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Science and Buddhism IV: Is the scientific description true?
  • The realist view: science is revealing to us all the components of an ultimately real objective universe completely separate from us.
  • The instrumentalist view: we can say nothing about reality, but we use science for its practical convenience.

A traditional Buddhist perspective would agree with neither of these. Our experience is indeed experience of reality — it is not a product of our minds — but the categories that we use to make sense of that reality are provisional — they are not ultimate components of reality.

This labelling and categorisation is a function of human minds, it is influenced by volitional processes of the past and present — human urges, tendencies, weaknesses and so on.  It is our minds that pick out the entities that we experience from the bewildering background of that tangled flow of phenomena. 

We make decisions to draw boundaries around things in a particular way, or we regard particular ‘shapes’ as being in the foreground.  Once we have done that, then the laws of the interactions between these entities we have picked out are now decided, and science can discover what the laws are. 

The entities will behave as they do whatever we think about them, once we have picked them out.  They are not all in the mind.  But the choice of what to look at is very significant indeed.  It produces whole sciences — geology, oceanography, animal behaviour — and the entities multiply, and some of them last a long time through the history of science, and some of them are briefly popular and then die away.  Not long ago, most astronomers were convinced that they could see a network of lines on Mars, and a lot of them agreed that they were canals.  But better telescopes showed that there is nothing at all there resembling the maps that people were drawing up until the 1930s.

The new sciences give rise to their own technologies, and a hint at plans to look for yet more new entities.  For example, once people started thinking of light as being rather like waves on the ocean, they wondered what a much choppier ocean would be like, and X-rays were discovered.  They wondered what a much slower swell would be like, and radio waves were discovered.  But it is no less true to think of light as zooming along like thousands of little pellets, not like waves on the ocean at all.

Is everything pre-determined?

Quantum mechanics suffers from the problem of indeterminism — the unpredictability of quantum events.  Is it that chance is ultimate, and any deterministic laws that we find come from the law of large numbers?  Or is it that determinism is ultimate, and apparent randomness comes from the complexity of huge numbers of interacting events, as studied in chaos theory?  A French Buddhist philosopher of science, Michel Bitbol, takes a dependent co-arising-type approach, showing that the causes of any event are not defined in the absolute, but are “relative to the very circumstances of the production of the phenomena”.[1]  Since phenomena arise in dependence upon an enormously complex context, a context which includes the person or instrumentation detecting the phenomena, they are immune to any certain determination.  Relations between things should be seen as being prior to the things that are relating; however, “neither connection, nor connected nor connector exist”, says Nagarjuna.  Buddhism’s radical analysis is needed to cap philosophy of science, since it comes from “direct stabilised experience of a disabused outlook” — i.e., non-conceptual Insight into reality — while the insights of Western philosophy, impressive though they are, are the products of the free play of ideas.

Is there a self?

Conditioned arising applied to oneself leads to the realisation that there is no core-self, something which current psychologists, as well as neuroscientists, are insisting on with increasing unanimity.  There are just mental processes.  Already 100 years ago, the founder of scientific psychology, William James, said ‘the thoughts themselves are the thinkers’ — there is no mysterious inner core of selfhood doing the thinking.

[1] In Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground, B. Alan Wallace (editor), Columbia University Press, New York, 2003, 349.

Science and Buddhism III: Investigating Reality

How do you find out what is the case?  Consider the criteria of the Kalama Sutta in which the Buddha provides a list of what he regards as unreliable sources of knowledge or advice:

  • something asserted repeatedly
  • tradition
  • hearsay
  • scriptural texts
  • sophistical reasoning
  • logical inference
  • prolonged consideration
  • getting carried away by a view that you identify with
  • indulgence in the pleasure of speculation
  • a person who makes a plausible impression
  • your respect for a spiritual teacher

None of these are reliable sources of knowledge.  Instead, he says, ‘when you know of yourselves that these teachings are skilful, blameless, recommended by sensible people [viññugarahitā], and that followed through and practised they lead to welfare and happiness, then practise them and stick to them.’[1]

We can investigate:

  1. Our surroundings — the material world.  Here, science is paramount, and manipulating things using what is learnt leads to technology.
  2. Ourselves — our ‘inner’ experience, character, drives, aspirations, abilities, pathologies; how this state of mind has come about.  What to do about it.  There are some Western insights, but Buddhism is way ahead.
  3. Other ‘selves’. But also,
  4. we can investigate how all these three fit together. 

Science supremely respects objective investigation, so that only ‘objects’ can be investigated — separable, isolatable things, or at best processes.  So its natural tendency is to reduce 3 and 2 to 1.

Buddhism makes 2 paramount, but doesn’t reduce 3 and 1 to 2.  Instead, it offers two ways of apprehending the totality of 1-3 — how they fit together in a single nondual universe.

Direct apprehension

The first way is said to be direct apprehension, with no mediation of descriptions, or models or framework etc.  You can’t prove this is possible, though you can intuit whether a holistic grasp of the situation (being completely present, with no need for divisions or discriminations — jñana, not vijñana) is in a sense already available, but overlain by rather nervous and insecure habitual colourings, enhancings, ignorings, and mental concepts.

It seems unlikely that this kind of insight could directly answer questions relevant to the physical sciences.  But when it comes to the mind and human life, Buddhists would tend to privilege their personal insights over the findings of science.  However, as soon as an insight (assuming such a thing to be possible) is reduced to a conceptual explanation, which it presumably has to be to be conveyed to another person, it has switched to the same objective level that science operates on.  This is the reason that the Dalai Lama is prepared to expose the teachings of Buddhism to scientific scrutiny, and to alter them if they are falsified.[2]

An intimation of the outcome of insight in is valuable to science.  Buddhism tries to gradually accustom one to the fact that there are no things, no essences, nothing ultimately exists, but neither are things nonexistent, and one has no core-self, and so on.  At first, this attitude is rather disturbing — it feeds in to one’s sense of insecurity.  But if a scientist can become accustomed to it, I think that it will help them to ponder the significance of their results more effectively, not distracted by essentialist or dualist assumptions.  Our intellect gives a certain form to the phenomena that we are trying to make sense of; but this is not the form of the things in themselves.

Conditioned arising

The second way of apprehending the totality of inner and outer experience is to find what might be the most simple and austere framework for accounting for reality, when conceptual structures first come in — very aesthetic, calm, vivid, elegant.

This is the way or ways that someone with considerable insight will use to try to give an account of their perspective — attempting to be as helpful as possible for others to achieve insight.  The account is known as pratitya samutpada.

It starts from the insistence that:

  • Nothing is fixed.
  • There are no independent entities (including oneself).

So all phenomena are an interconnected flow.  The Buddha put it like this:

‘This being, that becomes.  From the arising of this, that arises.  This not being, that does not become.  From the ceasing of this, that ceases.’ 

Whatever we think of as a thing or event wells up from the past on a wave of supporting conditions, and only remains so long as the conditions remain.  And that thing itself is a factor in other things or events arising.

The Buddha’s image is of a fast-moving river, with froth and eddies: structures in the water which form and vanish, merge, stay or move swiftly on….  But their formation and evolution and movement and interaction are all completely law-governed.

The number of factors is too great for exact predictions, in most cases.  And you can’t reduce the number of influences on one entity to a manageable number — other small influences might become appreciable (as in the butterfly effect).  But according to this view, nothing is completely fortuitous.  And there is no need to invoke a supernatural personality who runs the universe, or who decides to bring it into existence.

The natural laws of conditioned arising apply to the objective world, to one’s own mind, and to other people.

Is the world made up of things?

Buddhism has very fully investigated the laws of conditioned arising in human mind and life.  Science has done so in the material world.  Science does take this process approach, but often forgets it, in ‘discovering’ some fixed entity.

There is a strange contradiction in science.  It is supposed to be about the hard and objective material world.  But nearly everything it talks about is actually invisible — atoms, subatomic particles, pressure and electric current, distant galaxies, black holes and the Big Bang,  continental drift, evolution over millions of years, genes and instincts in animals.  These all have to be inferred using very sophisticated theories working on the data from very sophisticated equipment.

We tend to believe it all a bit too easily!  We are very respectful and credulous when we hear about genes or atoms, even though we’ve never seen one. The theories are wonderful, and are very fertile ways of understanding the universe, but we should not think that they are true.  We shouldn’t take them too seriously.  They are just very effective models, ways of coming to an understanding of the world for minds that work like ours do.  A different being would have a very different science, and we will have, I suspect, a very different science in 100-200 years.  It’s all a wonderful story, with vividly imagined and extremely weird characters in it.  But don’t be too solemn about it all as if it is some sort of absolute reality. 

To put this in Buddhist terms, there is a radical consequence of everything being interrelated, mutually conditioned.  Complete mutual conditioning means that there are actually no things being conditioned.  We can provisionally label parts of the tangled flow with names, thinking of them as real entities, but soon they have vanished and turned into something else.  So none of the names we use refer to anything which has the properties that one assumes that things must have.  There is no entity that exists in isolation, and no entity can give rise to or sustain itself, no entity can remain the same.  Conditioned coproduction shows that everything is shunyata, and therefore that every situation is open — it can evolve into something quite different.  You can’t say that all these categories that science talks about are somehow protected from shunyata.  Atoms and genes have no existence of their own; neither does gravity or natural selection.  They are just helpful descriptions that pick out parts of that flowing tangle, so that we can make some kind of sense of it while we wait until we can have insight into the whole thing.

[1] Ratnaprabha’s translation.

[2] In Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground, B. Alan Wallace (editor), Columbia University Press, New York, 2003, 77.

Science and Buddhism II: Understanding One’s Mind

Scientists themselves have increasingly seen the importance of ‘the observer’.  Science is for human beings, so it needs to understand what it is to be human, what self-awareness is, and what the range of human needs are (scientists tend to stop at the survival (medicine), and material (technology) needs.)  But above all because immediate experience is all we have!  All else is inferred, models, theories, assumptions, attempts at communication etc.

So take mental processes seriously.  And take seriously the mental processes of others — there is a real possibility of empathy.  (Note how primitive Western philosophy and psychology can be here, without ‘contemplative’ disciplines.)

Can consciousness be studied scientifically (i.e. objectively)?  Of course it can.  But one can miss what it actually is — and think that consciousness is a thing, rather than it being ‘actual awareness’ – a ‘light’ you and I are immersed in now, in a rolling present.  The structures that I use to make sense of the ‘contents’ of this illumination (which ‘I’ think of as partly inner, partly outer) can be studied.

Real empathetic communication implies different people’s described worlds can be compared.  One can even construct highly simplified circumstances amenable to careful measurement (experimentation) as in brain imaging, and correlate measured variations with reported mental states, and with observable body responses or actions.

Actual experience and the states of the brain act reciprocally upon one another, so that it is incoherent to say that brain states simply cause mental events.  Perception (says the Buddhist neuroscientist Francisco Varela) can be regarded as subsidiary to the mental function of imagination.  Perception refers to what is present, imagination to what is not present, and the two mix so that in every moment they are emerging into awareness from an unconscious background, as a living present. 

It is still the case that the dominant view among neuroscientists is, in effect, that processes in the body cause the mind.  But neuroscientists such as Varela have shown that one’s state of mind can access local neural processes, so that neither can be reduced to the other.  The mental state corresponds to a particular neural state, and actively incorporates or discards any contemporary neural activity in the relevant brain region, evaluating many potential neural states, “until a single one is transiently stabilised and expressed behaviourally”[1].  Mental states (says Varela) require both a phenomenological and a biological account.  The neural elements and the global cognitive subject are co-determined; the subject is emergent, not just from the brain, but also from preceding mental states.  Buddhism extends this account by offering its pragmatic consequences, showing how the living present, with imagination active, is a means for human transformation. 

[1] Varela and Depraz, in Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground, B. Alan Wallace (editor), Columbia University Press, New York, 2003. 213.  See also Varela, Thomson, and Rosch, The Embodied Mind (MIT press, 1993), 22.

Science and Buddhism I: Universes Colliding

Antennae galaxies colliding. NASA, ESA, SAO, CXC, JPL-Caltech, and STScI, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In a direct encounter between two massive spiral galaxies…, huge cold clouds of molecules will be compressed, and millions of new stars will burst into life like a string of Christmas lights. As the galaxies first swing by each other, their once orderly skies will become jumbled with dust, gas, and brilliant blue star clusters. Then the galaxies may do a slow, graceful U-turn and plunge into each other. This second encounter will trigger another burst of star formation, which will drive the remaining gas and dust from the combined system.[1]

Science and Buddhism can be seen as self-contained universes, apparently complete in themselves.  Each is a very extensive, coherent worldview, worked out over many centuries.  They are the greatest collective cultural achievements of the West and of Asia respectively.  Now they are undergoing a historic encounter, and we are still in the early days of it.

In the 19th century, Westerners encountering Buddhism were very keen to present it as a rationalistic, even scientific approach[2].  But a genuine dialogue between Buddhism and science didn’t really start until the Dalai Lama’s Mind and Life conferences and dialogues began. Their first topic in 1987 was Buddhism & the Cognitive Sciences[3].

From boyhood, the Dalai Lama has had a very open, inquiring and fascinated response to science.  For example, he says that, if any Buddhist assertion is convincingly refuted by science, it should be abandoned, because freedom comes from knowing reality as it is. (However, though he’d be relaxed about the non-existence of Mt Meru, he might be less quick to abandon ‘suffering arises in dependence on craving’, say, if a study appeared to contradict it.) And generally, scientists rather like Buddhism. 

Buddhists are fascinated by the torrent of human experience, and what it all means.  Their main priority is to expand the scope of awareness. They are not encumbered by the rather strange doctrines one encounters in ‘Religion’. (The only exception to this is perhaps rebirth. )  Both are concerned with the truth, and are prepared to take it on board, even if it threatens one’s cherished preconceptions. This is the ideal, and of course practising scientists and practising Buddhists both vary a lot.

The project and attitude of science.

The project: making systematic records of what is going on, accumulating factual knowledge, but also finding out what the connections are between all the things going on, and between what came before and what comes after — in other words, looking for laws of nature.  Once science has found out how things connect with each other and affect each other, it tries putting them together in new ways.  Sometimes this is just to see what happens — scientific experiments.  Sometimes it is to make things happen in new ways, things that people want to happen — that is technology. 

The attitude: reality as objective, implying the use of experimental method.  Thus science takes that part of human experience which seems to be outside oneself very seriously, and takes it as primary.

The project and attitude of Buddhism.

The project: a path of growing insight and compassion — ethics, meditation, wisdom — each with insight and compassion aspects. Eradicating human suffering.

The attitude: the possibility and the desirability of complete awareness — being fully present in awareness of reality (insight) and of people (compassion).  This attitude means that it takes consciousness very seriously, and as primary.

Where Buddhists and scientists agree

  • Curiosity-driven.
  • Interest in knowledge/truth/reality. 
  • Discovering universal laws. 
  • Problem-solving.
  • Reality as process.
  • The recalcitrance of the external world, which challenges ego clinging.
  • To change the results, you need to change the conditions.
  • Vast space and time.  There are probably many inhabited places at inconceivable distances from each other, yet the same patterns can be discovered everywhere in the universe. 
  • No creation, and no end of the world.
  • Relativity.
  • The plenum void: seeing that the void teams with potential, and with coming into being. 
  • Linear time not intrinsic.
  • No self: seeing that the ‘self’ is a convenient fiction — there are just mental processes, which require no ego.
  • Animals are basically like us, and their drives can be found driving us from deep within.
  • Recognition of the barrier of subjectivity.  Seeing that perception is prey to illusion and delusion, and other methods are needed than the conditioned senses to discern what is really going on. 
  • The creation of a cooperating community (the peer-group of scientists, or the Sangha) able to achieve more than any individual can.

One-sidedness in Buddhism and science?

Buddhists have neglected the material, and this has influenced the countries where Buddhism has been active.  For example, Joseph Needham claims that Buddhism seriously inhibited the growth of science in China, though I am not convinced by his arguments[4].  Sometimes, this is for the better.  If there is less expectation that ‘things’ can yield happiness, more happiness results.  But two things have been lost:

  • potentials from technology to reduce hardships
  • potentials for understanding the objective pole of experience more fully — and therefore ourselves and others

Science has neglected immediate experience, which is not trusted because it is so personal, and because it is so hard to come up with standardised results.  Also, the disciplines of introspection and mental cultivation take a long time, so that William James and early psychologists while initially keen, gave up on it.  The current fashion is to call introspection and even meditation itself ‘contemplative science’[5].

To come: Science and Buddhism II: Understanding One’s Mind

[1] From the Hubble telescope website. See https://hubblesite.org/science/galaxies

[2] For the history of this encounter, see Buddhism and Science: a Guide for the Perplexed by Donald S Lopez Jr (University of Chicago Press: Chicago 2008), and my review in the Western Buddhist Review.

[3] https://www.mindandlife.org/events/mind-and-life-dialogues/

[4] Joseph Needham, The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China, Volume I (Cambridge University Press, 1978), pages 264, 265, 272.  But an essay by Jose Ignacio Cabezon indicates that the conditioning factors were far more complex, and that when Western science did arrive in Asia, it was treated by Buddhists in an open and welcoming way, in contrast to the responses to science of many European churchmen. (In Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground, B. Alan Wallace (editor), Columbia University Press, New York, 2003.)

[5] See the works of B Alan Wallace.

The Buddha’s advice to the Kalamas

THE KĀLĀMA SUTTA


This is what I heard. Once, the richly endowed one (Bhagavā). while wandering by stages in the Kosala country with a large Bhikkhusangha, arrived at a town belonging to the Kalāmās called Kesaputta.


The Kālāmās of Kesaputta heard [it said]: ‘bho (‘Sir’) Gotama, the freelance spiritual teacher (samana), the Shakyan who has gone forth from [that] clan, … has entered Kesaputta. [With] good renown, he is described as:
‘Indeed richly endowed, of highest worth (arahant), fully and perfectly awakened, knower of the worlds, best guide for men training [themselves], teacher of devas and human beings, awakened, richly endowed. He makes known this world and its devas, maras, and brahmas; this generation and its spiritual seekers (samanas), priests (brāhmanas), princes (devas), and [other] people, seeing it all clearly himself with his higher knowledge (abhiññā). He presents a dharma which is goodly (kalyāna) in the beginning, middle, and end [of the spiritual life], with its inner meaning (sāttha) and specific expression (savyañjana), all complete (kevala) and perfect (paripunna(?)); a completely purified and sublime life (brāhmacariya) – that he illuminates. The sight (dassana) of such worthy ones (arahants) is good indeed.’


Then the Kālamas of Kesaputta drew near the Bhagavā. Having drawn near, some prostrated (abhivadetvā) and sat down to one side. Some exchanged joyful greetings (sammodi9su), and after a gladdening and memorable conversation, sat to one side. Some saluted him with raised, joined palms and sat to one side. Some told him their name and clan and sat to one side. Others [just] came in quietly (tunhabhuta) and sat to one side.


The Kālāmās said … ‘Bhante, certain spiritual aspirants and priests (samanas and brāhmanas) visit Kesaputta. They only explain and illuminate their own teachings (vāda), condemning, abusing, and pulling to pieces (opapakkhi9 karonti, literally ‘plucking’) the teachings of others. Then different ones visit [and do the same thing]. We are in doubt (kankhā) and uncertainty (vicikicchā) about them, Bhante. Which of them told us the truth. which spoke falsely?’


‘You are definitely right to be in doubt and uncertainty. Kālāmās – this [matter] is a doubtful one. So, Kālāmās, don’t [rely on] what you hear repeatedly (anussava), nor on what is handed down in a tradition or lineage (parampara, lit. ‘succession’), nor on hearsay (itikirā), nor on a scripture as authority (piṭaka-sampadāna), nor on sophistry or logical inference (takkahetu or nayahetu), nor on prolonged consideration (ākāraparivitakka), nor on getting carried away by a view you identify with (ditthinijjhānakkhanti) [alternatively, ‘nor on indulgence in the pleasure’of speculation’], nor on [someone making a] plausible impression (bhabba-rūpatāya) [alternatively, ‘nor on (something that) looks plausible’], nor on your respect for a spiritual teacher (samaṇo no garū).


‘Kālāmās. When you know of yourselves that these teachings (dhammas) are unskilful, blameable, faulted by sensible people (viññugarahitā); that, followed through and practised, they lead on to harm and dukkha, then give them up.
‘Consider this, Kālāmās. When craving (lobha) …, hatred (dosa) …, [or] delusion (moha) arise in someone, do they lead to benefit or harm?’ ‘Harm, Bhante.’ ‘Someone who is craving …, hating …, [or] deluded, obsessed and mentally overcome by craving …, hatred …., [or] delusion, kills, takes what is not given, goes with someone else’s wife, tells lies; and gets others to do likewise. Will that give rise to his harm and dukkha in the long run?’ ‘Certainly, Bhante.’ ‘So do you think these things are skilful or unskilful?’ ‘Unskilful, Bhante.’ ‘Are they blameable or not?’ ‘Blameable.’ ‘Are they condemned or approved of by sensible people?’ ‘Condemned.’ ‘If you follow them through and practise them, do they lead to harm and dukkha or not, or what do you think?’ ‘ It appears to us that they lead to harm and dukkha’
‘That is why I said that you should not [rely on] … [repeated as above, to:] … give them up.


‘[But], Kālāmās, when you know of yourselves that these teachings are skilful, blameless, recommended by sensible people, and that followed through and practised they lead to welfare and happiness, then practise them and stick to them.


‘Consider this. When non-craving …, non-hatred …, and non-delusion arise in someone …, who, without these [three], not obsessed or overcome by them, refrains from killing, taking the not given, going with someone else’s wife, telling lies, and getting others to do likewise, will that give rise to his welfare and happiness in the long run? ‘ ‘Yes, Bhante.’ ‘So do you think that these things are skilful or unskilful?’ ‘Skilful.’ ‘Blameable or not?’ ‘Blameless.’ ‘Condemned or approved of by sensible people?’ ‘Approved.’ ‘If you follow them through and practise them, do they lead to welfare and happiness, or not, or what do you think?’ ‘It appears to us that they lead to welfare and happiness.’
‘That is why I said that you should not [rely on] … [repeated as above, to:] … give them up.


‘Then a follower of the Āriyas, who is free from this sort of covetousness and ill-will, and is undeluded, with clear comprehension and mindfulness, lives with his heart full of mettā. He extends his mettā to each quarter in turn, and above and below, and in all directions, to all living beings as [to] himself. He lives with his heart filled with abundant, exalted, and limitless mettā, free from hostility, unaffected by ill-will, extending to the whole world.
(The above paragraph repeated for compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.]


‘So a follower of the Āriyas, with a heart (citta) thus free from hostility, unafflicted by ill-will, undefiled, and unified gains four anticipations (assāsās) here and now. He thinks: “if there is life after death, and if skilful and unskilful actions (kammas) have results, then when my body disintegrates after death, I might be reborn in a blissful realm.” This is the first anticipation.


‘“But if there is no life after death, and actions have no results, then here and now, in this lifetime, I am free from hostility, afflictions, and anxiety, and I shall live happily.” This is the second anticipation.


‘“If one who does evil experiences evil [consequences], then since I never think of doing evil to anyone, how will dukkha ever touch me?” This is the third anticipation.


‘”But if one who does evil experiences no evil consequences, then I know that I am pure on both counts.” [i.e. if so-called evil acts do not result in suffering, they cannot really be regarded as ‘unskilful’. So one is pure in that one performs no so-called evil acts, and in that no acts are really evil anyway’. Probably a tongue-in-cheek remark by the Buddha.] This is the fourth anticipation. …’


‘Indeed it is so, Bhagavā! Indeed it is so, Sugata!…’ [The Kālāmās then repeat the four anticipations, in agreement.]
‘Brilliant, Bhante, brilliant! It’s as though someone had righted something knocked over, revealed the concealed, shown the way to a lost [traveller], or taken a lamp into the darkness so that those with eyes can see everything. just so the Bhagavā has demonstrated the Dharma in various ways. Bhante, to the Bhagavā for refuge we go. To the Dharma for refuge we go. To the Bhikkhusangha for refuge we go. Bhante, please regard us as followers (upāsakas) who have today gone for refuge for life’.



Notes:

This is a translation I prepared a long time ago, so it lacks input from recent scholaship and wise interpreters. It’s a re-rendering based on explanations given by the Venerable Sangharakshita at a seminar at Padmaloka, July 1980. Prepared using the unedited transcript of the seminar. and translations by Ñanamoli, Soma, and Woodward.

Words in square brackets are additions to make the sense clearer. Three dots (…) means that some repetition has been omitted. The Pali originals, given in italics, have been checked where possible, and are usually given as in the headwords of the Pali Text Society’s (PTS) Pali English Dictionary
The original in romanized Pali is in the Anguttara Nikaya, Vol. I, pp188-193 (ed. R Morris, revised Warder, Luzak for PTS, 1961). Virtually complete translations are available in the PTS’s Numerical Sayings. and as translated by Soma Thera, The Instruction to the Kalamas (Wheel Publications No. 8, Buddhist Publication Society, Kandy, Ceylon, 1963). Partial translations: Woodward’s Some Savings of the Buddha (Buddhist Society, London), pp189ff; Bhikkhu Ñanamoli’s Life of the Buddha, pp175-8; Walpola Rahula’s What the Buddha Taught, pp2-3 (very selective, significantly omitting ‘faulted by sensible people’); and Alexandra David-Neel’s Buddhism, p123 (very garbled). It is discussed at length in Michael Carrithers’ The Buddha (Oxford University Press ‘Past Masters’ series), pp89-94, with a partial translation.
                            Ratnaprabha

Tolerance — ksanti

Kusunoki_masashige

Kusunoki Masashige, photo by Jim Epler https://www.flickr.com/photos/epler/

The Zen master and the general

In the warring period of medieval Japan, one of the most ferocious of the clan generals swept into a peaceful valley with his army. The general was used to the terror his arrival would always cause. The Buddhist monks in the local Zen monastery fled into the mountains – all except one. The general stomped through the monastery buildings, and was very surprised to find one remaining monk, the Abbot, a well known Zen Master, who was calmly sitting in his room. He strode up to him. his sword drawn: ‘Don’t you know who I am? You dare to remain seated in my presence? I have killed scores of men. Do you realise that, without blinking an eyelid, I could run you through with this sword?’ The Zen master did not move. ‘General,’ he said ‘do you realise that, without blinking an eyelid, I could be run through with that sword.’ After a pause, the general put away his sword and bowed, and ordered his army to leave the valley.

I remembered this story as a striking example of a special kind of tolerance which is found in Buddhism, a personal tolerance which includes  the ability not to join in with any games of power. (I will question the Zen Master’s behaviour later.)

Tolerance in Buddhism

It’s tempting to bestow some reassuring but bland declarations of how nice it would be if everyone else were more tolerant. But what of our own personal level of tolerance? I’d like to look at that from a specifically Buddhist angle.

I learnt Buddhist meditation as I was about to start my finals at university (and I certainly needed the effects of meditation then!) So I had some contact with a Buddhist, the meditation teacher, in fact he was the one who told me that story. He impressed me very much, and I decided to investigate Buddhism as a whole, not just the practice of meditation.

Two things, among others, really struck me about Buddhism. One was its emphasis on the individual, and one’s actual experience, here and now. The other was that it does more than tell you that you ought to be kind to people, and tolerant and so on. It recognises that you may not feel kind or tolerant, and so it offers practical methods for developing such qualities, and methods for leaving behind habits that lead to harm and suffering. These two points apply to Buddhist tolerance.Firstly, it is said to be individual tolerance that matters most. So it is not Buddhism that is tolerant, but Buddhists. And it is not other isms that Buddhists tolerate, but real individual people. I think this is quite an important distinction.

However, if you strongly identify with your religion or your ideology, and label other people with their religion or ideology, then it is very tempting to make the label so huge that you can’t see the person behind it. And then it is a label which you tolerate, or don’t tolerate, as the case may be. She is a Moslem, so she must be bloodthirsty and fanatical, say.

The second point was to do with seeing tolerance as a quality to be developed in the individual, using practical methods, not as a pious hope, or something received from outside you by grace. So what is the quality of tolerance like, and how can you develop it?

Well, I’ve been using the word tolerance, which of course is an English word, to translate a traditional Buddhist term which actually has a rather broader meaning. The word in Sanskrit is ksanti, a rather beautiful word, I think. As well as tolerance, it means forbearance, patience, kindness, and maybe the best translation is non-reactivity. Non-reactivity is something the Zen Abbot exemplified, I think. It is the ability to respond with kindness whatever another person does to you. Quite a tall order, but it is something you can gradually strengthen, as we’ll see. It is not something you just have or don’t have, and you just have to put up with it. This is a great mistake, I think, which it is very easy to make. I can believe, ‘well, so I am a bit crabby. But I was born like that, and that’s the way I am.’ .So ksanti is a quality you can develop, the ability to remain cheerful and positive even if people are not treating you as you’d like to be treated.

An old poem ascribed to the Buddha includes the line: ‘Ksanti is the highest form of austerity.’ I think this means that when people get difficult, learning not to react with more of the same is a better form of training than the most impressive feats of self-denial or fasting and so on.

Developing ksanti

So how do you learn ksanti, how do you develop tolerance as a personal quality?

In Buddhism, the first steps for cultivating any inner quality are ethical ones. You apply awareness to your actions, and to your feelings as well. You restrain any impulses that are intolerant, because if those emotional urges turn into words and actions, they get a firmer hold on you, as well as damaging whoever has to bear the brunt. Instead of acting from intolerance, you emulate anyone you know, or know of, who seems to be truly tolerant, and so your habitual behaviours slowly adjust.

But ethics is only a first step, and it is not enough. You need to tackle the intolerant impulses at their roots in the heart, and cause tolerant impulses to sprout there instead. Any method which achieves a direct emotional change is called meditation. Meditations for developing ksanti use the medium of empathy. In a meditation to cultivate kshanti,you would get into a quiet state of mind which is flavoured with confidence. This is because the meditation will not work if you do not have a strong sense of self-worth. You could say that you can’t really tolerate others unless you can be tolerant to yourself: everyone has flaws and makes mistakes, but it is counter-productive to give yourself a hard time about them. In Buddhism, they are called ‘adventitious defilements’ because deep down you are ok, there is a core of inner purity, the potential for Enlightenment.

So with that feeling of being happy about yourself, you than call to mind the people you are intolerant of (whether or not you think the intolerance is justified), and you start to feel what it must be like to be them, as best as you can. You regard them with the same kind of understanding that you have for yourself, and notice that they are the way they are because of all sorts of circumstances, and some of those circumstances can change. Thus you start to empathise with them.

As you empathise more, you may realise that your intolerance of them is based on very superficial characteristics – it’s their tone of voice or their facial expression which really gets up your nose. Alternatively, you may decide that their behaviour is just not on. In Buddhist terms, their behaviour is unskilful, ie it is damaging to themselves or others. This is where your tolerance is really tested – when it seems that you have good reasons for it. William Blake says:

Learn … to distinguish the Eternal Human … from those States or Worlds in which the Spirit travels. This is the only means to FORGIVENESS OF ENEMIES.[i]

In other words, we can recognise that our common humanity is where our regard for each other comes from. On the surface of that humanity, everyone passes through many mental states, some skilful, some unskilful. If our reason for not being tolerant is others’ mistakes and unskilfulness, then we will tolerate no-one.

You can’t ignore unskilfulness. But I think you need a thoroughly tolerant frame of mind in order to be of any real use in helping someone overcome it. And maybe you can’t — maybe you can’t cope with this person, but you have no choice but to cope with your own reactions to them.

There are much more advanced developments of ksanti or tolerance in Buddhism, connected with the very significance of birth and death, but I just wanted to give you some practical ideas about how to make it stronger. There is one more thing I’d like to add about tolerance as a quality. Kshanti has been defined as not expecting anything.[ii] This may seem a bit extreme, because we always, surely, have some expectations. But then we are often being disappointed. And what makes it so difficult to be tolerant is other people not fulfilling our needs and our expectations of them. Expect nothing, and life is full of very pleasant surprises!

So in this talk, I have deliberately focussed on ksanti, tolerance, as a quality for each individual to strengthen in themselves. We may think we are already very tolerant. That may be true when it comes to events in distant countries, or the religious rites of exotic communities. Tolerance is really tested, though, between you and your relatives, the people you work with, or whoever is with you now. Can we really put up with such weird and unreasonable human beings in such close proximity?

One reason for the difficulty of being tolerant is that other people are different from us, and their differences can seem unreasonable, even threatening. Can I accept that someone else is fully human, and deserving of a good and full life, even though they are not like me? One way out of this problem is to regard differences as unreal, but I think that is a cop out.

Religious tolerance

I wanted to concentrate on personal tolerance, so I have not discussed religious tolerance, or the toleration of variant views and beliefs. As you know, this is not really an issue for Buddhism as a tradition, despite very poor behaviour by some Buddhist communities. But ksanti or tolerance as a personal quality is just as much an issue for Buddhists as for anyone else. For a Buddhist, any other person is to be treated as an independent human being, responsible for their own destiny, who is potentially a Buddha, whatever their opinions may be.

But what if their opinions are pernicious? For example, what if they hold tenaciously to an ideology in which a huge section of the community is regarded as untouchable, their very shadows being seen as polluting, as is still the case in large parts of India? If so, then I think the harmful views should be exposed, but in a spirit of personal friendliness. So I am pointing out that you do not have to tolerate everything. Tolerance does not mean blurring the truth and pretending that we all believe the same thing or are really all on the same path. I am convinced that there are  real differences between people, and also real differences between the Buddhist approach and other approaches, and between different people’s priorities and aims. I feel it’s rather intolerant for someone to insist otherwise.

Why is it that (with exceptions such as Northern Myanmar in our own time) Buddhists have as a whole has been quite happy to coexist with other religions and ideologies, while for most of their history, the other world religions have not been tolerant of each other?

I haven’t time to treat the whole issue thoroughly, and I could well be quite wrong about it. But I consider that it is connected with belief in God. Buddhists do not believe in God. Buddhism is a religion of discovery, of discovering the truth by taking full responsibility for the growth of your own wisdom and compassion. The other main world religions are, for most of their followers, religions of revelation. If you believe your truth is revealed from an infallible divine source, then it is difficult to admit the quite different revelations of other religions, or even the different interpretations of the revelation of your own religion.

It is obvious that individual theists can be genuinely tolerant people, but I think that such people have left behind some of the traditional associations with God. Each theistic religion as a whole, as a tradition or an institution, seems to militate against many forms of tolerance, and will carry on doing so unless there are some big changes. For example, I very cheekily asked a priest why the church did not simply repudiate the Old Testament, but he wasn’t having it!

So, if you are a believer in God, however you conceive of him, a non-theist might really test your tolerance by saying: ‘I am convinced that God does not exist, and that belief in God can in itself explain why there is more active intolerance in the theistic religions than outside them.’

Conclusion

I was thinking some more about the story of the Zen Abbot and the general. It is an impressive story, and he must have been a very impressive man. But I am not sure he was setting a very good example. In fact, I am sure he had no intention of setting an example, he was just being himself. If I had been there, I am certain I would have scampered off into the mountains with the other monks.

When I have told such stories before, some people usually respond by saying: ‘If everyone acted like that, society would fall apart!’ or ‘Someone has got to resist the tyranny and oppression of the strong over the weak’, or they think he was just lucky.

I sympathise with these responses, but I think they miss the point. The Abbot was not writing a list of recommended behaviours to suit all situations. He was just being himself, and each of us is different. For a start, we have probably not developed anything like his imperturbable kshanti, and that is not something you can pretend about.

Another Japanese master was lucky enough to die in his bed. As he lay dying, his devoted disciples gathered round, and asked him for his last words of wisdom. He just croaked: ‘I don’t want to die!’ ‘But master’, they said, ‘we want some final advice that posterity will remember you for’. ‘No really,’ he said ‘I don’t want to die.’ So I am sort of heartened by that. Maybe we can develop tolerance, tolerance for each of our fellow human beings, not imposing our expectations on them. But maybe we can keep one or two aspects of this world untolerated, as that last Zen master did with the expectations of his own pupils; maybe we can even refuse to tolerate the finality of death, and discover for ourselves what  it is all really about.

 

Based on lecture to a United Nations Association interfaith meeting in 1995

[i] William Blake, Jerusalem, 49: 72-5. His capitals.

[ii] Chogyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, 174.

Karma in Buddhism: why stop acting from preference?

kindnessKarma: acting by skill instead of likes and dislikes

A karma means a deed: anything we initiate, whether a deliberate thought, a few casual words to someone, or a physical action. All actions have their effects, and the intentional ones change our character and thus our future most powerfully of all.

There is a choice between what the Buddha called dark deeds and bright deeds. With mindfulness you can put energy into certain mental impulses and withdraw it from others; you can let some impulses express themselves in action, and restrain yourself from acting on others. This is Buddhist ethics, an ethics based in your knowledge of mental states, which offers the choice between skilful actions, the bright deeds, which genuinely benefit one’s self and others, and unskilful, dark deeds, which cause harm and distress.

The consequence of the basic negative impulses of craving and aversion is that things go wrong, and life becomes unsatisfactory because the world does not match your wants. This is how unskilfulness is defined in Buddhism: it comes from craving or aversion, and it leads to frustration and misery. By definition, unskilful actions harm yourself and others. Skilful actions in contrast come from open and loving states, and lead to benefit and happiness.

The first stage of a Buddhist life is to move the seat of government from the likes-and-dislikes polarity to that of skilful and unskilful, the criteria of Buddhist ethics. You restrain the craving, the clinging, and the other self-protective responses, and you see whether you can stop yourself turning those mental responses into harmful words and deeds. Instead, you practise friendliness, compassion, stillness, awareness and so on.

This does not mean a swap to not doing what you want to do and doing what you dislike. Skilful/unskilful are categories of a different nature from like/dislike. You are choosing on the basis of skilfulness instead of giving in to the habits of protecting a precarious identity, and a skilful choice can be tough, but it is often delightful. It can be very skilful to do what you like, and pleasant experiences are often the consequences of previous skilfulness. Ruling your life by always choosing what you like, hedonism, leads to disappointment and selfishness. But ruling your life by what you don’t like is religious asceticism, a practice the Buddha tried before his awakening, and emphatically found did not help. He reflected: ‘Why am I afraid of such pleasure?’ Then he explored the delights to be found in a clarified human mind – a skilful mind.

Karma, action, has tangible consequences, according to Buddhism. Why is it that one notices some things and not others? And why is it that some things are liked and some disliked? The reason is said to be past karma: the decisions we have made, the habits we have entrenched, perhaps in previous lives, in short all our seeds of ethical and unethical actions; these give significance to our current world, and determine what we notice and what we do about it.

Extracted from Finding the Mind by Robin Cooper (Ratnaprabha), Windhorse Publications, 2012.

Some notes on envy in Buddhism

Sanskrit irshya, Pali issa

Envy in English is: “A feeling of grudging or somewhat admiring discontent aroused by the possessions, achievements, or qualities of another” (Collins dictionary)

  1. Angelo Bronzino, Wikimedia

    It may be ethically neutral – “I do envy you your lovely house”.– Simply a form of praise.

  2. It may represent mild covetousness, actually wishing you did have a nicer house, but not with any enmity involved.
  3. Then it can become negative where you feel that they have something that you deserve better than they do.
  4. Finally a strong hatred or aversion, where you want to hurt the possessor that you envy.

 It is one of the five poisons (kleshas)

  1. Craving
  2. hatred
  3. ignorance
  4. envy (irshya)
  5. pride

Irshya can arise as an unskilful response when we notice the possessions, the good qualities or the achievements of others. We wish we had those things ourselves, so it is a form of craving. But it goes much further than covetousness or craving, because we don’t simply notice something which we then want to have, we actually resent the person who’s got it. So it is a mixture of craving and hatred. The Buddha says that envy arises when we can’t bear the success or possessions of other people. We find it difficult or impossible really to appreciate other people’s joys and achievements. They seem painful to us, because they remind us too strongly of our own deficiencies, as we see them.

The Alexander Berzin archive defines irshya as: “A disturbing emotion that focuses on other peoples’ accomplishments – such as their good qualities, possessions, or success – and is the inability to bear their accomplishments, due to excessive attachment to one’s own gain or to the respect one receives.”

Consider:

  1. Envy among children…
  2. envy at work…
  3. envy in romance and friendship…

Kant defined envy as “a reluctance to see our own well-being overshadowed by another’s because the standard we use to see how well off we are is not the intrinsic worth of our own well-being, but how it compares with that of others.”  So if we are completely at ease with ourselves as we are, the qualities and achievements of other people are not threatening at all, in fact we can appreciate them, and enjoy them. Envy comes from comparison, and from the feeling that I am special, so that I deserve things in preference to others, or the feeling that I have a special entitlement.

Everybody needs a certain amount of approval and appreciation, and perhaps if you lack it as a child, you are likely to have that sensitivity to being reminded, as you see it, of your deficiencies, by the qualities and achievements of others. The metta bhavana is a wonderful practice for tackling a lack of self-worth, because it doesn’t stop with encouraging a sense of love and well wishing towards yourself, but it expands to others as well, and that process of expansion is what establishes a robust mental emotional positivity in yourself. You no longer need the outside world to treat you well, because you feel okay about yourself.

Someone once asked the Buddha: “what is it that traps people, so that, though they wish to live in peace, without hate and hostility, they yet live in conflict, with hate and hostility.” The Master replied: “It is the bonds of envy and avarice that so trap people that, though they wish to live in peace, they live in conflict, with hate and hostility.”

“If we trace external conflicts back to their source, we will find that they spring up because we envy others for the qualities they possess which we desire for ourselves, and because we are driven by an unquenchable avarice to extend the boundaries of what we can label ‘mine’.  Envy and avarice in turn are grounded in two more fundamental psychological conditions. Envy arises because we identify things as ‘I’, because we perpetually seek to establish a personal identity for ourselves internally and to project that identity outward for others to recognize and accept. Avarice arises because we appropriate: we attempt to carve out a territory for ourselves and to furnish that territory with possessions that will titillate our greed and sense of self-importance.” (Bhikkhu Bodhi)

In the beginnings of envy, perhaps skilful desire is there, and is being used positively, to stimulate action. In the Mandala of mythical Buddhas, there is a green Buddha in the Northern quarter, his name Amoghasiddhi means “infallible success”, his quality is action or karma, and he transforms the poison of envy into the all performing wisdom.  The mental state that counteracts envy is mudita or sympathetic joy, but we can also say that actively intervening in your life is important if you find yourself experiencing envy, realising that you do have the ability to make a difference, to change things, looking at what you are doing, rather than worrying too much about whether people are better or worse than you.

Fearlessness is also an antidote to envy, and the green Buddha holds up his right hand in the gesture of courage, or bestowing fearlessness, as in the story of a furious elephant being set upon the Buddha by his envious cousin Devadatta.

The meditation on sympathetic joy (mudita).

First of all making a connection with a lighter, more at ease part of ourselves, wishing ourselves well. Then thinking of somebody we like who is happy or fortunate, at present at least, and seeing if we can rejoice in their happiness or good fortune. Then thinking of a neutral person, and if necessary imagining their happiness or good fortune, and rejoicing at that. Then a difficult person. Then equalising the mudita for all four people, and spreading it out to everybody in the world.