Archives for July 2017

Kamma, upādāna & majjhimāpaṭipadā

July 12, 2017

flat snake on sand among fall leaves

The history of habit-clinging & the middle way

Mental suffering comes from unwholesome habits of thinking, not from some mysterious cause.

The gap between each beat in the rhythm of experience holds opportunity. We can see how the next beat will affect our habits, our ways of being in the world—or not.

We can choose to reinforce bad habits, or cultivate better ones. We can change the future likelihood of wholesome thoughts & feelings, or the opposite—which leads to more suffering, mental distress, in the future.

Our intentions in these moments are what make the difference. Gotama saw this as the answer to the human problem. Like the spiritual idea of grace, always available, he saw each moment’s turning as the beginning of the path to escape our fearful experience of the world. This is what’s meant by Gotama’s choice to redefine the Pāli word kamma (a.k.a. karma) as intention (cetana in Pāli)—as in, “my intention in this moment.” The culture of his day thought that we were fated by birth to play the role we were given in this life in hopes of a better rebirth. Gotama said we have a choice, that we could achieve freedom “in this very life.”

In each moment—whatever length a moment has—everything arises & everything passes away: imagine just that.

Existence & non-existence, “everything exists” & “nothing exists”, atthi and n’atthi, are merely the wave crests and troughs of delusional thought in our experience, as the tide passes us. Moments of awareness are blurry snapshots of this universal flux.

Gotama’s middle way of understanding (majjhimāpaṭipadā) the present-moment awareness of the flux, keeping unwholesome conditioning tranquilized, observes this movement of the mind, realizing that no part can be thought of as an essence. The signs (nimitta) of ordinary experience fade like shafts of sunlight cut off by clouds; the signless (animitta) appears. Detail in this landscape is useful for getting around, but only real in that pragmatic sense.

It is only knowing and seeing the process, not grasping some part of it, that is helpful. This knowing & seeing is a perspective, a trained way of experiencing. It observes precisely the process of which anicca, impermanence, and anattā, not-self, are the chief characteristics, and of which dukkha, for beings who are not free, is the result. Our stress & suffering begin with natural ignorance, inborn & ingrained as habit; that is part of the nature of this process. This ignorance of what is really going on, avijja, determines the very structure of our psycho-physical being, distorting our senses from simple sensations, to pleasant or unpleasant reactions to them, to perceptions of experience that we make into solid reference points, on to complex desires & aversions, delusions, & the seething oceans of thoughts and emotions above them. If the process of grasping these signs is left undisturbed, the cycle reinforces itself, each pulse strengthening the ignorance (not seeing how mental suffering is arising) that began the prior one. This is the monkey-trap of kamma, where our fist, grasping the fruit of experience, awaits the hunter, dukkha, who comes each moment to slay us. Letting go of the fruit, we could be free, but our untrained minds cannot see this, obscured by our desparate habits of clinging.

Craving, taṅhā, is the one phenomenon that Gotama specifically identifies as the mechanism that moves kamma through space & time, from the perspective of one experience of being to the next. The body does not survive death; neither does the personality, or the five aspects of our experience in form, pleasant/unpleasant/neutral feeling, perception, habitual inclinations, & various forms of consciousness. All those arise as a result of new cycles of ignorance, which were created by previous clinging. Craving, like a flame thrown through space and time¹, ignites the process anew in the fuel of ignorance. New selves that suffer arise from the flames, phoenix-like, over and over, unless & until seeing things as they truly are, yathābhūtaṃ, snuffs out the cycle, quenches the flames. This is the true meaning of nibbāna, cooling. Note that no consciousness moves from life to life. Craving/clinging (upādāna), as expressed & held in all beings & other processes in the world, are sufficient to prolong greed, hatred & delusion through time. Basic human mechanisms, combined with this ongoing environment, suffice to create continuous dukkha for beings that are not free.

It is vitally important to us in our sci-tech-material culture, stripped of comforting mythologies and unseen dieties on which to transfer the imagined omnipotence of our parents, to understand and properly invest with power, the mechanism of clinging. Like the apparent strength & ultimate weakness of the nightmare demon, craving/clinging is the energy source that can be cut off, if only we see clearly & cultivate (bhavana) the strength to cut through it. The knowledge of the middle way, majjhimāpaṭpadā, can free our minds from all the false solutions to the problem of dukkha, suffering, that we try, the blind alleys we continually follow.

All our instincts, based in materiality, lead us to think the answer must be an object, whether it be a person, a drug, or an idea, that in itself will satisfy our needs. But our needs by their very nature are insatiable—that is the essence of craving/clinging, falling into the hedonic loop of insatiability.

The beauty of understanding the true energy mechanism of kamma, clinging, is that this understanding can exist comfortably in our sci-tech-material culture. Craving/clinging is like a contagious disease that we do not treat, & that we constantly pass along to everyone we encounter. In this way it spreads horizontally through the culture and vertically through time, as we sigh and give in to the hedonic cycle one more time, modeling this behaviour for our peers and all the world’s children. This inheritance from the mechanisms of evolutionary repetition spreads & succeeds down through time like a brilliantly successful fungus or bacteria, perfectly fitted to its ecological niche in the human psyche.

But evolution’s most subtle aspect also provides us with a solution. We think of the complexities that now exist as the result of evolution through passing time, increasing slowly through millennia. This is true, but the secret to understanding the evolutionary process is that each small mutation, if reproduced & successful, changes the game. Each layer of success for one phenomenon introduces a new aspect to the world, changing the environment for all subsequent events. Eons ago, the Earth’s atmosphere was poisonous to most life as we now know it. But some microorganisms’ mutation allowed it to thrive in a carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere was poisonous to others, by using solar energy to convert it to oxygen—photosynthesis. An entirely new environment arose (the carbon dioxide to oxygen shift).²

Our ability to cultivate concentration and calm, to slow & magnify our view of the nature of our experience (practice), & to understand our situation (study), are the results of evolutionary processes, blind & goalless beyond their success at replication. They created the trap of the hedonic cycle, but they also created the means to escape it. By developing concentration & insight, the ability to avoid the innate compulsion to see things as either existing or not existing, but as a flux, we can free our psycho-physical reactions to experience. We can learn not to take the bait. We can end the fire of clinging by letting go of the fuel of ignorance. The kamma that creates dukkha can be ended, saṃsāra transformed into nibbāna.

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¹The Buddha: “Just as a fire burns with sustenance and not without sustenance, even so I designate the rebirth of one who has sustenance and not of one without sustenance.”

Vacchagotta: “But, Master Gotama, at the moment a flame is being swept on by the wind and goes a far distance, what do you designate as its sustenance then?”

“Vaccha, when a flame is being swept on by the wind and goes a far distance, I designate it as wind-sustained, for the wind is its sustenance at that time.”

“And at the moment when a being sets this body aside and is not yet reborn in another body, what do you designate as its sustenance then?”

“Vaccha, when a being sets this body aside and is not yet reborn in another body, I designate it as craving-sustained, for craving is its sustenance at that time.”

— SN 44.9 (Thanissaro)

²“Great Oxygenation Event”, Back In Time app

Looking nihilism in the face

July 12, 2017

spider on splinter, black background

What would it be like if nothing mattered? I don’t mean that there is no ordinary meaning in human life. Baseball is still baseball, and it is enjoyable to watch (if you ever felt that in the first place). But ultimately it has no meaning, beyond the enjoyment of players and spectators. After the heat death of the universe—or before that, if there are no humans remaining anywhere—baseball will have no meaning. There is no Platonic Baseball Hall of Fame, no Cooperstown lingering as a phantasm in the void if the sport becomes something only historical that no one plays anymore. (I plan to be dead by then.) That’s what I mean by “to matter.”

If this kind of relative meaning can exist without ultimate meaning, what is the meaning of “ultimate meaning”? If you cannot cash in your ultimate meaning today, for face value, what good is it? On the other hand, if you can cash in your meaning today, it must be relative meaning. How else do you establish its value? The contract lawyers of the universe have got you there. You have a coupon, a receipt, a promise, a piece of paper. That and $3 will get you from Alewife to Fenway Park on the “T.” But why would you want to go to heaven—maybe!—if you can go to Fenway Park today, for sure? OK, the beer is outrageously expensive at Fenway Park, but at least you can drink it today. There’s even a ballgame to watch while you drink it.

Not only will the future always be in the future, the meaning of the future will always be in the future, too.

But we want the meaning of the future to be negotiable in the present—hence “the sacred.” We want the “fact” that the future means something in an ultimate sense to change the meaning of this very moment. We want it, in fact, to provide the meaning for this moment, even though it (the future) doesn’t exist right now. These time things are tricky!

The implication of this is that we can’t locate meaning in the current time without reference to meaning in some future time, or in the eternal, whatever that means. It is “outside of time & space,” as is sometimes said. This seems to me just a fancy way of saying “not now.” There is a theory that we construct time and space as we go, that is, time & space are, as Gotama would say, “conditioned,” as opposed to the some popular notions of nibbāna as something eternal, “beyond space and time,” even though he clearly rejects the eternal.¹ But Gotama was experiencing nibbāna, “the unconditioned,” while he lived, right in front of others. He was there, not beyond space and time. (There are, of course, elaborate Buddhist philosophical systems including three different emanations of the Buddha, only one of which could be seen, and so on; but these come off as mere convoluted ideas to justify various metaphysical views, which Gotama rejected.)

I am being facetious about things that some people hold very dearly and seriously; but I wish to make a point. Can you have your eternal future cake and eat it too? I don’t think so. In the flow of experience, we are always eating here and now; we are free—or not—here and now. We need to be able to see the fear of death clearly, so we can let it go & get on with living—here—now. The reason to contemplate death, as my teacher Anālayo reminds us, is because the only time we can live is here and now. And if we can master that skill of living, then eternity is optional. It is seen for what it is: just another very human idea.

The only meaning that matters is the one we are creating here & now. We’re either creating dukkha, stress & suffering, or not. We’re either reinforcing the habit of creating that dukkha, or we’re not. (There are subtle degrees in both cases, but they all tend one way or the other.) This is the meaning of Gotama’s teaching on dependent arising (paṭiccasamuppāda). The irony—& the glory—is that the only way to affect the meaning of future moments is the way we create meaning in present ones. This is a simple way of showing why we need training (study & meditation practice) to balance in the flux of experience—balance that frees us from both ideas of eternal ultimate meanings & the numb despair of meaninglessness.

So rather than ultimate meaning or no meaning we have this experience, here & now. This is why it is said that nibbāna and saṃsāra are the same. With training, you can look nihilism in the face & say “There is this sense, this idea of nihilism; see how it arises & passes.”

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¹Kaccānagotta Sutta, Saṃyutta Nikāya ii.16-17

Sacred, sublime, letting go (preliminaries)

July 12, 2017

pink wildflower bud closeup, soft focus

Why we must carefully avoid attachment to substitutes for God, beauty, & other symbols of the eternal: There’s nothing wrong with valuing beauty & benevolence in human experience, as long as we don’t deify, reify, or get attached. But we must understand why we crave them, & what the alternatives might be.

“He perceives gods as gods. Having perceived gods as gods, he conceives gods, he conceives (himself) in gods, he conceives (himself apart) from gods, he conceives gods to be ‘mine,’ he delights in gods. Why is that? Because he has not fully understood it, I say.”¹

We crave order, stability, predictability. We want to believe in a benevolence that inheres in the nature of things. As we mature, we seek to transfer the answers to these needs and wants from our parents to some other source of safety. Our inborn ability to detect agency in the world, combined with these needs, has led to a common feature of human cultures, namely deities, “higher powers,” and so on. The amazing, historically rapid increase in our scientific and technical mastery of our physical environment —verging on terrifying—has had two consequences that bear directly on how we cope with the existential needs just described.

First, our ability to truly believe in the idea structures, metaphors, and language games created by our cultures prior to the last century or so have been severely compromised. The level of cognitive dissonance we must accept if we want to maintain such beliefs continues to rise steadily, with no end in sight. To put it bluntly, our old tricks for suppressing the fear of inevitable death don’t work any more. Some know this consciously, others—far worse for them & for us—only unconsciously.

Second, there have been, broadly speaking, two responses to this. The first is to double down on the beliefs, creating enormous pressure to compartmentalize the mind into everyday rational/pragmatic and irrational/magical-thinking sections; this is how you can have fundamentalists who use cell phones and fly on airplanes, and even use these to kill people who threaten the stability of their inherently unstable belief systems. The second category of response is to modify the language game, substituting more abstract, less literal ideas for the traditional cultural metaphors that simply extend or replace concrete notions of parents, order, beauty and benevolent deities. This thread goes back a long way in human culture, but has expanded beyond traditional religious systems, for example with the Romantic movement and its precursors that flowered at the end of the 19th century.

Many contemporary Buddhists in the West have either accepted traditional fundamentalist interpretations of Buddhist texts (cultural beliefs & practices associated with various traditions), or been swept up in this second category of responses, filtering & adapting their interpretations of Gotama’s teachings through the lens of Romantic tradition. Just as there is a reason that deities usually come in “mother” and “father” forms (including in later Buddhist traditions), there is a reason Romatic poetry figures prominently in many of the Dharma talks you hear these days. It is a way of appealing to both the fundamentalist & Romantic responses, without overtly committing to either one.

I submit that this is an unfortunate misunderstanding of what Gotama taught. Even when cleverly disguised as “the sublime”², this approach carries with it the same increasing pressure of cognitive dissonance as the first response of fundamentalist doubling-down. It does not avoid dukkha, psychological suffering, but rather leads toward more of it. Moreover, I believe that Gotama, through his strategy of understanding the dependently arisen nature of experience, offers a pragmatic solution, when combined with meditative development of calm, concentration and insight. Seeing anattā clearly—experiencing the world without a sense of a fixed self—we can dissolve attachment to the need for a sense that human-focused order, beauty, and benevolence is part of nature. At the same time, the wholesome types of order, beauty and benevolence, cultivated by humans toward other beings, can be seen, and how they alleviate dukkha can be directly known.

That is the subject of the following essay.

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¹Mūlapariyāya Sutta, MN 1 (Bhikkhu Nanamoli & Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha.)

²Stephen Batchelor, After Buddhism

Sacred—sublime—letting go

July 12, 2017

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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¹Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, Majjhima Nikāya 22

² Sean Carroll, “Maybe You’re Not an Atheist—Maybe You’re a Naturalist Like Sean Carroll”

³Kalupahana, A History of Buddhist Philosophy

⁴Kalupahana, A History of Buddhist Philosophy

⁵from course materials prepared by Thanissaro Bhikkhu, Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, Spring 2016

⁶Kalupahana, A History of Buddhist Philosophy

⁷Kathryn Harrison, interview with Joe Fassler in The Atlantic, April 18, 2016

⁸Pema Chodron, from The Places That Scare You (Shambhala Publications)

Seven ways of thinking about Gotama’s teachings

July 12, 2017

closeup of queen-anne's lace bud

These seven topics I find to be most important for understanding the distinction between the core of Gotama’s teachings on one hand, & the cultural context & language in which they have been handed down to us on the other. These descriptions are not meant to be either critical of other approaches or comprehensive, but only to suggest new language to explore. From these points of departure, I find, we can make our way through all of his insights & advice.

Middle way: paṭiccasamuppāda, dependent arising

Thoughts are just one aspect of experience. There are not who you are. They are valuable tools, but nothing more than that. If you think that thoughts themselves deserve special status, make sure you look at the process that they arise from.

Careful thought can be helpful, but it is very easy to get trapped in unhelpful views, metaphysics & other complex ideas. We get drunk or high on some cosmic notion that seems to explain everything. We try to tie down the profound, but get tangled in knots of nonsense. Gotama’s response to this is difficult to capture succinctly. He said that the right way to understand is to see that everything we experience—including ideas—depends on many other things. This is not meant to be an idea to be accepted; it describes what can be directly seen by a still & otherwise prepared mind.

When we look closely at our experience, we see sights, sounds & ideas arising, then passing away. We can look as closely as we like at an idea, but like the layers of an onion, we search in vain for its center, the something that it is without reference to something else. How can we explain any word or idea without using other words or ideas?¹ Everything depends on its context for understanding. We get attached to an idea like “eternal” or convinced that “everything is meaningless” even as we ponder that this statement itself has…”meaning”! Seeing directly that our experience is an endless flux of arising & passing away, we try to label this or tie that down. We try to use it to explain experience to ourselves, to soothe our anxiety, to ward off the fear of death, to know what to do. But the best we can do is find our balance while riding this flux, not grasping after elusive ideas but training ourselves to remain calm amidst the chaos. This is Gotama’s method of avoiding the traps of philosophy, if you will.² The more we understand the other aspects of his teachings, the clearer this truth becomes.

Nature of person: what comes before who

We are obsessed with who we are. The real issus is, what are we? Once we use trained introspection to see what we are, the notion of who we are becomes irrelevant in terms of human suffering (dukkha) & freedom from suffering.

Gotama saw that to understand the human problem, we must start with the basic experience of human existence. Searching for some ”essence” only leads to suffering. We have evolved to have needs that serve only the pattern of physical survival (& thus reproduction), not our true happiness. In fact, we are literally wired to be unhappy (what’s known as Gotama’s first ennobling truth, about dukkha, suffering & stress.) We must look calmly & closely at our needs for sense pleasures & collections of charming ideas, & see that these needs are not what we are. The dull, throbbing ache of “Who am I? Why am I? Where am I going?” can be relieved by clearly seeing what we are & what we are not. True happiness & a sense of what to do flow naturally from this clear seeing, which requires practiced concentration, calm, & insight.

Person of Buddha: Gotama

“The Buddha” was not a god. That’s a good thing. He was a uniquely wise being. That’s more useful than being a god, actually.

It is a natural human tendency to deify someone whose insights & accomplishments put them so far beyond our ordinary experience as human beings. But Gotama specifically denied he was a god; he saw the idea of gods-as-a-source-of-solace as just something else that would ultimately disappoint us & cause suffering. It is inspiring & instructive to know that he was extraordinary, but human—extra-ordinarily human, you might say. That he was human means that ordinary humans can follow his teachings with success, transcending our given, suffering human experience.

Kamma: history of habits

Without training, we become victims of our past, repeating painful habits. We can train ourselves to break free of this. Knowing that we can do this is the ultimate human consolation.

Kamma, or karma, is frequently misunderstood as a primitive, fatalistic belief or as a vague wishful substitute for a just & benevolent force beyond human understanding. But it can be explained most usefully as a vast matrix of habits that flows throughout the history of sentient beings. It is the effect of human actions from the past on our situation right now, in the very moment you are reading this. It does not include everything that affects what happens; some things happen by chance, unrelated to what we do. To understand kamma as Gotama described it, we must invert the historical telescope: We look through the big lens of understanding, making it into a microscope to examine our experience in the moment, with the help of Gotama’s brilliant tools of analysis. Seeing how our suffering arises each moment because of our bad habits of understanding what we are, we suddenly understand how our individual sufferings right now become compounded into the “mass of suffering” that afflicts humans & all the sentient beings we live with. We see a vast river of tears & sorrow flowing through time, & also how to cross that flood to freedom.

Sīla: training for true happiness

It may seem discouraging that freedom requires personal discipline & effort. But consider: This means freedom is available to all of us. It does not require miracles, only sincere effort.

Sīla is sometimes thought of as the same as ethics or morality in wisdom traditions. While it is indeed a set of recommendations on how to behave, there’s an important distinction. Gotama’s sīla is not as a set of “thou shalts” that magically guarantee salvation in some future heaven. This sīla shows how behaviors that conflict with our natural human benevolence distract us from clearly seeing how psychological suffering & stress arise in our experience. It shows how it interferes with deeper training that can allow us to see our experience in the moment quickly & clearly enough to avoid suffering & stress for ourselves & others. (This is why sīla is a key part of preliminary training, allowing for deeper training later.) It is the process of learning through training how our behavior causes us suffering when it conflicts with our basic human benevolence. It is the equivalent of an athlete getting her body in shape for more sophisticated training in her chosen sport. Our sport is life. If we are not strong & flexible, trained for the endurance we need to maintain keen attention to everything in our experience, all the time, we cannot win against the opponent: our unconscious desires & delusions. We cannot afford to fall into the ordinary traps of thoughtlessly harming of others, selfishly taking, being mindlessly driven by sexual urges to harm others, pointlessly lying, & distracting ourselves with intoxicants that make us foolish. If we step onto the playing field with these disadvantages, we will never win true happiness.

Pragmatism: it has to work here & now

Everything about Gotama’s teachings is practical. It works just like other processes you know about that are practical. You learn to be a carpenter. You learn to play a musical instrument. You practice & become skilled at a sport, a skill of any kind. There is no mystical secret. “Come & see.” Start whenever you like. Whenever you can.

Gotama said “What I have always taught about is just stress & suffering & how to end them.”³ All his teachings support that goal. There is nothing extra in his teachings beyond that. This phrase is like a touchstone, a key to all his other teachings. If you cannot understand a particular teaching in terms of how it relates to ending dukkha, then it is time to ponder it further. If a teaching seems to lead to breathless cosmic statements, magical beliefs, or romantic notions, consider that you have missed the point. This pragmatic approach is what makes Gotama’s teachings capable of being rearticulated for use in our current day & age. It is vital to understand the pragmatic meaning of each of his teachings, to separate them from culture & superstition. This is what makes them useable here & now without cognitive dissonance in our era of advanced natural science & pervasive technology.

“Sacred”: growing up; getting over it

The nature of things, as they really are, is not friendly. Death is not friendly. Denying this is a sure route to suffering. All the traditional ways of ignoring this reality end at the same spot. We must turn & face the monster of mortality. Change is our enemy as long as we deny it; but we can seek to understand it instead.

We are by nature frightened beings. This helps us to survive, of course. We would prefer to live forever, but we know both consciously & in a deep subconscious layer of instinct that this body will die. The simmering terror of this drives our cultures, our personal illusions about who & what we are, & all of the horrific human actions that we lump together as “evil.” Our minds desparately want a theory to unify all the thoughts & feelings we have stitched together in our vain attempt to cool down the terror. We invent something we call “sacred” to fill this need, a constellation imagined as we search the night sky for benevolence & meaning in the universe. But these inventions only succeed in distracting us & avoiding the necessary confrontation with the terror. It is like the monster that forever chases us in our nightmares. Only by turning & confronting it can we truly escape. Gotama realizes this, & his teachings are built on training ourselves to turn against the nightmare monster & vanquish it.

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¹This truism of postmodern thought is actually quite old. More importantly, Gotama offers techniques for seeing it directly in experience, rather than accepting it as a discursive thought.

²Here Gotama anticipates Wittgenstein’s understanding of language, but again, as part of a pragmatic method rather than a purely philosophical statement.

³This is my translation of Alagaddūpama Sutta MN 22:

Pubbe cāhaṃ, bhikkhave, etarahi ca dukkhañceva paññāpemi, dukkhassa ca nirodhaṃ

What is sacred?

July 12, 2017

Did you kiss the dog you love

When you were a little child?

Will you lay in the arms of

Some sweet reverie a while?

—Jim White, “A Town Called Amen”

When we “hold this sacred,” what do we mean?

We put it above all else. We create a kind of purity that should not be spoiled; it is a moral issue, since it is behavior—ours or others’—that might spoil it. Underneath this, though, is the lurking knowledge of our mortality. We hold something sacred because we want to use it as a talisman, a charm, a protection against the ultimate impermanence, our own death. Because of this, the sacred becomes both vital & fragile, in danger, in need of defense. We will likely visit some form of violence (social &/or physical) on those who violate it. If it is not held pure, then its magical efficacy is in doubt. It can no longer protect us. This is why maintaining it becomes literally a matter of life and death, something people are ready to die for or kill for.

While this interlocking set of ideas is relatively easy to spot in established wisdom traditions, some version of it pops up in even the most contemporary habits of thought. When Ray Kurzweil assures us that we will be able to upload our minds to a computer, and thus achieve immortality, it takes the form of the idea that digital technologies will save us. It is the conviction (demonstrably false¹) that the mind is an information processor that is being held sacred, as part of the idea that science itself is sacred; its self-correcting design is the token of its deity; its ability to produce “truth” (about the material world) is held inviolable; its superiority to any other way of approaching the human existential situation is held sacred and defended at any cost.

In contemporary Buddhism in the West, the notion that there is something “sacred” survives in various forms. As more and more scientific evidence emerges that the teachings of Gotama have measurable physical and psychological benefits, the need to defend something beyond (or beneath or above) those mundane truths seems to become stronger. I once heard one of the leading lights of the Western mindfulness movement urge a group of people who support one of its institutions to make sure to preserve “the sacred, whatever that may mean.”² The lack of specificity in that statement, and in many other discussions I have witnessed or become aware of, seems to highlight that this is a felt need rather than a well-defined idea of the sacred. When interrogated, this need shapes itself into something like Romanticism, “interconnectedness,”³ Vedanta teachings of nondualism, nature worship, art, and so on, depending on whom you ask. Many Buddhists feel that they need something sacred; but Gotama would call this craving & clinging, a kind of bhava-upādāna, clinging to becoming or being, or to a view about the eternal.

But ultimately most traditional wisdom systems and the current empirical/scientific hegemony work in the same ontological way: First, establish what exists, and by inference what does not exist. This becomes “Truth.” Based on this Truth, one elaborates systems of deciding what is the best course of action in any given situation. The initial rationalizations for certain feelings & needs become codified into a set of spiritual laws & ethical norms. Because this is linked back to some version of “the sacred,” we feel we have achieved the greatest possible solidity for the foundation of the fortress that defends against thoughts of our mortality.

For reasons that I will elaborate, I do not think this is how Gotama thought about it. His empirical, phenomenological pragmatism takes a completely different approach to the human existential problem, one that, properly understood, avoids the cognitive dissonance between a materialistic, scientific culture and the human nature that fears death and clings to the sacred.

The fortresses of most wisdom traditions, as practised, are in fact built on the shifting sands of cognitive dissonance. Our existence is a flux, and somewhere deep inside, we know this. No intellectual construct, no pile of information, facts, “knowledge,” or sacred rituals can change that. Subtly, constantly, quietly but insistently, we hear the voice of impermanence speaking to us: “This body will die,” it says, like the dark, minor-key tone of the breeze in the trees as a storm approaches. Like the deep gray transparency of an overcast afternoon, it is a question and an answer all in one. The question repeats, and the answer is always the same. We make our raft from scraps of various sacred rituals, well-worn ideas, the memories of our parents’ warm embrace, the childlike wonder like a worn piece of old blanket kept at the bottom of a pocket. But all around us, as far as the eye can see, out to the end of the circle of imagination that moves with us wherever we go, is the endless empty sea. Deep in our hearts, no matter what beliefs we profess, we know the truth.

That is our existential truth; that is why we create the sacred.

The purpose of these essays is to offer another way of relating to these thoughts and feelings, one that does not build a fortress on top of cognitive dissonance, on needing something to exist eternally or be sacred in the way I have described. Preserving, reconstituting or tweaking some existing understanding and articulation of “sacred” won’t work in our empirical, materialistic age. The power of cognitive dissonance is too strong, and resisting that pull while clinging to old beliefs tends to cause very bad behavior by human beings, even those who may have all the appearances of being deeply spiritual and advanced in their understanding.⁴

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¹ See for example The Empty Brain

²Jon Kabat-Zinn at BCBS donor event July 9, 2016

³This term is frequently conflated with paṭiccasamuppāda, dependent arising, which is a completely different idea, one of Gotama’s diagnostic tools for seeing the origins of suffering, whereas “interconnectedness” is a Romantic idea in which pity for suffering beings is mistaken for karunā, compassion.

⁴For example, Buddhists in Burma (e.g., Sayadaw U Pandita & others speaking disparagingly about Muslims), Thailand & Sri Lanka have spoken & acted in uninspiring ways that seem in conflict with their nominal spiritual stature.