Early Buddhist writings claim that practice of their teachings will raise one’s life to a higher level. In practical terms I take this to imply that gradual progress in such practice will make one a better person in some recognizable way. This should offer me some way of measuring progress toward this transformative goal, telling me whether my practice is being successful or not.
How can we think about this in a rational way?
We can start with the fact that it seems clearly possible for example, in the extreme case, to “rid myself of Attachments” in a way that would result in completely withdrawing from the world, having as little to do with anything or anyone, not caring about anything or anyone. In this case, ridding myself of Attachments is clearly not making me a recognizably better person.
For someone trying to practice Buddhist teachings described in the above chapters in an intelligent way, this can be an important kind of thing to think about. It is important not to take it on faith that following these teachings, however done, will bring one’s life to a higher level. It is important to think about this and be self-critical. Think critically: Is my practice having any result that is producing in me less-than-admirable character traits, and leading to less than admirable ways of interacting with the world and other people? If so, this means that my practice is being based on what I should regard as a “bad interpretation” of Buddhist teachings. It is a sign that I should reevaluate my interpretation and try to reformulate it in a way that will more likely lead only to good results in terms of character traits and customary ways of relating to the world and other people.
I think this applies to practice of any given religion. No set of religious beliefs should be taken to support personality traits or ways of interacting that on their own would appear clearly not worthy of respect and admiration.
Early Buddhism presents special problems in this respect, namely because its ideals are predominantly expressed in negative terms as the cessation, the absence or lack of Craving, Attachment, and Distress. No one can become a better, more admirable person by merely lacking something. I think that we should assume that at least a great many members of the earliest Buddhist communities were engaged in transformative practices that did result in ideal ways of being that they rightly perceived to be positively and extremely admirable and inspiring. Otherwise it is hard to account for the rapid spread of Buddhism in the first centuries of its existence. Fleshing out the bare bones of teaching consisting almost entirely on practical guidelines for achieving this state, means trying to imagine and formulate for ourselves some positive concepts of what it is that they may have perceived so inspiring and admirable about this ideal.
This I have tried to do in several places in previous chapters, trying to think of concepts describing “what it is like” to make progress toward the early Buddhist transformative ideal. What kinds of recognizably positive good qualities might ideally result from intelligent practice of the Buddhist ideal?
Some examples.
Progress should give you a more self-contained and unshakeable self-confidence, able to face a very broad range of otherwise threatening circumstances, confident that “whatever happens I can handle it.”
It should make you more flexible and adaptable, more readily accepting and adapting to unexpected and upsetting turns of events.
It should make you more resilient, able to more easily and quickly recover from anxieties or depression resulting from difficult life-events.
It should make you less self-centered, less likely to “take things personally,” enabling you then to be more other-centered, more able to put yourself in the place of others and empathize with their feelings.
These are not the Buddhist ideal itself, which is more difficult to understand because it is something internal and also extremely unusual, not entirely like anything a person who is not on the Buddhist path would be likely to have experienced. These are more-easily-understood likely manifestations that would result from being in this ideal state, or making significant progress toward it.
A general theory of interpretation of religious classics.
The above ideas apply to early Buddhism an approach that I think applies well to many classics written in this period of human history—early Chinese Taoist and Confucian writings, Hindu and Buddhist writings from India, the Hebrew bible, the Christian New Testament and the Q’uran from the Near East.
The communities out of which these writings arose were generally composed of individuals attracted to the teachings found there because of their connection to inspiring and uplifting ideals about how human life is best to be lived. For example the Christian Gospels were not written to give objective historical and biographical information about the life of Jesus. They more resembled preaching aimed at internal transformation or “conversion”, leading to a new way of being in the world and relating to the world that early Christian communities found uplifting and inspiring.
That is, personal transformation, not true doctrines, was the main interest driving the development of ideas found in these writings. And ideas explained in the early part of this essay apply to early Buddhism a way of thinking critically about the transformative ideals found in many religious classics written at this period. This approach to thinking about these ideals is highly dependent on my study of Plato’s ideas about virtue and his account of “Socratic” methods of thinking critically about virtue.
Plato’s Geek word for virtue was arētē, which means something more like human “excellence.” Plato developed a way of using Socratic critical thinking to find possible flaws in any particular kind of human excellence one might want to think about, with the ultimate aim of correcting those flaws to arrive at an ideal concept of this kind of excellence known to be free of any flaws, the perfect “Platonic Form” of that kind of excellence.
In the case of early Buddhism: think of Nibbana, the end goal of Buddhist practice, as a kind of human excellence. Critical thinking about Nibbana would consist in thinking of ways that a person could interpret Buddhist practice and the goal of this practice, in a way that would lead to ways of being that are obviously not admirable. The case described above, of total withdrawal from the world, not caring about anything or anyone, is an extreme example. The task is then to make an effort by this method to uncover quite a few possible flaws in our understanding of the Buddhist transformative ideal, and by remedying each of these flaws to arrive at a concept of Nibbana one can rationally know to be free of flaws and perfect in its goodness, worthy to be regarded as the supreme good in human life.
This is a good way of thinking critically about the transformative ideals of any given reason, for both practical purposes and theoretical purposes.
Critical Pluralism.
When it comes to theory, these ideas are the basis for “critical pluralism”. “Pluralism” allows for the possibility that there exist a great many fundamentally different ideals of human excellence, and that each different religion might focus on a different kind of excellence. In depth study of early Christian, early Daoist, and early Buddhist writings have convinced me that this is the case with these three.
This “pluralist” idea of course runs contrary to a popular view today that “all religions teach the same thing”.
At the same time this is a “critical” approach. There are possibly a great many different equally great excellence-ideals. But not just any concept of a given excellence ideal is a good or great one, worthy of our admiration. And there exists a rational (“Socratic”) method of differentiating between great ideals, mediocre ones, and bad ones.
