Having your Cake and Eating it.

THE IDIOMATIC PROVERB in my title today is one of the strangest in the language I think. It refers to someone who wants everything. The basic idea is that having eaten your cake you no longer have any cake. So you can either have cake, or you can eat cake, but not both. I think Western Buddhists want to both eat their cake, and to have it. We often want both a full conventional life and liberation: to fully participate, and feel comfortable in saṃsāra; and escape from it. We might have a career, a family, a hobby: the "full catastrophe" as Zorba the Greek says. [1] We go to films, listen to music, and surf the Internet. And yes, we eat cake! And we might squeeze in one session of meditation a day around our busy schedule. An hour if we are lucky. And we want to be told that this is OK; that it is sufficient, that liberation is a possibility under these conditions. I've seen people become visibly upset at the mere hint that this is insufficient. But it is insufficient. Though that doesn't make you (or me) a bad person!

By contrast I have a friend who does building work for a couple of months each summer, and uses the proceeds to spend four months on solitary retreat every year, and has done for 12 years. Another colleague is on an open ended retreat that has so far lasted 3 years. Tibetan Buddhist clergy routinely do three year retreats, and have developed facilities for just this purpose. Now if I had to guess at where liberation was likely to occur I would have to say that it would be amongst this second group - the serious practitioners who arrange there life around their practice and not the other way around.

We need to be realistic. There's no shame in leading a lifestyle that is reasonably ethical and wholesome, but which lacks the intensity of practice that might be conducive to liberation. That kind of lifestyle is admirable in many ways, and preferable to an unexamined, hedonistic or vicious life. But it is not realistic to think that a lifestyle which is not conducive to liberation might by a fluke allow us to be liberated. It's pretty unlikely. Liberation seldom spontaneously arises in someone. We may have an insight which turns us around, makes us rearrange our lives, and reorder our priorities, as often happens for instance when a loved one dies; but this kind of spontaneous insight requires nurturing and cultivating if it is to bear fruit. And in a busy life it will be lost quite quickly. It's down to setting up the right conditions.

I was recently leading some study with my Order peers and pointing out that in texts which feature the spiral path or lokuttara paṭicca-samuppāda [2] the stage of ethics is characterised not by following rules and precepts, but by guarding the gates of the senses (indriyesu guttadvāra), wise attention (yoniso manasikāra), non-intoxication with sense objects (appamāda), and restraint (saṃvara). I suggested that this was a far more demanding approach to ethics than we normally take on. These models effectively suggest that we approach ethics as a trial run for the wisdom stages of the path: i.e. disenchantment (nibbidā) and turning away (virāga) which are the conditions for liberation (vimutti). Morality in this case is acting as if we are disenchanted with the delights of the senses, and a deliberate, even mechanical, turning away from them. The texts suggest that the results of these practices are a clear conscience (avippaṭisāra), faith (saddhā) and importantly joy (pamojja). Ayya Khema has said that joy is an essential quality for meditation. With joy we are ready to begin training in and becoming skilled in the jhānas which prepare the mind for seeing through (vipassanā [3]) the delights of the senses.

All this is demanding and to be successful requires considerable persistence and effort, because it goes against our natural inclinations. Frankly, it isn't really consistent with how most of us live or want to live. Therefore it is hardly any surprise that so few of us are confident in jhāna, able to enter jhāna at will, and move easily between the levels. I know people who are, but they are the ones I mentioned above who organise their lives around their meditation practice and dedicate long hours to practice. Of course developing familiarity with jhāna is only a preparation for vipassanā practices. Jhāna can help loosen the grip that intoxication with sense pleasures has on us, but other practices—reflections on the nidānas, on impermanence etc.—are, according to tradition, what set us free of that intoxication permanently.

I'm more focussed on study, on learning and reading Pāli, and on trying to understand Buddhist doctrines and the history of Buddhist ideas. My life, while not given over to vice, is not directed towards prolonged and intense meditation. But I make my contribution to a community of practitioners and help to create the conditions for bodhi to arise in someone; mostly like someone else. And after all it need not be me. Serious meditators do need a support system. As long as I help to set up supportive conditions for those who can make use of them, I feel I'm making a valuable contribution. My colleagues seem to confirm the usefulness of my work, so that's a relief!

We have different temperaments and can't all practice with equal intensity. And many of us come to the Dharma already encumbered with serious responsibilities. We can't both have our cake and eat it. I suggest that we need to think in terms of serving - making cake if you like. Not only serving something greater than ourselves (in my case the Triratna Order) but serving those members of our community who will benefit the most from our support. This in turn, unlike in the financial economy, has a trickle down effect and benefits the entire community, and we might say the entire world (if that is not too grandiose).

~~oOo~~

Notes

1. The full quote seems to be "Am I not a man? And is not a man stupid? I’m a man. So I married. Wife, children, house, everything. The full catastrophe." The source is less certain and it may be from the movie Zorba the Greek directed by Mihalis Kakogiannis, rather than the novel Life and Politics of Alexis Zorepa written by Nikos Kazantzakis; though Kazantzakis contributed to the movie screenplay as well. Note that this original version of the idea lacks the kind of positive spin given to it by John Kabat Zin.
   
2. My comprehensive list of such texts and examination of them, along with diagrams showing the various links and nodes is here: http://www.jayarava.org/dependent-arising.html
3. Although we usually translate vipassanā as 'insight' in many ways this is a poor choice. The vi- in vipassanā does not indicate seeing inwards, but seeing through, and seeing through is closer to what we are trying to achieve. As I've said before Buddhism is not necessarily about looking inwards, not just navel gazing. Here the vi- is cognate with the Latin 'dia-' as in diaphanous which literally means 'appearing through'. A Latin translation of vipassanā might be diavisionem. We might call a moment of vipassanā a 'diaphany', on the model of epiphany.
   

The Post-Abhidharma Doctrine Disaster.

I WAS COMMENTING ON a discussion on Google+ regarding an article by B Alan Wallace recently when something crystallized out in my thinking about the history of Buddhist ideas. One of my long term interests is the way the definitions of dhammas evolved. Early on it seems reasonably clear that dhammas are seen as aspects of experience that have no ontological status. For this reason the Kaccānagotta Sutta can say that atthi (it exists) and n'atthi (it does not exist) do not apply to the world of experience. As Eviatar Schulman has pointed out, this does not mean that early Buddhist doctrines have no metaphysical implications. [1] But these implications did not seem to interest the authors of the suttas; which leads us to presume didn't they interest the Buddha either. However as attempts to systematise the teachings proceeded it seems that metaphysical implications became more and more interesting. Noa Ronkin has argued that it is overstating the case to say that the Abhidharmikas introduced ontology into Buddhism, but they certain were interested in ontology in a way that the authors of the suttas were not.[2] And this opened up Buddhism to metaphysical speculation. One of the problems that Buddhists created for themselves relates to bodhi.

The problem seems to be that Buddhists sidelined dependent arising as the mechanism by which one experienced bodhi. They did this by:

a.) reifying conditioned dhammas;
b.) deifying unconditioned dhammas (i.e. bodhi);
c.) forgetting that dependent arising has a lokuttara aspect. (See e.g. A XI.1-5, Nettipakaraṇa, 65).

The combined effect was that dependent arising could no longer account for bodhi. Dependent arising is relegated to describing how saṃsāra works, with a focus on the material world. There is a sense of this in Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimagga when he mentions the lokuttara-paṭiccasamuppāda only in passing and, as fa as I can tell, seems to regard it as relating to saṃsāra rather than nibbāna. Similarly Nettipakaraṇa defines the twelve nidāna sequence as lokiya 'worldly'.

Bodhi, according to the post-Abhidharma traditions, is somewhat like the Christian idea of grace. Grace is a quality that Yahweh gives out at his whim, and one cannot earn it through any amount of piety and good works. Similarly most Buddhists seem to believe that one cannot cultivate or pursue bodhi, one must just meditate and hope for the best. I always meet resistance when I use the phrase "cultivating insight" on my blog! "Insight", I am solemnly informed, "is not something that can be cultivated." Which I do not believe for a second.

The vinaya provides sanctions for anyone who is not an arahant claiming to be one. These days any kind of claim to spiritual attainment is seen with suspicion. And this particular attitude combined with the vagueness about how bodhi might happen have created a strange situation in Buddhism. People do claim to be arahants in this day and age. I've mentioned Daniel Ingram, who openly calls himself an arahant, to a few people and the attitude seems to mainly be one of indifference. Which is surprising in some ways. If someone has achieved what we have strived for years and decades to achieve then shouldn't we be at least curious? But I gather that most people secretly believe it is not possible, or they are not interested because he is the wrong kind of Buddhist.

The side-lining of dependent arising meant inventing new ideas to account for bodhi, prominent amongst which was tathāgatagarbha. Tathāgatagarbha appears to adapt the Vedantic idea of the ātman (and some Mahāyāna sūtras explicitly equate tathāgatagarbha with ātman). This idea is that in each of us is a spark or mote of bodhi, which we have covered in defilements. This mote has all the characteristics of ātman. If you read about ātman in the Upaniṣads instead of Buddhist anti-Hindu propaganda, you will see just what I mean.

With the advantage of hindsight we can see what a disaster the whole Abhidharma project was, and how it created huge down stream philosophical problems (including the one under discussion). Really we should be thinking in terms of letting the house of cards fall down and rebuilding from scratch.

I don't know as much about Nāgarjuna as I ought. But I see him as an interesting figure, not for the usual reasons, but because he cited a Sanskrit version of the Kaccānagotta Sutta (KS) in his Mūlamadhyama-kakārikā (MMK). David Kalupahana has made much of this single citation - the only text cited by name in fact. He sees MMK as a grand commentary on the KS. [3] While I think this is plausible, I don't think it's the only way to see the relationship. I think the KS reflects a particular attitude to the teachings which I have been calling the "hermeneutic of experience". With the hermeneutic of experience we seek to interpret doctrines as though they are always talking about experience, rather than metaphysics (enquiry into 'being') or ontology (enquiry into 'what is'). I'm told this is similar, but not identical, to the methods of phenomenology. I think Nāgarjuna might have been employing a hermeneutic of experience, which lead him to resist the Abhidharmika interest in metaphysics. But Nāgarjuna had a problem: traditionally Buddhists could not backtrack. Though he disagreed with the Abhidharmika metaphysics, he could not simply set them aside, and perhaps it did not even occur to him. The Abhidharma was already canonical by that stage. So he came up with a way to get back to experience, and deal with ontological speculation by introducing the idea of svabhāva śūnyatā, and it's corollary the so-called "two truths". Though this was a brilliant solution to his dilemma I wonder if we could actually do better. I've already tried to demonstrate that the two truths are in fact superfluous if we do not make erroneous assumptions about where pratītya-samutpāda applies, i.e. if we apply the hermeneutic of experience, and do not reify conditioned dharmas. [4] If we ditch the abhidharmika metaphysics of dharmas, then the idea of svabhāva śūnyatā is also superfluous because it is already explicit in the KS.

This is not to say that good ideas and practices have not come out of the post-Abhidharma doctrine debacle. Straying into metaphysics required some creative correctives such as Nāgarjuna introduced. But the result is messy and confused. Doctrinal wrangling is such a prominent, even dominant, feature of Buddhism! We cannot decide what our own teachings mean, or if we do 'know' then we invariably seem to be dogmatic about it and often ignorant of alternatives. Since I adopted the hermeneutic of experience I have found that many of the paradoxes and polarisations that surround Buddhist doctrine have melted away, and this is partly why I think it is so useful! There is much less to argue about.

The irony is that the methods continue to be effective despite our messed up views. So there is another argument which says that it doesn't matter that much what you believe, and it is certainly not necessary to have big doctrinal arguments (unless you like that kind of thing). If what we believe motivates us to practice, and by practice I mean the full range of Buddhist practices, then the practices themselves tend to sort out our views, eventually. So in fact doctrine is of relatively minor importance compared with practice.

~~oOo~~

Notes

1. Shulman, Eviatar. (2008) 'Early Meanings of Dependent-Origination.' Journal of Indian Philosophy. 36:297-317.
2. Ronkin, Noa. (2005) Early Buddhist Metaphysics. Routledge.
3. Kalupahana, David J. (1986) Nāgārjuna: The Philosophy of the Middle Way. State University of New York Press.
4. Jayarava. (2011) 'Not Two Truths.' Jayarava's Raves. http://jayarava.blogspot.com/2011/08/not-two-truths.html
   

Sound, Word, Reality

KŪKAI'S 声字実相義 (Shōji jissō gi) [1] is one of a trilogy of texts that set out to both answer his critics and to instruct his students. Each of the three texts is rather dense, and fairly esoteric in itself. I have been working through a commentary on this work for a book I am editing which reprints Professor Thomas Kasulis's article: ‘Reference and Symbol in Plato’s Cratylus and Kūkai’s Shōjijissōgi’ [2] alongside translations of the two dialogues and some introductory essays.

In his text Kūkai develops a way of interpreting mantra, a hermeneutic, which relies on different syntactical analyses of the combination word: Shō-ji-jissō 'sound, word, reality'. He analyses the Chinese as though it were a Sanskrit compound to demonstrate that we can construe the relationships in various ways, some more profound than others. This is a novel approach, but where does this principle of sound, word, reality come from?

In this exegesis Kūkai makes use of some lines extracted from chapter two of the Mahāvairocana Abhisaṃbodhi Tantra:

The perfectly Enlightened One's mantras
Are made up of syllables, names, or clauses;
Like the statements made by Indra,
They are meaningful and effective.[3]

In the verse ‘the perfectly enlightened one’ stands for the Body Mystery of the Dharmakāya and corresponds to reality; “mantras” make up the sounds that constitute the Speech Mystery; while the “syllables” and “names” correspond to word. Note that he does not equate these with the Mind Mystery. So the verse itself demonstrates the principle in action. Kūkai believes that there are hierarchies of being, or layers to reality, and that by paying careful attention to our mundane level of perception that we can get insights into higher levels because not only is each phenomena interpenetrated by all the others, but the levels of being or perception also interpenetrate each other. As in Indra’s net an insight at one level provides access to all levels. To reinforce this Kūkai shows that the principle holds good for the Mahāvairocana Sūtra as a whole, and even for the single syllable ‘a’.

The 'power' of a mantra, then, is related to its associative relationships with aspects of experience. This ties into a tradition which goes back to the early days of the Mahāyāna in Gandhāra – in the north-west of what is Pakistan (including the towns of Peshawar and Taxila, and the Swat Valley). There we find, in texts and sculptures, the local alphabet being used a mnemonic. For many years the sequence of alphabet, still not fully explained, lead people to think that it was invented or ‘mystical’. But Professor Richard Salomon, in three published articles, has shown that the alphabet is that of the local language, now called Gāndhārī, though Buddhists often still refer to it as the Arapacana Alphabet or the Wisdom Alphabet. This alphabet was written in the Kharoṣṭhī script which was most likely modelled on the form of Aramaic writing used by the Achaemanid Persian who administered that area for a time. Kharoṣṭhī, like Semitic and Tibetan scripts, has only one vowel sign which is modified by diacritics to indicate different vowels. The unadorned sign is ‘a’. Like other Indic scripts each written syllable has an implicit ‘a’ vowel unless accompanied by diacritics.

The mnemonic use of the alphabet seems to be closely associated with meditation practices in prajñāpāramitā texts, particularly the larger 18,000, 25,000, and 100,000 line versions. The first five letter of the Gāndhārī alphabet – a ra pa ca na – came to be associated with the wisdom deity Mañjuśrī (his mantra is oṃ a ra pa ca na dhīḥ) and with the Prajñāpāramitā tradition generally. This tradition pervades the Mahāvairocana Abhisaṃbodhi Tantra. In some Buddhist texts, e.g. the Lalitavistara Sūtra, the original Gāndhārī alphabet is substituted for the Sanskrit alphabet. Curiously the MAT has a kind of hybrid – the consonants are from Sanskrit, but in most cases they are only accompanied by a single vowel as in Kharoṣṭhī.

Each letter in the alphabet was made to stand for a word, and each word was the focus of a reflection on śūnyatā. So for example 'a' stands for the Sanskrit word anutpāda ‘non-arisen’. The reflection was akāro mukhaḥ sarvadharmāṇāṃ ādyanutpannatvāt "The syllable 'a' is a door because of the non-arisen-ness of all dharmas." This is pointing to the idea that dharmas, as the objects of the mind, are neither existent nor non-existent - when we have an experience, nothing substantial comes into being. There is no doubt that we have experiences, and objects present themselves to our minds, but the ontological status of the experience itself is indeterminate. The original insight of Buddhism was that mistaking experience for something substantial, and treating it as something which could be held on to was the cause of suffering. Hence reflecting on the contingent, impermanent, and unsatisfactory nature of experience was one of the prime methods of accessing the insights that freed one from suffering. These reflections clearly continue that original Buddhist tradition.

In Tantric texts the syllable is not simply a sign for the verbal sound, but has become a fully fledged symbol of the aspect of reality indicated by the word it signifies. This symbolic function is in the foreground in Tantra to the point where merely visualising the written form of a letter is seen as putting one in touch with the quality it represents. This finds its apotheosis in the meditation on the syllable 'a' – where one simply visualises the letter, usually written in the Siddhaṃ script, and by such close association one becomes imbued with the wisdom which sees dharmas – mental phenomena – as the really are.

The correspondence between the sound of the letter, the word it reminds us of, and the reality it points to in the example above is seen by Kūkai as a special case of a general principle. But the point is that here we have sound, and word and reality.

sound	shō	a	阿
word	ji	anutpāda	不生
reality	jissō	sarva-dharmāṇāṃ ādy-anutpannatvāt	阿字門，一切法 初不生故 [4]

Although it is not entirely obvious from the translations and commentaries, I believe that this is the idea that underlies Kūkai's analysis of “sound, word, reality”. The sound /a/ stands for the word 'non-arising' (anutpāda), i.e. not coming into being; and this reminds us that 'all dharmas have the primal quality of not having come into being'. That is to say that when we perceive a dharma we do have an experience, but though we have an experience nothing permanent, satisfying or substantial comes into being. In Mahāyāna terms the experience is empty of intrinsic being (svabhāva śūnyatā).

Of course finding a correlation is not the same as finding a cause; and finding a precedent is not the same as showing a genetic relationship. However I think this explanation is a plausible account of the origins of the sound, word, reality.

~~oOo~~

Notes

1. There are two complete translations of this text into English: Hakeda, Y. (1972) Major Works, p.234-245; and Giebel, R. (2004) Shingon Texts, p.83-103. The text is also partially translated and discussed in detail Abe, R. (1999) The Weaving of Mantra, (esp p. 278ff.) though his reading is one which relies heavily on contemporary Semiotics jargon, which I struggle to make sense of.
2. Philosophy East and West, 1982.
3. Hodge, Stephen. (2003) The Mahāvairocana Abhisaṃbodhi Tantra. Routledge, p. 129. Hodge translates from the Tibetan. The Tibetan text replaces the line about Indra with ‘by mastery of the words’. The Chinese reference is Taisho 18.850, 83a22-a23. The Chinese text is:

   等正覺真言 - Děng zhèng jué zhēnyán
   言名成立相 - Yán míng chénglì xiāng
   如因陀羅宗 - Rú yīn tuó luó zōng
   諸義利成就 - Zhū yìlì chéngjiù

4. Chinese text from Kumārajīva's translation of the Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra (T.223).
   

Conjecture and Refutation

"Everything we've learned... is just a theory, and it might well be wrong... the greatest thrill of all would be to prove something wrong." Dr Kathy Romer, Astrophysicist. [1]

THERE IS A CONVERSATION I seem to have again and again when talking with Buddhists. It's about what science is, and how scientists employ the scientific method. Given that we all study science at secondary school, how is it that so few people seem to understand the role of scientists or the process of advancing scientific knowledge? Given the central importance of the applications of science in the modern world, can we afford to be so ignorant?

I have a little confession to make first. I've never read Karl Popper's books on the scientific method. And I never heard of him while studying science at school or university. I read of Popper only as an adult. Particularly in the book "Wittgenstein's Poker", but also in books and lectures by Richard Gombrich whose father was a personal friend of Popper. The young Richard proof read the seminal work Conjectures and Refutations, and it obviously had a powerful effect on him.

Popper is probably the most important figure in the philosophy of science to date. It was he who definitively described what science is and is not, and I want to review my understanding, in the hope that others will appreciate science better, but also so I can point to this essay in inevitable future arguments.

Although I've just been using science as a proper noun, I want first of all to make the point that science is not an entity. We say things like "science says..." or "science does..."; but science in this sense simply doesn't exist. There is no distinct agent or entity which we can name. There is no doubt a body of evolving knowledge. There is a community (or even one might say an ecosystem) of people employing the scientific method of conjecture and refutation (with it's parasites known as science journalists whose method is more like rejecture and confutation). But there is no entity present in all of this - this is a point Buddhists, of all people, ought to be able to appreciate. Science is anātman, asvabhāva, śūnya. At best "science" is a place holder for the body of knowledge and practice, and the community of practitioners. It's very like Buddhism in this sense - there is no single entity or agent identifiable with Buddhism, and finding something we all have in common is difficult; and that commonality exists only on the most general level. As soon as we begin to specify what makes a Buddhist, then Buddhism begins to splinter.

A scientist is anyone who practices the methods of science. All scholars who advance knowledge follow a process of conjecture and refutation. I put forward a conjecture and my grounds for doing so, and I ask my peers to refute it if they can. If it can be refuted then I drop it, and move on to the next conjecture. Science applies this method to the phenomenal world (rather than, say, to literature or history). Religion on the other hand begins with the Truth, and asks us to change our minds until we completely agree with the Truth. No challenge to the Truth is possible, since it is True. Certain strands of religious Buddhism are like this also, and in that sense very far removed from science. Religion also often posits a noumenal world, by which I mean knowledge not related to phenomena. This is an oxymoron in Buddhism, but it has an on going appeal across the spectrum of Buddhism for some reason.

Within the conjecture/refutation procedure the scientist practices by observing phenomena; creating falsifiable predictive hypotheses about the world; testing their predictions; and through peer review and publication inviting others to test their theory. Although we retain the Enlightenment/Victorian Era language of Laws of Physics, scientists know full well that a theory tested to the limits of human ability is still not proved. It was Popper who in the first half of the 20th century began to formalise this, partly in reaction to Logical Positivists who claimed only verifiable knowledge was valid. The classic example is the notion that since all swans are observed to be white, then the statement "all swans are white" is held to be true. The first Europeans to return from Australia brought shocking news - downunder the swans are black. Black swans are a different species, but they are no doubt swans. Since Popper it's been explicit that any theory may be falsified. Mind you anyone familiar with the havoc wrecked on previous theories by Einstein's oeuvre could hardly feel confident about any view they hold about the physical world.

Now non-scientists maintain a number of anachronisms. They seem to think that scientists are stuck in the Victorian Era: trying to prove things, seeking immutable Laws, and believing the equivalent of "all swans are white". While I never studied Popper at school—more's the pity—it's clear that scientists are not stuck in the same Victorian time frame as non-scientists. In fact scientists are all working to disprove everything that we think we know. This is fundamentally what makes science different from religion. Yes, there are scientific "laws", yes there are powerful explanatory theories, but the dream of every scientist is to rewrite those laws, to over-turn those theories. No scientist worth the label is satisfied with the current state of knowledge, and each wants to find a 'black swan' (and have it named after them!).

So the scientist makes observations. Often today it is through complicated and expensive machinery. But not always. One of my scientific heroes is Jane Goodall who changed our paradigms with regards to chimps with a pair of binoculars and a notebook. Scientists pay close attention to phenomena and try to describe as accurately and dispassionately as possible what they perceive. Ideally they see something new, but it may be that they simply observe what has been observed before and see it in a new way. Any explanation they come up with—an hypothesis [2]—seeks to predict further observations suggesting that the explanation has grasped the underlying regularity of the phenomena. For example: if after observing a comet, I hypothesise that it is a small body in an elongated elliptical orbit, I can predict when I will see it again. If it does not appear when I predict then my theory is wrong. The fact that it does appear suggests that my theory is useful, not that it is True.

But science is not a private enterprise. It is public. So having observed, hypothesised, and tested I then submit my results for publishing. Scholarly publishing subjects all potential publications to peer-review. A group of a scientists peers will read the paper to try to ensure that at each stage the scientist has not made gross errors or leapt to false conclusions. As a trainee scientist I was constantly admonished not to go beyond my data - not to add to my observations from past experience, and especially not to try to make my conclusions fit my hypothesis. Of course this process is subject to problems. Publishing a book can circumvent peer-review, though books also get reviewed even if only after the fact. Scientists more and more seem to announce results to the press rather than their peers. One of the most infamous occurrences of this was the announcement by Pons and Fleischmann that they can observed nuclear fusion at room temperature (while others were seeking it at millions of degrees). Peer review panels are subject to human foibles: they are capable of blocking new ideas; individual animosity may intrude; and they also fail to prevent rubbish being printed. There is sometimes, especially in medical publishing, a bias to only publish the results of studies which support an idea, and to suppress those which do not (a variety of conformation bias). But on the whole the system works well.

There is a further step in the scientific method post-publication. For a result to be meaningful or useful, it needs to be repeatable. So a one off result is not worth much. Ideally three or four other scientists or groups of scientists will carry out the same experiment, with the aim of trying to disprove the result or find an alternative explanations, and they will also publish their results. Before a theory becomes accepted as generally useful at predicting future observations, it has to be thoroughly tested. And scientists like nothing more than proving their rivals wrong. The history of science is rife with competitiveness, often devolving in rancorous disputes. Of course these days no one can get funding for merely reproducing someone else's experiment, so what we get a series of overlapping results.

A problem for the lay person these days is irresponsible science journalism. Newspapers eager to increase circulation and sell advertising are not famous for their probity (and are often infamous for their lack of it). What the science journalist does is search for journal articles with sensational findings and write a simplified version of the paper for a general readership. Examples of this are legion. The MMR Vaccine controversy is a good case in point. A researcher with multiple conflicts of interest, publishes a single article suggesting a link between the vaccine and autism. Later he is found to have manipulated evidence and broken ethical codes, and not only is the paper retracted, but the author is struck off the Medical register. Meanwhile the newspaper article claiming that MMR vaccine causes autism has gone viral and many parents refuse to vaccine their kids, causing a minor epidemic of measles in the UK (which has not yet abated). [3] A similar story is the "cell-phones do/don't cause cancer" story that runs and runs, not because anything definitive is discovered, because things that cause/cure cancer sell newspapers.

So this is my view on what science is, and how knowledge proceeds. Knowledge is always provisional, though of course it may retain it's usefulness. I think lay people often throw the baby out with the bath water. They hear, for instance, that Einstein's theory of gravitation supersedes Newton's, and suppose that Newton's theory of gravity is redundant. But this is simply not true. If I were putting up a building and calculating stresses, or building a new aeroplane, or firing a rocket into space, I simply would not need to use Einsteinian mathematics, and to try to do so would simply hamper my efforts. I would use Newtonian mathematics. All measurements have a margin of error - and real science always gives margins of error when stating a measurement. The margins of error, though very much greater when using Newton's equations still amount to a few parts per billion in most of the applications I might be interested in. If accuracy of more than a few parts per billion is required then one switches.

The idea that scientists themselves see their theories or mathematical equations as dogmatically True is wrong in most cases (there are still a few Logical Positivists around, but we need not give them much credence). Though some theories have survived every conceivable test and we simply accept them, the door is never closed. A black swan might appear at any time.

~~oOo~~

Notes

1. "Is Everything we Know about the Universe Wrong?" [documentary] Horizon. BBC HD. 9 Mar 2010. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00rgg31
2. hypothesis means 'under-thesis', and thesis means 'a proposition'. The Online Etymological Dictionary relates it to PIE *dhe- 'to put, to do', but also to the Greek tithenai, which suggest to me a connection to Sanskrit √sthā 'to stand, to remain'; c.f. Pāli thāna literally 'place, state' but abstractly something which 'remains' and therefore a 'fact' in the sense of something on which logical conclusions can be based.
3. The story is told in full online in many places. The Wikipedia article MMR vaccine controversy is a good place to start.

Additional note on how real scientists think: 14 Oct 2011.

"The way many scientists work is that while they're pushing one idea passionately, they always have in the back of their mind that they may be wrong, and they have alternative explanations for the same observations - and I did too... When you find evidence that directly contradicts your favourite idea and you have to switch modes, switch paradigms to a different concept, that's real progress...".
Professor Paul Olsen (Columbia University). The shifting face of a 200-million-year-old mystery. BBC News 13 Oct 2011.

Quote 10.12.2011

"There is now no safer occupation than talking bad science to philosophers, except talking bad philosophy to scientists".
- Midgley, Mary. 1979. 'Gene-juggling'. Philosophy. 54(210): 439-458.

Sāriputta

SĀRIPUTTA WAS ONE OF THE TWO chief disciples of Gotama the Buddha. He was born a Brahmin and wandered with his companion Moggallāna in search of the deathless. A chance meeting with Assajī lead to his breakthrough insight and becoming a Buddhist. He was held in extremely high esteem by all who knew him, including the Buddha.

Later however Sāriputta was identified with a brand of formalistic Buddhism, and several texts were composed in which he is portrayed as stiff and rather stupid. Of course Buddhists have always portrayed their enemies this way in texts, but it is particularly infelicitous that such a great figure should become the butt of jokes for the purpose of sectarian pissing contests. One of the things that turned me off Mahāyāna Buddhism was precisely the derogatory attitude towards, and denigration of, Sāriputta. So I offer this translation of the Susīma Sutta where Sāriputta gets his due.

Susīma Sutta
SN ii.29 S i.63

Connected with Sāvatthī. Then indeed Ānanda approached the Blessed One, saluted him and sat to one side. The Blessed One asked him “are you pleased with Sāriputta?”

Could Sāriputta not be pleasing to anyone who is not stupid, wicked, confused or mentally deranged? The Elder Sāriputta is wise, Sir. He has great wisdom, precise wisdom, joyful wisdom, swift wisdom, piercing wisdom. Sāriputta is contented, satisfied, [enjoys] seclusion, living alone, energetically resolute, a speaker [of truth], gently spoken, he exhorts, he censures evil. Could Sāriputta not be pleasing to him who is not stupid, wicked, confused or mentally deranged?

Quite right Ānanda, I agree with everything you’ve said.

Once these virtues of the Elder Sāriputta were spoken Susīma the deva [1], surrounded by a great retinue of devas, approached the Blessed One, saluted him, stood to one side and said:

It is just as you say Blessed One, just so Excellence. I totally agree with you.

Whichever company of devas I approached, I hear this very same full report [in praise of Sāriputta].

Then indeed the deva-company of the deva Susīma, at the telling of the qualities of Sāriputta were pleased and delighted.

Just like a beautiful, excellent, perfectly symmetrical crystal of beryl, artfully arranged on a saffron cloth, shining, glittering, and scintillating

Just like a nugget of gold from the Jambu River, skilfully refined in the furnace by clever goldsmith from a family of smiths, artfully arranged on a saffron cloth, shining, glittering, and scintillating.

Just as in the morning star appears in the sky towards dawn on an cloud free autumnal evening shining, glittering, and scintillating.

Just as the autumnal sun, rising above the morning mists into a cloud free sky, dispels the darkness of the heavens, shining, glittering, and scintillating.

Then indeed Susīma the deva spoke these verses with reference to the Elder Sāriputta in the presence of the Blessed One:

Known as wise,
Sāriputta is loving;
Content, humble, restrained,
a sage conveyed by the teachers praise

Then indeed the Blessed One replied in verse to Susīma the deva regarding Sāriputta:

Known as wise,
Sāriputta is loving;
Content, humble, restrained,
biding his time well restrained and developed.

~~oOo~~

Note

1. Thanks to Sabio Lentz for pointing out a confusion in my translation. Susīma is a devaputta, and I had left the term untranslated at first. A devaputta is a human being who has been reborn in the devaloka i.e. the realms of devas. The word literally means "son of a deva" - just as Sāriputta is the "son of (his mother) Sārī". They often seem to retain a sense of connection to the manussaloka or realm of human beings. There is no obvious single English word that conveys this concept that is unique to India. PED suggests "angel" but this is so wrong as to be laughable. Still unable to choose a better translation I've opted to use 'deva' which should be more straight-forward, and at least does not introduce foreign ideas into the discourse.

Image: a Sri Lankan monk from Scribner's magazine. 1891. I imagine Sāriputta would have looked a bit like this.

In My Eye

I'VE COMMENTED BEFORE on the episode where the Buddha speaks to Bāhiya in a post entitled "In the Seen...". He begins the famous speech with: "in the seen, only the seen; in the heard only the heard...". This is somewhat cryptic, but I noted that I had found another sutta which acts as a commentary on the Bahiya incident: The Māluṅkyaputta Sutta is in the Saṃyutta Nikāya (SN 35.95 PTS: S iv.72).

My translation of part of the text says:

Having seen a form with mindfulness [sati] forgotten,
attending to the delightful appearance;
Experiencing an impassioned mind,
and remaining attached to that;

In him numberless sensations multiply from that form,
Covetousness and worry impair thinking.
Thus suffering is heaped up and nibbāna is said to be remote.

The gist is that without mindfulness, delight in the pleasures of the senses overcomes our minds and our minds are impaired. As a result we heap up suffering and are unlikely to be liberated - we will remain in thrall to pleasure seeking. Those who are mindful, do not delight in the pleasures of the senses, do not heap up suffering, and for them nibbāna is close.

In contemporary Buddhist presentations we usually find the idea that there is something other than the "seen in the seen" attributed to Brahmins. Compare the text above with this passage from the Chāndogya Upaniṣad (CU)

atha yatraitad ākāśam anuviṣaṇṇaṃ cakṣuḥ sa cākṣuṣaḥ puruṣo darśanāya cakṣuḥ | atha yo vededaṃ jighrāṇīti sa ātmā gandhāya ghrāṇam | atha yo vededam abhivyāharāṇīti sa ātmā abhivyāhārāya vāk | atha yo vededaṃ śṛṇvānīti sa ātmā śravaṇāya śrotram || CU 8.12.4 || [1]

Where the eye gazes into space, that is the puruṣa of the eye. The eye is for seeing. The one who experiences "let me smell this" is the ātman. The nose is for smelling. The one who experiences "let me say this" is the ātman. The voice is for talking. The one who experiences "let me hear this" is the ātman. The ear is for hearing.

atha yo vededaṃ manvānīti sa ātmā | mano 'sya daivaṃ cakṣuḥ | sa vā eṣa etena daivena cakṣuṣā manasaitān kāmān paśyan ramate ya ete brahmaloke || CU 8.12.5 ||

The one who experiences "let me think this" is the ātman. Mind is its divine eye. [The ātman] sees the delights and pleasures of the world of Brahmā, with this divine eye, the mind. [2]

Here CU is proposing that there is something other than the seen in the seen. In the seen we find 'the one who sees', which here is described as both puruṣa 'person' and ātman 'self' - the two are synonymous.[3] It is this ātman which, through the divine eye, sees the pleasures of the world of Brahmā/brahman (the word could mean either the creator god, or the universal essence; a distinction entirely lost in the Buddhist Canon). Elsewhere we find that this self is to be sought within the heart (i.e. through introspective meditation) and having once identified it, it becomes one's whole world (idaṃ sarvaṃ). The analogy I use is that when one falls in love, one's lover becomes one's whole world. We might also think of a meditator absorbed in samādhi, where the samādhi itself becomes their whole world.

Buddhist critiques of this kind of material are probably familiar to Buddhist readers. CU seems to propose that there is an 'entity' behind experience, an experiencing 'person' or 'self' which has the experiences. Discovering this self within oneself is what enables the seer to be liberated. However note that there is a discrepancy. The Brahmin does not aim to see the delights of this world. This is confirmed in many passages throughout CU as well as other Upaniṣads. Ordinary desire and the delights of this world are as much an anathema in the early Upaniṣads as they are in early Buddhist texts. The Brahmin ascetic aims at union with brahman, and thereby escape from saṃsāra. However the Buddhist criticism focusses on paying attention to delights of the senses. Is it because they deny the possibility of anything behind the senses, or have they just missed the point? I think it's not out of the question that the Buddhists simply did not understand the main points of the Upaniṣads and that the beliefs being criticised were not in fact held by Brahmins. Indeed as far as I can see such beliefs are not even attributed to Brahmins in the Pāli texts.

The Buddhist critique of ātman rests on the idea that, as an immanent aspect of brahman, it is substantial, permanent and makes us happy when we find it. Although the idea does not occur in the suttas, compare this description of nibbāna from the canonical Cūḷaniddesa:

Nibbānaṃ niccaṃ dhuvaṃ sassataṃ avipariṇāmadhammanti asaṃhīraṃ asaṃkuppaṃ.

"Nibbāna is permanent, constant, eternal, not subject to change, indomitable, unshakeable." [4]

Such a statement is common enough in Buddhism. How is this different? The essential difference here is that Buddhists assume Brahmins to be speaking literally, and take their own almost identical statements metaphorically. This assumption goes unchallenged amongst Buddhists. Why? I suggest that it is because of deep seated prejudices against, and antipathy towards, Hinduism. Our identity as Buddhists is bound up with rejecting Hinduism - even if only nominally. However I do not believe that the Brahmins were speaking literally. Rather, I'd say they were struggling to put into words their own meditation experiences, and were themselves inventing a new metaphorical language to do so, and rejecting their own 1000 year old traditions in the process. There's no a priori reason to assume unsubtly or stupidity on the part of Brahmins. In fact Brahmanical thinking of this period is scintillating and full of subtlety. A few centuries later the Buddhists of India adopted precisely the same kind of essentialist metaphor for tathāgatagarbha! Buddhists also posit a faculty other than the six senses—with no name I've been able to discover—which can discern nibbāna or "the Unconditioned" [sic] or "things as they really are". How is this different from the 'eye' which sees the brahmaloka? Note that Buddhists also adopted this Brahmanical idea of the brahmaloka, but again they took it literally. Which suggests that they simply did not understand the idea. The Buddhist criticisms of those seeking rebirth in the brahmaloka are wide of the mark, and more or less irrelevant from the point of view of the Upaniṣads. This is not to say that criticism is not possible, only that early Buddhist texts are wholly unconvincing in their criticism.

I am not suggesting that there is no difference in the doctrinal positions of Buddhism and Brahmanism. Clearly there are differences. However Buddhists have long exaggerated and distorted these differences. Modern Buddhists, like their ancient counterparts, seem largely ignorant of the Upaniṣads or the nuances in them. And as I come to better understand them myself, I am becoming increasingly doubtful about the idea that Buddhist doctrine is a reaction against Upaniṣadic Brahmanism: one can hardly react against what one is ignorant of. This raises interesting questions which I hope to address in the future.

For an inspiring and vivid account of the Brahmanical religion I heartily recommend this book:

William K. Mahoney. The Artful Universe: An Introduction to the Vedic Religious Imagination. State University of New York Press.

I must warn traditionalist Buddhists however: this book may cause you to experience sympathy and respect for Brahmins, which could be detrimental to your Buddhist faith.

~~oOo~~

Notes.

1. Chāndogya Upaniṣad. Sanskrit text from www.sub.uni-goettingen.de.
2. My translation follows Valerie Roebuck's which is more literal than Patrick Olivelle's.
3. As an aside I would once again like to point out the mad way we capitalise these words when they are in a religious context. We want to say that 'Self' is somehow different from, more important than, 'self'. Capitalising suggests either something substantial (a thing), or something transcendental (beyond our ability to sense or understand). Sometimes, paradoxically, both . Neither is very helpful. The Sanskrit 'ātman' is ambiguous, and the ambiguity is part of the fun. If we try to make clear a distinction when our source text is (perhaps deliberately) ambiguous we are not doing justice to the text: ātman means 'body, and self, and the immanent aspect of brahman.' And especially in the early Upaniṣads all three meanings are found. If we try to fix it as one or other we lose nuances, and we may in fact obscure the meaning.
4. The CST version of the Pāli Canon does not include PTS page numbers for this text. It is from the commentary on the Pārāyanānugīti gāthā from the Sutta-niptāta. CST p.201.

Phenomenon

music of the spheres

FIRST USED IN ENGLISH in 1570s the word phenomenon is traced back to the Greek phainesthai 'to appear, to seem' from phainō 'to show, to bring light'. For instance in The Odyssey, when marking the start of a new day, Homer often used the lovely phrase: phanē rhododaktulos Ēōs "Dawn's rosy fingers appeared". Phainō can also mean 'to make known' via the metaphor 'to see is to know'.

From the Greek come such words as fantasy, fancy, phantom, emphasis, and diaphanous. The PIE root is *bhā 'to shine'. Via Germanic cognates we get words such as banner, beacon, berry. In Latin a phantasma is the name for an apparition or spectre. Also via Latin we get epiphany, sycophant, hierophant. The root goes into Sanskrit as bhāsati 'to shine' and prabhā 'shining' and vibhāta 'shining forth'.

In English the meaning of phenomenon varies according to the context but basically it refers to the something known through the senses rather than by the intellect or reason. It can also mean any kind of observable event. Of course a Buddhist definition of phenomena, would include objects of the mind and observable mental events (not all such events are observable from within).

Phenomena are sometimes contrasted with noumena (from Greek noeō 'to perceive, to observe, to notice'; probably from a non-IE source since there are no other attested forms, and no PIE root). Before Kant philosophers took noumena to be synonymous with Plato's ideal forms. Plato likened human perception to seeing shadows cast on the wall of a cave, suggesting that we don't ever see the things that cast the shadows, i.e. the ideal forms (this gives us the label 'Idealist'), or presumably the light which illuminates them. In Kant's philosophy the appearance of thing (phenomenon) is contrasted with the 'thing in itself' (German Ding an sich) or noumenon, and, according to Kant, noumena are not directly perceptible, we can only intuit their existence from appearances - hence his philosophy is called Transcendental Idealism. Other philosophers hold that noumena can be perceived by the intellect, or pure reason, which might appear to make them akin to the Buddhist notion of the mental sense objects (dharma), however the differences are great enough to warn us off suggesting noumena as a translation. Although most Buddhist traditions would deny the possibility of noumena outright, some Buddhists find it hard to let go of the notion that there is something beyond phenomena, a transcendental reality, which can be experienced "directly".

The adjective noumenal (related to noumena) is sometimes conflated with the adjective numinous, though the latter is from a different root. 'Numinous' is mainly used by theologians to suggest the felt presence of God. This word comes from the Latin numen 'divine will'. Ultimately we can trace it to the PIE root *√neu "to nod"; and it suggests ascent by a nod of the head. A related English word is innuendo.

Because dharma/dhamma is often used in the sense of an object of the senses, particularly the mind-sense (manas), and because it can mean 'a thing', or 'an item' we often translate it as 'phenomenon'. The fit is not exact however. Dharma comes from the root √dhṛ 'to hold, to support'. There is a word which would be well translated by phenomenon and that is vedanā. The root of this word is √vid 'to know, to find' and is regularly used in words to do with knowledge such as veda 'sacred knowledge' and vidyā 'secret knowledge'. We often translate these Indic words with English from the same root, i.e. wisdom 'experience and knowledge combined with the ability to judiciously apply them'. Vedanā then is 'the thing known', in effect it is 'what appears', i.e. the phenomenon. Though again Western thinkers don't typically include mental objects under the rubric of phenomena.

Vedanā is often translated as 'feeling' because in Buddhist doctrine it is associated with pleasure and displeasure (sāta/asāta or sukha/dukkha), leading to attraction and repulsion. I tend to translate 'sensation' because 'feeling' allows for vedanā to be confused with emotions which are colloquially also called 'feelings'. We could say that emotions have a felt component, and a cognitive component. A feeling without a corresponding thought process is possible, but it is usually hard to know what to make of it. In modern terms the feelings of pleasure and pain associated with sensations are part of our internal sense network which includes proprioception, the inner-ear balance organs, the viscera and digestive tract, and other sources of information from within the body itself. We sometimes talk about 'raw sensations' in Buddhism, but this is a bit of a misnomer because even in Buddhist psychology a lot of complex processes have to be active in order for us to become aware of a sensation. What in effect we mean by raw sensation is the vedanā before it gives rise to craving or aversion. To experience this we have to be relatively detached from pleasure and pain.

From the Buddhist point of view one of the important things about vedanā is that it arises in dependence on conditions. It is said to arise when there is contact, and contact occurs when sense faculty meets sense object giving rise to sense consciousness - and the three together constitute the condition for the arising of vedanā. We see a crucial difference in the Buddhist and Western approaches here. The Western intellectual tradition sees our internal world as subjective, as synonymous with the subject. Buddhists see this as a mistake. The subject is involved in creating experience, but only in active interaction with the object. Experience itself then is neither subjective nor objective; it is not a function of either alone, but of the interactions of the two together. I have observed before that this technically means that early Buddhist thought is dualistic - it acknowledges that subject and object are two different things. This is a metaphysical position, and it has wide ranging implications should we choose to follow them up, but the authors of the suttas never did.

Buddhism in the West is still in the process of settling on terminology. Perhaps for the first time in history a culture is having to deal with multiple competing forms of Buddhism which are using radically different oriental vocabulary e.g. Indian, Tibetan, Chinese, Japanese, Thai and Korean. Of these languages only Japanese and Korean are even remotely related (and the relationship is remote in this case). Phenomenon and it's counterpart noumenon are widely used, but the discussion about suitability has yet to really take place. I'm reasonably well versed in Indian Buddhist terminology, but I find I cannot read books on Tibetan Buddhism because they use another set of terms with may neologisms that I don't understand. Similarly I often flounder when reading about Japanese Buddhism. Buddhist jargon is often impenetrable, even to Buddhists.

I'm all in favour of just ditching traditional jargon and Buddhist Hybrid English (English vocabulary with Sanskrit syntax) that doesn't make sense. Perhaps it is time to drop all the words and have a new attempt at describing the procedures of Buddhism, and the experiences that result? A word like phenomenon shows that it won't be easy, because words come with baggage. On the other hand we are constantly redefining words: think of terrific (i.e. terrifying OEtD), or silly (originally 'happy, blessed' OEtD). It suggests that there will be a role for philologists—those people who tell us what words mean, and why they mean that—in Buddhism for a long time to come.

~~oOo~~

Everything changes, but so what?

πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει.
Everything flows and nothing stays.

Heraclitus quoted in Plato. Cratylus. 402a. Perseus Digital Library.
[translation Concise Oxford Dictionary of Quotations]

IT CAN SOMETIMES SEEM that Buddhists take the great insight of the Buddha to be that "everything changes". It can sometimes seem that "everything changes" is equated with paṭicca-samuppāda. While it is certainly true that everything changes, I think we Buddhists are often wrong in the way we present change. In particular we present this idea that everything changes are some kind of revelation from the exotic East, previously unknown to the mundane West. But the fact that everything changes is actually passé in the West, at least as old in our intellectual history as in Indian. So here I want to present a few quotes on the subject from pre-Buddhist Europe:

Nothing endures but change. Heraclitus (540 BC – 480 BC), from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers.

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

Observe always that everything is the result of change, and get used to thinking that there is nothing Nature loves so well as to change existing forms and make new ones like them. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121 AD - 180 AD),

ὁ κόσμος ἀλλοίωσις, ὁ βίος ὑπόληψις. The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Meditations, V, 3.

I have never come across any credible suggestion that these Greek and Roman thinkers were influenced by Buddhism. In fact, Heraclitus most likely predates the Buddha. And yet some of these observations are indistinguishable from the phrases repeated by Buddhists as representing our most profound wisdom. I want to take this a little further by quoting a paragraph from David Sedley's stimulating commentary on Plato's Cratylus Dialogue—here he is actually talking about the Timaeus Dialogue:

According to the Timaeus, the sensible world is gignomenon, something which constantly 'becomes' but never 'is'. It is therefore not an object of knowledge, on the Platonic principle that the contents of knowledge should not, even in theory, admit of being falsified at a later date: items of knowledge are permanent possessions, not subject to revision; their objects must therefore be entities incapable of change, that is primarily at least, the Forms. The sensible world is, by contrast, the domain of opinion, doxa, which shares the instability of it's objects and which, even if true now, can be falsified at any time. [Plato's Cratylus, Cambridge University Press, 2003; p.101]

A similar kind of distinction is made in Buddhism. Our views (dṛṣṭi) about experience are expressed as opinions on the world, and on reality. But with insight and wisdom we begin to see that what we comment on is merely perception which is subject to change even when the object being perceived does not change. However it is possible to see experience just as it is (yathābhūta) and this kind of insight has certain characteristics which do not change. The knowledge gained is called prajñā. I would see this in terms of knowledge about the underlying dynamics and processes of perception - it has no object as such, hence it is without condition (asaṃskṛta). And I see no hint that Sedley is in any way familiar with, let alone influenced by, Buddhism in his reading of Plato. However, modern presentations of Buddhism are influenced by Neoplatonism.

I think this is sufficient to establish that "everything changes" is not an observation unique to Buddhism. There are two possibilities. Either the statement tells us that the Greeks were on the same wavelength as the Buddha; or the statements are both equally banal. And I suggest it is the latter. I don't think that observation that everything changes is very profound; or that the Greeks were awakened in the Buddhists sense; or that "everything changes" is what the Buddha was on about.

Hopefully this opinion doesn't come as a surprise. I've written a number of times that I do not think that paṭicca-samuppāda was intended to be a theory of everything. This is argued at length in my commentary on the Kaccānagotta Sutta, and summarised in my blog post: A General Theory of Conditionality? The theory paṭicca-samuppāda was intended to explain the arising of experience, and guide us towards insights into why we suffer, with suffering distinguished from painful sensations. It might be argued that this is an attempt to discover 'the original Buddhism' which I myself have described as folly, and criticised others for. However I think there are good doctrinal and methodological reasons for adopting this approach and these are set out in many previous blog posts, and longer essays.

I've gathered many quotes from Westerners who, as far as I know, were not aware of or influenced by Buddhism.

All things change, nothing is extinguished. There is nothing in the whole world which is permanent. Everything flows onward; all things are brought into being with a changing nature; the ages themselves glide by in constant movement. Ovid (BC 43-AD 18) Roman poet.

In human life there is constant change of fortune; and it is unreasonable to expect an exemption from the common fate. Life itself decays, and all things are daily changing. Plutarch (46-120) Greek essayist, and biographer.

 French prose intro to L'Image du Monde, ca. 1320 CE. BNF Français 574. Translation by @PiersatPenn. A medieval monk defends his encyclopedia...

“We have described everything briefly, because people prefer simple things
that don't take long to explain. Their lives are short & their bodies transitory;
the days pass quickly, centuries roll by, and death comes before you know it.”

The circumstances of the world are continually changing, and the opinions of men change also; and as government is for the living, and not for the dead, it is the living only that has any right in it. That which may be thought right and found convenient in one age, may be thought wrong and found inconvenient in another. In such cases, who is to decide, the living, or the dead? Thomas Paine

Today is not yesterday: we ourselves change; how can our works and thoughts, if they are always to be the fittest, continue always the same? Change, indeed is painful; yet ever needful; and if memory have its force and worth, so also has hope. - Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) British historian and essayist.

Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men. Matthew Arnold, A Question.

Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832) German poet, novelist and dramatist.

We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature.
Edmund Burke (1729-1797) British political writer.

Change is inevitable. Change is constant. Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) British politician and author.

We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person. William Somerset Maugham

When you're finished changing, you're finished. Benjamin Franklin

"Everything changes". Amongst Buddhists "everything changes" has become a cliché. But, so what? Awareness of it should, and does affect the way we choose to live, however I do not think it was the radical insight seen by the Buddha. I have tried to show in my essay on the Kaccānagotta Sutta that the idea of that everything changes was, from the Buddha's point of view, demonstrably false. With only his bare senses and mind he couldn't have imagined that gem stones for example changed imperceptibly over millions of years: they simply did not change. However our experience of everything is always changing, even when presented with an apparently unchanging object, and here we are closer to the mark.

~~oOo~~

Nāmarūpa

A diagram of the traditional 12 nidānas and explanations from Pāli and Chinese Āgama texts. Click for a larger image.

TODAY I WANT TO EXPLORE the rather mysterious term 'nāmarūpa' in a Buddhist context. The word has a history pre-dating its use in Buddhist texts, but I don't have space for a fully fledged archaeology. Most of us will only be familiar with the received tradition which defines what this word means, but there are problems with this tradition, and when we begin to explore it things are less than clear.

The word is most often translated as 'name and form', though one also sees such variants as 'sentient-body'. It is the fourth of the 12 nidānas. However, nāmarūpa is a difficult term to pin down precisely. For instance, it does occur in the truncated nidāna sequence in the Mahānidāna Sutta, but unlike the other terms it is not defined in that text.

Elsewhere in the canon the nāma in nāmarūpa is defined in terms of: vedanā, saññā, saṅkhārā, phassa, and mansikāra. However, saṅkhārā precedes nāmarūpa in the nidāna sequence, and both phassa and vedanā follow it. So this does not make sense. Another fairly well known definition, found in the Chinese Āgama texts according to Roderick Bucknell (1999) and in the Pāli (S ii.3), equates nāmarūpa with the five khandhā: rūpa is the four elements (catumahābhūta: paṭhavī, āpo, tejo, vāyo; earth, water, fire, wind) while nāma is the remaining khandhas, i.e. vedanā, saññā, saṅkhārā and viññāna. This is no better. Again, vedanā comes later; and both saṅkhārā and viññāṇa come before. I'm left wondering why the tradition would explain things this way. I find that the simplified popular presentations of this material make a certain kind of sense, but in reading the Pāli Canon and examining the texts that sense drops away, I'm left feeling puzzled. There is no coherence.

I'm aware of a few modern attempts to rationalise this term and will gloss some of them.

Eric Frauwallner (1973) observed that a sequence beginning with taṇha was quite common and concluded that the nidāna sequence was originally two shorter sequences. This has become a popular notion. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to solve the problem of cross-over in the definitions. The shorter versions of the sequence may equally be an abbreviation as an elaboration. Even so, this only places the confusing aspects of the sequence together into the second group. Frauwallner's hypothesis doesn't help us solve the problems of interpreting nāmarūpa.

Dhīvan Thomas Jones, in his 2009 M.Phil thesis, has taken a slightly different approach. He notes that the Suttanipāta contains another (better) candidate for a primitive nidāna sequence in the Kalahavivāda Sutta (Sn 168-170) with synonymous but different terms to the standard model. This sequence begins with nāmarūpa, and leaves out viññāṇa, which helps, but includes sāta-asāta (pleasant and unpleasant) as an equivalent of vedanā which still leaves us with a contradiction if this is part of the definition of nāmarūpa.

One of the most interesting developments of recent times is the attempt by Joanna Jurewicz to show that the terms in the nidānas were deliberately chosen as a parody of Vedic cosmogony. Richard Gombrich (2009, esp. ch.9) has taken this idea and wedded it to Frauwallner's 'two sequence' explanation to suggest that the original list was the short sequence from taṇha onwards, and that this was extended using terms from the Vedic lexicon to form a deliberate parody of Vedic cosmogony. Dhīvan Thomas Jones has shown that this not unproblematic, mainly because there is no evidence to show that Frauwallner's sequence is primitive. The same kind of process might have occurred with the Kalahavivāda Sutta (or something like it) as the nucleus of a teaching on becoming, that was given an ironic twist so that it could also serve as a parody of Vedic cosmogony. This is reasonably plausible, though of course there is no sign of cognizance of such a strategy in the Buddhist tradition itself, so if this is what happened it was almost immediately forgotten by the tradition which adopted it. Such forgetfulness is not easily explained with reference to teachings of such central importance, especially in the face of open and explicit criticism of Brahmins elsewhere. However, the context shows that the commentarial tradition (including those suttas which comment on the sequence) is not internally consistent, so something has gone wrong somewhere.

Bucknell (1999) summarises Reat who sees nāmarūpa as referring to objects of consciousness: nāma refers to conceptual (adhivacana) and rūpa to sensory (paṭigha). As Bucknell points out this view is criticised by both Peter Harvey and Sue Hamilton. However, Reat's suggestion would fit nicely with Dhīvan's model of the development from a nucleus - the primitive nāmarūpa qua objects of consciousness giving rise to 'contact' (phassa) makes some sense. Hamilton's view is that nāma "should be taken to refer to abstract identity and [rūpa] to physically (though not necessarily visibly) recognisable identity." (p.151) For Hamilton nāmarūpa is closely tied to viññāṇa as is shown by the Mahānidāna Sutta (DN 15) that links the two of them in a mutually conditioning relationship. Reat and Hamilton's positions are subtly different, but not incompatible I think.

What is clear is that once we move away from simplified popular presentations of Buddhist doctrine, there is no single and coherent understanding of what this term means or represents. And this is a continuing quandary because it suggests that we have lost touch with the spirit of the texts. If we no longer understand key terms (and I would suggest that saṃkhārā is another candidate for this category) then there is a discontinuity. Being stuck with the term we have come up with different and mutually incompatible explanations, but this only adds to the sense of confusion (rather like commentaries on the Heart Sūtra which are all from incompatible sectarian points of view).

I have no better explanation to offer. No theory, and no sense that any one of the existing theories has recover the lost meaning of the term.

Another issue with nāmarūpa and its place in the 12 nidāna chain is that it suggests that viññāna is a precondition for form, which the received tradition usually treats as the physical body. Although Buddhists complain when they perceive consciousness being treated as an epiphenomenon of the brain, they apparently have no problem believing that the body is an epiphenomenon of the mind. Not even the Three Lifetimes Interpretation can save us from this conclusion. The Mahānidāna Sutta (D 15) nāmarūpa and viññāna are mutually conditioning, but this doesn't really help us. However, elsewhere we find viññāna arising in dependence on the āyatanas (the six sense faculties and the six sense objects). This suggests we can have sense faculties, which includes the eyes, before we have a body. It seems to me that the received tradition has lost the thread somewhere along the line. Buddhists usually gloss over these kinds of inconsistencies and do their best to make sense of them. And unfortunately there is no scholarly consensus on what nāmarūpa might have originally meant in a Buddhist context. Perhaps it's time to rethink this strategy of papering over the cracks?

~~oOo~~

[I'll be away from 2-9 Sept]

• Bucknell, Roderick S. (1999) Conditioned Arising Evolves: Variation and Change in the Textual Accounts of the Paṭicca-samuppāda Doctrine. Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, 22 (2), 312-342,
• Frauwallner, E. (1973). History of Indian Philosophy. (Vol. 1). (V. Bedekar, trans.) Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
• Gombrich, Richard. (2009) What the Buddha Thought. Curzon.
• Hamilton Early Buddhism a New Approach.
• Jones, Dhīvan Thomas. Paṭiccasamuppāda in Context: The Buddha in Debate with Brahmanical Thinking. M.Phil Dissertation. Cambridge University [unpublished]
• Jurewicz, J. Playing with Fire: the pratītyasamutpāda from the perspective of Vedic Thought. Journal of the Pali Text Society, 26, p.77-103