Am I a materialist?

Recently on the Buddhist Geeks website my enthusiastic endorsement of the scientific method was referred to as "dry", "reductionist", and (shock horror) "materialistic". I thought the terms of the discussion were a bit limited. I'm not really much of a philosopher, and have not studied much Western philosophy, but I don't think of myself as a materialist. I understand my philosophical position to be this:

I'm a sceptical epistemological realist; and more vaguely, a transcendental idealist. Though I'm also a pragmatic Popperian empiricist.

The basic position of an epistemological realist is that objects exist independently of your mind. Many Buddhists take the position that objects do not exist independently of your mind, but only exist in conjunction with your mind, or indeed only in your mind. I think this takes the Buddhist argument on the nature of experience too far. I go back to the basic Buddhist teachings and base myself on the idea that consciousness is always specific to the sense associated with it, and arises in dependence on contact between sense equipment, and sense object.

Since all the information we have about objects comes through the senses there are limitations on what we can say about them. But certain consistencies occur. For instance objects are recognisable, and memorable. With reference to any particular object, people agree (more often than not) that there is an object, and also agree on its general characteristics, even though specifics may be disputed. If you could see me writing this you'd probably agree that I'm sitting at a desk, in a room, in a house, in a town, etc; or you'd be open to the charge of madness. If someone else sees an object and communicates to me about it in a way that suggests that they see the same object as I see, then I take that as evidence pointing towards the independence of the object from either of our minds. When everyone laughs at the same time in a movie then it suggests the movie is external to all of us. Explaining observations like these becomes very difficult if objects only exist in our minds.

The view that objects only exist when I observe them at best is egocentric. But consider - when I leave my room and go downstairs to make a cup of coffee, it seems nonsensical to me that my room and all of the hundreds of objects which fill it cease to be because I'm not there to see them. And what about when I blink? In that fraction of a second when I do not see the things, do they disappear? And do they then reappear when my eyes are open again? What happens to them during my blink? Trying to explain this is much more difficult, much more cumbersome, than assuming than that the objects simply exist. However I don't think we can say much about that existence, which is why I am a sceptical empirical realist.

It is my view that the Buddha was unconcerned with the nature of existence, or reality. That is to say he was not concerned with the nature of the objective pole of experience. This lack of concern with existence (and non-existence) is clear in, for instance, the Kaccānagotta Sutta, and strongly re-emphasised in Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. The duality between subject and object is uncontentious in the Pāli Canon, it is simply a given. The conceptualisation of the problem of suffering, all of the analysis, and all of the practices, focus on the subjective side of experience. The nature of the object is simply irrelevant, it has to be there of course, but the arising of suffering is to do with our internal relationship to our perceptions, not with the objects of perception.

I've also said that I'm a transcendental realist, which in a way flows out of the previous paragraph. I must say I'm not a very sophisticated transcendental realist, and not very well versed in Kant or other philosophers of that ilk. Kant began with a problem. Hume had showed that a purely empirical approach to knowledge denied the possibility of metaphysical concepts like causality, time, and space. On the other hand empirical scientists, exemplified by Newton, had shown that we can say very definite things about causality, time, and space. Newton's well-known laws of motion are example. Kant's solution to this was to propose that the human mind interpreted sense experience in terms of inbuilt, or a-priori, categories of knowledge. The very usefulness of Newton's laws showed that a-priori categories had, to some extent, to reflect reality. Kant showed that the subject was involved in the creation of all knowledge, but that knowledge thereby created was valid. We can know useful things about the universe and how it works. Things are more or less as they appear to us.

In terms of my approach to Buddhism what this comes down to is, again, a focus on understanding the subjective side of experience, trying to understand the a-priori, what we bring to our interpretations of experience. This comes out of a study and practice of Buddhism, but in terms of relating it to the categories of Western philosophy this is as close as I've come. The fundamental problem is that we interpret experience in ways that cause us misery. Experience arises out of contact between objects and our sensory apparatus - but it is not the experience per se that is problematic, not the raw experience anyway. It what we make of experience, and how we relate to experience, the stories we tell ourselves about experience that cause us suffering. In other words it is not pleasure per se that is evil, only the pursuit of pleasure with the thought that it will make us happy. Hence the knowledge we need is knowledge of our relationship to experience; knowledge of the way we process experience into views and reactions. It is this kind of knowledge that will be liberating.

The last label I referred to was "pragmatic Popperian empiricist". Karl Popper was to some extent reacting against a trend in European thought which sought to evaluate all knowledge by the criteria of 'verifiability'. That is to say some philosophers were not prepared to accept knowledge as valid unless it could be verified. Sadly, although this philosophical position has long been superseded, it is more or less the popular view that science operates along these lines. But any living scientist will acknowledge the contribution of Karl Popper. At one time it was axiomatic that all Swans were white, because no European had ever seen a Swan that was any other colour. The statement "all swans are white" had become a standard in textbooks of logic even. However when Europeans got to Australia they discovered black swans. One can never anticipate when one might find a black swan which falsifies the statement that all swans are white. And this is the essence of Karl Popper's theory of knowledge, which informs my own understanding, and all of modern science. Facts and laws are only ever provisional because at any time a counter-example may disprove them. Theories might prove to be useful, but they can never be proved once and for all.

I said I'm also a pragmatist and this is because though they cannot be falsified, let alone proved, some forms of knowledge and some forms of practice are useful, or better helpful (I'm not a utilitarian). Some forms of knowledge which have been falsified on one level, even retain their usefulness on another. It is a fact that Newton's Laws remain useful in some contexts - say landing a human on the moon, or designing an aeroplane - even though observations have shown them to be inaccurate, for instance, when considering objects moving close to the speed of light. Then there is the placebo effect, the phenomena that we heal better, if we believe that we have had an effective treatment - even though it may be false to state that we have actually had an effective treatment, still we fair better than if we had no treatment at all. I argued this in the case of karma, which cannot be either verified or disproved, but is still useful as a view in helping to determine how we should behave. That is, I believe the theory of karma is morally helpful, even though it has doubtful truth value, if only in a provisional sense. (see Hierarchies of Values). Despite my definite preference for the rational, factual truth is not the only criteria that I apply when assessing the value of an idea. I may also form an opinion on the basis of helpfulness, or more aesthetic qualities such as elegance or beauty.

I don't feel entirely comfortable with this kind of discussion, or with these kinds of labels, I'm all too aware of the extent of my ignorance of Western philosophy. But when someone calls me a materialist because I'm educated in, and enthusiastic about, the scientific method, I need a way to respond which doesn't buy in to the simplistic duality being proposed: either one is a materialist, or a non-materialist. This simple opposition is not very helpful. People don't really hold views that are either one or the other, but have a far more sophisticated relationship to the objective pole of experience. One simply cannot be a practising Buddhist, as I have been for 16 years, and maintain a purely materialist view of the world. Clearly I do have a view about the material world, and I do think science can tell us far more about the material world than can Buddhism, but my focus is very much on the subjective, on the relationship to perception, on the nature of experience. Traditional Buddhist approaches to knowledge are rooted in pre-technological world-views that are frequently little better than superstition - the Buddha has a magical ability to know ultimate reality through super-powers - which just doesn't chime with my own experience of Buddhists and Buddhism. I see the European Enlightenment as a good thing (unlike some of my colleagues).

The other aspect of the criticism was that scientific investigation is reductionist. Reductionism by definition is the attempt to "explain a complex set of facts, entities, phenomena, or structures by another, simpler set" (the free dictionary). Which means of course that Buddhist doctrine is on the whole reductionist, because at its heart are explanations of phenomena in terms of short lists of mental states and events; and simplified models of dependent arising. By contrast some people try to explain phenomena in terms of more complex, often metaphysical or even mystical, ideas; they go against Occam and invent new entities to explain what they experience. What to call this kind of approach? Inflationist? The inflationist critique of science is that it tries to explain the unknown in terms of the known; whereas inflationists try to explain things in terms of the unknown, and the more mysterious the better. Apparently no one likes to admit that they simply don't know the cause of some experiences, nor the nature of them. If someone claims to remember a past life and I express doubt then I am, apparently, a materialist. But I don't see why an experience should be interpreted in terms of mysterious entities and processes as opposed to known entities and processes, if the truth is that we just don't know.

The charge is that experience is reduced only to that which can be measured. I would turn this around: it seems to me that inflationistists tend to project their subjectivity onto the world, and assign it an objective status which it does not deserve. There are many examples of inflationism stemming from interpretations of Indian religious ideas. Despite all evidence to the contrary people treat cakras, for instance, as really existent rather than symbolic or at best subjective; similarly they insist that the mysterious 'third eye' has some physical manifestation in the body (a past acquaintance assured me that it was connected to the pineal gland!) . I know many people who have seen or felt ghosts, because the house up the road (which is occupied by members of my order and community) is haunted. In fact it is supposedly one of the most haunted houses in the UK. I do not doubt that people have had uncanny, strange, unnerving, and inexplicable experiences. However I also do not necessarily accept that ghosts are the best explanation for those experiences. Some experiences do not have external objects, as anyone who has ever meditated, dreamed, taken psychedelic drugs, or gone mad will confirm. Actually anyone who ever thought, or remembered, or imagined anything is not (necessarily) working with external objects. A ghost certainly has more mystique, than a hallucination, but is it more likely? I'd have to say no. Plus at least half of the weird experiences are obviously caused by sleep paralysis. [See also today's xkcd cartoon]

So, am I a materialist? No. I'm a sceptical epistemological realist, a transcendental idealist, and a pragmatic Popperian empiricist (or something like that - actually I usually just say Buddhist). As such I don't have much to say about the nature of existence or reality (or any of that material stuff). Although I really enjoyed those Brian Cox documentaries and read Stephen Hawking, these days I'm mostly interested in the nature of experience. I do see an empirical approach to investigating it as the most useful; though I'm prepared to be pragmatic about what is helpful for that investigation. The main point is that I reject the dumbing down of religious discussions, especially in the area of the interaction between religion and science. If anything is dry and reductionist, and frankly boring, it is the idea that everyone interested in science is necessarily a materialist.

Next week [22 Oct 2010] I attempt to demolish the idea that Buddhism and Quantum Mechanics have anything in common. See Erwin Schrödinger Didn't Have a Cat.

Rebirth Eschatologies

The word eschatology derives from the Greek eschato 'last' and refers to belief systems related to the destiny of individuals and groups, especially after death. Last week [see Brahmā the Cheat] I drew attention to Gananath Obeyesekere's fascinating book on rebirth eschatologies - Imagining Karma - published by the University of California Press (2002). This week I want to look more closely at his ideas. By comparing various belief systems around the world Obeyesekere teases out the essential features of belief in rebirth, and then looks at Buddhist, Amerindian, and Greek belief systems in light of these generalities.

The simplest form of rebirth is a usually unending cycling between this world and another world. Richard Gombrich (who has collaborated with Obeyesekere in the past) has highlighted the work of Polish Sanskritist Joanna Jurewicz which shows that contrary to prevailing views there is evidence of just such a belief system in the Ṛgveda: the brahmin goes to the world of the fathers for a period after death and then returns to this world. Jurewicz identifies a single verse in a late hymn which appears to confirm a belief in this kind of rebirth. The late timing suggests that the idea comes not from the group who wrote the Ṛgveda, but rather than the they picked it up after they had been in India for some centuries. [1]

The simplest form of rebirth eschatology is not moral, rebirth is not dependent on behaviour and so the other world is not differentiated, and this kind of rebirth is the commonest around the world. As soon as morality is introduced into the picture the other world bifurcates into a place of reward, and a place of punishment. In this model good deeds cause one to be reborn in heaven for a period until the merit of the previous life is exhausted, when one returns to this world. This morality need not be ethical. For instance in the morality of brahmins one's destination after death was dependent on proper ritual behaviour, not on ethical behaviour. Just as for centuries Hindu morality focussed on doing one's duty, rather than on one's behaviour more generally (a central theme in the Bhagavadgīta).

A further development occurs when the rebirth destination in this world (as opposed to the other world) is determined by morality in the previous life. This is roughly the situation of the rebirth theories in the early Upaniṣads: Bṛhadāranyka (BU), Chāndogya (CU), and the Kausitaki (KauU). [2] The 'doctrine of the fires' maps out a relatively complex set of possibilities. On death the one who has understood the identity of ātman and brahman goes to the gods and then onto brahman and does not return [3]. The one who has carried out the sacrifices (i.e. a brahmin who follows the pre-Upaniṣadic religion) goes to the world of the fathers and is eventually reborn as a human (which is the old simple cycle). The third possibility is for everyone else and they are reborn as a śudra or an insect - they don't have an account for the other classes, or any women.

The ethicization of rebirth changes the model substantially into what Obeyesekere calls a karma eschatology - something which appears to be unique to India. This is where one's ethical actions (karma) determine one's next rebirth (though confusingly karma meant ritual action to the brahmins). Although there are hints at an ethical rebirth in BU, the idea is first found fully articulated amongst the śramaṇa groups. Some scholars have taken this to mean that the idea originated amongst śramaṇas and was only later adopted by brahmins, and argue that BU especially shows this absorption in process of happening since it presents different patterns of rebirth. The fact that the ideas about rebirth are presented by kṣatriyas in BU and CU helps to reinforce this interpretation.

In earlier models rebirth was an endless cycle, which came to be called saṃsāra - meaning 'continues to go on'. This idea must have persisted into the Buddhists period even though middle Vedic period texts like the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa (ca 8th-6th century BCE) mention the possibility of escape from the cycle of 'redeath' as it is called there. We know this because many of the Buddha's teachings are given in terms of an escape from saṃsāra, where saṃsāra is precisely this beginningless, endless cycle of birth and death. Buddhists were not the only group teaching an escape from saṃsāra, and this seems to have been one of the most important religious paradigms both at the time, and subsequently. In the early Upaniṣads, as I have mentioned, escape from the cycle was conceived of in terms of 'going to brahman', or 'union with brahman': brahmasahavyata. I have discussed one of the Buddhist responses to this belief in the Kevaddha Sutta in an earlier post. Here we find the Buddha claiming:

I know Brahmā, and Brahmā's domain, and the way leading to Brahmā's domain.

The result was not to deny the escape from saṃsāra in terms of the path to brahman, but to adopt and adapt it. At present I do not think the very distinctive nature of the brahmavihāra meditations with respect to other styles of Buddhist meditation has received sufficient attention. This may be because later Buddhists lost sense of the metaphor and read brahmavihāra as literally being reborn in Brahmā's world, i.e. as not leading to freedom from liberation, despite the related description cettovimutti being applied to it. My reading of the texts, following Gombrich, is that the Buddha clearly used brahmavihāra as a synonym for nibbāṇa.

So the Buddhist idea of an escape from saṃsāra was not original. What was original was how the Buddha defined 'this world' and what escaping from it meant. I have explored the former in my post What the Buddha meant by World, and clearly his definition of 'the world' as the world of experience, has profound implications for eschatology. What we are escaping from is not necessarily birth and death in the sense of physical rebirth, and physical death. Indeed the Buddha often couched his eschatological teaching in terms of escape from the experience of disappointment (dukkha). It allowed the Buddha and other arahants to say they were liberated, that they had "done what needed to be done" in their own lifetimes, without the necessity to die first (an innovation on the Brahmin conception at least!). Heaven, dwelling with Brahmā (brahmavihāra), is available here and now, according to the Buddha.

Historically Buddhists seem to have taken on existing cosmologies with some adaptation, but with a tendency to reify them for rhetorical effect. Although the Buddha defined 'this world' in terms of experience, the 'other world' became a series of actual places where one could be reborn: the brahmaloka in particular was brought within saṃsāra. This seems to have been a wrong turn, and has left us with a confused picture of cosmology and rebirth. Tradition asks us to believe quite literally in rebirth and in the various realms. The spirit in which the Buddha claimed to know Brahmā and the way to companionship with Brahmā - as a metaphor for escaping saṃsāra - has been lost. One result has been the ongoing polarisation about whether or not we Western Buddhists should believe in rebirth. On the contrary Chögyam Trungpa has spoken of the six realms as psychological metaphors rather like the Jungian archetypes, and this sits better with the idea of 'world' as experience, than more traditional realms for actual rebirth. [4]

One of the weird things about rebirth and karma eschatologies has been the enthusiasm for them in the West. For the Indian repeated rebirth and redeath is a curse to be escaped from. In the popular imagination of Western culture, rebirth seems an attractive proposition. We actually want to be reborn. What this tells us is that westerners in general see rebirth in terms of personal continuity. This is what the Pāli texts call 'having a pernicious view' (pāpakaṃ diṭṭḥigataṃ). When nibbāṇa is presented in terms of the end of personal continuity, I think something baulks in the Western psyche. It suggests that despite living in hedonistic and nihilistic times, that underlying this is a frustrated eternalism. Having given up on the prospect of eternal life somewhat reluctantly because of the accompanying baggage, we are drowning our sorrows. Perhaps this is also why western culture is so obsessed with youth, so mired in the Peter Pan Syndrome.

It is unlikely that Obeyesekere's book will appeal to the mass market, or even to most Buddhists. The ideas are complex, even if well presented. Complex ideas are difficult to popularise, especially in our 'sound bite' culture. However the more that we understand about how the early Buddhist presentation of the Dharma was conditioned by the time and place of its articulation, the better we will understand how to adapt it to our own times. The aspects of the Dharma that are simply cultural will stand out better, allowing us to grasp more clearly the principles which are applicable in our own context.


Notes

1. Jurewicz's original paper was: Jurewicz, J. ‘Prajapati, the Fire and the pañcagnividya’. In: Balcerowicz, P., Mejor, M. (Eds.) Essays in Indian Philosophy, Religion and Literature. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass 2004, s.45-60. A revised version of her conference paper from the 14th World Sanskrit Conference, July 2006, on this subject is on the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies website: Jurewicz, J. The Rigveda, 'small scale' societies and rebirth eschatology. 2006.
2. KauU contains a later reworking of ideas found in BU and CU.
3. I have pointed out that this idea is missing from the Pāli texts. The omission is significant, but so far not much commented upon in the academic literature. One scholar who has also noticed this is Dr Brian Black of Lancaster University, watch for a series of forthcoming publications from him.
   
4. See Trungpa's commentary in Trungpa, Chogyam and Freemantle, Francesca (trans.). The Tibetan Book of the Dead: Great Liberation Through Hearing in the Bardo. Shambala, 1975. (link is to the new edition)
   

image: Monks stand waiting for a confession as a martyr is tortured on the wheel. Taken from How Stuff Works, ultimately from Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Brahmā the Cheat

The Brahmanimantanika Sutta (MN 49) has a number of interesting features. The sutta opens with the news that Baka the Brahmā has taken on a wrong view. Baka means 'crane' or 'heron', but it has figurative meaning which is according to Monier-Williams: "hypocrite, cheat, rogue, the crane being regarded as a bird of great cunning and deceit as well as circumspection)". We should immediately be alert therefore that this is a polemic. The animal with the same characteristics in Anglo-European culture is the weasel - so the character's name might be rendered God the Weasel.

The view that Baka has taken up is this:

Idañhi, mārisa, niccaṃ, idaṃ dhuvaṃ, idaṃ sassataṃ, idaṃ kevalaṃ, idaṃ acavanadhammaṃ, idañhi na jāyati na jīyati na mīyati na cavati na upapajjatī’ti; santañca panaññaṃ uttari nissaraṇaṃ ‘natthaññaṃ uttari nissaraṇa’nti vakkhatīti.

This, sir, is permanent, this is enduring, this is eternal, this is everything, this is unending. This is not being born, is not aging, is not dying, is not falling, is not being reborn; and beyond this, there is no escaping.

Our first question is what does Baka mean by 'this', what is he referring to? And because the text moves swiftly on to another tack it is difficult to tell. However there is a clue in the passage I've cited, in the sequence: birth, aging, death, falling, rebirth. This is not a random sequence, nor are death (mīyati) and falling (cavati) simply synonyms as one might easily assume them to be, nor perhaps are birth (jāyati) and rebirth (upapajati).

I need to backtrack for a bit. In 2002 Gananath Obeyesekere published Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist and Greek Rebirth, which took a broad view of the idea of rebirth. It seems that many cultures develop a theory of rebirth and in its most basic form it involves circulating between this world and another world - usually some form of heaven, often inhabited by one's own ancestors. It has been asserted for a long time that in the early Vedic period there is no evidence of a belief in rebirth, but more recently Joanna Jurewicz showed that the Ṛgvedic mantra 10.16.5 can be interpreted as a request for Agni to send the dead person back again to his descendants (this is discussed in Richard Gombrich's 2010 book What the Buddha Thought). This suggests that early Vedic people had a standard rebirth theory in which the person (actually the man) cycled between this world and the other world.

The 'other world' for the Vedic Brahmin was the world of the fathers (pitaraḥ). This idea is expressed in greater detail in the Bṛhadāranyaka and Chāndogya Upaniṣads which both tell the story of how one precesses through the cycles. However the simple binary persisted for some time and it is referred to in the Pāli texts (in the phrase 'this world and the next world'). The simplest expression of this cycle does not allow for escape.

Let us now reconsider the Brahmanimantanika Sutta. The sequence, again, is: birth, aging, death, falling, rebirth. The cycle involves being born (jāyati) and living in this world (jīyati); dying (mīyati) and arising (upapajti) in the heavenly realms. Having lived a long time in the heavenly realms, one falls (cavati) back down to earth to be once again born (jāyati). And so the cycle goes round.

This cycle is called saṃsāra which is a noun from the the verb sam+√sṛ 'flow' - and means to move about continuously, to come again and again. It is this that Baka is saying is "permanent, enduring, eternal, everything, unending". This is his deceit: the view he adopts is that saṃsāra is forever, and inescapable, that we are doomed to go around and around endlessly. The ethicization of the universe that occurred amongst the samaṇa movements meant that the model had to become more sophisticated, but I will leave that thread for now. But the idea that one could escape from the rounds of rebirth (or redeath as it is sometimes called) must have seemed extremely radical. Indeed the Upaniṣads the idea is introduced to Brahmins by a King or Kṣatriya, and although there is much speculation about what this might mean, at the very least it shows that the idea was new and from outside fold.

Māra steps into the sutta at this point and his contribution at first sight is puzzling. However Māra is sometimes called Namuci, which is a contraction of na muñcati 'does not release'. His role often relates to keeping beings in saṃsāra. Māra as an archetypal figure is often associated with our own doubts, he is the inner voice of doubt. So whereas Baka seems to represent the social pressure exerted on us to doubt the possibility of liberation; Māra represents our own doubts.

One of his warnings to Buddha is:

so... mā tvaṃ brahmano vacanaṃ upātivattittho... evaṃ sampadamidam bhikkhu, tuyham bhavissati

He... do not overstep what Brahmā says... [or various evils] will befall you.

This is reminiscent of the debate scene in BU 3.6 where Gārgī is questioning Yajñavalkya on what the various aspects of the universe are made; and finally asks on what brahman is woven. Yajñavalkya replies

sa hovāca gargī mātiprākṣīḥ
mā te mūrdhā vyapaptat

Don't ask too many questions, Gārgī
your head will split apart.

Gārgī desists, but later in the text another questioner's head does split apart.

Of course Māra also plays the role of Lord of saṃsāra - he thinks of the kāmaloka as his realm, where we dwell at his mercy, which is to say we dwell suffering. Māra is afraid that if the Buddha teaches that beings will go beyond his realm (te me visayaṃ upātivattissanti).

Then the Buddha and Baka have a discussion about the elements. Baka says

Sace kho tvaṃ, bhikkhu, pathaviṃ ajjhosissasi, opasāyiko me bhavissasi vatthusāyiko, yathākāmakaraṇīyo bāhiteyyo

If indeed you, bhikkhu, will be attached to earth, you will be in my domain, in my reach, at my mercy.

This is repeated for a list of elements. Of course the Buddha is aware of this and says that he not attached to the elements. The list of elements is unusual: earth, water, fire, air, beings (bhūta), devas, Prajāpati and Brahmā. Once again I refer the reader to BU 3.6 and the discussion with Gārgī. It goes like this (I'll use Valerie Roebuck's translation, slightly modified)

"Yajñāvalkya, she said, since all this earth (idaṃ sarvaṃ pārthivaṃ) is woven on the waters, as warp and weft, on what are the waters woven?
On air.
On what is air woven?"

And so on. The list begins the same: earth, water, air. Then we get 'the middle realm' (antarikṣaloka) which may well correspond to bhūta in the Pāli list. Then in BU a list of various devalokas - gandharvaloka, adityaloka, candraloka, nakṣatraloka, devaloka, indraloka - then prajāpatiloka and finally brahmaloka. If we collapse the list from gandharva to indraloka into 'devaloka' (which they are all varieties of) then the list from Brahmanimantanika Sutta and BU are very similar indeed. What's more the list makes more sense in the context of BU than it does in a Pāli sutta, because the Buddha was hardly likely to be attached to Prajāpati or Brahmā.

There is one snafu here. And it is that one of the distinctive teachings of the BU, which we meet at the end of book 3 (3.9.28), is the idea of escape from rebirth:

jāta eva na jāyate ko nv enaṃ janayet punaḥ |
vijñānam ānandaṃ brahma rātir dātuḥ parāyaṇaṃ ||

Born, only, not born again; who could beget him?
Consciousness, bliss, Brahman, grace; the gift to the giver.

It seems that in all of these kinds of references to Vedic ideas in Pāli texts, there is always an element of over-simplification, of parody. One gets the sense that the last thing a Buddhist wanted to do was debate a Brahmin on their own terms - and yet again so many of the converts seem to have been, at least nominally Brahmin.

In Brahmanimantanika Sutta we seem to have some quite clear references to Upaniṣadic ideas. However as I noted in Early Buddhists and Ātman/Brahman the references are to cosmology rather than to the more central details of the Upaniṣadic thought. It seems as though the cosmologically notions had been popularised, or perhaps more likely that the cosmology recorded in the Upaniṣads represents a popular tradition rather than a specifically Upaniṣadic tradition - I would make the contrast with the identification of ātman and brahman, which is not found in the Pāli texts. 

 ~~oOo~~

Rebirth and the Scientific Method

I've been involved in a desultory discussion via comments on the blog Buddhist Geeks on the subject of reincarnation and the scientific method. This was sparked by a blog post entitled An Evidence Based Spirituality for the 21st century. In it Charles Tart argues for a scientific approach to ESP and reincarnation (Tart seems to prefer this term to 'rebirth') based on what he considers to be "solid evidence". I have a life-long interest in science, and studied it at school and university. Having invoked the scientific paradigm I think that Mr Tart needs to follow through on the implications of it, and here I will explore some of the them. I want to look particularly at reincarnation from two different points of view - methodological and philosophical - and show that we are far from having a scientific account of reincarnation.

The Problem of Method.

Mr Tart cites some 4000 cases collected at the University of Virginia Medical School, where research and publication continues on this subject, especially by Dr Jim Tucker. Tucker's informants, as Tart says, are children between the ages of 3 and 6; and the 'evidence' is the testimony of these infants. So already we must register some concerns. The theory of mind, the ability to distinguish others as self-conscious individual beings, only develops at around 3 or 4 years. Very young children like this have some difficulty distinguishing self from other; truth from fantasy; memory from imagination; overheard conversation from their own thoughts. So we must doubt their reliability as witnesses. As in legal cases, how one questions very young children has a strong determining effect on the answers you get. We could not accept this kind of 'evidence' without detailed scrutiny of the method - something which would be time consuming and beyond the scope of a blog post. For instance one group of researchers looking at children's evidence in sexual abuse cases conclude:

"It is now acknowledged that persistent suggestive questioning can lead children to provide accounts of events that never occurred, even when they first denied them. Sometimes the questioning results in the child developing a subjectively real memory for an event that never happened."

Such conclusions are widely replicated across a number of different disciplines over the last couple of decades. Even in adults memories are very plastic and subject to change; and subject to invention; imagination can come to seem like memory. Stories repeated by family members can come to seem like personal recollections, even when we weren't there, or born yet. Often the way we recall a situation depends on the emotions associated with the memory. This is why anecdote is seldom invoked as evidence by scientists. The fact that most of the informants are under six may well mean that after that age the distinction between fantasy and fact becomes clearer, or that the children are less able to be lead by enthusiastic researchers with something to prove.

The claim is often that the person could not possibly have known the details of their account from personal experience in this life. Having just trashed anecdote, I'll risk hypocrisy by sharing something from my own life. For years I had memories from childhood which involved an unaccountable knowledge of and respect for Buddhist monks. As a child I understood what meditation was, and once or twice sat down to meditate. It has a lot to do with why I was attracted to Buddhism as an adult. I grew up in a small town in New Zealand and I could not possibly have had contact with Buddhism in my childhood, as far as I know there were no Buddhists within a hundred miles. There was no way for me to have such knowledge from this life. Or so I thought. Last year I started re-watching the old TV show Kung Fu, and realised that this was the source of my 'memories' - it all came flooding back. I'd loved the show as a kid, 30+ years previously, but had simply not made the connection partly because so many years had passed.

If someone, especially a young child, says that they remember a past life, or even if they only appear to have a memory which cannot be explained, that is not the same thing as them actually having had a past life. How would one establish beyond any doubt that a so-called memory was of a past-life? We can easily accept the idea that people have a memory that they cannot account for; but why assume a past-life is the best explanation for this?

I propose this test: one of these people who recalls a past life could predict some previously unknown historical fact, that could then be shown to be true by previously unknown archaeological finds. Get the subject to make a prediction, publish it well in advance of the search, and then go off and dig and find some previously unheard of city or civilisation which substantially confirms the predictions of the person. A variation on this procedure might including getting the person to predict the discovery of the previously unknown species recorded in the fossil record, and then discover a fossil just as described. Or they might show how to read a previously undeciphered script. Something that only a person living in that time and place could know, and that is entirely unknown to us now.

The value of a scientific theory is in the predictions it makes. I would be very interested to hear about any peer-reviewed publication in which a past-life recollection told us something new about the world in the way that I've outlined.

[7 May 2014 - a thorough assessment of the methods and conclusions of another reincarnation enthusiast, Dr Ian Stevenson can be found at the Skeptics Dictionary.]

Philosophical Problems.

The basic contention of Tart et al is that empirical methods can be used to demonstrate metaphysical ideas or perhaps we should say 'abilities' such as extra-sensory perception or recollection of past lives. They are saying that such ideas are demonstrable and measurable, and therefore not really metaphysical, i.e. not beyond physics. However there is a kind of placebo effect at work: ESP is only detectable if you believe in it in the first place. Presumably this is what has gone wrong in all of the properly controlled studies which have shown absolutely no evidence in support of ESP and the like. On the other hand there is also the fact that a desire to believe has allowed charlatans to pull the wool over the eyes of the credulous in a number of cases. The best known, and funniest, of which is the Project Alpha, a hoax perpetrated by some (sleight of hand) magicians which exposed the credulity, and poor methods, of ESP researchers.

When, in 1915, Einstein proposed that gravity is better understood as the bending of space by masses, it might just have remained another novel idea if Arthur Eddington had not demonstrated in 1919 that it is indeed the case. Eddington's observations of the transit of Venus demonstrated that masses bend light, which itself has no mass, as it passes close by them. In the face of this kind of evidence, the world then accepts this new idea even though it is counter to the prevailing view and even counter-intuitive (how can something with no mass be affected by gravity?). The same thing happened with Quantum Mechanics which was not accepted without some fierce opposition lead by none other than Albert Einstein, and now underpins the technological revolution. The same thing is currently happening in cosmology as empirical evidence accumulates that the universe must contain more mass than we can see or our theories predict (dark matter), and that something is pushing galaxies away from each other (dark energy).

Sometimes paradigm changes can be theory led, sometimes observation led. However the empirical side of things is based on published observations which are then repeated by an independent third parties, who often have a vested interest in proving their rivals wrong! It is the build up of repeatable results that creates the pressure to change a world view - and let's be clear that our views of the world can and do change from time to time. The dark matter/energy observations will eventually change our understanding of the cosmos for instance. So called 'cold fusion' by contrast could not recreated in any of the labs which tried, and it soon became apparent that the announcement had been premature to say the least. ESP has being researched for 200 years without coming up with one uncontestable result, while at the same time many frauds have been exposed.

Reincarnation fans complain that if scientists would only apply empirical methods to the study of reincarnation they would see it is real. But equally if a scientist reports a negative result it is because they are too materialistic, and not open to new ideas (tell that to any astronomer or nuclear physicist of the last century and they might beg to differ). Usually an unequivocal negative result requires a scientist to abandon their theory (e.g. phlogiston, or the æther) and seek a new explanation.

There is a much greater philosophical problem with so-called memories of past-lives, and it is one that plagues all theories of rebirth/reincarnation. Such theories suggests a continuity between lives, over multiple lives, a personal continuity. This raises the question about the nature of that continuity? There must be some aspect of our being, not reliant on our physical body, which goes from life to life, collecting and preserving memories, and then later allowing our present consciousness reliable access to those memories, though apparently only during childhood. What can survive intact through multiple lives and deaths, and accurately preserve memories? I know of nothing which would meet the requirement except a soul of some kind.

Now, if science is to offer any insight into the phenomena at all, then it would be in establishing the existence of, and the mode of functioning of this soul-like phenomena which provides a medium for memory storage external to the body, and particularly the brain. They would show how and where such memories are stored. Of course they must take into account the well demonstrated role of the brain in the formation, storage and recall of memories of living humans - we can lose all of our memories and the ability to make new ones through brain injury. (I recommend Joseph LeDoux's book The Emotional Brain for a survey of the history of this field). The idea that memories survive the death of the entire brain, and surface sometime later in a person with no close genetic relationship, requires explanation. Tart et al, having invoked the scientific paradigm, must seek to explain it within that paradigm. It's up to people like Mr Tart and his colleagues and supporters to come up with the theories that can be tested, with measurements that can be made. As I understand it they do not propose mechanisms for metaphysical memories. They do not propose theories that can be tested. They merely churn out anecdote. It is not sufficient for the idea to be taken seriously to invoke the "50 million Elvis fans can't be wrong" argument.

In Conclusion

I think it is only right to be sceptical towards the idea of recollection of past lives. It is a deeply problematic metaphysical belief. It will not be easy to demonstrate that life continues after the death of the individual, and as far as I know this has yet to happen. My view is that a belief in past-life recollection is more than likely linked to a deep desire for personal continuity. It's poignant, it's understandable, but it is entirely unscientific. By invoking science the meta-physicians are caught out. If the phenomena is material enough to be observed then it must either obey known laws, or we must recast those laws to account for it. But if it really is as described in faith texts, then it is not dependent on the material world and will be forever beyond the reach of empirical science. So why invoke the scientific method in the first place? I will have to leave this question hanging, but it is one I must come back to. The conflict between the ancient world views preserved in the amber of religious faith, and the modern empirical world view is on-going.

Update: 10.10.2010

Anyone interested in the way memory works will be fascinated by this story from the Guardian Newspaper: Meredith Maran: Did my father really abuse me? It is an extract from her book My Lie: A True Story of False Memory, which looks at the way one intelligent and articulate woman manufactured 'memories' of incest out of a febrile imagination, on the basis of her deep (and positive) involvement in the issue of sexual abuse, and a culture which demonised men. I don't think this in any way trivialises the issue of sexual abuse, but it does give us insights into the complexity of the mind, and memory in particular.

Thanks to my friend Vidyavajra for bringing this to my attention.

Update 24-7-11

This cartoon on Calamities of Nature is apposite. As it says: either souls interact with the world and are within the province of science; or they do not, in which case why should they concern us?

Update 7 May 2014

Sean Carroll a real scientist talks about life after death: Physics and the Immortality of the Soul; 

The Linguistic Joys of Popular Religion

As I have a prominent website dealing with Buddhist mantra, I frequently receive requests for help and advice with phrases in Sanskrit, often for tattoos. I tend not to help with tattoos, but I like to help Buddhists trying to understand what they are chanting. Recently, someone wrote asking about this phrase, suggesting that it was something the Buddha had said:

yad bhavam tad bhavati

This is clearly Sanskrit, a simple relative clause sentence (yad 'what, which'; tad 'that, this'). There is some possible ambiguity because of the lack of diacritics - is it bhavam or bhāvam? The former means 'becoming, being'; the latter 'being, origin'. However, there is some crossover - both can mean 'becoming, existence'. I think bhava is a primary derivation from the root bhū, and bhāva is a secondary derivative (of, or connected to, bhava). Either way, the sentence appears to be a tautology:

'what becomes, that is becoming' or 'what is, is'.

One interpretation might be that bhavam is intended in its special meaning of 'truth' - 'that which is true, that is'. This relies on the double meaning of satya 'true, real'; if something exists then it is both true and real. Now compare this with what it is said to mean on the internet. We begin with an article in the Huffington Post by Stacey Lawson, which is where my correspondent found the phrase:

There is a famous yogic teaching: "Yad Bhavam Tad Bhavati." The most literal translation is: "You become as you think." But the Sanskrit language has many layers of meaning. It can also be interpreted as, "The state of mind and the state of matter are one," or "The light of the mind coalesces as matter." Through delving into this single statement, the yogis were able to apprehend the entire structure of creation through the mind.

I'm already puzzled because of the capitalisation. People do this with mantras as well. You'll often see a mantra like 'oṃ maṇipadme hūṃ' written 'Oṃ Maṇi Padme Hūṃ'. What does capitalisation indicate in this case? Scholars will often use italics for foreign words, which helps the reader take in the difference, but how does this capitalisation help? I think one need only look in the King James Bible to see why we do this:

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." John 1.1

We Buddhists do this as well. We capitalise words live nirvāṇa, enlightenment, buddha, to mark them as special, perhaps we might say 'sacred' (though I wouldn't) on the model of a 17th century English Bible, and in defiance of contemporary English conventions. This doesn't occur in Indic scripts since they lack capitals, and all words and letters are special anyway. I think it suggests an inferiority complex when we have to make sure everyone knows our jargon is 'special'.

What do people mean when they say things like, "But the Sanskrit language has many layers of meaning"? Is Sanskrit any more layered than other languages? No it isn't. But vague statements in a spiritual context lend themselves to meaning whatever you want them to mean. We supply the specifics depending on what we want to believe. In effect, the statement can mean almost anything we want it to. So the phrase gets translated as:

You become as you think
as you think so you become
It will transform as you wish
your feelings define your world
as is the feeling, so is the result
as is the feeling, so is the experience
what you intend, that becomes reality
The light of the mind coalesces as matter
The state of mind and the state of matter are one
what you choose to believe becomes your personal truth
Whatever you have in mind will be reflected back to you as a reality

Clearly, many of these statements are not logically connected to each other, or meaningful in any ordinary sense, and none of them seem to derive from the actual Sanskrit words. Which is more or less the same as saying that the Sanskrit phrase can mean anything you want it to (especially if you don't know Sanskrit!). This is a form of linguistic relativism, which presumably goes nicely with the "all is one" style of popular religion. But vagueness in language usually disguises vagueness of thought. As one website translates the phrase: "what you choose to believe becomes your personal truth." Quite. The sad fact is that people simply believe what they want to believe despite what intellect and experience tell them; and that, very often, what we affirm as true, or True, is merely what we believe, merely our opinion. It's like a belief in a creator god: it's just an opinion.

Although my interlocutor thought this was a Buddhist saying, it clearly isn't. Though compare this fake Buddha quote:

“The mind is everything. What you think you become.” Buddha quotes (Hindu Prince Gautama Siddharta, the founder of Buddhism, 563-483 B.C.)

Apart from a spelling mistake and dubious dates, the thing that stands out for me is that the Buddha is described as a Hindu! It may be that the first sentence in this quote is a garbled version of the Pāli verses which begin the Dhammapada, but the phrasing is quite different.

mano pubbaṅgamā dhammā manoseṭṭhā manomayā.
Mind precedes experience, mind is foremost, [experience is] mind-made.

And, in any case, this is an ethical teaching, not an ontological one - it is about how your mental state determines the outcomes of your actions. I've also seen a website where our phrase is associated with Tibetan Buddhism, though the artist/author also says that the statement: "is a truth that transcends religion" . The phrase - yad bhavam, tad bhavati - may simply be a fake Buddha quote. Bodhipakṣa, of Wildmind fame. has been collecting fake Buddha quotes for a while now if anyone is interested in this phenomenon.

Elsewhere, I have seen the phrase attributed to 'the Upaniṣads' and 'The Bhagavadgīta', but not convincingly. The context of the Sanskrit phrase (as opposed to the various translations) always seems to be Hindu, and mostly associated with Sathya Sai Baba, the controversial South Indian 'holy man', not to be confused with Sai Baba of Shirdi (the 19th century saint). Many of the web hits point to a discourse called God is the Indweller, where it is spelt it a little differently:

Yad Bhavam Tad Bhavathi
As you think so you become.

Here bhavati, has become bhavathi, and I'm unsure about what it could be except a spelling mistake. Though he also spells satya as sathya, so it could be a matter of idiosyncratic rather than mistaken spelling. Although the phrase comes in a talk peppered with Sanskrit quotes and translations for which textual sources are cited, no source is given for this particular phrase. He does, however, mention the story of Prahlada (a character from the Puraṇas) and one translation I found suggested that our phrase in the form - "Yad Bhavam tad Bhavati (Whatever you have in mind will be reflected back to you as a reality)" [sic!] - might occur in this connection. I couldn't find any confirmation of this, however.

After a bit of playing around with the Devanāgarī I did find one quote in the form "यद्‌भावम्‌ तद्‌भवती" (i.e., yad bhāvam tad bhavatī) where bhavatī is a spelling mistake for bhavati. Technically, in Sanskrit you'd probably write this यद्भवम्तद्भवति with sandhi and conjuncts obscuring the word breaks. But this did not shed any light on the origins of the phrase.

An email on the subject from Sanskritist Kiran Paranjape, who I often refer people to for tattoo transcriptions, makes me wonder whether Sai Baba hasn't just done a Sanskrit translation of the Spanish/Italian phrase "Que sera, sera" - "What will be, will be." The Sanskrit would be according to Kiran: yad bhāvyam tad bhavati, which is very close to our phrase. I would have gone for something like: 'yad yad bhāvyam tad tad bhaviṣyati', though it lacks the brevity of the original; or perhaps 'yad bhāvyam, bhāvyam' which captures the form but, like the original, is not fully grammatical.

Another possibility is that 'you become what you think' is an example of the so-called Law of Attraction - a form of magical thinking popular in Theosophical circles, and amongst New Age gurus like Deepak Chopra. It forms the basis of the book: Think and Grow Rich. It may be that the phrase has also been picked up on by Sai Baba. It sounds vaguely similar to Hindu religious ideas, so fits in with his rhetoric.

After quite a lot of searching around, I did not find any traditional Indian source - Vedas, major Upaniṣads, Epics and Puraṇas; in either Roman or Devanāgarī. Perhaps I have missed something, but it doesn't seem to be obvious. I should add that the whole thing is redolent of Hindu spirituality, and may well be genuine - the fact that I can't find it may be a failing on my part. The phrase is widely quoted across the internet, and attributed to a range of people or texts. On the face of it, however, the words are a bit of meaningless cant that 'spiritual' people project their ideas onto, the linguistic equivalent of crystals.

I suppose this is how legends get started. Someone, for whatever reason, attributes some saying to the Buddha. Later generations take it seriously, but not finding a source for it, must create a plausible context for the fake quote. So we get drift from the words of the master towards the words of fakers (who may have been well intentioned, I'm not suggesting they are necessarily evil). Sometimes it is very difficult to tell the difference, especially if we aren't familiar with a wide range of sources. This is one of the most valuable functions of scholars: to take cant like this and explain why it is inauthentic, to slow the drift towards mumbo-jumbo.

The Four Tantric Rites

In the early days of Jayarava's Raves I did a series of rather impressionistic essays on the tantric rites - though I used a set that had connections with the Five Buddha Maṇḍala. For our celebration of Padmasambhava (the great tantric yogi and magician) this weekend at the Cambridge Buddhist Centre there will be a series of talks on the set of four rites, and I will be speaking about the puṣṭīkarman or rite of prosperity. This post will provide some background about these four rites collectively, especially the associated language and some of the history of the rituals.

The word being translated as 'rite' is in fact karman, which is literally 'action, work'. However here it signifies a ritual action, hence we translate it as 'rite'. This is the first of several clear links with the Vedic sacrificial ritual.

The four rites in Sanskrit [1] are:

śāntikakarman	rite of pacification
vaśyakarman	rite of subjection
puṣṭikarman	rite of prospering
raudrakarman	fierce rite, rite of destruction

In early tantric texts such as Mahāvairocana Abhisaṃbodhi Tantra the various rites are actually forms of 'homa' (Chinese/Japanese goma) ritual. The word 'homa' means 'the act of making an oblation' and dervies from the root √hu 'sacrifice'. In Vedic ritual this function was carried out by the hotṛ priest [2]. The Buddhist homa ritual involves setting up a sacrificial alter with a fire, and making coloured offerings to the fire. In Vedic times the idea was that the similarity between the microcosm and macrocosm allowed one to be influenced by the other through the ritual (which occupied a kind of intermediate space). In particular fire (agni) transformed the offerings into smoke which then wafted to heaven and induced the deva to respond (this kind of connected thinking underpins tantric sādhana as well). In the homa ritual the correspondence is between the body, speech and mind of the devotee and the Three Mysteries (triguhya) of the Dharmakāya Buddha which also have body, speech and mind aspects: all forms are the body, all sounds the speech, and all mental activity the mind of the Dharmakāya. The ritual conceives of the fire altar as an analogue for both (the altar itself is the body, the hearth is speech, and the fire is the mind), and through the ritual the microcosm of the individual is brought into with the macrocosm of the Dharmakāya. This kind of imagery is also drawing on Vedic models, but Buddhists are always careful to insist that śūnyatā (lack of self-nature) and pratītya-samutpāda (dependent-arising) underpin all their practices - so one is not merging with God, or with a numinous universal principle, but directly realising śūnyatā.

For the early Vedic priests the desired response of the ritual was keeping the natural order by bringing the rains at the proper time and averting disasters, but it was also connected with the health and prosperity of the king. In the tantric rites it is the individual who benefits and if there is a spiritual purpose to them, then it appears to be grafted onto the mundane, rather than the other way around. That is to say that it appears to me that these rites were already being used for mundane purposes when Buddhists began to adapt them for spiritual purposes, and that the mundane, even vulgar, use has been retained. We find mention of some of the rites in Gṛhyasūtras which covered domestic rites in Brahmin households. [3]

Each of the rites is associated with a colour and here too the rites tell us of their Vedic origins because the colours are: white, red, yellow and black. These are the colours associated in the Vedic tradition with the four varṇa or classes. [4] In fact varṇa more literally means 'colour'. So the brahmaṇa was associated with white symbolising their purity and the śudra with black symbolising their impurity (as I mentioned in A Pāli Pun). The kṣatriya were symbolised by red, and vaiṣya by yellow. The functions of the rites relate to some extent to the classes as well. Brahmins were concerned with rites and rituals, and ritual purity; kṣatriyas with ruling and conquering; vaiṣyas with agriculture and commerce; and śudras were serfs forced to labour. So we get these correspondences:

rite	colour	varṇa	function
śāntikarman	white	brahmaṇa	pacification
vaśyakarman	red	kṣatriya	subjugation
puṣṭikarman	yellow	vaiṣya	prosperity
raudrakarman	black	śudra	destruction

Why śudra and destruction? It may be that the impurity of the śudras threatened the makers of the original system; or that the were perceived as barbarous. Rudra, from which raudra ("connected with Rudra", "destruction") derives, is the name of a Vedic god who by this time was associated with Śiva who is also known as 'the destroyer' because his role in the Hindu trinity of gods is to preside over the destruction phase at the end of each time cosmic epoch (Brahmā is the creator, and Viṣṇu the sustainer). Perhaps some of the śudras worshipped Śiva?

These rites were absorbed into the Buddhist tradition at the time of the great synthesis and renewal which we call 'Tantra'. [5] Since they appear in the Mahāvairocana Abhisaṃbodhi Tantra we know that they must have been incorporated near the beginning of the process since this text is the earliest systematic tantra, and is thought to have been composed sometime in the 640's CE. In this text each of the rites consists of a pūjā which involves a series of preparatory practices in which one visualises oneself as a Buddha, the creation of maṇḍala with a fire place in the middle, an invocation to the deva Agni, and then the offering of appropriated coloured offerings accompanied by mantras. Some time much later the various functions were incorporated into mantras of White Tārā and I have written about some of these on my other website: visiblemantra.org - White Tārā. See especially the section: Other forms of the mantra.

Such rituals are still regularly carried out by both Tibetan and Japanese Vajrayāna practitioners, as well as some Hindu devotees. The goals of such rituals vary. I think on the whole they are used for spiritual purposes in the present day. But Stephen Beyer notes some mundane uses of such rites: So for instance he records:

"...and within my experience [Kurukullā's rite of subjugation] has been called upon by at least one Tibetan refugee group to coerce the Indian government. Tibetan traders seeking profit and Tibetan lovers seeking satisfaction followed upon the the ritual tracks established by their Indian processors." [The Cult of Tara: Magic and Ritual in Tibet, p. 302]

It may be this kind of behaviour which lead David Snellgrove to comment:

"So far as the verbal expression is concerned the most suitable English word for all these Sanskrit [synonyms for mantra] is undoubtedly 'spell.' One attracts by a spell, one binds by a spell, one releases by a spell... whether one likes it or not, the greater part of the tantras were concerned precisely with vulgar magic..." [Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, p.143]

So these rites began as popular adaptations of the larger and more complex Vedic fire rituals, and from there were adapted by Buddhists, and to some extent they retained their 'vulgar' purposes. Martin Willson's introductory notes on the Tārā Tantra suggest caution with respect to the rites as found in the texts:

But someone has been playing a practical joke on Tibetan would-be magicians for the last eight centuries - the mantras have been shuffled. Anyone who thought he was summoning a woman with the rite of Chapter 16 was actually driving her away... At best the arrangement of the other mantras is uncertain. [In Praise of Tara: Songs to the Saviouress, p.48]

As I say there is a living tradition, dating back to the mid 7th century, of performing these rites in a bona fide spiritual context in both Tibetan and Japanese vajrayāna circles - and while the Tārā Tantra may be muddled the Mahāvairocana Abhisaṃbodhi Tantra does not appear to be. Magic they may be, but the vulgar tag doesn't apply generally, and Snellgrove appears to have overstated his case.

Later the rituals were adapted to better fit the Five Buddha Maṇḍala with colours matching them: white, blue, yellow, red, and green with a surrounding aura of a special colour known in Tibet as chenka (it is said to be indescribable, but something like amethyst). [6] The function of the rites are then modified to better fit the functions of the five Buddhas. Subjugation for instance, becomes more like 'fascination' to fit with Amitābha's pratyavekṣana-jñāna or wisdom of discrimination, and his compassion. The rite of destruction is no longer for killing people, but for overcoming hindrances to practice and so on. It was this more wholesome set that I wrote about in my original essays on the rites.

The tantric rites are a good example of the eclecticism of tantra and of Indian religion generally. I've commented on this before, but it is worth saying again that in the Indian context this is far from unusual: in fact it is the norm. It is only from the point of view of strict monotheism that such borrowings look odd. This is not quite the same thing as saying all religions are the same, or that one can put together any religious elements and have a viable spiritual path. However it does mean that practices from another faith might be employed in Buddhism, although there is usually a thorough re-contextualisation of any new material, and at the same time religion (including monotheism) can be and often is subverted for mundane and vulgar purposes.

Sangharakshita has presented tantric material to the Triratna movement in terms of it's symbolism, for instance in his book Creative Symbols of Tantric Buddhism (which discusses the four rites in the section on colour symbolism), without directly passing on tantric teachings he received from his Tibetan teachers. Although we make use of tantric symbolism - somewhat naïvely I would argue - we are not a tantric movement. A few members of our Order who take tantra more seriously - notably Vessantara and Prakaśa - have sought abhiṣekha with Tibetan teachers. On the other hand Sangharakshita has written polemically about the breakdown of the proper guru/disciple relationship in Tibetan Buddhism and is scathing about people who collect initiations, and teachers who give them to anyone who asks or is willing to pay the fee. (Whereas I would argue that the function of giving of initiations has naturally shifted in the displaced Tibetan community and that this hardly represents a degradation but is a cultural adaptation to very difficult circumstances, and is in any case less radical than Sangharakshita's own de-contextualisation of tantra.)

My earlier essays on the rites: white, blue, yellow, red, green.

Another good source of info relevant to the Triratna Order's approach to the Tantric rites is Subhuti's talks on Kalyana Mitrata, published by Padmaloka and still on sale for £4.50. Unfortunately when these talks were republished as Buddhism and Friendship, the Tantric Rites sections were omitted.

Notes

1. The Tibetan equivalents are: śāntikarma: zhi-ba’i ‘phrin-las; puṣṭikarma: rgyas-pa’i phrin-las; vaiṣyakarma: dbang gi phrin-las; raudrakarma: drag-po’i phrin-las.
2. The hotṛ was one of four types of priest: three each associated with the three vedas, and a fourth, the brāhmaṇa, who was an overseer and put right any errors. The word hotṛ is the root hu with the -tṛ suffix making it an agent noun, and so means 'the sacrificer'.
   
3. The Gobhila-Gṛhyasūtra for instance mentions the puṣṭikarma. It is also found in the Kausikapaddhati which is an 11th century commentary on the Atharvaveda. The śāntikarma is mentioned in the Āśvalāyana-Gr̥hyasūtra. There are several mentions in the Mahābharata.
   
4. I use class to translation varṇa even though many scholars use caste. This is because caste more properly relates to jāti (the word is the same in historic Sanskrit, and in present day North Indian languages). While there are only four varṇa, there are now thousands of jāti. The division of society in terms of jāti was well in place by the time tantra began to develop. Indeed later tantra specifically negates Brahmanical class purity boundaries by contact with and ingesting of ritual impure substances.
   
5. In fact some of the rituals described in the Suvarṇabhāsottama (Golden Light) Sūtra resemble Hindu rituals to some extent as well, which indicates that some intermixing may have occurred earlier without necessarily implying that Tantric Buddhism predates the 7th century.
6. I recall reading about this somewhere but now that I come to reference it, I cannot find a single source. So either I made it up, or my recollection of the spelling is hopelessly out.
   

Image: a Shingon monk performing the homa ritual.

Early Buddhists and Ātman/Brahman

It is well known that the teachings on anātman (translated variously as 'no-self', 'non-self', 'no-soul', 'not-soul' with variations particularly in capitalisation of self/soul) are important to the overall Buddhist program of transformation. Several books and many articles have been written arguing for and against various interpretations of the relevant texts - some finding an ātman affirmed, some finding it denied, and some taking a middle way between these two extremes.

It is widely accepted that the teachings on anātman must be set against the background of Brahmanical thought of the day. It is further generally accepted that the texts that have come down to us as the Upaniṣads, especially the Bṛhadāranyaka, Chāndogya, Taittirīya and Aitareya Upaniṣads, reflect the Brahmanical religion at the time. In the the Tevijja Sutta (DN 13) we find references to these four for instance [1]. It is often assumed that the Brahmanical faith formed the mainstream of religion at the time and place, though this is now plausibly disputed (see Rethinking Indian History), and it seems likely that Brahmins and their religion were new comers to the North-east of India, and in fact in the process of absorbing ideas from the samaṇa movements. In any case many people have pointed to passages in the Pāli Canon which show that early Buddhists were familiar with the Upaniṣads - and anatta in relation to ātman is one of the key aspects of this theme.

Just as the central uniting concept across all of the Buddhist texts is paṭicca-samuppāda, the central subject in these early Upaniṣads is the identity of brahman and ātman: the former being the universal essence, while the latter is the manifestation of that universal essence in the individual. As Signe Cohen puts it:

"An Upaniṣad can, most simply, be defined as an ancient text in Sanskrit that teaches that ātman and brahman are one and the same, and that the knowledge of this identity leads to liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth." [2]

However at the same time there was a theistic tendency present in the Upaniṣads which gradually became more prominent. In its theistic guise the grammatically neutral brahman becomes the grammatically masculine brahmā, and is equated with Prajāpati 'Lord of Progeny' aka the Creator God. The two terms are often ambiguous: as the first member of a compound they are both brahma-. Additionally the two are sometimes used side by side as if to make it clear that they are not to be considered distinct. As time goes on brahman is used less, and brahmā more.

We know a certain amount about the Buddha's contemporaries from polemics and parodies directed against them in the Pāli texts, though of course such portrayals must be taken with a grain of salt. Jains, Ājivakas and Brahmins are recognisable in the texts from the way they behave and how they speak. However, and this is my main point today: nowhere in the Pāli canon, so far as I can tell, does any Brahmin so much as express an opinion on ātman, and nowhere is the ātman doctrine attributed to a Brahmin. This is a surprising situation since this doctrine is one of the most characteristic and distinctive of that group. A subsidiary point is that while the founders and important teachers of religions are mentioned, Jains for instance talk about former teachers, and while there are even lists of the seven Vedic ṛṣi - the star of the early Upaniṣads - Yajñavalkya - is not mentioned in Pāli.

In Pāli the two Sanskrit words brahman and brahmā have coalesced into the single form brahmā (a masculine noun) which sometimes stands for religious ideals in general (it is often translated as 'holy' or 'divine' for instance), but in our present context always means the creator god. [3] The coalescence may be reflected in the confusion of the declension of the noun, [4] and we do not know whether the single, if somewhat variable, grammatical form in Pāli represents the state of Buddhist knowledge of Brahmanical beliefs, or whether a mechanical process of grammatical change obscured a difference (c.f. my comments on sattva, satka, satva in Philological Odds & Ends III sv bodhisattva). Notwithstanding the ambiguity of brahma- as the first member of a compound, in the context of the beliefs put into the mouths of Brahmins (or indeed into the mouth of Brahmā) there is no clear reference to brahman in any text in the Pāli Canon. [5] I'm not the first to make this observation, but don't have references to hand.

Parodies of the creator god are some of the funniest, and most damning of the Buddhist polemical texts - the creator god is portrayed as a deluded and bombastic fool, afraid to look bad in front of the other gods. The central Brahmanical idea of the identity of brahman and ātman is completely absent and has been replaced by the idea of brahmasahavyata - companionship or union with Brahmā. The word brahmavihara 'dwelling with Brahmā' is a synonym of this. However note that I have summarised Gombrich's discovery that the Buddhist texts seem to have lost the true sense of this allusion before the fixing of the Canon - The Buddha and the Lost Metaphor.

The clear references to Vedic texts noted by Gombrich and others (including me) have established that the Pāli texts themselves are aware of Vedic concepts. We find the names of Vedic ṛṣi, and Vedic traditions; references to sacrifices, sacred fires, mantras (in particular the Sāvitṛ mantra); references to sacred bathing, to worship of the sun. We find a high awareness of Brahmanical class (vaṇṇa) prejudice. We also find more oblique references to the five fire wisdom, and to Vedic cosmogony (especially as found in the BU and Ṛgveda 10.90). Many of these ideas and practices are still current in India more than 2000 years later! Although sometimes Brahmins are clearly just straw-men and present an inauthentic façade to be knocked down, there are many texts were Brahmins are recognisable even if not labelled as such. What's more the texts themselves record that many Brahmins of various kinds became converts (including prominent disciples like Sāriputta and Moggallana!) so the compilers of the texts had plenty of opportunity to mix with actual Brahmins. We have evidence of increasing Brahmin participation and influence in the Buddhist Sangha - some of which I discussed in A Pāli Pun. The text which most often seems to referenced is the Bṛhadāranyka Upaniṣad (BU). Those scholars who have tried to determine the geographical locations of the various texts (primarily Michael Witzel) place the BU in the eastern areas of North India in the Kingdoms of Kosala and Vidheha - precisely where the Buddha was active.

A conflicting picture emerges for which I have as yet no explanation. Brahmins in the Pāli texts are either old school Brahmins focussed on the sacrifice, or they are outright monotheists which is usually considered to be a late development - associated with later Upaniṣads or even the Puraṇas. A possibility is that the jaṭila or dreadlocked ascetics (especially Uruvela Kassapa) were ascetic Brahmins - the commentarial tradition certainly considers them Brahmins, though the nikāyas are more ambiguous. They are fire worshippers, some of them show allegiance to Brahmins (c.f. Sela Sutta) and have Brahmin surnames like Kassapa. But what beliefs they espoused is not revealed to us.

The Pāli texts appear conversant with aspects of the Upaniṣads, especially those related to cosmogony; and to Brahmin culture more generally, particularly concern for social class and stratification; and ritual purity. Certainly the subjects of atta and anatta get considerable attention, but they are never linked to the source i.e. the Brahmins themselves. Although we can easily make the cognitive link between a teaching against ātman and a group which we know espoused views on ātman, in practice the Pāli texts never seem to make this link! Indeed the important point about ātman from the Brahmanical point of view is not its eternal nature, i.e. not the fact that it participates unchanged in rebirth per se which is the focus for Buddhists, but its identity with brahman, since it is this identity that allows one to escape saṃsara (with more space I would discuss the proposition that this was by no means universally accepted by Brahmins in the Buddha's day). In short early Buddhists, perhaps the Buddha, but certainly the Early Buddhist texts, seem to have missed the main point of the Upaniṣads. The apparent fact of increasing Brahmanical influence in Buddhism makes this even more difficult to understand. Ironically centuries later they adopted more or less the same idea in the form of the Tathāgatagarbha for precisely the same reasons the Brahmins adopted it - it explains how liberation is possible for someone mired in saṃsara. There are also echoes in such ideas as absolute and relative bodhicitta.

Contra my previous enthusiasm for this idea, I think, therefore, that we must be cautious in accepting the conjecture that Early Buddhists were conversant with the traditions represented by the Upaniṣads. My suspicion is that the teachings on anātman/anatta do not relate directly to the ideas on ātman found in the Upaniṣads; that this is simply a coincidence of terminology, rather than a coincidence of ideology, however this would require a major rethink about the relationship between Buddhism and Vedism. Another possibility is that Buddhists only came into contact with Brahmins at a much later date than we usually allow for. Alternatively the Brahmins in the Canon, especially those who joined the bhikkhu saṅgha, might not have accepted the Upaniṣads - perhaps they moved eastwards for the same reasons that people fled Europe for America in the 17th century.

We must do more work to establish the extent of that Buddhist conversance with Brahmanical thought. Ideally we would go back over the research on ātman in Buddhist texts to date, and try to determine if it does in fact relate to Brahmanical views at all, or whether we need to look to another source.


Notes

1. DN13 records various types of Brahmins: addhariya, tittiriya, chandoka, chandāva and bavhārijjhā or brahmacāriya (the ms. disagree on the last, but there is a lost Brāhmaṇa text called Bahvṛca which would coincide with Pāli bavhārijjha). The chandāva brāhmaṇas are left out of some mss. and the connections are uncertain. Tittiriya and Chandoka correspond to Sanskrit Taittirīya and Chāndogya and to the Brāhmaṇa and Upaniṣad textual traditions of the same name. Although the Bahvṛca Brāhmaṇa is lost it is linked to the Aitareya Upaniṣad. Lastly addhariya corresponds to Sanskrit adhvaryu and is associated with the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa and the Bṛhadāranyaka Upaniṣad. These correspondences are discussed in the notes to Rhys Davids translation of the Dīgha Nikāya (p.303, n.2) and in Jayatilleke Early Buddhist Theory of Knowledge, p.479f.
2. Cohen, Signe. Text and Authority in The Older Upaniṣads. Leiden: Brill, 2008. p.39.
3. A cursory look at the Mahāvastu suggests that it also only uses brahmā and not brahman, or uses brahma- as the first part of a karmadhāraya compound (i.e. as an adjective). The vast majority of uses are in the compounds brahmacariya and brahmacārin. Along with the name King Brahmadatta these account for perhaps 90% of occurrences in the Sanskrit text.
4. The Pāli treatment of Sanskrit nouns ending in consonants is inconsistent. Our word brahmā sometimes follows the masculine -a declension, sometimes the -u declension; with other minor variations such as a vocative singular brahme and plural brahmāno perhaps drawing on the feminine -ā declension. Other -n nouns such as rājan, and attan show similar variability.
5. I have sought to identify all nikāya texts where a Brahmin makes a profession of belief. They are:
   • DN 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 27.
     
   • MN 49, 50, 84, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 108.
   • SN 6.3, 4; 7.1, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22; 35.132, 146, 151; 42.6; 45.38; 55.12.
     
   • AN 3.54, 56, 58, 59, 60; 4.23, 185; 5.191, 192, 193; 6.38; 7.62; 10.119, 167, 168, 176, 177.
     
   • Sn 1.7, 8; 2.7; 3.4, 6, 7, 9.
     
   In each case I have studied the text and translated relevant portions of it to be sure I understand it. Interestingly many of the narratives in these texts are repeated two or three times. For instance the story of Vāseṭṭha and Bharadvaja gets three closely related, but not identical tellings at DN 13, MN 98, and Sn 3.9. I think this tells us that at least three narrative lineages are preserved in the Pāli texts. It may be possible with close study to identify stylistic features in common and tease out other related texts that have multiple recensions within the Canon.