Buddhist? Buddhish? Non-Buddhist?
Monday July 26, 2010
Today I visited the Yuelu Buddhist temple, here in Changsha, China (a place that proudly flies both the Chinese flag and the international Buddhist flag – a curious juxtaposition) and as I sat in the courtyard, I found myself reflecting on the question – once again – of my relationship to Buddhism. What started me thinking was how curious it was that my most immediate response to finding myself in the quiet courtyard was to want to pull up a cushion and sit down and meditate. If I didn’t do so, because something about this act would have seemed ostentatious – it seems that this isn’t really the done thing. Instead I sat quietly, just taking in the peaceful atmosphere, enjoying the cool of the shade. and reflecting
As long-term readers will know, in the five years since this blog was started (five years – can it really be that long?), I have tended to identify myself less and less as a Buddhist. My scepticism about many of the claims that are made within Buddhism, and my unease with the cultural worlds of Western (and Eastern) Buddhism have grown. But at the same time, my intellectual interest in the various worlds of Buddhism has tended to decrease as well. I don’t find myself turning to Candrakīrti, for example, or to Dōgen, for stimulation or for invigorating thoughts. This is not an argument against either of these thinkers, it is just that they don’t seem particularly urgent to me at the moment. I am having too much fun reading and thinking about Zhuangzi. Or reading about brain science. Or reading a hundred other things that are seem to be currently proving fruitful.
So… Buddhist, Buddhish, not-Buddhist…? (Here I’m tempted to play the Buddhist logic game, once again, but I’ll resist the temptation.) Which of these? I don’t really know. But perhaps what has changed most over the past five years is that I no longer really care that much. Back in the day, it mattered to me, and it mattered profoundly, that I was a Buddhist. These days, it doesn’t. When it comes to the elaboration of Buddhist ideas, the grand schemes, the subtle philosophical positions, I suspect that I simply haven’t the energy to engage with these ideas; similarly when it comes to the more rigorous practices, I can’t quite summon up the appropriate level of interest. Both philosophically or in terms of practice, I don’t really have the taste for extreme-sports Buddhism, and seeing those that do, I am not entirely convinced that it is the path to a form of life that I find particularly appealing.
Nevertheless, when I look more deeply, and when I look at thoughts that are, in a sense, more homely and everyday, there is a kind of ineradicable Buddhishness to the way I see the world, and for this I am grateful. I am grateful to be rid of the idea of the self as an enduring entity that must be protected and shored up; I am grateful for the knowledge that the world is supple, that it changes moment by moment; and I am grateful to be rid of the idea that it might be possible to transform the world so that it is entirely to my liking. Not only this, but I am grateful for the various practices that continue to allow me to poke and prod at my habitual assumptions about what I am, about what it means to perceive the world.
As I have come closer to the five year mark, I have sometimes thought about the name of this blog and whether it is still appropriate. One thing I have wondered is whether the name of the blog has itself tended to limit the kinds of things I talk about. I am listed in various places as a Buddhist blogger, but is this even accurate? In the end, it all depends on what you mean, although perhaps it might be good – from the point of view of that practice of writing this blog – to free myself a little from the sense of obligation to be “Buddhist” or even “Buddhish”, and to simply get on with the business of thinking out loud and writing.
And also, of course, much depends on what happens next, and that is something that one really can’t second-guess. This blog, like everything else, is changeable and without self-nature. Onwards. Let’s see what happens!
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Mortification of the flesh, with some thoughts on Buddhist logic and the consumption of cake
Sunday July 11, 2010
If it’s been quiet around here lately, that’s partly because of my temporary relocation to China, where I am doing some research for a forthcoming novel. This has knocked almost everything else for six, what with organising everything for my departure, and then getting my head round life in a different part of the world and (oh, dear!) a different language.
Anyway, today I noticed that thinkBuddha is close to its fifth birthday, which is just over a couple of weeks away. If I have internet access at that time, I’ll have some modest festivities online. Without cake, of course, because a virtual cake is no cake at all. And talking about cake, or the absence of cake, brings me nicely to today’s topic.
Early today I wandered up the road from where I’m staying in Beijing to the Wanshou Temple (万寿寺) – the temple of longevity – which dates from the sixteenth century, and which was apparently much favoured by the Empress Dowager Cixi. Sunday was probably not the day to visit, as it was bustling with tour groups; but it’s a lovely place nonetheless – Empress Dowagers, I imagine, would settle for nothing less – with a good, if small, display of Buddhist art. The labelling in English was a little eccentric – although not as eccentric as it would be if I tried to label anything in Chinese – and it’s easy to take cheap pot-shots at these kind of things; but I was intrigued rather more philosophically by the caption on an image of the Buddha Shakyamuni. It said a Buddha was someone who has “woken up after practising mortification.” This got me thinking about the place of mortification in Buddhism. Because even if, as is well known, the Buddha explicitly rejected both mortification and excess, nevertheless the story of his austerities has a kind of dramatic role that is a bit odd. So even in the texts where the Buddha says, in short, that mortification is useless for developing any kind of insight into things, at the same time he says that when it came to mortification he was the top banana (by virtue of eating none, no doubt). And this carries on throughout the various Buddhist traditions, with the Buddha being admired for his austerities, whilst at the same time this mortification is doctrinally dismissed as being of no use. On the one hand the Buddha is claimed to be pretty damn great because he could mortify himself to the n th degree; on the other hand it is claimed that there is no value to this. There’s something a bit suspect here, methinks. The strong implication is that this mortification is, in fact, something to do with his eventual awakening; but this is at the same time rejected.
Of course, one could come to a kind of uneasy psychological resolution of the apparent paradox. Once could say that this story (if it is true) shows the Buddha’s determination, determination that, properly channelled, would be of benefit to him. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it is hard not to think that there is something here that is close to having your cake and eating it. Or, given the circumstances, of not having your cake and eating it. Or – hey, who can pass up the chance of indulging in a spot of Buddhist logic when it arises? – of both having your cake and eating it and also not having your cake and eating it. Or, to complete the tetralemma, of neither having your cake and eating it nor not having your cake and eating it.
Hard work, logic. I’m going for a slice of cake. They go great Portuguese custard tarts (葡式蛋挞) here in Beijing.
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Mindfulness of Coffee
Saturday June 5, 2010
Last weekend, I was sitting in the Yesim Turkish Café, my all-time favourite Leicester watering hole (it’s at the town end of the Narborough road, for those readers who are local, and it’s thoroughly recommended). I ordered a Turkish coffee, and when it arrived I got into a conversation with the proprietor about the art of carrying coffee. The trick, he said, is not to focus on the coffee. If you look at the cup, then the coffee will spill. Instead, you must look ahead, towards your destination, and the coffee will almost miraculously (speaking as a bit of a klutz myself) stay where it should, in the cup.
This information, alas, came too late to address the many shortcomings in my brief and unsuccessful career as a waiter, back in my student days. Who knows, perhaps if I had known this then, I’d now be a head waiter at some high-class restaurant, rather than a writer of obscure novels and philosophy books. But what it did start me thinking about was a idea I’ve been interested in for some time, and that is the idea that you can see mindfulness as a kind of suppleness of awareness and of mind.
“Mindfulness” of course, is itself a supple term, and is used to translate a whole range of terms that in turn have various shades of meaning. Rather than attempting an essentializing definition of mindfulness that can take account of all these, I’m going to pass over these complexities to look more closely at this question of suppleness of attention. Let me go back to the Turkish coffee. As a bad waiter (I speak from experience), one might think that to carry a full cup of coffee the best thing would be to focus exclusively on the coffee itself, to keep one’s eyes firmly on the coffee, to make sure that one is constantly aware of the distance between the top of the coffee and the rim of the cup. There is an appropriately ghoulish Buddhist text that imagines an analogous situation:
“Suppose, monks, that a large crowd of people comes thronging together, saying, ‘The beauty queen! The beauty queen!’ And suppose that the beauty queen is highly accomplished at singing & dancing, so that an even greater crowd comes thronging, saying, ‘The beauty queen is singing! The beauty queen is dancing!’ Then a man comes along, desiring life & shrinking from death, desiring pleasure & abhorring pain. They say to him, ‘Now look here, mister. You must take this bowl filled to the brim with oil and carry it on your head in between the great crowd & the beauty queen. A man with a raised sword will follow right behind you, and wherever you spill even a drop of oil, right there will he cut off your head.’ Now what do you think, monks: Will that man, not paying attention to the bowl of oil, let himself get distracted outside?”
(From Access to Insight)
I love that “Now look here, mister!” Anyway, the question is how should this monk, having found himself in such an implausible situation, successfully navigate? The answer that the proprietor of the café might give – that he should focus on where he is going, and not on the bowl itself – is not immediately intuitive. But the reason this works better is that, presumably, the business of carrying a cup of coffee (not to mention a bowl of oil through a jostling crowd, with a swordsman at your back) is a complex one – think of all those mental and physical processes – and if your attention is narrowed down onto the bowl or the cup alone, then you risk closing down your awareness of the broader environment; and this is precisely the kind of awareness you need to be able to navigate at all.
Mindfulness, then, is not just a question of degree (how mindful am I, on a scale of one to ten…?), but it is also a matter of fluidity, of a kind of responsiveness to the situation in which one finds oneself. The fact is, we cannot be completely aware of everything that is happening at any one time. Anybody who tells you that we can is, I would suggest, simply mistaken. The brain just isn’t built like this. If I am mindful of something, I am also necessarily unmindful of other things. Attention is selective. So it is a question of how we deploy the capacity for awareness that we have, to be able to navigate well through our lives.
Sometimes you come across a certain kind of Buddhist comportment (or even, as Bourdieu would say, a certain habitus – but you don’t want me getting all Bourdieu on you, do you?) that can pass for a kind of superior mindfulness – the slow movements in which you sense that every single gesture is being noted, the careful speech – but which seems strangely dissociated from the world. There is attention here (as Nyanaponika Thera points out, attention is an ordinary human faculty), but when attention becomes ossified like this, it seems to me that it is risks closing itself down to much of life, rather than opening up an awareness of the world. There may be a place for fixity and continuity of attention; but there is also a need for fluidity. And perhaps it is in the balance between the two, constantly shifting in relation to the environment, that is the fullest expression of that thing we call – loosely and fluidly – mindfulness.
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Blind, pitiless, indifferent...
Saturday April 10, 2010
Over the last few days, in what spaces I have had between working on a couple of chapters for an introduction to philosophy, I have found myself thinking about the idea that crops up again and again in contemporary writing. The idea is this: that we live in a blind, indifferent and pitiless universe. Here’s Richard Dawkins, in his article “God’s Utility Function”: “The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” Dawkins is not, of course, the first to argue this – he goes on to quote Housman’s Tell me not here, it needs not saying, which ends like this:
For nature, heartless, witless nature,
Will neither care nor know
What stranger’s feet may find the meadow
And trespass there and go,
Nor ask amid the dews of morning
If they are mine or no.
Many might argue that to attribute “pitilessness” (or, indeed “witlessness”!) to the universe as a whole is nothing but sober truth-telling. Capacity for pity is, after all, simply not a property of the universe as a whole, because the universe is not that kind of thing. After all, in saying that the universe is “pitiless” we are not saying that the universe is out to get us, only that our purposes are our own purposes, our hopes our own hopes, our stories are our own stories, and that these hopes, purposes and stories are not written up there in the stars.
There is something fishy going on here, however. Firstly, why is “pitiless” an interesting thing to say about the universe as a whole? After all, we could equally well say that the universe as a whole is “humourless” or that it is “chinless”, but these don’t seem interesting, or perhaps even sensible, things to say about the universe.
“Pitiless”, when we use it in an everyday sense, is not simply saying that something lacks a certain property, the property of “pity”. To describe something as “pitiless”, and to do so interestingly, is to suggest that the thing described should be capable of feeling pity, but that, because it has its own purposes, it chooses not to. To usefully deem something indifferent or pitiless, in other words, we might want it first to have the capacity for partiality or pity. This is perhaps why it would seem fairly odd to say that my toothbrush is pitiless even though, technically, we could argue that it is.
To call the universe as a whole “pitiless” (or, for that matter “indifferent” or “meaningless”), it seems to me, is both unreasonable and unhelpful. It is not that the universe is indifferent or pitiless, so much as that to talk about indifference or partiality, pitilessness or pity, in relation to the universe as a whole is to take these concepts and to apply them in places where they do not belong.
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Throwing Away the Ladder
Saturday April 3, 2010
It’s the day before Easter, and I’m sitting outside in the sunshine with a pot of Chinese tea, trying to convince myself that it’s warm enough not to be holed up inside. There’s an April chill in the air, and I suspect that the cold will be cumulative, so I’ll make this post relatively short. Still, it is nice to see the sun again, and to sit here listening to the birds twittering and bumble bees chugging around and the distant sounds of traffic and barking dogs. And it’s nice to be away from my philosophy books for a while, after quite a few days of intensively reading about all things Wittgenstein for a book I’m working on (which is one – but only one – reason for the title of this post).
What I want to write about here, however, is not Wittgenstein, but something I came across a couple of days ago whilst reading the New Scientist. Last week’s edition carried a brief article which asked the intriguing question how many ways can we be conscious? The article suggested that consciousness is not a simple either/or business (either we are conscious or we are not), but that there is increasing evidence that the kinds of things the brain does are much more intricate and many-layered than this.
Now the idea that there are different kinds of consciousness is one that is familiar within the Buddhist tradition, where there are all kinds of rankings of states of mind, for example the familiar list of hierarchically-ranked dhyānas. The idea of a hierarchy of consciousness is one that I think is deep-rooted in us. It appears in the New Scientist article as well, which ends by saying “consciousness is looking increasingly like a ladder rather than a light switch.”
This tendency to see consciousness hierarchically may, however, be the very thing that gets in the way of understanding the real implications of what is going on here. After all, it’s all very well to loaf around all day in the “higher” states of dhyāna, and these may indeed feel higher as one sits on one’s cushions. But it is not clear in what sense they could be considered “higher” if we wanted to do something more practical like pilot a plane or perform brain surgery. I’d choose a brain surgeon with ordinary everyday bog-standard consciousness (whatever that might be) over fourth-dhyāna consciousness (whatever that might be) any day…
Leaving aside metaphors of ladders and ideas of hierarchy, the fact that what we designate as “consciousness” is not one but many things, that there is a multiplicity of different kinds of mental states, and that our binary opposition “conscious/unconscious” is not up to the task of talking about this multiplicity of states, is one that should give philosophers of consciousness pause. What, after all, is philosophy of consciousness actually about, if we start finding that our notion of consciousness itself begins to fragment in this way?
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Missing Out
Thursday March 11, 2010
A couple of years back I reviewed Charles Taylor’s book A Secular Age
And there are certain works of art — by Dante, Bach, the makers of Chartres Cathedral: the list is endless — whose power seems inseparable from their epiphanic, transcendent reference. Here the challenge is to the unbeliever, to find a non-theistic register in which to respond to them, without impoverishment. (p. 607)
The claim — here made in relation to art, but also frequently made in relation to other aspects of human experience — is that by believing, or not believing x, one is simply missing out. One can see this claim on both sides in the seemingly interminable debates between the religious and the irreligious: the religious may claim that life with God is simply better; and the irreligious may claim that life without God is simply better. And both will claim that the other is missing out.
But there is something a bit suspect in all of this. Take Taylor’s challenge for example. If one assumes — as, one imagines, Taylor does — that on the scale of good things, God is about as good as it gets (that is, he is better than a posse of porcupines, or a tub of ice cream, or the complete works of Leo Tolstoy), then on this view it is hard to see that any non-theistic register could be a way of responding to these artworks without impoverishment. “Non-theistic” for Taylor already implies impoverishment, and if one goes along with this implication, then his challenge is impossible to meet. If one assumes at the outset that God is an ultimate source of richness, then this supposed impoverishment is of a fundamental order.
One can see why Taylor makes these claims; but I am less sure why thinkers who take a more naturalistic position should use the rhetoric of missing out. After all, a naturalistic position is one that does not need to make claims about ultimate sources of richness. It is true, on the one hand, that absolutely everything we might deem good is also a kind of missing out on something else that we might also (or that others might also) deem good. If for my holidays I go out drinking and partying, I am missing out on the quiet delights of birdwatching; and if I spend my holidays holed up in a hide on some remote marsh, looking for rare warblers, then I am missing out on drinking and partying. Every form of life is a missing out on some other form of life; indeed, every form of life is a missing out on innumerable other forms of life. To be sure, when I listen to Bach, or when I read Dante, my experience is impoverished in respect of not having that whatever-it-is that believers may have when they experience these things; but then when believers experience these things, their own experience may be differently impoverished.
And it is here, I think, if one takes a broadly naturalistic position, one has an advantage over the theists – an advantage, at least, in terms of not having to worry quite so much about whether one is, or is not, missing out. Theism implies a scale of ultimate value in which, if I miss out on God, I miss out on the very best, most important thing that there is. But if one takes a naturalistic position, one can recognise that our sense of the value of things is rooted in the various conditions of our lives, in our histories and social worlds and habits of thought. It is not inscribed in the fabric of the world. And if it is not inscribed in the fabric of the world, then there is no ultimate missing out. Taylor talks about “fullness”. But fullness is not a scale that leads only in one direction. There are many kinds of fullness, and we do not need to assume that they are necessarily in contention with each other.
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Let's Get Radical?
Friday February 19, 2010
I don’t often listen to the news at the moment, nor do I spend a great deal of time reading the newspapers. There are, after all, other things to read – and if I want to make any headway with the wonderful Dream of the Red Chamber, I need to focus my attention a bit more.
Nevertheless, on occasion I do catch a bit of the evening news reports if I happen to be in the kitchen cooking at the right time, and when I do – partly because I listen to it less, and therefore I’m not so habituated to it – what often strikes me is the sheer oddness of the language used not only by those in the media, but also by those who speak to them. One particular oddness that crops up again and again, and that seems to me to raise some interesting questions, is the recurrent idea of “radical” change. No new initiative, it seems, can be introduced without it promising such change, no media pundit can resit saying that we live in rapidly changing times and thus we need to find radical responses to the radically different circumstances in which we find ourselves.
What strikes me about this language is that we are, perhaps, not very good at thinking about change. Western thought, in particular, seems to be very wedded to an idea of stasis as the fundamental condition of things. OK, we think to ourselves, so things change and they move: but only if they are pushed. And in this picture, what needs to be accounted for is not why things stay the same (for a while), but why things change. This is not the case across the board in Western thought – for example, Lucretius’s physics is predicated on a model that sees stability as a kind of local and temporary condition, and that sees motion as a more general picture – but it does seem to be the general picture.
One of the things that has always attracted me to Buddhist thought is the recognition of impermanence, which turns this pretty much on its head. This recognition is much more than a recognition of the fact that the span of our life is limited, that the cake we have in the morning may well be gobbled up by the evening, and so on (what the Tibetans call “coarse” impermanence); it is also a recognition that things are in constant moment-by-moment transformation (what the Tibetans talk about as “subtle” impermanence). It has to be said that if we respond to impermanence only on the first level, then it seems a fairly bleak idea; but if we take into account subtle impermanence, the moment-by-moment arising and passing-away, then the world comes alive again, it begins to buzz and hum with a kind of liveliness. And there is something that I find wonderfully quickening and enlivening in the thought of subtle impermanence. The fact that things are subtly impermanent requires a kind of subtleness of response, a nuanced approach to the things of this world.
If change is seen as the background against which we must make sense of temporary stability, rather than stasis the background against which we must make sense of change, then the world begins to look rather different. The question becomes not how can we change things?, as if things themselves needed a bit of a shove for them to change at all, but how can we respond to and participate in the changeability of things?
When I listen to political rhetoric about radical change, I can’t help thinking that there is an odd – and mistaken – idea of what change actually involves. It seems to me that this rhetoric is rooted in a view that for anything to change in the world needs a kind of dramatic intervention, a deus ex machina, that breaks with how things currently are; and this seems a view that is profoundly uncomfortable with both stability and change. I am uneasy with the dramatic register of this rhetoric. It isn’t just that I’m unconvinced that “radical” change is what the world needs or that I’m unconvinced that seeing the world as “radically” different from before is particularly useful; it’s more that I can’t help thinking that this language may obscure the deeper and broader conditions that underlie the changeability of things, and may therefore cloud our judgement so that we are no longer able to see – insofar as we are capable of directing the multitudinous changing things of which we are a part – how it might be possible to direct change more to the benefit of ourselves and of others.
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