Letting go: There is no sublime except that
If you cling to anything—anything at all—you will suffer. This is central to Gotama’s teaching. The goal, nibbāna, is not a place or even a single mind-state, but a way of being that continuously lets go of conditioned reactivity:
anissito ca viharati
na ca kiñci loke upādiyati
“dwelling independently
not clinging to anything in this world”1
Clinging falls into two categories: sense desires and views. It’s important at the outset to remind ourselves of the empirical observations Gotama made that led him to see dukkha and its causes clearly, known as ti-lakkhaṇa, “the three characteristics.” Everything changes, continuously; there are no exceptions (impermanence, anicca). If you believe that you have found an exception, you are simply not looking carefully enough, closely enough. Impermanence is the first of the ti-lakkhaṇa, the three characteristics of experience. The fact that change is continuous, universal, and unavoidable, means that there cannot be any such thing as a permanent self, a something to which this change is occuring (the doctrine of non-self, anattā); there is only an ever-flowing process. But our nature is to assume, from the cellular level on up, that there is such an entity (even when we intellectually know otherwise). Because our needs have objects—I need x—the illusory separate subject, “I,” comes into being. These two characteristics, change and non-self (annica, anattā), ordinarily lead to the continuous arising of the third characteristic, dukkha: dissatisfaction, stress, suffering. Needs continuously arise, in reaction to sensations (sense desires, either wanting or not-wanting) or to ideas (fixed views that seem to explain the world to us); the suffering, stressful “I” continuously arises in its wake.
Can we have an idea, such as “the sublime” (to use Stephen Batchelor’s favorite word for it), the sacred, within the language game that Gotama proposed for alleviating our existential dilemma? Or does that violate Gotama’s understanding that we must stay in the middle space between eternalism and nihilism, or find ourselves clinging to some idea or feeling, leading sooner or later to stress or suffering?
We seem to crave beauty, which should already be a warning sign, since craving (taṅhā, literally “thirst”) leads to clinging (upādāna), which leads to dukkha. This is the Romantics’ path, and interestingly, it was their desire to fill this need without resort to the Christian (or any other) idea of God that led them to elevate beauty, art, & nature, to the role of the sacred. Consciously or unconsciously, in our times Dharma teachers use this strategy, often with abandon. It is not an accident that the last thing you hear in a Dharma talk is often a quote from a poem or a prose soliloquy about nature; this makes sure no one in the audience who holds a deep need to feel that someone is in charge, or everything is going to be alright in the end, leaves the room feeling downhearted. Beauty, the epitome of order, has been linked to the divine, the ethical, and all good things, since at least pre-Socratic Greek thought (Pythagoras & his linking of beauty with mathematics, mainly proportions, for example). But in the senses just indicated, it is something conspicuously absent from Gotama’s teaching in the sense of something admirable or valuable. Indeed, sense pleasures & fixed views—including taking beauty as an absolute good—are among the chief categories of what to avoid becoming enchanted with.
Beauty then becomes just another way to avoid working with the inevitable. I’m sorry to have to put it this way, but from the point of view of all of us who aren’t liberated, this individual experience doesn’t end well: We will die. There is no doubt about it. You can work through your feelings about this now, or wait for your deathbed, but there is no third choice that comes without suffering & stress. Clinging to ideas about sunsets and what might be beyond them—not an option that avoids dukkha.
So we need some way of dealing with the need for “the sacred” (put your favorite God subsitute here) that is not an answer, but a continuous question of maintaining equilibrium with this need, a question that can still be on our lips as we utter our last words. No problem, right?
But those are the unavoidable criteria; otherwise, we are simply moving the chairs of suffering around on the deck of the existential Titanic. We’re still going down in the end; the band may be playing an inspiring romantic tune, but the waters will close around us. The great steel shell of our ship of ideas, poems, rationalizations and cheerful images will not help us. You’re probably ready to stop reading now, but hang in there; I hope to come to some answers.
First, let’s remind ourselves of the criteria we need to satisfy if we are to avoid Gotama’s predictions of suffering:
- We cannot cling to anything, meaning a sense desire (to feel warm and safe, for example, at all times) or a view (“God will welcome me into heaven”)
- We cannot veer toward either eternalism (“something, somewhere, lasts forever, and I’m a part of it”) or nihilism (“nothing matters, and that’s the end of it; end of story, just stop worrying about it”)
Other caveats come to mind:
- Our “sacred” should not be used as a way of conveniently explaining away the random, or the unpleasant (the death of the innocent, for example)
- Gotama teaches us that what we need is not knowing some cosmic truth, as such, but a way of working with our experience moment to moment: It is a skill we can learn
This means that our resolution of “the sacred need” can work in that context; we can resolve the feelings of needing the sacred as they arise, and the fact of impermanence assures us that all such feelings will pass away. We need to understand the causes and conditions that lead to the arising of these feelings, & avoid identifying with them (creating a sense of “I”). If we can do this, we have our existential strategy & tactics worked out, and we do not need to craft an intellectual or an emotional solution beyond that. We do not need to be able to prove our premises to someone else, as such (although we could offer our strategy as a guideline to someone else for creating their own approach). This approach is self-reinforcing over time, as the urge to identify with what arises is replaced by the habit of letting go; suffering decreases.
One way of thinking about this that might be helpful is noted by the physicist and writer Sean Carroll, who carefully distinguishes between “awe” and “wonder”:
“Awe makes you think about being so impressed with the world, that you don’t know what to do. You let it wash over you. Wonder is a connotation, a feeling that this is amazing and I want to understand it better.”2
I think this is key, since “awe” here could be associated with the Romantic response. Rather than giving in to a desire for a feeling that we can become addicted to, letting it “wash over” us whenever existential dread arises, we can “wonder” about the feeling, investigate the causes and conditions in our experience that lead to its arising, see these as impermanent, let go of them, and return ourselves to equipoise. We don’t need to try to float in warm fuzzy feelings or pat ideas that will eventually let us down. We don’t need to try to name, tie down, & solidify some permanent source of the feeling, in hopes that this will save us from fear of death. We can, to borrow Kalupahana’s phrasing in translating the Pali word saṅkhāra, try “desolidfying the dispositions.”3 Our inclination to feel in need of the sacred or the sublime can be seen for the wanting, grasping & clinging that it is. We can let go of it, rather than indulging in wanting it, which simply conditions us to run down the same dead-end street in the future.
As this way of working with experience deepens, I think it is possible to see the need for the sacred or the sublime as a response to certain causes and conditions (compassion for the world, grief, and so on), rather than a solid need in and of itself. We want an answer (a powerful benevolent diety or a promise of future bliss would be nice). But resorting to such tactics only leads to such needs arising again in the future; rather than uprooting the defilements (āsavakkhaya-ñāṇa, literally “knowledge of the ending of the defilements”) to use Gotama’s language, we nourish the toxic weeds and push the problem back toward our deathbeds again. Do you want to overcome your fear of death, or live with conscious or subconscious fear for the rest of your life? To me, this is the definition of a no-brainer. As my teacher Anālayo reminds us, “Death is a part of life.”
Is it possible to experience beauty without clinging? Do we have to swear off Romantic art of all types? Maybe not, but it takes a lot of practice to avoid reinforcing unhelpful responses to feelings of existential crisis. Those feelings are more common at all scales of our experience than we often acknowledge, in my experience. Should we therefore avoid beauty? Unfortunately beauty is unavoidable. It is a conditioned response to see it (rūpa, literally “form,” is the word in Pāli) and be attracted to it. Ironically, the deepening of practice in Gotama’s teaching only seems to heighten one’s sense of this. This is in fact the source of the idea, I think, in later Buddhist traditions (notably Zen) of the aesthetic expression of Dharma. One can see beauty in a blade of grass; welcome back to the Romantic era! As we begin to see through the grosser forms of beauty (forms that arouse sexual attraction, for example), subtler ones appear in the same space in our minds. That space you see just ahead that looks so familiar: that’s the God hole.
Anything that fits the God hole is bound to provoke attachment. Only a process, such as clearly seeing our experience as dependently arisen, can dissolve the need that creates the hole, & can remove our disposition to reattach ourselves to beauty as a cure for dukkha. As Kalupahana notes about dependent arising (paṭiccasamuppāda):
“…the difficulty in perceiving and understanding dependence is due not to any mystery regarding the principle itself but to people’s love of mystery. The search for mystery, the hidden something (kiñci), is looked upon as a major cause of anxiety and frustration (dukkha). Therefore the one who does not look for any mystery (akiñcana), and who perceives things ‘as they have come to be’ (yathābhūta), is said to enjoy peace of mind that elevates him intellectually as well as morally. This explains the characterization of dependent arising as peaceful (santa) and lofty (panīta).”4
The goal is an experience of “the signless” (animitta), that is, not grasping & clinging to any of our conditioned mental reactions, perceptions, & so on, to the world of senses & thoughts that arises. This sounds impractical, not possible in the way we normally interact with the world, but remember that “the world” for Gotama meant contacts with the six senses (with mind being the sixth). These contacts continue to happen, but they no longer creating clinging—we do not think of these unconscious reactions as optional, but with training, they can be.
This is the solution to the false feeling that is used to fill the God hole; it avoids the need for the Romantic notion, the starry sky; even with the very Romantic-sounding “orginal mind” that is “radiant” in the early texts, the ”radiance” goes away at the time of liberation: Sean Carroll’s wondering reaches its conclusion, and experience (not some metaphysics) is known, seen clearly. There is a mind that does not get caught up. Here is Ajahn Thanissaro:
“The ‘original mind’ means the original mind of the round in which the mind finds itself spinning around and about, as in the Buddha’s saying, ‘Monks, the original mind is radiant’—notice that—’but because of the admixture of defilements’ or ‘because of the defilements that come passing through, it becomes darkened.’
“The original mind here refers to the origin of suppositions, not to the origin of purity. The Buddha uses the term ‘pabhassaraṁ—pabhassaram-idaṁ cittaṁ bhikkhave’—which means radiant. It doesn’t mean pure. The way he puts it is absolutely right. There is no way you can fault it. Had he said that the original mind is pure, you could immediately take issue: ‘If the mind is pure, why is it born? Those who have purified their minds are never reborn. If the mind is already pure, why purify it?’ … Meditators will see clearly for themselves the moment the mind passes from radiance to mental release: Radiance will no longer appear. Right here is the point where meditators clearly know this…” 5
We feel that we need a kind of beauty transcendant enough to take the place of diety, parental benevolence, the consolation of religion, to cope with the human condition—some purity at the heart of the universe. But Gotama warns us that such a thing is not to be found. Therefore it is a question of removing our conditioned reactions, the defilements, & seeing the way things are—there is absence of defilements, but no purity or beauty. What is impossible to convey in words is that this way of seeing doesn’t have the suffering, the dukkha, that we fear. The giving up of the need is also the dissolution of the fear.
While Gotama clearly intended the idea of dependent origination to provide an alternative to the “eternal self” of the Brahmans6, some part of us actually wants mystery, and thus seeks more nebulous ideas like “the sublime” to satiate that want.
But the impulse toward art, or at least the language people use to talk about the value or purpose of art, often valorizes the mystery, “the darkness” or the unconscious, as restoring something lost, rather than letting it go, as Gotama advises. As the writer Kathryn Harrison puts it:
“There’s huge redemption in the fact that there is a world that is dark, or opaque, to conscious life. The realm of darkness that heals and restores, and allows memory to bind up, provides the present with a kind of solace that is almost holy. … A realm that God inhabits.”7
But solace in Gotama’s understanding does not come from trying to restore what has been lost, rather from seeing the way in which what was lost never existed in the sense we thought, and that what arises now is a different experience, with memory as part of its cause. Rather than trying to restore something, we can see more clearly the creation of our current experience and let it go before it strengthens into the dukkha of longing for an unrecoverable past experience, or hoping for some particular future experience.
In the Kaccānagotta Sutta, Gotama reminds us we must find the middle path between eternalism and nihilism; using our direct understanding of dependent arising enables us to see our experience created in the moment, not relying on anything previously existing and not creating anything permanent. We have to balance between knowing and not-knowing, seeing the contingency of all things, without needing to resolve our feelings into some thing but to see them as among the innumberable arisings of our experience. But what we need is “the consolation of no consolation,”8 since our relentless exploration of material reality through science & technology will erode all dreams of spiritual consolation faster than we can create them. We can translate the Pāli word saddha as “faith” if we like, linking it to Christian connotations of consolation, but Gotama knew such inclinations were in vain, only delaying the experience of dukkha until a time when the pressure was too great to support that faith through shear will, desparately wanting to believe the unbelieveable. Impermanence is not to be denied or wished away. Translating saddha as “trust,” as in “trust in the teachings of Gotama,” provides a sturdier answer. Because it does not rely on any unseen, believed-in-without-evidence realities, but the skill of understanding our experience in this moment (including the experience of feeling the need for solace). It does not require a continuous act of will to maintain it. Rather than continuing to hold up a heavy object, we can put the burden down and move on.
The sacred, then, would be replaced by the experience of true freedom.
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1 Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, Majjhima Nikāya 22
2 Sean Carroll, “Maybe You’re Not an Atheist—Maybe You’re a Naturalist Like Sean Carroll”
3 Kalupahana, A History of Buddhist Philosophy
4 Kalupahana, A History of Buddhist Philosophy
5 from course materials prepared by Thanissaro Bhikkhu, Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, Spring 2016
6 Kalupahana, A History of Buddhist Philosophy
7 Kathryn Harrison, interview with Joe Fassler in The Atlantic, April 18, 2016
8 Pema Chodron, from The Places That Scare You (Shambhala Publications)