How is suffering created?

One time the Buddha was wandering for alms in Rājagaha when he was approached by a naked ascetic called Kassapa*. "Kassapa", the Buddha said, "this is not the right time for asking questions". But Kassapa persisted, and eventually the Buddha relented and said, "alright, what is your question?" Kassapa asked whether suffering is self-made (sayaṃkataṃ), or whether is other-made (asayaṃkataṃ), or perhaps both, or neither. In each case the Buddha answered: "not thus" (mā heva) or more colloquially "it's not like that". At this point Kassapa wondered aloud whether the Buddha knew the answer. But to this question he answered, "I do know". Kasssapa asked the Buddha to teach him.

The Buddha tells Kassapa that if you believe that the one who acts is the same as the one who experiences the result (so karoti so paṭisaṃvedayati), then you must believe in a lasting entity, and this amounts to eternalism (sassataṃ etaṃ pareti). If you believe that the one who acts is other (añña) than the one who experiences the results (añño karoti añño paṭisaṃvedayati), then this amounts to nihilism (ucchedaṃ etaṃ pareti). Suffering in fact arises in dependence on causes. The Buddha teaches Kassapa about the 12 nidanas - ignorance gives rise to volitional tendencies, which gives rise to consciousness, etc. This, he declares is the origin of this mass of suffering (dukkhakkhandhassa).

Kassapa finds this illuminating and asks to join the bhikkhu Sangha. The story has other interesting features, but let's go back and work through the exchange I've just outlined. Sayaṃkataṃ can mean "created by oneself" (which is how Bhikkhu Bodhi translates it) or it can mean "made by itself". PED also suggests "spontaneous" as a possibility. To me it seems more likely that Kassapa is asking whether suffering causes itself, rather than do we cause our own suffering. This fits the context as we will see.

Now the Buddha responds to Kassapa's question about how suffering occurs by first critiquing two wrong views about the relationship between acting (karoti) and experience (paṭisamvedeti). By the way: acting (karoti) produces an action (kamma) both of which come from the root √kṛ - 'to do, to make'. And action according to the Buddha is intention, ie it is the motivations, the subjectivity, behind actions that he is interested in. To emphasis a point I have been making repeatedly lately, the link here is between intention and experience. Paṭisaṃvediyeti comes ultimate from the verbal root √vid 'to know or feel'. Vediyati is a form of the the causative, and therefore means something like 'informs', but it's clear that it refers to experiencing sensations. Vediyati is related to the important word for sensations vedanā (literally: announcing or making known). The suffixes here (paṭi + saṃ) don't seem to change the meaning very much. Paṭi perhaps makes it reflexive, and saṃ can mean together or complete. In any case paṭisamvediyati refers to the experience of sensations or vedanā. So the context here is the subjective pole of both actions and consequences, not the objective side of the equation - bodily actions and things in the world.

Kassapa sees two basic possibilities - suffering is either self-made, or not-self-made. It seems that the Buddha interprets the former as saying that one who acts and and the one who subsequently experiences are identical; while the latter is saying that actor and experiencer are not linked. Indian logic also allows for both and neither to be the case. But neither the two basic cases, nor both, nor neither apply. Now because Kassapa is a naked ascetic and for some complicated reasons about the way he asks his questions, we can assume that he is a Jain.

Like most Indians of the time the Jains believed in a kind of rebirth. All forms of rebirth theory present one major difficulty. What links one life to another? If there is something which continues from life to life, then that is eternalism; and if there isn't then rebirth isn't really rebirth, and we only have this one life, which is nihilism. If one is concerned with exhausting karma in order to be liberated, a more specific question arises because if one dies what then is the link between actions and consequences? The Jains believed that humans possess a jiva, or life energy, which continues from life to life. The image for the way the jiva operates is that actions (kamma) produce dust, which sticks to the jiva weighing it down. Liberation can be achieved by removing the dust (through the experience of suffering) and by not creating any new dust - that is by not acting. The Jains believed that all actions - whether intentional or not - created dust. In addition they believed that all things possess some kind of consciousness, so eating even vegetables was causing harm. It was the Jains who first adopted the practice of ahiṃsa - non-harm. Many of the austerities carried out by Jains consisted primarily in non-action - long periods of immobility, extreme fasting, and holding the breath for example. Going naked meant not having to harm plants or animals for the sake of clothing. The idea was that through painful austerities one "burned up" one's karma, removing the dust from the jiva and allowing it to float up and be liberated.

Several suttas in the canon portray the Jain Sangha falling into dispute and confusion after the death of their leader Mahāvīra. This may be polemical, but it might provide the context for a Jain asking advice of the Buddha, and for being in such a hurry to know. Note that Kassapa is not asking "why do I suffer?" in any abstract way. He is asking really concerned with the question - "how do I understand suffering in order to be liberated from it?" In other words his outlook is not much different from a Buddhist, he just lacks the insight of dependent arising - which the Buddha tells him about.

So the question about the link between actions and consequences, and the origins of suffering have the same answer. Experiences, of which suffering is the paradigm for the unliberated, arise in dependence on causes. The key aspect of this is that when we experience pleasurable sensations (vedanā) we desire more (taṇha). This craving provides fuel (upādāna) for continued becoming (bhava). This results in the cycle of birth (jāti) old age and death (jarā-maraṇa) - that is to say that it causes us to suffer since all unenlightened experiences are (unsatisfactory) dukkha. Only if we understand this process, can we then begin to interrupt it because although vedanā is involuntary, taṇha is not.

We often choose the wrong course of action because we think that pleasure is happiness. We want happiness, but we pursue pleasure. In fact it is a double bind, because not only do we pursue pleasure, but the way offered by the Buddha appears as if it may not be entirely pleasurable: we have to give things up, we have to be disciplined etc. And because we also avoid discomfort we won't commit ourselves to practice while we see happiness in terms of pleasure. It's not until we really begin to see where happiness lies that we are able to overcome this reticence: to give up what must be given up, and to take up what must be taken up. Often we must do a lot of study and engage in discussions and debates to get to this point. We have to take apart our views about happiness in order to make room for practice. And a third fetter may have been put in place by this point. We may have burdened ourselves with many commitments by the time we come to our senses. We for instance have families and careers that we have a responsibility to. So then finding a compromise between our practice and our responsibilities can be quite difficult. But still it is important to understand what we are doing and why. We have this experience because it has arisen in dependence on causes. We have a choice about what conditions we set up in the future - so we can always practice to some extent.

*This story is from the Acelakassapa Sutta, Saṃyutta Nikāya 12:17 (PTS SN ii.18 ff). It can be found on page p.545 in Bhikkhu Bodhi's translation (single volume edition). The Sutta is also translated by Bhikkhu Thanissaro on Access to Insight. (Note that Thanissaro translates dukkha as 'stress' which can be a bit confusing).

image: modern day naked Jain asetics by Freddy Nagarvala.

Who's in charge?

Recently in the news I noticed a headline which suggested that cheap booze is killing people in the UK. The claim was being made by an official of the medical profession. Put this alongside the focus, last year, on the "epidemic" of obesity which claims that obesity is the number one health issue in the UK today, and the problem is cheap poor quality food. What do these two stories have in common? I think it it this: that eating and drinking are not involuntary but voluntary. But the news is telling us that we are not responsible for what we put in our mouths, that the fact that fatty foods and booze are cheap is what is causing the problem.

I consider that the main job of the media is entertainment. This is the only explanation for the choice of news stories, or at least the choice of which stories to give prominence. The front page and the lead story are always the one that will get the biggest emotional response from the audience. Since anger and fear are more easily provoked, and often more intensely felt, than other emotions, these are the ones they go for. There is even micro-targeting for what will outrage the target market so that papers will highlight different stories that will outrage their demographic.

So I never assume that anything is being reported for the information content, but only for its ability to rouse emotions. Which is why I seldom comment on the media, current events, or politics. But I see a trend here which is worth looking at. I think it does reflect an attitude in the UK, if not elsewhere, that are counter productive.

If I am fat then chances are I eat too much. I allow for some people having genetic disorders, and genuine medical problems, but the fact is that most people who are over-weight eat the wrong kind of food, and too much of it. Combined with lack of sufficient exercise, that is the obesity problem. It is true that fatty foods, and processed foods are often cheap, but this is not to say that good food is unaffordable. Most people have the choice, but they simply do not exercise it. Why? Well I think part of it is that we are being trained to think that we are not responsible for our actions. If the media constantly presents obesity as a problem of cheap fatty food, instead of greedy, undiscerning eaters then we start to think: "I'm not responsible". Similarly if I drink heavily it is not because there is cheap booze. It is because I choose to drink heavily. There may well be reasons behind that, but it is my choice. The attitude of not being responsible is fostered in the UK by ever increasing amounts of legislation and regulation which are aimed to prevent problems caused by not taking responsibility. The main area is what's called Health and Safety. Because of the large number of accidents in the workplace a series of measures have been implemented to stop people doing things which might result in accidents. And because you can't legislate against stupidity or unmindfulness, the rules try to make the world safe for stupid or unmindful people. In fact if you operate a workplace in the UK you have to assume that your employees and customers are very stupid and not at all mindful. This lowest common denominator has become the norm. The result is wasteful and infantilising. It seems to have encouraged the notion that safety is someone else's responsibility rather than that my safety is my responsibility. Now it may be argued that unscrupulous people put others at risk and that employees especially need to be protected, and I will grant that this is the case. But the next time you see someone operating a pneumatic drill or jack hammer, take a look at their ears. I suppose about 50% of the people I see are not wearing hearing protection - even though the H&S regs have made this freely and easily available to all. If there is some doubt over workplace safety there can be none over food and drink. As kids we eat what we are given, but as adults we choose.

The Buddhist program calls for us to be aware of our intentions, how they manifest in actions, and what the consequences of those actions are. This is not an easy path by any means. So often we can only see what's going on in retrospect when everything has turned to custard and we review what happened. Even then the urge is to blame other people, or other factors. As Buddhists when something goes wrong the first thing we should do is examine our own mind. What were our motivations? So often these are complex and largely unconscious. The practice of ethics (of behaving in accordance with ethical guidelines and confessing breaches of them) brings us hard up against our motivations. Sangharakshita has said there is no justification for sustaining a negative mental state. We may not be able to prevent one arising, because they arise in dependence on past conditions and causes, but we can surely recognise a negative mental state in the present and do something about it! So often we justify our irritation - and this justification is reinforced by those around us. But irritation is just aversion and nothing good can come from it. It is hatred. We need to face up to this, and pay attention to what happens when we go around letting irritation persist in our minds. I don't need to spell it out, because it's up to everyone to discover for themselves what it's like. But I can say that I don't enjoy it.

And ethics are not simply an exercise in good behaviour and finding approval. We may well find approval, but being scrupulously ethical may also meet with disapproval from an uncomprehending society. The point is to become more aware of how our minds actually work. To find the connections between our intentions and the consequences, and to see how our experience arises in dependence on causes. It is this that we urgently need to understand because the lack of clarity is causing us (and everyone else) to suffer. We particularly need to see how we response to pleasant sensations and to painful sensations. This leads is naturally into meditation techniques which help to strip away the distractions and the confusion and allow us to focus on understanding the nature of experience. But without a measure of calm and positivity we won't get far in meditation. The gross disturbances caused by breaking precepts means that our minds are unstable in meditation. We need to be ethical in order to experience what the texts sometimes call 'non-remorse' (avippaṭisāro). Discipline is for the purpose of non-remorse, and from non-remorse naturally arises happiness (pāmojja) and from this rapture (pīti), etc on up to knowledge and vision, and up to liberation. That is to say that ethics naturally leads us onto what Sangharakshita has called The Spiral Path, the progressive series of stages that lead to liberation the way that trickles of water may become rivulets, that join with others to become a stream, with many streams making a river, and eventually a mighty river that flows down to the sea. Just as a mighty river relies on its watershed of many tiny streams, so the process of liberation begins with ethical observances which, reflected on, give insights into how experience works.

We cannot afford to buy into the "it's not my problem" mentality. Everything we do is up to us, and it is we who have to live with the consequences.


image: Mail Online

Buddhism and Religion

I've lived in Britain* for about seven years now, and one thing that has stood out for me about living here is the different preoccupations of the British. They are preoccupied with status in a way that, as a Kiwi**, I find baffling. One manifestation is 'class', which is a subject all of it's own! Stemming from this is the scrutiny of schools and education - where you went, where you send your kids, who teaches what - it's always in the news! One of the things that really stand out as different here is religion. The history of religion in Britain is complex and rich. We are left however with a rare thing in the Western world which is that the head of state, is also the head of an established (that is to say an official state) church. I've been a subject of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II (left) all my life, but I hadn't even noticed that she's the head of a church as well until I moved here. Christianity is everywhere: the towns are full of churches - some of them centuries old; state media must broadcast religious content, and state schools must offer religious education. Yes, the remit has been broadened out in recent times to include "other" religions, but the proportion still reflects that mad Victorian Melvil Dewey's classification system: Christianity 200-289; Other religions 290-299; (Buddhism is 294.3 in case you're wondering).

Another thing I've noticed is that when the media talk about Religion, they generally mean first Christianity, and second other Abrahamic religions. A kind of third category of Atheistic Materialist Humanism exists, since the atheists are defined by their sometimes fervent lack of belief in God. Buddhism is understood to be a religion, along with "other" religions like Hinduism, but doesn't get much air time. A couple of exceptions are Vishvapani's occasional 2.5 minute appearances on Radio 4's Thought for the Day slot, and Melvin Bragg's In our Time which looked at Buddhism's popularity for 45 minutes in 2002 - enough to keep up our Dewey proportions.

If you ask Google to define religion (which you do by typing "define: religion") you get much the same thing. The majority of entries emphasise divinity, the supernatural, and/or use terms drawn exclusively drawn from Christianity. In other words the internet generally reflects the idea that Christianity is the model of what a religion is (what George Lakoff calls a prototype for the category). 'Other' religions are recognised as religions by Westerners in so far as they resemble Christianity. But does Buddhism fit into this scheme? We have to answer yes, and no.

Pragmatically yes, Buddhism does resemble Christianity (in some ways). Like Christians we gather together for acts of worship. During that worship many Buddhists pray for salvation. The Buddha is not a creator God, and Buddhism recognises no creator God, but he is capable of offering us salvation. For some Buddhists there is no way forward except through the intervention of a Buddha, for others a Buddha is insufficient and salvation requires the intervention of a human teacher. Like Christians some Buddhists believe that without someone to lead the way (a Christ-like figure) no salvation is possible. I may be accused of being controversial for using 'salvation' - a term drawn from Christianity - where I might have used, for example, 'liberation' or 'Enlightenment'. But since the liberation cannot, seemingly, be attained on one's own, then we are being saved by the (supernatural) 'other'. Part of the ambiguity revolves around the multifaceted nature of Buddhist belief which is so broad that the varieties are bewildering. You personally might not believe any of the above. But this does not make it untrue. Furthermore the Buddhist scriptures are full of references to the supernatural: to ESP like powers, to levitation and magic of various kinds (even if only to ban their use by monks). 'Hindu' gods such as Brahma, Indra, and Agni simply abound; and animistic spirits like yakkhas, nāgas, appear on almost every page of the Canon. So in these senses at least Buddhism really does resemble other religions.

However in the rational West Buddhism is not a religion. Westerners, often refugees from organised (especially, state) religion are attracted to the Buddhadharma, but loath to take up the seemingly less rational aspects of it. So a kind of sanitised version of Buddhism emerges where references to the supernatural are seen as "mythic" or "archetypal" and thereby explained away. They may still inspire us, mostly they don't, but we don't have to take them literally. Often the non-literal attitude to the supernatural creates a seeing separation between 'us' and what have been called 'ethnic Buddhists'. However this is complicated when leaders, such as the founder of my order, regularly have (or at least had) what are described as mystical experiences involving personal meetings with various supernatural spirits. (See The Rainbow Road for an account of some of Sangharakshita's experiences). Mystical experiences aside (preferably), we focus on the rational, on the common sensical, teachings. The teachings in other words that appeal to the belief system that we have absorbed from birth from the surrounding culture. One of the main influences on surrounding culture is Protestant Christianity with a dollop of the European Enlightenment. This emphasises personal religion, plainness, chaste morality, distrust of papal (i.e. human) authority in favour of the biblical (i.e. textual) authority, hard work, and rationality. Indeed here are many of the things against which the spirit rebels, and over which the British are conflicted. Buddhism in the west, and in particular the FWBO, has been accused of being Protestant Buddhism. There is truth in this, but it deserves its own post. I suspect that Buddhism in predominantly Catholic countries will look quite different, just as French philosophy is very different from British philosophy.

The upshot is a Buddhism which tends to suppress the supernatural in favour of the rational, the personal in favour of the cosmic, the visionary in favour of the moral, and magic in favour of hard work. It doesn't look much like religion despite having Protestantism as an influence. And Buddhists of this ilk have carried on the venerable Buddhist tradition of writing polemics against the others - with Sangharakshita, despite his mystical experiences, being a great exponent of it. These kind of Buddhists tend not to see Buddhism as a religion. I am in this camp, despite being aware of the kinds of conditions that give rise to this belief - which is to say I admit that I'm not very original in thinking this.

Last week I argued that Buddhism, at least by Bryan Magee's definition, is not a philosophy and that the Buddha was not a philosopher. Prompting at least one Professor of Philosophy to admit that he's not a philosopher by that definition either! My own view, although I acknowledge that this is far from universal, is that Buddhism is not a religion either. What's left?

I think the fact that this is a question at all reveals much about the way the discourse is framed. Buddhism must fit into preconceived categories. The fact that it doesn't creates a cognitive dissonance, a discomfort that cries out for resolution - just like a dominant seventh chord cries out for the tonic to create the classic "amen" of the perfect cadence. Many a contemporary composer deliberately chooses harmonies that eliminate the possibility of the perfect cadence, leaving the listener adrift and uncertain. A metaphor for our times I am sure. So I'm going to leave it up in the air. The Buddha himself repeatedly said that he was only interested in suffering, the cause of suffering, the end of suffering, and the way to bring that end about.

Notes

* The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the official name for the region. Great Britain includes the kingdoms of England and Scotland, and the principality of Wales. Britain, technically, is only England and Wales. People in England, apparently, think of themselves as "British". England and Scotland have had a single monarch since 1603 - which the Scots appear to be very bitter about. The Prince of Wales is usually eldest son of the monarch of the UK (not sure what happens when there is no male heir).

** A "Kiwi" is someone from New Zealand. The Kiwi being a large fat, flightless, almost blind, nocturnal bird that eats worms and grubs, and is on the brink of extinction. It just happened to grace the lid of the (New Zealand made) boot polish of choice in WWI which created the association with the hapless bastards from down-under who went to fight for the King in Europe in 1914-18, only to be slaughtered on the beaches of Turkey in a futile exercise dreamt up by incompetent generals - thereby helping to forge a national identity distinct from Olde Mother England. We will remember them.

Reading

There is a good discussion of Buddhism as a religion in Land of No Buddha: Reflections of a Sceptical Buddhist, by Professor Richard Hayes (a man of many aliases and a fellow member of the WBO known in these circles as Dayāmati - Compassionate Mind). Pgs 142-150. I can also recommend his blog: New City of Friends.

Buddhism and Western Philosophy : the Fundamental Mismatch

Following on from last week I want to continue the theme of ontology. This week I want to look at the differing attitudes to ontological speculation in early Buddhism and Western Philosophy generally. It seems to me that there is an almost irreconcilable difference between the two approaches. I've been sparked off by reading Confessions Of A Philosopher by Bryan Magee (left) . Here's what he says philosophy is about:

"The ur-question of philosophy throughout most of its history has been ‘what, ultimately, is there?’ This was the dominant question for the pre-Socratics, and it has underlain, then it has not dominated, most of the best philosophy since. In pursuit of an answer, philosophers have asked a multitude of subsidiary questions, such as ‘what is the nature of physical objects? What is space? What is causal connection? What is time?’ And by a natural progression from this they have become deeply exercised about the possibility of human knowledge: ‘How can we find out these things? Can we know any of them for certain? If so, which? And how can we be sure we know when we do know?’" (Magee p.86)

Magee puts this definition forward in his explanation that the so-called Oxford School, aka Linguistic Philosophy, really isn't philosophy at all. I want to use this paragraph as a jumping off point for comparison of early Buddhism (the narrow definition is necessary) and Western Philosophy, and to show that Buddhism, at least early Buddhism, is also not really philosophy at all.

In the west the primary question then is "what is there?" The assumption is that there is something "there", i.e. it assumes that we are a subject having an experience of an object. Early Buddhism too acknowledges this view point and sees humans as experiencing subjects being aware of objects. In particular we find the oft repeated formula that vedanā arises in dependence on contact between a sense object, a sense organ, and sense consciousness; and from vedanā all of the other functions of consciousness (or at least the functions relvant to the Buddhist project). Contemporary Buddhist discourse often tries to play down or eliminate this duality, but it is inherent in the early Buddhist texts. We have experiences of something.

However there is a fundamental difference in attitude towards the objective pole of experience. For philosophers the nature of 'what is there' is at the forefront. They enquire into the nature of the objects and the relationships between them. Even those that accept that to a large extent what we are talking about is a mental representation of some perceived reality, are still interested in what can be known and/or said about that external reality. Magee himself is not content to accept that nothing can be known for certain about Reality, but strives to find the limits of such knowledge. This is the broad subject area of metaphysics - the study of what is beyond physics. He describes more than once his disappointment that he was unable to persuade Karl Popper into the field of metaphysics.

Early Buddhism whilst acknowledging objects, has nothing much more to say about them - I know of nothing but leave open the possibility that I have not yet found it, or over looked something. The vast corpus of texts focus almost entirely on the experience, that is the subjective pole of contact. It is our response to sensations (vedanā - literally 'the known') that occupies the attention of the Buddha and early Buddhists, the cascade of mental functions and phenomena that follow from vedanā. I've harped on the Buddhists use of the word 'loka' lately so it should be familiar to my readers. It does not mean the objective world in most cases, but the subjective. When the Buddha is called "lokavidū" (in the Buddha Vandana for example) - the knower of the world - this does not mean that he knows about worldly things, but that he has fully understood his own world, his self-constructed world. He understands how experiences arise and pass away.

This is where we must specify early Buddhism - by which I mean the earliest strands of Buddhism largely represented by the Pāli texts, but with fragmentary parallels in Gāndhārī and Sanskrit, as well as translations into Chinese, and to some extent Tibetan and some Central Asian languages. Later on, although not that late, at least one strand of Buddhism began to think in terms of actually existent objective entities. This strand was called Sarvāstivāda after the Sanskrit phrase "sarvaṃ asti - everything exists". Perhaps because India had philosophers as well, the Buddhists got sucked into creating and systematising theories about reality (or worse, Reality), but this drew them well away from what seem to be the concerns of the early texts.

Where there is a quest for knowledge in philosophy it is knowledge of reality, knowledge of the the objective world. Questions of Truth and Authority revolve around this notion of a reality (or Reality) external to us in which we participate. There is a great deal of mileage in this. After all we to a large extent share experiences, and we can communicate about them. Technology relies on observations of objects and their relationship: from the earliest tools, to working metals and clays, to the hi-tech of atom smashers and the internet, these are all successes of the view that objects are real and knowable. Technology is not simply a matter of mental phenomena. If we dismiss the objective world out of hand, then we run the risk of appearing (and actually being) silly.

However once again the Buddha seems to have been preoccupied with other matters - generally speaking in the nature of experience, and more specifically in the nature of suffering or unpleasant experience. And not just in the content of experience, but in the mechanics of it. In the process by which we have experiences. This becomes apparent when we take an overview of the teachings on the khandhas, which Sue Hamilton has described as the "apparatus of experience". It's not that objects are denied. The observation that we can only know what we can experience, is shared by Western thinkers. It's that the Buddha's project was to end suffering, and not to make samara more pleasent or livable. Technology was beside the point to the Buddha, even if he had not adopted the lifestyle of a traditional wanderer. The focus, as I explained in Life, the Universe and Everything [16 Jan 2009], is suffering, it's causes, it's ceasing, and the ways one can make it cease. No technology is required to do this, because it is all about understanding how the experience of suffering arises from vedanā.

I would suggest then that Buddhism is not, or at least not in its earliest known texts, a philosophy, and the Buddha was not a philosopher, at least not in the terms given by Bryan Magee. The Buddha appears not to have been interested in the central questions of philosophy, and they have no bearing on the method of Buddhism - the object is immaterial compared to our experience of it, and how we understand that experience.

If Buddhism is not a philosophy, this begs the question, is it a religion? A subject for another rave...


Reading

• Magee, Bryan. 1997. Confessions Of A Philosopher. London: Pheonix.

The World and What Exists

Some time back I wrote a post about the early Buddhist attitude to ontology - the issue of what exists, and what the nature of that existence is. I argued that ontology plays no part in the Buddha's presentation of his teaching. However in a note to the Flower Sutta (SN 22:94; PTS S iii.138-140) Bhikkhu Bodhi, one of the foremost authorities on Theravāda Buddhism, states "The Buddha's utterances at 22:94, for example, show that he did not hesitate to make pronouncements with a clear ontological import when they were called for" (Bodhi 2000 : 734, n.29). I want to look at key passages in this sutta, and examine the claim that they have an "ontological import".

The Flower Sutta begins like this:

Sāvatthinidānaṃ. ‘‘Nāhaṃ, bhikkhave, lokena vivadāmi, lokova mayā vivadati. Na, bhikkhave, dhammavādī kenaci lokasmiṃ vivadati. Yaṃ, bhikkhave, natthisammataṃ loke paṇḍitānaṃ, ahampi taṃ ‘natthī’ti vadāmi. Yaṃ, bhikkhave, atthisammataṃ loke paṇḍitānaṃ, ahampi taṃ ‘atthī’ti vadāmi’’.

At Sāvatthi: Bhikkhus I don't dispute with the world, the world disputes with me. A Dhammavādin doesn't quarrel with anyone in the world. That which the wise in the world agree "it does not exist (na atthi), I too say "it doesn't exist". That which the wise in the world agree "it exists" (atthi), I too say "it exists".

Dhammavādī is an adjective which describes someone who professes, or speaks, Dhamma. Vāda is an argument, view, or ideology; and the -in suffix (vādin) is a possessive - someone who has that view. In my translation I've adopted Dhammavādin (the uninflected form) because it is on the model of Theravādin, or Yogacārin and should be familiar enough. I quite like the term Dhammavādin.*

The sutta continues by asking what it is that the wise agree doesn't exist in the world? The answer is forms, feelings, perceptions, volitions, and consciousness that are permanent, stable, eternal, not subject to change do not exist in the world. These are of course the five khandhas, aka the apparatus of experience. What the wise agree as existing in the world are khandhas that are impermanent, suffering and subject to change.

Taken at face value this passage we might read this as an ontological statement. However I think we need to be quite careful. The problem is with the word loka. Literally it means 'world', and Bhikkhu Bodhi is clearly taking it to mean that the khandhas exist in some impermanent sense in the world (loke/lokasmiṃ). However in his long essay on the word on 'loka' Jan Gonda (1966) shows that the original meaning of the word was something like 'the visible world' or 'the world of experience'. The original image is one of a clearing in a forest - loka is what can be seen clearly, what appears to the mind. On the physical level this means the sensual world. However it also has the connotation that we have in English with regard to the world - one can live in 'one's own world' for instance. In this case the meaning is more personal, it is a psychological term. Gonda is concerned with Vedic literature which predates the Buddha, but he establishes the metaphorical/psychological use of the word. Sue Hamilton (2000) has shown that this is also how the Buddha uses the world loka. Hamilton links loka and khandha together as part of an elaborate extended metaphor developed by the Buddha for describing the subjective pole of experience.

So I would paraphrase the above as: in the world of experience, there is nothing in that experience which is lasting, satisfying, or independent of experience. Read in this way there is nothing here of ontological import. Bhikkhu Bodhi is mislead by reading loka literally rather than metaphorically. I think the Buddha was an empirical realist - he has no explicit quarrel with the idea that there are objects of the senses, but he has nothing definite or positive to say about such objects or their natures.

To play the devils advocate for a moment, if we were to accept Bhikkhu Bodhi's assertion that the Flower Sutta has something ontological to say, then what would it be saying? Presuming also that Bhikkhu Bodhi, going along with orthodox Theravada doctrine, accepts that the khandhas are a complete definition of reality, then what is being said in this sutta is that nothing definite can be said about the reality that Bhikkhu Bodhi is thinking of. In this view nothing at all is stable. There is nothing in this view on which to pin an ontology. Nothing exists in fact. So accepting the proposition we are lead to a paradox - one that is often overlooked. The way out of this is provided by Hamilton. What the Buddha is describing is not reality but experience. If reality really were so fluid we could not experience it. By necessity we must water down the statement that 'everything changes' to 'everything changes, but some things change slowly enough for us to experience them as persisting'. In fact everything that we experience as a something, must change slowly else we wouldn't experience it as a something. If something is there one second and gone the next, we usually assume that it was a trick of the mind (recalling that the Buddha had only his bare senses and no camera or other recording equipment!). So things must actually exist for a time in order for us to experience them.

However Hamilton's is a more elegant view. It is our experience of things which is changing from moment to moment, which is never satisfying. The fact that our experience changes from moment to moment says nothing about the nature of reality. It is a comment on the nature of consciousness and awareness. This is a statement that can be taken at face value, without having to back off to allow for practicalities. In fact it has important practical implications for Buddhists in the sense that it directs our attention not to the world as such, but to the world of experience.

The sutta later describes each of the khandhas as "loke lokadhammo", which Bikkhu Bodhi translates as "a world-phenomena in the world". It is this that the Buddha has awoken to (abhisambujjhati) and realised (abhisameti). If we read loka as something more like 'world of experience' then the Buddha is saying that he has understood the elements of experience in the world of experience. I think we can see this as further vindication of Hamilton's approach to the subject. Her view is that the khandhas are not the sum total of existence, but the elements of, or by which we have, experiences. What the Buddha was interested in was understanding the very process whereby we have experiences, and why we misinterpret them to our detriment. The nature of the world as an externally existing 'something' (kiñci) is not relevant to this question, because the Buddha, like many Western thinkers, took the view that we could not directly touch that something. We have only the information of our senses and what our mind makes of them. It is by understanding the mechanics of the process - by watching it in action - and disentangling ourselves from the stories we tell about experience, that we can free ourselves from the erroneous conclusions that cause us suffering.

Notes

* Members of the Western Buddhist Order are known as Dharmacārī or Dharmacāriṇī which are, respectively, the masculine and feminine nominative singular of the adjective dharmacārin. Dharma is familiar, and cāra means "going, motion, progression, course; proceeding; practising". The -in suffix, as above, is a possessive. So dharmacārin describes someone who is practising the Dharma. Dharmacārin is the stem or uninflected form and therefore gender neutral. I have argued, so far unsuccessfully, that the WBO should adopt this usage rather than the gender specific terms.

Reading

• Bodhi. 2000. The Connected Discourses of the Buddha : a Translation of the Saṃyutta Nikāya. Boston : Wisdom Publications.
  
• Gonda, J. 1966. Loka : World and heaven in the Veda. Amsterdam, Noord-Hollandsche U.M.
• Hamilton, Sue. 2000. Early Buddhism : a new approach. The I of the beholder. Richmond, Surrey : Curzon.

See also: To be or not to be : the problem with ontology. Jayarava's Raves 31-10-2008


image: World map from ancientworldmaps.blogspot.com

Words in mantras that end in -e

Anyone familiar with Buddhist mantras will be familiar with the number of words that end in -e. They constitute something of a mystery as they don't make sense grammatically or semantically, and explanations of them are obviously ad hoc (i.e. made up on the spot). For instance the Heart Sūtra mantra:

gate gate paragate parasaṃgate bodhi svāhā

Compare to this to the dhāraṇī offered by the Medicine King Bodhisattva in the White Lotus Sūtra:

anye manye mane mamane citte carite same samitā viśānte mukte muktatame same aviṣame samasame jaye kṣaye akṣaye akṣiṇe śānte samite dhāraṇi ālokabhāṣe pratyavekṣaṇi nidhiru abhyantaraniviṣṭe abhyantarapāriśuddhimutkule araḍe paraḍe sukāṅkṣi asamasame buddhavilokite dharmaparīkṣite saṃghanirghoṣaṇi nirghoṇi bhayābhayaviśodhani mantre mantrākṣayate rute rutakauśalye akṣaye akṣayavanatāye vakkule valoḍra amanyanatāye svāhā ||
(Vaidya 1960 : 233)

Note how many of these words have the -e ending. Kern, the first person to translate the Lotus into English, in 1884, links many of these names to the Great Mother Goddess.

“All of these words are, or ought to be, feminine words in the vocative. I take them to be epithets of the Great Mother, Nature or Earth, differently called Aditi, Prajñā, Māyā, Bhavānī, Durgā. Anyā may be identified with the Vedic anyā, inexhaustible, and synonymous with aditi. More of the other terms may be explained as synonymous with prajñā (eg pratyaveksaṭi), with nature (kṣāye akṣāye), with earth
(dhāraṇī).” (Kern p.371, note 3)

For the uninitiated perhaps a brief explanation about inflected languages is in order. Where in English we use prepositions such as "of, for, to, by, with, on, in, from" etc. to indicate the relationship between words in a sentence, inflected languages add different endings to the words. The easiest way will be to show. Let's take a word that has a stem in -a: buddha. (It's actually a past-participle meaning awoken or understood). So somewhat simplistically we could show the endings and their 'meaning':

• buddhaḥ - nominative - the Buddha.
• buddhaṃ - accusative - the Buddha as the patient of a verb: e.g. I saw the Buddha.
• buddhena - instrumental - by means of, or with the Buddha.
• buddhāya - dative - to or for the Buddha. e.g. namo Buddhāya - homage to the Buddha.
• buddhāt - ablative - from the Buddha
• buddhasya - genitive - of the Buddha; the Buddha's... (possessive)
• buddhe - locative - in or on the Buddha
• buddha - vocative - O Buddha. (address or invocation)

There are many paradigms like this in Sanskrit. Each noun has dual forms in addition to singular and plural. Masculine, feminine and neuter nouns vary slightly, and stems can end in any monophthong vowel or certain consonants - meaning that there are very many different forms to remember! The -e ending is typically associated with three grammatical forms. In the case of the word 'gata', which is a part-participle and declined like a noun, the possibilities are:

• feminine vocative
• masculine locative (see above) or vocative

Gaté therefore most likely means something like "O she who is gone", i.e. it is in the vocative case. This is what Edward Conze thought. The other possibilities are open, but the subject of the Heart Sūtra is Prajñāpāramitā - who is feminine both in gender and grammatically. But when all the words in a mantra, as above, are in the feminine vocative the string of words is not grammatically sensible - they do not make a sentence. The usual explanation is some variation on the idea that these are strings of invocations to deities or qualities. Kern obviously thought something like this and expected feminine vocatives - but note that he is expecting Hindu goddesses in a Buddhist text. To some extent they do appear, but he may not, in 1884, had a very clear idea of the differences between Buddhism and Hinduism

An unspoken assumption here is that the mantras are written in Classical Sanskrit. This is the language which was formalised and polished (ie 'saṃskṛta' - literally "made complete") in about the 4th century BCE, and became the standard language for literary and religious compositions in India. Given that some of the texts, the Heart Sūtra for one, are written in Classical Sanskrit this seems at first glance a reasonable assumption. However we know that Buddhists before the Gupta Empire (4th - 6th centuries CE) wrote in a Sanskritised version of the Prakrit, or spoken dialect, locally spoken. This literary language which is now known as Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit actually shows massive variations over time and place. The name Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit (BHS) was coined by Frank Edgerton who wrote a grammar and dictionary for it. Many well known sūtras were written in BHS including the Mahāvastu, Lotus, Golden Light, Gaṇḍhavyūha, laṅkkāvatātra, Sukhāvatīvyūha (larger and smaller), the Large Perfection of Wisdom, and the Diamond. Śantideva's Śikṣāsamuccaya which is made up of quotes from many Mahāyāna sūtras is almost entirely in BHS. In addition, notably, Buddhists reverted to BHS during the Tantric period after the 6th century.

BHS is full of irregularities particularly in the grammatical endings. In Classical Sanskrit for nouns with stems ending in -a the nominative singular is -aḥ (e.g. devaḥ, the god, or the king), whereas is Pāli the ending is -o, (e.g. devo), while in Māgadhī the nom sg. was -e (deve). The variety of BHS nom sg. endings for nouns with -a stems found in extant manuscripts includes: -o, -u, -ū, -a, -ā, -aṃ, and -e. The -e ending is also used for the vocative singular as in Sanskrit. In the case of the Gāndhārī Prakrit, at least in written form, the variety of nom. sg case endings has been described as "bewildering", and it seems as though final vowels may have been de-emphasised to the point of almost disappearing in speech, which caused confusion amongst scribes (Salomon p.130-131)

So if the mantras were written in Prakrit or perhaps BHS then we might suspect that they were simply words in the nominative singular. It might better explain the long lists of words such as the Lotus Sūtra example quoted above, although the Heart Sūtra mantra might still best be seen as an invocation. If one is stringing together words then the most basic form is usually the nominative singular.

But why would Sanskrit texts preserve a form that is aberrant from the point of view of Classical Sanskrit grammar? To answer this I cite the example of a Prakrit feature that is preserved in many Sanskrit texts, over quite a long period of time and including in indirect borrowings.

The Arapacana alphabet is the alphabet of the Gāndhārī prakrit. We know that at least from the first couple of centuries of the common era it was used as a mnemonic device, where each letter stands for a key word that is used in a line of verse of a poem. Most extant examples are either obviously a practical reminder about a meditation practice, or derive from one of these. Having been composed in Gāndhārī, perhaps as a stand alone poem*, it was imported into Sanskrit texts such as the Lalitavistara Sūtra and the Large Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra**. In the case of the Lalitavistara a version exists which was fully Sanskritised, but there is also a version in Chinese translation which retains the Gāndhārī order (see Brough 1977). In the Large Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra all known versions retain the Gāndhārī order. In the Gaṇḍhavyūha Sūtra the Gāndhārī order is retained but the phonetic connection between the alphabet and the keywords is lost. In the Mahāvairocana Abhisaṃbodhi Tantra (MAT) the alphabet is Sanskrit, but the vowels except 'a' are left off in imitation of the Gāndhārī alphabet (which only uses one sign for initial vowels, which is then modified by diacritics to make all the other vowels). It's reasonably obvious that the source for the alphabet in the MAT is the Large Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra, which means that it is twice removed from Gāndhārī, a language not spoken in India for several centuries by the time the MAT was composed! Perhaps not surprisingly there was a streak of conservatism by Buddhists when composing texts, especially with regard to mantra.

So there is a possibility here: if the mantras were in fact composed in Māgadhī or Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit, or some other dialect where a nom sg. in -e was used, then it is likely that the original form of the mantra would have been retained even as the text itself was Sanskritised. It might even have stayed in that form when borrowed by other texts. This means that the form in the mantras could be nominative and strings of words in nom sg., or at least intended to be. Perhaps a closer examination of the words, without the assumption of Classical Sanskrit might lead to a better understanding. For the moment the puzzle remains, and my conjecture though plausible is not a final answer to the problem - if anything I may have muddied the waters!

* we're still waiting for a full translation and analysis of a fragment of manuscript containing the earliest known version of the Arapacana. See the publications page of the Bajaur Collection of Buddhist Kharoṣṭhī Manuscripts for a preliminary report.

** The Large Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra has versions in 18,000, 25,000 and 100,000 lines which are distinguished chiefly by the number of repetitions and the thoroughness of spelling out variations on a theme. The chief feature of the version in 100,000 lines is the lack of the use of "etc" or "and so on". Conze has published an English translation largely based on the 25,000 line version, but which draws freely on the others due to the "execrable state" of the manuscripts.

Reading

• Boucher, Daniel. 1998. Gāndhārī and the early Chinese Buddhist translations reconsidered : the case of the Saddharmapuṇḍarīkasūtra. Journal of the American Oriental Society., 118 (4), p.471-506.
• Brough, John. 1977. The arapacana syllabry in the old Laita-vistara. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies. 40 (1), p.85-95.
• Vaidya, P.L. 1960. Saddharmapuṇḍarīkasūtram (Buddhist Sanskrit Texts, 6). Darbhanga : The Mithila Institute. Online: www.sub.uni-goettingen.de.
• Conze, Edward. 1975. (trans.) The large sutra on perfect wisdom ; with the divisions of the Abhisamayālaṅkāra. (Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass : 1990)
• Edgerton, Franklin. 1953. Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Grammar and Dictionary. New Delhi : Munshiram Monoharlal, 2004.
• Kern, H. 1884. The saddharma-pundarīka or the lotus of the true law. (Delhi : Motilal Banarsidass, 1980) (1st pub. 1884 Sacred books of the East Vol.21)
• Nattier, Jan. 2005. A few good men : the Bodhisattva Path According to the Inquiry of Ugra (Ugraparipṛcchā). (University of Hawaii Press)
• Salomon, Richard. 1999. Ancient Buddhist scrolls from Gandhāra : the British Library Kharoṣṭhī Fragments. London : The British Library.

See also my bibliography of publications on the Arapacana.


30 July 2010.

See also Some Additional Notes for a summary of: Cohen, Signe. "On the Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit/Middle Indic Ending "-e" as a 'Magadhism'," Acta Orientalia Vol. 63 (2002), p.67-9.

13 Aug 2015

I was discussing the correct way of writing a Fudō mantra and realised something about the mantras in the Mahāvairocana Abhisaṃbodhi Tantra. MAT is probably the first proper tantric text. The mantra in question is: namaḥ samantavajrāṇāṃ hāṃ. Most of the mantras begin with either this or namaḥ samantabuddhāṇāṃ.

The Sanskrit is slightly peculiar. Namaḥ means 'bow, pay homage, etc' (from namati 'he bows'). Samanta means 'universal, all, entire'. The slightly weird bit is the grammatical inflexion. Usually we bow *to* something as in namo buddhāya. The inflection is the dative singular case, "homage to the buddha". Here the inflection is the genitive plural. samantavajrāṇāṃ means 'of all the vajras'. So it looks like it says "homage of all the vajras". Really we want namaḥ samantavajrebhyaḥ "homage to all the vajras". So this is in fact a very interesting thing. Because in Prakrit (like Pāḷi), unlike Sanskrit, the dative merged with the genitive. So this proves that the mantras in the MAT were composed in Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit. And this bolsters the argument here that we should consider the -e ending to be Prakrit, or Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit, rather than Pāṇinian Sanskrit.

Philological odds and ends I

Regular readers will know that I find words and the way they communicate meaning to us a fascinating subject. So I am always on the look out for interesting etymologies and derivations. In other posts I have mentioned alternate ways of understanding: yathābhūta, brahmacarya, dharaṇī, upādāna, ariyasacca, brahmavihara, and hīnayāna. There are one or two stories about words, that don't quite rate a post on their own, but that I would like to share.


Tathāgata

This is how the Buddha most often refers to himself. So you'd think that it would be clear and well understood, in fact the PED notes that in Pāli texts even non-Buddhists were supposed to understand it. However Buddhaghosa gives as many as eight possible derivations, of which two are most common. Firstly it is analysed as tathā + gata. Tathā is an adverb meaning "thus, so, in that way, likewise". Gata is a past-participle formed on the verbal root gam - gam if you don't know is wildly irregular, as a first person singular it is gacchāmi, as in "buddhaṃ saraṇaṃ gacchāmi". So this interpretation tells us that the noun means "thus-gone". This is not very helpful. Sometimes we are told that it means that the Tathāgata has gone to nibbāna, but this assumes that nibbāna is somewhere you can go, and this is not sustainable. PED notes that Mrs Rhys Davids suggested "he who has won through to the truth", but this is quite a leap from thus-gone.

A second, even less likely explanation analyses the word as tathā + āgata. This rests on a sandhi rule which says that ā + ā = ā, so it's not impossible. Āgata is again a past-participle, and means "come" (the ā- prefix indicates motion towards). In this case tathāgata is said to mean "thus-come", presumably a reference to the fact that a Tathāgata has manifested in the world (which has a Mahāyāna ring to it).

Prof. Richard Gombrich offers a way out. He points out (in the 2006 Numata lectures soon to be published as What the Buddha Thought by Equinox Publications) that as the second member of this kind of compound -gata loses its usual meaning and means simply 'being'. He gives an example from Coulson's Teach Yourself Sanskrit citragatā nārī means not "the woman has gone into the picture, but "the woman in the picture". On this model Gombrich suggests that tathāgata means something like "one like that". The fact the Buddha referred to himself as "one like that" is indicative of the impossibility of fully explaining his enlightened experience. Gombrich also notes that the term can apply to any enlightened person, for example at MN 1.140 :

Bhikkhus, when the gods... seek a bhikkhu who is liberated in mind, they cannot find anything... One thus gone (i.e. tathāgata) is untraceable here and now. (Alagaddūpama Sutta = MN 22, Ñāṇamoli, p.233)

On the same model we might say that another common epithet for the Buddha, sugata, probably means "one who is good or well".


Sūtra

I'm not sure who first realised that sūtra is a hyper-sanskritisation. I have seen it in a book by K.R. Norman who is an expert philologist and has published many detailed etymologies, but it seems to have become common knowledge. The story here is that the Buddhist use of the Sanskrit word sūtra is based on the mistaken notion that the Prakrit (especially Pāli) word sutta derives from the Sanskrit word sūtra. This is understandable since Pāli resolves almost all conjunct consonants to double consonants. But if you ever look at a Brahminical sūtra you can easily see that they are an entirely different genre of texts, with more in common with abhidhamma style texts - they are terse, almost like bullet points. There is none of the narrative style of the Buddhist sūtras. It is far more likely that sutta derives from another Sanskrit word, sūkta. Both sūkta and sūtra resolve to sutta in Pāli. Sūkta means well spoken from su + ukta. Su, as above, means "good or well". Ukta is a past participle formed (irregularly) on the verbal root vāc - speech or words. Sūkta is a name for the verses of the Vedas and it seems likely that this is another case of conscious imitation of Brahmins by Buddhists - other examples include Tevijja the Buddha's three kinds of special knowledge vs the three Vedas; and the three fires of greed, hatred and delusion vs the three sacred fires of the Vedic sacrificial enclosure. So the use sūtra by Buddhists derives from the early Prakrit traditions, and is called a hyper-sanskritisation because it seems like an over compensation - picking a familiar word and using that to make it sound pukka.

Śramaṇa

A śramaṇa (Pali samaṇa) was an ascetic practitioner in ancient India. In Buddhists texts they are very frequently contrasted with brāhmaṇa, the Brahmins, both ascetic and householders. The Buddha practised with śramaṇa teachers before his enlightenment and learnt meditation techniques from them. The root of the word is śrām meaning "to exert oneself, to labour, toil", but also "weariness". Incidentally it is the 'r' in the Sanskrit that forces the 'n' to become retroflex 'ṇ' and this is retained in the Pāli 'samaṇa'. Śrāma then, is toil, and a śramaṇa (short 'a' in this case) is one who toils, i.e. 'a toiler'. It can be used in various contexts so that Vedic texts for instance sometimes talk about exerting oneself in sexual intercourse, but most relevant to Buddhism is the exertion at tapas or the generation of heat, an ancient Vedic metaphor for ascetic practice. We also find it in the word āśrama (Anglicized to "asharam") - meaning a place of striving. What makes the word śramaṇa particularly interesting is that it found its way into English via quite a tortuous route.

Probably in its Prakrit form ṣamaṇa it was introduced into central Asia, where for instance in Tocharian it became ṣamāne. From where it made it's way to Chinese as sha men ( 沙门 or perhaps 沙弥 ) - a general term for Buddhist monks. Siberians then seem to have borrowed the word to describe their "shamans". It survives in the Evenki language, a member of the Tungus group of languages in Siberia as šamān. From here it entered the Russian vocabulary as shamán. In German this became schamane and then finally it was adopted in English in the familiar spelling, shaman, in 1698. The route is somewhat speculative, but plausible and makes for a good tale! This etymology is assembled from many sources, which contain a variety of spellings!

Loka

Loka is a word that gets quite a workout in Buddhist Pāli and Sanskrit. It is usually translated simply as 'world' but this can disguise its the background and connotations. The Sanskrit grammarians like to derive words as far as possible from notional verb roots. Loka is derived from the root lok. It means to see behold or perceive. It may be familiar to you in another form. In the name Avalokiteśvara it occurs in the word "avaloka" meaning 'look upon', hence the name in this form means "the Lord (īśvara) who looks upon [suffering beings with compassion]." Because of a fluidity around the syllables 'ra' and 'la' it is also related to the root rok meaning "light, lustre, brightness". The earliest uses, in the Ṛgveda, give the suggestion of a clear space in which one can see - perhaps a forest clearing. So the word has always had the connotation of perception and perceptual range - the world is just what one can see or percieve. It may be that this is an old Indo-European metaphor because we use world in this sense as well: e.g. "a world of his own". One of the Buddha's epithets in the Buddha Vandana is "lokavidhu" - knower of the world, ie one who knows his 'own world', or the 'perceptual world. In English the word comes to us, via Latin, in terms like location, local, and locus.


Gahapati/Gṛhapati

This is a term that is typically translated as house-holder but Jan Nattier points out that the implications of it are hidden by that translation. The term literally means house (gṛha) lord (pati) and she notes that there is a general consensus on translating it. However the context of use reveals that it indicates considerable financial means - Edgerton actually suggested "capitalist" in his dictionary of Buddhist Sanskrit. The term is also mentioned in lists of castes alongside brahmaṇa and kṣatriya, and the people to whom it is applied are usually merchants or guild leaders - Anathapiṇḍika's brother-in-law for instance is called gahapati. Nattier concludes that it most likely applies to someone of considerable influence and power, perhaps a "leading citizen" but who is not a member of the two higher castes. (Nattier, p.22ff.)


References

• Ñāṇamoli. 1995. The Middle Length discourses of the Buddha. Boston : Wisdom Publications.
• Nattier, Jan. 2003. A few good men : the bodhisattva path according to 'The inquiry of Ugra (Ugraparipṛcchā). Honolulu : University of Hawai'i Press.

See also:

• Philological Odds and Ends II: cakravartin, cintāmaṇi, yoniso manasikara, pāramitā, etymology.
• Philological Odds and Ends III: bodhisattva, anagārikā, samyak/mithyā (Pāli sammā/micchā)
• Philological Odds and Ends IV: vrata, mitra, kavi

Ego... Again

I have written a number of times on the subject of 'ego' (Ego in the Spiritual Life, The Problem of Self-preoccupation, Anatta in Context). On the whole I seem to take a different line to mainstream Buddhist teachers. After a discussion recently I wanted to revisit this subject. Regular readers will know that for the past year or so I have been developing a particular take on the Dharma. My approach stems from my answer the the question: "What is it that arises in dependence in causes?" My answer is that the emphasis in the early Buddhist texts is that it is dharmas that arise in dependence on causes, and that in this context dharmas should be understood as mental objects, that is the mental equivalent of the objects of the physical senses. And having pursued this line of enquiry through my practice I have some faith that it is a very useful approach.

Today I was talking with a friend today who was insistent that it is "egotism, and self absorption" that causes us to make the kinds of errors that cause us suffering. I want to explore this idea again in the light of my recent thinking. I believe that this idea has it's origins in the refrain:

yad anattā taṃ netaṃ mama neso ‘haṃ asmi na meso attāti

That which is non-self, this is not mine, it is not 'I', it is not my self.

We find this phrase again and again in the suttas, but it doesn't stand alone. It is said in reference to the process of cognition or experience: the khandhas, i.e. the apparatus of experience; or about the objects of the senses, i.e. the contents of sensory experience. Sue Hamilton points out that although the lists are enumerated separately the overall emphasis is the identification with experience as a whole. It should be noted that in the Pāli texts the Buddha never categorically denies the existence of a self. So, rehearsing the argument: the Buddha explained that the apparatus and contents of experience are impermanent, and therefore unsatisfactory, and therefore non-self, and thus we are mistaken if we identify ourselves with them. I have already explained (Anatta in Context) that in my view this can, and perhaps should, be linked to the search for the Absolute (brahman) through the Self (ātman) which was a feature of many śramaṇa sects as well as most brāhmaṇa sects. The Buddha seems to have eschewed the search for absolutes of either existence or knowledge, although some later Buddhist philosophers went down the road of looking for them.

So how would I characterise the problem of egotism? Firstly we could say that egotism is self absorption; and secondly it is tied up with seeing the self as a manifestation of the Absolute. My earlier post on selflessness deals with the problem of self absorption, and I have dealt with absolutist thinking as well. Here I want to look at the perception of selfhood in relation to dharmas.

Why do we experience a self? This is a very vexed and difficult question, and one that has been addressed in many different ways with many different results depending on starting assumptions and method of argument. I like the idea put forward by Antonio Damasio in his book The Feeling of What Happens. Damasio proposes that the mental map of the body and it's processes underlies the sense of self. The process of maintaining the body in an optimum state requires us to be aware of how the body is now, and how it is changing. The basic question the system must answer "is the current state better or worse for survival?" When we add to this awareness of mental states, and awareness of being aware, then something like a sense of being a self contained, self aware 'being' emerges. Continuity is important in keeping the body in it's optimum state. Note that sentience or even consciousness is not required for this because even a single celled organism is capable of maintaining it's internal state as close to optimum as the environment will allow. And this is part of the reason I like Damasio. No extra entity - no homunculus or 'little person in the head' as he calls it - is necessary for this maintenance, but a sense of continuity emerges from the complexity of the task in the case of higher animals. An awareness over time, and under different conditions, gives us survival fitness. The fact that we are aware of being in relation to the past, and with reference to possible futures is what gives us a sense of personal continuity. Damasio points out that the state of awareness that underlies this is not in fact continuous itself, but is constantly being constructed and reconstructed. The upshot is that we are capable of very complex and long term behaviour in order to maximise our wellbeing. We need not go to the extreme of logical positivist inspired behaviouralism and claim that there is no such thing as mind and that there is only behaviour. We may not fully understand consciousness as we experience it, but we need not dismiss it, or dismiss those aspects which we don't understand as non-existent! My point is that self-awareness helps us survive, and gives us choices. Damasio's theory doesn't take into account our social nature for instance, and the extent to which identity and behaviour are influenced by social factors.

It's important to be clear that anyone who abandons concern for their own wellbeing, and/or acts to harm themselves is not admirable. Selflessness has it's limits - we must be concerned for our wellbeing at some level. Although there may be times when one might sacrifice one's life for another, on the whole we need to care for ourselves. Someone who does not maintain a positive sense of self may allow others to manipulate them, or to exploit them. We have to make decisions about how we behave under various circumstances. To do this we must have a sense of what is important to ourselves, a sense of personal values. There are all too many horrific examples of what happens when we abdicate moral responsibility to others. In short we must be a self, must be a strong and positive self, in order to function well as an individual and in society. Selfishness on the other hand is a lack of awareness of others. The counterpoint between self and other, and how we impact on one another is addressed in the first three of the six perfections.

Where the Buddha helps is in identifying the mistaken conclusions we come to on the basis of our self-awareness. Self awareness comes from bodily sensations, and from mental experiences and representations of sensations. The problem of egotism then boils down to coming to wrong conclusions about the nature of experience. We might seek to re-experience previous pleasures, or to experience new pleasures. I suppose we have all done this and so we know the answer to the question of whether or not it works. Pleasure can't be sustained, no experience can be. Similarly we go to extraordinary links to insulate ourselves from suffering - we may even cut ourselves off from society and community in order to do this. And again, having tried to escape suffering we know that it doesn't work. The Buddha asks us to pay attention to those doubts that come up when our attempts to organise the universe to our satisfaction fail to pay off. Rather than coming up with a yet more elaborate plan for happiness we need to stop, as far as we can, and pay attention to how experience actually works. One of the things that I've noticed is how little control I have over what goes on around me - I can't stop myself from having experiences. Some are pleasant, some are not, most are kind of neutral, but the flow of experience is never ending, except perhaps in the deepest stages of sleep. Even in the very attenuated and refined experience of meditation there is experience - which was the subject of my post on Communicating the Dharma.

So for me it is not that helpful to characterise our fundamental problem in terms of ego, or egotism. Egotism is an effect not a cause. It is an effect of a mistaken relationship to our moment to moment experience. And to my mind the place to attack the problem is at the root. Indeed this is a common Buddhist metaphor - don't muck about pruning the tree of craving, pull out the roots of it! I don't think we address being self-referential if we don't address the nature of the experience of self, and this draws ironically us away from the personal. I'm not likely to enjoy having someone trying to undermine my sense of self, or tell me that my self is bad. However I can see the logic of the error in judgement with relation to the senses, and I'm drawn to trying to deal with this problem.

In fact although the rhetoric is quite different the methods are more or less the same: ethics and meditation. But so often an attack on ego has a ring of unkindness about it. It's as though we are being blamed for causing the problem in the first place. I recall a well known Zen Roshi who wrote about suicide that it is fundamentally a selfish and egotistical act! I was struck by the insensitivity of this so-called 'master'! I believe that if they really understood the choice that no one would choose suffering, or that in good circumstances anyone would see suicide as a solution to their problems. We suffer through ignorance not through informed choice, and sometimes that suffering can feel unbearable. So blame is hardly appropriate.

Similarly I don't think that examining cause and effect in the world is necessarily going to help much, although more than one of my colleagues have argued against me on this point. Sure, gravity makes things fall, for instance, and erosion will eventually wear away a mountain. The objects of experience do change if we wait long enough. But if the problem at it's root is our moment to moment relationship to experience, and if our experience is changing in each moment, then oughtn't we to look at the experience rather than the object of experience for insight? Another way of saying it might be to examine statements like "no thing arises" - this is common in Mahāyāna circles and is recorded in the first line of the Arapacana acrostic. In which sphere is this true? I think this is a straightforward proposition if we are talking about the realm of experience; but it is nonsensical if we are focussing on the objects of experience. And unfortunately many Buddhists end up saying nonsensical things about the objective pole of experience!

The problem is not ego in relation to the objects of experience, not even ego per se, it is the very nature of experience itself that is the root of our problems. This is where we can make a real difference.