Buddhism

Postscript to Minimal Metaphysics for Meditation: Reply to Dr. Caiati

Vito Caiati writes,

. . . while I see the wisdom in your assertion “no one is likely to take up, and stick with, serious meditation, meditation as part of a spiritual quest, unless he is the recipient of grace, a certain free granting ab extra,” I am troubled about the soteriological implications of such a view. I find it troubling that the necessary grace would be restricted to a relatively small portion of humanity, while the rest of us remain “lost in the diaspora of sense objects.” Is it your assessment that few are called to a higher state of consciousness, or is it that the call is more generally available but drowned out by the distraction fits to which the human mind inevitably falls prey?

What I want to say is that no one is likely to commit himself to a serious meditation practice with all that it entails unless he has had certain experiences which, phenomenologically, exhibit a gift-character and that point to a depth-dimension below or beyond surface mind. By that I mean experiences that seem as if granted by a Grantor external to the consciousness of the meditator whether or not, in reality, they are grantings or vouchsafings of such a Grantor. (One example of such an experience is that of a sudden, unintended, descent into a blissful state of mental silence.) This formulation is neutral as between the Pali Buddhist denial of divine grace and the Christian affirmation of it.

But even on this neutral formulation, Caiati's problem arises. Small is the number of those who are capable of having these experiences, and smaller still the number of those who actually have them. And among those who actually have them, still smaller is the number of those who set foot on the spiritual path and keep it up. And among the latter only some of them, and maybe none of them, attain the Goal. We cannot be sure that Prince Siddartha attained it. It would seem to be a very bad arrangement indeed if salvation were to be available only to a tiny number of people.

I think that this is a really serious problem for Buddhism. I have met met many a Buddhist meditator, but none of them struck me as enlightened. And the same goes for the Stoics and Skeptics I have met: none of them struck me as having attained ataraxia. The vast, vast majority of Buddhist meditators will die unenlightened. Unless you believe in rebirth, that's it for them.

The same problem does not arise for Christianity. In Christianity, unlike in Buddhism, there is no salvation without a divine Savior, the agnus dei qui tollit peccata mundi. The Savior doesn't do all the work, but the work that remains to be done can be done by any ordinary person who sincerely accepts Jesus Christ as his savior and who lives in accordance with that acceptance. Faith is the main thing, not knowledge, insight, or realization. There is no need for special experiences. Perhaps we can say that the soteriology of the East is noetic, that of the Middle East pistic. But I should immediately add that contemplative practices and mystical theology play a large role in Christianity with the exception of Protestant Christianity.

As I see it, faith is inferior to knowledge and any knowledge of spiritual things we can acquire here below can only serve to bolster our faith. Speaking for myself, given my skeptical mind, philosophical aptitude, and scientific education, I would probably not take theism seriously at all if it were not for a range of mystical, religious, and paranormal experiences that I have had. They, together with arguments for theism and arguments against metaphysical naturalism, incline me toward theism to such an extent that that I live as if it is true. 'As if it is true' does not imply that it is not true; it signals my not knowing whether or not it is true.

But you may be of a different opinion and perhaps you have reasons that justify your opinion. No one KNOWS the ultimate answer. Toleration, therefore, is needed, the toleration of those who respect the principle of toleration, and therefore, not Sharia-supporting Muslims or other anti-Enlightenment types such as throne-and-altar reactionaries. What is needed are toleration and the defense of religious liberty which along with free speech and other sacred American rights are under assault by the Democrat Party in the USA. This hard-Left party needs to taste bitter defeat. And so, as strange as it may sound, if you cherish the free life of the mind and the free life of the spirit, you must vote for Donald J. Trump in 2020.

Minimal Metaphysics for Meditation

There is a certain minimal metaphysics one needs to assume if one is to pursue meditation as a spiritual practice, as opposed to, say, a relaxation technique. You have to assume that mind is not exhausted by 'surface mind,' that there are depths below the surface and that they are accessible here and now. You have to assume something like what St Augustine assumes when he writes,

Noli foras ire, in te redi, in interiore homine habitat veritas. Do not wish to go outside, return into yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man.

The problem, of course, is that few if any will assume that truth dwells in the inner man unless they have already experienced or sensed the self's interiority. For the intentionality of mind, its outer-directedness, conspires against the experience. Ordinary mind is centri-fugal: in flight towards objects and away from its source and center. This is so much so that it led Jean-Paul Sartre to the view that there is no self as source, that conscious mind just is this "wind blowing towards objects," a wind from nowhere. Seeking itself as an object among objects, centrifugal mind comes up with nothing. The failure of David Hume's quest should come as no surprise. A contemporary re-play of this problematic is found in the work of Panayot Butchvarov. The Bulgarian philosopher takes the side of Hume and Sartre. See my Butchvarov category.

Ordinary mind is fallen mind: it falls against its objects, losing itself in their multiplicity and scattering itself in the process. The unity of mind is lost in the diaspora of sense objects. To recuperate from this self alienation one needs to re-collect and re-member. Anamnesis! The need for remembrance, however, cannot be self-generated: the call to at-one-ment has to come from beyond the horizon of centrifugal mind. One has to have already some sense of the Unseen Order, a natural and innate sense, not an intellectual opinion, a sense of "the existence of a reality superior to that of the senses." (Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts, p. 43.)

My conclusion is that no one is likely to take up, and stick with, serious meditation, meditation as part of a spiritual quest, unless he is the recipient of a certain grace, a certain free granting ab extra. (Here I go beyond Pali Buddhism which leaves no place for grace.) He must be granted a glimpse of the inner depth of the self. But not only this. He must also be granted a willingness to honor and not dismiss this fleeting intimation, but instead center his life around the quest for that which it reveals.

I would say that this also holds for the Buddhist whose official doctrine disallows grace and 'other-power.' Supposedly, the Tathagata's last injunction as he lay dying was that we should be lamps unto ourselves. Unfortunately, we are not the source of our own light.

I conjecture that what Buddha was driving toward in a negative way with his denials of self, permanence, and the possibility of the ultimate satisfaction of desire (anatta, anicca, dukkha) is the same as what Augustine was driving at in a positive way with his affirmations of God and the soul. Doctrinally, there is of course deep difference: doctrines display on the discursive plane where difference and diremption rule. But doctrines are "necessary makeshifts" (F. H. Bradley) that point toward the transdiscursive. Buddhists are famously open to the provisional and makeshift nature of doctrines, likening them to rafts useful for crossing the river of Samsara but useless on the far side. Christians not so much. But even Christians grant that the Word in its ineffable unity is not a verbal formulation. The unity of a sentence without which it would be a mere list of words points us back to the ineffable unity of the Word which, I am suggesting, is somehow mystically one with what the Buddha was striving for.

The depth of Buddha is toto caelo different from the superficiality of Hume and Sartre. For one thing, there was no soteriological/therapeutic intent behind Hume's reduction of the self to a mere bundle of perceptions. Secondly, it is arguable that the denial of a substantial self on the samsaric plane presupposes the Atma of the Upanishads, as Evola convincingly argues. More on this later.

Double Cultural Appropriation!

Before this morning's session on the black mat, I read from the Dhammapada. I own two copies. The copy I read from this morning has the Pali on the left and an English translation by Harischandra Kaviratna on the right. I don't know Pali grammar but I have swotted up plenty of Pali vocabulary over the years.

My point, however, is that I was feasting on insights from a tradition not my own. I am not now, and never have been, Indian. I am of Northern Italian extraction, 100%, and that makes me European. So what am I doing appropriating insights from a foreign tradition? I am feeding my soul and doing no wrong.

To appropriate is to make one's own. To appropriate is not to steal, although stealing is a form of appropriation, an illicit form. If I appropriate what you own by stealing it, then I do wrong. If I appropriate what you own by buying it from you in a mutually consensual transaction, I do no wrong. Libertarians speak of capitalist acts among consenting adults. I am not a libertarian. I merely appropriate their sound insights while rejecting their foolish notions. Critical appropriation is the name of the game. 'Critical' from Gr. krinein, to separate, distinguish, discriminate the true from the false, the prudent from the imprudent, the meaningful from the meaningless, the real from unreal, that which is conducive unto enlightenment from that which is not, and so on.

One can also appropriate, make one's own, what no one owns. I appropriate oxygen with every breath I take. I make it my own; it enters my blood; it fuels my brain; it is part and parcel of the physical substratum of spiritual production. Who owns the air? Who owns the oxygen in the air?

Who owns sunlight? I appropriate some every day. Who owns the sky, "the daily bread of the eyes"? (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Before the session on the black mat and after my reading I walked out into the Arizona early November pre-dawn darkness to gaze with wonder at "the starry skies above me" (Kant). Who owns Orion or Ursus Major?

Who owns truth?

Some races are better at finding it and expressing it, but no one owns it.

There are truths in the Dhammapada and no one owns them. Since no one owns them, they belong to all. Belonging to all, they are no one's property. They cannot be stolen. Their appropriation cannot be illicit.

My appropriation of Asian wisdom — which is Asian in that it is from the East, not Asian in that its essence is Eastern — is made possible by a SECOND form of licit cultural appropriation, namely translation. Translation is cultural appropriation! If done well, it is good.

ONE WAY TO MEDITATE. Start discursively with a verse from some noble scripture from the East or from the West, for example, verse 150 from the Dhammapada:

Here is a citadel built of bones, plastered with flesh and blood, wherein are concealed decay, death, vanity, and deceit.

Run through it, but then whittle it down to one word, death, for example, and than ask yourself; Who dies? Answer: I die! And then inquire: who or what is this 'I'?

No Total Clarity in Philosophy

To demand total clarity in philosophy is like demanding that one's visual field be all focus and no fringe. It is a demand that cannot be satisfied. But the situation in philosophy is worse than the metaphor suggests. The visual fringe can be brought into focus if one is willing to allow the focus to become fringe. The transdiscursive, however, to which philosophy is beholden and to which she points, can never be brought into discursive focus. The transdiscursive, ineliminably obscure, must forever remain fringe.

The unity of the proposition, for example, without which no proposition can attract a truth value, and without which no proposition can be more than a truth-value-less aggregate of its sub-propositional parts, lies beyond the grasp of the discursive intellect.

Might we reasonably expect total clarity in the next world? The next world might be samsara 2.0, clearer, brighter, more intelligible, but still subject to the duality: clarity-obscurity. Ascend from the Cave, and you will still experience light and darkness, but more light and less darkness than down below. And beyond that there perhaps lies samsara 3.0, and so on. Ever subtler realms of chiaroscuro. The nirvanic terminal state would then be the extinction of all dualities, and the unspeakable unity of clarity and obscurity, intelligibility and ab-surdity. Could that be the ultimate Goal? Could the ens reallissimum himself take as his final goal, nibbanic extinction?

Could the ens perfectissimum et necessarium say to himself: Take it to the limit Old Man and become finally in truth what you were supposed to be all along, Absolute and Unconditioned?

The above is a species of nonsense from the point of view of the discursive intellect. Important nonsense or nugatory nonsense? If you plump for the latter, are you not assuming that the discursive intellect is unconditioned?

Companion post: The Scariest Passage in the Critique of Pure Reason.

The Scariest Passage in the Critique of Pure Reason

With Halloween upon us, it is appropriate that I should present to my esteemed readers for their delectation if not horror the scariest passage in Kant's magnum opus:

Unconditioned necessity, which we so indispensably require as the last bearer of all things, is for human reason the veritable abyss . . . . We cannot put aside, and yet also cannot endure the thought, that a being, which we represent to ourselves as supreme among all possible beings, should, as it were, say to itself: 'I am from eternity to eternity, and outside of me there is nothing save what is through my will, but whence then am I? All support here fails us; and the greatest perfection, no less than the least perfection, floats insubstantially before the merely speculative reason, which incurs no cost in allowing either the one or the other to vanish entirely. (A613 B641, Norman Kemp Smith tr. corrected by BV)

God thinks to himself: I am a necessary being: I cannot not exist. What's more, I am unconditionally necessary: I do not derive my necessity from another like numbers and other abstracta; they derive their necessity from me, but I have my necessity from myself. And yet, while my nonexistence is impossible, I can conceive of my nonexistence: the question Whence then am I? makes sense. My nonexistence is thinkable without logical contradiction even if it is impossible. This is troubling. I do not exist of merely logical necessity, but of metaphysical necessity, which is a species of real necessity, and the latter suggests some hidden contingency, some hidden dependence.

God thinks further to himself: Am I truly unconditioned? I am who am: my nature is to be, to exist. (Exodus, 3:14) I do not have existence like my creatures; I am existence itself in its primary instance. As such, I cannot not exist, and I cannot cease to exist. I cannot commit suicide. I have no power over my own existence. I am bound to exist. It is my nature to exist, and I have no power over my nature. How then am I absolutely sovereign? I am bound by a condition over which I have no control.

How then am I absolutely unconditioned? I am not that than which no greater can be conceived. For I can conceive a greater, a being that is not bound by existence but is free to enter nonexistence. If I were absolutely unconditioned, then I would be beyond existence and nonexistence. I would be master of that distinction, and not subject to it. I would be beyond all duality.

As subject to the distinction between existence and nonexistence, I am not the Absolute, the Ultimate, the Unconditioned. I am merely the highest being. I am at the apex of the samsaric pyramid — but still samsaric. The truly Unconditioned is beyond Being and Nonbeing.

With this, his final thought, God entered nibbana.

Reading Now: Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening

Excellent introduction to Pali Buddhism. Will blog portions later.

You say Evola was a fascist? Well, Sartre was a Stalinist; Frege was an anti-Semite (according to Michael Dummett); and Heidegger and Carl Schmitt were members of the Nazi Party. Are those affiliations good reasons to not read those great authors? Not to a sane person. Only to a leftist crapweasel. You know my motto: "Study everything; join nothing." No book burning, no de-platforming! Stand up for free speech and open inquiry! Defend the universities against the Pee Cee!

To hell with the Left and its index librorum prohibitorum. To hell with the Democrat Party. Man up, gear up, bone up.

Spiritual Practices and Metaphysical Dogmas

It would be foolish to let the dubiousness of metaphysical dogmas dissuade you from spiritual exercises and the good achievable by their implementation. Don't let the weakness of the three pillars supporting the Buddhist edifice, anatta, anicca, dukkha, keep you from a long and salutary session on the black mat.

Related: A 'No' to 'No Self'

Meditation as Inner Listening

Our friend Vlastimil V. worries that his meditation practice might lead him in a Buddhist direction, in particular toward an acceptance of the three marks of phenomenal existence: anicca, anatta, dukkha. He shouldn't worry. Those doctrines in their full-strength Pali form are dubious if not demonstrably untenable.

For example, the doctrine of anicca, impermanence, is not a mere recording of the Moorean fact that there is change; it is a radical theory of change along Heraclitean lines. As a theory it is dialectically driven and not a summary of phenomenology. One could read it into the phenomenology of meditational experience, but one cannot derive it from the phenomenology. The claim I just made is highly contentious; I will leave it to Vlastimil to see if he can verify it to his own satisfaction.

Since he is a Christian I recommend to Vlastimil an approach to meditation more in consonance with Christianity, an approach as inner listening. In one sentence: Quiet the mind, then listen and wait. Open yourself to intimations and vouchsafings from the Unseen Order. But be aware that the requisite receptivity exposes one to attack from demonic agents whose power exceeds our own. So discernment is needed.

The East no more owns meditation than the Left owns dissent. Here is a quick little bloggity-blog schema.

Buddhist Nihilism: the ultimate goal is nibbana, cessation, and the final defeat of the 'self' illusion.

Hindu Monism: the ultimate goal is for the little self (jivatman) to merge with the Big Self, Atman = Brahman.

Christian Dualism: the ultimate goal is neither extinction nor merger but a participation in the divine life in which the participant, transfigured and transformed as he undoubtedly would have to be, nevertheless maintains his identity as a unique self. Dualism is retained in a sublimated form.

I warned you that my schema would be quick. But I think it is worth ruminating on and filling in. The true philosopher tacks between close analysis and overview, analytic squinting and syn-opsis and pan-opsis.

You say you want details?

Related

A 'No' to 'No Self'

Can the Chariot Take Us to the Land of No Self?

Buber on Buddhism and Other Forms of Mysticism

A Similar Pattern of Argument in Buddhism and Benatar

On Buddhism the human (indeed the animalic/sentient) condition is a profoundly unsatisfactory predicament from which we need extrication. The First Noble Truth is that fundamentally all is ill, suffering, unsatisfactory, dukkha. That there is some sukha (joy, happiness) along with the dukkha is undeniable, but the little sukha is fleeting and unsatisfying and leads to dukkha which is primary. Desire breeds desire endlessly with no satisfaction being finally satisfactory. You may satisfy your sexual craving, but the satisfaction is impermanent and gives rise to further desires upon desires and temporary satings upon temporary satings which become increasingly habitual but never finally satisfactory. So not only is frustration of desire unsatisfactory, satisfaction of it is as well. Either way dukkha is the upshot. This is the deep and radical meaning of the First Noble Truth.

Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.

The Second Noble Truth is that suffering has its origin in desire or craving (tanha). The natural pursuit and possession of the ordinary objects of desire such as name and fame, pleasure and pelf, property and progeny, power and position all breed attachment, and this attachment breeds misery. Why? Because the ordinary objects of desire are impermanent (anicca) and insubstantial (anatta). They lack the power to satisfy us. Desire or craving (tanha) drives us to cling to the fleeting and unreal that cannot last and cannot ultimately satisfy. In this sense sukha, which is derivative, leads to dukkha which is primitive and fundamental.

Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the origin of suffering: it is this craving which leads to re-becoming, accompanied by delight and lust, seeking delight here and there; that is, craving for sensual pleasures, craving for becoming, craving for disbecoming.

Should we then re-direct desire to what is permanent and possesses self-nature, God for example? You would think so, right?

No!

For on original, radical, Pali Buddhism nothing is permanent and nothing possesses self-nature. All is impermanent and insubstantial. This is the nature of things and cannot be otherwise. The task cannot be to re-direct desire to the Eternal in the manner of a Christian Platonist such as St. Augustine who turns away from this deceitful world of time and change and misery and seeks salvation in God. The problem is desire itself, not mis-directed desire. The task, then, must be to uproot desire. The task is to step off of the wheel of samsara and achieve cessation or nirvana.

Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the cessation of suffering: it is the remainderless fading away and cessation of that same craving, the giving up and relinquishing of it, freedom from it, non-reliance on it.

How do we extirpate desire and end our delusive attachment to the insubstantial and unreal and unsatisfactory?

Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the way leading to the cessation of suffering: it is this noble eightfold path; that is, right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.

Critical Question

How can the entire samsaric realm, including us and the manifold objects of our desire, be devalued relative to a nonexistent and indeed impossible standard? If nothing is permanent and nothing can be permanent how can impermanence be a negative axiological feature of what alone exists? And if nothing is and can be a self or substance, how is it any argument against samsaric items that they are devoid of self-nature?

I am assuming that there cannot be impossible ideals. Either an ideal is realized or it is not. If the former, then it is possible. If the latter then it must be realizable. Ideals must be realizable if they are to be ideals. What is realizable is possible. So if permanence is an ideal, then it must be possible. But it is not possible on early Buddhist principles. So it is not an ideal. Since it is not an ideal, nothing samsaric falls short of it. It follows that ordinary objects of desire cannot, all of them, be unsatisfactory on the ground of their impermanence.

To appreciate my point, suppose God as classically conceived exists. Think of the God of Augustine and Aquinas. He is permanent, a self (in excelsis) and absolutely and finally satisfying to himself and to those who share his life. If such a God exists, then it makes perfect sense to consider of lower or even of no value the objects of ordinary mundane desire such as money and property and the paltry pleasures of the flesh.

The great Spanish mystic, St. Teresa of Avila, is supposed to have said to the nuns in her care, "Sisters, we have but one night to spend in this bad inn."

To liken the world to a bad inn makes sense as a claim purporting to be objectively true only if there is a heavenly home to which it is possible to go. But if there is no God, no soul, and this life is all there is, then this world of time and change cannot be objectively assessed to be of little or no value. Any such assessment could then be subjective only, and if Nietzsche is right, a slandering of life that merely reflects the physiological decadence of the sick slanderers who are too sick to face reality and must in compensation invent hinterworlds.

As Nietzsche remarks in Twilight of the Idols, in the section entitled "The Problem of Socrates," if there is no true world, then there is no merely apparent world either : this world objectively lacks plenary reality and value and is rightly assessed as lacking such only if there is a true world it falls short of.

I spoke to a hermit monk a couple of summers ago. I said, "This world is a vanishing quantity." He agreed wholeheartedly, having abandoned a millionaire's life as a super-successful Wall Street bond trader for the austerities of a monkish, and indeed eremitic, existence with its vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. But my assertion and his agreement could make no sense as an objective negative appraisal of the reality and value of this world except on the assumption that there is an Unseen Order that is not impermanent to its core, but the opposite, the source of all intelligibility, reality, and value, and the summum bonum, the highest good, of human striving. And if the assumption is true, then the negative appraisal is true.

A Similar Pattern in Benatar

One source of David Benatar's anti-natalism is his conviction that human life, on balance, is objectively bad for all despite how well-placed one is. There is some good, of course, but the bad so preponderates that it is morally wrong to perpetuate this life by procreation. But the standards and ideals Benatar invokes to show the objectively bad quality of human life are impossible as I try to show in this preliminary draft. My thought is that to fall short of an impossible standard is not to fall short. Benatar's radical pessimism and anti-natalism do not comport well with his naturalism.

To this extent my critique of Pali Buddhism and of Benatar is 'Nietzschean.' Impossible standards do not permit a devaluation of what actually exists.

But I share Nietzsche's naturalism and atheism as little as I share Benatar's. And of course I reject Nietzsche's psycho-physiological reductionism: the deep sense of philosophers and sages from time immemorial that this life is no good cannot be dismissed as a merely subjective response of the sick and decadent. Thus a No to Nietzsche's reading of Phaedo 118:

Concerning life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is no good. Always and everywhere one has heard the same sound from their mouths — a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness of life, full of resistance to life. Even Socrates said, as he died: "To live — that means to be sick a long time: I owe Asclepius the god of healing a rooster." Even Socrates was tired of it. [. . .] "At least something must be sick here," we retort.

If the appearance of life's low quality is real, because life falls short of the ideal, then the ideal must itself be real — elsewhere, not here below, but in the Unseen Order.

We are told not to become attached to the usual objects of desire such as name and fame, pleasure and pelf, land and stand. Why not? Because they are impermanent (anicca), insubstantial (anatta), and do not ultimately satisfy (dukkha).

So there is something permanent, substantial, and finally satisfying?

No! Nothing is!

Well then, you have no basis to devalue ordinary objects of desire! If nothing is or can be permanent, then it is no argument against anything to point out its impermanence. And similarly for the other two marks.

Buddhism in its root (radical) Pali form issues in nihilism. If everything bears the three marks, then nothing is worthy of pursuit or avoidance. The quest for Transcendence voids itself.

The mistake is to think that desire as such is the root of woe when it is misdirected desire.

These ideas are presented in rigorous and scholarly fashion in my No Self? A Look at a Buddhist Argument, International Philosophical Quarterly 42 (4):453-466 (2002).

This here is but a bloggity-blog summary.

Pratityasamutpada

Claude Boissons writes to express puzzlement over the following quotation pulled from a Buddhism site:

Everything exists dependently upon everything else. Nothing exists independently in and of itself. Therefore, everything is empty of inherent existence. Every phenomenon is empty of true existence, therefore emptiness is the ultimate nature of everything that exists.

Professor Boisson remarks:

I don’t understand how the second "therefore'' is used. Is it true that if nothing exists independently, the consequence is that nothing exists, period? And so I feel there is a play on words in moving from "empty of inherent existence" to "empty of true existence."

Maybe some day you might tell us what you think about this?

How about right now?

Charitably understood, the Buddhist claim is not that nothing exists, period. For that would fly in the face of what we all know to be the case. The claim is not that nothing exists, but that what exists lacks self-nature. This is the famous doctrine of 'no self' or anatta, which, along with anicca (impermanence) and dukkha (suffering), make up the three pillars of Pali Buddhism.

The anatta (Sanskrit: anatman) doctrine lies at the center of Buddhist thought and practice. The Pali and Sanskrit words translate literally as 'no self'; but the doctrine applies not only to persons but to non-persons as well. On the 'no self' theory, nothing possesses selfhood or self-nature or 'own-being,' perhaps not even nibbana 'itself.' We can explain this in Western terms as follows.

If a (primary) substance is anything metaphysically capable of independent existence, then we can interpret the anatta doctrine as a denial of the existence of substances. The 'no self' theory would then imply that in ultimate reality there are no substances: what we ordinarily take to be such are wrongly so taken. The world is a Heraclitean flux of momentary items, dharmas, each of which is insubstantial, impermanent, and something which breeds suffering among the ignorant who try to cling to what in itself cannot be clung to.

Causation in such a system is understood as paticcasamuppada (Sanskrit: pratityasamutpada) usually translated as dependent origination or dependent arising according to which all dharmas arise in dependence upon other dharmas.

What is puzzling you is the move from 'empty of inherent existence' to empty of 'true existence.'

There is no puzzle if you understand 'empty of inherent' existence to mean 'empty of substantial existence' and 'true existence' to refer to a mode of existence that Buddhists claim nothing has.

Let me know if this makes sense to you. Of course, I am not endorsing it.

Nietzsche on Pyrrho: Sagacious Weariness, a Buddhist for Greece

Will to Power #437 contains a marvellous discussion of Pyrrho of Elis. A taste:

A Buddhist for Greece, grown up amid the tumult of the schools; a latecomer; weary; the protest of weariness against the zeal of the dialecticians; the unbelief of weariness in the importance of all things. (tr. Kaufmann)

Years ago I noted the strange similarity of some arguments found in Nagarjuna and the late Pyrrhonist, Sextus Empiricus. (Memo to self: blog it!)

Is Islam a Religion? Buddhism?

Claude Boisson writes,

Given your criterion 3 for an ideology to be a religious doctrine, it is doubtful that Islam could be viewed as a religion (it is also a socio-political system with a supremacist agenda, but that is another matter).

In Islam, man can err, has to be obedient to Allah, but man is not fallen, and needs no redemption.

When he is born, a human being is pure (and a Muslim by nature). His primordial nature (fitra) is not wounded, corrupted, fallen, and needs no regeneration.

Even more, according to the most extensive interpretation of the (belated and somewhat anti-Qur'anic) doctrine of ismah (the impeccability of prophets), prophets, including Muhammad, never sin intentionally.

Here again are my tentatively proposed seven criteria for an ideology's being a religion:

1. The belief that there is what William James calls an "unseen order." (Varieties of Religious Exerience, p. 53) This is a realm of absolute reality that lies beyond the perception of the five outer senses and their instrumental extensions. It is also inaccessible to inner sense or introspection. It is also not a realm of mere abstracta or thought-contents. So it lies beyond the discursive intellect. It is a spiritual reality and thus mind-like. It is accessible from our side via mystical and religious experience. An initiative from its side is not to be ruled out in the form of revelation.

2. The belief that there is a supreme good for humans and that "our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves" to the "unseen order." (Varieties, p. 53)

3. The conviction that we are morally deficient, and that this deficiency impedes our adjustment to the unseen order. Man is in some some sense fallen from the moral height at which he would have ready access to the unseen order. His moral corruption, however it came about, has noetic consequences.

4. The conviction that our moral deficiency cannot be made sufficiently good by our own efforts to afford us ready access to the unseen order.

5. The conviction that adjustment to the unseen order requires moral purification/transformation.

6. The conviction that help from the side of the unseen order is available to bring about this purification and adjustment.

7. The conviction that the sensible order is not plenary in point of reality or value, that it is ontologically and axiologically derivative. It is a manifestation or emanation or creation of the unseen order.

As I understand Islam, a normative Muslim could accept my (1) and (2). But as Professor Boisson makes clear, (3) implies that Islam is not a religion.

We can now argue in two ways: If anything is a religion, then its satisfies my criteria; Islam does not satisfy my criteria; ergo, Islam is not a religion. Or one could insist that Islam is a religion and that my (3) ought to be jettisoned.

What about Buddhism? It is a religion of self-help, a religion of self-power as opposed to other-power. Among the last words of the Tathagata:

Therefore, O Ananda, be ye lamps unto yourselves. Rely on yourselves, and do not rely on external help.

Hold fast to the truth as a lamp. Seek salvation alone in the truth. Look not for assistance to anyone besides yourselves.

[. . .]

I now exhort you, saying: ‘All component things must grow old and be dissolved again. Seek ye for that which is permanent, and work out your own salvation with diligence.’

My (4) rules out self-help wisdom-paths. We cannot achieve salvation by our own power. We need divine grace. So if Buddhism is a religion, then (4) must be jettisoned. If, however, (4) is upheld, then Buddhism does not count as a religion.

We note en passant that my (4) also rules out Stoicism and Pyrrhonian Skepticism as religions.

This leads to the thorny question of what one is doing when one sets forth criteria as I have done. I am obviously not involved in a project of pure stipulation. On the other hand I am not trying to give a lexical definition of 'religion.' Dictionary definitions are of little use in inquiries such as this one. (See The Dictionary Fallacy.) I am trying to pin down the normative essence or nature of religion.

But does religion have an essence? Not clear. It may be that the concept of religion is a family resemblance concept, one to which no essence corresponds. But even if religion does have an essence, how do I know that my criteria articulate this essence? In particular, how do I justify (3) and (4)?

But suppose religion does have a normative essence and that I have captured it. Then Islam and Buddhism are no more counterexamples to my definition than the existence of a three-legged cat is a counterexample to a definition of 'cat' that includes being four-legged as one of its essential marks. A three-legged cat is not a normatively normal cat; it is a defective cat. Islam and Buddhism are arguably not normatively normal religions; they are defective religions. They leave out essential features of the 'true' religion.

It is important to realize that none of these questions will ever be resolved, here below leastways, to the satisfaction of every competent practitioner of the relevant disciplines. It is therefore eminently stupid, besides being morally wrong, to violate and murder our ideological opponents, except in self-defense against the adherents of the 'religion of peace' to employ a contemporary example.

Pyrrhonism and Buddhism

Anyone familiar with both will have noticed the similarities between Pyrrhonism and Buddhism. The theme is explored in an on-line book I just discovered but haven't read: Adrian Kuzminski, Pyrrhonism: How the Ancient Greeks Reinvented Buddhism.

Category: Buddhism