Five Facts to Continuously Reflect on.

This is the 250^th post on this blog. That's 250 raves in a little less than six years, one per week since the beginning of 2008. I started out limiting myself to 1000 words, though that has gone by the board. So I've written perhaps 300,000 words, mostly on the Buddhadharma. Thanks to all my readers and commenters over the years. And thanks to my friend Ann (Pema) Palomo for inspiring the first raves. I'd like to dedicate this one to all practitioners everywhere.

THESE LINES FROM THE Upajjhatthana Sutta (AN 5.57 PTS A iii.71f) [1] are fairly commonly cited, and the kind of thing I would expect every Buddhist to be familiar with. If not in this form, then something very like it. Still... I get a shudder each time I read them. How often do we really give time to contemplating the facts (ṭhānāni) presented here?

Five facts should be continuously reflected on by men and women, at home and on retreat. Which five?

1. I am subject to ageing, ageing isn't overcome (yet),
2. I am subject to illness, illness isn't overcome (yet),
3. I am subject to death, death isn't overcome (yet),
4. I will be separated and cut off from everyone I love, and everything I hold dear.
   
5. I am the owner of my actions, the heir of my actions, born from my actions, bound to my actions, and find refuge in my actions. Whatever actions I do - beautiful or evil - I will be the heir of them.

These should be reflected on continuously.

These are reflections for every one. Men and women. In its essence Buddhism is not gender specific, though of course different cultures have imposed gender based restrictions on practitioners.

My translation "at home and on retreat" does not exactly follow the Pāli: gahaṭṭena vā pabbajitena vā. More literally this says 'by householders and those gone forth'. Since in the Triratna Order we don't necessarily make this distinction I wanted a translation that reflected our approach more accurately. We are all householders, all settled monastics, and all forest renunciants, some of the time. We may spend the majority of our time in one or other mode—and in our movement we have all three—but we are free to move between lifestyles because we have rejected the formalism associated with each. This point, based on Reginald Ray's tripartite model of Buddhist society in his book Buddhist Saints in India, was made by Dharmacārī Subhūti some years ago. Not so long ago I might have said this was unique to the Triratna Community, but lifestyle mobility is a feature of contemporary Buddhism generally, and any serious Buddhist is unlikely to have just one lifestyle all the time. Householders go on retreats of varying lengths. I've been on many retreats from single days up to four months. I have literally been a forest dweller during some of that time. I've lived for months at a time like a cenobitical monk, and may well do again. Even my home life is not exactly classic nuclear family because I live in a Buddhist community with other single men for instance. So in this translation I wanted to suggest something of the modern spirit of Buddhism, especially as the Triratna Community conceives it. I leave readers to judge whether I have succeeded.

These five phrases are 'facts' (ṭhānāni) to be reflected on (paccavekkhitabbāni) constantly (abhiṇhaṃ). The translation of thāna as 'fact' is also used by both Nyanaponika & Bodhi, and by Thanissaro. The word ṭhāna more literally means 'place', or 'state'. It derives from the verbal root √sthā which is cognate with the English 'standing'. In Sanskrit and Pāli the verb means 'to stand, to remain' and hence 'to be located'.[2] It has a number of abstract or applied meanings one of which is 'standpoint' i.e. ground for, reason, principle. A ṭhāna is the valid ground for a logical conclusion: i.e. a fact.

Each of the first three phrases is in the form: jarā-dhammomhi, jaraṃ anatīto'ti. The final ti means this is something one says or thinks. The morphology of jarādhammomhi foxed me for a little while, and eventually my friend Dhīvan pointed out the correct reading for me. It is a phrase: jarā-dhammo (a)mhi.[3] Here amhi is the first-person singular of the verb 'to be', i.e. 'I am'; while jarā is 'ageing' and dhamma (in this case) means 'nature': jarādhamma 'subject to ageing' or 'of a nature to age'. Dhamma as a suffix can sometimes be translated as the English suffix -able in this context, though it doesn't work in this case, nor with byādhi (disease) or maraṇa (death), c.f. vayadhamma which I translate as 'perishable' relying on the double meaning of perish: 'to die, to decay' to capture the same double meaning of vaya. 'Subject to ageing, disease and death' is a serviceable enough translation. As an aside it occurs to me that the contemporary interest in the "living dead" could be seen as a morbid rejection of these facts about old age, sickness and death.

The word atīta has two senses. In terms of time it means 'past'. Modally it means 'having overcome or surmounted', or even 'free from'. It combines the prefix ati- (beyond, past) with the past participle of the verb √i 'to go' so it literally means 'gone beyond', or 'gone past'. Here it has the negative prefix a(n)- added, so jaraṃ anatīta means 'ageing is not overcome', or 'I have not gone beyond death', or perhaps 'I am still subject to ageing'. I've added yet in parentheses because these are not the morose deliberations of a fatalist waiting to grow old and die. They are a clarion call for those who seek to go beyond. And it must be said that these statements make a lot more sense in a milieu where rebirth is an accepted fact.

At death I will be cut off (vinābhāva) and separated (nānābhāva) from everyone I love (piya) and everything I hold dear (manāpa). Piya is 'love' in the ordinary sense, including familial and romantic love.[4] Manāpa means 'pleasant, pleasing'. All the people and things we are attached to we leave behind at death. Everything. We may have the misfortune to be reborn—and for Buddhists rebirth is a disaster—but we won't come back to what we know and love. Each time we start over, except for underlying tendencies. We have to find new friends and loved ones, accumulate new possessions and memories, only to lose them all over again. For those who believe in rebirth what stronger motivation could there be to practice? For those who don't, what strong motivation to practice can replace it?

In the fifth reflection 'actions' translates kamma, which occurs in a series of compounds: kamma-ssaka, kamma-dāyāda, kamma-yoni, kamma-bandhu, kamma-paṭisaraṇa: owner of actions, heir to actions, born from actions, bound to actions, with a refuge in action.[5] The last is particularly interesting. The word is paṭisaraṇa which has more or less the same meaning as saraṇa 'refuge, protection, shelter' - we are not only the victims of our own misdeeds, but actually the authors of our own salvation as well. The message of these terse statements of the idea of kamma is that morally significant actions have consequences. It's useful to think of kamma in terms of how we treat people. It is our actions in relationship to other people that are morally significant, or should I say that that our actions find their moral significance when considered in terms of our relationships with other people. I think this is why the traditional precepts are phrased the way they are. But also it is in relationship to people that we experience the moral effects of our actions. We see the way patterns develop, habits and characters are formed, and harmony preserved or destroyed. This is not the only way to see kamma, but it is useful.

Note that the second part of the fifth reflection, beginning with "Whatever actions I do..." juxtaposes the words kalyāṇa 'beautiful' and pāpa 'evil'. So morality here is linked to aesthetics. Kalyāṇa 'beautiful, auspicious, helpful' is from the root √kal. It is cognate with the Greek κάλλος (kallos) that we find in English words such as calligraphy (beautiful writing), calliope (beautiful voice) and kaleidoscope (beautiful shape observer). Evil (pāpa), then, could be seen as 'ugly' in the sense of a quality of relating to people which is ugly.

Finally we should reflect on these five facts continuously (abhiṇhaṃ). This could also be translated as 'repeatedly'. The word is a contraction of abhikkhaṇaṃ. It is thought to derive from the verbal root √īkṣ 'to see', with the suffix abhi-, which according to PED has the primary meaning of 'taking possession and mastering'. One of the figurative senses (PED I.2) is "intensifying the action implied by the verb". Thus the sense of abhiṇham is to look at these facts closely and repeatedly, to reflect on them over and over again. We can always gain perspective by placing whatever is happening within the context of these five facts. Whatever else is true about our situation, these five facts are also part of the existential situation. Reflecting on these facts helps us to orient ourselves to the world, and to assess our priorities.

All of this could be seen as quite pessimistic and depressing on its own. But behind it is the idea that ageing, illness and death can be overcome. Through our own actions we can find ourselves no longer subject to suffering, and suffering (as distinct from pain [6]) is a result of choices we make. We can develop equanimity in relationship to the people and things that give us pleasure or pain, and that we think make us happy or unhappy. We can find a happiness that is not dependent on sense objects (i.e. which is 'unconditioned'). And as I have already said we can be the authors of our own liberation through choosing our actions carefully. The point is not to deflate, but to inspire—we may still have much left to do, but it can be done! We can all be liberated from the oppression of craving and aversion, especially in relation to other people. I have no doubt about this, though I am not yet liberated from them myself.

~~oOo~~

Notes

1. Also known (particularly in CST) as Abhiṇhapaccavekkhitabbaṭhāna Sutta. This is my translation. Also translated by Thanissaro on Access to Insight.
2. Hence place names like Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The -stan ending comes from the same verbal root.
3. In other words we have a compound and an external sandhi which joins two words. External sandhi is relatively rare in Pāli: we'd expect to see jarādhammo amhi as two separate words in Roman script.
   
4. C.f. my comments on the Piyajātika Sutta: From the Beloved.
5. I read the first four compounds as tatpuruṣa of various kinds, and the last as bahuvrīhi.
   
6. I've written about the distinction between Pain & Suffering.

Not Two Truths

FOR SOME TIME I have wanted to write a critique of the Doctrine of the Two Truths. The task is potentially a large and difficult one because there is no single version of the idea that is universally accepted, and the history of its development is complex. Some version of the idea of Two Truths is accepted by most schools of Buddhist thought, but they do not agree on the details. An in-depth exposition on the subject would be a long book project.[1] However, I think a single wrong step begins the path that leads to all versions of this theory. Therefore, I may be able to head them all off by identifying that step and suggesting reasons why we should not take it.

In broad outline, the idea of Two Truths says that there are two ways of understanding the world. In the conventional (samvṛti) sense the world is just as it appears to the unawakened. So, for instance, we find the world to be a relatively reliable place where the laws of physics and chemistry apply; where we are born and die; where we interact with people. And yet, according to this theory, this conventional world is not real. Taking the world to be real is why we suffer. Buddhist theorists came up with the idea of an ultimate (paramārtha) truth, the perception of which is liberating, and the understanding of which is liberation—those who see things this way see things as they really are, i.e., they see Reality (with a capital R). Many different explanations of this duality are supplied throughout the history of Buddhist philosophy. I'm going to go out on a limb and argue that all of these explanations are wrong. So, I'm probably mad, or deluded, but bear with me.

Let's begin at the beginning, or as close to it as we'll ever get. We do not find the idea of Two Truths in the Pāli suttas, nor, so far as I am aware, in the early Buddhist texts preserved in other languages. So, we cannot cite any Pāli sutta in defence of this idea. And this is, unsurprisingly, my first point. The idea is a later development. If the early Buddhists did not feel the need for such a theory why did later Buddhists invent it? (This is a question worth asking for many other ideas as well!).

I have argued for some time now that paṭicca-samuppāda is not a Theory of Everything.[2] Not only does paṭicca-samuppāda not explain the universe and everything in it, it was never intended to be applied beyond the arising of experiences in the mind, i.e., dukkha (literally: disappointment, dissatisfaction; suffering)—dukkha is our experience. The 'things' that arise in dependence on conditions are none other than dhammas, and these are the objects of the mind sense. The early texts have little or nothing to say about the ontological status of these dhammas. Indeed, the early Buddhist texts explicitly argue that ontological terms like 'existence' and 'non-existence' do not even apply (especially the Kaccānagotta Sutta. S ii.16). This is not to say that non-mental phenomena are not conditioned, or that cause and effect are not observed. They are. But this was not, so far as we can tell, the Buddha's insight, nor his teaching. So much should be familiar to readers of this blog. [and if this is not familiar then please read the essay referred to in footnote 2.]

Perhaps because their non-Buddhist contemporaries were deeply interested in ontology, such issues also came to occupy the minds of Buddhists. Not content to leave the dhamma as an indeterminate 'mental thing', what I refer to deliberately vaguely as 'an experience', they began to speculate on the nature of dhammas. Were they real? Were they ultimate? How long did they last? The answers to these questions were, from the beginning, irrelevant to the Buddhist program of practice. But, in some cases, they came to occupy centre stage of Buddhist discourse—so much so that many people today talk about the goal of Buddhism as "insight into the nature of Reality". [Google that phrase] The trouble with asking such questions is that people are rarely satisfied with not coming to a conclusion. I suspect that one only asks such questions when one already considers there to be a definite and preferable answer. A lot of time and energy is then wasted over competing opinions about something that is simply not relevant.

I understand the early Buddhist response to the question of whether dhammas are real or unreal to be that the question was neither answerable nor relevant, so even attempting to answer it is pointless. By extension I take the appearance of answers to this question to be one of the limits of what we I think of as early Buddhism.

It is a relatively straightforward proposition to argue that the external world is not dependent on my seeing it, for it to have form. It is harder to believe that the entire universe blinks out of existence and back into existence each time my eyelids close and open than that the Buddha was talking about was the world of 'subjective' experience. In fact, even the terms 'subjective' and 'objective' are out of place here, since the 'world' the Buddha was talking about arises from the condition of both sense object and sense faculty—that world is neither subjective nor objective. In any case, I have found no reference in any early Buddhist text to the reality or unreality of sense objects, nor any mention of it in secondary literature which discusses the early Buddhist world-view. Sense objects are always part of the process of unenlightened consciousness, but there is no speculation on their nature.

However, if I close my eyes then my mode of perception has changed, and my experience of 'the world' has radically changed. This probably leaves the world itself unchanged. I say 'probably', because I do not know and I do not believe I can know the world except through my senses. This leaves me uncertain, and unable to come to any firm conclusion. So neither materialism or idealism in the strict senses are intellectually honest. All I know for certain is that I have experience of something; I find the experiences I have problematic; and early Buddhism tells me that the something is not the source of the problem.

This pragmatic position avoids any argument about relative and ultimate. Such a duality is simply unnecessary. But once we begin to take sides, to insist that dhammas must either be real or unreal, or worse, that objects in the world are real or unreal, then we come into a dilemma because neither stance makes sense in light of the nature of perception.

If we begin to apply the paṭicca-samuppāda as a theory to everything, if we apply it not only to the arising of experiences in our minds, but to the arising of what we suppose to be objects in the putative world, then we create a problem. I have discussed this problem with respect to the simile of the chariot. In this case we lose sight of the fact that the chariot is a metaphor for how our 'world'—that is the world that we experience, not the world as ontological reality—is conditioned by the meeting of sense faculty (indriya) and sense object (dhamma) in the present of sense awareness (viññāna). The chariot is not the point of this story and neither is the world of sense objects. The main point is made in the seldom quoted statements that follow the simile:

"apart from dukkha nothing arises, and apart from dukkha nothing ceases".

When we focus on the chariot and its parts we start asking questions like: is the chariot real or not? Is there a chariot apart from the parts? Is there some essence of chariot? And we come to strange and speculative conclusions. In effect we must invent something like the Two Truths to account for the paradoxes that arise. Plainly, the chariot exists and is, in a sense, 'real', since we perceive it; but it can't be really 'real', or solidly existent because we know it to be merely a conglomeration of parts. Clearly, it cannot be both real and unreal, both exist and not-exist at the same time, so... there must be two distinct truths about reality: at one level it is real and at another unreal.[3]

If we reframe the question in terms of experience, then we already know that our mental states are neither real nor unreal—these kinds of dichotomies don't apply to experience. If we remove the sense object, the sense faculty or awareness from the equation our experiential world ceases or fails to arise (that being, this becomes, etc.). While the three factors are present, then there is both the experience and the experiencer. The khandhas are just another way of breaking up the experience and making the same point. [See The Apparatus of Experience] When we limit our domain to experience, then dualities like real/unreal or existence/non-existence simply and straightforwardly do not apply, and we do not create paradoxes.

All experiences, including the experience of self-hood, are formed this way: from an interaction of our mind, sense faculties and sense objects. And all experiences are characterised as impermanent, disappointing and insubstantial. We may think that a pleasant experience equates with happiness, but we find the experience is fleeting, and it isn't repeatable, which we take to mean that we are unhappy. We grasp after pleasure, but can never be satisfied, and the harder we pursue pleasure the less pleasure we experience. It is not that there is no experience, just that we fail to understand the nature of experience. And experience has only this nature. Awakening, I would say, is awakening to the nature of experience.

It's not that conventionally something exists, but ultimately it doesn't—if we are using words like exist, true or real then we're applying the theory in the wrong way and/or in the wrong domain. Because we are, or should be, talking about experience of things rather than the things in themselves, we have no need of two different truths. Only those who attempt to stretch the application of the paṭicca-samuppāda beyond it's intended domain require two truths.

The other aspect of the Two Truths that is insisted upon is that the ultimate truth is inaccessible to words: "Reality is ineffable". Words do a fair job of communicating about objects and ideas. But when it comes to experiences... no experience can be communicated in words. We can say that we have had an experience; we can say how we explain and/or interpret that experience; we can say how we feel about having had that experience; we can say how the experience changed us: but with mere words we cannot communicate the experience we've had. This is true of every single experience. So experience, all experience, is ineffable. And in fact probably all of us have had life changing experiences after which we have never been the same. We shouldn't make a big deal out of that in the case of bodhi. The ineffability of experience is a simple truism, not a profound Truth. I think the tendency is to emphasise the mystical aspects of bodhi, and for someone like me it makes it seem impossible.

So this is my mad thesis—that all Buddhist philosophers (including the modern Theravāda) are barking up the wrong tree with this business of Two Truths. If we take paṭicca-samuppāda in its natural domain there is no need to go down the route of inventing this dichotomy, because we do not meet the paradoxes that arise from the misapplication of the theory. The early Buddhists had no need of a Two Truths theory because they understood the domain in which paṭicca-samuppāda applies. We have no need of it either; in fact, it is probably a hindrance.

~~oOo~~

Notes

1. A good overview of the subject is: Thakchoe, Sonam, 'The Theory of Two Truths in India,' The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Online: plato.stanford.edu. [though of course the theory developed outside India as well!]. See also Ñāṇavīra. 'Paramattha Sacca.' Notes on Dhamma. p. 27-33. Online: www.nanavira.110mb.com.
2. For an extended treatment of this topic see my long essay: Is Pāṭicca-samuppāda a Theory of Everything? This is based on a close reading of the Kaccānagotta Sutta (S ii.16). I've covered some of the same ground in this blog:
   • A General Theory of Conditionality? (31-12-2010)
   • Paṭicca-samuppāda - A Theory of Causation? (24-12-2010)
   • Action and Intention II. (17-12-2010)
3. If you are at all tempted to invoke Quantum Mechanics at this point then I suggest that you read my essay: Erwin Schrödinger Didn't Have a Cat. I don't think QM has anything helpful to say to us about this issue because conclusions about the nature of single sub-atomic particles do not apply when several septillion of them conglomerate at room temperature.

Civilisation and Technology

Clipart ETC

I'VE ARGUED IN THE PAST that the problem of suffering, especially as conceived of by Buddhists and experienced in the present, may well arise out of civilisation itself. For instance the food surpluses initiated by agriculture led our relationship with hunger, and the pleasurable sensations of eating to change in a way that directly relates to the obesity 'epidemic'[1]. Then again we are constantly surrounded by strangers, and as a social primate this is stressful. As cities become larger and larger, and populations ever more mobile, communities become fragmented. Present day cities can only be alienating for a social ape such as ourselves. [2]

Against this proposition the obvious argument is that the benefits of civilisation outweigh the costs. By combining together we have transformed the lives of individuals - and arguable we have never been better off materially than we are now - alienation, pollution, environmental degradation, increasing commodification of social goods, and other negative manifestations of civilisation not withstanding.

In this essay I will again pursue the role of advocatus diaboli - the devil's advocate - with respect to civilisation. I'm writing this on a computer connected to the internet, surrounded by the products of technology, all of them mass produced. Is it not a little ungrateful to attack technology? Is it not more than a little retrograde? We'll see. My contention is this: that the products of technology are increasingly focused on mitigating the negative effects of technology itself.

The telephone (patented 1876) is one of the key inventions in history. Marshall McLuhan made the point that technology extends the human senses, and the telephone clearly does this. It allows us to talk (Greek: phone) at a distance (Greek: telos). This is clearly a case of "the medium is the message". The fact that we build elaborate globe spanning infrastructures to enable conversations tells us more about the human being than the content of those conversations, the vast majority of which are trivial and banal. It tells us the simple truth that humans, as social primates, want to feel connected to others and experience this partly through talking (we talk the way other primates physically groom each other). It should comes as no surprise that the cellphone has become commoditized and ubiquitous, nor that the Internet which is a more sophisticated telephone network is becoming commoditized and ubiquitous.

But why do we need the telephone? We need to speak to people far away, I would say, because our communities have been divided and scattered. The industrial revolution was the beginning of the end of the sense of belonging and community that people in the 'West' experienced. With the advent of machine work we no longer grew up, lived, and loved amongst people known to us - we moved away to where there was work, to the cities. There is no doubt that we are adaptable, and that we can make new friends. But technology itself changed the structure of our culture in ways that separated us from our loved ones and kin, from our roots. And this process has been accelerating. We stand up for the rights of the individual, which is admirable, but the individual is not the smallest viable unit of humanity. As the old saying goes, "united we stand, divided we fall."

The Amish - a sect of strict fundamentalist Christians living mainly in the North-East of the USA - have an interesting attitude to the telephone. They were early adopters back in the day. However they do not allow telephones inside their houses where they would interrupt family life. Instead they often have little telephone sheds, sometimes shared by several households. And they only use the telephone to arrange face to face meetings with friends and relations. No technology which would disrupt their family or community, or put a man out of work, is suffered amongst them. Which is not to say that they completely eschew technology. They do not. But technology serves their values, it doesn't determine them.[3]

The media is a source of constant fascination - a word which in the 16th century meant 'falling under a spell'. The media's main job is to entertain, though a little bit of useful information slips through occasionally. The internet as the collision of communication technology and the entertainment industries is something of a monster.[4] What is the message in this medium? I believe it is story-telling. We use narratives internally to make sense of our lives, joining the dots into a coherent self image. And we do the same thing on the scale of the community, and on higher scales - religious affiliation, national identity, ethnic group, potentially at least with humanity and all life, though the larger the scale the more difficult becomes the identification. The mass media is a vast story-telling enterprise, and because we live through and by stories, we are enthralled by the media. And the result is that, as we allow technology to tell our stories for us, we spend a lot less time telling stories ourselves. This is partly because of the barriers to participation. In my early life family gatherings consisted of sitting around telling stories about people and places - it's how I got my world view! A generation earlier with no TV and not a great deal of radio (where I grew up) and family gatherings were even more important. Go back far enough and there was a time when we gathered in the evenings just to tell stories, to collectively remember our history, to reinforce our sense of belonging through shared narratives. Now we passively consume stories, and our sense of belonging so often rests on having watched the same TV shows or the same movies. A recent TV documentary quoted Carmen Hermosillo (aka humdog) as saying that the internet "commoditizes emotions and sells them as entertainment." [5] Stories have always been a universal form of entertainment and selling them is pretty old as well. It goes back at least to the invention of the printing press, but probably before. But the internet is like a battery farm which has intensified the process, and magnified the scale by orders of magnitude. Still, it comes back to the fact that the need to communicate over distances is caused by isolation; and that isolation is a direct result of successive technological revolutions.

Medicine seems to be a public good without question, and a place where technology is unequivocally beneficial. But where does most of the funding for medicine, and the efforts of research go? A big chunk goes on dealing with the diseases of old age. It's nice to live longer, to not die from curable diseases, but we only live longer because we harness ourselves to technology. Technology enables us to live longer, but it creates problems that only more technology can solve. Another chunk of funding goes towards curing diseases caused by over-eating, and drinking: heart disease, liver disease, diabetes, etc. Yet another huge chunk goes towards dealing with the effects of stress (and what is stress but the inability to adapt to circumstances?). I'm only identifying problems here, by the way, I am not suggesting solutions. I see the dilemma, but I can't solve it. In wiping out diseases and plagues, we have opened the door to a different kind of plague. We have clearly long since multiplied beyond the levels at which we could live off the land without technology - without artificial fertilizers and pesticides, without machines. We are now completely dependent on technology to survive at our present population levels. If we were to turn back the technological clock, billions might die of starvation and disease. [6]

This may change in the developed world in the next few generations because the baby-boomer generation will reach old age and die out leaving a less fertile and less productive ancestors. China has to some extent addressed this problem through it's draconian one child policy - a more stringent and far reaching decision on environmental impact then any enacted in the west, and possible only in a totalitarian state that values the collective over the individual. And filled with ethical dilemmas. India, and Indonesian - the 2nd and 3rd most populous nations - however will continue to expand, with no population controls and no baby-boomer bubble to burst. One interesting impact of the ubiquitous use of internet pornography is impotence and loss of interest in sexual partners.[7] So in this sense technology might be self limiting.

Throughout the world one of the resources most affected by over-population is water. We continue to pollute our waterways with human and industrial effluent, though this is turning around in places like the UK and NZ. Producing enough fresh water consumes enormous resources. Drought affects many places in the world on a regular basis now, with the effects most likely worsened by human induced climate change.

One can only cite a few examples in a short essay, but I hope you can see the pattern. I would like to pose this as a hypothesis for further investigation: "that each new advance in technology in the present is designed to mitigate problems caused by previous generations of technology." This can be disproved by showing that some technologies have come about recently that are not designed to mitigate problems caused by technology. I think this was true in the past: the wheel and the lever were not problematic in the same way. What I contend is that it is true now.

I suspect the cross-over point was after the industrial revolution, and before the 20th century, but I imagine it would be difficult to pin down to a year or even a decade. But I would suggest that the Amish don't have this problem, and that they may provide clues to maintaining a healthy relationship with technology precisely because they subsume the use of technology to a strong, unified, and well articulated set of values which have families, and communities at their heart. We may not wish to adopt their particular values, but the fact that they have more or less avoided the industrial revolution and the ills it brings, whilst still enjoying some of the fruits of modernity, make them a fascinating case study.

~~oOo~~

Notes

1. Epidemic is in scare-quotes because you can't catch obesity, so it's not an epidemic in the usual sense of the word. What is meant is that a huge and increasing number of people are obese. Except in a very few cases being fat is a result of over-eating.
2. I argued this point in Why Do We Suffer? An Alternate Take. 28 Aug 2008.
3. On the Amish and Phones see The Amish Get Wired. The Amish? Wired Magazine: 1.06 (1993); and Look who's talking. Wired, 7.01. (1999) [back in the days when Wired was still an interesting read]. See also my blog: Cellphones, communications and communities. See also Amish Telephones; and How the Amish View Technology. There are many references to Amish technology use on the Web these days.
4. Frank Zappa once quipped that "government is the entertainment wing of the military-industrial complex". I tend to agree.
5. The documentary was All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, Episode 1. It's available on YouTube. The essay referred was Pandora's Vox: Community in Cyberspace (1994) and is worth reading by anyone who is interested in so-called 'virtual community'. I've also trashed the idea of virtual community (19 Sept 2008).
6. On the subject of medical budgets see also: Our Unaffordable War Against Death. via BigThink. This is a review of a NYT article locked behind a paywall.
7. See various posts on the blog: Biology has Plans for Your Lovelife.

see also

"The root of inequality? It's down to whether you ploughed or hoed: A group of US economists claims the role of women in many modern societies is shaped by their agricultural past." Guardian 31.7.11.

What is the Dhamma, and what isn't it?

Solitary retreat hut
Danakoṣa Retreat Centre

MY TEXT TODAY is quite well known. The version usually cited is in the Vinaya, but I've opted for the Aṅguttara Nikāya version because it will be easier for people to find other translations to compare mind with. [1] If one is stuck with having to read translations, one should never be satisfied with only one, but consult several. The different Pāli versions agree perfectly with regard to the essential teachings. As I often do I'm opting for a slightly different reading to what I have seen others give.

Thanks to my friend and colleague Jñānagarbha for asking the question which sparked this post.

Saṃkhitta Sutta
(A 8.53; iv.279 = Cv 406; Vin ii.258)

One time the Bhagavan was staying at Vesāli in the gabled hall of great forest. The Mahāpajāpatī Gotamī approached the Bhagavan and greeted him. Then standing at one side she addressed him: "it would be excellent, Sir, if you could give me a brief teaching, and I, having heard that teaching will dwell on it alone, secluded, vigilant, active and resolute.

Gotamī you should remember: these things conduce to passion, not to dispassion; conduce to bondage, not to freedom; conduce to accumulation, not to decrease; conduce to much desire, not to few desires; conduce to discontent, not to contentment; conduce to socialising, not to solitude; conduce to idleness, not to vigour; conduce to delighting in the ugly, not to delight in the beautiful -- you should definitely remember "this is not the teaching, this is not the discipline, this is not the edict of the teacher.

Gotamī you should remember: these things conduce to dispassion, not to passion; conduce to freedom, not to bondage; conduce to decrease, not to accumulation; conduce to few desires, not to much desire; conduce to contentment, not to discontent; conduce to solitude not to socialising, ; conduce to vigour, not to idleness; conduce to delighting in the beautiful, not to delight in the ugly -- you should definitely remember "this is the teaching, this is the discipline, this is the edict of the teacher.

In contemporary language Gotamī is going on a solitary retreat and she asks her teacher to give her a subject to reflect on. So my approach is not to take this as a doctrinal teaching, but as a methodological one, that is to treat the content of the discourse primarily as a subject for reflection rather than as a definition of the Dhamma.[2]

The teaching is given in response to a request, to a particular person at a particular time and place. One imagines it tailored to that person and their particular needs. However it has more general implications as well. Meditation subjects in early Buddhism, by which I mean subjects for reflection designed to stimulate insight rather than concentration techniques, could often be quite specific. A more general subject like this sets up a different dynamic though. It seems to me that the idea here is to undermine attempts to intellectualise and rationalise, to prevent the student becoming too literalistic. The effect is to throw Gotamī back into her own experience, and to assessing the consequences of her own actions.

Human activity is driven by various motivating factors - what we call the emotions (from Latin ex- 'out' + movere 'to move'). To break it down to it's most fundamental level we are usually seeking pleasure or avoiding displeasure. There's a rational level to this. We find pleasure in food, because if we didn't -- as in anorexia -- then we'd probably die of malnutrition. Pleasure stimulates the behaviour that keeps us alive. Similarly if my finger is in a flame, it is only rational to remove it, rather than to try to ignore the pain. But a lot of the time we're not simply responding to things in this way. Because of the view that happiness consists of pleasant sensations for instance, we tend to equate the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of pleasure. It's not an overwhelming and over-riding urge, more of an underlying tendency, and it affects some more than others, though one can see the effect quite clearly on a societal level.

If we take this teaching seriously what we have to do is ask ourselves before we act: does this emotion conduce to passion, to bondage, etc., or not. If it does, then it's not the Dhamma, it's not helpful. If it is conducive to dispassion, to freedom, et., then that is the Dhamma, it is helpful. If we continue on a course of action motivated by these unskilful emotions then we may be harmed, and we may harm others. And this restrains us from acting harmfully. The teaching draws our attention to feedback loops between emotions, actions, and outcomes. I would think that an intense retreat situation is the only place where you could really take on this kind of practice. One needs to be leading a very slow paced, and very simple and undemanding, and probably solitary life to pursue this kind of practice successfully. It's only with substantial progress that one can bring the practice to bear in more lively situations.

I won't say much more, but I do want to look at some of the terms more closely. Passion (rāga) is the old fashioned sense of the word: as in the passion of martyrs. The PIE root is *√pēi 'to hurt; to scold', and from this same root we get the word fiend.[3] It refers here to emotions that rise up and overwhelm us, against our will. The Pāli (and Sanskrit) word rāga literally means 'red' and seems to refer to the flushed face of the person in the grip of hot emotions like anger and sexual arousal. These strong emotions tend to carry us away, and cause us to act on impulse without considering the consequences. A lot of time in Western society we seem quite pleased to be caught up in emotions like this, even though we are also frequently horrified by the consequences. The Romantic movement idolised emotions and emotionality - which may account for why we think of passion in a positive sense nowadays. Buddhism asks us to adopt a more cool approach to life, so that we don't act without reflection and cause harm.

Bondage (saṃyoga) seems fairly straight forward in this context. The next word (ācaya) is less clear however. The pair here is ācaya and apacāya: and ācaya means 'increase, accumulation', whereas PED has for apacaya 'falling off, decrease; unmaking'. If we turn to the commentary it glosses ācaya as vaṭṭassa vaḍḍhanatta, which I take to mean 'gaining and fostering of alms donations'. So Buddhaghosa, as he often does, sees this from the point of view of a settled monastic. I think more generally it may well mean the accumulation of material possessions. However PED also hints that it might mean the accumulation of kamma leading to rebirth (sv. apacaya). The latter would also fit the context quite well.

The pair mahicchata and appicchata are literally - big-wished and small-wished, where icchata is the past-participle of icchati 'to wish, to desire, to long for'. The meaning is clear enough, though rendering this into good English requires translating the meaning, not the words themselves. The next term, contentment (saṇtuṭṭhi), is also reasonably straight-forward.

Where I imagine we struggle is with the pair: saṅgaṇika and paviveka. The first term saṅganika is from saṃ- + gaṇa + -ika. And gaṇa is used for collections of people: so it can mean 'a meeting or chapter of two or three bhikkhus', or on a larger scale: 'society, a crowd'; and with non-human items 'a suite or collection'. I think these exhortations to solitude are the ones that many people find difficult. People often say that they don't want to cut themselves off from the world, they want to live and practice in the world. Of course such a lifestyle was known in ancient India as well. We tend to call it 'lay Buddhism', though I don't think the monk/lay divide is a useful one any longer (given that many monks don't really practice, and many lay people really do!). But while Buddhism can accommodate this less intense approach to practice, the recommendation is to seek out solitude (paviveka). I think this goes back to what I said earlier about a slow and simple lifestyle. There is nothing evil about living a busy and full life. It's just not conducive to insight. And while I know that saying so will get some people's back's up, I think we need to be honest about the level of intensity and direction of our practice. I have one friend who for the last 12 years has spent 3 or 4 months on solitary retreat each year. If anyone I know is likely to be insightful then I expect it to be him, rather than my other friends who've married, got careers and had kids. Realistically most of us aren't able to sustain intense practice, and we play other roles in our Buddhist communities. I for instance do not expect to become enlightened. But I actively participate in a community in which it seems reasonable that someone will, and there's every indication that people are having insight experiences. It's all about creating the conditions for awakening, and it doesn't have to be me. So the Buddha recommends solitude to better pursue our practice. One reasonable compromise to full-time solitude is to spend regular time alone, preferably on retreat. In the past my teacher has suggested one month in the year on solitary retreat as a guideline. The more progress we make, the better able we are to take the fruits of our practice into relations with other people.

The last two pairs are kosajja (idleness, sloth) & viriyāmbha (making an effort); and dubbharata (delighting in the harmful or ugly) & subharata (delighting in the beautiful or wholesome). I don't think I need say much about these.

I think anyone who has been on a meditation retreat of more than a few days duration will have some inkling of what I'm saying about the conditions which would be conducive to sustaining, and acting on the kind of reflection practice given to Gotamī. On retreat, with the simplicity of it, the intensity of practice, and the space to pause and reflect, one comes alive in a way that is simply not possible in a busy urban life. Those people who think that having more and more stimulation and excitement is living life to the full are fooling themselves. To be fully alive to one's experience requires quiet, space, stillness, and simplicity. This is a life lived to it's full potential.

There is another, perhaps more usual, way to interpret this text. I have read it as primarily a methodological text, one which is advising on a way of living. But we might also read it as doctrinal and definitional. The different readings turn on the ambiguous use of the word dhamma. So here ime dhamme could mean: "these things", "these teachings" or "these mental objects". My interpretation emerges from taking dhamma here to simply mean "thing", or "mental object", or perhaps even "mental state". If however we take it to mean '"teaching" then the emphasis shifts. In this case we might see the pairs of antonyms as definitional. In this reading anything which conduces to liberation is the Teaching. This has interesting implications as well. It points away from dogmatism, sectarianism, and conservatism, towards a more open, ecumenical, and progressive attitude to what it means to be a Buddhist. It moves us away from prescriptive definitions of the type 'you have to believe X, or do practice Y'. I believe that most commentators have seen the text this way, though my opinion is that my methodological interpretation is the more likely. Mahāpajāpati asks for, and is given, a meditation subject; she aims to dwell on it in solitude; and though it is unstated her aim appears to be liberation from dukkha, and her verses in the Therīgāthā (Th2, v.157-162) tell us that she did achieve this aim.

~~oOo~~

Notes

1. Access to Insight refer to this as the Gotamī Sutta.
2. Having written this, and in a slightly surreal moment while checking for other translations, I find that I myself have already commented on this text on my blog, but had no memory of doing so (and it wasn't that long ago). It is quite interesting to see that I have taken a very different approach this time. See What is Buddhism? (23 Apr 2010).
   
3. PIE /p/ changes to /f/ in Germanic -- c.f. Sanskrit: pitṛ; Greek/Latin: pater; Proto-Germanic: *fader; German vater; Old English: fæder; English: father. 'Fiend' is from the Old English foend, which also devolved to foe. Compassion comes from the Latin which combines this same word in the form pati 'to suffer' with the prefix com- 'together'. Compassion is cognate with the Greek derived word sympathy 'to feel with'; while the closest Sanskrit term is anukampa 'to tremble with'.
   

Faith in What?

teaching Buddha
Asian Arts

I'VE BEEN PONDERING FAITH quite a bit recently. I've written a number of times about belief, and then last year was interviewed by Ted Meissner of The Secular Buddhist. Subsequently I joined a discussion group in which we talked about faith and belief; and about secularism and religion. One of our number came up with this aphorism;

Religious Buddhism doesn't convince us;
Secular Buddhism doesn't move us.

This seems to sum up a dilemma faced by modern, Western Buddhists. We often get this dichotomy between faith and reason. In our group we discussed the Kālāma Sutta which I have already written about. [1] It's one of those texts that gets cited far too often and usually for the wrong reasons. One of the negative criteria put forward in this text is:

mā ākāraparivitakkena...
don't use reflecting on signs...

To put it in context, this is saying that we should not decide on what constitutes good and bad behaviour on the basis of ākāraparivitakka, which I translate as 'reflection on signs'. Ākāra is from ā– + √kṛ 'to do, to make' and means 'a way of making; a state or condition; a property, sign; a mode'; while parivitakka derives from takka with prefixes pari– and vi– and means 'thought, reflection', or 'meditation' (in the English sense). Bhikkhus Nyanaponika & Bodhi translate it as 'reflection on reasons' which is not incorrect, but leads to a strange conclusion: that one should not reflect on the reasons for acting ethically. I've discussed the problem a little in my post about the ten negative criteria, but want to return to consider the context a little more.

In the Apaṇṇaka Sutta (MN 60) Gotama asks the Brahmin lay folk he's just met whether they have settled on a teacher in whom they 'have reason to have faith' (ākāravatī saddhā paṭiladdhā) - or perhaps 'have obtained reasoned faith'. Here ākāra is combined with the possessive suffix -vatin so the sense is a faith which possesses (-vant) 'reasons', or perhaps 'signs'. They have not found a teacher and so he gives them an incontrovertible teaching (apaṇṇakadhamma). There's no sense here that reasoning is a bad thing, and the expectation seems to be that people can be expected to have reasoned faith in a teacher.

The task of understanding is not made easier if we then read the Vīmaṃsaka Sutta (MN 47). Here the disciple has faith in the Buddha, which they should explain this way:

Where-ever I approach the Bhagavan, friend, he teaches a dhamma better and better, higher and higher, with dark and light counterparts, and [as a result of] direct knowledge of a certain aspect of that teaching I arrived at the conclusion (niṭṭḥamadama) I found satisfaction (pasīdi) in the teacher (expressed) thus 'the the Bhagavan is perfectly awakened, his dhamma is well taught, and his community on the good path.'

Most Buddhists will tend to talk about faith in the teachings, and indeed much of the discussion on the Kāmāla Sutta, both with my friends and in published work, revolves around the content of the teaching. Here, although his good teaching is certainly a positive criteria, saddhā is associated with the teacher, not in the teachings. Note that the Kālāmas ask "who is telling the truth?", not "what is the truth?" The Kālāmas are apparently not seeking independence, only guidance on which teacher to have faith in. Here in the Vīmaṃsaka Sutta we see that one firstly has faith in the teacher. Likewise the culmination of the Kālāma Sutta is the act of going for refuge to the Buddha by the Kālāmas - i.e. they place their confidence in him. The worldview of the texts is one in which not having a teacher is almost inconceivable, hence the magnitude of Gotama's achievement.

This same theme is repeated elsewhere. In the Karandaka Sutta (MN 51), the Mahānāma Sutta (AN 6.10 & AN 11.12), and the Samaññaphala Sutta (DN 2) one develops confirmed confidence (aveccapassāda) in the Buddha after hearing a Dhamma talk. It seems to me that the one thing that faith does not require, in these texts, is practice or experience. Faith arises merely upon hearing the Buddha speak. Elsewhere in the Vīmaṃsaka Sutta it says that faith should also be 'rooted in vision' (dassanamūlikā), a metaphor here for personal knowledge, but this vision also seems to arise upon hearing the Buddhadhamma, not upon practising it.

A number of texts in the Saṃyutta Nikāya refer to faith in the Buddha. For instance:

SN 55.37 (S v.395)

"To what extent, Sir, is a layman endowed with faith (saddhā-sampanna)? Here, Mahānāma, the layman is faithful (saddha), he trusts (saddahati) in the understanding (bodhi) of the tathāgata [as expressed in the Buddha vandana or itipi so gāthā]. To this extent, Mahānāma, the layman is endowed with faith."

This is interesting because it contains the noun (saddhā), the verb (saddahati), and an adjective (saddha) all from the same root. Faith here is faith in bodhi of the Tathāgata. In the Cabbisodhana Sutta (MN 112) we find it explicitly said:

tāhaṃ dhammaṃ sutvā tathāgate saddhaṃ paṭilabhiṃ

Hearing the Dhamma, I gained faith in the Tathāgata.

I have yet to find a text which describes faith, in the sense of saddhā, in anything other than a teacher. So despite the received tradition - and I include here the tradition I received - in the early Buddhist texts faith (saddhā) seems to mean faith in the person, or the personal achievement, of the Buddha.

There is another kind of confidence that arises from personal experience of practice and this is called aveccapasāda. Pasāda is more literally 'clear, bright' and we might translated it as 'clarity', and aveccapasāda as 'definite clarity'. SN 48.44 explicitly contrasts faith in the Buddha, with knowledge gained from personal experience. Sāriputta says he need not rely on faith in the Bhagavan (Na khvāhaṃ ettha, bhante, bhagavato saddhāya gacchāmi) to have faith that the faith faculty has the deathless as it's final goal (saddhindriyaṃ... amatapariyosānaṃ): he knows it for himself.

As I mentioned above there are texts where aveccapasāda is synonymous with saddhā, but more often the two are distinguished. Although this distinction is reasonably clear in the texts, it seems to have been lost in practice. And this has a downstream effect on discussions of faith in Buddhism. There is an over emphasis on what is effectively aveccapasāda (confidence based on personal experience), and a down playing of saddhā (faith in the teacher) as irrelevant. Although we use the term saddhā we do not use it in the same way as the canonical texts do, we tend to mean something more like aveccapasāda.

However this discussion still leaves the problem of how to understand and translate the occurrence of mā ākāraparivitakkena in the Kālāma Sutta. Frankly the only way it makes sense to me is to assume that ākāra here means something other than 'reason', and we do know that the interpretation of signs was practised since monks are banned from doing it in the Brahmajāla Sutta. [2] In various places Buddhaghosa equates ākāra with liṅga and nimitta (e.g. MA 3.38), both of which mean 'a sign'. For instance the clothing, long hair and beard are said to be a sign (ākāra, liṅga, nimitta) of the villager. Perhaps then our little phrase means 'don't go by external appearances', which would also fit the context.

If our morality is unreasoning, then it will likely be unreasonable. Similarly with faith. But in the texts I've cited faith is a quality of relationship between the protagonist and the Buddha. According to traditional compound analysis (in Sanskrit):

śraddhā iti. yatra hṛdayam mama dadhāmi, sā.
'Faith' [means] where I place my heart. [3]

This suggests that we don't place our hearts in things or ideas, but only in another person. For us it could could refer to the relationship between ourselves and our teacher, or perhaps between us and our imaginative connection with the Buddha. The latter, though, leaves us vulnerable to narcissism and hubris since we tend to imagine the Buddha (as Theists imagine God) to be like us, but a bit better.[4] Perhaps what this reinforces is the necessity of contact with a living exemplar of the practices, although even this is no longer a straightforward proposition in the West. So many of us have been more than a little naive about who we trust, and so many of the trusted have proved untrustworthy. And given that many of us convert to Buddhism, having already fallen out of love with Christianity or some other religion, faith is a subject fraught with tensions. We have a naive, romantic view of trust and love, and falling in love. Perhaps this is the fundamental problem - we court betrayal by trusting naively; then being hurt we think we'll find a refuge in ideas (aka The Dharma). I'm quote doubtful about this.

~~oOo~~

Notes

1. • Parallels to the Kālāma Sutta (22.4.11);
   • Positive Criteria for Moral Decision Making in The Kālāma Sutta. (8.4.11);
   • Negative Criteria for Moral Decision Making in The Kālāma Sutta. (1.4.11)
2. I discussed this three years ago in a post on Persian influences on Indian Buddhism.
3. See my Visible Mantra blog post on śraddhā, especially the comment by Elisa Freschi a scholar of Sanskrit, and Indian Philosophy.
4. Since originally publishing this essay I came upon some research which has quantified this phenomenon. Believers’ estimates of God’s beliefs are more egocentric than estimates of other people’s beliefs. PNAS. Part of the abstract reads: "In particular, reasoning about God’s beliefs activated [brain] areas associated with self-referential thinking more so than did reasoning about another person’s beliefs. Believers commonly use inferences about God’s beliefs as a moral compass, but that compass appears especially dependent on one’s own existing beliefs." Put simply: we appear to believe that God agrees with us. I leave atheists to contemplate what it means for us.
   

Rescuing the Dharma from Fundamentalists

© Sidney Harris
sciencecartoons.com

MY TITLE THIS WEEK is taken from a book by Bishop Shelby Spong, who, apart from having a delightfully resonant surname, wrote Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, a book I read long before converting to Buddhism. I no longer recall much about Bishop Spong's opus other than the title, but that phrase has popped into my head a number of times recently as I have been confronted by fundamentalist Buddhists. Surely the phrase 'Buddhist fundamentalist' should be redundant, at least if I am referring to the colloquially pejorative use of fundamentalist, but sadly it is not. Over the years I've met many fundamentalist Buddhists online, but have also met one or two in person.

Buddhists will often tell you that Buddhism is not a religion of blind faith. I think this is at best a misconception. Buddhists take many things on faith, most of them blindly, and many of us have spent a good part of our lives searching for confirmation of those articles of faith, usually without ever finding it. To keep believing, after decades of seeking and not finding, requires a great deal of faith. (Though I should add it's not that we've found nothing at all, just not what we were told to seek) Amongst the articles of faith that characterise Buddhism are beliefs in ideas such as karma, rebirth and nirvāṇa. For many years I myself accepted the notion of some kind of Absolute Reality, some reality above and beyond the one I currently experience - in philosophical terms this kind of thinking is called Idealism. This Absolute Reality has many names: nirvāṇa, dharmakāya, amṛta. Sometimes it is described in terms of paramārthasatya - ultimate truth, or ultimate reality, or Even Ultimate Reality! Talking to Buddhists it rapidly becomes clear that the belief in such views is not supported by personal experience, though personal experiences have been interpreted to fit these dogmas. These truly are articles of faith in the sense of beliefs unsupported by any evidence, only ancient, scriptural testimony. And what's more, when one presumes to question the validity of such beliefs the believer can become upset and even aggressive.

The basic problem of fundamentalism seems to be that if you question the articles of faith, then the faith disappears, and the person is left with nothing. I do not believe that this faith is Buddhism in the first place, or that it harms Buddhism to set aside views, or that we cannot dispense with the Iron Age Indian worldview that underpins traditional Buddhism and the Indic language terminology that comes with it. If Buddhism is not a religion of blind faith (and I am saying that for the majority this is a moot point), then relinquishing articles of faith should present no problems at all.

Because I'm in the habit of reinterpreting scripture, and questioning traditional authorities, I often find that fundamentalists are upset by what I write. For instance some time ago a chap going by the name of 'Namdrol' on the E-Sangha bulletin board, in a discussion of the Theravāda three lifetimes model of the nidāna chain - for which there is no Pāli Canonical authority - declared: "to reject the three lifetimes model is harming the dharma". I mentioned back then that I thought this a fundamentalist view, but was told that the word "fundamentalist" was banned in that forum (along with any reference to the New Kadampa Tradition which was a bit of a give away). E-Sangha died not long afterwards, but not before I realised that online forums, and arguing with strangers on the internet generally, were a waste of my time and started focussing on writing this blog.

When I first discovered the Dharma I fell in love with it. I just took the whole thing on, accepted everything I heard uncritically for a long honeymoon period. When you're in love you don't see the flaws in your lover. I read quite widely, but mostly at the level of popular Buddhism, and certainly nothing very scholarly or critical (in the sense of critical thinking). And I ended up getting into arguments. I've always learned through intellectual disputation, and I wanted to test this new found belief system. But as I got older, and I got interested in Buddhist scholarship, I found myself becoming less sure, more doubtful about what was now more obviously dogma at best, and often rank superstition.

As time has gone on I have come to see that the traditional accounts of Buddhism are not entirely coherent, that certain key terms and concepts are very, very difficult to understand, though talked about incessantly. [1] Indeed some dogmas which seem reasonable at a level of popular simplification, are positively incoherent when considered in detail. At the same time I became more interested in practice and what actually happens because my own experience of doing Buddhist practice was exciting and revealing. I began to have insights into my own character and the dynamics of my personality that I don't think I could have gained except through intensive practice. These insights changed my life, in some cases dramatically, and mostly positively. I don't claim that these were Insights in the technical Buddhist sense, but they were significant breakthroughs for me personally, and as a result I suffer considerably less than I used to, though still a lot more than I would prefer.

Where a dogma is incoherent or inconsistent I think we have a duty to say so. Where history or archaeology is at odds with tradition, we must not sweep it under the carpet. And where the Iron Age Indian world view conflicts with the modern scientific world view then I think we must accept the findings of science and adapt our presentation of Buddhism. The Dalai Lama has said something similar [2], though I've found his followers more the usually ready to accept dogma - with one or two exceptions (see e.g. the blog Buddhism Sucks).

I've written a number of posts exploring the philosophical problems of belief in karma and rebirth [3]. Intellectual honesty says that at best we can be agnostic about rebirth, but it's the kind of strict agnosticism associated with the Tooth Fairy (this is cited from Richard Dawkin's book Unweaving the Rainbow). Tooth Fairy agnosticism acknowledges that we cannot know for certain that there is no tooth fairy - after all how would one disprove such a proposition? It would be much easier to disprove the opposite proposition - that the tooth fairy doesn't exist - simply by producing the Tooth Fairy. Equally the Tooth Fairy is not something we need to take seriously, or spend a lot of time agonising over. Rebirth is a pre-scientific afterlife belief with very little to distinguish it from other afterlife beliefs, at least there is no more evidence for or against it than any of the others. The so-called proof of such beliefs is merely that at some time in the past, some people appeared to believe it, though the argument over whether the Buddha himself believed in rebirth continues to bubble away 2500 year later. The same people appear to have believed in gods, demons, and animistic spirits. The same people believed that a person could possess magical powers to fly though the air, hear conversations at a distance, and multiply their body so as to be in many places at once. If we accept rebirth as 'true' then why not all these others things? And of course there are some credulous folk who do believe every story the ancients told as having a basis in fact. They may also believe in bigfoot, the yeti, visitors from another planet living amongst us, that economics will solve the world's problems, and no doubt the tooth fairy. But what people believe is not as important as how they behave as a result of what they believe!

In a recent comment on this blog, one person asked what was left if we stripped away all of the articles of faith. I suggest we are left with some simple propositions. We suffer. We can gain insights into the conditions for, and workings of, suffering, and thereby suffer less (and help those around us to suffer less also). We gain insights into suffering through examining the arising and passing away of suffering. That we suffer is a simple observation, and I do not think any one can argue against this. Sangharakshita has proposed that the Buddha starts with an experience because it cannot be argued with (A Survey of Buddhism, p.145f.). The problem of suffering is not incidental or accidental: suffering is the central problem of Buddhism. I do maintain that there is a distinction between pain and suffering on more or less traditional Buddhist lines, and that suffering is a mental response to physical pain. The early Buddhist tradition was talking about suffering in this sense (c.f. my commentary on the Salla Sutta).

The proposition that we can gain insights into why we suffer, and thereby lessen our suffering, is one I can vouch for from personal experience and without resorting to mysticism, or obscure Indian jargon, or a world-view alien to the one I grew up with. The one article of faith that I maintain is that there is, so far as I can see, no limit to the extent of the insight which is possible; and therefore no limit on the extent to which we can reduce suffering in the world. Pain is inherent to sentient existence, suffering is not. One can be in pain, for instance and be happy. I can see no reason that the insights gained could not make permanent and irreversible changes in the way we perceive pain. After all we've probably all had an experience which has forever changed us.

And what I find is that the methods of Buddhist practice, and even more so the fundamental principles of Buddhist practices, are very conducive to understanding and relieving suffering. There are also methods not traditionally associated with Buddhism - tai chi, yoga, psychotherapy etc - which can help. Clearly the idea that anything that helps is part of 'the method' is one that is very attractive to some, but threatening to the fundamentalist. Fundamentalists are not simply conservative, they don't just resist innovation and change, they are opposed to any change - in direct contradiction of the dictum that everything changes.

In the last year of so I have had a little contact with varieties of so-called 'secular' Buddhist, 'atheist' Buddhists and even 'non-Buddhist' Buddhists, and while I have some sympathy with them I think we differ in some ways. To me religious Buddhism is fine. I have no problem with bells and smells, and devotional practices, or even idol worship. Because my criteria is not ideological or philosophical, it is pragmatic. I think religious Buddhism, with some caveats, is a good thing.

Buddhism has near enemies and far enemies. A near enemy is something we mistake for the true quality, while a far enemy is the polar opposite.

One near enemy of Buddhism is that instead of disinterestedly investigating our minds for insights into suffering, we tendentiously try to prove a dogma, to achieve a certain state, and see every experience in an elaborate sectarian ideological framework. It is a delicious irony that the great figures of Buddhism, from the Buddha onwards, have been the one's that said - "no, my experience does not fit the traditional narratives" and developed their own ways of making sense of the experience of doing Buddhist practices. In this respect I must say I find the new crop of arahants, who appear to confirm the traditional narratives, intriguingly old school.

One of the great problems of Buddhist fundamentalism is the way we Buddhists speak of our beliefs as Reality (always capitalised). Our dogmas are different because they are "the way things are". But are they? How do we know this? The knowledge that our dogmas are Reality, if it comes at all, only comes with Awakening (which we also capitalise). So logically if we are not awakened, we do not know the truth - so why do we believe? The best the unawakened can do is to have faith in the awakened - who ever they are. But few Buddhists really make this distinction, and many argue as if they personally know the truth. I've done this. It seems plausible partly because paṭicca-samuppāda is superficially a theory of cause and effect. Cause and effect is how we experience the world, so a doctrine which proclaims cause and effect must be true. But paṭicca-samuppāda was not originally a doctrine of cause and effect, it was an idea about how the experience of suffering arises, and used the language of conditionality, not of cause and effect. There's no real evidence that the originator(s) of this doctrine intended it to be a theory of cause and effect, let alone a Theory of Everything. And there's every evidence that the Western Intellectual tradition has understood cause and effect for at least as long as the East has - at least since the Buddha's Greek contemporaries, but throughout the intervening period we find quotes to the effect that "everything changes". If cause and effect, or even conditionality, was all the Buddha was talking about then we are all awakened, because in fact this is all rather easy to understand, and is covered in high-school physics. The fact that we do not appear to be awakened, in the sense that we still suffer, suggests very strongly that in focusing on cause and effect we are looking in the wrong place!

When a doctrine is Reality, when it is the Truth, when it is just "how things are", then to question it is not really possible. Indeed to question Reality is seen not merely as heresy, but as insanity. Buddhists will happily tell you that we don't have a sin called heresy; but they are also fond of the apocryphal quotation "all pṛthagjanas are crazy". The pṛthagjanas are you and me, the hoi polloi, the unawakened, and usually this statement includes the people citing it (and after 17 years of looking I've yet to find the source). So if I question the notion of karma, I'm not simply a heretic, I'm not offending anybody (because we Buddhists don't get offended) I'm just expressing my insane "views".

Most of the time this delusion of knowing Reality is actually pretty benign. Buddhists, on the whole, are tolerant of lunatics like me (See the case of the mad monk). Buddhists don't tend to coerce, manipulate, bully or injure unbelievers. It's been known to happen, including amongst our clergy, but it's rare. We are mostly harmless, as one would expect. We spout incomprehensible jargon a lot of the time, and are often a slightly edgy combination of zealous and defensive. But Buddhism, on the whole, is not a cult that is going to damage you. The main problem is confirmation bias -- if you already know what Reality is, you will dismiss everything else.

A far enemy of Buddhism, which we are seeing more and more, is militant nihilistic iconoclasm which strikes down any and all manifestations of religion. Perhaps we need to reflect on why some people are so violently opposed to religion per se - after all religion in some form is a feature of all human cultures, and to hate religion seems to me to be tantamount to hating our humanity. Many people appear to be appalled by their humanity. The sociality, irrationality, emotionality, and fragility of all humans appears to be deeply problematic to some. Is it a symptom of the widespread alienation that characterises the post-industrial world?

Buddhism proceeds by many ways and means to illuminate the way that suffering arises, but the focus is always on the arising and passing away of mental states. I would say that even those who "merely" offer generosity to monks are at least potentially fully participating in this exploration since to be truly generous one must find a deep empathetic connection with another being and give them what they truly need, to make them happy at whatever the cost to ourselves (the very opposite of the philosophy of Ayn Rand which has been so very influential on Wall St and in The City, as well as in Silicon Valley). Poor traditional Buddhists assiduously feeding and caring for monks are in some ways more admirable than middle-class Western Buddhists with desultory meditation practices and still driven by their own selfishness. Though we so often scoff at them as merely 'ethnic Buddhists'.

So, yes, I think we can dispense with the vast bulk of traditional Buddhist narratives, worldviews and terminology, and yet still consider ourselves to be Buddhist if we pursue Buddhist practices. I define a Buddhist in terms of what they do, not what they profess to believe. A Buddhist is someone who explicitly and purposefully pursues some form, any form, of practice whose purpose is ultimately to identify and ameliorate the causes of suffering; and who calls themselves as a Buddhist in the process. The last bit is relatively inconsequential. I personally know Buddhists with beliefs ranging from outright materialism, through the wackiest aliens-amongst-us conspiracy theories, to the most esoteric mysticism, whom I know to be good people, sincerely pursuing a Buddhist path, and even finding some success upon it, at least in the sense of manifesting Buddhist virtues like friendliness and generosity. I also know plenty of people who share values I hold dear, and even express them in virtues I admire, but who have no inclination to call themselves Buddhist.

Karma and rebirth as traditionally taught are just dogmas. Buddhists are afraid that if we dispense with karma and rebirth no one will be moral, and freedom from suffering will not be possible - after all it takes many lifetimes to practice the perfections. Christians expressed a similar fear about the death of God - without God, they said, people will be immoral, and the world will turn to chaos. Are we more or less moral than our 17th century pre-European-Enlightenment forebears? Probably about the same on average. Probably about the same, on average, as individuals anyway, as anyone anywhere, any time. Because morality is not determined by profession of belief. Even the faithful can sin; even the heathen can be moral. To find what makes us moral we need to look deeper than belief and religion. To find out what causes us to suffer we need to look at our own minds, and set aside our preconceived ideas.

Buddhists, of all people, should recognise that our traditions have sprung from centuries of cultural change, that our narratives and doctrines are not "original" and haven't been for more than 2000 years. Buddhists, of all people, have nothing to fear from change, should embrace change, should initiate change. Fundamentalism just seems out of place amongst us.

"What can we take on trust in this uncertain life?
Happiness, greatness, pride - nothing is secure, nothing keeps."

Euripides (ca. 480 BC – 406 BC), Hecuba. [4]

~~oOo~~

Notes

1. See for instance: Confessions.
2. "If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for the truth and for understanding reality. By learning from science about aspects of reality where its understanding may be more advanced, I believe that Buddhism enriches its own worldview." The New York Times (12 November 2005) [via Wikiquote]
3. see e.e. Rebirth and the Scientific Method; and Hierarchies of Values.
4. Note that Euripides's estimated dates coincide exactly with the most recent estimations for the dates of the Buddha.