Finding Easter Eggs in Pāli Texts

I've been studying the Kaccānagotta Sutta (S 12.15) for some time now. We are fortunate to have three extant versions of the text: Pāli (KP), Chinese (KC), and Sanskrit (KS). KC is from one of two Chinese Saṃyuktāgama translations (Taisho 2.99, no.301) related to the Sarvāstivādin School and was translated in the mid 5th century CE. The original language was probably a Sanskritised Prakrit aka Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit.  KS is from a cache of texts in Turfan from a manuscript copied in the 13th or 14th centuries. There is presently no published English translation of the Sanskrit (a situation I hope to rectify).

The text seems to have been quite important as it is cited directly by Nāgārjuna in his Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (MMK 15.7); and indirectly in the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra and the Laṅkavatāra Sūtra. It's also likely that Chandrakīrti who commented on MMK had a different Sanskrit version that the Turfan Ms. 

In this essay I want to explore a single passage which contains an elaborate play on words that gets lost in translation. I call this passage paragraph 5c:

• KP: Tañcāyaṃ upayupādānaṃ cetaso adhiṭṭhānaṃ abhinivesānusayaṃ na upeti na upādiyati nādhiṭṭhāti ‘attā me’ti.
• KS: etāni ced upadhyupādānāni cetaso ’dhiṣṭhānābhiniveśānuśayān nopaiti nopādatte nādhitiṣṭhati nābhiniviśaty ātmā meti |
• KC: 若無此取者，心境繫著使不取、不住、不計我

Translations

• KP: And that obstinate tendency of the mind to attachment and grasping this [noble disciple] doesn’t approach, doesn’t hold, [he] doesn’t insist on ‘the self is mine’.
• KS: And [they] don’t hold this obstinate tendency of the mind to grasp and cling, they don’t accept, [they] don’t insist on or have a tendency to say: ‘this is my self’.
• KC: Not seizing those, they don’t have the obstinate mental state of attachment; they don’t insist on, or think wrongly about ‘I’.”

Buddhaghosa’s commentary on KP throws light on this passage. He says

Tañcāyanti tañca upayupādānaṃ ayaṃ ariyasāvako. (SA 2.33)

'Tañcāyaṃ' means that attachment and grasping, and this noble-disciple.

This makes it much easier to unravel the syntax by supplying a subject who does not insist on the statement ‘the self is mine’, without whom the sentence is puzzling since on the face of it the subject who doesn't hold the wrong view is the same subject as the one bound by attachment and grasping (which is caused by wrong views). The reference to self is part of the oft repeated formula found in Early Buddhists texts regarding wrong views about the self, namely:

rūpaṃ etam mama, eso'ham-amsi, eso me attā ti samanupassati

he regards forms: this is mine, I am this, this is myself.

The formula is repeated for each of the skandhas, and in each case the assutavant is incorrect, where as the sutavant ariyasāvaka knows that it is not true.

What I particularly want to draw attention is a form of syntax which is unusual in English. We can for instance say "I sing a song" but not "I work a work" or "I talk a talk". Mostly this kind of idiom doesn't work in English but it is common in Pāli and Sanskrit. We have several examples here, though in the negative. The Pāli has (with the verbal root of the two words in parentheses):

upayaṃ na upeti (upa√i) - he does not attach the attaching

upādānaṃ na upādiyati (upa√pad) - he does not cling the clinging

adhiṭṭhānaṃ nādhiṭṭhāti (adhi√sthā) - he does not insist the insisting

Compare the Sanskrit:

[upayaṃ]* nopaiti  (upa√i)

upādānaṃ nopādatte (upa√pad)

adhiṣṭhānaṃ nādhitiṣṭhati  (adhi√sthā)

abhiniveśaṃ nābhiniviśati (abhi-ni√viś) he does not tend the tendency

We can see that where KP has upaya, KS has upadhi. This is difficult to explain because upadhi means ‘addition, attribute, or ‘condition, support’; so it might mean ‘tendency to grasp at supports where upadhi refers to dvayaṃ niśrito ‘based on a duality’. BHSD s.v. upadhi suggests that S. upadhi = P. upadhi (upa √dhā) ‘foundation, basis’; or upādi = upādāna. So KS could be intending upadhi as a synonym of upādana. However upadhi doesn’t seem to fit here, and from the Pāli we would expect to see upaya. What's more the play on words breaks down with upadhi. So it seems that upadhi is a substitution, though it does occur twice in the text.

Other features of the syntax hide the play on words to some extent. The nouns are all given in advance and some are compounded: upayupādānaṃ cetaso adhiṭṭhānaṃ abhinivesānusayaṃ. We are left wondering about the role cetaso (a past participle in the genitive or dative case). My translation above takes things as they come, but here I'm exploring an alternate possibility. If we take the nouns to go with the matching verbs then we might rearrange things like this:

Tañ ca ayaṃ upayaṃ na upeti, upādānaṃ na upādiyati adhiṭṭhānaṃ nādhiṭṭhāti abhinivesaṃ [abhinivisati] cetaso ānusayaṃ 'attā me’ti.

And he does not grasp the grasping, cling to the clinging, insist on the insisted, incline the inclining, this tendency of the mind [i.e.] 'this is my self'.

Clearly this doesn't work so well in English and there are strong arguments for not trying to use Pāli syntax for English translations. How might we improve it then?

And he does not grasp, cling to, insist on, or incline to this tendency of mind [i.e.] 'this is my self'.

I have taken a liberty here. KS completes the pun by including abhiniviśati where Pāli lacks the parallel. Given the structure I believe it was intended to be included and that the Pāli scribes left it out in error. It completes the picture and it's hard to imagine the author of this play on words missing the opportunity. So the Sanskrit is not an interpolation.

Now one test of this is to look at how the Chinese translators handled it. In Chinese we would expect a phrase like 'he does not cling the cling' to be confusing because the two words would likely be represented the same character.

KC 若無此取者 is literally ‘if not a seizer of those’ (i.e. existence and non-existence). It corresponds closely to KS. etāni ced upadhyupādānāni, but is similar to KP. Tañcāyaṃ upayupādānaṃ when it is read in the light of Buddhaghosa’s commentary. This confirms that Buddhaghosa’s reading is the correct one.

KC 心境繫著使 breaks down as: 心境 ‘mental state’ which renders S. cetaso; 繫著 ‘to be bound, attached’ seems to correspond to KP adhiṭṭhānaṃ abhinivesa and KS adhiṣṭhānābhiniveśa, where abhiniveśa means ‘obstinate or tenacious’; 使 renders S. anuṣaya ‘bias, proclivity, tendency’.

不取、不住、不計 are clearly the equivalent of P. na upeti na upādiyati nādhiṭṭhāti. For 不住 compare P nādhiṭṭhāti (i.e. na adhiṭṭhāti) ‘does not insist’ where adhiṭṭhāti (Skt. adhitiṣṭhāti) is from adhi+√sthā. the character 住 means ‘stopping, settling, staying’ which is Sanskrit √sthā 'stand, remain', so I have read it as Sanskrit adhitiṣṭhati. Re 計 DDB includes the notions of ‘discriminating, construing, and positing’ so there has been a slight reinterpretation here from nādhiṭṭhāti ‘attā me’ti (doesn’t insist on 'this self is mine') to 不計我 ‘does not construe a self’. While a self (P. attā, S. ātman) is not explicitly denied in Pāli Nikāyas, thinking in terms of a self is discouraged in the strongest possible terms. The attitude seems to be that a self is not relevant. However it seems that as Buddhist philosophy moved towards more ontological thinking that the denial of the existence of a self seemed a natural progression from warnings not to think in terms of a self.

This passage in particular shows up the way that an Indic original helps to makes sense of the Chinese. A problem discussed by Bucknell (2010). By contrast previous translators, apparently relying on the Chinese alone have rendered this passage as:

“Suppose one is without this grasping, not grasping at a mental realm which causes suffering, not dwelling, and not discerning a self.” Lapis Lazuli (2010)

“In one who has no such attachment, bondage to the mental realm, there is no attachment to the self, no dwelling in or setting store by self.” Choong & Piya (2004)

Some of the nuances get lost. Clearly “grasping at a mental realm” or “bondage to the mental realm” is far less satisfactory than “mental state of attachment” in Buddhist doctrinal terms.

So the Chinese does not pick up on this elaborate pun that we see in the Indic texts, and lends weigh to my first translation. However the nature of the play on words gives the sentence an added and ingenious structure. We can see that the structure has been marred in both the extant Pāli and Sanskrit, which are, of course, both translations. However the structure gives us what is called a checksum in computer jargon: a way of assessing the fidelity of transmission. Metre is often able to alert a read that a passage has been altered. For example the last verse of the Kāraṇiya Mettā Sutta is in a different metre from the other nine verses suggesting perhaps that it was added later. The structure here allows us to see how the sentence was originally constructed and what it meant. Of course we do not know when or where this sentence was composed, nor by whom, but they were more than averagely clever in this instance. 

When a computer programmer leaves a little message, or even small application that performs simple and usually benign functions, hidden in their code it is called an Easter egg. It is something for later generations of programmers or users to discover and delight in. Here the early Buddhist author has left us an Easter egg, and if one appreciates the subtleties of Indic grammar it is quite delightful. 

Bibliography

KC: CBETA. http://tripitaka.cbeta.org/T02n0099_012 

KP: Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana Tipiṭaka. Version 4.0. 1995. Vipassana Research Institute 

KS: Tripāṭhī, Chandra. (Ed.) (1962). 'Fünfundzwanzig Sūtras Des Nidānasaṃyukta' in Sanskrittexte aus den Turfanfunden (Vol. VIII). Edited by Ernst Waldschmidt. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1962. [Includes translation into German]: 167-170. 

Bucknell, Roderick S. (2010) ‘Taking Account of the Indic Source-text,’ in Translating Buddhist Chinese: Problems and Prospects. Konrad Meisig (ed.). Harrossowitz Verlag. 

Choong Mun-keat & Piya Tan (2004) ‘Saṃyukta Āgama 301 = Taishō 2.99.85c-86a’. Dharmafarer. Online: dharmafarer.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/6.13a-Sa-301-Kaccayanagotta-S-rev.pdf (pages numbered 89-91) 

Lapis Lazuli Texts (2011) ‘Saṃyuktāgama 301: Kātyāyana.’ Wikisource. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/ Saṃyuktāgama_301:_Kātyāyana

Pañca-skandha: Etymology and Dynamics

SKANDHA in the Sanskrit Dictionary (Comparing MW and Apte) primarily means 'bough, branch; shoulder bone (scapular); break, fracture.'  It also means 'a branch of knowledge', 'a chapter in a book', and 'a division of an army' which are obvious metaphorical extensions. Added to this the word apparently means 'a troop or multitude', which is not obvious from the etymology. The supposed root is skandh 'to collect'; sometimes confused with skand 'spring, jump, spurt'  from PIE *skand (AHD) or related to Latin scandare 'to climb, ascend, descend'. Frankly it would seem that the dictionary definition and etymology are inconsistent, except, funnily enough in the Buddhist sense of a 'collection'. However in point of fact the skandhas are not collections at all, and I can't help but wonder if 'collections' have been tacked on here precisely to accommodate Buddhist usage, thus fouling the trail.

Clearly the main meaning of 'branch' (or a tree or a line) is not related semantically to 'collect', but etymologists also draw attention to semantic similarities with Greek κλάδος (klados) 'branch, shoot, an offshoot' (CSED); from PIE *kldo- from *kel 'to cut' and giving rise to English 'calamity, clade, clast, gladiator' etc. The problem here is that, while the semantic field is very similar, the phonetics don't seem to be related.

Another possibility is that skandha comes from a PIE root *(s)k(h)ed or *sked (AHD). It has a form  nasalised form *skend and partly covers the semantic field 'to split' - which would connect it semantically with *kel 'to cut' This root is not well represented in Sanskrit, but is the root behind English words such as 'scatter, shatter and shingle'. If this is the PIE root then it is not well represented in Sanskrit either. I think we have skandha < *skand 'to split off, to branch' and that skandhayati is a denominative. I don't see any other related forms. This rarity of form may have led to confusion with Sanskrit skandh and (homonymous) skand 'to jump'. However I can't be sure of this without a lot more research.

Thus the etymology of the word is obscure. However I think we can agree that 'aggregate' as a translation is madness, and that other modern translations of Buddhist usage (group, mass, heap) are almost equally unhelpful. If indeed skandha were related to Greek klados, at least semantically, then we might translate skandha as 'branch'. The skandhas, then, might be thought of as the five 'branches of experience'. This might be interesting in light of the word prapañca (On the origin of the word prapañca from the branching of the hand into five fingers see: Translating Prapañca). We might postulate that prapañca (becoming fivefold) is related to the five branches of experience, though clearly some work would be required to establish this speculation. Since this is a blog rather than an academic publication I can take liberties and so for this essay I translate skandha as 'branch'; as one of five branches (pañcaskandha) of experience; it's justified by the dictionary and, as we will see, it works pretty well here. I would note that the branching of the end of limbs into five digits is universal amongst animals. What appear to be exceptions (horse hooves etc) turn out to have have fused two or more of the five digits and embryonic forms often begin with five distinct digits. This ought to be a very common basis for metaphors and we should not be surprised to find it.

Richard Gombrich (What the Buddha Thought, 2009) has suggested with reference to the term pañc'upādāna-kkhandhā, that Pāli upādāna-kkhandha should be read as a contraction of upādāna-aggi-kkhandha where aggi-kkhandha means 'a blazing mass' but c.f. Sanskrit skandhāgni 'fire made with thick logs'. (MW) I now wonder whether aggi-kkhandha just means 'a burning bough'. The phrase pañca upādānakkhandha is often rendered 'five aggregates of clinging', where we might read it as 'five branches which are fuel [for the fire]'; where upādāna means 'fuel' and 'the fire' is 'the fire of being'. I find the connection with the extended fire metaphor entirely plausible (see Playing with Fire; and Everything is on Fire!) and I suggest that it works even better when khandha is understood as 'branch'.

Having looked, somewhat inconclusively, at the meaning of skandha, let us now examine a passage from the Pāli Mahāpuṇṇama Sutta (M 109; iii.15ff ) which tells us something about the relationships of the skandhas:

The four elements are the reason for, the condition for the manifestation of the branch of form. 

Contact is the reason for, the condition for the manifestation of the branch of sensations. Contact is the reason for, the condition for the manifestation of the branch of recognition. Contact is the reason for, the condition for the manifestation of the branch of volitions. 

Name & form is the reason for, the condition for the manifestation of the branch of cognition.

Here someone has tried to show the dynamics of the skandhas. The form branch (rūpa-kkhandha) of experience is made up from the four elements: earth, water, fire and wind (catur mahādhātu: paṭhavī, āpo, tejo, vāyo;); or in experiential terms: resistance, cohesion, heat and movement. There's every reason to believe that just as cakkhu 'the eye' stands for the visual faculty; that paṭhavī stands for the experience  of resistance. Before looking at the other branches let us look at an interesting passage (SN 35.93) which sheds further light on this. 

The production of cognition is conditioned by a pair. Visual-cognition arises conditioned by the eye and forms. The eye is impermanent, reversible, and unstable. Forms are impermanent, reversible, and unstable. So this pair is transient, wavering, impermanent, reversible, and unstable.

Visual-cognition is impermanent, reversible, and unstable. Whatever the reason (hetu) or condition (paccaya) for the arising of visual-cognition, it is impermanent, reversible, and unstable. So how could visual-cognition ever be permanent?

These three things [i.e. forms, eye, & visual-cognition] coming together, encountered and co-occurring are called visual-contact (cakkhu-samphassa). Visual contact is impermanent, reversible, and unstable. Whatever the reason or condition for the arising of visual-contact, it is impermanent, reversible, and unstable. So how could visual-contact ever be permanent?

The contacted (phuṭṭha) is sensed (vedeti); the contacted is willed (ceteti); the contacted is recognised (sañjānāti). So these things (dhammā) are transient, wavering, impermanent, reversible, and unstable.

[The other senses are outlined in identical terms.]

So now our model has rūpa being made up of the elements (dhātus); and contact (phassa) is the condition for the next three branches. S 35.93 fills in a gap here. Contact comes about when rūpa, cakkhu (the eye, or visual faculty) and cakkhuviññāna 'visual cognition' come together; the latter in fact being conditioned by the former pair. And then contact is sensed, willed, and recognised. 

The last three mental actions are equivalent to the three middle branches. We can match up the verbal and nominal forms: vedanā vedeti 'he senses sensations'; saṅkhārā ceteti 'he wills volitions'; and saññā sañjānāti 'he recognises names' or 'he recognises recognitions'. However note that the three verbal forms are in a different order than the nominal forms. And this is unusual. Sue Hamilton's comprehensive survey of the skandhas in Pāli finds that they always occur in the same order (Early Buddhism, p.72). 

Next we add the three branches of vedanā, saññā and saṅkhārā to rūpa to make up nāmarūpa; and nāmarūpa is the condition for the arising of viññāna.

The astute reader will have already spotted a problem here: viññāna (associated with the six kinds of senses) is the condition for the arising of vedanā, saññā and saṅkhārā and thus indirectly the condition for  nāmarūpa. Thus we have two models in which the direction of the relationship between nāmarūpa and viññāna goes in opposite directions. How can we have two mutually exclusive models which are both  canonical? In the  Mahānidāna Sutta (D 15) nāmarūpa and viññāna condition each other? If this was the original idea it might have survived in two fragmentary and contradictory forms with unidirectional conditionality. Or perhaps the Mahānidāna Sutta sought to harmonise the two different models by combining them. Certainly the Mahānidāna Sutta says that nāmarūpa is root, cause, origin and condition for contact (tasmāt iha ānanda, eseva hetu etaṃ nidānaṃ esa samudayo esa paccayo phassassa, yadidaṃ nāmarūpaṃ). Nāmarūpa is quite a problematic term in its own right: see Nāmarūpa. And in another model we find "nāma is 'sensation, recognition, impulse, contact and attention'." (vedanā, saññā, cetanā, phasso, manasikāro – idaṃ vuccati nāmaṃ. S ii.3). And this in a model where phassa is a stage in its own right that comes after nāmarūpa. 

It must be the case that viññāna is being used in at least two different senses: cakkhuviññāna (and the other sense-viññānas) and viññāna (as a standalone) cannot be referring to the same process or even the same kind of process. The standard explanation is that viññāna 'furnishes bare cognition of the object' (Nyanatiloka. Buddhist Dictionary) but this is still contradictory. In the model of the five branches we're looking at viññāna simply cannot amount to 'bare cognition' since it is preceded by vedanā, saññā and saṅkhārā. Without 'bare cognition of the object' how could these three exist? Is the problem with the phrase 'bare cognition'? 

Elsewhere I have pointed out that viññāna is said in Pāli to be always related to the sensory stimulus that conditioned it. For example in the Mahātaṇhāsaṅkhaya Sutta. (MN 38. PTS M i.259):

Bhikkhus from whatever condition viññāṇa arises, it is called that kind of viññāṇa. Viññāṇa arising with the eye and form as condition, is called eye-viññāna (i.e. visual cognition).

From the same sutta we know what viññāna is not: "that which speaks and feels, that which experiences the good and bad." (yvāyaṃ, bhante, vado vedeyyo tatra tatra kalyāṇapāpakānaṃ kammānaṃ vipākaṃ paṭisaṃvedetī ti) This is cited as an example of a wrong view. We also know that Buddhists do not posit a 'theatre of consciousness', a metaphorical container in which experiences happen, since viññāna is seldom if ever used in the locative case, and where it is the text is usually arguing against a wrong view.

Idiosyncratic, but none the less insightful, bhikkhu Ñānavīra, says

Consciousness (viññāṇa) can be thought of as the presence of a phenomenon, which consists of nāma and rūpa. Nāmarūpa and viññāṇa together constitute the phenomenon 'in person'--i.e. an experience. The phenomenon is the support (ārammaṇa) of consciousness, and all consciousness is consciousness of something (viz, of a phenomenon). [Notes on Dhamma, p.81]

I don't think Ñāṇvīra has solved the problem I have identified here, i.e. the role of viññāṇa in the khandhas.  Since nāma depends on sense-viññāṇa. However he does add an interesting caveat to this discussion.

Consciousness, it must be noted, is emphatically no more 'subjective' than are the other four upādānakkhandha (i.e. than nāmarūpa)... It is quite wrong to regard viññāṇa as the subject to whom the phenomenon (nāmarūpa), now regarded as object, is present. [Notes on Dhamma, p.82]

Back in April 2012 I argued that Westerner terms like subjective and objective only obscure the discussion. In the Buddhist model of consciousness, subject and object are not relevant. This is a corollary of the idea that existence and non-existence don't apply to experience. We only get confused trying to marry the two modes of thinking about our experience of being aware. Indeed to think of viññāṇa as 'consciousness' is demonstrably wrong (see  The 'Mind as Container' Metaphor.) Nāṇavīra himself implies this, but doesn't not make the leap to rejecting the translation outright. We have our discussions as if Western concepts like consciousness, subject, object, etc., are givens. But they are not. The early Buddhists don't seem to have thought in these terms. Where they encounter this style of thinking, they tend to treat it as irrelevant to the task at hand. Ontological questions that fascinate Westerners, are just a distraction to early Buddhists. We are not trying to understand our self or our consciousness in the abstract, we are trying to understand why we suffer. Of course early Buddhists had a raft of assumptions about their experience of the world and we need to tease these assumptions out in order to understand their worldview. But imposing modern philosophical jargon often obscures more than it reveals.

This essay has at least shown how translating skandha as 'branch' and pañcaskandha as 'the five branches [of experience]' might work, and might be more comprehensible than present alternatives. It is intrinsically interesting that at least one of the strands that made up the Pāli Canon attempted to give the five branches of experience a temporal sequence, though whether it works is moot. My previous understanding, based on reading Sue Hamilton was that the skandhas did not form a sequence, but were to be taken collectively as the "apparatus of experience". That this attempt breaks down with the inclusion of viññāṇa is a puzzle that I'm sure I will come back to.

We have considerable work to do still to untangle early Buddhist ideas about why we suffer from Western ideas about our existence and the ontology of the self with which they seem to have been snarled. The first step in any comparative philosophy will be to understand early Buddhism on it's own terms and I don't think we have done this yet.

~~oOo~~

Note 5/5/13

In article by Collete Cox I found this the re the *Mahāvibhāṣā "In a discussion of the implications of the various meanings of the term "aggregate," or skandha, as a heap (rāśi), a bundle, an assemblage, or as a collection..." Thus the usage 'heap' predates Conze!
Cox, Collett. (2004) 'From Category To Ontology: The Changing Role of Dharma in Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma.' Journal of Indian Philosophy. 32: 543-597.

Supernatural Disenchantment

I've already commented on this issue, but this is another take on my attitude to the supernatural coming at it from a slightly different angle. There are some experiences, waking experiences, don't when we have them we know that they are weird or unusual. I've written quiet often about out-of body experiences. It was reading Thomas Metzinger's account of his out-of-body experiences, and his realisation that when he analysed the phenomenon that there was no need to assume that his consciousness left this body, that finally set me free of believing in the supernatural. However in the UK belief in the supernatural is widespread (and do scroll down to see Derren Brown's response).

Super means 'over, above', so the supernatural is conceived of as a realm over and above nature, a higher realm. It is particularly the realm of God.  The 18th century writings of Emmanuel Swedenborg were influential in establishing the idea that one could communicate with spirits, and that there were multiple unseen realms (was he influenced by Indian cosmology in this?) The word 'supernatural' has been applied to the 'world' inhabited by ghosts and like entities since the 19th century. I suppose that this coincides with the rise of Spiritualism, itself said to begin in 1848 when Kate and Maggie Fox pulled off one of the great hoaxes of history: convincing people they could communicate with the dead.

"There is no such thing as a spirit manifestation. That I have been mainly instrumental in perpetrating the fraud of spiritualism upon a too-confiding public many of you already know. It is the greatest sorrow of my life . . . When I began this deception, I was too young to know right from wrong." Margaret Fox (1888), quoted in Joseph F. Rinn, Searchlight on Psychical Research, 1954 (via BBC - Religions)

What we call "the supernatural" is actually a fairly loose collection of beliefs that invoke unseen entities and forces to explain unusual experiences. Some of these beliefs are old, and some, like spiritualism are more recent. They represent an strong form of mind/body dualism in which consciousness can exist in a refined realm of 'pure spirit', disconnected from the gross (impure) material world. Indeed many people appear to see the body as a vessel which temporarily holds consciousness in this inferior and unsatisfactory material world. Interest in this material world--particularly science--is seen as gauche and unsophisticated.

Unseen forces emanating from this other realm can affect our lives in various ways. They are responsible for luck and fortune for example. And for all manner of events which cannot otherwise be explained. Though they can affect the material world, the unseen forces are not like the physical forces (such as gravity or electro-magnetism). Unseen forces can not be measured, or detected by physical instruments. Indeed ghosts are difficult to photograph even though they can be seen with the eye. This highlights one of the fundamental contradictions of this way of thinking. What is the difference between the eye and a camera? It is precisely the brain interpreting the images that are formed by the lens of the eye.

The way that the supernatural interacts with this world is random and inconceivable, thus the interactions cannot be understood systematically. Most people believe in an ordered universe, but the supernatural subverts and defies this order, indeed it is when the order of the universe breaks down that the supernatural is apt to be invoked. Particularly it is when we are disappointed or disconcerted. Hence the supernatural beliefs which swirl around the subject of death. The bad things that happen to us, for example, are caused by luck, karma, fate, gremlins, God testing us, etc. The supernatural is an explanation for the inexplicable.

As the 20th century progressed the Supernatural accumulated more and more aspects, and Westerners began to explore other forms of religion and culture they incorporated exotic elements into their version of the supernatural. Folk beliefs from pre-Christian antiquity were partially preserved, and combined with Christian superstitions. To them are added some of the more exotic ideas of modern life like flying saucers and quantum mechanics.

Another rich source of superstition is India and its folk beliefs such as rebirth, and the 'vibrations' of mantras (especially hypostatized into crystals). I've written about the way we project profundity onto the Sanskrit language for instance. Some people literally believe that cakras (Sanskrit 'wheels') are supernatural entities ('energy centres') within our bodies. I've even met people with a rather literal belief our possession of a third eye. Western Buddhists in particular often seem to suffer no cognitive dissonance combining supernatural beliefs from Europe and India. Like the villagers of the Pāli Canon we are maṅgalika. For example seem happy to take on taboos against the left hand (despite the fact that few of us remember the original meaning of the word 'sinister') and the feet (See: Ritual Purity or Rank Superstition?).

One of the odd features of the supernatural in modern times is the attempt to 'prove' the existence of the supernatural despite the fact that by definition it ought not to be provable. Many popular books purport to 'prove' everything from UFOs to reincarnation. And these popular books are taken quite seriously and uncritically as proof of their subjects. However the more rigorous that scientific experiments are at eliminating the possibility of hoax or prestidigitation, the less likely they are to succeed in detecting the supernatural. Under the strictest conditions which allow for no human intervention, where any observed effects must necessarily be due to the supernatural, nothing is ever observed. The Amazing Randi, a stage magician, has made a second career out of successfully debunking such experiments by showing how conjuring tricks are involved. Derren Brown has done similar work to show how psychics and other fakers do their tricks. (See On Credulity). However, like the confession of the Foxes, debunking does little to damp the enthusiasm for the supernatural.

Since pre-scientific cultures typically have some kind of supernatural belief, our contemporary encounters with them are seen as confirmation of our own remnant of folk beliefs. And virtually all our religious texts are written in pre-scientific milieus. Buddhism for example originates in the Iron Age and, though it continues to develop, it never quite throws off that Iron Age worldview. There is confirmation bias involved so that any experience which appears to confirm our belief is eagerly embraced. Stories of the supernatural are sought out, preserved, and spread. Reports that cast doubt are set aside as uninteresting or materialistic. Reports of fakers are also dismissed. Some fakers, having been caught out, have come back careers in the the same field (Uri Geller). I've explored some of this territory before: Derren Brown etc. (Again, see On Credulity).

Ignorance of Science.

It's become apparent to me as an adult with a university education in science that, although everyone in the West studies science at school to some extent, there is a large section of the population who have no good grasp of basic concepts like forces, energy, chemical elements and compounds, or crystals (let alone the more sophisticated versions of these ideas). Many of the words are treated almost like magic spells used to invoke unseen forces and entities, when in fact they all refer to seen entities (seen in the sense of being subject to reliable measurement). As well as being, or perhaps because they are, weak on science these people seem to be susceptible to pseudo-science. I seems that many people actively want to see the world in magical terms. In a world where public aesthetics often tend towards brutalism (concrete boxes and sharp edges) people want a little magic in their lives. Whether it be a woo belief (in fairies, angels, ghosts, lay-lines, God, aliens etc.), a penchant for hallucinogenics, or just a fascination with horror movies (which mostly invoke the supernatural in some way) people want to be enchanted. These Romantics like to quote Shakespeare (Hamlet Act 1, scene 5):

Horatio: O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!

Hamlet:    And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
               There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
               Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

People have quoted this text at me time and again to show how limited my thinking is. No one stops to ask what Shakespeare can have meant by "philosophy" in Elizabethan times. They seem to forget that 400 years have passed in the meantime and the scientific revolution has made Horatio's philosophy, such as it was, completely outmoded and superseded. There is today far more to science than any one person could possibly hope to encompass and comprehend. Even with training and a sustained interest in science I can only scratch the surface. On the other hand to know nothing about the science is to be close to barbarism. For better of worse our fates are now bound up with science and technology.

Seeing Things

All human beings have a mild form of apophenia. This is the ability to attribute meaning to patterns or events; and significance to stimuli. We need this ability to interpret our sensorium, but the ability is typically tuned to err slightly on the side of significance. Consider our ability to see shapes in the clouds. We most often see faces and animals, because these are the patterns we seek out in the jumble of sensory stimuli. At its worst this tendency to see patterns and attribute meaning to them can become pathological. A portrayal of this pathology can be found in the film A Beautiful Mind, based on the life of mathematician John Nash. Actually though he was a gifted mathematician, his mind was not that beautiful a lot of the time. In his development of Game Theory he viewed humanity in terms of his own psychotic aetiology: delusional, paranoid, self-seeking. And these qualities are built into Game Theory which now informs everything from 'target culture' in the UK Health Service and Education sector; to massive bonuses for bankers; to military strategy. But that is another story.

Unusual experiences are often thought to be especially significant. However, many of these experiences seem to be merely attention grabbers. I know a lot of people who believe they have experienced ghosts or similar phenomenon (the Triratna Buddhist Order owns a haunted house in Cambridge: the story of its haunting is elaborated by an outsider here). Almost none of these experiences are significant except that they are good stories, telling them gets attention, and they act as a confirmation of the supernatural paradigm. They keep the magic alive. Just like in Peter Pan (the archetypal puer aeternus) there is magic because we all believe (and when we stop believing a fairy dies). People who see things that have no substance don't want to be told that they had a hallucination. Hallucinations are significant in the wrong way and reflect badly on the seer. So anyone who wished to report their experience is likely to insist on the significance of it in order not to look foolish. They may even, unconsciously, embellish the details in order to make it seem more plausible.

The particular hallucinations we see are to some extent culturally determined, but how we interpret what see see or hear is strongly culturally determined. If you don't believe in ghosts to begin with, then you are unlikely to experience one, or if you experience something (say, sleep paralysis) then you are far less likely to ascribe the experience to supernatural entities or forces (See Encultured Hallucinations - Genealogy of Religion). Belief itself changes what we think we see, and how we interpret what we see.

In discussion I always try to make it clear that what I doubt is the explanation of the experience, not the experience itself. We all know that the mind plays tricks on us. We all mistakenly attribute significance to experience, and we misidentify stimuli some of the time. And we don't like to think that we simply made a mistake if the experience felt significant or made us feel important. On the other hand there are uncanny and unnerving experiences and these are difficult to explain and we are seldom content with no explanation for the disappointing or disconcerting experiences we have.

We chose the explanations we give to experiences. We choose explanations on a number of different bases, but underlying this is a mechanism in which facts are given an emotional 'weight' and the facts that seem most salient to us are the ones that we have given weight to (the one's that feel right). For this picture I've suggested the analogy that belief systems distort the space in which facts have mass, causing reason to move in curves; in come cases, closed curves or circles.

Without an explanation we feel a sense of unease and dissatisfaction. People who believe in the supernatural have said to me "science can't explain everything" which I acknowledge. But they themselves seek to fill in all the explanatory gaps by invoking the supernatural. And the irony and the blatant contradiction inherent in this approach to knowledge is lost on them. Perhaps we have not changed so much from our animistic ancestors who saw the world as full of living beings, who anthropomorphized the forces of nature and ascribed motivations to them? Perhaps most of us still feel at the mercy of a capricious universe and want an explanation; or a lever to change the behaviour of the gods; or some kind of advantage in the confusion? Or maybe it's all of the above? In any case superstition is alive and well.

~~oOo~~

All Experiences Are Ephemeral

This "verse" occurs several times in the Nikāyas. It sums up a great deal in the space of just a handful of syllables. Like other celebrated verses it was no doubt composed as a short text to memorise and reflect on. It seems to be the same style of verse that we find at the end of Udāna texts, or in the Dhammapada. This particular verse occurs in two variations which I analyse below.

One version is found in two places in the Saṃyutta Nikāya (S i.6 & S i.200):

1. Aniccā sabbe saṅkhārā, uppādavayadhammino;
2. Uppajjitvā nirujjhanti,  tesaṃ vūpasamo sukho.

All experiences are ephemeral; rising and perishing according to their nature;
Rising, they cease; and quenching them is happiness.

The metre is old vatta. ( . = short,  _ = long )

. _ _ _ | _ _ _ _ | _ _ . . | . _ . _
_ _ _ _ | _ _ _ . | _ _ _ . | . _ . _

This is a fairly flexible metre of eight syllables in two lots (padas) of four syllables (a & b). In this case two lines are combined into lines of 16 syllables (four padas), with both lines ending with short-long-short-long (in fact there is an introductory line in the same metre at S i.6 that I have not included in this post). This is similar to the "epic" styles that doesn't organise lines into verses (thus this is not actually a verse, just two lines of metrical writing). Lines in this metre need not rhyme, but here the final syllable of the final padas do.

The variant is found at DN ii.257, S i.158; Ap i.64, 274, ii.385, & J 1.95 (Mahāsudassana)

1. Aniccā vata saṅkhārā, uppādavayadhammino;
2. Uppajjitvā nirujjhanti, tesaṃ vūpasamo sukho.

Ephemeral indeed are experiences; rising and perishing according to their nature;
Rising, they cease; and quenching them is happiness.

Again the metre is old vatta.

_ _ _ . | . _ _ _ | _ _ . . | . _ . _
_ _ _ _ | _ _ _ . | _ _ _ . | . _ . _

My studies of Pāli metre are cursory to date, so I cannot comment on the comparitive aspects of the two versions. However we can say that this metre is associated with the early days of Pāli composition. Vatta metre went out of fashion by the later parts of the Canon. So these lines are old compared to the rest of the Canon. (See: Pāli Prosody)

Most of the terminology in the lines is familiar, but it's worth revisiting it. It makes a useful frame work for restating the view that the Buddha was talking about experience, and shows how we can apply this hermeneutic to an unfamiliar text.

Line 1a. Aniccā sabbe saṅkhārā

Aniccā (Skt. anitya) means 'impermanent'. The word appears to derive from the preposition ni 'downwards, inwards'. The route to the meaning of 'constant, continuous, permanent' is not clear, but the usage is consistent. Here it is in the nominative plural and thus goes with (and is predicated of) saṅkhārā.

The difference between the two version is in this second word either: sabbe or vata. The version with sabbe may well be related to the Dhammapada verse 277, which has a similar metrical pattern:

sabbe saṅkhārā aniccā
_ _ _ _ | _ . _ _

Sabbe means 'all'; while vata is an exclamtion suggesting emphasis or certainty 'indeed, surely, certainly'. Here sabbe is declined as a pronoun in the masculine plural and vata is indeclinable.

Lastly saṅkhārā means 'contructs' (nominative plural - the 'subject' of the sentence). The etymology is sam- 'together, complete' + khāra (Skt. skāra) an action noun from √kṛ 'to make'. Literally it means 'putting together', hence 'construct'. I take this word to refer to a particular model of knowing - sense organ meets sense object in the light of sense awareness which is called phassa (Skt sparśa) 'contact'. From contact we get 'data' or 'knowns' (vedana). Vedanā is a passive past participle from the causative form of the verb √vid 'to know, to find'. Thus vedanā means 'caused to know, making known'. It is through vedanā that we known our world (loka). So saṅkhārā are what are put together for us to know, or have an experience of, the world. Or to put it another way our experience is a construct. The English word 'experience' conveys the meaning, while highlighting my way of reading the texts (my hermeneutic).

So this pada reads 'all experiences [i.e. 'all knowledge arising from contact' or 'all that results from putting together sense object, organ and awareness'] are impermanent. And we understand this to apply to the domain of experience, not to the domain of 'what is'. It is a statement about the ontology of experience, not the ontology of objects. Experience is empheral even when objects are not.

Line 1b. uppādavayadhammino

This pada consists of a single long compound uppādavayadhammino. We can analyse this in the following way: it is made up of three words: uppāda + vaya + dhammino and would scan as uppādāya ca vayāya ca dhammī or uppādāya dhammī vayāya ca dhammī. "whose nature (dhammin) is to arise (uppāda) and perish (vaya)." Dhammino is a nominative plural because it qualifies saṅkhārā which is in the same. 

This simply expands on the first point about impermanence. The nature of experience is that it constantly arises and passes away. It does this because our attention is always on a single aspect of the very broad range of input from our senses. We live in sensory information like a fish lives in water. So much of it that we hardly notice most of it. The Buddhist view is that we process this information one bit at a time. But we constantly scan our senses at such a rate that our experience seems to broadly take in our surroundings and proivides the illusion of smooth continuity. In fact our experience is grainy or lumpy in the same way that a film is made up of a series of still images. Projected onto a screen rapidly enough so that we cannot see them individually, but cognitively blur them into motion. 

It's worth reminding ourselves at this point that the sense of selfhood or first person perspective is subject to these same limitations. It is something that arises and passes away depending on where the attention is. In deep sleep and deep meditation there is no sense of self. In waking we can sometimes catch the sense of self being assembled. Some practitioners report that it is possible to operate without any overt sense of self or a first person perspective. Though I recall Sangharakshita's quip that before you can transcend the self, you have to have one. 

Line 2a Uppajjitvā nirujjhanti, 

These are two verbs, the first a gerund and the second a finite verb in the 3rd person plural. The gerund forms a subordinate clause indicating an action which precedes the main verb. Here the plural number of the main verb makes it clear that we are still talking about experiences (saṅkhārā).

The verb uppajjitvā comes from uppajjati (Skt utpadyati). The root is √pad 'to go'; with the preverb ut- 'up' it means 'to go up' i.e. 'to arise, to come forth or out, to be born.'  There are two strategies for translating gerunds. We can either says 'having arisen...' or allow the order of the words to imply the order of the action and say 'arising...'

The vern nirujjhanti (Skt. nirundhati) comes from the preverb ni 'down' with the root √rudh 'to stop'. So it is literally 'to shut down, to cease, to be destroyed.'.

So this phrase says 'having arisen, they are destroyed' or 'arising, they cease'. All that can happen when a saṅkhārā arises is that it ceases. The duration of any particular sensation is a fraction of a second. The number of 25 frames per second for a film to fool our eye into seeing smooth motion may be a clue to the duration of any particular experience. However the early Buddhists did not have films!

Line 2b tesaṃ vūpasamo sukho.

Having established the facts of the matter the verse gives us the punch line: happiness (sukho) is the quenching (vūpasamo) of them (tesaṃ); i.e. in the quenching of saṅkhārā. The word sukha is familiar enough not to need much comment: it is the opposite of disappointment and misery, i.e. contentment, happiness, and/or bliss. Sometimes, as I discussed some time ago in commenting on the Dhammapada, sukho seems to be a synonym for nibbāna.

The word vūpasama (Skt vyupaśama) combines the two preverbs vi 'apart' and upa 'up' with the verbal root √śam 'to labour or toil'. On its own upa√śam means 'calm, quiet' and is not not predictable from the combination of preverb and root (this is very often the case). Here the vi preverb is being used in its sense of intensifying the verb. Thus vūpasama means 'allaying, calming, supression, quenching (especially of thirst).'

Comments

Where nibbāna means 'blown out or extinguished' using the metaphor of fire; vūpasama references the metaphor of thirst (taṇha Skt tṛṣṇa). And the thirst metaphor is familiar stuff for Buddhists. We thirst for experience because we think that pleasurable experiences amount to happiness. That this is not so was apparently obvious 2500 years ago in India, but this knowledge of the basic falseness of the idea has not quashed it. Indeed I would say that this idea is more prevalent, more powerful than ever and driving industrialised, first-world, 'Western' societies close to madness and destruction. The pursuit of pleasure through sensory stimulation or through appropriation of objects or wealth has damaged not only us humans, but many other species and the very biosphere itself. And our pursuit appears to show no signs of slowing down.

And here is this text telling us that happiness is the quenching of experience - the very opposite of what we believe. Happiness is found through quenching our thirst for experience, not by trying to satiate it. Because the thirst for experience can never be satiated. We'll never get so much pleasure that we don't want any more. And though the Buddha could not have known this, it is also the conclusion of people who study the brain and to some psychologists.

And even in these few syllables we find the key to quenching that thirst. It comes about through examining the transient nature of experience. Our practice consists in various techniques to produce various experiences. Firstly we try to calm down - the take the edge off the restlessness of our thirst. Then we turn our attention to experience itself - watching it arise and pass away. Noting the speed and duration of change. Noticing how there is never stability. The continuity that we experience on an every day level is grainy. And in the still depths of samādhi we can see the dynamics of experience arising and passing away. We can come to understand right to the core of our being the utter pointlessness of pursuing pleasure. Which is not so say we ought not to enjoy our food or sex or whatever. We enjoy whatever pleasurable experience that comes along. But we know it as it is (yathābhūta-ñānadassana). even our cherished self is just another experience arising and passing away. There is nothing in experience that can be grasped. Forms are like soap bubbles - an outline of something which when we take it in our hands simply vanishes.

~~oOo~~

Insight, Peak Experience and the Supernatural

It's important to be clear that in critiquing the conceptual explanations of experience, as I did in my essay Thinking it Through, I am not denying experience itself. People have experiences. Clearly people have experiences in very many contexts which fall into the vague category of "mystical" experiences - a sense of boundlessness, feelings of transporting bliss, a sense of connectedness, the loss of a sense of self, apparent separation of the self from the physical body, and so on. I certainly do not deny that people have such experiences. To some extent I've had similar experiences. What I don't do is invoke the supernatural to explain and interpret such experience.

It was reading Thomas Metzinger's account of his out-of-body experiences that finally convinced me that a supernatural explanation is never preferable.  Metzinger realised that although he initially was drawn to a supernatural perspective on his OOBEs that there was a simple (and to both him and me) a preferrable explanation which invoked the way that the sense of self is constructed in the brain by integrating several streams of input. An OOBE occurs when the integration breaks down. It's definitely worth reading his account (especially before commenting!) though the very brief summary in New Scientist Magazine 23 Feb 2013 may suffice. (I recommend getting hold of this issue and reading the articles on self!) I finished reading The Ego Tunnel and I simply did not believe in the supernatural any more. It was a relief. It means there are some things I can't explain yet, but there is no principial problem with that, and in most cases the lack does not affect my daily life. Though not having a satisfactory explanation for a phenomena does often make us uncomfortable - the human mind abhors a vacuum every bit as much as nature does. For many people a supernatural explanation is preferable to no explanation, despite the many weaknesses of supernatural explanations.

We are capable of having extra-ordinary experiences. We all have them to some extent. At their highest pitch these experiences are radically transformative. One can't have a mystical experience, it seems, and remain the same. It is a watershed where one realises that there is another mode of experience that is unlike ordinary waking experience in its beauty, peace, happiness; unlike dream awareness in that it is coherent and consistent; unlike unconsciousness in that there is awareness. I think Jill Bolte Taylor does a pretty good job of describing this mode of awareness in her TED talk about her stroke: beautiful, expansive, unifying, inclusive, blissful. She stresses the word beautiful several times. Aldous Huxley coined the phrase "opening the doors of perception" for such experiences based on his experimentation with hallucinogens and they do help us to see our world anew.

Many writers have noted such experiences across the full range human cultures. These experiences seem to be available to any human being. Sometimes they come spontaneously; sometimes they are induced through intense austerities or meditation; and sometimes through the use of hallucinogens. The mystical experiences that result become the touchstones for religieux, even if only vicariously (for a large but unquantified proportion of religieux - my guess would be 99%).

Leading members of my Order have been struggling with how to convey this kind of experience. Recently Dharmacārī Subhuti has been experimenting with different kinds of language. A year ago he  spoke at an Order gathering about numinous experiences, and confused this with a noumenal realm behind experience, and it was a relief to see him abandon this attempt. These terms are loaded with unhelpful connotations. More recently he has suggested that there is something he cumbrously calls a "supra-personal force" (a term associated with sociologist Max Weber, but also used by psychologist Erich Fromm - Subhūti doesn't cite his sources). The "supra-personal force" is experienced as acting from an egoless perspective. Subhūti's prototypical example being the weeks after the death of Dr Ambedkar when Sangharakshita did his bit to rally Ambedkar's supporters and felt as if "something were working through me" (this period of his life is recounted in his memoire In the Sign of the Golden Wheel). At the peak of experience, the ego melts away and we act on the basis of this "supra-personal force" rather than our own will. Any artist who has created something will most likely be able to describe the feeling of something coming through them as they create. When I have experienced this it is as though I was merely a conduit for something which emerged on a canvas for example, and I could view it quite dispassionately because it did not seem to be "mine" and in a way the whole seemed unrelated to my dabbing paint on a particular part of it. The suggestion is that this feeling is analogous to the egolessness experienced by mystics and meditators. Sangharakshita has also modified a commentarial list -- the fivefold niyama aka the five niyamas -- to provide another name for this "supra-personal force", i.e. dhamma-niyama. It's now common for my colleagues to speak of "the Dhamma-Niyama" as we used to speak of "the Absolute" or "the Unconditioned". I'm not necessarily endorsing any of this, by the way, but I do find it interesting that the traditional ways of discussing mystical experiences are being re-invented by my senior colleagues drawing (without acknowledgement) from various modern(ist) forms of discourse.

There are two important facts embedded in the preceding statements: mystical experiences can be induced by massive left-brain strokes; and they can be induced by chemicals. Indeed we know from experiments conducted in labs that strong magnetic fields which disturb brain activity in certain spots also produce similar experiences; and can add epileptic seizures and migraine to the list of triggers. Even the most ardent proponent of the supernatural must grant that these mystical states have a physical correlate in the brain. The brain is always involved in experience and thus always involved in mystical experiences. Whether this is causal or epiphenomenal or something else is not so important to my argument, I merely wish to state that as far as can be determined there is always a cerebral correlate to experience. I'd be willing to reconsider if someone can show me evidence of the counter, i.e. an experience with no brain correlate, but I'm not currently aware of any such evidence. Direct changes in the brain--through injury or drugs--do change perception and/or personality and/or awareness, and the descriptions of such changes are often indistinguishable from descriptions of mystical experiences.

All of these experiences come under the general banner of 'insight' in Buddhism. But it is reasonable to ask: "in-sight in-to what?" The most general answer is that the mystic has insight into the "nature of reality" and the claim is that the mystical experience is somehow more real than other kinds of experience. The idea being that reality is in fact more like a mystic vision and that other kinds of experience is poor substitutes. I suppose it is inevitable that peak experiences change the way we perceive the world. The peak experience seems to expand possibilities, and even opens new fields of endeavour for us. We know from first hand experience that we can be more, and for some that can be very inspiring. And most people are never the same after their mystical experience - it brings a radical shift in perspective. I've know one or two people dissipate their lives in trying to  recreate that peak experience and never quite managing it.

Humans seek out peak experiences is many ways: meditation, drugs, and extreme situations or activities of various sorts. Starvation and painful austerities have often proved popular and effective triggers. People are often willing to risk injury or death in search of a peak experience. And we often dine out on recounting the peak experiences of our lives, or if our lives are very drab we may simply recount the experiences of others. Buddhists with special teachers are prone to the last. It seems that the peak experience defines us in some way. That peak experiences seem more real because they are more intense. Ironically the pursuit of intense experience of any kind merely blunts our sensibilities, which is a consequence of being embodied in an organic feedback system. Either we reach satiation and stop, or if we persist we experience less and less pleasure from our activity and must seek out more intense forms of stimulation. This may be why pain becomes fascinating as an intense experience. As the Buddha said, we mistake the painful for the pleasant.

How we interpret experience, especially peak experience, is heavily culturally determined. We are not free to interpret experience in any old way. We make sense of the world on the basis of some built in concepts such as causality and time (though these are also to some extent culturally determined); and in terms of concepts we learn through our memberships of various groups: family, school, peers, religious groups, etc. So if we have a mystical experience we will understand it in terms of our previously accumulated categories and concepts. Though the experience itself may give us new categories and concepts.

Thus many of my friends have experienced sleep paralysis and all of the creepy sensations involved, but because they live in a house that is supposedly haunted, they describe the experience as involving the ghost(s) of the house. Some are quite convinced they have experienced a disembodied spirit, some are more sceptical but favour the ghost story, and none have been receptive when I point them to the well documented phenomenology of sleep paralysis.

The belief in ghosts or disembodied spirits comes from our pre-scientific past and has persisted through to the present. Ghosts and other entities which survive death are prominent themes in modern literature and film. The ghost belief forms a complex with the prominent stories of the haunted house which is listed in more than one book as "one of the most haunted houses in Britain". The experience of sleep paralysis is certainly unnerving, but why the resistance to the idea that it might just be sleep paralysis? Why does belief persist in the face of plainer, simpler facts? I addressed this in some depth in my essay Facts and Feelings. Beliefs alter the salience of facts so that when we come to weigh things up, certain facts are deemed by us to be more weighty or more important. (Recent research suggests that those with supernatural beleifs find sleep paralysis more distressing - ScienceBlog). Thus the ideas of a ghost outweighs the idea of sleep paralysis for a whole complex of reasons. And not least of which is the impression that being visited by a ghost comes with a certain notoriety and even popularity and everyone wants to hear your story and marvel at your fortitude in dealing with it. Who wants to give that up?

I'm arguing that peak experiences are just like this. We no doubt have experiences. There is no doubting the sincerity of the people who describe these experiences. But for some it is a meeting with god, for others a glimpse into reality, and still others it is non-dualism or egolessness or brahman. There is a clear coherence in the phenomenology of the experiences themselves, but there is no coherence in the phenomenology of the interpretation except in relation to culture. The interpretation is generally in terms of categories we already have.

However sometimes we have experiences for which there are no convenient explanation. In the modern world we cast about, often in popular literature or on the internet, until we find someone or something who can explain what happened. Thus for instance the people who are sincerely convinced that they have been abducted by aliens. Often such inexplicable experiences are what lead us to religion in the first place. Scratch a Buddhist and you often find a trauma.

The sad fact is that however much we pursue such experiences most of us will not have a mystical experience. Even amongst long term meditators (and I know dozens of people who have been meditating for more than two decades) such experiences are relatively rare. Certainly meditation can give us all peak experiences, and I've my share of those, but the mystical or visionary experiences that transform, even radically transform the practitioner are elusive. Most long term meditators are certainly admirable people, but they are refined versions of themselves, rather than egoless or saintly or whatever. For most of us the path produces slow growth and evolution, but not revolution. Personally I mourn the loss of the value placed on cultivating virtues that has come with our societies struggling free of superstition and supernatural religions. I admire people who consciously cultivate virtues such as generosity, harmlessness, contentment, empathy and heightened awareness. So I don't see it as a problem, nor as any great surprise, that most people are not saints.

In my search for better explanations and interpretations I certainly do not mean to devalue the experiences themselves. In some cases my approach does take away the personal kudos attached to an experience like sleep paralysis because my explanation is at first glance more mundane. But only at first glance, because sleep paralysis reveals a fascinating side of our embodied minds and has its own value. It raises all sorts of questions about our embodied minds, and those who explore such questions are producing the most tantalising results.

vanillin

When I was a youngster (in the 70s) we used to call vanilla ice-cream 'plain'. We'd be asked "Do you want chocolate ice-cream or plain?" As I got older however I began to appreciate that vanilla is a delightful flavour in its own right, and when I first smelt a real vanilla orchid pod I though I had died and gone to heaven. Serrendipitously, in my third-year organic chemistry lab I was handed a vile of white powder and, with no clues, required to identify the compound before the end of the term. So I analysed it (using chemical methods and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance and Infra-red spectroscopy) and it turned out to be 4-Hydroxy-3-methoxybenzaldehyde or vanillin (right) one of the main compounds associated with the smell and taste of vanilla -- artificial vanilla essence is basically an alcoholic solution of methyl- and ethyl-vanillin. If I had a greenhouse I would grow the vanilla orchid. Vanilla ice-cream is my favourite these days. My kind of explanation need not lead to a grey world which lacks meaning. It is not plain compared to the chocolate of the supernatural. My world is full of wonder and colour. Also full of questions to be answered. Life is deeply puzzling. But I no longer feel any need to invoke the supernatural in response to questions and puzzles.

Emptiness for Beginners

Enso

Not surprisingly, some of the most abstruse doctrines in Buddhism are widely misunderstood, or the terms are used vaguely. One of the most abused terms in our Buddhist lexicon is śūnyatā. Since I've been responding to questions about the Heart Sutra recently, I thought I'd put together a basic guide to the term.

So lets begin, as usual, with etymology. The word śūnya means 'empty, void, barren'. Mayrhofer in his Etymological Dictionary lists this word under śūna from a Proto-Indo-European root *kuer (the change from PIE k to Sanskrit ś is regular). According to Mayrhofer "This is probably from *keur 'swell', as in 'bulge, bulge, cavity' (possibly via 'bloat', 'inwardly hollow out')". Porkony lists this PIE root under keu-. In English it can be seen in words such as 'cave, cavern, and church'. It is related to the Greek κύαρ (kuar) 'a hole, an orifice'. Our word zero ultimately comes from the Sanskrit word śūnya via Arabic sifr 'cifer', and Medieval Latin zephirum. In Sanskrit, this idea seems to manifest as the verbal root √svi 'to swell', which may also have forms √śū and √śvā. It's worth keeping in mind another word which appears in the Heart Sutra: ūna 'deficient, defective'. Thieme has speculated that śūna might be from su+ūna where su means 'well, good'. However, I think the latter seems unlikely and that the connection with swelling is much more plausible.

Those familiar with the image of the ball of foam for śūnyatā will immediately see that the simile might have another connotation than the obvious one - i.e., that a bubble is something that has swelled up leaving it's internal space is empty, i.e. it is hollow. I'll come back to this image.

Translating śūnya from a philological perspective is not difficult. It means  'empty, void, devoid, zero' and  possibly 'hollow, barren'. 'Empty' is a good basic translation. And 'emptiness' is the abstract noun from 'empty' in exactly the same way that śūnyatā is an abstract noun from śūnya. Here the -tā suffix is an equivalent of -ness. So literally śūnyatā is the state or quality of being empty; or the characteristic of something which is empty. However, the word is used in a specific context and we do need to be sensitive to that context.

In order to best understand this word we need to know something about the context in which it was used. In fact, the word is found in the Pāli texts, but as a techinical term of Mahāyāna Buddhism it is used quite differently. Firstly, by this time it is deeply engrained that 'dharmas arise in dependence on conditions'. A thinker like Nāgārjuna lived in a time when this had been the worldview for some centuries. It is fundamental to the discussion. It's worth stressing this if only because it seems to be lost sight of sometimes. Dependent-arising is a given.

The second thing to understand what is empty, and what it is empty of? We find the answer in the Heart Sutra in the two phrases: sarvadharmāḥ śūnyatā-lakṣanāḥ and pañcaskandhān svabhāvaśūnyān.

The first tells us that "all dharmas are characterised by emptiness". Thus the focus is dharmas. And what are dharmas? Dharmas are the objects of the mind sense or manas. This is a theory that applies to mental phenomena. It's important that we don't fall into the trap of saying or thinking that "all things are characterised by emptiness". This is not a doctrine about "things", this is a doctrine about dharmas.

The second phrase is aimed at the skandhas. But consider that the skandhas are aspects of experiece -- embodiment, sensations, names, volitions, discriminations. Sue Hamilton has shown that skandha is synonymous with duḥkha, which  in its broadest sense means 'unawakened experience'; and also with loka, 'experience'. Indeed, duḥkha and loka are both described as products of the process described in the nidānas so they are not only synonymous, but equivalent. (See Is Paṭicca-Samuppāda a Theory of Everything? for a discussion of this correspondence). The skandhas divide experience into useful chunks for vipaśyana meditation (and Avalokiteśvara was doing a skandha reflection practice at the beginning of the Heart Sutra); dharmas are the 'atoms' of experience from a Buddhist point of view. For the sake of this discussion, then, we could subsitute sarvadharmān svabhāvaśunyān here since dharmas are the focus. And this would mean 'all dharmas are devoid of svabhāva'. The word sva-bhāva is a compound. The sva bit means 'own'. If I wanted to say "I'm going to my house" it would be: sva gṛhaṃ gacchāmi. Bhāva comes from the root √bhū 'to be, to become'. Buddhists are sometimes a little too insistent that bhū means 'to become' and want to shy away from the 'to be' meaning, but this is an error. And we see it here because bhāva means 'being, existing'. So svabhāva means 'existing on its own or in it's own right; 'own-being' as Conze quite literally puts it. It's also translated as 'intrinsic-existence, inherent-existence, self-existent, self-nature, etc.' Thus "dharmas are empty of svabhāva" means that dharmas don't exist on their own or in their own right.

Now svabhāva is a technical term that exists in the worldview I described above. For something to exist on its own means that it is its own condition. So for a dharma to have svabhāva means that the condition upon which it arises is itself. Nāgārjuna points out that there is an inherent contradiction in a dependently arisen dharma being its own condition.

1. If a dharma with svabhāva (itself as a condition for its own arising) is currently non-existent, then that dharma can never come into existence.
2. If a dharma with svabhāva is currently existent, then it could never cease to exist.

And, just as Nāgārjuna does, in his Mūlamadhyamakakārakā (15.7), I will now point out that the Kaccānagotta Sutta  is the authoritative text on this subject (Pāli SN 12.15; Chinese Taishō 2.99 85a-86c [my translation]; a Sanskrit version is also extant). I've written a lot about this text - in particular, my long essay Is Paṭicca-Samuppāda a Theory of Everything? The Kaccānagotta points out that in practice we experience dharmas arising (utpāda) and passing away (nirodha). Now, if a dharma arises then it cannot be non-existent. The term used here is (nāsti) but Nāgārjuna uses abhāva. And, if a dharma ceases then it cannot be existent (asti/bhāva). So, if a dharma that presents itself to our awareness arises and passes away then it cannot be self-existent. And the Buddhist argument is that our mind only processes dharmas. Thus, we can say with some confidence that dharmas lack svabhāva or, in Sanskrit, sarvadhamāḥ śūnyatā-lakṣana. In the Kaccānagotta, the Buddha tells the Kaccāna that the terms 'existence' (astitā) and 'non-existence' (nāstitā) do no apply to the world of experience (loka). Thus we really ought to drop them from our discourse. Whenever we find out selves talking about real/unreal or existent/non-existent then a red flag should go up - we've strayed into wrong view. And this is the basis of my critique of the so-called Two Truths.

By a quirk of history, the development of Abhidharma thinking drifted towards the opinion that dharmas, as the fundamental building blocks of experience, must actually exist. This wrong view is why Buddhism had to produce whole new categories of sūtra and śāstra. Outside of this context of contradicting a particular wrong view, the doctrine of śūṇyatā doesn't really make sense. This wrong view is said to be the reason behind the name of the Sarvāstivāda sect of Buddhism. The name beaks down to sarva (all) + asti (exists) + vāda (ideology). I understand that the crude depiction of Sarvāstivādins as Realists has been challenged by some scholars, particularly Collette Cox, but I haven't had the time to look into it yet.

As I have previously observed, Nāgārjuna was, to some extent, stuck with this idea because the Abhidharma was canonical (I've referred to this as the Post-Abhidharma Doctrine Disaster). The easiest way to deal with the problem of starting to think in terms of existence ought to have been to start over, but Buddhism is a deeply conservative religion and, rather ironically, it clings on to existing ideas. They can be superseded, but not done away with altogether. So Nāgārjuna was stuck with this idea about the existence of dharmas. His response was to employ the term śūnyatā to undermine the Realism of the Abhidharmikas and get Buddhist thought back on track. It allowed him to agree with tradition--yes, dharmas exist--(conventional truth); but to refute this notion in the same breath--no, dharmas don't really exist (absolute truth). But the Two Truths were a workaround, and if we don't buy into dharmas with svabhāva (and who does these days?) then we don't need them. We can stay with the singular truth outlined in the Kaccānagotta Sutta, namely that dharmas arise in dependence on causes and by definition lack svabhāva. (And because I maintain this position, I have been called a NeoSautrāntika). Buddhist thought is important because it informs Buddhist practice. From time to time (every couple of centuries or so) we need to be reminded that, having calmed down and become focused, our next task is to turn our attention to our experience as it arises and passes away, because that is where the truth about experience is. In my view this is precisely what Nāgārjuna attempts to do in his works.

Thus, experience itself really is like a ball of foam. We definitely have experiences, but they don't seem to exist in the way that the 'things' we experience do. Keep in mind that this is a simile for the arising of a dharma present to the manas: the foam defines a shape but offers no resistance; the foam can be seen, but close up is transparent; the foam defines a volume of space, but it is hollow; the foam shape exists briefly and then bursts and is gone.

Another favourite analogy is to say a dharma is like rabbits' horns. I can say the phrase "rabbits' horns" and you can hear, correctly parse, and understand what I've said. The words are said and heard and understood and you can imagine what a rabbit with horns might look like. Yet at no time does a rabbit ever have horns. So is the image of a rabbit with horns that the words evoke real or unreal? The Buddhist answer is that neither applies so let's not go down that road. Just because you can name (samjñā) something does not make it real (or unreal).

Trying to unravel and comment on the myriad uses and misuses of the word śūnyatā would be a book length project and I have no intention of undertaking something like that. But it won't hurt us to reflect on how the usages that we encounter map onto this basic meaning. Keep in mind that it's not always wrong to reframe Buddhist doctrine - in fact, it is essential. Buddhism is not made up of eternal truths. Buddhism is a collection of methods and associated ideas which aim to produce a particular experience -- the experience of seeing through (vipaśyana) and understanding (prajñā) the nature of experience itself. And, in the meantime, the exploration of experience is itself a fascinating area of inquiry. And the way we talk about the ideas that inform our practice must reflect the times and places we are in. If we are to communicate the Buddhadharma then we need to use a language and idiom that people can understand.

To do this we must be thoroughly versed in what is meant. Like a jazz musician must be thoroughly versed in scales before they can be truly free to improvise. And Buddhism ought to be like jazz rather than some crusty old classic music always read from the page.

~~oOo~~

Thinking it Through

I haven't felt the urge to blog lately because I've been caught up in various things. At the same time I've been involved with a desultory discussion about the value of inter-religious dialogue with Elisa Freschi on her blog. In response to something I wrote, Elisa responded:

"But I do not think that one's religious beliefs are tantamount to the degree of psychological "biasedness" or to one's lack of insight. What about being sincerely trying to think through one's beliefs?

Don't you believe in the possibility of theology (i.e., rational thinking within the framework of some key beliefs)?" 

My reply is the comments on that post, but I thought it would be worthwhile to expand on my answer. My response consisted of a critique of the idea of "rational thinking". I began by invoking a paper by Daniele Cuneo (who is currently working on the Sanskrit Manuscripts Project at Cambridge University). In Thinking Literature: Emic and Etic Approaches, Daniele makes an interesting point about emic and etic viewpoints. Most people who study religion will be be familiar with this distinction which might be summed up as "insider" and "outsider" views. We will almost certain be familiar with the idea that Buddhism cannot be understood from the outside and one must practice it to understand it. I'm no longer convinced of this and why this is so may become clear as I proceed.

Daniele makes the excellent point that when we study a religion or a textual tradition as an outsider (and etic approach) we tend to project our own emic assumptions onto the subject. For instance we may refer to Buddhist literature, but "literature" is an emic concept for us. It comes loaded with cultural baggage. It is never the case that we can stand outside a tradition and study it objectively, we can only stand outside it and study it in terms of other traditions. There is no god-like positionless position. Or in other words we always make assumptions when we interpret information.

What I said about "rational thinking" was that it is an emic concept. Rational thinking is an idea about how humans process information that owes a great deal to the European Enlightenment. It's a modernist concept. But in recent years that very idea of rational thinking has come under heavy fire (to invoke the argument is war metaphor) from rational thinkers. I'm interested in at least two strands of the arguements against the idea of rational thinking - both of which have featured heavily in blogs of the last few years. The first is from neuroscience, particularly (for me) in the popular works of Antonio Damasio and Thomas Metzinger (though I've delved into Metzinger more deeply as well).

Antonio and Hannah Damasio have both looked at the consequences of damage to the medio-ventral prefrontal cortex (MVPC: see my blog here) and discovered that minor damage disrupts out ability to make certain kinds of decisions. The theory is that we don't just judge how true a proposition is, but that we judge how important it is to us (or at least how important it is to the decision at hand); which is to say we judge the value or salience of the information. And we experience the value of the information somatically as emotional states or feeling. When MVPC is disrupted then the link between information and its value or salience is disrupted and thus while we know what is true, we can no longer decide which true facts are more important than others. Thus we lose the ability to make decisions. It is my informal suggestion that we generalise this - that we experience the salience of all kinds of information as emotions.

Allied to this is something that a highly successful advertising expert once told me: "People don't make rational decisions, they may emotional decisions and then rationalise them." It doesn't take too much deconstruction of the adverts of top companies to realise that they all behave as if this were implicitly true. And if it wasn't their ads would not work. Pragmatism suggests that there is something in this - whatever Myers and Briggs say.

The second strand of critique of rational thinking comes from philosophy. I usually confess that I don't like philosophy and have not read any. This is not entirely true. I did have a period of reading the books of Geroge Lakoff and to some extent his coauthor Mark Johnson. Lakoff is a philosopher of language whereas Johnson is a philosopher of the mind (more or less). The thesis here is that language reflects embodied consciousness. They argue for instance that all abstract thought is metaphorical in nature, and that the metaphors we use draw on our physical experience of being embodied and interacting with the world. To give a very simplistic example or their very sophisticated idea: when we say "things are looking up" or "I'm feeling down" we invoke a spatial metaphor related to our bodies orientation in space. "Up is good" because when we are alive, healthy and alert we are upright; "down is bad" because when we are dead, ill or unconscious we are prostrate. Lakoff's more indepth work on categories in the wonderfully named "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things" shows that we tend to construct categories based on how we physically and mentally interact with the world; and we tend to understand relationships between members of categories metaphorically based on our own embodied experience. The broader category for these ideas (more associated with Johnson I think) is Embodied Cognition.

In short all thought is embodied, all thinking involves working with metaphors that rely on our experience of being embodied. "Rationality" -- as disembodied abstract thought -- is like Harold Bloom's joke about Freudian Literary Criticism being like the Holy Roman Empire... not Holy, not Roman, and not an empire. Empirical support of these theories has been found in the form of types of brain cells known as mirror neurons and canonical neurons. Mirror neurons are part of the motor cortex that controls voluntary muscles and are active both when we perform an action and we observe someone else performing an action. The implication is that we understand our observations in part by using the same part of the brain that we would use if we were performing the action. Canonical neurons are also part of the motor cortex and they are active when we perceive an object - the theory here being that in understanding an object we assess how we might physically interact with it, how we might manipulate it.

So to sum up "rational thinking" doesn't really exist. We can't think without using our emotions to assess the importance of information to us; to assess the salience of the information for the issue at hand. Similarly we can only think in abstract terms by employing metaphors that relate to how our body feels and functions; how we physically interact with the world. When we "grasp" an idea (a metaphor also available to Sanskrit speakers) we are invoking the felt experience of grasping. When we choose one idea over another, it is always because one feels right, or more right (i.e. of more value to us, and more salient to the issue).

With regard to the issue of sincerity I reported on a BBC Radio 4 interview with creationist Malcolm Bowden (the interview is archived here). Mr Bowden is eminently sincere, and as an engineer he knows how to think, but his conclusion is that all science is mistaken: that the sun goes around an earth created in 6 days by God about 6000 years ago. Mr Bowden sounds calm, reasonable and rational. He argues his case based on a series of assumptions that I certainly do not share, but argues logically from those assumptions. He says, and I believe him, that he has examined his assumptions about the world and this is his conclusion. He acknowledges the difficulties his confession has caused him, but is committed to his view.

How can someone like me make sense of someone like Malcolm Bowden? I think the foregoing argument shows one way to do it. Mr Bowden is sincere and rational and using reason to assess the information available to him, but he is giving certain information a much higher salience than I am. I give the bible no salience as a set of facts, so it plays no role in my decision making. He places the highest value on it. I don't need to think of the man as an idiot or to feel angry about it as many people might. I do feel a bit angry, but I'm aware enough to suppress it for the greater good. On the other hand Mr Bowden could use the same argument to understand what I've just written. After all, what am I doing but telling readers what kinds of stories about experience feel right to me; what kinds of metaphors help me to grasp my situation in life; to make sense of what is going on around me. I believe what I say I believe in this essay not because it is absolutely true, but because my life experience predisposes me to feel that way. I would not say that there is nothing I can do about it, but the conditioning is both strong and largely transparent.

I think this notion of transparency is vitally important. On the whole we don't think our own thoughts, we think the thoughts of our culture. "Rational thinking" is a very good example. The concept is so transparent that we don't even see it as a social construction. "Rational thinking" is an emic concept. We just assume that there is a function we do called "rational thinking", and some people are better at it than others. But no one does rational thinking in the sense that we generally mean. There's no doubt that some people are more articulate and better at justifying their decisions; better at persuading others. But again persuasion is not a simple matter of presenting the facts and leaving it at that. Malcolm Bowden is an engineer who despite being capable of disproving his own belief, maintains a Ptolemaic view of the universe - he rejects all astronomical observation since Galileo discovered moons in orbit around Jupiter. Presumably Mr Bowden is fully cognisant of the facts. He just doesn't care about them in relation to what's in the Bible. And I would argue that though Mr Bowden is a fairly extreme example, he is not qualitatively different from any other human being.  He's doing what we all do to make sense of our worlds. And our worlds do seem to need making sense of!

So is there scope for inter-religious dialogue? Does it achieve anything? I'm very doubtful. The very nature of belief makes it difficult to discuss with non-believers precisely because of the salience problem. However in my response to George Adams (in the Journal of Ecumenical Studies, 47(2), Spring 2012. 282-287 [paywalled unfortunately]) I realised that I shared some fundamental values with him. I could certainly empathise with his desire to see his loved ones no cease to exist, though as I pointed out it is Adam's eternalist views that cause him pain with regard to this prospect - because he believes the only alternative to eternal (after)life is annihilation and is thus caught in the trap outlined over 2000 years ago by Buddhists. Never-the-less I felt that despite his false assumptions, poor/circular logic and unreasonable conclusions I could connect with him as a human being. But this is not an inter-religious dialogue - its only possible when we set aside our respective religious doctrines and meet as human beings who love other human beings. Religion only gets in the way of this discussion. I said that my interest in dialogue was with precisely the people I have mentioned in this essay: with neuroscientists and philosophers who help me to see through the transparent conditioning I've taken on board and thus to potentially free myself from it. Conditioning causes us to think and act in ruts. This helps us fit into a society, but it restricts and limits our ability to respond creatively to experience.

The issue I have not addressed is "insight". I may come back to this, but usually it is expressed in culturally specific forms. On the other hand I am a great fan of Jill Bolte Taylor's Stroke of Insight on TED.