Philosophical Detritus IV: Truth

"I swear by Almighty God to tell the truth,
the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."

—Traditional British courtroom oath

In this series of essays, fuelled by questions on the Quora website, I have been questioning the value of the legacy of certain abstract concepts in philosophy. I've argued for an epistemic-nominalist approach to abstraction, i.e. abstractions are ideas about things; they are not things in their own right. And I've tried to show that this means we have to reconsider the value of traditional metaphysics generally. No one has privileged access to reality; i.e. there is no epistemic privilege. And in view of this, I have explored how a pragmatic approach can at least net us a useful concept.

So far, I have applied this to the major concepts of "consciousness" and "reality". I have tried to show that commonly used definitions, including "common sense" definitions, are hopelessly confused and unhelpful. This is fueled by the long-standing, active, and growing dissensus on these abstract concepts, amongst professional philosophers. Philosophers not only lack agreement, but on these topics, they actively and vociferously disagree and are constantly coming up with new ways to disagree. Not only is the goal of a universal definition difficult, but the methods adopted virtually guarantee failure. Hence, we often fail to agree on important matters even after thousands of years of argument.

In this essay, I will tackle another legacy metaphysical concept from philosophy: "truth". Yet again, there is a profound and ongoing dissensus about what "truth" means and what value it holds. It seems obvious to us to ask, "What is true?" and "What is the truth?" But it is surprisingly difficult to answer such questions in a satisfying way. Beware, we are in deep, shark-infested waters here. There is a serious risk of drowning or being eaten alive. Let's dive in!

Truth

"True" is used in several senses, but the underlying sense of the word is "firm, reliable, certain, trustworthy." We are particularly concerned with the idea applied to statements and propositions; i.e. with telling the truth, or veracity.

When trying to define "true" and "truth", we immediately run into the problem of epistemic privilege. No one is in a position to state the truth with absolute certainty, because no one can possibly know what it is. And, if we don't know what truth is, then we don't know if any given statement is true or not. And yet we constantly make confident pronouncements on the truth of statements. I went most of my life not realising how utterly weird this situation is. Now I cannot unsee it. But I do think I can unfuck it, to some extent.

There are numerous competing definitions of "truth" that do not converge (this is always a bad sign). For example, we might invoke:

1. Correspondence Theory: Truth is a statement's accurate representation of objective reality.
2. Coherence Theory: Truth is the logical consistency of a statement within a larger system of beliefs.
3. Pragmatist Theory: Truth is what is useful, reliable, or works successfully in practice.
4. Consensus Theory: Truth is what is agreed upon by a specified group, often through ideal discourse.
5. Deflationary Theory: "Truth" is a redundant or logical concept that adds no substantial meaning beyond disquotation (e.g., " 'Snow is white' is true" just means snow is white).
6. Performative Theory: To call a statement true is to perform an act of endorsement or agreement.
7. Semantic Theory (Tarski): Truth is formally defined for a language by satisfying conditions like " 'Snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white."
8. Epistemic Theories: Truth is what is knowable or justifiable under ideal epistemic conditions.
9. Pluralist Theories: Different domains of discourse may require different truth properties (e.g., moral vs. factual truth).

All of these approaches have pros and cons. However, note that all the metaphysical definitions have the problem of epistemic privilege. For example, how can anything be said to represent "objective reality" when no one can possibly know what objective reality is? (If this is unclear, refer back to my essay on reality.) Defining "truth" in terms of "belief" fails because belief is a feeling about an idea, and belief can be false. And yet throwing out the concept of truth entirely seems too drastic.

I think we need to go back to basics. "Truth" is not just an abstract metaphysical concept; it's also a moral concept. Thus, we need to start by thinking about what morality is and why it has a claim on us. However, philosophy's problems also plague this topic. If anything, even after thousands of years of intellectual effort, there is an even greater dissensus around the concept of morality.

I believe we can do better than the present flailing around. To my mind, the place to start is (the late, great) Frans de Waal's work on morality in animals. Especially, his book:

• de Waal, Frans. (2013). The bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Amongst the Primates. W.W. Norton & Co.

De Waal's 2011 TED talk Moral Behavior in Animals is an excellent introduction to the main themes in the book and useful for the short videos of the relevant experiments. No one watching this can come away thinking that capuchin monkeys do not understand fairness, for example.

I've written at length about morality, in the light of reading de Waal:

• The Evolution of Morality. Introduction and Deontology. (18 November 2016)
• The Evolution of Morality. Two Pillars of Morality - Reciprocity (25 November 2016)
• The Evolution of Morality. Two Pillars of Morality - Empathy. (02 December 2016)

We begin with a simple fact that I highlighted in my 20th anniversary essay: humans evolved an obligatory social lifestyle. We evolved to live in communities, and rare outliers notwithstanding, humans are obliged by our nature to live in communities. And we are not alone in this. Chimps, bonobos, gorillas, and many other mammals are obliged to live in social groups.

A social lifestyle offers numerous evolutionary advantages. We are stronger as a collective than we are as individuals. Indeed, large-scale cooperation is our evolutionary superpower. I'm aware that I assert this in a general climate of ideological individualism and a hegemonic political ideology that despises collectivism and asserts slogans such as "there is no such thing as society". Nonetheless, Humans are social creatures who live in communities and form societies that have cultures.

In brief, de Waal identified two essential capacities shared by all social mammals (and some social birds, but I'll focus on mammals to keep it simple) that do a lot of work in explaining the evolutionary origins of morality: i.e. empathy and reciprocity. These capacities are minimally required for the social lifestyle of mammals. Note that social insects are a totally different story.

Empathy allows us to intuitively know how other individuals are feeling from interpreting (and internally modelling) cues such as posture, facial expressions, tone of voice, direction of gaze, and so on. This allows us to accurately judge the emotional impact of our actions on others. And their actions on each other. And this is the basis of moral rules about how we treat others. We don't need an external standard or judge to tell us that our actions resulted in happiness or hurt feelings. We simply know from observation. While the psychopath may not care, they still know.

Reciprocity involves responding in kind. If someone shares with us, we share with them. If someone is kind to us, we respond with kindness. Social animals keep track of what kind of relations they have with others, but also the relations of the rest of the group has with each other. It's vitally important—in evolutionary terms—to know how our community is functioning, what conflicts and alliances exist, and our place in all this.

Incidentally, this means that our sense of identity is not, and cannot be, only based on an autobiographical narrative (a story we tell ourselves about ourselves). Being obligatorily social, we also require a socio-biographical narrative (a story about our community and our place in it). While I arrived at this insight through reflecting on de Waal, ChatGPT tells me that it is similar to ideas found in Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989).

Empathy and reciprocity lead humans to live in networks of responsive mutual obligations. And this leads to a deontological view of morality as being based on mutual obligation. This does not preclude anyone from talking in terms of virtue ethics or consequentialism or whatever. Indeed, taking these other perspectives can be advantageous. Rather, it means that we define "virtue" deontologically: A virtuous person is one who meets or exceeds their obligations to the community. Notably, the most virtuous people are seen to help others. Similarly, we judge the consequences of a person's actions in terms of whether or not they support or undermine their obligations.

Since none of us is perfect, it makes sense to have some way to deal with breakdowns in this system.* De Waal notes, for example, that the leading male chimp is constantly called on to mediate between other male chimps. If there is a fight, he always intervenes on the side of the weaker male. He goes out of his way to console the loser of a fight and makes sure that the two get back into harmony.

* There's a potential digression into rules and rule-following here that I will pass up for now, but see also the last of my series of essays on Searle's "social reality": Norms without Conscious Rule Following. (Here, again, there is an unexplored similarity to Taylor's philosophy).

From reciprocity, we get the idea of fairness. Fairness is everyone fulfilling their obligations. Unfairness is a failure of reciprocation. And justice involves restoring fairness.

Of course, how these basic elements are elaborated into systems of morality is wide open and dependent on many factors, including the local environment. Moral rules also get mixed with etiquette to make for complex mores, even without elaborate technology.

This brief outline is probably enough to be getting on with. But check the earlier, more extensive essays if things are unclear.

Truth is Both a Metaphysical Concept and a Moral Concept.

We now have two ideas to try to integrate:

1. My critique of metaphysical concepts applies: truth is a metaphysical concept, and no one has epistemic privilege. "The truth" as a metaphysical absolute is unknowable. And yet most people still see value in truth as a moral concept.
2. My view of morality as essentially deontological (deriving from mutual obligation).

The first idea means that, if I am ever called to give testimony in court, it will be interesting because I cannot make the traditional oaths (including the modern secular varieties). The lack of epistemic privilege means that I cannot promise to "tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." This would imply that I know "the truth" and that I'm capable of communicating it. While I might have a belief about the truth, no matter how sincere I might be in holding this belief, I can always be wrong. In which case, my belief is not the truth. And after all, belief is a feeling about an idea (and an involuntary feeling at that). Which raises the question: If belief is not a reliable guide to truth, why do we privilege it?

Rather ironically, given their role in justice and history, eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable. It is common for several people to witness an event and for them all to tell different stories about what happened. What the court really wants is not that witnesses "tell the truth", since this is an unreasonable expectation of anyone who lacks epistemic privilege. The court wants to ensure that we do not set out to deceive the court. That is to say, the court wants us to be honest. And this lesser goal turns out to be a more straightforward proposition.

One day, it might be interesting to look at how we managed to put so much emphasis on knowing the unknowable, but I want to stay on the track of extracting something workable from the existing mess.

A functioning community requires that we trust the other members of the community to fulfil their obligations. If we are standing shoulder to shoulder, driving off a leopard, for example, it only works if enough of us stand our ground. A leopard will easily kill a lone human or chimp. But a group of us is much more intimidating. Five chimps, or humans with sticks, can easily drive a leopard off if they work together. Trust requires that we not deliberately try to deceive others.

No matter how honest I am, my view could be incorrect, inaccurate, or imprecise, and I might not know it. All I can promise is that I'm not deliberately trying to deceive you. And, morally, that is all you can ask of me. So if I appear in court, the only oath I could take would be to promise to be honest. It's up to the jury to decide if what I say is salient to assigning blame for a transgression.

I think this generalises. My moral obligation is not to "tell the truth", but to refrain from deliberate deception. Or, more positively, my obligation is for honesty rather the truthfulness. This makes allowance for my "knowledge" to be imperfect or even incorrect, it allows for the vagaries of memory, it allows for unexamined bias, and so on. Being honest does not guarantee accuracy or precision.

Something we need to be wary of is the relativisation of truth, which I see as a function of ideological individualism. We see this in the idea of a "personal truth". This is something that one person believes and asserts to be true. But when contradicted, they simply assert, "that's your truth", and "my truth" is unaffected by your truth.

While the standard metaphysical definitions fail to be meaningful or useful, the idea of a "personal truth" is catastrophic. Equating opinion with truth only creates confusion and uncertainty. At least those people who try to define truth by some external standard have the goal of reducing uncertainty.

Note that, in the ideal, science is not concerned with "truth" as many lay-people imagine. Rather, scientists examine phenomena and compare notes to produce heuristics that make predictions to some arbitrary level of accuracy and precision. It's not that Newton's laws of motion are untrue and that Einstein's are. Rather the situation is that, under such conditions as we encounter here on Earth, Newton's laws are sufficiently accurate and precise for our purposes. We can predict the future with confidence. But when we start to look on larger scales of mass, length, and energy the accuracy and precision of Newton's laws declines. And we find that Einstein's laws of motion provide better accuracy and precision.

Scientists make and test inferences about phenomena by close observation and comparing notes. While such inferences are incredibly, almost miraculously reliable, we still cannot claim that they are true in any deeper sense.

Conclusion

Thousands of years of documented arguments about "truth"—from a variety of cultures—have left a legacy of dissensus and confusion. Something that seems so straightforward as "telling the truth" turns out to be impossibly complicated. Not only do we not know the truth about anything, but we cannot even agree on how we would know it if we came across it.

Questions such as "What is true?" or "What is the truth?" can never be answered in a way that will satisfy everyone.

"Truth" is another legacy of philosophy that does more harm than good. Since metaphysical knowledge requires epistemic privilege that no one can possibly have, telling "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" is an unattainable goal.

Morality does not arise out of metaphysics or commandments from some supernatural being. It emerges pragmatically from evolving to live in social groups that require cohesion to function. Evolution equipped us to live in societies bound by mutual obligations. And the moral obligation that emerges from this is not to "tell the truth", but to be honest. That is to say, we do not deliberately set out to deceive.

The problem of the zeitgeist is less that we live in a "post-truth era" and more that we live in an era characterised by dishonesty.

Pragmatically, honesty is attainable because it only requires that we not set out to deceive. This allows that our beliefs about what is true can be sincere but mistaken.

Honesty is a virtue because it promotes the trust and cooperation necessary for a group to fulfil its evolutionary function. The consequence of dishonesty is a breakdown of trust and cohesion.

However, all of the above notwithstanding, the idea of truth and the many discourses centred on it are deeply ingrained and unlikely to change. So expect confusion to reign.

~~Φ~~

All of them Arahants. Notes on Aṣṭasāhasrikā and Speech Acts.

I'm doing some preparation for reading Chapter One of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā-prajñāpāramitā-sūtra (Aṣṭa) with a friend and have ended up making a load of notes. I'm mainly looking at the edition by Vaidya, but comparing it where possible with the Gāndhārī, and two versions in Chinese, one by Lokakṣema, translated in 179 CE (the earliest), and one by Kumārajīva, translated in 404 (the most popular). This will be too laborious to do for the whole text, but might help shed light on particular passages (we may well get a publication out of it at some point).

The first sentence is:

evaṃ mayā śrutam ekasmin samaye bhagavān rājagṛhe viharati sma gṛdhakūṭe parvate mahatā bhikṣusaṃghena sārdham ardha-trayodaśabhir bhikṣuśataiḥ, sarvair arhadbhiḥ kṣīṇāsravair niḥkleśair vaśībhūtaiḥ suvimuktacittaiḥ suvimuktaprajñair ājñair ājāneyair mahānāgaiḥ kṛta-kṛtyaiḥ kṛta-karaṇīyair apahṛta-bhārair anuprāpta svakārthaiḥ  parikṣīṇabhava-saṃyojanaiḥ samyag-ājñā-suvimuktacittaiḥ sarvaceto vaśiparamapārami-prāptair ekaṃ pudgalaṃ sthāpayitvā yaduta āyuṣmantam ānandam ||

In this batch of notes, I will make some miscellaneous comments about numbers, dhāraṇī, and the absence of bodhisatvas. I then look at how speech act theory can inform translation, using one of these adjectives (in red) as my example.

Numbers

In english we say that there were "twelve hundred and fifty bhikṣus". However, Sanskrit Buddhists texts say this differently, using the form "x hundreds-of-bhikṣus" (where hundreds-of-bhikṣus is a compound, bhikṣuśatāḥ). In this case the number of hundreds is ardha-trayodaśa or literally "half-thirteen". This means thirteen-less-a-half, or twelve-and-a-half. And "twelve and a half hundreds" = 1250. The significance of this number is unclear, but it crops up in other texts as well.

Dhāraṇī

One of the overall things that strikes me about the string of adjectives (in red) is how much it looks like a dhāraṇī. There is the same kind of iteration and alliteration, e.g. suvimuktacittaiḥ suvimuktaprajñair,  ājñair ājāneyair, and kṛta-kṛtyaiḥ kṛta-karaṇīyair. If change the instrumental plural to the standard eastern Prakrit nominative singular ending, it emphasises the similarity e.g. 

kṣīṇāsrave niḥkleśe vaśībhūte suvimuktacitte suvimuktaprajñe ājñe ājāneye mahānāge kṛtakṛtye kṛtakaraṇīye apahṛtabhāre anuprāpte svakārthe  parikṣīṇabhavasaṃyojane samyagājñāsuvimukte

Tack a svāhā onto the end of this and it could be a dhāraṇī as found in most Mahāyāna texts after about the 4th Century. It seems we could say that dhāraṇī make use of literary techniques already in use, such as the tendency to iterate adjectives, to double up (or higher multiples) in order to create emphasis. 

The form of this statement, using the instrumental plural is rare in Pāḷi, occurring only in the Samaya Sutta, recorded twice: in the Dīgha Nikāya (DN ii.252) and the Saṃyutta Nikāya (SN i.25). 

Evaṃ me sutaṃ – ekaṃ samayaṃ bhagavā sakkesu viharati kapilavatthusmiṃ mahāvane mahatā bhikkhusaṅghena saddhiṃ pañcamattehi bhikkhusatehi sabbeheva arahantehi; 

Thus have I heard: one time the Bhagavan was dwelling with the Sakyas in a large grove in Kapilavattu, together with a large congregation of five hundred bhikkhus, all of them arahants. 

The Pāḷi number idiom is slightly different. Pāḷi says "five measures (pañcamatta) of one hundred bhikkhus (bhikkhusata)." However, most of the other adjectives are familiar in one way or another. 

Note that Lokakṣema's translation doesn't have a list of adjectives and thus looks a lot more like the opening of the Pāḷi Samaya Sutta. It suggests that the adjectives were added after the original composition. This highlights that the Mahāyāna texts were not part of a Canon (a collection of texts in fixed form), even when written but, instead, they were continuously added to over the centuries. 

Bodhisatvas

Though this is a Mahāyāna text and the critical edition is based on relatively late manuscripts, with the oldest being from the 10th Century, there are no bodhisatvas present. This seems significant, because the presence of bodhisatvas seems to be an important feature of Mahāyāna.

However, when we look at the old translations we find a different story. Lokakṣema's translation from 179 AD, 《道行般若經》 (T224) says: 

[8.425.c06] 佛在羅閱祇 耆闍崛山 中，摩訶比丘 僧不可計，諸弟子 舍利弗 、須菩提等；摩訶薩菩薩無央數，彌勒菩薩 、文 殊師利菩薩  等。 

Once the Buddha was at Rājagṛha on the Vultures Peak with a huge congregation of monks, impossible to count, all of them disciples (弟子), including Śāriputra and Subhūti; and countless mahāsatva bodhisatvas, including Maitreya and Mañjuśrī. 

This kind of hyperbole is what we expect from a Mahāyāna sūtra. By the way, the word "disciples" (弟子) seems to reflect an underlying śrāvaka, though we expect arhat here, and is probably a mistake. It may reflect the idea that arhat was the goal of the śrāvakayāna, whereas the bodhisatva was the goal of the bodhisatvayāna. 

Unfortunately, the Gāndhārī manuscript (dated to 70 AD) is damaged and/or missing at this point. By the late 4th Century Kumārajīva's text (T227), while still considerably shorter than the later manuscripts, is completely conventional:

[537a25 - 26]  如是我聞。一時佛在王舍城耆闍崛山中。與大比丘僧千二百五十人倶皆是阿羅漢。

Thus have I heard: one time the Buddha was staying at Rāgagṛha on the Vulture's Peak, with a great congregation of 1250 bhikṣus, and all of them were arhats. 

Here the word arhat is transliterated as 阿羅漢, which in Middle Chinese was alahan. It may reflect a Prakrit original (cf Pāḷi arahant), but, by Kumārajīva's time, was fairly standard, though there were many variant "spellings" in Chinese, e.g.,  阿盧漢; 阿羅訶, 阿羅呵; 阿梨呵, 阿黎呵. This was later abbreviated to lohan or louhan (these Romanizations represent modern Mandarin pronunciations)

So the text is seemingly quite different at different times, assuming that the Chinese translations accurately reflect their source texts. Nor are the differences explicable as a linear evolution. Lokakṣema has bodhisatvas present, whereas others did not. So was Lokakṣema's text different or was he taking liberties? We don't know, because the Chinese did not preserve the Sanskrit originals of the Indic texts that they translated and, indeed, very few texts survive from that period, anywhere. The surviving Sanskrit manuscripts of Aṣṭa are on corypha palm leaves and date from about the 10th Century onwards. Note also that—especially in the earlier translations—the translators were working from single manuscripts that were most likely riddled with copying errors.

One of the things this brief comparison shows is that there is no single sūtra called Aṣṭasāhasrikā. I tried once before to bring out this with respect to the Vajracchedikā-prajñāpāramitā-sūtra (Is There Any Such Thing as 'a Text'? 20 December 2013). Similarly, Jonathan Silk has recently called into question the applicability of traditional philological techniques of identifying the "original" text, (Establishing / Interpreting / Translating: Is It Just That Easy?), which I used as the basis of my essay, The Heart Sutra and the Crisis in Buddhist Philology (30 June 2017).

Effectively, the text of any given sūtra is different for different people at different places and times. And this is an argument for the prominent position that translations play in Western Buddhism, despite the fact that, as far as the Prajñāpāramitā literature is concerned, there are no good translations, as yet. With the forthcoming book by Paul Harrison we may finally have a decent translation of the Vajracchedikā but, as my work has shown, we do not yet have a reliable source text from which to translate the Heart Sutra. An accurate translation of Aṣṭa would be a fine thing.

Speech Act Theory and Translation

In this short sub-essay I'll take a single example and examine how we should understand it in the light of speech act theory. 

Kṣīṇāsrava

Like most of the adjectives in our list, this is a compound. It combines kṣīṇā, 'cut off', and āsrava, 'inflow' ← ā√sru,* where √sru means "flow", but also "to flow out of, to gush forth". The addition of the ā- prefix to verbs involving direction, usually reverses the direction, i.e., suggests, as a first approximation, "inflow, influx". We could translate kṣīṇāsrava as "inflows cut off". We could play around with synonyms such as "influx", or more traditional attempts at interpretation such as "taints, corruptions" or the wildly interpretive "intoxicant biases" (Nyanatiloka's Buddhist Dictionary). But what does any of this mean? What precisely is "flowing in"? I've been a Buddhist for more than 20 years and I still draw a blank when I see these terms.

* the change from sru to srava is regular and expected. The root sru undergoes guṇa → sro, which is conceived as sr(ău). We add a to create an actions noun giving, sr(ău)a. This creates an internal sandhi which resolves as srava. 

Can we do better? I think we can. Many writers, not least Richard Gombrich, have pointed out that āsrava (Pāḷi assava) is a term taken from Jainism. In that context, actions (karma) cause an inflow (āsrava) of "matter" or "dust" (the Sanskrit word here is unclear) that sticks to the soul (jīva) and keeps it in saṃsāra. But the word āsrava might also be translated as "channel for acquisition of karma", i.e. the Jains see āsrava both as the flow and channel for flow of karma. Jains believe that suffering removes (nirjarā) karma from the jīva, thus liberates it from saṃsāra. Another way of thinking about it in Jain terms, is that āsrava is a way that the consequences of karma impinge on the person. An āsrava is a karma conduit.

So what might it mean to cut off the inflowing or channels for inflowing of karma? It means that the person concerned is not going to suffer the consequences of any past actions because the flow of karma has ceased. Nor will they create any new karma (conceived of as consequential actions that will result in rebirth) that might prevent from being finally liberated from rebirth. Someone who is kṣīṇāsrava does not create new karma and has no old karma waiting to manifest.

In other words, to be kṣīṇāsrava is to be free of karma: free in the sense of not subject to any consequences of past actions; and free in the sense of not having to worry about what they do because they can no longer do actions that result in rebirth. Of course, Aṅgulimālā might be considered an exception, since he still has to suffer from past karma but he is still not making any new karma and won't be reborn.

Dictionaries are helpful tools, but to really understand a language one has to think beyond the dictionary, to see words in their cultural context. This is particularly important for Sanskrit which is used in a wide range of distinct contexts which may use the same words very differently. Similarly, etymology can tell us what the parts of a compound originally meant, but not how the individual words are used at a particular place or time, let alone the meaning of a compound.

Speech Acts and Translation

The theory of speech acts was developed in the USA in the 20th Century, largely by two men, John L. Austin and John Searle. Their analysis was part of a movement away from seeing language in merely semantic terms by applying principles deriving from pragmatism. Semanticists ask "What does language mean?", while pragmatists ask "What does language do?" Austin and Searle mapped out the kinds of things we do with language. They treated spoken sentences as "speech acts". In this pragmatic view, semantics must be subordinated to pragmatics, if only because of irony, i.e., when we say one thing, but mean something else. If I say "I love your new haircut", a semanticist can only analyse the words themselves and conclude that I do love your new haircut. A pragmatists also listens to my tone of voice and watches my face as I say it, and they might realise I don't like your new haircut, at all, and that I am mocking you. Semantics cannot cope with sarcasm or irony, because the same words are used as if I was sincere. Pragmatics doesn't just add a dimension to semantics, but shows that "sense" occurs in the context that goes well beyond word choices.

This is one of the problems of working with written texts. Written texts have no eyebrows or tone; we cannot tell how the author intended us to read their words, whether as literal truth, informative myth, entertaining legend, or some other interpretation. To take a real example, one of us might read a Buddhist text such as the Pāḷi Tevijjā Sutta as a parody, which changes its meaning entirely; while another dismisses the idea that Buddhists could portray the Buddha as having a sense of humour as projection, and argues for a more literal reading. 

Speech act theory suggests that we can understand a communication in terms of what was said, what was meant, and what was understood. The technical terms for these are locution, illocution, and perlocution (and be aware that the technical definitions of all of these terms are a lot more sophisticated than how I have boiled it down here). The case of kṣīṇāsrava illustrates this very nicely. Obviously kṣīṇāsrava is a locution; i.e., it is a declaration about an arhat that helps to establish legitimacy and authority on several levels. It establishes the status of people present (who subsequently participate in the dialogues); it helps to establish the status of arhats as a class of people; and because the Buddha is surrounded by a large number of them, his authority and legitimacy is also established. Buddhists are obsessed with these political issues of status, legitimacy, and authority from the earliest records of their thinking.

Conze's attempt to translate kṣīṇāsrava is "their outflows dried up". This is a perlocution for Conze, it represents what he has understood, but it is also a new locution, something he is declaring. This is a feature of translation. The author composes a text and perhaps writes it down as a document. The translator reads the text, tries to understand it in the source language, then they compose a text in the target language which they hope will have the same illocutionary force. A translation is always a new locution. It's never the same locution.

Conze wants us to understand this thing about arhats: "their outflows dried up". This is similar to how Kumārajīva's translation team understood term, since they translate 諸漏已盡 "all leaks completely exhausted"

So, contrary to the dictionaries and Jain usage, which clearly suggest that ā√sru means "in-flow", both Conze and Kumārajīva understand "outflow". One of the things about borrowed terms is that they are thoroughly decontextualised, so the knowledge that this word āsrava originally came from a Jain context was lost and not recovered until after Conze was writing.

I'm not sure about other readers, but when I think of "their outflows dried up", I think of a leaky container, particularly a human body leaking fluid from various orifices (the Chinese 漏 "leak" only reinforces this!). I have a cold at present with a runny nose and sore throat. I have a lot of extraneous outflows that I wish would dry up. So, what Conze seems to be saying, on face value, is that the leaking body fluids from the arhats have dried up. It certainly does not conjure any sense of what the term means in practice, or convey anything to me that I intuitively find meaningful.

By looking at how the word was used in its original context we have deduced that the illocutionary force of kṣīṇāsrava is that arhats are free of karma. And we can use this conclusion "free of karma" as our translation. To my mind, as a Buddhist who has explored Buddhist karma doctrines in some depth, this makes a great deal of sense; whereas, "their outflows dried up" doesn't communicate anything relevant to me (and produces a load of irrelevant associations). 

What I do not control is how the reader will understand this - the perlocution. For example there are many different ways of thinking about karma and I can't be sure that all of them will fit my conception. Some might take this to mean that the arhats are free from moral restraint, for example, and able to act immorally with impunity. Though this would not be what I intended to say, not my illocution, it might be a perlocution for the reader.

Conclusions

This "essay" is really just a collection of notes with no overall theme except that they arise out of reading Aṣṭa and thinking about how to translate it. However, one of the major themes I've explored over the years is just how difficult translating really is. I've tried to convey how little confidence we should have in translated documents as representative of the author's intentions. The very idea of "the text" is much more fluid in our Buddhist milieu that it is for, say, Christians.

On one hand, this ought to legitimate translations. We know that in most Asian countries, Indic texts were abandoned quickly once translations became widely available. Indic texts were not generally preserved in the long term, but remained theoretically important. On the other hand, the whole point of the story of Xuanzang going to India (and he was only one of many such pilgrims from China and Tibet) was that he felt the translations of Kumārajīva and others were not sufficiently clear or comprehensible. It is a little ironic then, that while his translations were generally considered superior by scholars, none of Xuanzang's translations ever become popular or replaced those of Kumārajīva in the popular imagination.

Translations are seldom really about translating individual words. The basic unit of meaning is the sentence. That is to say, it is how words are used in sentences that convey the authors' intentions. A list of adjectives is a special case. But the single word example of kṣīṇāsrava does seem to highlight many of the problems with English translations of Buddhist texts. We are not there yet in terms of fully migrating to English as a medium for communicating the Dharma. We are still struggling with Buddhist Hybrid English and with incomprehensible word for word translations.

One of the problems we seem to have is that few scholars are going over the ground and bringing the light of new discoveries to familiar texts. I think this is partly a problem of how such work is funded now. Everyone is busy working on "new" areas and previously untranslated texts (which seem to become more obscure with each passing year).

Another text I've been looking at recently is Lewis Lancaster's unpublished dissertation on the Chinese translations of Aṣṭa which compares the versions - and delineates three periods of the text. I hope to write up some notes on this as well, because it is apparent that this 50 year old document has not had the kind of influence on the popular imagination of Prajñāpāramitā that it should have. It is  a great pity that in the 50 years since Lancaster's doctoral dissertation no one seems to have followed up on the doors that it opened. Certainly, no new translation of Aṣṭa has appeared to replace the faulty one produced by Conze. One bright spot is Seishi Karashima's glossary of Lokakṣema's Aṣṭa, which ought to make a new comparative translation much easier. 

~~oOo~~

Texts, Values and Truth

Following on from my suggestion of a hierarchy of values I have some further thoughts on our attitude to factual truth as a value in relation to Buddhist and religious beliefs.

Buddhism is clearly a massively multifaceted phenomena in the present and one can see, despite claims to timelessness, that it has developed chronologically. To some extent we can trace the development back in time - rather like physicists use the evidence of the present to make conjectures about the early universe. Just as for the universe, the actual origins of Buddhism are obscure and will remain so because we do not have enough evidence and never will have. However we can point to certain features - common to all forms of Buddhism, and emphasised in early texts, which appear to be archaic. One of the main features is the emphasis on practice. Yes, we have considerable amounts of biography, history, sociology and philosophy but the overwhelming concern of Buddhist literature and material culture suggests that what Buddhists did (and of course still do) is carry out certain practices, particularly forms of "meditation". [1]

I suggest that Buddhist texts are primarily concerned with practice: with the mechanics of practice; with the context for practice; with the fruits of practice. They also contain a technical vocabulary or jargon for understanding and communicating about the process and fruits of practice. Buddhist texts reflect the concerns of Buddhists i.e. a pragmatic program of transformation. The nature of that transformation is the subject of a lot of speculative writing, and one can see changes over time in how it is written about, and we can further speculate about the kinds of socio-political environments the authors lived in and what their religious concerns and ideals were like. But it always comes back to practice.

We are probably familiar with claims from religious believers that their special book contains the absolute truth, a truth which comprehends all other truths and supersedes them. We Buddhists are not immune from this. The claim to truth is very easy to disprove in most cases, which makes religious people look stupid. I once had two Christians come to my door and tell me that all of Newton's laws were found in the Bible. Having recently completed my degree in chemistry (with a sprinkling of physics) I knew Newton's Laws reasonably well, so I asked them in and requested they show me what they meant. They pointed to Genesis 1.14-17 which concerns Jehovah's creation of the sun, moon and stars. [2] I asked: "how do you get from that to the inverse square law?" [3] And surprise surprise they didn't in fact know any of Newtons laws. They looked stupid, realised it, and beat a quick retreat. But that was too easy. Newton's laws are irrelevant to their beliefs, and they were foolish to try to explain their faith in those terms. If your faith is not based in science, and you don't understand science, you'd be better off not explaining faith to a scientist in scientific terms.

In this case how should we regard Buddhist texts? It has to be admitted that on the whole the Buddhist texts are badly written, they aren't great works of literature and most people get along fine with summaries and commentaries. Buddhist texts are given to waffle, to tedious repetition, to digression, and to impenetrable idiom. One has to wrestle with hyperbole, superlative, hagiography, idealism, excessive piety, and quite a lot of vicious polemic. In many ways the Buddhist texts appear naive to the modern reader. However no one ever built a statue to a critic, [4] and all that said there are nuggets and gems within the ore, many of which I have blogged about, that make it all worth while.

I suggest that rather than seeing Buddhist texts as documents of truth, that we should see them as a recipe book or instruction manual. Indeed cooking is one of the metaphors for spiritual practice one finds in the texts. In the texts one finds described a comprehensive pragmatic program which comments not just on how to meditate and what to expect when you do, but how to live a life conducive to meditation, and importantly the value of doing so - both direct and indirect value. It is not simply a philosophy in the contemporary sense, though it is close in spirit to the original sense of philosophy. Nor should we be fooled by the religion that has built up around Buddhism. I don't see the Buddha as a religious man, if anything he was the Richard Dawkins of his day, going around telling religious people not to be so foolish. [5]

If Buddhism is a pragmatic program, and Buddhist texts are the ancient recipes for this program, then the question "is it true?" becomes irrelevant. With recipes we don't ask if they are true, we ask "does it work?" or even "does it help? Recall that the Buddha's own definition of the Dhamma was anything that helped. [see: What is Buddhism?] And really the only way to find out if a recipe works is to bake the cake and eat it. Much of academic Buddhology and comparative religion is about criticising recipes without doing any baking. Effectively they take recipes as a genre of literature and develop critical theories about this genre. In case this seems an unlikely conclusion I would point out that there are academic articles about recipes, and interestingly one study that I found came to this conclusion:

"The most significant finding of this research is that the evolution of the New Zealand pavlovas occurred largely within domestic kitchens and was the outcome of ongoing and widespread interest in novelty and experimentation." [6]

I suspect that if one studied Buddhist 'recipes' one would come to a parallel conclusion - that the recipe books show a gradual evolution over the centuries, with changes driven by practitioners interested in novelty and experimentation (although I would add here that they would also be responding to large scale socio-political events such as the rise and fall of dynasties). The average Buddhist need not pay much attention to literary criticism of recipes qua literature because they are actively putting them into action on a daily basis - proving them in the old sense of that word. One learns more about meditation in a single session of sitting, than in reading the whole canon. Indeed discussions about recipes are only interesting to a certain type of person, even amongst cooks and bakers. The critical approach to the literature does occasionally throw up important or useful results, some of which I have attempted to highlight in this blog. However, I can't help thinking that philosophy is really only a minor consolation, and that perhaps more philosophers ought to take up baking.


Notes

1. I put meditation in scare quotes because the English word does not precisely match the traditional terms for our practices e.g. bhāvana, yoga, samādhi, dhyana.
   
2. I further note that in Gen 1.14 the "lights of the firmament", as well as being for dividing night and day, seasons and years, were for "signs" - i.e. astrology. Though this passage is often cited as part of an argument that the ancient Hebrews had rejected astrology (associated with the Babylonians) since they give the prosaic name 'lights' to the heavenly bodies, indicating that they did not see the lights as gods or other sorts of celestial 'beings'. Note that the Pāli/Sanskrit word deva literally means 'shining'.
   
3. Newton's law of gravity says that the attractive force between two masses (gravity) is in proportion to product of the masses divided by the square of the distance between them. It is beautifully simple, and accurate enough to land a man on the moon. A summary of Newton's laws of motion can be found here.
   
4. This quote is apparently from the composer Sibelius.
5. The Pāli texts record a lot of polemic against religious people, particularly Brahmins and Jains. The Brahmins and Jains for their part were critical of Buddhism as well.
   
6. Leach, Helen. 'What Do Cookery Books Reveal about the Evolution of New Zealand Pavlovas?' http://www.hss.adelaide.edu.au/centrefooddrink/papers/leach.pdf

image: cover of the most popular New Zealand recipe book. See: History of the Edmonds Cookery Book. The Edmonds recipe for Pavlova is not included on their website, but it can be found on recipezaar.