For me, when it comes to explaining this topic, I find it difficult to get around the confusing notion that "we" do things - e.g.interpret experiences as a self. That word "we" still evokes some sort of hidden agent. It's a word use problem though.
Good to hear from you again. I don't get much feedback these days.
Yep. Our language uses pronouns. In Indic languages one can do without pronouns. But even the Buddha is portrayed as using them - sometimes 3rd person, but often first person as well. He also used pronounless first person verb forms.
I think we're taught to fear admitting or implying through language that we are not awakened. You get these horrible tortuous sentences that are supposed to represent a "non-dual" point of view (though they are inevitably dualistic anyway. Pretending to speak from the awakened point of view, when one is not awakened is just so pretentious. I am totally not awakened and happy to speak from my present point of view.
I've heard it thus : 'it is raining, but there is no rainer, no one who is making it rain' ie. rather than using pronouns, it is phased in the passive.
Thanks as always for your insights & exacting analysis.
Unfortunately for your analysis "it" and "one" are in fact pronouns. It's a good example though and one that I've thought about before after reading a collection of essays by Benjamin Lee Whorf (which are unfortunately in storage right now). In the phrase "It is raining" to what does the pronoun "it" refer to? It implies an agent, eh?
BLW argues that some Nth American Indian people use different language structures. They might say "raining" - just the bare verb. Or "there is rain". And people who think like this must experience the world in a different way to those of us who see rain and think "it is raining".
Sanskrit makes much more use of the passive than we do in modern English - especially as newspaper editors managed to establish the ridiculous principle that the passive ought never be used. Fine for newspapers, but stupid for the rest of us.
When I was training in the sciences we were rigorously drilled in using the passive for our reports thus removing ourselves from the narrative: an experiment was carried out... it was observed that... the conclusion is... This helps the scientists pretend to objectivity and perhaps even helps them with being more objective in practice. Why other branches of scholarship in which personal opinion is front and centre adopted this convention I'll never know, but I find it irksome.
Anyway I often wonder whether the extensive use of the passive in Sanskrit might have affected the Brahmin worldviews. One can even say "anena bhāvayati" which is literally "being [is done] by it" or in active voice "it exists" or "it is". Perhaps this influenced the fatalism that characterises Hinduism?
Yes , the passive form is 'I was rained on' rather than 'it is raining' i.e. the subject receives the action rather than engenders the action. It suggests action being analysed in terms of responsibility. A legal document would be alive to this : ' you hit me' - ' I hit you' - ' I was hit'
Re-newspapers : well ... it's a lot about mud slinging isn't it? Reports go something like 'The poplar ice caps diminished by 5 percent last year' rather than 'China's greedy coal consumption is threatening our very town with flooding'
Fourth Precept,no?
We have a need for passive, objective language before we can proceed into responsibility. Concretely, in real life situations, using every day language, I'm speaking as a parent here. It's a lot less conflictual to start a dialogue with something like 'I see the cup is broken' rather than 'Did you break the cup?' Conversely, in Non Violent Communication (Marshal Rosenberg) conjugates it from the first person ending in an inclusive request, maybe using 'we' , addressed to the second or fourth person : 'I'm angry because the cup is broken. I have a need for my belongings to be cared for. If you borrow my cup in the future, would you be willing to take care of it please?' or ' Could we treat it with care please?' i.e. starts in the first person & finishes with an inclusive request to the second person.
Some times we can't take our karma out from the karma of another person or group of people. i.e. karma also acts out collectively, so the chestnut 'who receives the fruit of their action' isn't quiet correct as the karma also goes into the collective outcome/retribution/result/consequence. I find that being a little bit more flexible about the boundaries of one's own self, allows me to be more willing to look into accepting (limited) responsibility for collective karma. I'm thinking about Global Warming as a consequence of three hundred or so years of intense carbon fuel usage for instance. Though I can also see this in more personal areas such as recurring family traits passed on down the generations for instance.
I need to study the word 'Bhava' & specifically here in relation to karma, how it applies to agency & verb conjugaison.
Lest we forget passive verbs can be both transitive and intransitive.
He is hitting me (sa māṁ hanati) - active transitive I am being hit (ahaṁ hanyate) - passive intransitive I am hit *by him* (tenāhaṁ hanyate) - passive transitive
I think you are taking the passive to be intransitive, but clearly even the passive can have an agent. In Sanskrit we use the instrumental case to indicate the agent and in English the preposition 'by'. It is because the passive is so common that Sanskritists tend to avoid the language of the subject and object of a sentence. In a passive sentence the subject is passive also - as you say they receive the action. But there is no reason that an agent (expressed in the instrumental) is not part of the sentence.
And as I read this, the agent is still responsible for the action. Though of course that nutter Śāntideva disagrees with me. For him the very fact of thinking 'ahaṁ' is a cause of tenāhaṁ hanyate and thus morally reprehensible. But that's the Mahāyāna for you - these Romans are crazy!
As I recall NVC one first tries to empathise with one's intended victim before striking. It's important to think like your prey and feel their pain as you pounce with your request, and then make a small sacrifice to speed their soul on it's way (or something like that). I think most people leave that bit out and just learn how to better manipulate others by phrasing demands in sneaky ways that are harder to say "no" to. One certainly could not make the kind of request you suggest without first establishing a report and finding out how the person felt about breaking your cup. And having done so I don't imagine any request of behaviour change would be required, because on the whole people don't break coffee cups on purpose. If they did it on purpose you have much bigger problems than cups!
I'm not clear on the veracity or utility of the idea of collective karma. I tend to think "meh".
Let me know how you get on with the word bhava. The root is √bhū. It undergoes guṇa so bhū > bho-. Then forms a present stem in -a: bho is archaic bhău भउ , so bhău + a > bhava- and the 3rd person singular present is bhavati.
And of course we have the primary derivative verbal noun with -a, i.e. bhava. With basically the same morphology.
Past participle (with weakest root) is bhūta.
I think bhāva must be a taddhita (secondary derivative forming an action noun) with the suffix -a and vṛddhi of the root vowel: bhū + a > bhau भौ + a (bhau is archaic bhāu भाउ) > bhāu + a > bhāva.
Whereas bhāvanā seems to be a secondary derivative action noun in -anā from the causative Skt bhāvayati, P bhāveti 'causing to be; producing, cultivating' (only the bhāv part of the verb survives the derivation). Not sure why it's feminine in Pāli. Sanskrit seems to prefer the masculine bhāvana.
Good read, though I will be rereading this when I have more time to fully ponder it over.
I do feel compelled to point out that the Buddha often refers to himself as Tathagata. I guess he's making some kind of distinction regarding awakening.
We don't really know how the Buddha referred to himself. We know how is portrayed talking about himself by the most zealous disciples of his most zealous disciples (across about 10 generations). But we also know that for the early Buddhists the founder figure was put up on a pedestal very early on and talked about in legendary, if not mythic terms. On the other hand he is just as often portrayed as using first person pronouns and first person verbal forms.
Of course Buddhists have traditionally made "some kind of distinction regarding awakening" just as modern accounts of various kinds also make "some kind of distinction". I think I've dealt with this in general terms in the essay and more in the comments. Is there some further point you wish to make?
Not sure if I have a point, but after thinking about it some more, I saw "Tathagata" as a way of acknowledging the "I, me & mine" problem. Yeah, he did refer to himself in first person - though I wonder if referring to oneself in third person was weird in his culture it is now (a bit of a joke there).
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
[Image]
"I suppose a question I have is: if there is no 'self',
how can we be responsible for our actions?"
A few days ago one of my colleagues asked this question in response to Dayāmati's essay What does one not have when one does not have a self? This is one of the crucial questions of Buddhist metaphysics. If there were no self, then there could be no moral agent or moral agency, and there would be no one who could be held responsible for actions. It would be an odd world. But modern Buddhists continue to argue that Buddhism involves not having a self on two levels: the self we currently have is an illusion; and once we are awakened we'll realise we have no self.
This highlights a major discontinuity in the early Buddhist texts. I already have an essay ready and waiting which addresses another dimension of this problem, but I found the phrasing of this particular question interesting enough to dash off a reply.
As far as the early Buddhist texts are concerned none of them ever comes out and says "you don't have a self". They seem to me to be saying something quite different and much more subtle. My starting point would be that early Buddhist texts focus on a particular domain (visaya) of knowledge. They say that all the knowledge we have is experiential: everything (sabbaṁ) is just the senses and the qualities of sense experience (solidity, resistance, volume, colour etc). Our perceptual world (loka) is the product of perceptual processes (khandhā). Sensations (vedanā) only arise when sense object and sense organ connect in the presence of sense consciousness. But we are intoxicated (pamāda) by the play of sense experience - and lost in the manifold interpretations of it (papañca). We mistake experience for something else. In Thomas Metzinger's terms we are "naive realists". We treat experience as if it is real; as though we are in direct unmediated contact with objects. Why we do this is another interesting question, but I'll take it as read for the purposes of this essay.
One of the important points made by early Buddhists was that dichotomies like "real" and "unreal" don't apply to experience - this is implied in the critique of the terms atthitā (existent) and nātthitā (non-existent) with respect to loka in the Kaccānagotta Sutta. Be it the immediate sensory experience or the cascades of impressions and associations that follow contact, the ontological status of experience is indeterminate. Experience is best described in process terms as arising when the conditions are in place and ceasing when they are not.
I'm not sure about other people but I don't think of myself as "having" a self, but in terms of "being" a self (I am). It's only in artificially abstract discussions that we begin to talk in terms of "having" a self. Most of the time the sense of being a self is transparent and unconscious. I have a locus of experience, a point of view (I look out through the windows of my senses), a sense of having a certain amount of control, a sense of (and a desire for) continuity, and a sense of ownership over what I am aware of (they are my perceptions). These observations are the background against which I understand my world of experience. These qualities of consciousness are a bit like the "a priori judgements" in Kant's philosophy that structure experience. The language of "having" a self may well stem from the problem of the afterlife and continuity. From a Christian point of view we "have" a soul which survives our physical death. We can use the language of possession because a soul does not participate in the world of matter, it only provides continuity in the afterlife. I've explored this kind of duality of spirit and matter in some depth already so I won't go into it again here (See Metaphors and Materialism).
In the final analysis this sense of being a self is just an experience with the same characteristics as all experiences (anicca, dukkha & anāttan). We experience the world from a first person perspective but it is wrong to say "I am this experience" or "that experience is me" or "this experience is mine". Thus it would in fact seem to be wrong to say that we do or don't have a self. Or that we have a self that is then lost. The world of experience is what arises in our awareness when our body and mind interact with the world of objects (which is never in doubt in early Buddhist texts) including other people, who we can impute have a very similar experience of being to us through communication. Thus experience is neither subjective nor objective but exists in the overlap of the two - it is always both together. And this may be one reason the Buddhadharma is describes as a middle way.
The fundamental problem outlined by early Buddhist texts is intoxication with experience so that we mistake what is impermanent for something permanent and so on. Of course a great deal of ink is spilt on the consequences of this misidentification, but it all stems from being out of alignment (mithyā) with how experience really is. As we know ourselves through experience (since all knowledge stems from experience) then our self shares the characteristics of all experiences.
Though we cannot use the language of real or unreal with respect to experience, particularly the experience of being a self, "we" (the self we experience being) can still take responsibility for what this body, mouth and mind do. This is partly because experience has a physical locus (rūpa, first of the khandhās). Another aspect of having an experience is saṅkhāra or volition, in effect the urge to act on the stimulus. Volition in relation to experienceis explained in terms of the mental & emotional responses (cetanā) associated with the different senses. Early Buddhism sees action (kamma) as resulting from responses to experience (cetanāhaṃ, bhikkhave, kammaṃ vadāmi AN 6.63). Motivation/intention/reaction with respect to experience does not require a sense of self. It is part and parcel of having an experience in this view. Since both saṅkhāra (the urge to act) and vedanā (the results of kamma) share a locus it can be observed that activities enacted from this locus of experience have consequences at this locus of experience. In other words as well as the observation that experiences arise in a conditioned fashion, we can in addition observe causal relations between actions and consequences. From a first person perspective this is interpreted as 'my actions have consequences for me'. And for most of us this is an important perspective. For if my actions did not have consequences for me, then surely I would be far less motivated to be ethical.
I've argued before that Buddhist morality is primarily focussed on interactions with other people. To speak of "actions" in the abstract can be misleading. By "action" I think we can say that early Buddhists meant our behaviour towards other people considered as other loci of experience. A Pāḷi verse which is repeated in several places suggests that our ability to attribute our kind of experience to other loci is the basis of morality. We understand that 'our' experience is much the same as 'their' experience, and thus we don't go about causing pain because we understand that pain is undesirable. "I" am responsible for actions initiated at this locus of experience if only because this is also where the consequences are experienced.
The realisation of self qua contingent experience is liberating because it allows us to become sober (appamāda) with respect to sense experience. We are not caught up in grasping after experienced pleasure and averting unexperienced pain. We still experience both, but don't get hooked up on them. The Salla Sutta (The Discourse on Being Pierced) makes an important distinction between the unawakened and the awakened. The unawakened, struck by an arrow experience physical (kāyika) pain, but then they also experience a psychological (cetasika) reaction to the pain, as if they are pierced by a second arrow. The awakened experience the first arrow, but not the second. I wrote about this distinction in terms of pain, which we all have, and suffering which only the unawakened have. I imagine the experience of awakening to be characterised by contentment as we are not pulled this way and that by (habitual) reactions to stimulus. Our sensory world becomes less compelling and we can disbelieve it if we choose, or suspend disbelief and plunge in. (Gary Weber describes something like this). However as an embodied being we still have the same perceptual processes going on.
In terms of morality, post-awakening we are able to behave in ways that are consistent (Skt. samyañc) with how experience actually works instead of inconsistent (Skt. mithyā) and especially in relation to other people we don't behave selfishly because we see through our sense of being a self. Thus realising the contingent nature of self and not treating the self as a really existent entity allows for naturally skilful actions.
It's not that at some point we do "have" a self and then later we don't "have" a self. From an early Buddhist point of view we have experiences that we (unconsciously and transparently) interpret as us being a self. We proceed as though I, me, & mine are straightforward propositions. To the point where questioning I, me, & mine in any serious way is unusual and apt to draw blank stares from most people. When we learn to see those same experiences in the light of awakening then we no longer interpret them in the same way. The problem of agency in the light of not "having" a self doesn't arise because having or not having a self is not the case.
I can't speak to later developments. Buddhists seem to have very quickly got caught up in the pan-Indian conversation about ontology and the competition for influence and resources that accompanied being a large religious institution. They seem to have lost their way doctrinally. Once the Abhidharma is in place as canonical (around the beginning of the common era?), different solutions to the question were required and were supplied with varying success.
~~oOo~~
posted by Jayarava Attwood at 08:27 on 03-Jan-2014
9 Comments
Close this window Jump to comment formVery lucid. Thank you as always.
For me, when it comes to explaining this topic, I find it difficult to get around the confusing notion that "we" do things - e.g.interpret experiences as a self. That word "we" still evokes some sort of hidden agent. It's a word use problem though.
Saturday, January 04, 2014
Hi Swanditch,
Good to hear from you again. I don't get much feedback these days.
Yep. Our language uses pronouns. In Indic languages one can do without pronouns. But even the Buddha is portrayed as using them - sometimes 3rd person, but often first person as well. He also used pronounless first person verb forms.
I think we're taught to fear admitting or implying through language that we are not awakened. You get these horrible tortuous sentences that are supposed to represent a "non-dual" point of view (though they are inevitably dualistic anyway. Pretending to speak from the awakened point of view, when one is not awakened is just so pretentious. I am totally not awakened and happy to speak from my present point of view.
Saturday, January 04, 2014
Great twist on the 'to be' or 'to have' question.
I've heard it thus : 'it is raining, but there is no rainer, no one who is making it rain' ie. rather than using pronouns, it is phased in the passive.
Thanks as always for your insights & exacting analysis.
Saturday, January 04, 2014
Hi Adam,
Thanks.
Unfortunately for your analysis "it" and "one" are in fact pronouns. It's a good example though and one that I've thought about before after reading a collection of essays by Benjamin Lee Whorf (which are unfortunately in storage right now). In the phrase "It is raining" to what does the pronoun "it" refer to? It implies an agent, eh?
BLW argues that some Nth American Indian people use different language structures. They might say "raining" - just the bare verb. Or "there is rain". And people who think like this must experience the world in a different way to those of us who see rain and think "it is raining".
Sanskrit makes much more use of the passive than we do in modern English - especially as newspaper editors managed to establish the ridiculous principle that the passive ought never be used. Fine for newspapers, but stupid for the rest of us.
When I was training in the sciences we were rigorously drilled in using the passive for our reports thus removing ourselves from the narrative: an experiment was carried out... it was observed that... the conclusion is... This helps the scientists pretend to objectivity and perhaps even helps them with being more objective in practice. Why other branches of scholarship in which personal opinion is front and centre adopted this convention I'll never know, but I find it irksome.
Anyway I often wonder whether the extensive use of the passive in Sanskrit might have affected the Brahmin worldviews. One can even say "anena bhāvayati" which is literally "being [is done] by it" or in active voice "it exists" or "it is". Perhaps this influenced the fatalism that characterises Hinduism?
Sunday, January 05, 2014
Yes , the passive form is 'I was rained on' rather than 'it is raining' i.e. the subject receives the action rather than engenders the action. It suggests action being analysed in terms of responsibility. A legal document would be alive to this : ' you hit me' - ' I hit you' - ' I was hit'
Re-newspapers : well ... it's a lot about mud slinging isn't it? Reports go something like 'The poplar ice caps diminished by 5 percent last year' rather than 'China's greedy coal consumption is threatening our very town with flooding'
Fourth Precept,no?
We have a need for passive, objective language before we can proceed into responsibility. Concretely, in real life situations, using every day language, I'm speaking as a parent here. It's a lot less conflictual to start a dialogue with something like 'I see the cup is broken' rather than 'Did you break the cup?' Conversely, in Non Violent Communication (Marshal Rosenberg) conjugates it from the first person ending in an inclusive request, maybe using 'we' , addressed to the second or fourth person : 'I'm angry because the cup is broken. I have a need for my belongings to be cared for. If you borrow my cup in the future, would you be willing to take care of it please?' or ' Could we treat it with care please?' i.e. starts in the first person & finishes with an inclusive request to the second person.
Some times we can't take our karma out from the karma of another person or group of people. i.e. karma also acts out collectively, so the chestnut 'who receives the fruit of their action' isn't quiet correct as the karma also goes into the collective outcome/retribution/result/consequence. I find that being a little bit more flexible about the boundaries of one's own self, allows me to be more willing to look into accepting (limited) responsibility for collective karma. I'm thinking about Global Warming as a consequence of three hundred or so years of intense carbon fuel usage for instance. Though I can also see this in more personal areas such as recurring family traits passed on down the generations for instance.
I need to study the word 'Bhava' & specifically here in relation to karma, how it applies to agency & verb conjugaison.
Wishing you a happy, healthy & creative 2014
adam
Monday, January 06, 2014
Lest we forget passive verbs can be both transitive and intransitive.
He is hitting me (sa māṁ hanati) - active transitive
I am being hit (ahaṁ hanyate) - passive intransitive
I am hit *by him* (tenāhaṁ hanyate) - passive transitive
I think you are taking the passive to be intransitive, but clearly even the passive can have an agent. In Sanskrit we use the instrumental case to indicate the agent and in English the preposition 'by'. It is because the passive is so common that Sanskritists tend to avoid the language of the subject and object of a sentence. In a passive sentence the subject is passive also - as you say they receive the action. But there is no reason that an agent (expressed in the instrumental) is not part of the sentence.
And as I read this, the agent is still responsible for the action. Though of course that nutter Śāntideva disagrees with me. For him the very fact of thinking 'ahaṁ' is a cause of tenāhaṁ hanyate and thus morally reprehensible. But that's the Mahāyāna for you - these Romans are crazy!
As I recall NVC one first tries to empathise with one's intended victim before striking. It's important to think like your prey and feel their pain as you pounce with your request, and then make a small sacrifice to speed their soul on it's way (or something like that). I think most people leave that bit out and just learn how to better manipulate others by phrasing demands in sneaky ways that are harder to say "no" to. One certainly could not make the kind of request you suggest without first establishing a report and finding out how the person felt about breaking your cup. And having done so I don't imagine any request of behaviour change would be required, because on the whole people don't break coffee cups on purpose. If they did it on purpose you have much bigger problems than cups!
I'm not clear on the veracity or utility of the idea of collective karma. I tend to think "meh".
Let me know how you get on with the word bhava. The root is √bhū. It undergoes guṇa so bhū > bho-. Then forms a present stem in -a: bho is archaic bhău भउ , so bhău + a > bhava- and the 3rd person singular present is bhavati.
And of course we have the primary derivative verbal noun with -a, i.e. bhava. With basically the same morphology.
Past participle (with weakest root) is bhūta.
I think bhāva must be a taddhita (secondary derivative forming an action noun) with the suffix -a and vṛddhi of the root vowel: bhū + a > bhau भौ + a (bhau is archaic bhāu भाउ) > bhāu + a > bhāva.
Whereas bhāvanā seems to be a secondary derivative action noun in -anā from the causative Skt bhāvayati, P bhāveti 'causing to be; producing, cultivating' (only the bhāv part of the verb survives the derivation). Not sure why it's feminine in Pāli. Sanskrit seems to prefer the masculine bhāvana.
bhū is cognate with English 'be'.
Monday, January 06, 2014
Good read, though I will be rereading this when I have more time to fully ponder it over.
I do feel compelled to point out that the Buddha often refers to himself as Tathagata. I guess he's making some kind of distinction regarding awakening.
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Hi Larryang
We don't really know how the Buddha referred to himself. We know how is portrayed talking about himself by the most zealous disciples of his most zealous disciples (across about 10 generations). But we also know that for the early Buddhists the founder figure was put up on a pedestal very early on and talked about in legendary, if not mythic terms. On the other hand he is just as often portrayed as using first person pronouns and first person verbal forms.
Of course Buddhists have traditionally made "some kind of distinction regarding awakening" just as modern accounts of various kinds also make "some kind of distinction". I think I've dealt with this in general terms in the essay and more in the comments. Is there some further point you wish to make?
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Not sure if I have a point, but after
thinking about it some more, I saw "Tathagata" as a way of acknowledging the "I, me & mine" problem. Yeah, he did refer to himself in first person - though I wonder if referring to oneself in third person was weird in his culture it is now (a bit of a joke there).
Wednesday, January 15, 2014