The falsity of the enmity between Buddhism and Hinduism is also highlighted from an experiential standpoint when one thinks of great Hindu sages like Ramana Maharshi. Is the Atman he knew somehow inferior to the Nibbana of say Ajahn Chah? What if any is the difference between these men's attainments?
It seems to me that experienced mystics almost never dispute with one another, but theologians often do.
In fact we don't know if Ramana Maharshi had a different experience from Ajahn Chah. But clearly both where admirable in many ways, and both expressed them in very different ways. I don't know enough about either to comment further.
However I don't accept the argument that the distinction between Hinduism and Buddhism is false on this basis either.
It seems to me that false distinctions are made, and true ones can be made as well.
Excellent. Your article makes me wonder if there are vital dialogue projects out there between Buddhist and Hindus. I know of interfaith dialogues in the monotheistic traditions, but I was wondering if you have heard of any in these two contemplative traditions. Have you found others, like yourself, questioning Buddhist misunderstandings of Brahmanism?
I'm not so interested in interfaith dialogue (as you may recall), but I am interested in educating Buddhists about Buddhism. I suppose there is some interfaith dialogue between Buddhists and Hindus but I've never gone looking for it.
I'm not aware of anyone else who takes my particular approach: lots of people try to claim there's no difference between Buddhism and Hinduism, but that's just wrong.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
michael reidy said...
The concept of atman that Buddhists reject is not the atman that Advaitins (the darshan that I am familiar with) hold. It is pure consciousness, one without a second. It is this sat chit with the mind as limiting adjunct (upadhi) i.e. the witness/sakshin, that can be mistaken for some sort of ego. It is also in the notion of self luminous cognition and annica that differences are patent between the two great traditions.
No. I think you'll find that we Buddhists do reject the Advaitan ātman. At least this Buddhist does.
The terminology you use is unfamiliar to me - I presume this is advaitan jargon. Since I don't understand the proposition you are putting forth I can't really respond to it. Your last sentence as far as I can tell is not a properly formed English sentence.
Could you try again in plain, and grammatical English so I know what you are talking about?
Thanks for this thread on perception, upon which I continue to mull over (as an artist painter).
Guarding the sense gates as one of the four nutriments (vitals, senses, volition, consciousness). Plus object/subject relations & non dualistic perception.
Some thoughts from the Upanishads:
"Of inconceivable power am I; without eyes I see; without ears I hear."- Kaivalya Upanishad
"There is no seer but Him, no one to hear but him, no one thinking, no one aware but Him. He is the Self, the Ruler within, the One Immortal."- Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
FYI, here is a website dedicated to these types of thoughts from all traditions - Christian, Buddhist, Hindu & Secular:
http://www.theawakenedeye.com
Perception is a human biological constant across religions & cultures, enriched & greatly influenced by the filters & meanings we put on it.
My preference for comments is that they express your own understanding or confusion. I seek an encounter with you personally, rather than what you can turn up on Google. To paraphrase ShitMyDadSays: "no one is impressed by the book/website you found; you just read it, you didn't write it."
Just typing out or copy/pasting quotes or links; and especially quotes which are not properly referenced and from a named translator (and preferably accompanied by the original language with notes on the translation) doesn't really add much. Why not try giving voice to your own thoughts? Or if you quote something explain why you think it is relevant. The purpose of study is to identify and examine our presuppositions and assumptions about experience.
I don't see how those quotes are relevant to the discussion. What point were you trying to make by citing these texts? Could you please locate where in those texts the cited verses come from, discuss the context and how you feel it is relevant to what I wrote, and point me to the translation of the text that you used (and preferably convince me that you've read the whole thing).
The website you've linked to seems to epitomise everything I hate about religion - it's what David Chapman calls Monism: "all is one", "all religions teach the same thing". It represents a catastrophic failure of intellect. I'd recommend that readers of this blog not visit websites like that as it will make them confused. Again I fail to see how anyone who read what I wrote would consider this relevant to the discussion. An out of context is not sufficient to convey your meaning.
If you think this stuff is relevant then by all means say why and how. But be warned I don't have much time for Monism. I consistently find that those who find compelling similarities in Buddhist, Hindu and Christian thought have a superficial understanding of at least two of those traditions. I'm also learning that the harshest criticism of Buddhism also stem from ignorance, but this is not an argument for Monism, but an argument against ignorance and prejudice.
Now your last sentence I think is very interesting, and at odds with the rest of what you wrote. I think the implications of the common mechanism of human perceptions are interesting. I'd be keen for you to expand on that one sentence and see whether you think that a common mechanism amounts to a universally common experience (as Monism suggests) or whether the cultural overlays obscure the commonality. In other words do our beliefs about what experience amounts to determined more by the biological or cultural. My feeling is that culture - our conditioned subjectivity - vastly outweighs biology in this case. I think David Chapman begins to explain why in his post on mystical experiences as metaphysical evidence. I'm convinced by his argument that "mystics from different cultures give wildly different descriptions [of mystical experiences], which generally reflect their cultural background." One can trace the idea of Monism in it's development: it comes out of the Romantic Movement's reaction against the rationalism of the European Enlightenment. Sometimes called the Perennial Philosophy, it is related to two trends in religious thought:
1. the embracing of the relativity of culture and custom by worldly Europeans along with the breakdown of trust in institutionalised religious authority (again David Chapman has summarised this issue very well - his whole Meaningness blog is dedicated to this project; but the idea is detailed in David McMahan's book The Making of Buddhist Modernism.
2. To the assimilative tendencies in Indian religion. I've written about the latter a few times, but tried to encapsulate it here: Religion in India and the West. In Indian one doesn't neutralise a competing belief system by attacking it and annihilating it (the basic Christian strategy until about the 18th century); one assimilates and recontexualises it - hence Hindus will tell you that Buddha is an avatar of Viṣṇu, and that "all is one, and God is good". Similarly we Buddhists long ago converted Śiva to Buddhism. But this represents a strategy to neutralise competition for resources and influence - it does not represent the "truth".
Both of these trends find expression in movements such as Theosophy which in turn has back influenced modern India religious thought. In fact the descriptions of consciousness in Hinduism and Buddhism, not to mention Christianity and Neuroscience are radically different. I find the philosophy of Thomas Metzinger compelling in this regard - his representationalist philosophy of consciousness integrates neuroscience and more subject, non-ordinary states of consciousness. It is now plausible, I think, to regard all experience as taking place in the brain, including mystical experiences.
The only traditional school of thought which is consistent with this discovery is early (pre-abhidhamma) Buddhism. All other schools of thought are reliant on consciousness being able to operate separately from the body. Early Buddhist thought, though incorporating a range of folk beliefs has it's core in the idea that only dukkha arises and passes away, that the āyanatas are sabbe (everything), and that our only valid domain (visaya) is experience.
Thank you for taking the time to reply in such length. Sorry if my shorthand from last comment was difficult to understand & caused annoyance and misunderstanding.
Why did I quote from other Upanishads? Yes I guess I didn't explain why I thought these quotes relevant. Cryptic shorthand strikes again. My intention was to express my own personal discovery that the notion of a 'Self' or an ' I ' (in the capitalized & divine sense) who sees is repeated in other Upanishads as well as the Chāndogya Upaniṣad. After all, this is exactly how your above article starts off. It mentions the Bahiya & then the recurrence of this same theme in the Māluṅkyaputta Sutta. Isn't it fair to assume that if something is reiterated in different texts, then it is an important theme. I thought the repetition in the Upanshads worth mentioning. My motivation was that it might of be of use to the development of this thread & not to impress, as one may have wrongly perceived it. Perception can quickly lead to misunderstanding, no?
I might look into Chapman & McMahan when my head has the space, my life the time & i feel the need. I can see that people do think differently & do believe different things. That it doesn't all boil down to same thing - 'Monism' as Chapman calls it. I have heard the 'monist' argument before, often in real life, on the terrain & not in books, most often where common ground & tolerance is sought between people of different religions, rather than the inflaming of hatred by the insistence of difference. Again I suspect our communality is more to do with our common human biological condition (the five remembrances) rather than our own personal points of view. If we could only just drop our points of view occasionally....or at least not get so attached to them, do a bit of 'in the seeing, just the seen'... and just see our common humanity including its fragility, then maybe more compassion would be born from this insight.
'in the unseeing, the invisible'
Actually, the thing I find increasingly offensive is not misperception but invisibility. How can people do hurtful & horrible things to each other? OK there's the fear & the projection of fear that leads scape-goating & demonisation that leads to hatred & persecution that Adrendt explains so well vis-à-vis the Shoah... which is clearly a case of misperception. But there's also invisibility. For some people, many people simply don't exist. They simply aren't seen. Not even in the picture. Invisible. They aren't taken into account. Their well-being doesn't count because quiet simply they aren't seen. For example, you could fall over & be near death on the streets of Paris. Maybe someone would stop, maybe they wouldn't (actually I found the Parisians pretty good). Another more mundane example is the frequent inconsiderate acts that go all time between neighbours. Not out of contempt but because their well-being isn't simply isn't seen. Off-screen. Invisible. Unseen. If it blips up on the screen, it very well might be quickly dismissed as of no importance. Computers are probably making us more inclined to 'in the unseeing, the invisible' .... Another variant on invisibility is that of the Third World, for example. We know that they suffer. It's on the news but we choose not to see. The enormity of the problem & the suffering is too much so we cut it out of our field of vision, a kind of form of denial. Out of sight, out of mind? We can't hold it in our optic of the world. We choose to try not to see.
more to follow....specifically on the Bahiya & Malunkyaputta
No, I haven't mastered the mind reading siddhi yet! ;-)
Personally I thought that the idea of a substantial self in Vedic/Hindu ideology was a given, and still is(!), but I stumbled upon those particular verses that enabled me to relate it more directly to the Buddhist account of self. I'm much less interested in how the idea developed in non-Buddhist thought, than I am in how the Buddha might have been in dialogue with his contemporaries.
I'm usually deeply underwhelmed by inter-faith dialogue but happen to be writing a "Buddhist" response to an essentialist critique of anātman as the moment. It should see publication as it is a commission. I note in my article that comparing doctrines that are mutually exclusive will be unlikely to lead to anything but disagreement. Whereas as human beings we do seem to share certain values: love of kin and friends; human life, etc. We can dialogue about how these values play out in our life, and how our behaviour is distorted by the prism of our views a bit more productively.
However, as human beings we have limitations. One of which involves how we relate to other beings. Most of us can manage about 150 personal relationships, and then things start to get abstract - relationships are not based on empathy but on lesser values like common language, dress codes, adornment, or an ideology (religious or otherwise). Once we get into the abstract realm then it is easy to define someone different as "other", and then a simple step to "non-human".
I find the internet like this. I'm more or less autistic on the internet - I find it very difficult to detect emotions in writing, to feel empathy for a person via their written word, or to feel any sense of personal connection: which is probably why I am so brusque (or "mean" or "a prick" depending on your ability to empathise with me or not). I'm very often surprised by the emotions and motivations (not to mention mental-illnesses) attributed to me by others, and I've more or less come to the conclusion that we're all autistic on the internet.
It's not that I don't see you at all, but that I see some writing, a tiny little thumbnail pic that does not produce an emotional response, and that's all I have to go on. It is insufficient in most cases to invoke the empathy response. Most of my online interactions do not even pretend to be personal, i.e. we do not express interest in each other as people, but try to connect on the basis of the abstract ideas I write about. I have no mental picture in my mind and no emotional response for most of the people I interact with online. And this is not true of me in person!
The likelihood of our meeting in person is pretty small: I have met two readers in person as a result of interacting about my blog. One fellow Order member from Scotland; and a scholar from Italy. How much emotional energy can I afford to invest in these ersatz relationships - it certainly takes considerable time, but gives little emotional sustenance. I actually think watching soap operas would be healthier as at least one gets an empathy response going!
I believe that living high-density, fast-food, fast-lane, short-attention-span, electronically-mediated lives is detrimental to our ability to empathise. So acting in selfish, self-centred ways is on the increase globally; and altruism and philanthropy are on the decrease. As we Westerners all now realise our system of government and the structuring of our economies benefit only a very few already well off people at the expense of the majority. I don't see this trend reversing any time soon. I'm extremely pessimistic about the humans.
After more than a decade of internet, I think most of us know that internet is not a perfect medium for communication without confusion!
I meant in general about invisibility and not your good self in particular (coreless as that may be). I mean the process by which each of us can become invisible or how each of us chooses (to greater or lesser extent) to try not see suffering ie make someone else invisible OK this is adding a moral overlay to sense impressions, which very well maybe an 'add-on', an extra something, a mental projection that we add on to sensory impressions, about which the Bahiya & the Malunkyaputta advises against(as well as the beginning of The Seeker, 25 The Dharmapada & Kaccayana's Riddle of the Wandering Mind, as talked about in depth by Sayadaw U Pandita, 'In This Very Life' http://www.wisdomlib.org/buddhism/book/in-this-very-life/d/doc1531.html). ie Guarding the sense doors with mindfulness. Not running after the pleasurable nor being repulsed by the aversive & unpleasant.
One morning after walking meditation with the sangha, I fell into conversation with a monastic brother. We talked about how mindfulness increases sensory awareness by way of just letting the sensory input be perceived, without flying off into a conceptual overlay or projecting a personal psychology onto the exterior world by way of interpretation. In the line of 'awareness perceives, the mind interprets' ( staying close to rupa in the skandhas). It happens that I actually try to spend a lot of time staying with the seeing whilst painting, stopping the wondering mind, staying with perception, so it's not that very surprising to me (but now leads me quickly to a real sense of impermanence as these sensations just pass by, especially in my walking mediation practice).
" The effort to see things without distortion takes something like courage and this courage is essential to the artist, who has to look at everything as though he saw it for the first time. " - Matisse
“Art may seem to be in danger of being drowned by talk… We have neglected the gift of comprehending things through our senses. Concept is divorced from percept, and thought moves among abstractions.” - Arnhiem. Art and Visual Perception, a Psychology of the Creative Eye
So when the monastic observed this, I reposted "what of the sight of someone who has been brutally mutilated, tortured & murdered?" How do we see suffering? What is the role of the sense gates in this? Or is it more a mental act of imagining ourselves in their place & thus empathetically realizing the nature of their suffering? How can some people not see suffering in others, including animals?
'in the not seeing, only the invisible' (always a good wheeze to flip over an adage or precept into it's opposite)
I think of the monk that Ashoka saw wandering over the battlefield, amongst the corpses & horror. He wasn't repulsed, wasn't acting on aversion via the sight of the massacre. How does Right View function here? was it because the massacre wasn't of his doing?
Sorry to bang on with this but thought you might be interested in this :
I agree our only valid realm is experience. The Buddha placed more importance on insight than intellectualism (note the occulariity of insight). Hence the importance of Right View. Occularity looks like being an important theme in Buddhism. ( Maybe is this a translation thing? Maybe us Europeans see eyesight words such as insight, view, see, perception where sanskrit & pali doesn't? ). Indeed, now I see the importance of occularity to the Vedic thought as well. Cross-cultural comparison can be illuminating. I'm now going to mention a book. 'Downcast Eyes, the Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-century French Thought' by Martin Jay. It's a survey of what the major C20th french philosophers thought about eyesight, world representations & vision.
BTW, occularity is a word he uses to stress the eyeball, which some philosophers denigrate as inherently meaningless. There's probably just as disputing going amongst the French Philosophers as the Neolithic Brahmins & Bhikkhus. There's lots of difference between Lyotard & Bergson for instance but they both thought about occularity. They are all also part of french culture, diverse as it may be. The book progresses by pointing out the differences between them. It is possible to compare & contrast, especially when doing so with a universal theme such as eyesight that biologically applies to all (even the blind).
Thursday, October 06, 2011
[Image]I'VE COMMENTED BEFORE on the episode where the Buddha speaks to Bāhiya in a post entitled "In the Seen...". He begins the famous speech with: "in the seen, only the seen; in the heard only the heard...". This is somewhat cryptic, but I noted that I had found another sutta which acts as a commentary on the Bahiya incident: The Māluṅkyaputta Sutta is in the Saṃyutta Nikāya (SN 35.95 PTS: S iv.72).
My translation of part of the text says: Having seen a form with mindfulness [sati] forgotten, attending to the delightful appearance; Experiencing an impassioned mind, and remaining attached to that;
In him numberless sensations multiply from that form, Covetousness and worry impair thinking. Thus suffering is heaped up and nibbāna is said to be remote.The gist is that without mindfulness, delight in the pleasures of the senses overcomes our minds and our minds are impaired. As a result we heap up suffering and are unlikely to be liberated - we will remain in thrall to pleasure seeking. Those who are mindful, do not delight in the pleasures of the senses, do not heap up suffering, and for them nibbāna is close.
In contemporary Buddhist presentations we usually find the idea that there is something other than the "seen in the seen" attributed to Brahmins. Compare the text above with this passage from the Chāndogya Upaniṣad (CU)atha yatraitad ākāśam anuviṣaṇṇaṃ cakṣuḥ sa cākṣuṣaḥ puruṣo darśanāya cakṣuḥ | atha yo vededaṃ jighrāṇīti sa ātmā gandhāya ghrāṇam | atha yo vededam abhivyāharāṇīti sa ātmā abhivyāhārāya vāk | atha yo vededaṃ śṛṇvānīti sa ātmā śravaṇāya śrotram || CU 8.12.4 || [1] Where the eye is gazes into space, that is the puruṣa of the eye. The eye is for seeing. The one who experiences "let me smell this" is the ātman. The nose is for smelling. The one who experiences "let me say this" is the ātman. The voice is for talking. The one who experiences "let me hear this" is the ātman. The ear is for hearing. atha yo vededaṃ manvānīti sa ātmā | mano 'sya daivaṃ cakṣuḥ | sa vā eṣa etena daivena cakṣuṣā manasaitān kāmān paśyan ramate ya ete brahmaloke || CU 8.12.5 ||
The one who experiences "let me think this" is the ātman. Mind is its divine eye. [The ātman] sees the delights and pleasures of the world of Brahmā, with this divine eye, the mind. [2] Here CU is proposing that there is something other than the seen in the seen. In the seen we find 'the one who sees', which here is described as both puruṣa 'person' and ātman 'self' - the two are synonymous.[3] It is this ātman which, through the divine eye, sees the pleasures of the world of Brahmā/brahman (the word could mean either the creator god, or the universal essence; a distinction entirely lost in the Buddhist Canon). Elsewhere we find that this self is to be sought within the heart (i.e. through introspective meditation) and having once identified it, it becomes one's whole world (idaṃ sarvaṃ). The analogy I use is that when one falls in love, one's lover becomes one's whole world. We might also think of a meditator absorbed in samādhi, where the samādhi itself becomes their whole world.
Buddhist critiques of this kind of material are probably familiar to Buddhist readers. CU seems to propose that there is an 'entity' behind experience, an experiencing 'person' or 'self' which has the experiences. Discovering this self within oneself is what enables the seer to be liberated. However note that there is a discrepancy. The Brahmin does not aim to see the delights of this world. This is confirmed in many passages throughout CU as well as other Upaniṣads. Ordinary desire and the delights of this world are as much an anathema in the early Upaniṣads as they are in early Buddhist texts. The Brahmin ascetic aims at union with brahman, and thereby escape from saṃsāra. However the Buddhist criticism focusses on paying attention to delights of the senses. Is it because they deny the possibility of anything behind the senses, or have they just missed the point? I think it's not out of the question that the Buddhists simply did not understand the main points of the Upaniṣads and that the beliefs being criticised were not in fact held by Brahmins. Indeed as far as I can see such beliefs are not even attributed to Brahmins in the Pāli texts.
The Buddhist critique of ātman rests on the idea that, as an immanent aspect of brahman, it is substantial, permanent and makes us happy when we find it. Although the idea does not occur in the suttas, compare this description of nibbāna from the canonical Cūḷaniddesa: Nibbānaṃ niccaṃ dhuvaṃ sassataṃ avipariṇāmadhammanti asaṃhīraṃ asaṃkuppaṃ."Nibbāna is permanent, constant, eternal, not subject to change, indomitable, unshakeable." [4] Such a statement is common enough in Buddhism. How is this different? The essential difference here is that Buddhists assume Brahmins to be speaking literally, and take their own almost identical statements metaphorically. This assumption goes unchallenged amongst Buddhists. Why? I suggest that it is because of deep seated prejudices against, and antipathy towards, Hinduism. Our identity as Buddhists is bound up with rejecting Hinduism - even if only nominally. However I do not believe that the Brahmins were speaking literally. Rather, I'd say they were struggling to put into words their own meditation experiences, and were themselves inventing a new metaphorical language to do so, and rejecting their own 1000 year old traditions in the process. There's no a priori reason to assume unsubtly or stupidity on the part of Brahmins. In fact Brahmanical thinking of this period is scintillating and full of subtlety. A few centuries later the Buddhists of India adopted precisely the same kind of essentialist metaphor for tathāgatagarbha! Buddhists also posit a faculty other than the six senses—with no name I've been able to discover—which can discern nibbāna or "the Unconditioned" [sic] or "things as they really are". How is this different from the 'eye' which sees the brahmaloka? Note that Buddhists also adopted this Brahmanical idea of the brahmaloka, but again they took it literally. Which suggests that they simply did not understand the idea. The Buddhist criticisms of those seeking rebirth in the brahmaloka are wide of the mark, and more or less irrelevant from the point of view of the Upaniṣads. This is not to say that criticism is not possible, only that early Buddhist texts are wholly unconvincing in their criticism.
I am not suggesting that there is no difference in the doctrinal positions of Buddhism and Brahmanism. Clearly there are differences. However Buddhists have long exaggerated and distorted these differences. Modern Buddhists, like their ancient counterparts, seem largely ignorant of the Upaniṣads or the nuances in them. And as I come to better understand them myself, I am becoming increasingly doubtful about the idea that Buddhist doctrine is a reaction against Upaniṣadic Brahmanism: one can hardly react against what one is ignorant of. This raises interesting questions which I hope to address in the future.
For an inspiring and vivid account of the Brahmanical religion I heartily recommend this book: William K. Mahoney. The Artful Universe: An Introduction to the Vedic Religious Imagination.[Image] State University of New York Press. I must warn traditionalist Buddhists however: this book may cause you to experience sympathy and respect for Brahmins, which could be detrimental to your Buddhist faith.
~~oOo~~
Notes. Chāndogya Upaniṣad. Sanskrit text from www.sub.uni-goettingen.de.My translation follows Valerie Roebuck's which is more literal than Patrick Olivelle's.As an aside I would once again like to point out the mad way we capitalise these words when they are in a religious context. We want to say that 'Self' is somehow different from, more important than, 'self'. Capitalising suggests either something substantial (a thing), or something transcendental (beyond our ability to sense or understand). Sometimes, paradoxically, both . Neither is very helpful. The Sanskrit 'ātman' is ambiguous, and the ambiguity is part of the fun. If we try to make clear a distinction when our source text is (perhaps deliberately) ambiguous we are not doing justice to the text: ātman means 'body, and self, and the immanent aspect of brahman.' And especially in the early Upaniṣads all three meanings are found. If we try to fix it as one or other we lose nuances, and we may in fact obscure the meaning. The CST version of the Pāli Canon does not include PTS page numbers for this text. It is from the commentary on the Pārāyanānugīti gāthā from the Sutta-niptāta. CST p.201.
13 Comments
Close this window Jump to comment formThe falsity of the enmity between Buddhism and Hinduism is also highlighted from an experiential standpoint when one thinks of great Hindu sages like Ramana Maharshi. Is the Atman he knew somehow inferior to the Nibbana of say Ajahn Chah? What if any is the difference between these men's attainments?
It seems to me that experienced mystics almost never dispute with one another, but theologians often do.
Friday, September 23, 2011
Hi Swanditch
In fact we don't know if Ramana Maharshi had a different experience from Ajahn Chah. But clearly both where admirable in many ways, and both expressed them in very different ways. I don't know enough about either to comment further.
However I don't accept the argument that the distinction between Hinduism and Buddhism is false on this basis either.
It seems to me that false distinctions are made, and true ones can be made as well.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Excellent. Your article makes me wonder if there are vital dialogue projects out there between Buddhist and Hindus. I know of interfaith dialogues in the monotheistic traditions, but I was wondering if you have heard of any in these two contemplative traditions. Have you found others, like yourself, questioning Buddhist misunderstandings of Brahmanism?
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Hi Sabio
I'm not so interested in interfaith dialogue (as you may recall), but I am interested in educating Buddhists about Buddhism. I suppose there is some interfaith dialogue between Buddhists and Hindus but I've never gone looking for it.
I'm not aware of anyone else who takes my particular approach: lots of people try to claim there's no difference between Buddhism and Hinduism, but that's just wrong.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
The concept of atman that Buddhists reject is not the atman that Advaitins (the darshan that I am familiar with) hold. It is pure consciousness, one without a second. It is this sat chit with the mind as limiting adjunct (upadhi) i.e. the witness/sakshin, that can be mistaken for some sort of ego. It is also in the notion of self luminous cognition and annica that differences are patent between the two great traditions.
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Hi Michael
No. I think you'll find that we Buddhists do reject the Advaitan ātman. At least this Buddhist does.
The terminology you use is unfamiliar to me - I presume this is advaitan jargon. Since I don't understand the proposition you are putting forth I can't really respond to it. Your last sentence as far as I can tell is not a properly formed English sentence.
Could you try again in plain, and grammatical English so I know what you are talking about?
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Hello Jayarava :-)
Thanks for this thread on perception, upon which I continue to mull over (as an artist painter).
Guarding the sense gates as one of the four nutriments (vitals, senses, volition, consciousness). Plus object/subject relations & non dualistic perception.
Some thoughts from the Upanishads:
"Of inconceivable power am I; without eyes I see; without ears I hear."- Kaivalya Upanishad
"There is no seer but Him, no one to hear but him, no one thinking, no one aware but Him. He is the Self, the Ruler within, the One Immortal."- Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
FYI, here is a website dedicated to these types of thoughts from all traditions - Christian, Buddhist, Hindu & Secular:
http://www.theawakenedeye.com
Perception is a human biological constant across religions & cultures, enriched & greatly influenced by the filters & meanings we put on it.
Friday, September 30, 2011
Hi Adam
My preference for comments is that they express your own understanding or confusion. I seek an encounter with you personally, rather than what you can turn up on Google. To paraphrase ShitMyDadSays: "no one is impressed by the book/website you found; you just read it, you didn't write it."
Just typing out or copy/pasting quotes or links; and especially quotes which are not properly referenced and from a named translator (and preferably accompanied by the original language with notes on the translation) doesn't really add much. Why not try giving voice to your own thoughts? Or if you quote something explain why you think it is relevant. The purpose of study is to identify and examine our presuppositions and assumptions about experience.
I don't see how those quotes are relevant to the discussion. What point were you trying to make by citing these texts? Could you please locate where in those texts the cited verses come from, discuss the context and how you feel it is relevant to what I wrote, and point me to the translation of the text that you used (and preferably convince me that you've read the whole thing).
The website you've linked to seems to epitomise everything I hate about religion - it's what David Chapman calls Monism: "all is one", "all religions teach the same thing". It represents a catastrophic failure of intellect. I'd recommend that readers of this blog not visit websites like that as it will make them confused. Again I fail to see how anyone who read what I wrote would consider this relevant to the discussion. An out of context is not sufficient to convey your meaning.
If you think this stuff is relevant then by all means say why and how. But be warned I don't have much time for Monism. I consistently find that those who find compelling similarities in Buddhist, Hindu and Christian thought have a superficial understanding of at least two of those traditions. I'm also learning that the harshest criticism of Buddhism also stem from ignorance, but this is not an argument for Monism, but an argument against ignorance and prejudice.
cont...
Friday, September 30, 2011
To Adam cont...
Now your last sentence I think is very interesting, and at odds with the rest of what you wrote. I think the implications of the common mechanism of human perceptions are interesting. I'd be keen for you to expand on that one sentence and see whether you think that a common mechanism amounts to a universally common experience (as Monism suggests) or whether the cultural overlays obscure the commonality. In other words do our beliefs about what experience amounts to determined more by the biological or cultural. My feeling is that culture - our conditioned subjectivity - vastly outweighs biology in this case. I think David Chapman begins to explain why in his post on mystical experiences as metaphysical evidence. I'm convinced by his argument that "mystics from different cultures give wildly different descriptions [of mystical experiences], which generally reflect their cultural background." One can trace the idea of Monism in it's development: it comes out of the Romantic Movement's reaction against the rationalism of the European Enlightenment. Sometimes called the Perennial Philosophy, it is related to two trends in religious thought:
1. the embracing of the relativity of culture and custom by worldly Europeans along with the breakdown of trust in institutionalised religious authority (again David Chapman has summarised this issue very well - his whole Meaningness blog is dedicated to this project; but the idea is detailed in David McMahan's book The Making of Buddhist Modernism.
2. To the assimilative tendencies in Indian religion. I've written about the latter a few times, but tried to encapsulate it here: Religion in India and the West. In Indian one doesn't neutralise a competing belief system by attacking it and annihilating it (the basic Christian strategy until about the 18th century); one assimilates and recontexualises it - hence Hindus will tell you that Buddha is an avatar of Viṣṇu, and that "all is one, and God is good". Similarly we Buddhists long ago converted Śiva to Buddhism. But this represents a strategy to neutralise competition for resources and influence - it does not represent the "truth".
Both of these trends find expression in movements such as Theosophy which in turn has back influenced modern India religious thought. In fact the descriptions of consciousness in Hinduism and Buddhism, not to mention Christianity and Neuroscience are radically different. I find the philosophy of Thomas Metzinger compelling in this regard - his representationalist philosophy of consciousness integrates neuroscience and more subject, non-ordinary states of consciousness. It is now plausible, I think, to regard all experience as taking place in the brain, including mystical experiences.
The only traditional school of thought which is consistent with this discovery is early (pre-abhidhamma) Buddhism. All other schools of thought are reliant on consciousness being able to operate separately from the body. Early Buddhist thought, though incorporating a range of folk beliefs has it's core in the idea that only dukkha arises and passes away, that the āyanatas are sabbe (everything), and that our only valid domain (visaya) is experience.
Regards
Jayarava
Friday, September 30, 2011
Dear Jayarava
Thank you for taking the time to reply in such length. Sorry if my shorthand from last comment was difficult to understand & caused annoyance and misunderstanding.
Why did I quote from other Upanishads? Yes I guess I didn't explain why I thought these quotes relevant. Cryptic shorthand strikes again. My intention was to express my own personal discovery that the notion of a 'Self' or an ' I ' (in the capitalized & divine sense) who sees is repeated in other Upanishads as well as the Chāndogya Upaniṣad. After all, this is exactly how your above article starts off. It mentions the Bahiya & then the recurrence of this same theme in the Māluṅkyaputta Sutta. Isn't it fair to assume that if something is reiterated in different texts, then it is an important theme. I thought the repetition in the Upanshads worth mentioning. My motivation was that it might of be of use to the development of this thread & not to impress, as one may have wrongly perceived it. Perception can quickly lead to misunderstanding, no?
I might look into Chapman & McMahan when my head has the space, my life the time & i feel the need. I can see that people do think differently & do believe different things. That it doesn't all boil down to same thing - 'Monism' as Chapman calls it.
I have heard the 'monist' argument before, often in real life, on the terrain & not in books, most often where common ground & tolerance is sought between people of different religions, rather than the inflaming of hatred by the insistence of difference. Again I suspect our communality is more to do with our common human biological condition (the five remembrances) rather than our own personal points of view. If we could only just drop our points of view occasionally....or at least not get so attached to them, do a bit of 'in the seeing, just the seen'... and just see our common humanity including its fragility, then maybe more compassion would be born from this insight.
'in the unseeing, the invisible'
Actually, the thing I find increasingly offensive is not misperception but invisibility. How can people do hurtful & horrible things to each other? OK there's the fear & the projection of fear that leads scape-goating & demonisation that leads to hatred & persecution that Adrendt explains so well vis-à-vis the Shoah... which is clearly a case of misperception. But there's also invisibility. For some people, many people simply don't exist. They simply aren't seen. Not even in the picture. Invisible. They aren't taken into account. Their well-being doesn't count because quiet simply they aren't seen. For example, you could fall over & be near death on the streets of Paris. Maybe someone would stop, maybe they wouldn't (actually I found the Parisians pretty good). Another more mundane example is the frequent inconsiderate acts that go all time between neighbours. Not out of contempt but because their well-being isn't simply isn't seen. Off-screen. Invisible. Unseen. If it blips up on the screen, it very well might be quickly dismissed as of no importance. Computers are probably making us more inclined to 'in the unseeing, the invisible' .... Another variant on invisibility is that of the Third World, for example. We know that they suffer. It's on the news but we choose not to see. The enormity of the problem & the suffering is too much so we cut it out of our field of vision, a kind of form of denial. Out of sight, out of mind? We can't hold it in our optic of the world. We choose to try not to see.
more to follow....specifically on the Bahiya & Malunkyaputta
Wednesday, October 05, 2011
Hi Adam,
No, I haven't mastered the mind reading siddhi yet! ;-)
Personally I thought that the idea of a substantial self in Vedic/Hindu ideology was a given, and still is(!), but I stumbled upon those particular verses that enabled me to relate it more directly to the Buddhist account of self. I'm much less interested in how the idea developed in non-Buddhist thought, than I am in how the Buddha might have been in dialogue with his contemporaries.
I'm usually deeply underwhelmed by inter-faith dialogue but happen to be writing a "Buddhist" response to an essentialist critique of anātman as the moment. It should see publication as it is a commission. I note in my article that comparing doctrines that are mutually exclusive will be unlikely to lead to anything but disagreement. Whereas as human beings we do seem to share certain values: love of kin and friends; human life, etc. We can dialogue about how these values play out in our life, and how our behaviour is distorted by the prism of our views a bit more productively.
However, as human beings we have limitations. One of which involves how we relate to other beings. Most of us can manage about 150 personal relationships, and then things start to get abstract - relationships are not based on empathy but on lesser values like common language, dress codes, adornment, or an ideology (religious or otherwise). Once we get into the abstract realm then it is easy to define someone different as "other", and then a simple step to "non-human".
I find the internet like this. I'm more or less autistic on the internet - I find it very difficult to detect emotions in writing, to feel empathy for a person via their written word, or to feel any sense of personal connection: which is probably why I am so brusque (or "mean" or "a prick" depending on your ability to empathise with me or not). I'm very often surprised by the emotions and motivations (not to mention mental-illnesses) attributed to me by others, and I've more or less come to the conclusion that we're all autistic on the internet.
It's not that I don't see you at all, but that I see some writing, a tiny little thumbnail pic that does not produce an emotional response, and that's all I have to go on. It is insufficient in most cases to invoke the empathy response. Most of my online interactions do not even pretend to be personal, i.e. we do not express interest in each other as people, but try to connect on the basis of the abstract ideas I write about. I have no mental picture in my mind and no emotional response for most of the people I interact with online. And this is not true of me in person!
The likelihood of our meeting in person is pretty small: I have met two readers in person as a result of interacting about my blog. One fellow Order member from Scotland; and a scholar from Italy. How much emotional energy can I afford to invest in these ersatz relationships - it certainly takes considerable time, but gives little emotional sustenance. I actually think watching soap operas would be healthier as at least one gets an empathy response going!
I believe that living high-density, fast-food, fast-lane, short-attention-span, electronically-mediated lives is detrimental to our ability to empathise. So acting in selfish, self-centred ways is on the increase globally; and altruism and philanthropy are on the decrease. As we Westerners all now realise our system of government and the structuring of our economies benefit only a very few already well off people at the expense of the majority. I don't see this trend reversing any time soon. I'm extremely pessimistic about the humans.
Jayarava
Thursday, October 06, 2011
Thanks for your reply, Jayarava.
After more than a decade of internet, I think most of us know that internet is not a perfect medium for communication without confusion!
I meant in general about invisibility and not your good self in particular (coreless as that may be). I mean the process by which each of us can become invisible or how each of us chooses (to greater or lesser extent) to try not see suffering ie make someone else invisible OK this is adding a moral overlay to sense impressions, which very well maybe an 'add-on', an extra something, a mental projection that we add on to sensory impressions, about which the Bahiya & the Malunkyaputta advises against(as well as the beginning of The Seeker, 25 The Dharmapada & Kaccayana's Riddle of the Wandering Mind, as talked about in depth by Sayadaw U Pandita, 'In This Very Life' http://www.wisdomlib.org/buddhism/book/in-this-very-life/d/doc1531.html). ie Guarding the sense doors with mindfulness. Not running after the pleasurable nor being repulsed by the aversive & unpleasant.
One morning after walking meditation with the sangha, I fell into conversation with a monastic brother. We talked about how mindfulness increases sensory awareness by way of just letting the sensory input be perceived, without flying off into a conceptual overlay or projecting a personal psychology onto the exterior world by way of interpretation. In the line of 'awareness perceives, the mind interprets' ( staying close to rupa in the skandhas). It happens that I actually try to spend a lot of time staying with the seeing whilst painting, stopping the wondering mind, staying with perception, so it's not that very surprising to me (but now leads me quickly to a real sense of impermanence as these sensations just pass by, especially in my walking mediation practice).
" The effort to see things without distortion takes something like courage and this courage is essential to the artist, who has to look at everything as though he saw it for the first time. " - Matisse
“Art may seem to be in danger of being drowned by talk… We have neglected the gift of comprehending things through our senses. Concept is divorced from percept, and thought moves among abstractions.” - Arnhiem. Art and Visual Perception, a Psychology of the Creative Eye
So when the monastic observed this, I reposted "what of the sight of someone who has been brutally mutilated, tortured & murdered?" How do we see suffering? What is the role of the sense gates in this? Or is it more a mental act of imagining ourselves in their place & thus empathetically realizing the nature of their suffering? How can some people not see suffering in others, including animals?
'in the not seeing, only the invisible' (always a good wheeze to flip over an adage or precept into it's opposite)
I think of the monk that Ashoka saw wandering over the battlefield, amongst the corpses & horror. He wasn't repulsed, wasn't acting on aversion via the sight of the massacre. How does Right View function here? was it because the massacre wasn't of his doing?
Thursday, October 06, 2011
Sorry to bang on with this but thought you might be interested in this :
I agree our only valid realm is experience. The Buddha placed more importance on insight than intellectualism (note the occulariity of insight). Hence the importance of Right View. Occularity looks like being an important theme in Buddhism. ( Maybe is this a translation thing? Maybe us Europeans see eyesight words such as insight, view, see, perception where sanskrit & pali doesn't? ). Indeed, now I see the importance of occularity to the Vedic thought as well. Cross-cultural comparison can be illuminating. I'm now going to mention a book. 'Downcast Eyes, the Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-century French Thought' by Martin Jay. It's a survey of what the major C20th french philosophers thought about eyesight, world representations & vision.
BTW, occularity is a word he uses to stress the eyeball, which some philosophers denigrate as inherently meaningless. There's probably just as disputing going amongst the French Philosophers as the Neolithic Brahmins & Bhikkhus. There's lots of difference between Lyotard & Bergson for instance but they both thought about occularity. They are all also part of french culture, diverse as it may be. The book progresses by pointing out the differences between them. It is possible to compare & contrast, especially when doing so with a universal theme such as eyesight that biologically applies to all (even the blind).
Thursday, October 06, 2011