Insight, Peak Experience and the Supernatural

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

vanillin

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

Emptiness for Beginners

Enso

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~oOo~~

Thinking it Through

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heart Sutra: Horiuzi Palm-leaf mss. Transcription

"Facsimile of the two palm-leaves of Horiuzi, sent to Prof. Max Müller in 1880.
Catal. of Japanese books and mss. in the Bodleian Library, No. 45."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Falongsibeiye.png
CLICK IMAGE TO EMBIGGEN

Provenance

The image is a facsimile of the so-called "Horiuzi Palm-leaf MSS." of Hōryū-ji monastery. The manuscript was preserved in Hōryū-ji, and is said to date from 609 AD.  Georg Bühler notes in Müller (1881) that a comparison of the script with India manuscripts and inscriptions argues for a date in the 8th century. He hypothesises that all of those later scribes and stone masons of other editions were being deliberately archaic. However the simpler hypothesis is that the Horyuji manuscript is late.

The manuscript begins with the Heart Sūtra. From page 2, line 2 we find the Uṣnīṣavijaya Dhāraṇī. The last line is a complete Sanskrit syllabary in Siddhaṃ script - preceded by the word siddhaṃ and ending with llaṃ kṣa. Each texts begins with the auspiscious mark ࿓ called yigmo in Tibetan, which is often erroneously interpreted as oṃ.

Transcription of the Heart Sutra

Numbers in square brackets are line number. Syllables in curly brackets are doubtful readings.  Note the complete lack of punctuation and syllables are fully separate - except for the mantra where they clump into words.

RECTO [1] ࿓ na ma ssa rva jñā ya ā ryā va lo ki te śva ra bo dhi sa ttvā ga mbhī raṃ pra jñā pā ra mi tā yaṃ ca ryāṃ ca ra mā no vya va lo ka ya ti sma paṃ ca ska ndhā stā śca sva bhā va śū nyaṃ pa śya ti sma [2] i ha śā ri pu tra rū paṃ śū nya tā śū nya tai va rū paṃ rū pā nna pṛ tha k śū nya tā yā na pṛ tha grū paṃ ya drū paṃ sā śū nya tā yā śū nya tā ta drū paṃ e va me va ve da [3] na saṃ jñā saṃ skā ra vi jñā nā ni i ha śā ri pu tra sa rva dha rmā śū nya tā la kṣa ṇā a nu tpa nna a ni rū ddhā a ma lā vi ma lā nā nā na pa ri pū rṇa ta smā cchā ri pu tra śū nya tā [4] yāṃ na rū paṃ na ve da nā {na} saṃ jñā na saṃ skā rā na vi jñā ni na ca kṣū śro tra ghra ṇa ji hvā kā ya ma nā {msi} na rū paṃ śa bda ga nda ra sa spra ṣṭa vya dha rmā na ca kṣu rdhā tu yā va nna ma [5] no dhā tu na vi dyā nā vi dyā na vidyā kṣa yo nā vi dyā ksā yo yā va nna ja rā ma ra ṇaṃ na ja rā ma ra ṇa kṣa yo na duḥ kha sa mu da ya ni ro dha ma rga na jñā naṃ na pra pti tvaṃ bo dhi sa tva sya pra jña pā ra mi [6] tā a śri tya vi ha ra ti ci tta va ra ṇa ci ttā va ra ṇa nā sti {tva} da tra sto vi pa rya sā ti krā ntaḥ ni ṣṭha ni rva ṇaḥ trya dhva vya va sti tā sa rva bu ddhāḥ pra jñā pā ra mi tā a śri tyā nu tta rāṃ sa mya ksaṃ bo dhi {sa hi} [7] saṃ bu ddhā ta smā jñā ta vyaṃ pra jñā pra mi tā ma hā maṃ trā ma hā vi dyā maṃ traḥ a nu tta ra maṃ tra a sa

VERSO [8] ma sa ma maṃ tra sa rva duḥ kha pra śa ma naḥ sa tyaṃ a mi thya tvā {d} pra jñā pā ra mi tā yā mu kto maṃ tra  ta dya thā gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā || pra jñā pā ra mi t {hrid} yā sa ma pta.

Notes

The handwriting is not too bad compared to some manuscripts. Some of the conjuncts are difficult to read. The syllables a sa śa and ma are easily confused.

This text has a different maṇgala to Conze's edition: namas sarvajñāya 'homage to the omniscient'.

Mistakes include: anānā for anūna; prajñāpramitā for prajñāparamitā; vijñāni for vijñānaṃ (plural for singular); na vidyā nāvidyā na vidyākṣayo nāvidyāksāyo when only nāvidyā nāvidyāksāyo makes sense in context of nidāna sequence; na missing from na saṃjñā; sa hi, or perhaps a hi, where expect samyak; niṣṭha-nirvaṇaḥ should be niṣṭha-nirvāṇāpraptaḥ (else it doesn't make sense); hṛda(?) yā  for hṛ da ya possible because of space constraints. Lots of odd sandhi, missing anusvāra and visarga but this could be down to Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit.


Text

I've added minimal punctuation to aid reading - but read carefully, previous editors have frequently got the punctuation wrong. A couple of insertions were required and are in square brackets. There are many errors in the ms. and it's possible I've made some as well.

࿓ namas sarvajñāya | āryāvalokiteśvara-bodhisattvā gambhīraṃ prajñāpāramitāyaṃ caryāṃ caramāno vyavalokayati sma paṃca-skandhās tā[ṃ]ś ca svabhāva-śūnyaṃ paśyati sma | iha śāriputra rūpaṃ śūnyatā śūnyataiva rūpaṃ rūpān na pṛthak śūnyatāyā na pṛthag rūpaṃ yad rūpaṃ sā śūnyatāyā śūnyatā tad rūpaṃ evam eva vedana-saṃjñā-saṃskāra-vijñānāni | iha śāriputra sarva-dharmā śūnyatā-lakṣaṇā anutpanna anirūddhā amalāvimalā nānān aparipūrṇa | tasmāc chāriputra śūnyatāyāṃ na rūpaṃ na vedanāna [na] saṃjñā na saṃskārā na vijñāni na cakṣū-śrotra-ghraṇa-jihvā-kāya-manāmsi | na rūpaṃ-śabda-ganda-rasa-spraṣṭavya-dharmā | na cakṣur-dhātu yāvan na mano-dhātu na vidyā nāvidyā na vidyākṣayo nāvidyāksāyo yāvan na jarāmaraṇaṃ na jarāmaraṇakṣayo | na duḥkha-samudaya-nirodha-marga | na jñānaṃ na praptitvaṃ | bodhisatvasya prajñapāramitā aśritya viharati [a]cittavaraṇa | cittāvaraṇa-nāstitvad atrasto viparyasātikrāntaḥ niṣṭha-nirvaṇaḥ | tryadhvavyavastitā sarvabuddhāḥ prajñāpāramitā aśrityānuttarāṃ samyak saṃbodhi [sam yak] saṃbuddhā | tasmā jñātavyaṃ prajñāpramitā mahā-maṃtrā mahāvidyā-maṃtraḥ anuttara-maṃtra asamasama-maṃtra sarva-duḥkha-praśamanaḥ satyaṃ amithyatvād | prajñāpāramitāyām ukto maṃtra  tadyathā gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā ||
prajñāpāramit [hṛda]yā samapta.

This text forms the basis of the Sanskrit edition published by Max Müller, which in turn forms the basis of the edition by Vaidya, This is significant because Vaidya is widely available on the internet and is the text which appears in the Digital Sanskrit Buddhist Canon. The text is quite different from the critical edition by Conze (1948, 1967).

In terms of the history of the study of Prajñapāramitā texts in the West this is an important document. Though it is far from perfectly copied, and probably not at old as the priests of  Hōryū-ji monastery say it is, it is never-the-less old. It ought to have been carbon dated before now, but I've seen no reference to any attempt. The ms. dates from not long after the Heart Sutra was composed and probably can claim to the the oldest ms. of it in existence. Not only that but it continues to influence study and perception of the Heart Sutra. The excellent calligraphy book by John Stevens reproduces this text with only minor amendments for example; and much of it survives into Vaidya's Sanskrit text.


Bibliography

• Conze, Edward (1948) ‘Text, Sources, and Bibliography of the Prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya.’ Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, April 80(1-2): 33-51.
• Conze, Edward. (1967) ‘The Prajñāpāramitā-Hṛdaya Sūtra’ in Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies: Selected Essays, Bruno Cassirer, pp. 147-167.
• Müller, Max. (1881) ‘The Ancient Palm Leaves containing the Prajñāpāramitā-Hṛidaya Sūtra and Uṣniṣa-vijaya-Dhāraṇi.’ in Buddhist Texts from Japan (Vol 1.iii). Oxford University Press. Online: http://archive.org/details/buddhisttextsfr00bhgoog
• Vaidya, P.L. (1961) Mahāyāna-sūtra-saṁgrahaḥ (part 1). Buddhist Sanskrit Texts No. 17. Darbhanga: The Mithila Institute. Online: http://dsbc.uwest.edu/

Publication

Another article of mine has been published. This time in the newly revamped Western Buddhist Review. BTW I am now a member of the editorial board of the WBR. Finishing these more in-depth articles was one of the main reasons for giving up blogging.

The Spiral Path or Lokuttara Paṭicca-samuppāda. Western Buddhist Review. 6, Dec 2012.

Abstract

This article surveys the Spiral Path or Lokuttara Paṭicca-samuppāda in the Pāli Nikāyas, with some reference to Chinese parallels, exploring the similarities and differences between the presentations to further elucidate the doctrine which has been at the forefront of the teaching of Sangharakshita and the Triratna Buddhist Order. English language sources are also surveyed and critiqued. Most writing to date has focussed on a single text, the Upanisā Sutta, which is shown to be unrepresentative of the class as a whole, and a new locus classicus is suggested in the Cetanākaraṇīya Sutta. The Spiral Path is seen to conform to the general outline of the Buddhist path as consisting of ethics, meditation and wisdom.

 ~~~

My friend Maitiu and I are working on a  study of the Chinese Spiral Path texts which can be found in section 5 of the Chinese Madhyāgama. Representatives of the main themes can be found in this block of 14 sūtras. As with other parallels the differences are relatively minor.

Heart Sutra Syntax

Dr. Edward Conze

UPDATED. This is one of those issues where I just have to write down my thoughts and there's not enough to warrant a published article.

I'm studying the Heart Sutra to practice my Sanskrit, and for the joy of chanting it aloud.  And I've found an interesting puzzle. Like many people I'm familiar with Conze's critical edition in Buddhist Wisdom Books (2nd Ed. 1975); checked against the version in Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies (1967) which contains the variant readings he found, and against Vaidya's edition (which is also online). The part that concerns me is right at the start:

ārya-avalokiteśvaro bodhisattvo gambhīrāṃ prajñāpāramitā-caryāṃ caramāṇo vyavalokayati sma: panca-skandhās tāṃś ca svābhavaśūnyān paśyati sma.

I think this sentence has been parsed incorrectly by Conze. There are three syntactical problems with this rendition.

Firstly the verb vyavalokayati (vi + ava + √lok; conjugated as a 10th class verb) has no object. If we break the sentence when Conze says, then it suggests that the verb vyavalokayati is intransitive. Avalokiteśvara is just looking, not looking at anything. This is a little bizarre, but worse when we consider the rest of the sentence.

The second problem is the place of ca. This is an enclitic particle that follows the word it applies to. Here it joins two sentences. This suggests that the second sentence must begin with tāṃś - an accusative plural 'they' (with a sandhi change from tān to tāṃś to accommodate the following ca). This means that pañcaskandhās must belong to the first sentence, but as it is in the nominative singular case it doesn't fit. In this case tāṃś is referring back to the object of the previous sentence - except that it does not have one.

Thirdly tāṃś (pronoun) and svabhāvaśūnyān (adjective) are both accusative plural forms. With what are they agreeing if not the five skandhas?

Let me just describe what is happening in this sentence for the non-Sanskrit reader. The first sentence has two clauses: The subject of the sentence is the Noble Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara (ārya-avalokiteśvaro bodhisattvo). He is practising (caramāṇo) the deep (gambhīrāṃ) practice of the perfection of wisdom (prajñāpāramitācaryāṃ). Here caramāno is a secondary verb in the form of a present participle which describes an action taking place at the same time as the main verb. The two words gambhīrāṃ prajñāpāramitācaryāṃ are in the (feminine) accusative singular - gambhira being an adjective which must match it's noun.  As such prajñāpāramitācaryāṃ is the object of the secondary verb, caramāṇo.

While practising Avalokiteśvara did the action of the verb vyavalokayati sma. The particle sma is called a "periphrastic past". To make a present-tense verb past, one has the option of just adding sma after it, as paśyati 'he sees' does in the next phrase. Conze's rendition of this as "looked down from on high" is fanciful and seems to be based on over analysing the word avalokita. Edgerton's Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Dictionary is more sober and suggests 'inspecting, examining' which makes more sense. Conze got carried away here in reading vyavalokayati as an intransitive verb and it left him a problem in the form of pañcaskandhās which has no clear syntactic relationship with the other words in either sentence, but is important in the text.

Now we know that extant manuscripts have a lot of variation - hence the need for critical editions. Conze (1967) notes here show that there is a majority with his reading, but some variations amongst the 12 Nepalese manuscripts. Regarding this passage (N stands for Nepalese manuscript).

N^e - omitted;
N^b,c pañca-skandhān svabhāva-śūnyāṇ vyavalokitavyam
N^k (begins) vyavalokitavyam
N^d,l - omitted.

Vaidya has:

... व्यवलोकयति स्म। पञ्च स्कन्धाः, तांश्च स्वभावशून्यान् पश्यति स्म॥
... vyavalokyati sma | pañca skandhāḥ, tāṃśca svabhāvaśūnyān paśyati sma

Vaidya has the same problem: what to do with pañcaskandhāḥ in the nominative plural? Now Conze renders this part of the passage "He looked down from on high, He beheld but five heaps, and saw that in their own-being they were empty".

I think this is a blunder on Conze's part, because the sentence simply can't say this. Pañcaskandhās is unambiguously a nominative plural, and thus the subject of the sentence. In the sentence pañca skandhāḥ, tāṃśca svabhāvaśūnytān paśyati sma it is clearly the pañca-skandhāḥ that did the seeing. Hence the superimposed comma (which Sanskrit entirely lacks) because otherwise it is nonsense.

Conze's reading is also problematic because it suggests that the skandhas have self-existence (svabhāva) which is empty; and as I understand this text (and Nāgārjuna) a central plank of Prajñāpāramitā thinking is that dharmas and skandhas all lack svabhāva. Self-existence is not possible according to Nāgārjuna. Surely the text must be saying that the skandhas are empty of svabhāva, rather than that their svabhāva was empty?

There is a simple solution to this dilemma which is suggested by Conze's Nepalese manuscripts b & c. Which is that pañcaskandhās is in fact an accusative plural: pañcaskandhān. However -ān followed by t undergoes compulsory sandhi change to -āṃs. Thus we expect to see pañcaskandhāṃs tāṃś ca. The difference is more subtle in Indic scripts which indicate the anusvāra with a dot:

पञ्चस्कनधांस्  vs  पञ्चस्कन्धास् 

pañcaskandhāṃs vs pañcaskandhās   

We know that Nepalese manuscripts are often sloppy with anusvāra. It solves both the problem of the lack of object for vyavalokayati and the placing of ca. In favour of this theory is that in Vaidya's edition of the long Heart Sutra we find just this, i.e. pañca skandhāṃstāṃśca.

The amended passage now reads:

āryāvalokiteśvaro bodhisattvo gambhīrāṃ prajñāpāramitācaryāṃ caramāṇo vyavalokayati sma pancaskandhāṃs, tāṃś ca svābhavaśūnyān paśyati sma.

Noble Avalokiteśvara, the Bodhisattva, practising the deep practice of the perfection of wisdom, examined the five skandhas and saw them empty of self-existence.

This simple change also avoids the awkwardness of Conze's translation, and makes more doctrinal sense.

It's important to be aware that the original Sanskrit manuscripts did not have punctuation and the hand writing was often very poor, especially on later Nepalese manuscripts. Conze himself complains of this. A manuscript might have looked a bit like this:

There's little or no punctuation in this style of writing, and no word breaks as each syllable is written as a standalone. For the record pañcaskandhāstāṃśca would look like this in Devanāgarī

पं च स्क न्धा स्तां श्च

paṃ ca ska ndhā stāṃ śca

 
In this manuscript it would not be hard to confuse stāṃ and ntāṃ, it's only a matter of a single misplaced stroke, or a smudge. In the image below I've taken the syllable from the manuscript above: stā is on the left and is altered to read ntā on the right (this ms. leaves off the anusvāra or ṃ):

However the loss of anusvāra is the simplest answer to the conundrum. I'll see if I have time to check the Chinese at some future date. This section of the text was almost certainly composed in China, and there is no parallel in the Large Perfection of Wisdom Sutra.

Bibliography

Conze, Edward. (1967) ‘The Prajñāpāramitā-Hṛdaya Sūtra’ in Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies: Selected Essays, Bruno Cassirer. p. 147-167. (Originally published in: Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1948, pp. 33-51.)

Conze, Edward. (1975) Buddhist Wisdom Books: The Diamond Sutra and the Heart Sutra. 2nd Ed. London: George Allen & Unwin.

'Facsimile of the Horiuzi Palm-leaf MSS. of Hōryū-ji Monastery' in Buddhist Texts from Japan. (Anecdota Oxoniensia, Aryan series), 1881. Online: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Falongsibeiye.png

Vaidya, P.L. (1961) Mahāyāna-sūtra-saṁgrahaḥ ( part 1). Buddhist Sanskrit Texts No. 17. Darbhanga: The Mithila Institute. Online: http://dsbc.uwest.edu/ [This volume contains editions of both long and short versions of the sutra].

Chinese Texts

照見五蘊皆空	T 8.251 ST Xuanzang	He observed that the fives skandhas are all empty.
照見五隠空	T 8.250 ST Kumarajīva	He observed that the five skandhas are empty.
照見五蘊皆空	T 8.253 ST	He observed that the fives skandhas are all empty.
照見五蘊自性皆空。彼了知五蘊自性皆空:	T 8.252 LT	He observed that the five skandhas where empty of self-existence. He knew the five skandhas were empty of self-existence.
照見五蘊自性皆空	T 8.254 & 257 LT	He observed that the five skandhas where empty of self-existence.
觀察照見五蘊體性悉皆是空	T 8.255 LT	He observed that the five skandhas where empty of self-existence. (with synonyms)

LT = Long text; ST = Short text.

Article

Just a quick note to let people know that an article of mine has been published in the Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies. Vol 3.

Abstract:

This article explores the plausibility of Michael Witzel’s speculation that the Śākya tribe might have Iranian origins, or at least Iranian connections. Circumstantial evidence suggests that ideas associated with Iran and Zoroastrianism appear in north-east India, especially amongst the śramana groups,and in particular amongst Buddhists, but not in the Brahmanical culture.Whereas Buddhism is frequently portrayed as a response to Brahmanism,or, especially by Buddhists, as ahistorical, Witzel’s suggestion gives us a new avenue for exploring the history of ideas in Buddhism. This essay attempts to show that, at the very least, possible connections with Iran deserve more attention from scholars of the history of ideas in India and especially Buddhism.

Changing the World: a Case Study.

This post, the last I have planned for this blog, is an extended version of an essay I submitted to Śabda the newsletter that our Order use to keep in touch (it's like a once a month manual forum). Many Buddhists are interested in changing the world. Over my lifetime the world has changed significantly, and I thought it might be interesting to write up some reflections on this change, and how it was achieved.

The world changed in 1971. 

In 1971 President Nixon unilaterally dismantled the Bretton Woods Agreement. This multi-lateral agreement on monetary policy was put in place to help the world recover financially from WWII. It spawned the IMF and the World Bank. Part of Bretton Woods was the gold standard. The countries involved agreed to fix the exchange rate of their currency to the value of the US Dollar, while the US agreed to peg the value of their currency to the value of gold. The expense of the war in Vietnam was putting great pressure on the US economy. Then the French began to swap their US dollars for gold. This caused a drain on gold reserves in the US and choked their money supply. In the face of these problems Nixon may not have had much choice but to withdraw from the gold standard. This is something for goldbugs to keep in mind.  As we will see this was the thin edge of the wedge.

In the same year the UK introduced the Competition and Credit Control Act. Economists joke about this really being 'all competition and no control'. The main effect of these changes was deregulation, which allowed private sector debt to begin to accumulate. From 1945 to 1971 there was a period of economic stability, with no notable crises. The IMF tell us that since 1970 "there have been 147 bank crises, 218 currency crises and 66 country-financing crises". In 1971 the motto of Polonious was decisively thrown out. The world began to borrow to finance consumption and to gamble on asset prices.

During the 1980s politicians influenced by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of economics, also known as Neo-classical economics, gained power. They were aided in part by divisions amongst the other dominant school of economic thought: the Keynesians. It was the ideas of John Maynard Keynes which had produced the post-war economic stability. Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the USA (and Lange in NZ) implemented policies inspired by the Chicago School. These policies are also known as Neo-liberalism. One of the main things they did was pursue deregulation of the economy. This pursuit was based on an ideological view of markets which they said could be left to themselves to sort out prices. Underlying this view was the 19th century utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham. And overlaying it was an over-estimation of the power of computers to predict the behaviour of the economy, and the validity of the computer models being used to make predictions. All around the first world Neo-liberal policies removed trade barriers, sold off public assets, down sized government departments, and took the deregulation of finance almost to it's logical conclusion.

Debt fuelled consumption and speculation, especially the latter, pushed up prices causing inflation. Inflation required pay rises, and further price rises. Until it all collapsed in a recession. Then began to pile up again. Each cycle was a little worse because some of the debt carried over. In the Third World it rapidly lead to ruin and poverty for many. Africa succumbed first in the 1970s. South American countries were hit in the 1980s. In South-East Asia ruin and poverty came in the late 1990's. Now the First World faces ruin.

The response to repeated crises was to further deregulate the economy, and particularly finance. In the UK this was done by a Labour government. The Labour party still describe themselves as "socialist", but alongside typically socialist policies like expansion of the welfare state, they pursued an extreme Neo-Liberal approach to the finance sector. This further deregulation allowed for more debt, and more risky lending. Banks, who make money from debt, were happy to oblige. Successive governments around the world followed similar policies.The whole thing gained momentum so that debts accumulated exponentially.

The finance sector generated huge amounts of income but concentrated it in the hands of a tiny minority. It generated even hugher amounts of debt. Today the UK is the most indebted country in the world. Recent estimates place our private sector debt at 450% of GDP, which includes household debt (including mortgages) at 100%. Government debt by comparison is just 81% of GDP.

The most recent crisis exposed corruption in the finance sector, and the massive scale of our indebtedness. Five years later we're still going down hill, with Europe teetering on the brink (of what?). Many first world banks are technically insolvent, but somehow reporting record profits and paying out large bonuses. Now we learn that some have been manipulating interest rates. They are propped by government borrowing amounting to a trillion pounds. Executive pay is increasing exponentially. Unemployment is high. So much for the "free market". What this approach to banking amounts to is national socialism. However the practitioners of this peculiar form of socialism for the rich, are still emphasising that the poor must pursue a pure form of free-market capitalism. Many intellectuals are pointing to disturbing parallels with Europe in 1931.

The same trend has exacerbated environmental problems. At the moment there are direct and indirect incentives to exploit resources at the maximum rate with no regard to the environmental consequences. Governments seem paralysed by fear of the business sector. And business and finance spend billions of dollars/pounds lobbying for favourable laws. The political will to address any of these problems does not exist at present. And those economists who did predict the credit crunch of 2007 are saying that we have not seen the worst. There is another massive credit crunch coming in 2012 or 2013.

How did this happen?

The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism come from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians. In most of these groups the movement against the system is participated in only by minorities. Yet, these often are the most articulate, the most vocal, the most prolific in their writing and speaking.

Lewis Powell Memo

The second major event of 1971 was the Lewis Powell Memorandum to the US Chamber of Commerce entitled "Attack on American Free Enterprise System". Powell characterised the situation as a war in which business interested were threatened by social change emphasising the values of cooperation and mutual aid (our values). The memo makes a series of detailed proposals for an aggressive response by conservative businessmen.

Businessmen should endow universities with chairs to teach conservative business practices, and financially support conservative institutes. Powell proposed that a number of very well resourced think-tanks be set up. These would help to create and promote a consistent, potent message. Deregulation was central to their agenda. They needed to train spokesmen in communicating the conservative message, and create booking agencies to help organise speakers. They also invested in media companies to ensure access. They did all this, and needless to say they funded conservative political parties. Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court two months after the memo was published.

At the same time US conservatives began to politicise fundamentalist Christians who had been disengaged to that point, creating a whole new constituency of millions of ultra-conservative voters.


Conservatives all over the world have benefited from this coordinated strategy to hijack democracy in the USA, and fight a war against their own people. A steady stream of graduates with PhDs in what amounts to conservative ideology, finds jobs in universities and think-tanks to explore and publish their ideas and influence new generations of students and intellectuals particularly economists. There are close linked between Neo-conservative though and Neo-classical Economics. Through manipulation and control of the media a constant presence of the conservative message is maintained. Powell's memo is one of the most important documents of the 20th century, it is the founding charter of the Neo-conservative religion.

However I should sound a note of caution. Some historians have noted that there is little evidence that Powell Memo had any real impact. Even so it remains iconic because it sums up the mood of conservatives in the US at the time, and it summarises what actually happened in terms of the mobilisation of conservatives.

As a result of these policies conservative ideas have been at the forefront of politics. Deregulation has wrecked the world's economy, and helped to wreck the environment. Conservatives set the agendas on which elections are fought (they are doing so again in the UK right now). Business policy became political policy; business values became social values. The world changed because conservatives captured the cognitive map, dominated the debate by choosing the frames, and made laws that represented their values.

Something that I did not say in my original essay was that during this time the hippies were busy taking mind addling drugs, catching crabs and growing their hair long. As John Lydon said with venom in an interview from the late 1970s the problem with hippies was that "they're complaisant". While people in the 1970's counter-culture were tuning in, turning on and dropping our, the conservatives where tuning in, turning on and taking over. This is relevant because many of the leaders of First World Buddhism were hippies or felt inspired by the counter-culture. Some still do feel inspired by that era. But the hippies changed nothing. Their self-indulgent abdication of civil responsibility simply allowed the conservatives to dominate political life.


This how American businessmen succeeded in changing the world. They certainly created a much bigger impact on the world than Buddhism has done. It might be argued that we are few and poorly resourced. But the basic problem seems to be that we don't care, or don't care enough. There are plenty of people out there to make common cause with. We suffer from what Glenn Wallis has called sufficiency. We think Buddhism is a magic panacea entirely sufficient for all purposes be it psychological integration, emotional positivity, and even social change. So we don't look elsewhere, and we don't make common cause with people who share our values. And honestly, most people share our values at least to some extent. We're not as special as we'd like to think, and that feeling of specialness really is a problem for us because it's an expression of ego.


Now What?

I ended by report to the order with this question: "OK, I've understood this, now what?" This was as much to do with the word limit on reports as anything. I'm quite clear on some of the measures I'd like to see in response.

Firstly we must as a priority involve ourselves in civic society. This may require some education. But there are plenty of resources for that in this day and age. We Buddhists almost always have a strong sense of values. At the very least we should all book a time to go and meet our elected representative and try to communicate our values to them. We're about 1% of the UK population, but we're clustered and if we all visited our representative then we'd be heard. Democracy only works if people participate. Your representative can only represent you if they know you. But we need to go further. We need to engage in whatever public forums are open to us and speak up about our values and aspirations (this will require a major effort to de-jargonise Buddhist-speak else no one will understand what we are saying).

There are many arguments for and against this, but for me the bottom line is that if you take altruism seriously as a virtue, then you need to act to resist laws and policies which visit suffering on people. If we want society to reflect our Buddhism values, then making a few thousand converts is not enough. We need to influence public policy, which we do by being personally involved.

Secondly there are pressing problems such as environmental degradation that need concerted action. Concerted political will only emerges when there is a clear public will. If we're not even in the discussion our voices won't be heard. We live in a world where in some places people are dying of starvation and malnutrition, and in other places dying from obesity. There is no shortage of food on planet earth, even for a much larger population. Speaking as an over-weight Buddhist, I say there is no excuse for being a fat Buddhist (except in some very rare glandular disorders). Charities and Aid are only sticking plasters. Necessary for the short-term but long term we need to be thinking about changing the political systems we live in. In the First World we have the greatest chance of making these changes precisely because we live in relatively free democracies.

My third point follows on from this. The major powers continually act with greedy self-interest when dealing with the rest of the world. If we had acted more honourably at key points in history, then there would be considerably less war in the world now. For instance if the European powers had kept their promise to the Arabs lead by Prince Faisal at the end of WWI then our relations with the entire Middle East would be very different. The UK and the USA governments in particular have behaved abominably right up to the present. We have to let them know 'not in my name'.

Lastly we need to understand how political debates are framed, and set about reframing them. And here I think I've gained valuable experience in dealing with how Buddhist debates are framed. What I reject is the traditional ultraconservative fundamentalist framing of Buddhism; and Buddhism as a supernatural panacea. And it is very interesting to note the religious tone to Neo-Liberal discourse, and the idea of the supernatural ability of markets to determine price (which reminds me very much of karma). I've already written several blog posts on the Renegade Economist site regarding these issues: Framing the Debate Part I and Part 2, and Distorting Darwin or How the West Was Won.

~~oOo~~

So that's it for Jayarava's Raves. I have nothing else planned out to say on Buddhism. In a sense I feel I've said what I wanted to say about it. If you read one essay a week it would take you six years to read them all. I have been working on packaging some of the essays up into a book (or perhaps two) but I have no deadline in mind at present.

Now I want to engage with the institutions of society more, to take part in the public debate. I will certainly do all this as a Buddhist, and I will draw on the Dharma. However I won't be setting out to convert people to Buddhism, only to encourage them (and myself) towards paying attention, expressing empathy and altruism, and finding contentment in their lives. And after all it's only a blog, and not even very popular.

Thanks to all my readers over the years. And Thanks especially to my friend Ann 'Pema Yutso' Palomo for inspiring the whole project.

The 'Mind as Container' Metaphor

"Whatever complex biological and neural processes go on backstage, it is my consciousness that provides the theatre where my experiences and thoughts have their existence, where my desires are felt and where my intentions are formed."

Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy

ONE OF THE MOST fundamental metaphors we use when talking about mind is: the mind is a container. The container prototype is very important in terms of how we interact with the world. A container is a physically finite and bounded space, with a clear distinction between inside and outside. Containers often, but not always, have lids which seal the inside from outside, or vice versa.

Our body is a physically a container with a sealable opening at either end: a mouth and an anus. We put food into our body via our mouth. The mouth itself is a container, because we put food into it as well. Various things happen inside our body And shit comes out of our anus. Similarly we breath into our lungs (which are inside our body) and out. Virtually all other animals follow a similar body plan, and set of biological processes.

But these metaphors have implications which go well beyond the way we talk. George Lakoff and his colleagues, especially Mark Johnson, have shown that abstract thought is always metaphorical, and that the metaphors we draw on for abstract thought are often based on how we physically interact with the world.

So when "a thought comes into our head" there are two metaphorical processes happening. Firstly we are allowing that our head is a kind of container. This might be obvious because physically our skull is a hollow chamber of bone filled with our brain. It also has some extrusions attached and several openings. But the head here is also standing for the what goes on 'in' the head, a form of metaphor called metonymy: where a part stands for the whole, and sometimes vice versa. Our head is the container of thoughts; that is the head here stands for the mind as the container of thought: the thought is in [the container of] the mind, which is in [the container of] the head. The head is a particular kind of container, more like a room which we inhabit. Experientially when the thought comes into my head, I become aware of it because it enters the space "I" also occupy.

The second metaphorical process that is happening is that both "I" and the thought are (metaphorically) solid objects with shape and mass. We can take an idea and turn it over in our heads, kick it around; we juggle priorities, manipulate data and crunch numbers; we weigh alternatives, and can be weighed down by our cares. "I" am the same kind of object because I exist in the same domain as the ideas - thinking goes on in my head, and I am thinking my thoughts.

As metaphors there is absolutely nothing wrong with these abstractions. Abstraction allows us to be much more sophisticated in how we interact with the world and each other. Abstraction allows us to use our imagination to consider how things might be, to think about new ways of using tools for example, or new ways to modify tools to do a certain job. In part at least this ability to abstract is related to a set of neurons called mirror neurons. These neurons are active when we do an action, but also when we see an action being performed by someone else. If the action is a facial expression, then something interesting happens: observing the action our own neurons become active and we have a sense of what it would be like to have that facial expression. This allows to know how someone is feeling by observing their face (and their body language and listening to the tone of voice). This is a very useful facility to have.

However we are not usually aware of what we are doing: we have the result without understanding the working. In fact the working only became visible when we started to use powerful real-time brain scanning techniques. When we respond to a smile we aren't aware of the mechanisms that allow us to parse the visual information, recognise the face and the expression, and translate that into an internal state that we can feel, and then formulate a response. We just smile back or mutter humbug or whatever.

Similarly when a thought comes into our head we see this is a naive realistic way: just as though something with shape and mass has entered a room in which we were already an occupant. For many centuries philosophers took this metaphor as real and asked a lot of questions about the container and the nature of the container. Alternatively as the ODP definition says we think of consciousness as a special kind of room (a theatre) in which we observe the experiences we have, with the implication that we are the audience watching the action on the stage. Since we started to learn about the function of the brain we have extended the metaphor to make the brain the container of consciousness or personality.

But as comfortable as this way of referring to our minds it's still just a metaphor, not a reality. Remember that a metaphor is when you explain one thing in terms as though it were something else. It's very important to remember what it is you are describing, which is a hard thing to keep in mind. The mind is also sometimes a leaky container!

Most people, I think, would be surprised to learn that this metaphor is not universal. Luhrmann (2011) surveying the ethnographical literature on hallucinations, notes some research conclusions: "The Iban [tribe of Borneo] do not have an elaborated idea of the mind as a container". (p.79) In the context of research on psychosis this means that "the idea that someone could experience external thoughts as placed within the mind or removed from it was simply not available to them."

We also know that people experience the complete breakdown of the sense of in-here and out-there under certain circumstance (e.g. Jill Bolte Taylor's stroke). So the metaphor is not universal, not hardwired. It is a culturally conditioned aspect of a virtual model which our organism generates for the purposes of optimising its interactions with the environment. But the metaphor is so pervasive in English that it's very difficult for me to write a sentence about the virtual model without referencing the mind as container metaphor.

I might add that all of the aspects of consciousness are similarly contingent and plastic.

I came across a quote from Wittgenstein recently which seems apposite: "meaning is use". By this he seems to have meant that a word takes it's meaning not from a relationship with the object it names, nor by the ideas the objects engender, but only from the way that speakers use the word. There is something in this. However I would add some caveats because the study of sound symbolism, and embodied cognition don't allow for a strict application of 'meaning is use'. Research in sound symbolism tells us that the sounds we use to make words are symbols, and that there is a relationship between the symbols we choose and the objects and events we are observing or thinking of. The case I've been making above is that how we think, the very metaphors we use to represent abstract ideas are based on how we physically interact with the world. So, yes 'meaning is use' but use is not arbitrary, it is motivated (to use de Saussure's term) by these existing relationships, i.e. it operates within limits and tends towards pre-determined states.

The thing I wanted to draw out is that the question 'what is consciousness' might not be a sensible qustion. We might accurately answer that consciousness is the experience of being aware, of having a sense of agency and a first-person perspective. In effect there might be no 'Problem of Consciousness'.  There is certainly an experience, but does it point to a real container, a real theatre in which we experience consciousness? The answer would seem to be that is does not.

I think this would be the Buddhist answer as well, or it would be outside of Western Buddhism. As I suggested above it's very difficult for use Westerners to think of consciousness at all without unconsciously invoking a metaphor which we habitually take to be real. The very terminology we use asserts the reality of the abstractions and metaphors we use to describe the experience. In a targeted, but not comprehensive search I have not found viññāṇa being used in the sense of a container of experience in Pāli. Indeed just what viññāṇa refers to is not entirely clear to me except that it is an essential component of perception; and that it is consistently distinguished from the sense objects (rūpa, sadda, etc) and from the sense organs (cakkhu, sota, etc), and that it comes in six varieties (cakkhu-viññāṇā, sota-viññāṇa, etc.) including mano-viññāṇa. So the one thing this does not look like is the theatre of experience. If, for instance the Buddhist texts say that we experience vedanā in viññāṇa, then I have yet to find the passage where they do. In what sense does viññāṇa resemble our Western conceptions of consciousness at all? My response would be that it doesn't resemble it at all.

One can broaden search quite easily by looking for viññāṇasmiṃ/viññāṇe (the locative singular), which we would expect to translate 'in consciousness' if viññāṇa were a container. We find many examples of this grammatical form in Pāli. One of them is indeed treating viññāṇa a metaphorical container. At M iii.18 and many other places the assutavā [i.e. the ignorant, or uninformed person] seeks (in vain) for self in viññāṇa and viññāṇa in self. But it's clear that the view being described is not one that the knowledgeable Buddhist would subscribe to.

At M i.139 we find another use of the locative (with the sense of 'with reference to'). Here it is the well-informed (sutavā) disciples of the nobles, and they become fed up (nibbindati) with reference to rūpa, vedanā, saññā, saṅkhāra and viññāṇa. At M i.230 a materialist says of the khandhas: With viññāṇa [and the others] as self (atta) a person (purisapuggala) from resting in viññāṇa (viññāṇe patiṭṭhāya) produces merit or non-merit. Gotama proceeds to demolish the views of the materialist, treating the khandhas as he customarily does: not mine, not me, not myself.

And that accounts for all of the occurrences of viññāṇāsmiṃ/viññāṇe I found in a brief survey of the nikāyas. No doubt there are others, but they don't stand out. Buddhist texts, so far as I can tell, are aware that some misguided people do use the 'mind as container' metaphor, but the Buddhist Theory of Mind does not. For Buddhist thinkers there is no theatre of experience, there is just experience. The implication for us is that the experience of being in a theatre of experience, is just another experience. Perhaps the difference lies in the lack of theatres in Iron Age India and the largely outdoor lifestyle of the Buddhists. Virtually all of the action of the Pāli Canon takes place outside.

In any case we think very differently from the ancient Buddhists about the mind. Recall also that they did not see emotion as a separate category of experience but lumped it in the citta. (Cf Emotions in Buddhism) Judging by their language we can see that they lived in very a different world to us. Our conceptions about the world, the mind, and life generally are often not applicable to the past; nor theirs to the present. Our scientists and philosophers have spent time and resources looking for this theatre, and ironically neuroscientists seem to be confirming that our ancient forebears were right: mind as a container is a figment, generated by hypostasizing a metaphor we once used to describe the experience of having experiences.

~~oOo~~

This essay was inspired by reading: On Containers and Content, with a Cautionary Note to Philosophers of Mind, by Eric Schwitzgebel.

Mind Metaphors in Pāli

seed

iti kho, ānando, kammaṃ khettaṃ viññāṇaṃ bījaṃ taṇhā sineho... hīnāya dhātuyā viññāṇaṃ patiṭṭhitaṃ (AN i.232 )
Thus, Ānanda, action is a field, cognition is a seed, and craving is sap... cognition is established on a low level. 

lamp

Seyyathāpi bhikkhave, kūṭāgāraṃ vā kūṭāgārasālā vā uttarāya vā dakkhiṇāya vā pācīnāya vā vātapānā. suriye uggacchante vātapānena rasmi pavisitvā kvāssa patiṭṭhitāti. (SN 12.64 )
Just as if, bhikkhus, a roofed house or roofed hall with windows in the north, south or east. When the sun rises where do rays land when they come through the windows? 

fire

Yaññadeva bhikkhave paccayaṃ paṭicca uppajjati viññāṇaṃ tena teneva saṅkhaṃ gacchati... Seyyathāpi bhikkhave yaññadevāpaccayaṃ paṭicca aggi jalati, tena teneva saṅkhaṃ gacchati. (MN 38)
Bhikkhus, whatever condition cognition arises upon, it is called after that... just as whatever condition fire burns, it is named after that.

Magic trick

Pheṇapiṇḍūpamaṃ rūpaṃ vedanā bubbuḷupamā
Marīcikupamā saññā saṃkhārā kadalūpamā,
Māyūpamañca viññāṇaṃ dīpitā diccabandhunā. (SN 22.95)
The kinsman of the Sun has taught that:
form is like a ball of foam, sensation is like a bubble,
perception is like a mirage, intention is like a plantain,
cognition is like an illusion,