth could conceivably motivate a person to be more ethical (which was, I believe, the original impetus for the idea of an afterlife.) But there is a problem, which is that Fundamentalism discourages the use of reason. Thanissaro effectively tells us we don't need to think about rebirth, we just need to read scripture and have (blind) faith.

Actually the same texts tell us that Buddha asked his followers to understand the teachings, and to reason with, and about the concepts he used to teach. Yes, one had to have faith in the Tathāgata (e.g. D i.63; p. 99 in Walshe's trans.), but this came about because what the Buddha said made sense. In the Pāli literature there are some striking examples of the Buddha failing to make sense (or at least people failing to make sense of him) with disastrous consequences: in the Piyajātika Sutta (previously mentioned) the Buddha's failure to empathise with a man whose child has died repels the man and sends him into the arms of vicious gamblers (contrast this with Kisagotamī episode!). Elsewhere the Buddha teaches bhikkhus to reflect on death, then goes off on a retreat. When he returns he finds that there has been mass suicide (the commentator tries to fudge this by invoking a deterministic version of the Law of Karma and the Buddha's psychic powers, but it's really unconvincing!) See my long essay on Suicide in the Pāli Canon for details [written before my ordination, so under my old name]. Reasoning and making sense are important.

Fundamentalism discourages individuality. Where a dogma exists, members of the group will incorporate that dogma into their self-image, so that anyone who disagrees becomes an outsider (a heretic!). My views, for example, have more than once brought forth the idiotic charge that I'm not really a Buddhist. Of course Buddhists don't burn heretics, but they do shun them, and they do disparage them. This contributes to divisions and partisan thinking. At times it has resulted in Buddhists instigating or condoning acts of violence. One only needs to mention, for example, the recent history of Theravāda countries such Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia; Japan in WWII; or the Tibetan Shugden debacle - which has resulted in violence and murder. Yes, the violence is rare, but could it exist in the absence of dogma inspired group think? If we want to make the world a better place then one of the main things we can do is dismantle dogmas (we need to be dogmanoclasts). As Buddhists our responsibility is to constantly test our own doctrines against experience. If they are not useful we should not insist that they are necessary. Thanissaro's case is not that rebirth is useful, but that it is Canonical.

Unfortunately fundamentalism also obscures what is good and useful about Buddhism. If we present it as just another superstitious belief system based on sacred texts, instead of a different system of practice based on centuries of experience, then we will lose the attention of the people who we desperately need to reach! Just as we can't drift towards enlightenment, we can't bullshit our way to making a difference in the world. Let's just drop the dogmatic assertions and focus on the practical. Doctrine is the least of what Buddhists have to offer the world! We pride ourselves on our techniques producing results, and they often do. But I would argue that our beliefs change nothing, whereas our actions might just change everything.

Finally dogma makes our mind unreceptive to experience. Indeed a forty page scriptural defence of a belief, with no argument from personal experience or substantial evidence, looks like the work of an intelligent, but ultimately closed mind. It is the experience of disappointment that makes most people interested in practice, and certainly this is the experience that the texts focus on. The central point of the texts is that all unawakened experience is disappointing (or 'stressful' Thanissaro's translations). You can't pour liquid into a cup that is already full. And for most of us the cup is full of dogmas and other beliefs. What can experience teach us, if we have no receptivity to it because we already "know" what it signifies.

I think Thanissaro fails on the idea of using the texts as an authority for belief because the texts are far from being as authoritative as he makes out; but even on the basis of those texts the kind of argument he makes is criticised as unhelpful. The bottom line is that, as far as I have know, the Buddha is never portrayed as saying to anyone: "you must believe in rebirth". In fact he never says "you must believe" in anything. So why is insisting on belief a feature of modern Buddhism? I suggest that we emphasise belief in the absence of personal experience.

I suppose we could see Thanissaro's long essay as a small victory. I see a forty page apologetic for rebirth as a sign that the case against is starting to hit home. The fact that the apologetic rests entirely on a fallacious appeal to authority shows us how flimsy the case for rebirth is. This is helpful in the long run, because it simplifies the task of the dogmanoclastic. So, I hope that rather than finding the Truth of Rebirth daunting, that those of us struggling to throw off the oppressive superstitions and dogmas of Old Buddhism will take heart from it. Clearly our arguments are starting to bite, and dogma is not really defensible.

~~oOo~~

Subjective & Objective

These two terms subjective & objective occur very frequently in discussions of Buddhism. The terms are used in fairly standard ways according to psychological or philosophical norms. But there is also the suggestion that bodhi consists of a breakdown of the distinction between subjective and objective. In this essay I will look at some of the philosophical assumptions behind these two words, and suggest that they are not in fact very useful to us as Buddhists because they don't apply in the domain that most interests us: experience.

The two words are part of a cluster linked by the common word 'ject' (meaning 'to throw out, to spout') which comes from a Proto-Indo-European root *iē 'to do, throw, project'. The cluster of English words includes: abject, adjacent, adjective, deject, eject, gist, inject, interject, jet, jetsam, jetty, jut, object, project, reject, subject, trajectory.

Etymologically an object is something thrown (ject) against (ob-) i.e. something we come into contact with through our senses (Buddhists also saw objects as striking the senses). While a subject is something thrown under (sub-), meaning something under our control. A 'subject' of the king is subjected to their rules. Similarly we are said (psychologically) to be 'a subject' because we believe our body and thoughts to be under our control. How much this is true is debatable, but this is what the etymology tells us.

Now the suffix -ive is used to turn a verb into an adjective. So objective simply means 'of or pertaining to objects' and subjective means 'of or pertaining to control'. But time has extended the simple meaning. In the case of objective the OED suggests "anything external to the mind, and actually real or existent; exhibiting facts without emotion or opinions; objects which are seen by other observers not just the subject." There are other definitions, but these are the relevant ones. Similarly subjective is now defined in terms of "the personal, proceeding from idiosyncrasy or individuality; not impartial; belonging to the individual consciousness or perception; imaginary, partial or distorted."

So these two terms have come to represent a fundamental dichotomy: what exists in the world, and what I individually perceive, including my sense of being a unique independent self. Along with this dichotomy is the assumption that we can tell the difference between the two domains. A shared experience, for example, is more likely to be considered objective, than a private one. Though we do also doubt the objectivity of groups. It is thought that scientists who describe objects dispassionately are being objective; that they are describing what really exists, as it exists. There are some notable attacks on this view from the 20th century, but the pendulum is already beginning to swing back from the extreme relativity of French nihilism and distrust of authority. Scholars are once again seeking objectivity (scientists never stopped!) though with more caveats than in the past, so that post-modernism was not a complete loss.

Now the Buddhist model of consciousness I have described on a number of occasions, but most recently on my Rave on Phenomena. Early Buddhism grants that there are objects of the senses. It is dualistic to this extent. It grants that there is a sense faculty and that this is associated with a locus of experience (body) and with mental processes such as sensing, apperception, and categorisation. When these come together in the light of sense consciousness then we have an experience. What we are aware of, and respond to is experience: it is the complex product of interactions between sense object, sense faculty and sense consciousness. This is similar to the kind of process outlined in recent years by, for example, Thomas Metzinger. In this model we know nothing of either objects, nor of ourselves as a subject. What we know is the experience of objects and the experience of ourselves as a subject. This distinction is vitally important to get clear.

Shared and repeatable experience leaves us with only one sensible conclusion: objects exist independently of us. There's every reason to think that the early Buddhists agreed with this, and that early Buddhism was therefore a form of Transcendental Realism. That the self is simply an object of the mental faculty is more difficult to show, but I have summarised and endorsed Thomas Metzinger's ideas on the first-person perspective. I'm convinced largely because of what happens when the first-person perspective breaks down. The self is a dynamic process of self-awareness. Like Metzinger I find Antonio Damasio's accounts of how this might come about quite plausible.

The terms objective and subjective as they are used today seem to make assumptions which, if we accept the Buddhist model of consciousness, we must conclude are false. When we say "objective" we cannot be referring to what exists, because it is implicit in our model that we can say nothing about it except how we experience, and experience contains an irreducible subjective component. Indeed I've challenged people several times now to come up with an unequivocal reference to the Buddha discussing the nature of objects and so far no one has come forward to accept the challenge. The objective world becomes a short hand for what we regularly and repeatedly experience, and what seems to be experienced by other people regularly and repeatedly. And while I do say that it makes sense that these experiences must be based on something independent of the observer, I go no further than that.

The idea of subjectivity also needs to be critiqued. The subjective is said to be private and individual, our sense of being a self and being in control. But if we accept that all experiences are conditioned - i.e. arise in dependence on sense object, faculty and consciousness - then we get into a loop of subject and object. We can't be a subject unless we are simultaneously an object, and vice versa. We've tended to separate so-called "subjective experience" off - and to distrust it as a source of knowledge. But experience arises in the interactions of sense-object, faculty and consciousness. No experience can be subjective or objective, all experience is both at the same time.

One of the most important points we can make is that far from being under our control, neither the mind or the body respond easily to our commands. We have limited control at best: we cannot stop our bodies from becoming ill, ageing and dying for example; there are some reflexes we cannot over-ride; we cannot consciously control our viscera. [1] Similarly with our mind. Thoughts and impulses appear unbidden from no-where. Measurement has shown that our motor cortex becomes active some time before we consciously come to a decision to move a limb, that movements are not actually under our conscious control, despite the persistent illusion that they are. Our mind is more amenable to control perhaps, but only with rigorous training spanning years. And then it is so tightly linked to our bodies that as our body ages and becomes ill our minds are involuntarily affected. So many things affect our moods - weather, diet, exercise, social status - and none of this is under our direct control.

So if the terms subjective and objective do not even apply to the Buddhist model of consciousness, then in what sense can bodhi be said to be a breakdown of the distinction between them? We are fortunate in this respect to have the testimony of Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroscientist who had a massive temporal lobe stroke that deprived her of language and disrupted her sense of self. She described being unable to distinguish where her body ended, and as a result feeling huge and extended. This is a common sensation for meditators, which even I have experienced. For Taylor it was accompanied by bliss and a sense of profundity. This is obviously a very desirable mode of functioning. She had the classic mystical experience of feeling at one with everything, and that everything was one. But in her case the cause was a massive stroke causing extensive brain damage. There can be no doubt that the stroke changed Taylor's life, and that she has dedicated herself to talking about human potential since her rehabilitation (which took many years). But did she experience bodhi? I don't know, in a way I can't know, but my sense was that despite being a likeable person that her experience had some real limitations. My main worry is that apart from having a massive stroke she did not seem to have insights into the processes which might bring about such as experience. I acknowledge the value she found in the experience, and that it is interesting and inspiring to hear her talk, but I am reluctant to pursue the experience of having a massive stroke.

I've tried to show that subjective and objective cannot have the same meaning in a Buddhist context as they do in either in philosophy or everyday speech; that really, considering the way we use these words, they don't apply. I'm resigned to talking about objects of the senses, but I don't see a role for the term 'subject' at all. I find Metzinger's more descriptive terminology - e.g. sense of self, first-person perspective - less fraught and more useful. We don't have subjectivity or objectivity, we have experiences arising from being equipped with sensory apparatus in a world of objects to be sensed. However sometimes it is safe to conclude that an experience was private: if we have a vision, but no one else in the room sees it, then it is a private experience. In this case the object may very well be an internal object such as a memory.

In the long run early Buddhism seems entirely unconcerned by the nature of objects. The nature of self-awareness gets some attention, but the main thrust of the Buddhist program is to be aware of our responses to sensory experience - of being drawn to, attached to, addicted to and obsessed by pleasure especially. The mainstream of practice seems to be paying attention to what is happening in our field of experience, and monitoring our responses to it.

~~oOo~~

Notes

1. Most of us have control over the last part of our gastrointestinal tract, and some people do seem able to gain limited control over their body temperature and heart rate. But I've yet to read of anyone with control over, say, their liver or spleen.