I very much enjoy your perspicacious essays. Thank you for writing.
Regarding the real meaning of dependent origination: this doctrine doesn't make sense intellectually because it's based on meditative experience. I have personally seen that consciousness does in fact condition rupa. I know it sounds weird and it surprised the hell out of me when it happened - I wasn't even looking for it - but it is true and directly perceivable by a mind that is well concentrated. Based on this experience I assume that the other bizarre linkages can be seen clearly too, whereupon they will make sense, experiential not conceptual sense.
As you have pointed out most cogently the Buddha's teachings apply not to external reality as such but to phenomenal reality, that which we directly experience right now. However they include the range of experience available in deep meditation, a range that most of us are not familiar with.
Heraclitus's 'the sun is the size of a man's foot' points to this distinction between idea and experience. We 'know' that the sun is a gigantic ball of atomic fire. But when we look directly and without assumptions, we see it clearly: it's as big as a foot. The sun is smaller than a house. Obviously! By the same token we 'know' that the mind arises in dependence on the physical brain, and that to assert the reverse is irrational. But when we look directly, it's not as we assumed.
I forget the sutta in which the Buddha says: "One whose mind is concentrated sees things as they actually are." This is serious advice.
I hope this is of some help to you and your readers. I encourage all who read this to persist untiringly in their meditative efforts.
Thanks for your comment. Apologies for it taking some time to appear. I inadvertently made the draft essay public and you managed to comment before I realised. The essay has changed a little, but not much on what you commented on.
Interesting reflections on consciousness and rūpa.
For what it’s worth, as someone who likes to understand things intellectually this is how I’ve interpreted paticcasamuppāda, no doubt as a result of the unconscious synthesis of a great deal of reading. This will be an interesting exercise for me (even if not for you) so thanks for provoking the thought…
Paticcasamuppāda is a process which takes place both over the course of rebirths, and as a complete cycle within this very life (fractals, anyone?). What it’s describing, essentially, is the way in which a desiring self comes into existence as it is experienced in all of our (well, almost all of our) samsaric everyday lives.
So the first few links are not a literal description of, for example, body and mind popping into existence (which would then, as you point out, make ‘becoming’/‘being’ redundant). Rather, I’d interpret it as ignorance as a primary condition for the arising of sankhara, that is, volitional formations – so this would be an ontological or phenomenological ignorance which allows for a volition to arise (and thus the existence of a point from which it arises), a volition which seeks objects (so we now have a structural duality of self-as-central-point and external otherness) – and the meeting of the volition with the objects we can think of as bringing into being a ‘volitional formation’ (this, I think, structurally echoes sense-contact-object rather than replacing it).
In creating the objects it seeks (for of course they don’t actually exist out there per se – seeking them out brings them into being as such, that is, as objects), name and form arises – that is, the identification of what is experienced as separate objects with individual labels. So we see a diversification or complexification of this whole immanent/emerging self-structure, so to speak.
Given the identification of objects and the existence of a volition which has brought them into being as such, the next step is the intellectualisation or categorisation of the realm within which volition has reached out to objectify, namely, the division of the experience of existence into the six sense doors. From here, as you point out, it’s fairly straightforward until being/becoming.
What I would suggest is that it is the links up until here that have brought us to the complete existence of a self-identified being, one who thinks and wants and ‘possesses’ a body and a mind. So all of these links, up to clinging (not solely clinging itself) condition the ignorant being’s coming-into-existence as such, the possibility of its being, which is made manifest in birth (which can be literally interpreted, as below, or metaphorically, as the coming-into-existence of that being in every moment that we experience as a self), which then inevitably leads to old age and death.
In terms of rebirth, I’d say that in the over-three-lives context, p-s happens, as it were, within the process of rebirth as opposed to completely being that process.
Allow me a digression here - personally my ‘question I don’t get’ is, despite many explanations, I have never been able to understand what it is that is reborn given that the canon is explicit that death includes the fading away of the aggregates – so what is ‘rebirth-consciousness?’ – unless we conclude that what is reborn is, essentially, a set of kammic circumstances or propensities and nothing more. I’ve moved from being a non-believer in rebirth to what I’d describe as a fellow-travelling agnostic, partly because of the clear experiential logic to the end of one thing conditioning the arising of another, which is not it, but which has its previous existence as condition – though one must also ask, then, how is it that the thing that is reborn is not eternal? I’d appreciate your thoughts on any of those points.
But getting back to paticcasamuppāda, what this would mean is that it is ignorance, volition, craving and clinging which impel the being from one life to another (i.e. to becoming, birth, aging & death), and in that process, presumably, these other links also function within the event or series of events in which one set of aggregates comes to an end and another arises – operating on both a macro and micro scale, so to speak. So in this sense, we can work on ignorance in this life in order that the process of rebirth not occur with death.
Yes. The whole point is that it takes a hell of a lot of explanation, glosses on words, interpretations, and theorising on what was meant... in order to come up with something sensible. One can do it, but it is exhausting... :-)
And there are many versions of what it might mean. All more or less respectable, though often mutually exclusive. And they fill many books!
Thanks for your reply. The connection I think I'm missing here is the implication that if the teaching isn't immediately apparent, or if it takes some intellectual effort to understand, then that in itself makes it problematic.
Presumably, at least as I'd read it in the canon, understanding this process (paṭicca-samuppāda) intellectually is something which is useful in progress on the path, as well as it simply being a description of a realisation which one will recognise as valid only after having that realisation -
But there are many other central teachings (anatta, for example, or dukkha as a mark of existence) which often seem counter-intuitive to non-Buddhists and which have taken up a huge amount of commentarial explanation (and controversy - for example, over the interpretation as to whether the teaching is that there is no self, or that one should not proceed as if there were, to caricature the debate as I understand it). But they can be explained satisfactorily and understood, though it may take some work for those to whom they don't seem immediately obvious (and obviously we'll all find some parts of the teachings which immediately gel with our experience of existence, and others which don't).
So I'm interested in whether you think there's a fundamental difference between these kind of teachings and paṭicca-samuppāda - would you argue, for example, that they are clearly explained in the canon where the aforementioned isn't? Otherwise I'm not sure why we should see a teaching as inherently problematic because it is complex and subject to differing interpretations, or because one needs to draw it out to understand it intellectually.
Anatta and the lakkhanas are comprehensible as a response to the Vedic idea that brahman/ātman has three characteristics sat-cit-ānanda, i.e. (permanent) being, consciousness, and bliss - though of course this doctrine is not explicitly found in the Canon AFAIK. That which is impermanent cannot be satisfactory, and what is unsatisfactory cannot be ātman. Hence the content and the order of the tilakkhanā. (I've written about this in Anatta in Context).
There you go in a single para. So yes I would say there is a fundamental difference there. Though my reading is based on the observations of 20th century western scholars!
The Buddha never says "you have no reincarnating-essence" (self or soul are not very good translations of ātman!) - he makes a long list and says this list of things isn't your reincarnating-essence - but especially wrt the khandhas. The khandhas, being read as "everything that exists" led to the conclusion that "there is no reincarnating-essence", since the Buddha appeared to be denying that anything that exists is your self. This btw is in direct contradiction to texts like the Kaccānagotta Sutta which denies the terms existence/non-existence are useful. It is also problematic in that it denies any kind of continuity between agent and consequence - and we must preserve a conditioned link. Sue Hamilton has showed that the khandhas are not "everything that exists" (or even the "entire psycho-physical being" or whatever) but are the 'experiencing factors'. Clearly the nature of experience is impermanence and what is impermanent cannot be satisfying, and what is not satisfying cannot be ātman. (I covered this in The Apparatus of Experience).
In fact it was Hamilton's work that inspired this post - she started from the pov that she simply did not understand the received tradition and set out to examine every single reference to the khandhas in the Canon and come up with a better explanation - though she herself says that she can only say how it makes sense to her in light of the suttas, and this may not have been what the Buddha meant.
The real problem is not doctrinal or linguistic obscurity, or even competing interpretations per se, though of course these do obscure things. The problem is internal and external contradictions. Paṭicca-samuppāda contains many internal contradictions (the main topic of my post). Also the competing interpretations are mutually exclusive - i.e. they appear to be pointing, not to the same truth from different directions, but to a different truth.
Paṭicca-samuppāda is particularly important because we are told that it is the explanation of everything; a grand theory of everything with no exceptions or inconvenient inconsistencies But clearly this is not right!!!
This leaves me, if no one else, in an interesting position as a Buddhist committed to the practical working out of these teachings in my life!
And certainly, I'd agree that the explanations that we have seem to be primarily aimed at epistemology rather than ontology in nature (in fact it was the primacy of this, despite the ontological implications of 'emptiness,' which attracted me to Zen/Mahayana practice initially, I think) and that there are serious problematics in thinking about the nature of experience/reality in terms of 'things' and 'existence.'
As I'm reading Shulman's article and thinking about the issues it raises about the nature of the canonical texts, I wonder how to approach this problem - I often find myself doing textual research on aspects of the canon which don't gel with my previously held view or which I find difficult to understand at the outset, whereas I rarely do so on those which do.
But on the other hand, presumably no matter what the original teachings were, they won't all seem immediately apparent to everyone (otherwise what need for a teaching or a teacher?) and, pragmatically, to get a 'Higher Criticism' perspective on the entire canon seems a task which is monumental if even possible over the course of a lifespan. How to resolve this dilemma?
And, incidentally, what would you recommend as the best place to start in terms of comparative studies investigating early Buddhism in the broader Indian religious context? (I've also got Gombrich on my list).
Yes, big questions. I often find myself following threads - at the moment looking at the views espoused by Brahmins in the Canon, across all of the suttas. This is contrasted with taking a single text and going deeply into it. I've done this too, but enjoy the breadth approach.
It can be invigorating to find that one's previously held views need reassessing, don't you think?
In terms of the early Buddhist context then I think Gombrich is the place to start. His last book sums up his thinking nicely and leads you to his papers. Contrast it with Johannes Bronkhorst's book Greater Magadha though, as he comes at it from a different direction and is critical of Gombrich. I wish I had time to read up on the Jains as they seem to have been under rated in terms of influence. Alexander Wynne's book on Buddhist meditation is on my list to read. The opening chapters of Geoffrey Samuels 'The Origins of Yoga and Tantra' I found illuminating as well - he reinforces Bornkhorsts 'two cultures' theory by coming up with it independently. If you're interested in Metaphysics then Noa Ronkin's book (can't think of the name off the top of my head, but there's only one I think). Signe Cohen's study of the Upaniṣad's sheds useful light on their development. Reading the Bṛhadāranyka and Chāndogya Upaniṣads would also be useful - I like Roebuck's translation (my Sanskrit is not good enough to attempt my own translation), but Olivelle's is often more clear. Watch out for my friend Dhivan Thomas Jones who has started publishing in this vein as well. Those would be my picks, and their references take you to the other relevant stuff - I'm reviewing a lot of it again at the moment.
Best Wishes Jayarava
Monday, July 12, 2010
gruff said...
Trying to understand the suttas without meditating is like trying to quench one's thirst by thinking about water.
I'd add that my intention is not to tell people how to understand the suttas, but how to read them.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
gruff said...
Yes I remember that essay of yours, it's quite good and a useful corrective to the tendency to think that one's one way is right. However that tendency is one of generalising; the present instance is a very specific one. You state quite clearly that the paticcasamuppāda cannot be understood intellectually. If we assume that paticcasamuppāda is a teaching of Gotama and that he did not lie, then it must be understandable. If not intellectually, then how? The suttas are clear on that point: "Bhikkhus, how do you see it in this case?" Not "What is your reasoned opinion"!
Well yes, this is specific. What I think I say is that the 12 Nidānas are not very intellectually satisfying. I don't argue that they can't be understood intellectually, only that I do not understand them in that sense. Clearly the many people who have written books on the subject think they do understand them. So the important point is my own confusion - it's a confession.
However I agree that one must meditate.
Personally I think the nidānas kind of make sense as a reflection subject, but not as a doctrine - having spent two weeks on a four-month retreat contemplating the nidānas I did begin to get a sense of them. So perhaps our positions are not so far apart as they seem.
You say: If we assume that paticcasamuppāda is a teaching of Gotama - well actually that assumption may be flawed in the case of the 12 nidānas. They show signs of being a later reworking of earlier material. Whether they were taught by the Buddha in that format is in question. Parts of the sequence make more sense than others. Also the words have been translated in Pāli from another Prakrit, probably Magadhi, but we don't actually know the language the Buddha spoke. They may not make sense because the tradition garbled them in the editing and translating process. My suspicion is that the original sense of some of the words was lost in this case, that there has been a break in continuity - one of many.
I suppose what bothers me is the suggestion that study is useless. Because without intellectual clarity, without the ability to reflect clearly on experience, then progress must be difficult to say the least. Thinking about the dhamma is quite good training, and it provides a vocabulary for further discussion. Also I wonder whether insight will necessarily mean that an intellectually confused doctrine will make sense. If one wants to communicate one's insight then a certain amount of intellectual clarity is an advantage (though clearly some gurus get by with out much!).
Anyway a new post tomorrow, another new subject for reflection...
Thursday, July 22, 2010
gruff said...
I didn't mean to suggest that study is useless in general. I find your essays very helpful on many points. I do maintain though that in the case of the paticcasamuppāda study can take one only so far, and not very far at that. Even if one did intellectually work out the meaning of the 12 link chain, that still wouldn't be ñāṇadassana, which is what the chain depicts.
I guess I see intellectual reflection as the handmaiden of paññā, not her equal or mistress. A doctrine that is only hammered out by reason doesn't satisfy the heart, but a doctrine that is only in the heart and not the mind can't be communicated very clearly and thus the dhamma wheel cannot roll.
I take your point that the 12 link chain may not be an original teaching . That's very possible. In fact the chain given at MN 38:26-30 is vastly more comprehensible and immediately useful. Though on the other hand if the 12 links had been worked out conceptually by later generations it might be expected that Buddhaghosa would have understood them, on the basis of tradition if nothing else, but he doesn't. He says something like "this is the best I can make of it". This accords with his self-admitted non-liberated status.
This is one of the subject that is much better explained by the Theravadins--it just didn't translate well when the Mahayana/Vajrayana tried to "make it their own", so to speak.
If you can look past all the horrible things that Tibetan-based traditions say about the "hinayana", you'll find that although they do not incorporate any of the Mahayana Sutras/teachings, they go into the Nikaya teachings at a *much* deeper level than the Mahayana traditions typically do.
Thanissaro Bhikkhu writes a book called the "Wings to Awakening". The introduction and first couple of chapters include teachings on "this/that conditionality" which is the basis for Dependent Origination, Karma, Rebirth, etc. (they are all manifestations of the conditionality law). Thanissaro does a REALLY good job of explaining it.
Once you have understood this/that conditionality, go back to dependent origination (stay away from Mahayana teachings on this to start with). Once you've understood the teaching as per the Theravada, go back to the Tibetan version & you'll understand it better.
You'll also notice some differences. Such as the Theravada (and historical Buddha) viewed it as a means to end it all, while the Mahayana often see it as a something that isn't to be changed, but as proof of non-duality that should be celebrated.
I've gotten to the point where any teaching that is taught in the Theravada tradition, I learn it from them first. Since they usually go deeper & are less abstract, I get a good understanding. I then go to the Mahayana/Vajrayana versions to learn how they differ in their views of a certain belief/practice & how they incorporate it (if applicable) into their respective path.
Thanissaro's book "Wings to Awakening" can be found online at www.accesstoinsight.org, if you'd like to check out the thorough coverage of conditionality.
You've missed the point of what I wrote, and the point of view I wrote it from (hint: I use Pāli terminology not Tibetan or Sanskrit!), and you have made an unfortunate assumption about me. But since I've addressed this kind of error in previous comments I'm not going to go over that ground again.
I don't recall any Tibetan saying anything "horrible" about the hīnayāna. Regular readers will know what I think of that word. And I disagree with Tibetan assessments of earlier teachings, but they aren't "horrible".
To say Tibetan traditions do not incorporate any Mahāyāna Sūtras or teachings strikes me as a ridiculous thing to say. It flies in the face both of what Tibetans say about themselves and the way they say it; it denies the contents of their canon (in which very few Nikāya texts survive); and it conflicts with what professional scholars I read say about them. By the time they made contact with Buddhism there was effectively no Nikāya Buddhism for them to interact with (at least not in India).
But worse, your tirade against the Tibetans seems completely irrelevant to the subject at hand!
So, Brian, thanks for taking the time to comment, but in this case I'm not sure that you are taking the discussion forward because you've not read the post carefully enough in the first place, and your opinions about Tibetan Buddhism, apart from being irrelevant to the subject, seem insupportable.
Regards Jayarava
Thursday, August 19, 2010
[Image]I've been reading an interesting paper by Eviatar Shulman on an interpretation of paṭicca-samuppāda. [1] We come to similar conclusions, but interestingly I disagree to some extent with how he gets to his conclusion. I'd like to write more about his thesis later, but today I am in a confessional mood. What I want to confess is that I simply do not understand paṭicca-samuppāda. The primary way that paṭicca-samuppāda is explained is through reference to the 12 nidānas. It's here that I want to focus, and I could begin by saying that other numbers of nidānas do not always number 12 - so is 12 the definitive number or just the most popular?
Some of the terminology is confusing: e.g. saṅkhārā, nāmarūpa, bhava. The confusion is only added to in the process of translation. Some of the explanations are confusing as well, but my focus here is on the canonical presentation. I should say upfront that although the idea that the 12 nidānas occur over three lifetimes is traditional, that idea is not explicit in any sutta. So I don't think this was the idea the Buddha had in mind, and I don't think we can use it to explain the scheme, though I will make some nods in that direction.
I think it's fair to say that saṅkhārā is the most confusing term in Buddhism. It literally means 'making together, or completing'. (Note the relationship to the name Sanskrit (saṃskṛta) which is often said to mean 'perfected' or 'polished'.) The most literal English translation would be confection: con = sam; khāra is from √kṛ 'to make or do', which is not cognate but coincides very closely to the Latin facere [2] and therefore to words such as affect, confect, defect, effect, faculty (etc there are many more examples). Saṅkhāra has several distinct senses but in this context is variously rendered "volitional tendencies, volitional formations (or just formations), mental dispositions, determinations". The idea that saṅkhāra is about volition or will I take to be related to the texts that explain it as cetanā, e.g. at S iii.60 saṅkhāra is explained as six kinds of cetanā: rūpasañcetanā, sadda-, gandha-, rasa-, phoṭṭabba- and dhammasañcetanā. Bhikkhu Bodhi renders them as 'volition regarding forms, -sounds, -odours, -tastes, -tactile objects, and -mental phenomena'. I'm still none the wiser - what is "volition regarding forms"? As I have often said: cetanā is how the Buddha defines kamma, but in this context it doesn't help.
Things get more complex when the texts say that saṅkhārā conditions viññāṇa - (typically translated as consciousness). The relationship is sometimes described as causal so formations (or whatever) cause consciousness, but the Pāli terminology suggests a conditional, rather than a causal relationship. [3] So volition precedes consciousness and is a (the?) condition for it to exist, and similarly when there is no volition there is no consciousness. The question then is how do volitions precede consciousness, in order to be a condition for it to arise? Are volitions not a product of consciousness rather than the other way around?
The situation gets substantially worse with nāmarūpa. Although the tradition is fairly unanimous that it means "mind and body" scholars are by no means agreed what the word means in a Buddhist context (or why it means that). Like saṅkhāra it is an old Vedic term and Joanna Jurewicz (a Sanskritist specialising in the Vedas) has used the Vedic origins of the names for the nidānas as a cipher to show that the Buddha intended them as a parody of the Vedas. However my friend Dhīvan examined this claim from the Buddhist point of view in his M.Phil thesis, and didn't find a great deal of evidence to support Jurewicz's conjecture. Let us leave aside the confusion amongst scholars and focus on the idea that nāma-rūpa means 'body and mind'. There are two conclusions from this. Firstly that body comes into being some time after consciousness has been operating - so volition precedes consciousness and body, and consciousness precedes body - this is somewhat counter-intuitive (backwards even). It gets worse if we follow some traditions and take form to be objects of consciousness - now consciousness is a condition for existence more generally (a variation on the strong Anthropic Principle?). Secondly we now effectively have the sequence: mind conditions mind, which conditions mind. Which is meaningless.
Having given rise to the body in this unusual fashion the sequence settles down and becomes conceptually easier - the senses are the condition for contact (phassa the meeting of sense organ and sense object) which is the condition for sensations (vedanā), which are the conditions desire (taṇha - literally 'thirst') which is the condition for grasping (upādāna). Grasping gives rise to being or becoming (bhava - although as previously stated we already 'are' by this time). I've discussed in the past that upādāna could mean 'fuel' and I would argue that desire fuelling the fire of becoming, makes marginally more sense than grasping as a condition for becoming. But what is bhava, what is becoming or being? Bhava means 'being' in quite a similar range of senses to the English word. It's an action noun from √bhū which is cognate with 'be'.
Perhaps at this point the early Buddhists realised that this is a bit circular - we've already come into being (in body and mind - mind three times even!), and now the nidānas are telling us about how being is conditioned. This short circuits the nidāna chain. But it leaves two links unaccounted for: birth (jati), old age and death (jarāmaraṇa). Sometimes all the various kinds of suffering are added onto jarāmaraṇa - especially the wonderfully miserable compound sokaparidevadukkhadomanassupāyāsā. The move from becoming to birth is fine, except that we already have both mind and body, etc. The death, which does follow naturally from birth, but then where do we go? In Indian thinking we go to birth. The traditional circle suggests that death is a condition for ignorance. But again this makes no sense, and in any case we do not find the Pāli phrase anywhere in the canon: jarāmaraṇapaccaya avijjā. Old age and death are not in fact a condition for anything!
One major problem with the idea that the nidānas occur over three lifetimes is that if each link can only cease by the ceasing of the previous one, then we need to tackle ignorance (avijjā) in a past life in order to be liberated in this or a future life. This necessity for retro-active action is probably the greatest flaw in that in approach and seems to be an insurmountable problem.
Far from being a straight forward chain or circle the nidāna sequence is like a game of snakes and ladders (one proceeds up, down, sideways, and often retraces one's steps). I've realised that in fact it does not make sense to me on it's own terms. I've always found the received explanations quite pleasing and even useful - and I've been hearing about it for more than 15 years. But when I look closely it's not quite that the emperor has no clothes, it's more like he got dressed in the wrong order and used a mix of styles. It's disconcerting to get this far and realise that I can't make head nor tale of the Buddha's most important teaching on its own terms!
One of the ways scholars have understood the nidāna chain is to chop it up: it is "clearly" made of at least two, if not three shorter sequences mashed together. I was not initially very happy with this approach, but it's grown on me. I can more or less make sense of the chain from the six senses up to becoming. I think we can hive off birth and death as explanatory of what is meant by becoming - becoming is the cycle of birth and death (and therefore only makes sense in the context of rebirth). In which case, contra the three lifetimes model, the last two links go nowhere, they just cycle from birth to death. The most worrisome part are the links from ignorance to name and form. My inclination is just to say they don't make sense, but I think it's important to say that they don't make sense to me. However we hardly need them because the process we are interested in does not require them. I think ignorance as a problem comes in later after we have contact, but as a cause it probably conditions all the other links directly.
Eviatar Shulman points out that at some points there really are ontological implications to the nidānas (if for instance viññāṇa gives rise to nāmarūpa (and rūpa is either 'the body' or 'forms'); or taṇha/upādāna give rise to bhava 'being': this is ontology), but I notice that the terms which appear to have ontological implications are also the ones involving most confusion and ambiguity. I'd like to focus on this in a future post.
So I can make sense of the teaching, but I have to do what other Buddhists have done and chop it about, make stuff up, and bluff to a certain extent. Which is hardly intellectually satisfying. It's all rather embarrassing.
Notes. Shulman, Eviatar. 'Early Meanings of Dependent-Origination,' Journal of Indian Philosophy, 36(2) 2008: 297-317. http://www.springerlink.com/content/7656238535363p05/A direct Sanskrit cognate to facere would be √dhā present dadhati, though the sense has drifted away from 'do' towards 'put'.Contrarily as Krishna Del Toso makes clear in his blog post on cause/condition in early Buddhism the distinction between the two types of relationship (hetu vs paccaya) only solidified in later texts. In favour of my statement the imasmiṃ idaṃ hoti formula, which almost always appears in conjunction with the 12 nidana paṭicca-samuppāda formula and appears to be a comment on how the links are connected, implies a conditional rather than causal relationship; as does the word paṭicca itself.
17 Comments
Close this window Jump to comment formJayarava,
I very much enjoy your perspicacious essays. Thank you for writing.
Regarding the real meaning of dependent origination: this doctrine doesn't make sense intellectually because it's based on meditative experience. I have personally seen that consciousness does in fact condition rupa. I know it sounds weird and it surprised the hell out of me when it happened - I wasn't even looking for it - but it is true and directly perceivable by a mind that is well concentrated. Based on this experience I assume that the other bizarre linkages can be seen clearly too, whereupon they will make sense, experiential not conceptual sense.
As you have pointed out most cogently the Buddha's teachings apply not to external reality as such but to phenomenal reality, that which we directly experience right now. However they include the range of experience available in deep meditation, a range that most of us are not familiar with.
Heraclitus's 'the sun is the size of a man's foot' points to this distinction between idea and experience. We 'know' that the sun is a gigantic ball of atomic fire. But when we look directly and without assumptions, we see it clearly: it's as big as a foot. The sun is smaller than a house. Obviously! By the same token we 'know' that the mind arises in dependence on the physical brain, and that to assert the reverse is irrational. But when we look directly, it's not as we assumed.
I forget the sutta in which the Buddha says: "One whose mind is concentrated sees things as they actually are." This is serious advice.
I hope this is of some help to you and your readers. I encourage all who read this to persist untiringly in their meditative efforts.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Hi Gruff
Thanks for your comment. Apologies for it taking some time to appear. I inadvertently made the draft essay public and you managed to comment before I realised. The essay has changed a little, but not much on what you commented on.
Interesting reflections on consciousness and rūpa.
Best Wishes
Jayarava
Friday, July 09, 2010
Hi Jayarava,
You make some interesting points here!
For what it’s worth, as someone who likes to understand things intellectually this is how I’ve interpreted paticcasamuppāda, no doubt as a result of the unconscious synthesis of a great deal of reading. This will be an interesting exercise for me (even if not for you) so thanks for provoking the thought…
Paticcasamuppāda is a process which takes place both over the course of rebirths, and as a complete cycle within this very life (fractals, anyone?). What it’s describing, essentially, is the way in which a desiring self comes into existence as it is experienced in all of our (well, almost all of our) samsaric everyday lives.
So the first few links are not a literal description of, for example, body and mind popping into existence (which would then, as you point out, make ‘becoming’/‘being’ redundant). Rather, I’d interpret it as ignorance as a primary condition for the arising of sankhara, that is, volitional formations – so this would be an ontological or phenomenological ignorance which allows for a volition to arise (and thus the existence of a point from which it arises), a volition which seeks objects (so we now have a structural duality of self-as-central-point and external otherness) – and the meeting of the volition with the objects we can think of as bringing into being a ‘volitional formation’ (this, I think, structurally echoes sense-contact-object rather than replacing it).
In creating the objects it seeks (for of course they don’t actually exist out there per se – seeking them out brings them into being as such, that is, as objects), name and form arises – that is, the identification of what is experienced as separate objects with individual labels. So we see a diversification or complexification of this whole immanent/emerging self-structure, so to speak.
Given the identification of objects and the existence of a volition which has brought them into being as such, the next step is the intellectualisation or categorisation of the realm within which volition has reached out to objectify, namely, the division of the experience of existence into the six sense doors. From here, as you point out, it’s fairly straightforward until being/becoming.
What I would suggest is that it is the links up until here that have brought us to the complete existence of a self-identified being, one who thinks and wants and ‘possesses’ a body and a mind. So all of these links, up to clinging (not solely clinging itself) condition the ignorant being’s coming-into-existence as such, the possibility of its being, which is made manifest in birth (which can be literally interpreted, as below, or metaphorically, as the coming-into-existence of that being in every moment that we experience as a self), which then inevitably leads to old age and death.
...continued below...
Friday, July 09, 2010
...continued...
In terms of rebirth, I’d say that in the over-three-lives context, p-s happens, as it were, within the process of rebirth as opposed to completely being that process.
Allow me a digression here - personally my ‘question I don’t get’ is, despite many explanations, I have never been able to understand what it is that is reborn given that the canon is explicit that death includes the fading away of the aggregates – so what is ‘rebirth-consciousness?’ – unless we conclude that what is reborn is, essentially, a set of kammic circumstances or propensities and nothing more. I’ve moved from being a non-believer in rebirth to what I’d describe as a fellow-travelling agnostic, partly because of the clear experiential logic to the end of one thing conditioning the arising of another, which is not it, but which has its previous existence as condition – though one must also ask, then, how is it that the thing that is reborn is not eternal? I’d appreciate your thoughts on any of those points.
But getting back to paticcasamuppāda, what this would mean is that it is ignorance, volition, craving and clinging which impel the being from one life to another (i.e. to becoming, birth, aging & death), and in that process, presumably, these other links also function within the event or series of events in which one set of aggregates comes to an end and another arises – operating on both a macro and micro scale, so to speak. So in this sense, we can work on ignorance in this life in order that the process of rebirth not occur with death.
Whew. Samsaric existence is exhausting.
With metta,
Rowan.
Friday, July 09, 2010
Hi Rowan
Yes. The whole point is that it takes a hell of a lot of explanation, glosses on words, interpretations, and theorising on what was meant... in order to come up with something sensible. One can do it, but it is exhausting... :-)
And there are many versions of what it might mean. All more or less respectable, though often mutually exclusive. And they fill many books!
Regards
Jayarava
Friday, July 09, 2010
Thanks for your reply. The connection I think I'm missing here is the implication that if the teaching isn't immediately apparent, or if it takes some intellectual effort to understand, then that in itself makes it problematic.
Presumably, at least as I'd read it in the canon, understanding this process (paṭicca-samuppāda) intellectually is something which is useful in progress on the path, as well as it simply being a description of a realisation which one will recognise as valid only after having that realisation -
But there are many other central teachings (anatta, for example, or dukkha as a mark of existence) which often seem counter-intuitive to non-Buddhists and which have taken up a huge amount of commentarial explanation (and controversy - for example, over the interpretation as to whether the teaching is that there is no self, or that one should not proceed as if there were, to caricature the debate as I understand it). But they can be explained satisfactorily and understood, though it may take some work for those to whom they don't seem immediately obvious (and obviously we'll all find some parts of the teachings which immediately gel with our experience of existence, and others which don't).
So I'm interested in whether you think there's a fundamental difference between these kind of teachings and paṭicca-samuppāda - would you argue, for example, that they are clearly explained in the canon where the aforementioned isn't? Otherwise I'm not sure why we should see a teaching as inherently problematic because it is complex and subject to differing interpretations, or because one needs to draw it out to understand it intellectually.
With metta,
Rowan.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Hi Rowan
Anatta and the lakkhanas are comprehensible as a response to the Vedic idea that brahman/ātman has three characteristics sat-cit-ānanda, i.e. (permanent) being, consciousness, and bliss - though of course this doctrine is not explicitly found in the Canon AFAIK. That which is impermanent cannot be satisfactory, and what is unsatisfactory cannot be ātman. Hence the content and the order of the tilakkhanā. (I've written about this in Anatta in Context).
There you go in a single para. So yes I would say there is a fundamental difference there. Though my reading is based on the observations of 20th century western scholars!
The Buddha never says "you have no reincarnating-essence" (self or soul are not very good translations of ātman!) - he makes a long list and says this list of things isn't your reincarnating-essence - but especially wrt the khandhas. The khandhas, being read as "everything that exists" led to the conclusion that "there is no reincarnating-essence", since the Buddha appeared to be denying that anything that exists is your self. This btw is in direct contradiction to texts like the Kaccānagotta Sutta which denies the terms existence/non-existence are useful. It is also problematic in that it denies any kind of continuity between agent and consequence - and we must preserve a conditioned link. Sue Hamilton has showed that the khandhas are not "everything that exists" (or even the "entire psycho-physical being" or whatever) but are the 'experiencing factors'. Clearly the nature of experience is impermanence and what is impermanent cannot be satisfying, and what is not satisfying cannot be ātman. (I covered this in The Apparatus of Experience).
In fact it was Hamilton's work that inspired this post - she started from the pov that she simply did not understand the received tradition and set out to examine every single reference to the khandhas in the Canon and come up with a better explanation - though she herself says that she can only say how it makes sense to her in light of the suttas, and this may not have been what the Buddha meant.
The real problem is not doctrinal or linguistic obscurity, or even competing interpretations per se, though of course these do obscure things. The problem is internal and external contradictions. Paṭicca-samuppāda contains many internal contradictions (the main topic of my post). Also the competing interpretations are mutually exclusive - i.e. they appear to be pointing, not to the same truth from different directions, but to a different truth.
Paṭicca-samuppāda is particularly important because we are told that it is the explanation of everything; a grand theory of everything with no exceptions or inconvenient inconsistencies But clearly this is not right!!!
This leaves me, if no one else, in an interesting position as a Buddhist committed to the practical working out of these teachings in my life!
Best Wishes
Jayarava
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Thanks for your reply.
I've been meaning to read Sue Hamilton's book.
And certainly, I'd agree that the explanations that we have seem to be primarily aimed at epistemology rather than ontology in nature (in fact it was the primacy of this, despite the ontological implications of 'emptiness,' which attracted me to Zen/Mahayana practice initially, I think) and that there are serious problematics in thinking about the nature of experience/reality in terms of 'things' and 'existence.'
As I'm reading Shulman's article and thinking about the issues it raises about the nature of the canonical texts, I wonder how to approach this problem - I often find myself doing textual research on aspects of the canon which don't gel with my previously held view or which I find difficult to understand at the outset, whereas I rarely do so on those which do.
But on the other hand, presumably no matter what the original teachings were, they won't all seem immediately apparent to everyone (otherwise what need for a teaching or a teacher?) and, pragmatically, to get a 'Higher Criticism' perspective on the entire canon seems a task which is monumental if even possible over the course of a lifespan. How to resolve this dilemma?
And, incidentally, what would you recommend as the best place to start in terms of comparative studies investigating early Buddhism in the broader Indian religious context? (I've also got Gombrich on my list).
With metta,
Rowan.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Hi Rowan
Yes, big questions. I often find myself following threads - at the moment looking at the views espoused by Brahmins in the Canon, across all of the suttas. This is contrasted with taking a single text and going deeply into it. I've done this too, but enjoy the breadth approach.
It can be invigorating to find that one's previously held views need reassessing, don't you think?
In terms of the early Buddhist context then I think Gombrich is the place to start. His last book sums up his thinking nicely and leads you to his papers. Contrast it with Johannes Bronkhorst's book Greater Magadha though, as he comes at it from a different direction and is critical of Gombrich. I wish I had time to read up on the Jains as they seem to have been under rated in terms of influence. Alexander Wynne's book on Buddhist meditation is on my list to read. The opening chapters of Geoffrey Samuels 'The Origins of Yoga and Tantra' I found illuminating as well - he reinforces Bornkhorsts 'two cultures' theory by coming up with it independently. If you're interested in Metaphysics then Noa Ronkin's book (can't think of the name off the top of my head, but there's only one I think). Signe Cohen's study of the Upaniṣad's sheds useful light on their development. Reading the Bṛhadāranyka and Chāndogya Upaniṣads would also be useful - I like Roebuck's translation (my Sanskrit is not good enough to attempt my own translation), but Olivelle's is often more clear. Watch out for my friend Dhivan Thomas Jones who has started publishing in this vein as well. Those would be my picks, and their references take you to the other relevant stuff - I'm reviewing a lot of it again at the moment.
Best Wishes
Jayarava
Monday, July 12, 2010
Trying to understand the suttas without meditating is like trying to quench one's thirst by thinking about water.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Hi Gruff
See this: Meditation & Scholarship ;-)
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
I'd add that my intention is not to tell people how to understand the suttas, but how to read them.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Yes I remember that essay of yours, it's quite good and a useful corrective to the tendency to think that one's one way is right. However that tendency is one of generalising; the present instance is a very specific one. You state quite clearly that the paticcasamuppāda cannot be understood intellectually. If we assume that paticcasamuppāda is a teaching of Gotama and that he did not lie, then it must be understandable. If not intellectually, then how? The suttas are clear on that point: "Bhikkhus, how do you see it in this case?" Not "What is your reasoned opinion"!
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Well yes, this is specific. What I think I say is that the 12 Nidānas are not very intellectually satisfying. I don't argue that they can't be understood intellectually, only that I do not understand them in that sense. Clearly the many people who have written books on the subject think they do understand them. So the important point is my own confusion - it's a confession.
However I agree that one must meditate.
Personally I think the nidānas kind of make sense as a reflection subject, but not as a doctrine - having spent two weeks on a four-month retreat contemplating the nidānas I did begin to get a sense of them. So perhaps our positions are not so far apart as they seem.
You say: If we assume that paticcasamuppāda is a teaching of Gotama - well actually that assumption may be flawed in the case of the 12 nidānas. They show signs of being a later reworking of earlier material. Whether they were taught by the Buddha in that format is in question. Parts of the sequence make more sense than others. Also the words have been translated in Pāli from another Prakrit, probably Magadhi, but we don't actually know the language the Buddha spoke. They may not make sense because the tradition garbled them in the editing and translating process. My suspicion is that the original sense of some of the words was lost in this case, that there has been a break in continuity - one of many.
I suppose what bothers me is the suggestion that study is useless. Because without intellectual clarity, without the ability to reflect clearly on experience, then progress must be difficult to say the least. Thinking about the dhamma is quite good training, and it provides a vocabulary for further discussion. Also I wonder whether insight will necessarily mean that an intellectually confused doctrine will make sense. If one wants to communicate one's insight then a certain amount of intellectual clarity is an advantage (though clearly some gurus get by with out much!).
Anyway a new post tomorrow, another new subject for reflection...
Thursday, July 22, 2010
I didn't mean to suggest that study is useless in general. I find your essays very helpful on many points. I do maintain though that in the case of the paticcasamuppāda study can take one only so far, and not very far at that. Even if one did intellectually work out the meaning of the 12 link chain, that still wouldn't be ñāṇadassana, which is what the chain depicts.
I guess I see intellectual reflection as the handmaiden of paññā, not her equal or mistress. A doctrine that is only hammered out by reason doesn't satisfy the heart, but a doctrine that is only in the heart and not the mind can't be communicated very clearly and thus the dhamma wheel cannot roll.
I take your point that the 12 link chain may not be an original teaching . That's very possible. In fact the chain given at MN 38:26-30 is vastly more comprehensible and immediately useful. Though on the other hand if the 12 links had been worked out conceptually by later generations it might be expected that Buddhaghosa would have understood them, on the basis of tradition if nothing else, but he doesn't. He says something like "this is the best I can make of it". This accords with his self-admitted non-liberated status.
I look forward to future essays. Thank you.
Friday, July 23, 2010
This is one of the subject that is much better explained by the Theravadins--it just didn't translate well when the Mahayana/Vajrayana tried to "make it their own", so to speak.
If you can look past all the horrible things that Tibetan-based traditions say about the "hinayana", you'll find that although they do not incorporate any of the Mahayana Sutras/teachings, they go into the Nikaya teachings at a *much* deeper level than the Mahayana traditions typically do.
Thanissaro Bhikkhu writes a book called the "Wings to Awakening". The introduction and first couple of chapters include teachings on "this/that conditionality" which is the basis for Dependent Origination, Karma, Rebirth, etc. (they are all manifestations of the conditionality law). Thanissaro does a REALLY good job of explaining it.
Once you have understood this/that conditionality, go back to dependent origination (stay away from Mahayana teachings on this to start with). Once you've understood the teaching as per the Theravada, go back to the Tibetan version & you'll understand it better.
You'll also notice some differences. Such as the Theravada (and historical Buddha) viewed it as a means to end it all, while the Mahayana often see it as a something that isn't to be changed, but as proof of non-duality that should be celebrated.
I've gotten to the point where any teaching that is taught in the Theravada tradition, I learn it from them first. Since they usually go deeper & are less abstract, I get a good understanding. I then go to the Mahayana/Vajrayana versions to learn how they differ in their views of a certain belief/practice & how they incorporate it (if applicable) into their respective path.
Thanissaro's book "Wings to Awakening" can be found online at www.accesstoinsight.org, if you'd like to check out the thorough coverage of conditionality.
With metta,
Brian Ananda
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Brian
You've missed the point of what I wrote, and the point of view I wrote it from (hint: I use Pāli terminology not Tibetan or Sanskrit!), and you have made an unfortunate assumption about me. But since I've addressed this kind of error in previous comments I'm not going to go over that ground again.
I don't recall any Tibetan saying anything "horrible" about the hīnayāna. Regular readers will know what I think of that word. And I disagree with Tibetan assessments of earlier teachings, but they aren't "horrible".
To say Tibetan traditions do not incorporate any Mahāyāna Sūtras or teachings strikes me as a ridiculous thing to say. It flies in the face both of what Tibetans say about themselves and the way they say it; it denies the contents of their canon (in which very few Nikāya texts survive); and it conflicts with what professional scholars I read say about them. By the time they made contact with Buddhism there was effectively no Nikāya Buddhism for them to interact with (at least not in India).
But worse, your tirade against the Tibetans seems completely irrelevant to the subject at hand!
So, Brian, thanks for taking the time to comment, but in this case I'm not sure that you are taking the discussion forward because you've not read the post carefully enough in the first place, and your opinions about Tibetan Buddhism, apart from being irrelevant to the subject, seem insupportable.
Regards
Jayarava
Thursday, August 19, 2010