A More Academic/Philosophical Introduction to Buddhism Essays
Magnificent, Master Gotama. Magnificent, Master Gotama. Master Gotama has made the teachingclear in many ways, as though he were turning upright what had been overthrown, revealing what was hidden, showing the way to one who was lost, or holding up a lamp in the dark. (MN 27. 27 [184])
This is an often repeated refrain from the Pali Canon, a collection of writings which are the closest we can get to the earliest beginnings of Buddhism as a religious movement. It shows us the awe in which the earliest generations of Buddhists regarded the Buddhist message, as a great revelation, discovered and taught by Gotama the Buddha. Teachings in the Pali Canon–more particularly teachings in one section called the “sutta” (Sanskrit: sutra) section–are the central topic of the present essays
But the question raised by the above quote is: Do these early Buddhist writings have something great to “reveal” to us today, that we could not have known by ourselves? What after all is great about early Buddhism, what does its greatness consist in? For that matter, what does the greatness of any religion consist in? These are topics of the present book, which also then treats the approach taken to early Buddhism here as one illustration of an approach I advocate taking to religions and spiritualities generally.
That is, while I hope this study contributes to a better understanding of the earliest kind of Buddhism known to us, I am also writing this as a contribution to rational method in the study of religions and spiritualities generally. This is an approach I have developed and applied to the study of other religious texts, most notably explained and developed in several publications on the Chinese Daodejing (Tao-te-ching), so far my main claim to fame as a scholar. In my doctoral dissertation I began developing this approach to an early Christian-Gnostic writing, the Apocryphal Acts of Thomas (published as Language and Gnosis).
Other major studies of the Pali suttas.
So this is a study of those Buddhist teachings taught in the Pali Canon, the earliest collection of Buddhist writings still available to us. Most likely the teachings I deal with here were fixed in some form sometime between 400-200 b.c. This means that I will not be considering those Buddhist teachings and practices found in the great number of Buddhist sects and traditions that developed after the Pali Canon. (This is mainly to limit my study. It implies no claim that these early writings represent the one and only “true Buddhism.”)
The two main previous detailed studies of the Pali Canon by academic scholars are very detailed works by Steven Collins (Selfless Persons), and by Peter Harvey (Selfless Minds). I have learned a great deal from study of both these authors when it comes to many details. But the approach I take is considerably different. The nature of the approach I take can best be described by contrasting it with the approach of these two learned scholars.
Critical reconstruction vs. a purely descriptive approach.
First, Collins and Harvey take a mainly descriptive approach to early Buddhist teachings, just describing what they think early Buddhists believed. Instead I ask, not just, “What did they believe?” but “What did they have good reasons to believe?” – reasons we can still regard as good reasons today.
It is in this sense that I ask about the truth of early Buddhist teaching. In what sense does Buddhism reveal to us something that we ourselves can know to be true?
As it turns out, I have come to think that some teachings of the suttas can be supported by good reasons, and some cannot. This also depends on interpretation: Some teachings can be supported by good reasons under some interpretations, but not under other interpretations.
Thus I offer here a “critical reconstruction” of early Buddhist teachings, including only those teachings, and those interpretations, which I think can be given a solid rational foundation. At the same time, I hope to show that this can be done without diminishing the very radical challenge that these teachings present to normal human ways of seeing the world and leading one’s life.
So while this is not another study of “Buddhist Philosophy” (I don’t think the Pali suttas were written to teach “philosophy” as this is understood in academic circles today), my intention to discover what truths early Buddhism has to teach us has required raising and trying to resolve some rather fundamental philosophical issues and problems.
What kind of truth?
Asking about the truth of early Buddhist teaching requires some definite notion of the kind of “truth” involved here. What kind of truth does Buddhism reveal to us?
Here I focus (1) on early Buddhist teachings as an effective guide to practices aimed to bring about an internal transformation – a long-term fundamental restructuring of a person’s internal psychological dynamics. Nibbana (Sanskrit: Nirvana) is the name given to the achievement of this internal transformation.
I focus (2) on the claim that this transformation raises one’s life to a genuinely higher level. In the Pali suttas, when the Buddha achieved nirvana he became the highest being in the universe, higher than all the gods and goddesses of contemporary Indian polytheistic religion. And nirvana is in principle a possibility inherent in the being of every human being.
The main truth Buddhism reveals, then, is truth about (1) a genuinely higher ideal possibility inherent in the being of human beings, and (2) a truly effective means of realizing this possibility. These are two elements essential to what I will call early Buddhist “transformative spirituality.” (Note that “spirituality” here has nothing to do with the existence of a spiritual “soul,” or with connection to some higher supernatural realm of “spiritual” realities. Both these ideas are conspicuously absent in early Buddhist teachings.)
Treating sutta teachings as transformative spirituality also contrasts with focusing, as Collins and Harvey do, on Buddhist claims to be correcting mistaken beliefs that people have about the nature of reality. The underlying assumption here: There is objective reality already and always existing out there. This reality is what it is independent of people’s beliefs, and people’s beliefs are true beliefs insofar as their beliefs exactly mirror this already existing reality as it is in itself. On this view, the main claim Buddhism makes is the claim to be replacing people’s normally false pictures of existing reality with a more objectively true picture. (Just as Copernicus and Galileo wanted to replace what they claimed was people’s false picture – a sun revolving around the earth – with an objectively true picture of an earth revolving around the sun.)
While not denying that some Buddhism teachings explain some “objective truths” of this kind, I argue that the main truth they reveal is truth about a higher ideal possibility inherent in the being of all human beings. Like any ideals a person might strive for, “higher” Buddhist ideals, as ideals, do not already objectively exist in reality as it is; they are ideal goals to strive for, to achieve a higher state of human existence than already exists at present in the normal state of human beings.
What does “higher” mean?
I realize that the idea of “higher” goals to strive for raises some problems of its own. What does “higher” mean here? And calling something “higher” seems to be a “value-judgement.” Is it possible to reason critically about value-judgements? These are problems not faced by Collins and Harvey, since they only attempt to describe Buddhist beliefs without critical evaluation, and they treat these as beliefs about objectively existing reality, rather than as claims about “higher” ideals.
A philosophical problem and its solution.
So the different approach I take requires dealing with what are basically philosophical problems. Part of my solution draws on some ideas of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). The main ideas relevant here are conveniently summarized in the following brief excerpt from Wittgenstein’s 1929 Lecture on Ethics, when he defined “ethics” as “enquiry into what is valuable, or, into what is really important… enquiry into the meaning of life, or into what makes life worth living, or into the right way of living.”
The Pali suttas leave us in no doubt that early Buddhists considered Nibbana to be what is ultimately “valuable,” “really important,” “what makes life worth living.” Early Buddhists clearly believed that, if a person dies having done nothing else in life but achieving nibbana, this would have been a life extremely well lived. This person would have achieved what they think is the one really important achievement.
When Wittgenstein associates Ethics with “the meaning of life,” what he says shades off into “existential” issues, issues of concern to modern “existentialist” philosophers. I draw here also on some existentialist-inspired ideas of therapist Viktor Frankl, explained in his influential book Man’s Search for Meaning. In this context, the claim that Nibbana raises one’s life to the “highest” level can be understood as the claim that achieving Nibbana is a most excellent way of fulfilling man’s search for meaning. Thus in this book I understand the Buddhist claim that Nibbana is an extremely high achievement, as the claim that Nibbana is a superb kind of ethical/existential excellence.
So one way of describing Buddhist claims in modern terms is that it addresses questions about “the meaning of life.” Except that nowadays this phrase tends to assume that there is something out there called “the meaning of the universe,” and that my life acquires meaning to the extent that it fits into this larger context of meaning. This is a view that I think is completely foreign to early Buddhist thinking. In this respect, when it comes to the world itself out there, early Buddhist thought is more like the view of modern science: Events and conditions in the world occur as they do because they are following impersonal laws, devoid of meaning and purpose.
Early Buddhists thought that the world itself has no meaning, but that my life can have a meaning. It is possible that I could lead a relatively meaningless life. But it is also possible that I could lead an exceedingly meaningful life. I can achieve something very highly meaningful, and of the greatest importance, deserving all the effort I can put into it, sacrificing many other human goods to achieve it.
For Buddhists the name of this achievement is Nibbana (Nirvana). Nibbana itself consists in an internal psychological transformation, a fundamental restructuring of normal human psychological dynamics, resulting in a completely different way of being in the world and relating to the world. To strive for Nibbana is to strive for the highest kind of human excellence, to realize the highest possibility inherent in human nature. In this sense to strive for Nibbana is to strive to perfect my own being.
Perfecting my own being by making progress toward Nibbana is in this sense an end in itself, not a means to something else. On the early Buddhist view, if I achieved nothing else in life but I made great progress toward Nibbana, this would still have been a life exceedingly well-lived. And for understanding the radical nature of this claim, it is important to realize that Nibbana is something that in principle a person could achieve living alone as a hermit in the wilderness.
The nature and possibility of this exceedingly great form of human excellence, and the means to achieve it, are the main things that early Buddhist teaching has to reveal to us. This excellence is a possibility inherent in the being of every human being, but it normally goes completely unrecognized.
One main reason that it goes completely unrecognized, and comes as a “revelation,” is that, when people go in search for something that will make their lives mean something, powerful human instincts lead them to search outward, to find meaning through connections, involvements, and achievements in the world outside themselves.
This gives people a basically optimistic view of the world out there, looking out at it as a promising field for meaningful connections and engagements. This stands in stark contrast with the extreme pessimism about the world that immediately strikes anyone reading the Pali suttas for the first time. Here the message you will find is: When you look at the world out there, do not think happy thoughts. The world is not a field full of promise for meaningful engagements. When you look at the world out there, think “impermanence,” the transitory and unreliable character of all conditions in the world that you might become dependent on as sources of meaning in your life. And think frustration and emotional Distress, dukkha, the “suffering” or “distress” that the world will inflict on you when it takes away those conditions you have become so attached to and dependent on.
Thus the early Buddhist message is a radical challenge to human normalcy, implying that there is something radically inadequate about normal ways of relating to the world. I think we should not downplay this challenge in the interest of making Buddhism fit more easily into human life as normally lived.
The transitory and ever-changing character of all conditions in the world is something you can do nothing about. You must learn flexible adaptation and resilience in the face of impermanent, ever-changing conditions in life.
But internal psychological factors that cause a compulsive reaching out to find sources of meaning out there are a different story. These are not beyond your control. Although Buddhism does not minimize how deeply ingrained these factors are in normal human psychology, and how difficult they are to change, it promises this possibility, and offers particular practical guidelines and practices effective in bringing about such fundamental change.
But it is here that one of the greatest challenges occurs for the approach that I take: The disparity between the enormous claims made for how marvelously wonderful Nibbana is, and the predominantly negative descriptions of what Nibbana consists in. It is the “cessation” or absence of outward-directed desire and attachment, leading to “the cessation of suffering,” the disappearance of emotional Distress people normally suffer, due to changing conditions in the world.
Another Problem: The Lack of Positive Descriptions of Nibbana in the Pali suttas.
But now one of the main problems for my approach appears. These negative descriptions in terms of cessations and absences cannot by themselves give us a clear and specific positive understanding of what Nibbana’s greatness consists in. Taken by themselves, they could just as easily be taken as a description of an escapist strategy: It is just a way of avoiding emotional pain due to changing conditions in the world, by simply withdrawing from the world, having no ambition and ceasing to care about anything or anyone. No one will regard such a state as a superb kind of human excellence.
This is a major problem for anyone who believes, as I do, that we have not fully understood early Buddhist teaching about Nibbana unless we can understand (1) exactly how achieving Nibbana would change a person’s way of being in the world and relating to the world, and (2) exactly what it is that early Buddhists thought was so supremely great about this transformed state.
What does “higher” mean?
Another problem which this “critical reconstruction” of the early Buddhist message is a philosophical one. That is, the above way of defining what “higher” means in relation to Nibbana, does not yet address the problem how it is possible to reason critically about “ethical” issues, in the very broad sense I explain above.
Here I rely on some philosophical ideas presented in Plato’s writing, discussed in considerable detail in my book on Plato (Rational Spirituality and Divine Virtue in Plato) summarized in several of the essays in the “Plato” section of this website.
My basic proposal here is to treat Nibbana as something like the perfect Platonic Form of some particular kind of “virtue”, better described by Plato’s term arete, “excellence,” also designated by the Greek term to agathon “the Good.”
The Platonic Form of any given kind of human excellence like Nibbana would be a precise, flawless, unambiguous description of something only and always perfectly Good. The reason for this is practical: In the Buddhist case, striving toward a flawed conception of Nibbana might make a person less Good rather than more Good.
Some parts of Plato’s writing offer methods of critical reasoning capable of testing claims that some particular virtue-concept deserves to be regarded as a representation of something perfect in its Goodness.
One is Socratic questioning by counterexample. In the Buddhist case, for example, due to very succinct styles of expression characteristic of the suttas, many descriptions of Nibbana found there are ambiguous enough that it is possible to understand them as recommending a basically escapist strategy, avoiding stress in life by ceasing to care about anything or anyone. Such “counterexamples” reveal flaws ad ambiguities which should be progressively remedied so as to work toward a completely unambiguous and flawless description of Nibbana as something only and always perfectly good. In this context, a concept of Nibbana can be shown to be a flawless representation of something superlatively good, by its ability to withstand all such Socratic questioning by counterexample
A second method of critical reasoning Plato offers can be described as the method of analogy. Plato holds that pure and perfect virtue-concepts are very difficult to grasp, just as early Buddhism pictures Nibbana as something difficult to grasp. But Plato holds that ordinary, more familiar, and easy-to-grasp concepts of courage for example, while not adequate to represent the pure and perfect Platonic Form of courage, are “analogous” to this perfect Platonic Form, and provide starting points for, as Plato describes it, “climbing a mental ladder” to work toward an understanding of what the virtue of courage would be at its most perfect.
In relation to Buddhist Nibbana, what this means is that, if Nibbana is a difficult to grasp representation of something pure and perfect in its Goodness, it must be able to be understood as the perfection of some kind of goodness more easily understood by starting with more easy to understand concepts of this same kind of goodness which are not Nibbana but which are “analogous to” Nibbana.
A more specific explanation of how these facets of Plato’s thought are relevant to the Buddhist Nibbana-ideal can be found at the ends of the two “Overview” chapters (Early Buddhism Overview (1) and Early Buddhism Overview (2).
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