Hello Jayarava, thanks for another stimulating blog post – and congratulations on 10 years of it! Thinking about unconditioned dhammas, this is presumably a later Abhidharma kind of thing. Having read your blog, I was looking again at the asaṅkhata-saṃyutta in the Saṃyutta-nikāya, where the Buddha is reported to have said that the asaṅkhata is the destruction of greed, hate and delusion. This sounds more like poetry than metaphysics, and presumably meant that the idea of the asaṅkhata was familiar to his hearers. But the metaphysical interpretation of asaṅkhata would presumably have been a later development, with all the attendant problems you mention.
That's quite an interesting exercise in alternative-Buddhism you seem to be doing... what if the evolution of early Buddhist ideas had gone in a completely different direction. I don't know if your interpretation is better than the one(s) that actually happened, but it's nonetheless interesting to point it out as a possible outcome.
In any case, you might not be aware that the Tibetan tradition, and the Indian sources they inherited it from (Dharmakirti, etc.) got a whole lot of mileage out of the notion of asaṃskṛta dharmas or "uncompounded phenomena" (Tib: 'dus ma byas). Their understanding is a bit different from the one you are presenting; as far as I understand, space (defined as "absence of obstruction") is the prototypical uncompounded phenomenon; such phenomena are not substantial, indeed they are explicitly said to be mental projections (i.e there is nothing out there in space that is an actual, substantial absence of obstruction - such as thing would be a contradiction in terms). This means that there is no contradiction in the fact that *cognition* of the uncompounded object is still momentary, lasting only until one's awareness wanders elsewhere, as it tends to do.
The genius move, then, is to consider all "generalities" as uncompounded, but cognizable phenomena. Negations such as "the absence of a rabbit on this table" are perfect examples, but so are abstract qualities such as "greenness", that are (empirically) objects of our conceptual cognition. In fact through some rather complicated gymnastics, generalities (sometimes equated with the western philosophical term of "universals") are defined in negative terms, and put on equal footing with absences. This amount to saying that you cannot cognize "green" without reference to "not green". And this is also how such generalities are said to be interdependent and empty of any intrinsic essence: not in being momentary (again: even if the cognition is momentary, its projected object is cognized as indefinitely enduring) or made of parts, but in being comprehensible only in relation to each other, without any ultimate foundation to ground them. Epistemologically, they are known via inference, whereas regular compounded phenomena are known primarily via direct perception.
I'm not a specialist on this topic, but much of this is part of the basic educational curriculum of Tibetan Buddhist monks, and to some extent Tibetan schoolchildren. First they go through elaborate classifications of existents (Tib. gzhi grub, shes bya), then through the various modes of valid and invalid cognition through which these can be known (Tib. blo rig). The details of presentation vary quite a bit between the four Tibetan Buddhist schools; I think what I've said is general enough to apply to all... or to make a hash of them more or less equally!
For the gory (err... let's say juicy) details see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-language-tibetan/ or http://www.berzinarchives.com/web/x/nav/n.html_1474539638.html
Hiya. I had meant to try to look through the asaṅkhatasaṃyutta but just haven't found the time. I think it is very interesting that we get these major shifts in meaning over time and that the result is frequently bad metaphysics. Would like to return to this. Thanks for highlighting it.
The irony is that this logic only relies on Buddhist axioms. It was available and to some extent was even grasped by ancient Indians.
My understanding is that nirvāṇa is the prototypical asaṃskṛta-dharma as it is the first that appears in the history of Buddhist thought. But this is with a long view of history. It may well be that Tibetans did what other later Buddhists with short views of history did, i.e. they tried to repair the damage caused by bad early philosophising.
The problem with space as a dharma is that one cannot perceive something that isn't there. Space as unobstruction can't be fundamental because it relies on the prior expectation of obstruction that is frustrated. Once again this is simply bad philosophy. Nor does it escape the logic explored in my essay - if it is asaṃskṛta then it must be either always perceived or never perceived. These are the only two options. A dharma cannot arise and pass away if it has no conditions. To be perceived, means to arise, and thus every dharma must be impermanent and conditioned; or be impossible to perceive.
"The genius move, then, is to consider all "generalities" as uncompounded, but cognizable phenomena. "
Hardly genius. It's a flat contradiction to consider an dharma without conditions to be cognizable, unless it is always and only cognizable. This limitation is absolute in the Buddhist model of mental functioning.
What's more all qualities are abstract. All dharmas are abstractions, that is the whole point of dharma theory. Dharmas are an abstraction from the sense object and sense faculty and sense cognition. And it is precisely because our first person experience is constantly changing that we know that there can be no asaṃskṛta dharmas. Hence the Kaccānagotta Sutta denies that existence and nonexistence (or reality and unreality) i.e. astitā and nāstitā can apply to the world of experience.
Defining experience in terms of absences and negativities is also doubtful at best.
Any number of nouns are absent from this sentence.
If you define the meaning of a sentence in terms of the absence of nouns, as opposed to their presence, then nothing ever makes sense, precisely because absence is effectively infinite. Even if you started, you would never finish elucidating all the absences (the number of nouns in English is constantly growing). That is not how grammar works and it is not how cognition works either. I'm not sure how anyone could have taken this seriously to begin with, but it certainly ought not to survive natural selection. And that begs a question about how religious ideas evolve, since natural selection seems not to operate.
As for an abstraction like "greenness" you are talking about svabhava in the sense it is criticised by Nāgārjuna. One cannot beat Nāgārjuna for pointing out the flaws in this way of thinking. Basically if there were greenness we would only ever see green because greenness would have/be svabhava. Ipso facto there is no "greenness" beyond a convention to call certain types of experience green. Interestingly an influential group of modern philosophers now say this about colour. They ignoring the fact of our common colour sensing apparatus and the physical facts of electromagnetic radiation, and opt to say that "green" is entirely subjective. sensible Buddhists would reply that nothing is *entirely* subjective since at the very least one of the conditions for experience is an *object*.
The more I learn about Tibetan approaches to doctrine the more I wonder how any people came out of that system with any semblance of insight. It is a miracle.
Hi Jayarava and dharmanomad. I was stimulated by dharmanomad's comments. One comment, though, would go that universals such as greenness ought not be regarded as unconditioned dharmas. Such universals are obviously objects of perception but, if they exist, could be regarded by inference as e.g. absence of non-greenness. This is an epistemologically powerful explanation for aspects of our experience such as colour but does not mean that colour is unconditioned. Perhaps space is the only sensible kind of proposed unconditioned dharma we should consider. I am better on Kant than on Buddhist epistemology, but the idea that space is unconditioned seems to bear some comparison with the idea that space is a transcendental condition for experience. It is neither objective nor subjective but is a condition for anything to be said to be in space. Hence we can cognize 'space' as a concept, we can form the idea of space, and this concept or idea may arise, pass away, etc., hence is 'conditioned', but the concept or idea is a concept or idea of space itself, which is unconditioned because it is transcendental. It's no doubt really obvious that this kind of epistemological interpretation of the unconditioned has nothing whatever to do with the unconditioned as being the destruction of greed hate and delusion!
It seems to me that greenness is not a universal at all, or at least that such "universals" are an attempt to smuggle an ātman into Buddhism and are in fact disallowed. Green is an experiential quality; greenness is the non-existent noumena that underlies the experience of green. There is no greenness. It's not productive to keep talking about it.
All this does not change the situation regards unconditioned dharmas. There are only two choices for unchanging phenomena: either we always perceive them or never perceive them. If pratītyasamutpāda describes how we have experiences, then asaṃskṛta-dharmas are ruled out. If it is possible to experience green, then green is governed by pratītyasamutpāda. Similarly with space - space does not involve the absence of experience.
The only applicable experience relevant to the discussion of asaṃskṛta dharmas is *the experience of cessation*. It is only this experience, in which all sensory and mental content ceases, which appears not to be covered by pratītysamutpāda since nothing is arising, but according to the texts one still has an experience. But I don't think asaṃskṛta dharmas is a good explanation for what happens in cessation. The choice of space as the prototypical asaṃskṛta dharma demonstrates that Buddhist thinking had by that time become bogged down in ontology and becomes less and less relevant to understanding experience.
Perhaps you're not familiar with the problem of universals. When you write 'green is an experiential quality' you are using the word 'green' but without specifying a particular green thing; it is hence a 'universal' (whether you call it 'green' or 'greenness'; 'greenness' is simply the quality or state of being green). The problem of universals (in medieval European philosophy, but with its parallels in Indian epistemology, no doubt) is working out the epistemological basis of our use of non-particular or universal signifiers. To say that 'green' is a non-existent noumena underlying the experience of green is a philosophical opinion, though not a very good one, since something non-existent cannot underly anything. The Buddhist (Dignaga's I believe) kind of answer to the problem of universals such as 'green' is really clever and intriguing, positing the 'absence of non-green' as a way to avoid positing an apparent essence, which of course would be incompatible with fundamental aspects of Buddhist metaphysics like śūnyatā.
I suspect that the kind of Buddhist philosophising around asaṃskṛta-dharmas that the Indians went for is probably a little more sophisticated than you're allowing for. I'm not everso familiar with it, but similar kinds of philosophising around e.g. space in Kantian philosophy are richer than you allow for here. If we take the idea of 'space as a form of intuition' in the Kantian kind of way, then in principle space is not something you can experience per se, but it is one of the conditions for the possibility of experience. We don't directly experience space, and nor time, but we infer them, and form concepts about them, and in both sense they are dharmas. I don't see that perception has to count as our only means of knowledge.
Wouldn't you say you reject the unconditioned dharmas that are described as modes of cessation because you reject the whole underlying ontology of momentary dharmas? It's not like you accept the doctrine of momentariness and that whole Abdhidharma ontology but not the unconditioned dharmas is it? I'm not all that keen on Abhidharma ontology, but then there is the causeless (ahetuka) non-karmic citta dharma which produces the 'smile of the arahant' – now doesn't that show that the Abhidharmikas weren't so bad?
I notice you have dropped the use of the abstract "greenness" which is what I was objecting to. "Green" I have no problem with. The abstraction "Green-ness" looks like an attempt at an noumenon. There is no "greenness".
"Green" is simply a linguistic convention that doesn't even exist in some languages. We don't in fact all agree on what is green. My view, following Lakoff, is that it's because our colour names are in fact related categories, each with a prototype. Colour is experienced as having a relationship to that prototype. Homer could talk about the "wine dark sea" because in his colour categories what we call "blue" came into one of the only four colour categories that the ancient Greek language had (roughly white, black, red, and yellow). Homer also describes the sky as "bronze". He's not colour blind or abnormal, it's just that his language has different categories to ours - and blue/green were not given separate names in that language. We really only began to understand Homer's idiom when, in the late 20th century, we figured out that Ancient Greek only had four colour categories compared to our ten or eleven (orange is pretty recent). See also See Blue.
I suppose this does highlight the inherent problems associated with any categorisation process - the temptation to think of a defining characteristic (svabhāva as used positively by Abhidharmikas) that places some object in a category as something that has an independent existence (svabhāva as used negatively by Nāgārjuna). This seems to happen because a category needs a stable definition to be useful.
Sure, we infer things and those inferences are technically dharmas (though I'm not sure dharma theory is really sophisticated enough for describing a logical inference - it would count as prapañca wouldn't it?). So if we infer something about space, let's say that we infer that it is unconditioned, then the dharma that is arising is not "space", but an inference about space. What have we learned about space qua dharma? Nothing, because we have not experienced space; no dharma categorised as "space" has arisen or passed away. Although one could follow the Nāgārjunian logic and argue that because space qua dharma never arises, then it is a good candidate for being unconditioned. The very fact that we never seem to experience space is evidence of this. Being wary of confirmation bias we can take the idea that space is an unconditioned dharma as a working hypothesis and seek to disprove it. But the simple fact is that we could never prove such a proposition beyond any reasonable doubt because of the Black Swan Effect. It might be a strong theory, but the moment someone realises that actually we do experience space, perhaps in some subtle way, then the theory dies. We have no way of knowing if or when this might happen, but we cannot rule it out. Of course the Sarvāstivādins did rule it out by declaring as an axiom that space *is* an unconditioned dharma. The problem with this is *how could they know?* If space is unconditioned there's no way to gain certain knowledge about it since it is not accessible to cognition. How do we have knowledge of something that no one experiences and that cannot be cognized? Their own epistemology denies them access to the knowledge that space is unconditioned. So, again, space is not a good prototype for the category "unconditioned dharma".
On the other hand if we start from an experience that some people we know have had (at least a few of our colleagues if their testimony is trustworthy), i.e. the experience of cessation, in which one is conscious, but without sensory or mental content, then this is a much more interesting starting point. But I've been over this ground already. It's what the essay is about.
What I'm saying is that to start from a theory and try to reason towards an ontology might be amusing, but it's not half so interesting or important as starting from an experience and trying to reason towards a theory of experience.
It's not that I reject the doctrine of momentariness, as much as I have shown that it cannot do what it sets out to do. The doctrine is incoherent. I don't see the need to state that I reject an incoherent theory; to me that's a given. The problem I am actively working on through this blog is that such incoherent theories are still actively being taught as the ultimate truth about the universe in our Buddhist centres.
I don't see a problem with pointing out that a Buddhist doctrine is contradictory on it's own terms. Indeed this strikes me as a useful way to get people to work down to the more fundamental problems: to say that asaṃskṛta dharmas contradict the theory of momentariness is a step in the right direction. Pointing out a series of contradictions at various levels in the superstructure of Buddhist doctrine, combined with reflections on the psychology of belief, will hopefully get more people to reflect on what they believe and why.
The best I could say about the Ābhidharmikas, is that they probably meant well.
For what it is worth, I think Kant has now been superseded and in language that is much easier to understand. For example Mark Johnson's book The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason contains a superior description of how we structure experience using image schemas. This links up with George Lakoff's work on categorisation in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Thingsand the book the pair of them wrote on metaphor, Metaphors We Live By. In this view there is no spooky transcendental judgement - the structure of experience is provided by the brain, through physical experience. The similarity we experience are provided by common brain structure/function and regularities in the universe.
On the mass, energy, and length scales relevant to human experience we also know, thanks to Einstein and others, that there is an existent universe independent of our experience of it, though how we experience it depends on our inertial frame. This universe is made up of spacetime, mass, and energy, all of which behave in a lawful manner as far as we can tell through millions of experiments. Of course at the nano-scale this apparent reality breaks down, but since we can never actually experience the universe at this scale it's not relevant to understanding experience. Scale is important. Of course there are theoretical problems in trying to find theories which show that the universe on any arbitrary scale is a manifestation of general laws - a law that explains the behaviour of the universe on the human, nano and cosmic scale. Some believe that String Theory or M Theory will turn out to be the general law. Ultimately this won't change the world of human experience - just as Relativity, 100 years old this year, doesn't really change human experience - we can with great effort and special instrumentation notice the effects of Relativity, but even this doesn't affect how we go about our lives. If we ever build a space-ship capable of relativistic velocities it might raise moral quandries, but for now we can ignore it.
Trying to do philosophy that is relevant to the present with outdated concepts and terms seems to be one of the major problems in the contemporary world. Similarly I don't think modern philosophy (or science) is much help in understanding early Buddhist thought either. Of course they shared some metaphors and image schemas with us, they are not aliens. But their project was very different from the Greek project and their methods were very different. Kant made break-throughs that helped to make sense of the knowledge of his day. But his day has been and gone. So, for that matter, has the Buddha's day been and gone.
I'm more of a historian of ideas than a philosopher - a very reluctant philosopher. The more I learn about traditional philosophy (Western and Eastern) the more reluctant I become.
Saturday, December 05, 2015
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It was ten years ago yesterday that I started this blog. This is essay no.447. I was going to write a review and reminiscence of the years, but frankly this turned out to be a boring task that did not interest me. So here instead is another essay exploring Buddhist doctrines. It seems more relevant to celebrate ten years of writing by more writing in the inquisitive and skeptical mode that I hope characterises my project/object.
We all have "Ah ha" moments. I enjoy it when some new piece of information lights up my mind and makes me reassess what I know. I'm lucky enough to have experienced this many times. There is a process of reorganising that goes on. In some cases, it can go on for years. One of these occurred for me in 2006. I was newly ordained into the Triratna Buddhist Order and went to attend some lectures by Professor Richard Gombrich at SOAS, in London. These later became a book, but hearing the professor talk us through the various arguments that he was making and having the opportunity to ask him questions at the end of each lecture was invaluable. I wish every non-fiction book I read came with 10 hours of the author talking about it and available to answer questions.
Now I realise that I was ignorant at the time and it is slightly embarrassing to admit this, but during one of the lectures Professor Gombrich said something about dharmas being the object of the manas or mind sense. As we know the early Buddhists saw cognition (vijñāna) as a function of this mind sense, as just as the eye sense (cakṣu-indriya) has form (rūpa) as its object (alambana), so the manas has dharmas as its object. I must have heard this at some stage, but for some reason it hadn't registered. When I heard Prof. Gombrich say it a light-bulb came on. To repeat: dharmas are the object of the manas. This is perhaps the single most important axiom of Buddhist doctrine that I know. It is vital to keep this in mind.
Dharmas are the object of the manas. It is dharmas that arise in dependence on conditions. Conditionality, first and foremost, refers to this.
One of the first insights that came to me on the basis of gaining this understanding was that when we say "things arise in dependence on conditions", by "things" we actually mean dharmas. It is dharmas that arise and cease. Later, I realised that dharmas don't arise in the mind because Buddhist texts lack the metaphor: MIND IS A CONTAINER. Dharmas are cognized by the manas, but not in the manas. Dharmas arise in the experiential world, loka. This is a subtle point, but quite important when we are trying to understand the Buddhadharma from the point of view of early Buddhists.
The fact that it is dharmas qua mental objects that arise in dependence on conditions, rather than anything more substantial, is central to making sense of many other Buddhist teachings. For example, the trilakṣana or "three marks" apply to dharmas. In other words, when we say "All conditioned things are impermanent", again by "things" we mean dharmas. And dharmas are conditioned because they only arise when a sense object (alambana) and sense faculty (indriya) meet giving rise to sense cognition (vijñāna). And this brings us to the so-called unconditioned dharmas.
There is an experience one can have, relatively easily I gather, in which all sense experience and all mental experience stops. By cultivating the meditations known as arūpāyatana (sometimes called the higher- or arūpa- dhyānas) one comes to experience emptiness (suññatā) as it is defined in the Pāḷi Canon (see especially MN 121, 122). Compare also the Buddha's experience described in my 2008 essay Communicating the Dharma. As I understand it, if there is no sense or mental experience then technically no dharmas are arising or ceasing in this state. Mental activity (and therefore karma) has ceased while one is in this state. It is also sometimes called a "temporary liberation of the mind" (sāmāyikacetovimutti) to distinguish it from states of liberation that are thought to be permanent (I'll return to the issue of permance shortly). It may also be called nirodha-samāpatti "attainment of cessation", or saññā-vedayita-nirodha "cessation of sensations and perceptions".
This experience of cessation threw up a major problem with Theravāda solution to the problem of action at a temporal distance. Linking actions to temporally distance consequences required an unbroken stream of mental events. But the most obvious interpretation of the experience of cessation is that dharmas stop arising. This would interrupt the connection and destroy the mechanism of karma. When they thought about it, sleep also posed the same problem. In order to preserve karma the Theravādins had to invent a whole new type of dharma called the bhavaṅgacitta that arose to fill the gap in mental events during cessation or sleep, but remained unconscious so as not to spoil cessation (by arising into awareness). Compare my description of this problem in Action at a Temporal Distance in the Theravāda. Yogācārins, who also accepted the Doctrine of Momentariness as a solution to Action at a Temporal Distance also had to bridge this discontinuity. They did this with an invented entity called ālayavijñāna. Unlike the bhavaṅgcitta this new entity is constantly present in all mental events as a kind of background to awareness, a solution that brings its own problems because the ālayavijñāna starts to look eternal. Both bhavaṅgacitta and ālayavijñāna are ad hoc solutions solely designed to maintain continuity and neither really achieves their aim.
It seems to be this experience of cessation that unlocks the insights sought by Buddhists. Vedantins also cultivate these kinds of states and what seems to distinguish them from Buddhists is that Vedantins take the experience of emptiness to be an absolute. Or, they might say, that in a state of emptiness one is in contact with the absolute, with Brahman. By contrast, Buddhists, on the whole, reject absolutes except in one interesting case: asaṃskṛta-dharma.
Asaṃskṛta Dharma
In an almost hackneyed passage from the Udāna, the Buddha says: atthi, bhikkhave, ajātaṃ abhūtaṃ akataṃ asaṅkhataṃ. no cetaṃ, bhikkhave, abhavissa ajātaṃ abhūtaṃ akataṃ asaṅkhataṃ, nayidha jātassa bhūtassa katassa saṅkhatassa nissaraṇaṃ paññāyetha.
There is [something that is] unborn, unreal, unmade, unconditioned. If there were not, it would not be possible to understand escape from [something that is] born, real, made, conditioned.
In Pāḷi the words jāta, bhūta, kata, and saṅkhata (born, real, made, conditioned) are all past participles acting as adjectives of something unspecified. The ambiguous nature of the sentence makes it perfect for Romantic projections, but very difficult to actually understand. Another related adjective is amata 'deathless' which is equivalent to ajāta, only focussing on the other aspect of repeated death and rebirth. Buddhists appear to have decided that the unspecified something being described here was a dharma, and that this dharma was nirvāna. But nirvāna cannot simply arise and pass away like other dharmas. So Buddhists said that nirvāṇa is not conditioned, i.e. asaṃskṛta (Pali asaṅkhata), which means that it does not, it cannot, arise and pass away. Clearly if nirvāna could cease, that would be a major problem for the mythology of Buddhism as it would make nirvāṇa a temporary experience like any other experience. Having attained, or obtained, nirvāṇa, a Buddha must always have it. In fact as my last essay points out this permanence itself became a problem for the Mahāyānist religion.
But an asaṃskṛtadharma is really very deeply problematic. If there are no conditions for the arising of the dharma and we argue that it has been cognized by the Buddha, then it must always be present which in the Buddhist worldview means that it exists as a permanent entity. So already we have something eternal. However, eternality is forbidden by axiom. It is also logically inconsistent for any dharma to be eternal. That is simply not how our minds work. The importance of the insights into dharmas qua mental events, is that they are constantly arising and passing away. The Kaccānagotta Sutta points out that "real" or "unreal" (astitā or nāstitā) in this context are meaningless terms, precisely because a dharma that arises cannot be permanently non-existent and a dharma that ceases cannot be permanently existent. Neither permanent existence (i.e. realness) nor permanent non-existence can possibly apply to dharmas. And yet, here we are, with a permanently existing dharma at the heart of Buddhist doctrine in a glaring apparent contradiction. Worse, if we do not have a permanently existing dharma then the entire mythology of Buddhism collapses.
Another way of looking at the problem is that dharmas are the objects of the manas. Another axiom of Buddhist psychology is that mental events occur one at a time: one citta follows another citta. So if a dharma is asaṃskṛta it must always be present or always be absent from our experiential world. But if we allow the existence of a mental event which is always present, then it constantly takes up that single slot in the manas. An asaṃskṛta dharma can neither arise nor cease. Thus if it exists, then it must always exist. If it exists we must be aware of it to the exclusion of all else. If it doesn't exist it is irrelevant. If there were an asaṃskṛta dharma only two possibilities exist: we would only ever be aware of that one dharma to the exclusion of everything else; or we would never be aware of it. This same logic pervades the writing of Nāgārjuna with respect to svabhāva.
If we argue that we might not be aware of the existence of an asaṃskṛtadharma, then this is a simple contradiction. To be unaware of a dharma (mental event) is the same as it not being cognized and this is tantamount to saying that it has ceased and been replaced by another mental event arising; or that it has not arisen. A dharma is a dharma because it is cognized. According to the universally accepted model of the mind, without cognition nothing arises. This is also an argument against the possibility of the bhavaṅgacitta - a mental even that is not cognized is a contradiction in terms.
This means also that any kind of argument along the lines of nirvāṇa being obscured by adventitious defilements is also a logical contradiction. Obscured here, with reference to dharmas means did not arise. And if tathāgatagarbha is not a dharma then what is it? So the ideology of Tathāgatagarbha is caught in a logical inconsistency, which leads to this kind of circular logic: If there is a tathāgatagarbha and we are not aware of it right now and always, then there is not a tathāgatagarbha.
We might argue that it can work if the dharma has a permanent existence that is independent of any mind. But this contradicts the very definition of dharmas as the objects of the manas. Additionally an unchanging permanently existing real object independent of the mind would create problems for the universe. How would an unchanging entity interact with a constantly changing world? Interaction is change, so interaction would be impossible. This may be why some modern Vedantins, perhaps under the influence of Sāṃkhyadarśana, deny freewill. If you believe in absolute being in any sense, then the logical conclusion is that all change is mere illusion. Under these conditions there can be no freewill because it would contradict the fundamental assumptions the worldview is based on. we begin to see why the early Buddhists were right to reject any kind of absolute being. It's a philosophical disaster. Absolute being wrecks everything and results in a kind of nonsense world, where everything interesting is just a trick of perception.
But if an asaṃskṛta dharma is a wrecking ball in Buddhist metaphysics, why on earth would they have adopted one (or three in the Vaibhāṣikavāda)? I'm not sure I understand this, but I have some preliminary thoughts. Firstly, of course, they were trying to use their simple philosophy to explain the experience of cessation. But as well as temporary cessation some early Buddhists experienced a seemingly permanent transformation of their minds. In mythic terms they wanted to see the Buddha , the anthropomorphic face of this transformation, as having crossed a threshold from which there was no coming back. And since their goal, in common with most, if not all, North Indians at the time was to end rebirth. If the Buddha had succeeded in his goal that would involve, at the very least, the end of rebirth. This quality the Buddha attained was at first hailed as his greatest success, though for Mahāyānists it was his greatest failure, because it left them without a saviour.
In an experiential world in which everything changes, there is no possibility of a irreversible change. If everything changes, then reversibility is always a possibility. Thus if nirvāṇa were to involve an irreversible change, then necessarily something non-changing had to be introduced into the mix. That doing so broke Buddhist metaphysics was probably a consideration, but I imagine it seemed like the lesser of two weevils. By introducing an asaṃkṛta dharma, the early Buddhists opened up the possibility of a permanent change. This enabled them to have an afterlife which mimicked some features of the Brahmanical afterlife, i.e. ending rebirth, without explicitly committing them to absolute being.
To get around absolute being, the early Buddhists argued that questions about the afterlife of someone who had experienced nirvāṇa, i.e. "someone in that state" (tathā-gata), had to remain unanswered or undifferentiated (avyākṛta). The early Buddhist position was that there was no way to know something that was absolute - for the reasons outlined above. Later Buddhists also rejected this axiom. When Kūkai returned from China with Tantric teachings one of the roadblocks he struck was his claim that the teachings came from the dharmakāya, personified as Mahāvairocana. At that time, in line with Mahāyāna orthodoxy, the Japanese mainstream considered the dharmakāya to be "formless, imageless, voiceless, and totally beyond conceptualisation" (Hakeda 1972: 82). They saw the dharmakāya as an absolutely transcendent state of being (rather like the Brahmanical brahman in fact). Because of this, they understood that no direct communication was possible. Kūkai set about undermining this by pointing to existing scriptural passages in which the dharmakāya Buddha does communicate and eventually won over the majority and went on to hold the highest post in the imperial government's ecclesiastical hierarchy. Absolutes are poison to Buddhist philosophy and practice.
Conclusions
So this idea of asaṃskṛta dharmas, although in some ways essential to Buddhism, is actually illogical and unworkable. It creates more problems than it solves. In our times the idea of unconditioned dharmas almost inevitably comes to be treated as an absolute: The Unconditioned (with definite article and capital letters). We have the same problem in the Triratna Community now with Sangharakshita's new take on dhammaniyāma, it has quickly replaced The Unconditioned to become The Dhammaniyāma. Lord, help us.
As convert Buddhists we are expected to take up certain articles of faith. We have to accept, first and foremost, that Buddhism does not require us to take up articles of faith (!); that karma creates a just world; that the afterlife in which this justice is enacted involves rebirth; that the sequence of lives is supposedly like one thought arising after another (or at least that the same model applies in both domains); that the Buddha achieved a kind of permanent transformation not reproduced by anyone we'll ever meet; and that certain nonsense propositions such as asaṃskṛta-dharmas are in fact sense. The first article makes it almost impossible to talk about the others because they are not really acknowledged for what they are. To give up or reject these articles of faith is to risk being expelled from the friendly and compassionate embrace of the religious community. Many converts are assiduous in learning the rhetoric with which these articles of faith are defended (I know I was). Some quite sophisticated arguments have been developed over the years and these can be deftly wielded by adepts to win arguments. But winning arguments about Buddhist doctrine is a pyrrhic victory.
It's a bit like the emperors new clothes. No one wants to be thought an idiot, so they go along with saying that they can see the fine new garments the emperor is wearing. To even admit that we don't understand something like asaṃskṛta-dharmas is to risk being looked down on by those who pretend to understand. To actively say that a central doctrine of Buddhism does not make sense sets off a whole new layer of defences in those who believe Buddhism makes sense of everything. Sceptics learn the meaning of peer-pressure. It has taken me many years of research and writing to get to a position where I feel confident about expressing my doubts and the consequences of doing so. I'm fortunate to have a small group of like-minded friends I can talk openly with about these issues.
I would like to say that I believe these articles of faith are being unravelled, but I don't think this is the case yet. Those who are questioning the traditional articles of faith are often merely replacing them with more acceptable articles of faith. Most are silenced by direct or indirect peer pressure. Apologists for traditional Buddhism are stepping up their efforts to preserve the faith and these śraddhāpālas are often able to exploit positions of power and influence within organisations to ensure that their followers fall into line. And underneath it all we want Buddhism to be right. Just like religieux everywhere, like human beings everywhere, we want certainty, absolute certainty.
What I'm saying is that we won't find it in the doctrines of Buddhism, which were broken from the start. I'm truly sorry about this, it was a wonderful dream while it lasted. And it's clear that the Buddhists of ca 200 BCE - 400 CE knew this and were scrambling to salvage Buddhism from its own incoherence. They patched something together, but it's not the raft that will take across the ocean.
~~oOo~~
Bibliography
Hakeda, Y.S. (1972) Kūkai, Major works: Translated and with an account of his life and a study of his thought. New York: Columbia University Press.
posted by Jayarava Attwood at 09:02 on 27-Nov-2015
10 Comments
Close this window Jump to comment formHello Jayarava, thanks for another stimulating blog post – and congratulations on 10 years of it! Thinking about unconditioned dhammas, this is presumably a later Abhidharma kind of thing. Having read your blog, I was looking again at the asaṅkhata-saṃyutta in the Saṃyutta-nikāya, where the Buddha is reported to have said that the asaṅkhata is the destruction of greed, hate and delusion. This sounds more like poetry than metaphysics, and presumably meant that the idea of the asaṅkhata was familiar to his hearers. But the metaphysical interpretation of asaṅkhata would presumably have been a later development, with all the attendant problems you mention.
Monday, November 30, 2015
That's quite an interesting exercise in alternative-Buddhism you seem to be doing... what if the evolution of early Buddhist ideas had gone in a completely different direction. I don't know if your interpretation is better than the one(s) that actually happened, but it's nonetheless interesting to point it out as a possible outcome.
In any case, you might not be aware that the Tibetan tradition, and the Indian sources they inherited it from (Dharmakirti, etc.) got a whole lot of mileage out of the notion of asaṃskṛta dharmas or "uncompounded phenomena" (Tib: 'dus ma byas). Their understanding is a bit different from the one you are presenting; as far as I understand, space (defined as "absence of obstruction") is the prototypical uncompounded phenomenon; such phenomena are not substantial, indeed they are explicitly said to be mental projections (i.e there is nothing out there in space that is an actual, substantial absence of obstruction - such as thing would be a contradiction in terms). This means that there is no contradiction in the fact that *cognition* of the uncompounded object is still momentary, lasting only until one's awareness wanders elsewhere, as it tends to do.
The genius move, then, is to consider all "generalities" as uncompounded, but cognizable phenomena. Negations such as "the absence of a rabbit on this table" are perfect examples, but so are abstract qualities such as "greenness", that are (empirically) objects of our conceptual cognition. In fact through some rather complicated gymnastics, generalities (sometimes equated with the western philosophical term of "universals") are defined in negative terms, and put on equal footing with absences. This amount to saying that you cannot cognize "green" without reference to "not green". And this is also how such generalities are said to be interdependent and empty of any intrinsic essence: not in being momentary (again: even if the cognition is momentary, its projected object is cognized as indefinitely enduring) or made of parts, but in being comprehensible only in relation to each other, without any ultimate foundation to ground them. Epistemologically, they are known via inference, whereas regular compounded phenomena are known primarily via direct perception.
I'm not a specialist on this topic, but much of this is part of the basic educational curriculum of Tibetan Buddhist monks, and to some extent Tibetan schoolchildren. First they go through elaborate classifications of existents (Tib. gzhi grub, shes bya), then through the various modes of valid and invalid cognition through which these can be known (Tib. blo rig). The details of presentation vary quite a bit between the four Tibetan Buddhist schools; I think what I've said is general enough to apply to all... or to make a hash of them more or less equally!
For the gory (err... let's say juicy) details see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-language-tibetan/
or http://www.berzinarchives.com/web/x/nav/n.html_1474539638.html
Tuesday, December 01, 2015
@Dhivan
Hiya. I had meant to try to look through the asaṅkhatasaṃyutta but just haven't found the time. I think it is very interesting that we get these major shifts in meaning over time and that the result is frequently bad metaphysics. Would like to return to this. Thanks for highlighting it.
Wednesday, December 02, 2015
@Dharmanomad
The irony is that this logic only relies on Buddhist axioms. It was available and to some extent was even grasped by ancient Indians.
My understanding is that nirvāṇa is the prototypical asaṃskṛta-dharma as it is the first that appears in the history of Buddhist thought. But this is with a long view of history. It may well be that Tibetans did what other later Buddhists with short views of history did, i.e. they tried to repair the damage caused by bad early philosophising.
The problem with space as a dharma is that one cannot perceive something that isn't there. Space as unobstruction can't be fundamental because it relies on the prior expectation of obstruction that is frustrated. Once again this is simply bad philosophy. Nor does it escape the logic explored in my essay - if it is asaṃskṛta then it must be either always perceived or never perceived. These are the only two options. A dharma cannot arise and pass away if it has no conditions. To be perceived, means to arise, and thus every dharma must be impermanent and conditioned; or be impossible to perceive.
"The genius move, then, is to consider all "generalities" as uncompounded, but cognizable phenomena. "
Hardly genius. It's a flat contradiction to consider an dharma without conditions to be cognizable, unless it is always and only cognizable. This limitation is absolute in the Buddhist model of mental functioning.
What's more all qualities are abstract. All dharmas are abstractions, that is the whole point of dharma theory. Dharmas are an abstraction from the sense object and sense faculty and sense cognition. And it is precisely because our first person experience is constantly changing that we know that there can be no asaṃskṛta dharmas. Hence the Kaccānagotta Sutta denies that existence and nonexistence (or reality and unreality) i.e. astitā and nāstitā can apply to the world of experience.
Defining experience in terms of absences and negativities is also doubtful at best.
Any number of nouns are absent from this sentence.
If you define the meaning of a sentence in terms of the absence of nouns, as opposed to their presence, then nothing ever makes sense, precisely because absence is effectively infinite. Even if you started, you would never finish elucidating all the absences (the number of nouns in English is constantly growing). That is not how grammar works and it is not how cognition works either. I'm not sure how anyone could have taken this seriously to begin with, but it certainly ought not to survive natural selection. And that begs a question about how religious ideas evolve, since natural selection seems not to operate.
As for an abstraction like "greenness" you are talking about svabhava in the sense it is criticised by Nāgārjuna. One cannot beat Nāgārjuna for pointing out the flaws in this way of thinking. Basically if there were greenness we would only ever see green because greenness would have/be svabhava. Ipso facto there is no "greenness" beyond a convention to call certain types of experience green. Interestingly an influential group of modern philosophers now say this about colour. They ignoring the fact of our common colour sensing apparatus and the physical facts of electromagnetic radiation, and opt to say that "green" is entirely subjective. sensible Buddhists would reply that nothing is *entirely* subjective since at the very least one of the conditions for experience is an *object*.
The more I learn about Tibetan approaches to doctrine the more I wonder how any people came out of that system with any semblance of insight. It is a miracle.
Wednesday, December 02, 2015
Hi Jayarava and dharmanomad. I was stimulated by dharmanomad's comments. One comment, though, would go that universals such as greenness ought not be regarded as unconditioned dharmas. Such universals are obviously objects of perception but, if they exist, could be regarded by inference as e.g. absence of non-greenness. This is an epistemologically powerful explanation for aspects of our experience such as colour but does not mean that colour is unconditioned. Perhaps space is the only sensible kind of proposed unconditioned dharma we should consider. I am better on Kant than on Buddhist epistemology, but the idea that space is unconditioned seems to bear some comparison with the idea that space is a transcendental condition for experience. It is neither objective nor subjective but is a condition for anything to be said to be in space. Hence we can cognize 'space' as a concept, we can form the idea of space, and this concept or idea may arise, pass away, etc., hence is 'conditioned', but the concept or idea is a concept or idea of space itself, which is unconditioned because it is transcendental. It's no doubt really obvious that this kind of epistemological interpretation of the unconditioned has nothing whatever to do with the unconditioned as being the destruction of greed hate and delusion!
Wednesday, December 02, 2015
Hi Dhivan,
It seems to me that greenness is not a universal at all, or at least that such "universals" are an attempt to smuggle an ātman into Buddhism and are in fact disallowed. Green is an experiential quality; greenness is the non-existent noumena that underlies the experience of green. There is no greenness. It's not productive to keep talking about it.
All this does not change the situation regards unconditioned dharmas. There are only two choices for unchanging phenomena: either we always perceive them or never perceive them. If pratītyasamutpāda describes how we have experiences, then asaṃskṛta-dharmas are ruled out. If it is possible to experience green, then green is governed by pratītyasamutpāda. Similarly with space - space does not involve the absence of experience.
The only applicable experience relevant to the discussion of asaṃskṛta dharmas is *the experience of cessation*. It is only this experience, in which all sensory and mental content ceases, which appears not to be covered by pratītysamutpāda since nothing is arising, but according to the texts one still has an experience. But I don't think asaṃskṛta dharmas is a good explanation for what happens in cessation. The choice of space as the prototypical asaṃskṛta dharma demonstrates that Buddhist thinking had by that time become bogged down in ontology and becomes less and less relevant to understanding experience.
Wednesday, December 02, 2015
Hi Jayarava,
Perhaps you're not familiar with the problem of universals. When you write 'green is an experiential quality' you are using the word 'green' but without specifying a particular green thing; it is hence a 'universal' (whether you call it 'green' or 'greenness'; 'greenness' is simply the quality or state of being green). The problem of universals (in medieval European philosophy, but with its parallels in Indian epistemology, no doubt) is working out the epistemological basis of our use of non-particular or universal signifiers. To say that 'green' is a non-existent noumena underlying the experience of green is a philosophical opinion, though not a very good one, since something non-existent cannot underly anything. The Buddhist (Dignaga's I believe) kind of answer to the problem of universals such as 'green' is really clever and intriguing, positing the 'absence of non-green' as a way to avoid positing an apparent essence, which of course would be incompatible with fundamental aspects of Buddhist metaphysics like śūnyatā.
I suspect that the kind of Buddhist philosophising around asaṃskṛta-dharmas that the Indians went for is probably a little more sophisticated than you're allowing for. I'm not everso familiar with it, but similar kinds of philosophising around e.g. space in Kantian philosophy are richer than you allow for here. If we take the idea of 'space as a form of intuition' in the Kantian kind of way, then in principle space is not something you can experience per se, but it is one of the conditions for the possibility of experience. We don't directly experience space, and nor time, but we infer them, and form concepts about them, and in both sense they are dharmas. I don't see that perception has to count as our only means of knowledge.
Wouldn't you say you reject the unconditioned dharmas that are described as modes of cessation because you reject the whole underlying ontology of momentary dharmas? It's not like you accept the doctrine of momentariness and that whole Abdhidharma ontology but not the unconditioned dharmas is it? I'm not all that keen on Abhidharma ontology, but then there is the causeless (ahetuka) non-karmic citta dharma which produces the 'smile of the arahant' – now doesn't that show that the Abhidharmikas weren't so bad?
Wednesday, December 02, 2015
I notice you have dropped the use of the abstract "greenness" which is what I was objecting to. "Green" I have no problem with. The abstraction "Green-ness" looks like an attempt at an noumenon. There is no "greenness".
"Green" is simply a linguistic convention that doesn't even exist in some languages. We don't in fact all agree on what is green. My view, following Lakoff, is that it's because our colour names are in fact related categories, each with a prototype. Colour is experienced as having a relationship to that prototype. Homer could talk about the "wine dark sea" because in his colour categories what we call "blue" came into one of the only four colour categories that the ancient Greek language had (roughly white, black, red, and yellow). Homer also describes the sky as "bronze". He's not colour blind or abnormal, it's just that his language has different categories to ours - and blue/green were not given separate names in that language. We really only began to understand Homer's idiom when, in the late 20th century, we figured out that Ancient Greek only had four colour categories compared to our ten or eleven (orange is pretty recent). See also See Blue.
I suppose this does highlight the inherent problems associated with any categorisation process - the temptation to think of a defining characteristic (svabhāva as used positively by Abhidharmikas) that places some object in a category as something that has an independent existence (svabhāva as used negatively by Nāgārjuna). This seems to happen because a category needs a stable definition to be useful.
Sure, we infer things and those inferences are technically dharmas (though I'm not sure dharma theory is really sophisticated enough for describing a logical inference - it would count as prapañca wouldn't it?). So if we infer something about space, let's say that we infer that it is unconditioned, then the dharma that is arising is not "space", but an inference about space. What have we learned about space qua dharma? Nothing, because we have not experienced space; no dharma categorised as "space" has arisen or passed away. Although one could follow the Nāgārjunian logic and argue that because space qua dharma never arises, then it is a good candidate for being unconditioned. The very fact that we never seem to experience space is evidence of this. Being wary of confirmation bias we can take the idea that space is an unconditioned dharma as a working hypothesis and seek to disprove it. But the simple fact is that we could never prove such a proposition beyond any reasonable doubt because of the Black Swan Effect. It might be a strong theory, but the moment someone realises that actually we do experience space, perhaps in some subtle way, then the theory dies. We have no way of knowing if or when this might happen, but we cannot rule it out. Of course the Sarvāstivādins did rule it out by declaring as an axiom that space *is* an unconditioned dharma. The problem with this is *how could they know?* If space is unconditioned there's no way to gain certain knowledge about it since it is not accessible to cognition. How do we have knowledge of something that no one experiences and that cannot be cognized? Their own epistemology denies them access to the knowledge that space is unconditioned. So, again, space is not a good prototype for the category "unconditioned dharma".
Thursday, December 03, 2015
On the other hand if we start from an experience that some people we know have had (at least a few of our colleagues if their testimony is trustworthy), i.e. the experience of cessation, in which one is conscious, but without sensory or mental content, then this is a much more interesting starting point. But I've been over this ground already. It's what the essay is about.
What I'm saying is that to start from a theory and try to reason towards an ontology might be amusing, but it's not half so interesting or important as starting from an experience and trying to reason towards a theory of experience.
It's not that I reject the doctrine of momentariness, as much as I have shown that it cannot do what it sets out to do. The doctrine is incoherent. I don't see the need to state that I reject an incoherent theory; to me that's a given. The problem I am actively working on through this blog is that such incoherent theories are still actively being taught as the ultimate truth about the universe in our Buddhist centres.
I don't see a problem with pointing out that a Buddhist doctrine is contradictory on it's own terms. Indeed this strikes me as a useful way to get people to work down to the more fundamental problems: to say that asaṃskṛta dharmas contradict the theory of momentariness is a step in the right direction. Pointing out a series of contradictions at various levels in the superstructure of Buddhist doctrine, combined with reflections on the psychology of belief, will hopefully get more people to reflect on what they believe and why.
The best I could say about the Ābhidharmikas, is that they probably meant well.
Thursday, December 03, 2015
For what it is worth, I think Kant has now been superseded and in language that is much easier to understand. For example Mark Johnson's book The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason contains a superior description of how we structure experience using image schemas. This links up with George Lakoff's work on categorisation in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Thingsand the book the pair of them wrote on metaphor, Metaphors We Live By. In this view there is no spooky transcendental judgement - the structure of experience is provided by the brain, through physical experience. The similarity we experience are provided by common brain structure/function and regularities in the universe.
On the mass, energy, and length scales relevant to human experience we also know, thanks to Einstein and others, that there is an existent universe independent of our experience of it, though how we experience it depends on our inertial frame. This universe is made up of spacetime, mass, and energy, all of which behave in a lawful manner as far as we can tell through millions of experiments. Of course at the nano-scale this apparent reality breaks down, but since we can never actually experience the universe at this scale it's not relevant to understanding experience. Scale is important. Of course there are theoretical problems in trying to find theories which show that the universe on any arbitrary scale is a manifestation of general laws - a law that explains the behaviour of the universe on the human, nano and cosmic scale. Some believe that String Theory or M Theory will turn out to be the general law. Ultimately this won't change the world of human experience - just as Relativity, 100 years old this year, doesn't really change human experience - we can with great effort and special instrumentation notice the effects of Relativity, but even this doesn't affect how we go about our lives. If we ever build a space-ship capable of relativistic velocities it might raise moral quandries, but for now we can ignore it.
Trying to do philosophy that is relevant to the present with outdated concepts and terms seems to be one of the major problems in the contemporary world. Similarly I don't think modern philosophy (or science) is much help in understanding early Buddhist thought either. Of course they shared some metaphors and image schemas with us, they are not aliens. But their project was very different from the Greek project and their methods were very different. Kant made break-throughs that helped to make sense of the knowledge of his day. But his day has been and gone. So, for that matter, has the Buddha's day been and gone.
I'm more of a historian of ideas than a philosopher - a very reluctant philosopher. The more I learn about traditional philosophy (Western and Eastern) the more reluctant I become.
Saturday, December 05, 2015