The Ocean of Existence
Wednesday May 7, 2008
Recently I’ve been reflecting on an image that recurs throughout the Buddhist tradition, that of the bhava-sāgara, or the ocean of existence. The Pāli texts are full of ocean metaphors, as a quick glance at the handy guide to similes on the Access to Insight web pages will show; and the image of the ocean of existence is one that finds its way into later Buddhism in Tibet, China Japan and elsewhere. In one quote of which I’m particularly fond, the Hua-yan Sutra says “Sentient beings bob and sink in the ocean of existence. Their troubles are boundless; they have no place to rest”.
The idea of existence as a sea is one that, for me, captures something of the sense we can have – whether queasy or exhilarating – of the profound instability and uncertainty of life, the ebb and flow and swell of our day-to-day existence. This ebb and flow has been recognised in the West ever since the days of the pre-Socratics (Πάντα ῥεῖ – panta rhei – Heraclitus is supposed to have said), but also it can often seem as if the Western tradition has sought to tame the flux, or else has sought to cross over this ocean in the Good Ship Philosophy to attain to solid ground.
At times it seems as if this longing for solid ground – a longing that seems to me to be antithetical to a good deal of Buddhist metaphysics – leads us to see the end of Buddhist practice as equivalent to putting into safe harbour. This is an idea that is not unprecedented in the Pāli texts, but it does not seem to me to be a particularly appealing prospect. After all, what would one do once one arrived at this safe port? Put up one’s feet and spend one’s days puffing on a pipe? And to stake our hopes one some promised land of solid ground that lies over the horizon is, to say the least, something of a gamble.
I prefer a different image. What if there is nothing other than the ocean? What if there is no safe harbour to be had? Here, out on the high seas, we were born; here we live; here we will die. Then perhaps what we need to do is give up hope of dry land, and get to know the movement of the winds and the tides, the ebb and flow of the ocean.
The Udāna has an image that I prefer. Those who have attained to understanding are not likened to sailors who have crossed the ocean and returned to dry land, but instead to great sea monsters who roam the endless depths, who sport and play in an ocean without any shore. They are those who have given up on land-lubber hopes and dreams for good.
(These reflections come from an article I’ve been writing for The Pragmatic Buddhist. I’ll post a link when the article goes online)
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Without Illumination
Wednesday April 23, 2008
It’s some time since I given time to reading about Buddhism, my interests of late having been elsewhere, but I was pleased to stumble across a copy of Bernard Faure’s Double Exposure: Cutting Across Buddhist and Western Discourses
So that’s how I came across Double Exposure, a of book that even its publishers describe as “something of an oddity”. Indeed, the description of the book on the Stanford University Press website seems almost to be a kind of parody of those Madhyamika texts that like nothing more than negation: this is not a book of comparative philosophy or religion, it is not a contribution “in a narrow sense” to Buddhist scholarship, it is not a contribution to vague notions of “spirituality”… You get the idea.
Given that I myself like to lurch in a shambolic fashion between vaguely Buddhish speculations and those drawn from the Western philosophical tradition (without any conviction that I truly understand either), the book was both fun and stimulating. It raises far more questions than it answers as it meanders from a discussion of whether we in the West really know what Buddhism is at all, through a consideration of the various “rationalities” of Buddhism, and from there to a consideration of Buddhism and Chinese thought, the major schools of Buddhism, the slippery idea of twofold truth, and so on. By the end, I found myself without illumination, but I’m not sure that Faure’s book aims at illumination in the ordinary (or even in the extraordinary) sense. I seems that it is more concerned with dissolving our assumptions, rattling our cages and leaving the reader with less of a sense of solid ground than at the outset. And that is always an entertaining way to spend a few hours.
After years of immersing myself in philosophy I’m currently feeling a bit queasy when I leaf through philosophy books. I am wondering if I have the zeal, the mad-gleam-in-the-eye that you need to really spend your life banging on about philosophy. All those abstruse arguments! All those damnably clever people convinced that they have the Truth (and that, as a consequence, their opponents are all dolts and dullards)! All that conviction (because even when philosophy profess uncertainty, they do it with a kind of zealous conviction)! All that heaping up of information, all those arguments and counter arguments, all those angels doing the foxtrot on the heads of pins!
Perhaps the fog will clear. But I’m enjoying letting it deepen for a while. And if deepening fog is your thing, Double Exposure is thoroughly recommended…
Unconscious Decision Making
Tuesday April 15, 2008
I don’t want to bang on about this one topic ad nauseum, but nevertheless, in the light of my previous post and the discussion that it has generated, I thought that visitors to thinkBuddha might be interested in some recently published research into the subject of free will.
John-Dylan Haynes and his fellow researchers at the Bernstein Centre for Computational Neuroscience wired up their subjects to fMRI scanners and asked them to press a button with either their left or right hand when the urge took them to do so. Meanwhile different letters flashed up before them on a screen, and they were asked, after the event, to say which letter was on-screen when they decided to press a button.
This, of course, looks very like the famous experiment by Benjamin Libet concerning the timing of volitional acts. The difference, however, was in the use of fMRI scans. When Haynes’s team analysed these, they found that there was activity in the prefrontal cortex up to an astonishing ten seconds before the decision was enacted, and that this activity could be used to reliably predict which button the subjects later pressed. In other words, our brains decide before we do (this, of course, makes sense of many things in my life: like, for example, why I am writing this in a coffee shop, rather than sitting at home and getting on with the job application forms that are on my desk…). This brings to mind a line from one of Natalie Goldberg’s books about the brain being an involuntary organ. When I first read that, it seemed to make sense of rather a lot.
If you want to find out more, then Wired Magazine has a good article on this research, with proper diagrams and everything, instead of feeble visual puns on the theme of brains/caulflowers. There’s also an article in New Scientist, which you may or may not need to log in to read.
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Free Will and Ethics
Tuesday April 8, 2008
Not that long ago, I read Dan Wegner’s wonderful The Illusion of Conscious Will
Regular visitors will know that I have tackled the question of free will before on thinkBuddha (see the posts here and here), but for those without the stomach to plough through those posts, let alone all the proper literature on the subject, the central problem was admirably summed up over two centuries ago by Samuel Johnson, who wrote that “All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it”.
Johnson is perceptive: we cannot deny the experience of free will. But our theories cannot seem to account for it. Wegner is interesting here, because he takes the lead from Hume to claim that will is, in fact, a feeling, rather than the source of action. The problem is not that free will is entirely ruled out by theory, but that in theorising free will we are looking to theorise something with causal efficiency, rather than looking to account for this feeling of authorship. And Wegner shows convincingly that in experimental situations it is possible for us to have the feeling of willed authorship without having any causal efficacy whatsoever. Conversely, it is possible to be causally efficacious without the feeling of will (for example, in the use of Ouija boards which, disappointingly, are not controlled by forces beyond the grave but by simple human shoving). So whilst we think that the causality is from conscious thought to action, instead Wegner proposes more complex causality whereby action and conscious thought are both unconsciously caused, leaving us to infer that the action is caused by the conscious thought when it isn’t.
The idea that will is a feeling is convincing, and certainly, without the feeling of will (sleepwalking, for example, or under hypnosis), it is not at all clear what it would mean to say that we willed something. Yet the problem many people have with all this, in the end, is ethics. Last weekend, I was talking about all this with a friend of mine, and he agreed that whilst this model made sense of experience, nevertheless, he was reluctant to give up on free will for ethical reasons. Free will, he said, seems necessary for ethics. And here, if we are talking about seeming, I cannot but agree. It does indeed seem to us that free will is necessary for ethics. But is it?
Wegner thinks it is. Towards the end of his book, he talks about the experience of (illusory) free will as ‘the mind’s compass’, claiming that this ‘emotion of authorship serves key functions in the domains of achievement and morality’ (318). In this sense, the illusion is a positive illusion. Susan Blackmore disagrees, however. There is a good article on her website where she writes as follows:
I have long assumed that free will is an illusion and have worked hard to live without it, but doing this provokes a simple fear – what if I behave terribly badly? What if I give up all moral values and do terrible things? What indeed are moral values and how can I make moral decisions if there’s no one inside who is responsible? I’m sure I don’t need to go on. I suspect that this natural fear is the main reason why so few people sincerely try to live without free will.
These are serious questions, but I myself wonder if the fear of moral chaos on giving up the idea of a legislating free will is the same as the fear that some have of moral chaos on giving up the idea of legislating God, but writ small. Without this legislating power, we fear, things will go to the dogs. But is this the case? One could also put the opposite view: that the idea of oneself as an autonomous subject who wills and who has the freedom to act in response to the dictates of this will may not be such a good thing after all, either for our own welfare or for the welfare of others. I’m not sure that our sense of ourselves as moral agents is necessarily the source of the kindness that makes the world a worthwhile place to live in. And when we start to assert ourselves in our capacity as moral agents, that is usually when the trouble begins…
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Knowledge, Freedom and Limitation
Sunday March 2, 2008
A few weeks ago, I wrote about transcendence – in a psychological rather than a metaphysical sense – and suggested that transcendence, worldly transcendence, may be necessary component of a happy life. A couple of days ago, as I was teaching my class on the philosophy of happiness, and whilst we were chewing over the idea of transcendence, it occurred to me that one dimension of transcendence, understood psychologically, is that of the recognition of the limitations there are to our capacity for knowing. This is partly simply to do with the fact that there are just so many things to know, and we can only know a handful of them – as Chuang Tzu says, the objects of knowledge are unlimited, and our capacity for knowing is limited, so why chase the unlimited with what is limited? But it is also something to do with the fact that when we do know – or claim to know – something, this knowledge is always partial, not the full story, incomplete.
This is not – at least, not in my reading – a reason to abandon knowledge, and it is certainly not a reason to fill in the gaps that we do not know about with extravagant metaphysical postulates such as gods, otherworldly forces, ghosts and spirits, ectoplasm and so on; but I do think that it is a reason to abandon what pretensions we may have to absolute knowledge, and to change our relationship to the things that we claim to know. The fact that there is always more to know means that the world will never be entirely sewn up for us.
On occasions, whilst attempting to get to grips with the stuff of life in conversation with more orthodox philosophers (not to mention more orthodox Buddhist scholars) it is precisely this absence of an dimension of openness that has troubled me, the sense that everything is all sewn up and there is nothing more to be done except to offer endless commentaries upon whatever the favoured System might be. Whether in conversation with hardcore Kantians, passionate phenomenologists (one of the more curious of philosophical breeds) or straight-down-the-line Theravadin scholar-monks, I have sometimes been dogged by the sense that, for my interlocutor, everything without exception can be accounted for within the System. And whilst all these traditions of learning may be, in a very real sense, deep and wide, this sense that everything has already been said is one that in the end seems to be dispiriting and not exactly conducive to a zesty and satisfying life.
For me, to recognise the limitations of our models of the world leads to a kind of freedom. There is always a further dimension to be explored, another angle to take; and therefore we are never simply stuck with the knowledge that we have, the world that we have constructed. To recognise the limitations of our present knowledge is to recognise that our models are only approximations; and when we recognise this, then we can let the world – the world that so often lies forgotten as we lose ourselves in admiration of the rickety edifice of our favoured System – pour back in.
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The View from the Chariot
Wednesday January 30, 2008
So, once again, this is how it went…
The sage came to King Shuddhodana to tell him that his newly-born son Siddhartha would either become a great king or a great sage. The king, knowing that sages are impoverished, awkward and unwashed, whilst kings are rich, elegant and bathe in asses milk sprinkled with rose petals, decided to ensure his legacy and the happiness of his child by sequestering the infant in a palace. There Siddhartha was provided with the kind of unstoppable torrent of delight that would tip most of us over into depravity. In such a fashion, the king judged, his son would never wish to leave the palace, and would therefore become his heir.
But one day, in the prime of his youth, leave he did. The young Siddhartha took a chariot into town and, although the king did his best to tidy up the place in advance, Siddhartha clapped eyes on an old man, a sick man and a corpse. Blimey, he said! What’s wrong with these people? His faithful charioteer explained all. They are old, they are sick, they are dead. That’s the deal. There’s no getting out of if.
Siddhartha was distressed. Suddenly the entire world appeared to him as a danse macabre, and the pleasures that he had formerly enjoyed now seemed hollow and empty. But then our hero spotted a humble looking fellow with a happy smile on his face, walking peaceably through the crowd. This fellow seemed to be both in the world, but also untouched by the miseries around him. “And what’s up with him?” Siddhartha asked. “He looks curiously happy, given the circumstances.”
“Ah,” said his charioteer, “he’s a sage…”
You know the rest. Young Siddhartha turned away from the pleasures of the palace, sneaked out in the middle of the night, cut off his locks (those who suffered their way through The Little Buddha will now be picturing the bronzed torso of the young Keanu Reeves as he slices his topknot with a sword) and went off to become a sage. The rest is history.
If the rest is history, then none of the above is. The story as it has come down to us, whatever its virtues as a story, is a complete fabrication. Nevertheless, it is a good story, and it is fun to read the Buddhist texts written by pious practitioners such as Ashvaghosha who attempt to both have their cake and eat it by, on the one hand, salaciously describing the delights of the palace in great and erotic detail, only to say on the other hand, “Of course, we know things like this are not for good, pious Buddhists, and of course the young Siddhartha was not at all affected by such goings on…”
Anyway, I last came across a retelling of this old story in Richard Haidt’s book The Happiness Hypothesis
What, then, is this error? It is, I think, an interesting one, and it concerns the difference between our imagined response to misfortune and our actual response. The question that Haidt asks is this: “What would have happened if the young prince had actually descended from his gilded chariot and talked to the people he assumed were so miserable?” Haidt goes on to talk about the work of the psychologist Robert Biswas-Diener who did precisely this: he travelled around the world talking to those who might be assumed to be wretched, asking them about their own satisfaction with their lives. And people in situations that we might consider to be unthinkably dire – those who had lost the use of their limbs, sex workers in Calcutta – reported in the main that they were more satisfied than dissatisfied with their lives.
This theme is also taken up by Daniel Gilbert in his book Stumbling on Happiness
This is not to say that there are no sufferings in the world, any more than it is to say that there are no pleasures. It is to say that we need to be clear sighted in our response to both sufferings and pleasures. The Buddha of the legends may be a shoddy psychologist; but I suspect that the Buddha who taught practices of meditation was a somewhat better psychologist. Through attention to the body and to the mind and to the circumstances and relationships in which we are enmeshed, it is possible perhaps to leave these dramas to one side, so that we may be able to see the pleasures and the pains of existence more clearly.
The view from the chariot is a theoretical perspective upon how things are. And it is perhaps mistaken, an over-reaction. But having said this, sufferings and pleasures continue to matter. It is only that we can’t respond to them fully whilst still riding on this particular chariot.
There are two ways that I know of coming down from the chariot. The first is to deepen one’s relationship with others and with the world. As Daniel Gilbert sagely says, the experience of others has much to teach us. The second way is to refuse as far as possible the seductions of the dramas that we play out in our minds, on the one hand by seeing the complexities and perplexities that underlie them (and here meditation has a role); and on the other hand by testing them against what we know of the world and of the experience of others.
Image: Shiva Shenoy
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Philosophy and Practice
Friday January 25, 2008
The other day I was at the university attending a seminar on practical philosophy. The seminar was being led with considerable verve and gusto by Italian philosopher Franco Volpi, who was talking about practical philosophy, drawing on Foucault’s book The Hermeneutics of the Subject
The main thesis in the talk was that there has been a tendency in the Western philosophical tradition to conflate what Foucault call the “care of the self” – the various practices that make up much of Hellenistic philosophy, for example Stoicism – with knowledge of the self – the Socratic imperative. As a result philosophy has become impoverished. Something that was always meant to bring about a good form of life becomes merely a means of airy speculation about the world. Here is what Wikipedia has to say on Stoic practices:
Philosophy for a Stoic is not just a set of beliefs or ethical claims, it is a way of life involving constant practice and training (or askesis). Stoic philosophical and spiritual practices included logic, Socratic dialogue and self-dialogue, contemplation of death, training attention to remain in the present moment, daily reflection on everyday problems and possible solutions, hupomnemata, and so on. Philosophy for a Stoic is an active process of constant practice and self-reminder.
This kind of practice goes far beyond self-knowledge, simply because knowledge is not, whatever some philosophers may think, the be-all and end-all of human life. To live philosophically – at least for the Stoics – it is not just a matter of knowing oneself, but also of finding for oneself a mode of conduct, a way of being in the world, an ethos that leads to a happy and virtuous state of being.
All of which will be familiar to those schooled in the Buddhist traditions, where traditions of practice are extremely vibrant, and where it is generally understood that theoretical knowledge is not enough. But it struck me as I sat there in the seminar room, that once we had identified the problem, we were talking about the wrong kinds of things. We were batting around theoretical speculations on the way in which contemporary philosophy reduces practice to theory; and thus we were replicating the very problem that we had identified.
Nobody in the seminar suggested that we redress the balance by exploring how we could train our attention to the fleeting, momentary sensations; nobody proposed that we should, to better understand the matter at stake, work out a programme of practices of reflection, journal writing and confession. Nobody suggested we should train ourselves, as good Stoics, in hardship by sleeping on the floor and not in our soft feather beds. And, to the extent that we were not doing these things, but only talking about them, then at least by the standards we were setting for ourselves in the discussion, we were not doing philosophy at all.
Fortunately, I’ve been able to explore the real practical implications of these different philosophical approaches elsewhere. The happiness course that I am teaching in the Botanical Gardens – which I like to imagine as a kind of Epicurean haven just outside the city walls of Birmingham – continues to be immensely enjoyable, and it satisfies this practical criterion for philosophy much more fully. In the previous week we have been putting into practice some Epicurean principles, and from the feedback this afternoon, it seems that Epicurean practices really do cheer you up. In the second half of the session today, we moved onto Stoicism – a very different kettle of philosophical pilchards – so I look forward to hearing next Friday how everybody gets on with the Stoic disciplines I have set for them to try out in the week…
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