Dharma-niyama in the Vyākaraṇa-Mahābhāṣya

restraints

The term dhamma-niyama (Sanskrit Dharma-niyama) has taken on increased significance in the Triratna movement over the last few years since Saṃgharakṣita, through Dharmacārī Subhūti, informally published his more recent thoughts on the five niyamas (pañcavidha niyama) as an intellectual framework for understanding Buddhist practice and doctrine (See Revering and Relying Upon the Dharma July 2010).

In our discourse one now frequently hears reference to "the dhamma-niyama" in the place that used to be occupied by phrases drawn from German Idealism, such as "the Transcendental" and "the Absolute". Saṃgharakṣita himself has backed away from use of these phrases and suggests that his use of them was misunderstood. In which case it seems that in reifying the term dhamma-niyama (indicated by the use of the definite article) we have once again misunderstood him.

Just before Saṃgharakṣita published his new ideas on the niyamas, however, a side discussion was started up in the order by my friend and colleague Dharmacārī Dhīvan. Dhīvan circulated a long essay "Sangharakshita, the Five Niyamas and the Problem of Karma" (2009), which argued that Saṃgharakṣita's use of the term niyama was in fact an innovation and not based, as was claimed, on a traditional interpretation. He showed how the idea of the niyamas developed from the 5th century commentarial literature where it first occurred, through the interpretative lenses of Ledi Sayadaw and particularly C. A. F. Rhys Davids. The latter was an influence on Saṃgharakṣita in many ways. Dhīvan argued that though Saṃgharakṣita was largely drawing on Rhys Davids, his doctrinal innovation was both justified and necessary, and indeed successful, in responding to the concerns of his followers. The niyamas teaching is authentically Dharmic, just not traditional. One of the main differences of opinion was the meaning of the word niyama.

"However, according to my understanding of the Pāli language and the Theravādin commentarial tradition, the word niyama does not mean what Sangharakshita or Subhuti take it to mean, and Sangharakshita’s list of five niyamas is a creative re-interpretation of Mrs Rhys-Davids’ creative mis-interpretation of what the commentators say." Dhīvan 2013.

Saṃgharakṣita, following Sayadaw and/or Rhys Davids takes niyama to mean 'order of conditionality'. The set of five niyamas are said to outline five "orders of conditionality" i.e. five hierarchical domains in which conditionality operates. But niyama simply does not and cannot mean 'order', it means 'limit, restriction, inevitability'.

I joined this discussion in 2012 when I began circulating my samizdat translation of all of the Pali texts that mention niyama, particularly the previous untranslated commentarial literature on the pañcavidham niyamam or fivefold niyama. See also my blog: The Fivefold Niyama. In producing these translations it became clear that Dhīvan's comments regarding the relation to the tradition were spot on. I believe he and I are still the only two members of our Order to have read the source texts in Pāli (and only a handful of others would even be capable). My translations made most of the texts available in English for the first time, save one which was translated by Sayadaw. In The Niyama-Dipani: The Manual of Cosmic Order Sayadaw translates in such a way as to support his modern reinterpretation of the niyamas and often with no reference to the actual Pāli usage. Problems with Sayadaw's translation are dealt with in my translation notes and in Dhīvan's essay and article (see bibliography). Unfortunately Subhūti is uncritical of Sayadaw - referring to this work as "the translation of the Atthasālinī" (p.15). Far from being "the" translation, it is "a" translation and a highly idiosyncratic, not to say tendentious, translation.

While the word niyama (or niyāma, the two spellings are interchangeable in Pāli despite deriving differently) occurs in sutta texts it is not until the 5th century CE that Buddhaghosa takes up the word to produce the five categories of restriction on change. The translation that follows shows how the word dharma-niyama was used in Classical Sanskrit by the grammarian Patañjali commenting on Pāṇini's descriptive grammar, the Aṣṭādhyāyī. The Vyākaraṇa-Mahābhāṣya or Major Commentary on Grammar is usually dated to ca. 150 BCE, though this date is somewhat uncertain. In the passage concerned Patañjali is in fact commenting on some glosses on the Aṣṭādhyāyī found in the Vārttika by Kātyāyana. This whole section from the introduction to the Mahābhāṣya concerns the relationship between meaning (artha) and words (śabda).

This translation is really intended for my own use and ought to be treated with some suspicion, and at least read in conjunction with the published translation by Joshi and Roodbergen. My translation relies on the published translation and comments made during our class reading of the text. It must be emphasised that this is my translation and all errors and infelicities are due to my limitations.

Note:

• Numbers in square brackets refer to the page numbers of the Sanskrit edition by Keilhorn (3rd ed. 1962).
• Numbers in curly brackets refer to section and page numbers in the translation by Joshi & Roodbergen.
• Passages in bold are Patñjali's citations from the Vārttika by Kātyāyana.

Vyākaraṇa-Mahābhāṣya, Paspaśāhnika (p.7-8)

[7] {80} But how is it known that the connection between a meaning and a word is established (siddha)?

From the world (lokataḥ) [i.e. from people in the world].

{81: 198} In the world, having acquired [in the mind] a thing meant (artha) the words (śabdān) are uttered. They make no effort in accomplishing this. However, an effort is required to accomplish a thing that needs to be made. For example: wanting to do a job with [or requiring] a pot, he goes to the house of a potter as says “Make a pot (kuru ghaṭaṃ), I require it for a job” . On the contrary one who will be using words doesn't go to the house of a grammarian and say [8] “Make words, I will utter them.” Right away having acquired the thing meant, he utters the words.

{82} If, then, the world is an authority (pramāṇa) in this [matter] what is the use of grammar (śāstra).

Where the use of a word is connected to the meaning from the world [as authority] grammar provides a restriction for the sake of religious merit (dharmaniyama).

{83: 200} Where the use of a word is connected to the meaning from the world [as authority] grammar provides a restriction for the sake of religious merit. What is dharma-niyama? It is a restriction for Dharma (dharmāya niyamaḥ); or, a restriction for the purpose of Dharma (dharmārthaḥ vā niyamaḥ); or a restriction aiming at Dharma (dharmaprayojanaḥ vā niyamaḥ)

Just as [in the case of] secular and Vedic [precepts].

{84: 202} The southerners have preference for taddhita compounds. So they say ‘laukikeṣu’ and ‘vaidikeṣu’ [in what is related to the world and what is related to the Vedas] instead of ‘loke’ and ‘vede’ [in the world and in the Vedas].

Or rather, the meaning of the taddhita is appropriate, i.e. just as the precepts (kṛtānta) found in secular and Vedic texts. So far as the world is concerned it is said “a domestic rooster is not to be eaten; a domestic pig is not to be eaten.” And that which is to be eaten is taken for the purpose of removing hunger. And one is also able to remove hunger by eating dog meat. In this case a restriction (niyama) is made: this is to be eaten; this is not to be eaten.

In the same way there is desire for women because of sexual arousal. And satisfaction of sexual arousal may be gained equally from available and unavailable [women]. In this case a restriction is made: she is available; she is unavailable.

{85: 207} Indeed in the Vedas also it is said “a Brahmin takes the vow (vrata) of milk (payo), a king the vow of gruel (yavāgū) and the merchant the vow of curds (āmikṣā)” And that “vow” is taken for the purpose of taking food (abhyavahāra). It is possible to take a rice (śāli) or meat (māṃsa) vow etc, as well. In this case a restriction is made.

Similarly it is said “The sacrificial post (yūpa) should be made of bilva or khādira wood. “Sacrificial post” is taken to mean what the [sacrificial] animal is tied to. And by this an animal might be tied to any bit of timber, erected or not erected. In this case a restriction is made.

Similarly the potsherds (kapālāni) are placed by the fire and the mantra is chanted “bhṛgūṇām aṅgirasām gharmasya tapasā tapyadhvam” [be heated by the heat of Bhṛgu and Aṅgirasa]. Even without the mantra, fire whose action is to burn would heat those potsherds. In this case a restriction is made: “done this way it leads to bliss (abhyudaya) [i.e. to heaven].”

{86:208} Thus here also the understanding of meaning may equally be expressed by correct words (śabda) and incorrect words (apaśabda) a restriction for the purposes of religious merit is made. “The meaning is only to be expressed by corrects words not by incorrect words. Done this way it leads to bliss.”

~o~

Comments

Now in this text it seems most likely, according to the commentaries ancient and modern, that dharma is being used in the sense of puṇya 'religious merit'. The idea that doing things in the way constrained by the injunctions or precepts (kṛtānta) will be a "causer of bliss" (abhyudayakārin) confirms this. Artha may have the sense of 'referent' (thing referred to by a word) or 'meaning' (the definition of a word) and it's not always clear if Patañjali makes this distinction.

The audience for this text lived their lives according to many religious and secular constraints. From the text we can see that some of them make sense on face value and some of them don't. Under most circumstances it is clear, for example, who is an available sexual partner and who isn't, even in our rather wanton society. In ancient India it was probably even more obvious since a person's spouse was the only sanctioned sexual partner (though that said prostitutes also plied their trade).

It might not be so obvious why a domestic pig was not appropriate food. The precepts allows for wild pigs to be eaten. And this is partly the point. A negative precept that says 'don't eat domestic pigs' is specific. We might be tempted to take the generally corollary that everything else is OK to eat. We might for example decide that dog meat was OK. But in India, as in the modern west, there was an unspoken understanding that dog meat was not for human consumption. There is no natural reason that this is so. Dog meat is consumed in some parts of the world and is presumably no more prone to disease or no less nourishing that any other kind of meat. But we just don't eat dog, and may even feel a sense of disgust at the thought. There is an implied restriction in the background to the specific restriction.

As mentioned above, one of the points of controversy in Dhīvan's initial essays on the niyamas was over the meaning of niyama. In this text there is no doubt that it simply means 'restriction'. One might eat anything, but there are various kinds of restrictions on what one may eat. One might have sex with anyone, but in practice one has a limited choice of partners. However the specific term dharma-niyama means a restriction for the sake of religious merit. That is to say that it is an injunction whose authority stems from the Vedas and is ultimately aimed at a good rebirth or at liberation through the correct performance of religious rituals. 

Fundamentally this argument is about restrictions on what is a correct word (plain śabda) and what is an incorrect word (apaśabda). Pragmatically Patañjali has to admit that many non-standard words are in common use. He is arguing that despite the many choices of words, that some are better than others. In particular he is arguing for what we call the Classical Sanskrit forms sanctioned by Pāṇini as correct and dialectical variations as incorrect. Here he points out even though we always have many choices of how to behave, that various kinds of restrictions apply: secular or worldly restrictions (laukikā) and religious restrictions (vaidkikā) found in the Vedic texts. So too words are restricted by secular and religious usage.

This is not so different to our time and place. Most people would use a different mode of speech when having fun with their friends than they might at a job interview. For English speakers in Britain the issue of local dialect words and expressions is a common one - and at present the mood seems to be going against allowing children to use dialect at school for fear that they won't be able to distinguish different contexts as adults and might use the wrong mode of speech. Or in other words that those with dialects that differ from standard (i.e. receive pronunciation, English as it is spoken in the South East) will be socially disadvantaged.

For the Buddhist who is interested in the idea of the niyamas the import is clear. Niyama means "constraint, restriction, limitation or inevitability". It is about restricted choices, vows made, and precepts imposed. In the Pali texts it refers to the restrictions on how change occurs. Thus is cannot mean a kind of "order" or "level" of conditionality, but only a constraint on how conditionality plays out. Things change, but not randomly. Plant a rice grain and it can only grow into a rice plant (and no other kind of plant). Perform an evil action and it must inevitably ripen as a painful vedanā.

In the case of dhamma-niyama it is used by the Buddhist tradition to explain the series of miraculous events that accompany the birth of a Buddha. There is a restriction on the universe related to the life history of a Buddha. As it says in the Sumaṅgalavilāsinī (DA 2.431)

"The shaking of the 10,000 world system when the bodhisatta enters his mother’s belly and other such phenomena [associated with the life story of the Buddha as told in the Mahāpadāna Sutta], this is called the inevitability of natures (dhamma-niyāma). Inevitability of natures is understood as consisting in this."

Such miracles as occur are bound to occur; they are what is required for the life story of a Buddha. I might well have translated dhamma-niyama here as "a restriction imposed by religion". In other words this is simply something that Buddhists believe, and, like the audience for Patañjali, they believe it because it is said in a sacred text. 

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Dhīvan. Sangharakshita, the Five Niyamas and the Problem of Karma. 2009. (See also Dhīvan's website for some other related bits and pieces)

Dhīvan. 'The Five Niyāmas as Laws of Nature: an Assessment of Modern Western Interpretations of Theravāda Buddhist Doctrine.' Journal of Buddhist Ethics. Volume 19, 2012

Dhīvan. 'The ‘Five Niyamas’ and Natural Order.' [Blog Post] 5 June 2013. http://dhivanthomasjones.wordpress.com/2013/06/05/the-five-niyamas-and-natural-order/

Jayarava. Source Texts for the Five-fold Niyāma (pañcavidhaṃ niyāma). 2012

Joshi, S.D. & Roodbergen, J. (Ed. Tr) Patanjali's Vyakarana-Mahabhashya. Paspasha-Ahnika. Poona, 1986. Online: scribd.com

Kielhorn, F. (Ed) The Vyākarṇa-mahābhāṣya of Patañjali. 3rd Ed. rev. by K. V. Abhyankar. Vol 1. 1962.

Ledi Sayadaw. (1978). ‘ The Niyama-Dipani: The Manual of Cosmic Order,’ in The Manuals of Buddhism, trans. Barua, B.M, Rhys Davids, C.A.F., & Nyana. Bangkok: Mahamakut Press (orig. publ. 1965). Online: http://mahajana.net/texts/kopia_lokalna/MANUAL04.html [includes Sayadaw's correspondence with Rhys Davids showing how her interpretation is dependent on his]

Subhūti. Revering and Relying Upon the Dharma: Sangharakshita's approach to Right View. 1st Published in Shabda. July, 2010. Online: sangharakshita.org

Origins of Myth: The Other Evidence

image credit: intrepidtravel.com

A few weeks ago I reviewed Michael Witzel's book Origins of the World's Mythologies. In that review I focussed, as Witzel does, on the evidence from comparative mythology. It's fairly obvious that if we share a grand narrative into which our myths fit, that there ought to be other evidence that follows a similar pattern. And Michael Witzel devotes a chapter of Origins exploring this evidence.

It must be said that none of the evidence is unequivocal and much of it is still rather ambiguous. More information is being added all the time. For example in the main text the book claims that there is no evidence of interbreeding between Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo Neanderthalensis. However between writing and publishing just such evidence was found indicating that all humans outside of Africa, New Guinea and Australia share a small number of genes with Neanderthals and Witzel acknowledges this in the forward. In the meantime further examples hybridisation have been discovered. (See Evolution: Trees and Braids)

To briefly recap, Michael Witzel sees a shared grand narrative in the mythologies of Europe, Asia, Oceania and the Americas (what Witzel calls "Laurasia") that is distinct from the grand narratives found in Sub-Saharan Africa, New Guinea and Australia ("Gondwana"). The Laurasian narrative involves creation of the universe from nothingness (void, chaos) via an egg or giant; the emergence of the earth from an abyssal ocean; the birth and lives of gods who fight amongst generations; the pushing apart of (father) sky and (mother) earth; the genesis and age of humanity, with an heroic age followed by our more mundane times; and finally the destruction of this universe, sometimes followed by the creation of a more perfect one. Local variations exist in abundance, but the overall story-arc seems to follow this broad outline. Gondwana mythology, by contrast, places no importance on creation.


Comparative Linguistics

The science of comparative linguistics is Witzel's home turf. He has, for example, studied the regional vations in Vedic Sanskrit and mapped the geographic areas that can be associated with various Vedic texts. He has also extensively studied loan words in Vedic showing that Munda may well have been the substrate language in Northwest India where the Vedic speakers first became firmly established. The early successes of comparative linguistics in the 18th and 19th centuries were impressive. It initially became clear, for example, that Greek, Latin and Sanskrit sprang from a common ancestor language. Germanic, Celtic, Iranian, and Slavic languages were soon added to the family, now most commonly called Indo-European. Systematic changes (such as /f/ for /p/ in Germanic as compared to Latin, part of Grimm's Law) across whole languages make it certain that they share a common ancestor and that language can be reverse-engineered on the basis of its surviving transformations. The reconstructed ancestor language is called Proto-Indo-European. The theory for example predicted three laryngeal sounds (related to our /h/) for PIE, which were not found in any living language, but were subsequently discovered in a written form of Hittite.

More recently the effort has been to try to create superfamilies by trying to locate systematic relationships across families or in reconstructed proto-languages. One result of which is a super-family called Nostratic (= "our language"). Nostratic includes Indo-European, Semitic, Sino-Tibetan, Austric (South-east Asia and Polynesia) and American Indian languages. The reconstruction is yet to find universal support amongst linguists. Witzel thinks this is in part due to artificial limits placed on the possibility of language reconstruction, but also due to the inherent difficulty of comparing so many languages at once. After all, few have the linguistic skill to do so. If we accept the proposed Nostratic language superfamily then we are immediately struck by the fact that its range is almost identical to the Laurasian mythology. For Witzel this is no coincidence, though he concedes that more work is required to establish Nostratic as a reality. But the tantalising conclusion is that the Laurasian mythology might have originally been framed in something like a Nostratic language. We are not there yet, but we have fine null hypothesis to try to disprove.

Genetics

Where language provides tantalising hints at an underlying unity in the form of a common ancestor tongue, the field of genetics provides further insights into the relatedness and movements of peoples around the world. Two main subjects make up this evidence: phylogenies (or family trees) of mitochondrial DNA which is passed from mother to daughter; and phylogenies of Y chromosomes which are passed from father to son. Both types of DNA change only slowly, but at a rate we can estimate. However of all the evidence, the genetic evidence is most difficult to follow. The results of experiments are somewhat confused at times and the use of acronyms is intense.

In outline genetic studies show that all modern humans are related and that our ancestors lived in Sub-Saharan Africa. Anatomically modern humans emerged ca. 150 kya (1000's of years ago) plus or minus about 50 kya. More than one migration event seems to have taken place, but the one that succeeded in populating the earth seems to have happened about 65 kya. There are competing models for exactly how this was accomplished, but most include a small group of between 1000 and 10,000 travelling along the coastline eastwards. Sea levels were between 50m-150m lower, the figures cited vary wildly even within Origins, so evidence for this migration is mostly now covered by the ocean. But modern humans arrived in Australia (having crossed the open ocean) by about 45 kya for which we have good archaeological evidence. They continued North as well settling in China between 42-39 kya. Across Eurasia, modern humans encountered other species of hominids, but in every case survived, probably at the expense of the predecessors (and probably also interbred with them to some extent). The image below shows an up-to-date outline of the migrations based on mitochondrial DNA.

Migrations: approximate routes and times from Guha et. al (2013)

Theories on how the rest of Eurasia was settled are much less clear. There are two most likely scenarios. Firstly a second wave of migrants left Africa ca. 45 kya and went north into Western Asia and spread from there. Or secondly part of the first wave, perhaps based somewhere in West Asia, were the source of the expansion (this is what the image above shows). Eurasia being backfilled from China is also a possibility. In any case modern humans entered Europe 40-50 kya where they met, and to some extent interbred with, Neanderthals. From about 20-11 kya successive waves of migration occurred from Siberia into the Americas which were very quickly settled all the way to Tierra del Feugo. From about 5 kya inhabitants of Taiwan began the epic ocean voyages that peopled the islands of Polynesia, reaching New Zealand ca. 800 CE, but not before making contact (directly or indirectly) with South America or people from there. These dates are broadly supported by archaeological and anthropological evidence.

The dates for the settling of the Americas are important in dating the Laurasian mythology. Since the mythology is shared between all of the Americans and Eurasians the main outlines must have been in place before the first American migrations across the Beringia land bridge ca. 20 kya. This is long before any evidence of civilisation in the form of agriculture or large-scale permanent settlements. However, if Witzel is right about the implications of shared narratives then we have to accept that the narrative was in place by 20 kya at the latest.

Beringia Land-bridge from Balter (2013)

Recently a complete genome was sequenced for a child who died some 24 kya in Mal'ta, southern Siberia (Balter 2013). This boy is closely related to Amerindians, but also, surprisingly to populations in west of the Altai mountains. "Before 24,000 years ago, the ancestors of Native Americans and the ancestors of today's East Asians split into distinct groups. The Mal'ta child represents a population of Native American ancestors who moved into Siberia, probably from Europe or west Asia. Then, sometime after the Mal'ta boy died, this population mixed with East Asians. The new, admixed population eventually made its way to the Americas."

And just as with language studies the broad outlines of this evidence is consistent with Witzel's hypothesis. If a people, probably (initially) sharing a language or group of related languages, spread through Eurasia then we would expect to see evidence of relatedness in their genes. The best fit to Witzel's myth and language data involves two out-of-Africa migrations. The first, beginning ca. 65 kya, along the southern coastal route to Australia took with it the Gondwana mythology and certain mitochondrial genes. They left behind a string of languages with no connection to the languages of Laurasia. The second began around 45 kya and pushed first north and then both east and west populated Laurasia. These people spoke languages unrelated to the first migration, had a new, or at least different, mythology, and shared variants of mitochondrial genes not common amongst the first wave.


Archaeology

It is often commented on that although anatomically modern remains are found by about 150 kya, other features we associate with ourselves - burial, complex art, music - are first seen only about 40 kya. Witzel notes that more recent research indicates a slow build up to this so-called explosion of culture. But none-the-less there does seem to be a turning point. Most of the complex cave art begins around this time. The first evidence of musical instruments in the form of bone flutes are found. And burials with valuable items or indications of a belief in an afterlife also date to around this same period.

I've already cited the migrations to America as a latest date by which the Laurasian mythology can have been known in a more or less complete form. Since we know that the Gondwana mythology was unknown in Africa, New Guinea or Australia ca. 45 kya we have a upper limit for it's existence. It would seem then that the creation of the Laurasian mythology broadly coincides with the expansion of culture into Europe and Asia ca. 40 kya., but not later than 20 kya. 

Thus, with many caveats and hedges, we can draw out from the evidence a coherent picture in which ca. 40 kya a change took place amongst the ancestral Laurasian population that they subsequently spread, along with their genes and their language, across all of Eurasia, the Americas and the Pacific. Perhaps it is no coincidence that this story itself fits the Laurasian mythology, what we might call the Laurasian worldview. It is a peculiar feature of human beings that we are constantly seeking out new frontiers, while at the same time obsessing about our origins.

It's important to note that in the case of genetics and language we see evidence of hybridisation - shared genes across species on one hand, and loan words and regional language features on the other. The image we tend to have in our minds is a tree structure branching out from a singularity. This singularity almost certainly never happened. If you view railway lines going off to the horizon they appear to converge due to parallax error. I think we need to be aware of the historical equivalent of this. Just because we can find common factors underlying present complexity, does not mean that everything converges. History is complex at whatever magnification or scale we choose.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Balter, Michael. (2013) 'Ancient DNA Links Native Americans With Europe.' Science. 25 October 2013: Vol. 342 no. 6157 pp. 409-410. DOI: 10.1126/science.342.6157.409.

Guha P, Srivastava SK, Bhattacharjee S, Chaudhuri TK. (2013) Human migration, diversity and disease association: a convergent role of established and emerging DNAmarkers. Frontiers in Genetics. doi: 10.3389/fgene.2013.00155. eCollection 2013.  Aug 9;4:155. 

Witzel, E. J. Michael. (2012) Origins of the World's Mythologies. Oxford University Press.

Note 27 Jul 2015

A recent large scale genetic study (scopeblog.stanford.edu) strongly suggests a single movement of people from the Siberia region into the Americans ca. 23,000 year bp.

The new genetic analysis suggests that the first immigrants to America left Siberia no more than 23,000 years ago, and then lived in isolation on the grassy plains of the Beringia land bridge for no more than 8,000 years. Those plains disappeared beneath rising seas 10,000 years ago. 

Once in the Americas, ancient Native Americans split into two major lineages about 13,000 years ago. One lineage populated both North and South America and one stayed in North America.

Unresolvable Plurality in Buddhist Metaphysics?

image: Indiwall

In discussion over my forthcoming article describing changes in the metaphysics of karma, I raised the problem of the moral force of karma in the absence of personal continuity. An interlocutor responded that the tradition had resolved this problem, but I'm convinced this is not the case. I think this problem is decidedly unresolved. Most writing on the subject of karma assumes that a unified view is intended and can be discovered in the early Buddhist texts, but I see plurality that seems unresolvable.

One specific problem is this. The moral force of karma derives from the notion that we must live with the consequences of our actions and that even death is no barrier to the consequences being visited on us (or someone linked to us in a way we care about). It is fundamentally fear of negative consequences, particularly a bad rebirth, that pushes the unawakened Buddhist to be ethical; and the prospect of liberation from repeated death that pulls them along. This implies that the person who lives out the consequences of my present actions must in some way still be me. I must feel a sense of ownership over my actions and their consequences. In other words karma implies some kind of personal continuity or it doesn't make sense in human terms.

I'm well aware that this is specifically denied in texts such as the Milindapañha. According to tradition the one who experiences the results is not the same as the one who acted, but not different either. That person is dependently arisen (I'll come back to this). However if this was intended to make people behave according to Buddhist norms I can't help thinking that it's a rather poor attempt at motivating people. Theoretically the problem is solved, but practically it still disconnects the actor from both their actions and the consequences and thus can hardly motivate anyone to do anything.

Teachings on karma emphasise this implication by telling stories which explicitly link past and present lives. Such stories as the many hundreds of Jātakas (both in the two books of the Pali Jātakas and spread throughout the Nikāyas, Vinaya and other collections such as the Avadāna). In Theravāda countries the Jātakas are the main vehicle for teaching morality precisely because they emphasise living with the consequences of actions performed in part lives. However this is not to say that karma is only presented in these terms in Buddhist texts. Compare also such texts as SN 15.1 which describes saṃsāra in terms of ancestors stretching back through beginningless time; and SN 15.10 which by contrast describes one person (ekapuggala) wandering through saṃsāra leaving a mountainous pile of bones behind them. Karma is also said to be quite specific. My actions determine my rebirth, they do not determine your rebirth and vice versa. Similarly your actions do not give rise to my suffering except where they directly impact on me. But direct impact is unnecessary for karma generally since it is intention that determines outcome for the actor. 

Now contrast the metaphysics of paṭicca-samuppāda applied to the sense of selfhood. For the most part Buddhists seem to insist that, in reality, there is no self. There is a strong influence of the Two Truths teaching in such statements which use the language of existence or non-existence, i.e. the language of ontology. The Two Truths are a pervasive tool for dealing with the paradoxes  and contradictions thrown up in Buddhist ontology. However if there is no self, then there is no continuity over time and Buddhist ethics simply does not work. The language of ontology is carefully avoided in many early Buddhist texts that emphasise the application of paṭicca-samuppāda to experience only (the locus classicus being the Kaccānagotta Sutta SN 12.15) which is why I do not find the Two Truths teaching, with a foot in the camp of existence, useful (See Not Two Truths).

But even if we reject the language of ontology as belonging to the wrong domain (avisaya; cf. the Sabba Sutta SN 35.23) we are still left with a denial of personal continuity. The one who is reborn is not the same as the one who died, though not different either – they arise in dependence on causes. As Nāgasena says to king Milinda when asked about this problem: “It is not he, nor is it another” (na ca so, na ca añño. MP 41; c.f. S ii.18ff). The idea that vedanā arises because of oneself or another simply misunderstands how experience arises. Indeed the very question "who suffers?" is deemed unsuitable (no kallo) (SN ii.13). This is clear enough. But it's not clear how morality would work on this basis. If it is not me that suffers (or enjoys) the consequences of my actions then what is my motivation for practising virtue and avoiding vice? I don't believe that a morality based on such an abstract notion of responsibility is viable. And I would argue that the Buddhist tradition, in a tacit acknowledgement of this problem, does not teach morality in this way. Most Buddhists or whatever time and place teach some variation on "your actions have consequences for you and the people around you." Cf Buddhanet, The Budddhist Centre (1st sentence in both cases), SEP (§1 sentence 2). The theme recurs in many introductions to Buddhist ethics.

There is a fundamental disconnect between the metaphysics of karma and the metaphysics of paṭicca-samuppāda. I cannot see how to resolve these two while preserving the essential features of both. On the face of it this problem ought to have produced a crisis in Buddhist philosophy, though to the best of my knowledge it never has.


Why Do We Seek a Singularity?

Is it possible to step back from the content of this question and ponder why it is important to frame problem the way it is framed? In other words I want to ask if it is essential to attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable. I said above that writing on the subject of karma assumes that a unified view is intended and can be discovered in the early Buddhist texts. The central historical narrative of Buddhism is that it all springs from a single individual, the Buddha. The Buddha is presented as having first cut his ties to society (i.e. to all the conditioning of his early life from family, clan, class). Then over an extended period he pursues practices designed to break his identification with his body (practices which were historically associated with Jain ascetics). Then, completely cut off from his antecedents, the Buddha produced a new insight (prajñā) and founded a new lineage of instruction (anuśāsana). All Buddhist traditions take their teachings to be the direct or indirect words of the Buddha, if not in his historical manifestation then of the Dharmakāya.

Conventionally we expect that all the lines of the development Buddhist thought ought to converge at some point in the past. We expect the teachings to be unified and systematic. Many scholars of Buddhism declare that, from their point of view, unity implying a founder figure is clear in the texts. However even a relatively obtuse reader becomes aware that all is not unified. There are apparent discontinuities. The twelve nidānas are sometimes ten and sometimes eleven. And sometimes other numbers. I don't know how the tradition dealt with this, but in modern scholarship we have the handy model of evolution. If a teaching exists in various different forms then we can line them up chronologically (if only relatively) and argue that as the Buddha lived 80 years he must have refined his teaching as he went on and what we have preserved are various versions of the teaching from different periods of His "career"; or that it was developed by later disciples. Thus anomalies that might make us question the story of "unity" are used to support it using evolutionary models.

Lately I've been questioning the applicability of the the linear models that result from applying simple Darwinian ideas to the development of Buddhism (see Evolution: Trees and Braids). The tree structure, with its linear, binary diverging leads back in time to a singularity. A braid allows for divergence and convergence that is not unidirectional. Might it be that because the tree metaphor dominates our view of evolution or development that even when we find inconsistencies we still perceive them as springing from a single source? Such a reaction would also be consistent with my theory of how people with strong beliefs handle counter-factual information. 

The fact that we buy into the idea of an historical founder is also a cultural lens. It also predisposes us to see unity if we believe in a founder figure. But which comes first? Do we read widely with an open mind and discover a unity which demands that we accept the idea of a founder figure? Or does the idea of a founder figure cause us to read with confirmation bias and see only unity and ignore and explain away diversity? Is not Buddhism always presented as the teachings of the Buddha? And if our religious beliefs predispose us to believe very strongly in the historical reality? And if we identify him as someone who shares our religious, philosophical and cultural concerns as most modern Buddhists do?

If we extend the image of a braided river and look at the sources of the river we find that many tributaries contribute to the stream. It's not always clear which is the mainstream and which the tributary. If we follow one tributary to source it may resemble a singularity, but we must always keep in mind that there are many tributaries with equal claim. Indeed we can say that each source spring is reliant on a watershed, and that the hydrological cycle recycles water in complex ways. The metaphor is complex, dynamic, and undermined singularity thinking. And since the object is human culture, we require any metaphor to have these qualities.

In my writing about the Buddhist texts, over many years now, I have noted broadly Vedic influences, more specifically Brahmanical influences, Jain influences, animistic influences that I take to come from (one, many, or all of) the Austroasiatic, Dravidian and Tibeto-Burman speaking substrate populations inhabiting the foothills of the Himalayas (before Vedic speaking people even entered India). I've also noted some Iranian and/or Zoroastrian influences, some of which are certain and some speculative. Of course it is always possible that all these influences came together and were synthesised in the person of a founder. Possible, but not very likely. Cultures tend to be assimilated and synthesised by other cultures. And in our case this may well have extended both before and after the time of the putative founder. 

My theory about early Buddhism has two aspects in relation to this problem. Firstly the morality we associate with Buddhism is probably (broadly speaking) the mores of the Śākya tribe. In my writing on the Śākyans (published and unpublished) I have argued that the Buddha and his contemporaries should be seen as representing the culmination of a process of synthesis that began with a group of Iranian tribes migrating into India. They becoming naturalised and then were forced by climate change to migrate again and so ended up on the margins of the kingdoms of Kosala-Videha and Magadha. And, contra Bronkhorst, I argue that Kosala was the cultural centre of gravity of this time and place (it is the setting for the debates with Yājñavalkya in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad for example). Importantly the pan-Indian rebirth eschatology met and was synthesised with the Zoroastrian idea of single destination—Heaven vs Hell—eschatology based on morality. The result was most obviously the various Śrāmaṇa faiths, but there was also considerable influence on Brahmanism outside the Āryavarta as well. As yet no plausible explanation has been put forward for why the Brahmins suddenly became dissatisfied with being reborn amongst their ancestors. However, if eastern, Kosala based, Brahmins were interacting with Zoroastrian influenced tribes, they might have been attracted to an afterlife in an eternal heaven and adapted the idea to their own uses. The earlier appearance of karma in Brahmanical texts simply reflects a predisposition to encapsulating religious ideas in texts that early Śrāmaṇa groups did not share until centuries later.


The Braid of Buddhist Metaphysics.

If there was an influence from Zoroastrian eschatology then it would emphasise the impersonal inevitability of post-mortem judgement, and would suggest post-mortem personal continuity. Personal continuity was already a feature of pan-Indian rebirth eschatology. Thus personal continuity ought to surface as an element in early Buddhist morality since it is present in the substrate belief systems on which Buddhism is built. And this is what we find in the Jātakas. Many aspects of the Jātaka literature, in particular some characters and moral themes, seem to cross sectarian boundaries and reflect shared culture. 

The other aspect of my account of early Buddhism, which is heavily reliant on Sue Hamilton's account of the khandhas, is that paṭicca-samuppāda was initially applied only to the process of having experiences. The basic description is vedanā (from √vid 'to know) arising from contact between sense object, sense organ and sense cognition, and the polarities involved in vedanā in turn giving rise to the mental processes by which we become infatuated and intoxicated with sense experience (papañca). My argument has long been that properly understood paṭicca-samuppāda only applies to this domain of experience. 

However, it is only natural that having discovered a principle like paṭicca-samuppāda that Buddhists would want to see what light it could shed on all aspects of their lives. And after all, as I have pointed out, the impermanence of the world and human life is quite universally acknowledged (Everything Changes, But So What?) My account of early Buddhism predicts that paṭicca-samuppāda applied outside the domain of experience ought to produce metaphysical problems. Thus the principle applied to the sense of self is a powerful lever that can shift our perspective on experience, but when we start to ask whether our self is real or unreal and try to answer in the same terms, we end up with nonsense. Asked if your self exists, later Buddhists are forced to answer both yes and no. And the yes/no answer is still being debated almost 2000 years after it was proposed by Nāgarjuna and his contemporaries (Not Two Truths). The metaphysics of the ontology of the Buddhist self are enormously complex and confusing. The result is some of the most convoluted discourses that end up degrading into insoluble paradoxes and are presented as representing the ineffability of the truth. It's notable that early Buddhist texts which apply paṭicca-samuppāda in the correct domain (visaya) never seem to resort to paradox or convolution in this way. Experience has three salient characteristics: it is impermanent, unsatisfactory, and lacking substance. The experience of selfhood is just another experience, has the same three characteristics, and is subject to the same limitations. Whether or not the self is real is completely irrelevant to the discussion of experience and how to manage it for our well-being. All other ontological questions seem also to be set aside as unanswerable and therefore irrelevant.

In this view the application of paṭicca-samuppāda to an ontological question such as personal continuity, particularly post-mortem, will be unlikely to produce entirely consistent answers. Experience is inherently discontinuous whereas the afterlife requires some kind of continuity. And this leaves us with an unresolvable problem in the area of morality. Considerable ingenuity must be employed to join the Buddhist morality to the principle of paṭicca-samuppāda. It is no coincidence that the question is one that troubles King Milinda. That the first answer never satisfied Buddhists can be deduced from the fact that it has been constantly revisited and reshaped. And even so when teaching morality it was and is common for Buddhists to embrace the idea of personal continuity, as in the Jātakas, for pedagogical reasons.


Conclusion

The kind of dependent continuity proposed by Buddhists as underlying Buddhist morality can hardly motivate people to practice virtue or avoid vice. Without the experience of actions having consequences for oneself, particularly in personal relationships, that Buddhist morality hardly makes sense. Without continuity between actor and the experience of consequence we have no motivation to alter our behaviour. As social animals were keenly attuned to the impact of our behaviour on others and theirs on us. If there were no personal continuity, or even if it were experienced as the kind of nominal continuity that Buddhist theorists propose, then we could not correlate actions and consequences in this life, let alone across lifetimes. Thus, ironically, it is the sense of our self as an entity continuous through time that underlies morality, at least in the unawakened.

Or we could see this as part of a pragmatic program. Morality is best taught with a strong grounding in personal continuity. Morality is concerned with our personal relations and without continuity the word "relations" is meaningless. Approaching morality in this way helps to eliminate major conflicts and prepare the mind for meditation. When it comes to reflecting on the nature of experience in religious exercises designed to liberate us from suffering, its best to point to discontinuity and to emphasise that the sense of self is no different from other experiences. To me this suggests the marriage of two very different activities and modes rather than a unified teaching. 

In fact what we see in the Pāli texts is a sea of partially integrated plurality, in crucial ways irreconcilable, and with a considerable amount of flotsam and jetsam from non-Buddhist systems of thought and practice. This isn't a problem if the Buddhist program is pragmatic rather than systematic. A lot of Buddhists are embracing pragmatism as an antidote to the idea of Buddhism as a systematic tradition. That said a surprising number of pragmatists are highly critical of, for example, teaching mindfulness to people who are anxious or in pain, precisely because it does not fulfil their criteria of Buddhism as a system. In the face of the plurality of doctrine, usually the best we can do is select a subset of the teachings that hang together and gloss over the discontinuities. A dense and complex jargon combined with an anti-intellectual discourse helps us to obfuscate such problems. Even those who study the texts more directly are doing so through cultural and historical lens that predispose them to see unity and continuity and to gloss over evidence of the opposite.

~~oOo~~

For a view on how the Buddhist tradition makes use of eternalism as an argument against nihilism and then mitigates eternalism with a specifically Buddhist argument. See:

Del Toso, Krishna. (2008) 'The Role of Puñña and Kusala in the Dialectic of the Twofold Right Vision and the Temporary Integration of Eternalism in the Path Towards Spiritual Emancipation According to the Pali Nikayas .' Esercizi Filosofici 3, 2008, pp. 32-58. Online academia.edu.

I have some reservations about this article. It is presented in terms of what Gotama taught, e.g. "Gotama makes a dialectical use of Eternalism as means to eliminate Nihilism." which I think is indefensible unless by "Gotama" the author means "the Buddhist tradition" and he does not seem to make this distinction. However the observations about the rhetorical uses of eternalism are very interesting.

Del Toso also refers to:

Hallisey, C. (1996) 'Ethical Particularism in Theravada Buddhism,' Journal of Buddhist Ethics, 3, pp. 32-43.

And in this article Charles Hallisey highlights the Mahāmaṅgala Sutta, which gives a list of desirable practices. Hallisey points out that the list of duties in the sutta and Buddhaghosa's exegesis argue "against any attempt to find a single metaethical principle that would make sense of everything on the list with an account of the occasion on which the canonical text was first taught." Hallisey's point is that although the audience for the text could agree on the auspiciousness of particular acts, they could not identify universal criteria of auspiciousness and Theravāda Buddhist ethics is thus particularist rather than generalist. 

Now see also Ethics and Nonself in relation to the Khandhas. (21.3.2014)

23 Mar 2015: See this short article by Thomas Metzinger on the value of the illusion of continuity for goals and rewards, which I take to be fundamental to morality also.

"As a philosopher, my conceptual point is that only if an organism simulates itself as being one and the same across time will it be able to represent reward events or the achievement of goals as a fulfillment of its own goals, as happening to the same entity. I like to call this the "Principle of Virtual Identity Formation": Many higher forms of intelligence and adaptive behavior, including risk management, moral cognition and cooperative social behavior, functionally presuppose a self-model that portrays the organism as a single entity that endures over time."