Reference: Buddhism
[NOTE: In color are Vinaire’s comments.]
The Buddha listed his Three Marks of Existence as impermanence (anicca), suffering (dukkha) and the absence of permanent identity or a soul (anatta). We are freed from the pain of clutching for permanence only if the acceptance of continual change is driven into our very marrow.
The Buddha’s total outlook on life is as difficult to be certain of as that of any personage in history. Part of the problem stems from the fact that, like most ancient teachers, he wrote nothing. There is a gap of almost a century and a half between his spoken words and the first written records, and though memory in those times appears to have been incredibly faithful, a gap of that length is certain to raise questions. A second problem arises from the wealth of material in the texts themselves. Buddha taught for forty-five years, and a staggering corpus has come down to us in one form or another. While the net result is doubtless a blessing, the sheer quantity of materials is bewildering; for though his teachings remained remarkably consistent over the years, it was impossible to say things for many minds and in many ways without creating problems of interpretation. These interpretations constitute the third barrier. By the time texts began to appear, partisan schools had sprung up, some intent on minimizing the Buddha’s break with Brahmanic Hinduism, others intent on sharpening it. This makes scholars wonder how much in what they are reading is the Buddha’s actual thought and how much is partisan interpolation.
We are not certain how much we are reading is the Buddha’s actual thought and how much is partisan interpolation.
Undoubtedly, the most serious obstacle to the recovery of the Buddha’s rounded philosophy, however, is his own silence at crucial points. We have seen that his burning concerns were practical and therapeutic, not speculative and theoretical. Instead of debating cosmologies, he wanted to introduce people to a different kind of life. It would be wrong to say that theory did not interest him. His dialogues show that he analyzed certain abstract problems meticulously; that he possessed, indeed, a brilliant metaphysical mind. It was on principle that he resisted philosophy, as someone with a sense of mission might shun hobbies as a waste of time.
Buddha’s burning concerns were practical and therapeutic, not speculative and theoretical. But his silence at crucial points is puzzling.
His decision makes so much sense that it may seem a betrayal to insert a section like this one, which tries forthrightly to identify—and to some extent define—certain key notions in the Buddha’s outlook. In the end, however, the task is unavoidable for the simple reason that metaphysics is unavoidable. Everyone harbors some notions about ultimate questions, and these notions affect interpretations of subsidiary issues. The Buddha was no exception. He refused to initiate philosophical discussions, and only occasionally did he let himself be pried from his “noble silence” to engage in them, but certainly he had views. No one who wishes to understand him can escape the hazardous task of trying to discover what they were.
Buddha refused to initiate philosophical discussions, and only occasionally did he let himself be pried from his “noble silence” to engage in them, but certainly he had views.
We may begin with nirvana, the word the Buddha used to name life’s goal as he saw it. Etymologically it means “to blow out,” or “to extinguish,” not transitively, but as a fire ceases to draw. Deprived of fuel, the fire goes out, and this is nirvana. From such imagery it has been widely supposed that the extinction to which Buddhism points is complete, total annihilation. If this were so there would be grounds for the accusation that Buddhism is life-denying and pessimistic. As it is, scholars of the last half-century have exploded this view. Nirvana is the highest destiny of the human spirit and its literal meaning is extinction, but we must be precise as to what is to be extinguished. It is the boundaries of the finite self. It does not follow that what is left will be nothing. Negatively, nirvana is the state in which the faggots of private desire have been completely consumed and everything that restricts the boundless life has died. Affirmatively, it is that boundless life itself. Buddha parried every request for a positive description of the unconditioned, insisting that it was “incomprehensible, indescribable, inconceivable, unutterable”; for after we eliminate every aspect of the only consciousness we have known, how can we speak of what is left? One of Buddha’s heirs, Nagasena, preserves this point in the following dialogue. Asked what nirvana is like, Nagasena countered with a question of his own:
“Is there such a thing as wind?”
“Yes, revered sir.”
“Please, sir, show the wind by its color or configuration or as thin or thick or long or short.”
“But it is not possible, revered Nagasena, for the wind to be shown; for the wind cannot be grasped in the hand or touched; yet wind exists.”
“If, sir, it is not possible for the wind to be shown, well then, there is no wind.”
“I, revered Nagasena, know that there is wind; I am convinced of it, but I am not able to show the wind.”
“Even so, sir, nirvana exists; but it is not possible to show nirvana.”
Buddha maintained that Nirvana is incomprehensible, indescribable, inconceivable, unutterable. [NOTE: Etymologically nirvana means “to blow out,” or “to extinguish.” This could refer to the “blowing out of all prior considerations or preconceived notions.”]
Our final ignorance is to imagine that our final destiny is conceivable. All we can know is that it is a condition that is beyond—beyond the limitations of mind, thoughts, feelings, and will, all these (not to mention bodily things) being confinements. The Buddha would venture only one affirmative characterization. “Bliss, yes bliss, my friends, is nirvana.”
The Buddha would venture only one affirmative characterization. “Bliss, yes bliss, my friends, is nirvana.”
Is nirvana God? When answered in the negative, this question has led to opposite conclusions. Some conclude that since Buddhism professes no God, it cannot be a religion; others, that since Buddhism obviously is a religion, religion doesn’t require God. The dispute requires that we take a quick look at what the word “God” means.
Buddhism forces one to look carefully at the meaning of “God”.
Its meaning is not single, much less simple. Two meanings must be distinguished for its place in Buddhism to be understood.
One meaning of God is that of a personal being who created the universe by deliberate design. Defined in this sense, nirvana is not God. The Buddha did not consider it personal because personality requires definition, which nirvana excludes. And while he did not expressly deny creation, he clearly exempted nirvana from responsibility for it. If absence of a personal Creator God is atheism, Buddhism is atheistic.
If God is defined as a “personal creator” then Buddhism is atheistic.
There is a second meaning of God, however, which (to distinguish it from the first) has been called the Godhead. The idea of personality is not part of this concept, which appears in mystical traditions throughout the world. When the Buddha declared, “There is, O monks, an Unborn, neither become nor created nor formed…. Were there not, there would be no deliverance from the formed, the made, the compounded,” he seemed to be speaking in this tradition. Impressed by similarities between nirvana and the Godhead, Edward Conze has compiled from Buddhist texts a series of attributes that apply to both. We are told
that Nirvana is permanent, stable, imperishable, immovable, ageless, deathless, unborn, and unbecome, that it is power, bliss and happiness, the secure refuge, the shelter, and the place of unassailable safety; that it is the real Truth and the supreme Reality; that it is the Good, the supreme goal and the one and only consummation of our life, the eternal, hidden and incomprehensible Peace.
We may conclude with Conze that nirvana is not God defined as personal creator, but that it stands sufficiently close to the concept of God as Godhead to warrant the name in that sense.
If God is defined as “Godhead” (the idea of personality is not part of this concept) that is unborn, uncreated and without form, then Buddhism is the truest religion.
The most startling thing the Buddha said about the human self is that it has no soul. This anatta (no soul) doctrine has again caused Buddhism to seem religiously peculiar. But again the word must be examined. What was the atta (Pali for the Sanskrit Atman or soul) that the Buddha denied? At the time it had come to signify (a) a spiritual substance that, in keeping with the dualistic position in Hinduism, (b) retains its separate identity forever.
Buddha denied the existence of soul—that aspect of self, which retains its separate identity forever.
Buddha denied both these features. His denial of spiritual substance—the soul as homunculus, a ghostly wraith within the body that animates the body and outlasts it—appears to have been the chief point that distinguished his concept of transmigration from prevailing Hindu interpretations. Authentic child of India, the Buddha did not doubt that reincarnation was in some sense a fact, but he was openly critical of the way his Brahmanic contemporaries interpreted the concept. The crux of his criticism may be gathered from the clearest description he gave of his own view on the subject. He used the image of a flame being passed from candle to candle. As it is difficult to think of the flame on the final candle as being the original flame, the connection would seem to be a causal one, in which influence was transmitted by chain reaction but without a perduring substance.
The Buddha did not doubt that reincarnation was in some sense a fact, but to him it was like a flame being passed from candle to candle. Here influence was transmitted by chain reaction but without a perduring substance, much like the DNA passing various characteristics from one generation to the next.
When to this image of the flame we add the Buddha’s acceptance of karma, we have the gist of what he said about transmigration. A summary of his position would run something like this: (1) There is a chain of causation threading each life to those that have led up to it, and to those that will follow. Each life is in its present condition because of the way the lives that led up to it were lived. (2) Throughout this causal sequence the will remains free. The lawfulness of things makes the present state the product of prior acts, but within the present the will is influenced but not controlled. People remain at liberty to shape their destinies. (3) The two preceding points affirm the causal connectedness of life, but they do not entail that a substance of some sort be transmitted. Ideas, impressions, feelings, streams of consciousness, present moments—these are all that we find, no spiritual substrate. Hume and James were right: If there is an enduring self, subject always, never object, it never shows itself.
Buddha’s acceptance of karma is consistent with the transmission of influence from one life to the next, as in the sense of the transmission of DNA programming.
An analogy can suggest the Buddha’s views of karma and reincarnation in a supporting way. (1) The desires and dislikes that influence the contents of my mind—what I pay attention to and what I ignore—have not appeared by accident; they have definite lineages. In addition to attitudes that I have taken over from my culture, I have formed mental habits. These include cravings of various sorts, tendencies to compare myself with others in pride or envy, and dispositions toward contentment and its opposite, aversion. (2) Although habitual reactions tend to become fixed, I am not bound by my personal history; I can have new ideas and changes of heart. (3) Neither the continuity nor the freedom these two points affirm requires that thoughts or feelings be considered entities—things, or mental substances that are transported from mind to mind, or from moment to moment. Acquiring a concern for justice from my parents did not mean that a substance, however ethereal and ghostlike, leapt from their heads into mine.
Our tendencies, attitudes and mental habits have lineages, but these are not permanent substances that are transported from mind to mind. We are not bound by them.
This denial of spiritual substance was only an aspect of Buddha’s wider denial of substance of every sort. Substance carries both a general and a specific connotation. Generally, it refers to something relatively permanent that underlies surface changes in the thing in question; specifically, this more basic something is thought to be matter. The psychologist in Buddha rebelled against the latter notion, for to him mind was more basic than matter. The empiricist in him, for its part, challenged the implications of a generalized notion of substance. It is impossible to read much Buddhist literature without catching its sense of the transitoriness (anicca) of everything finite, its recognition of the perpetual perishing of every natural object. It is this that gives Buddhist descriptions of the natural world their poignancy. “The waves follow one after another in an eternal pursuit.” Or,
Life is a journey.
Death is a return to the earth.
The universe is like an inn.
The passing years are like dust.
Substance refers to something relatively permanent that underlies surface changes in the thing in question, but there is no substance that may be considered absolutely permanent or everlasting. The only thing that comes closest to being permanent is the impulse to evolve.
The Buddha listed impermanence (anicca) as the first of his Three Marks of Existence—characteristics that apply to everything in the natural order—the other two being suffering (dukkha) and the absence of permanent identity or a soul (anatta). Nothing in nature is identical with what it was the moment before; in this the Buddha was close to modern science, which has discovered that the relatively stable objects of the macro-world derive from particles that barely exist. To underscore life’s fleetingness the Buddha called the components of the human self skandas—skeins that hang together as loosely as yarn—and the body a “heap,” its elements no more solidly assembled than grains in a sandpile. But why did the Buddha belabor a point that may seem obvious? Because, he believed, we are freed from the pain of clutching for permanence only if the acceptance of continual change is driven into our very marrow. Followers of the Buddha know well his advice:
Regard this phantom world
As a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp—a phantom—and a dream.
The Buddha listed his Three Marks of Existence as impermanence (anicca), suffering (dukkha) and the absence of permanent identity or a soul (anatta). We are freed from the pain of clutching for permanence only if the acceptance of continual change is driven into our very marrow.
Given this sense of the radical impermanence of all things finite, we might expect the Buddha’s answer to the question “Do human beings survive bodily death?” to be a flat no, but actually his answer was equivocal. Ordinary people when they die leave strands of finite desire that can only be realized in other incarnations; in this sense at least these persons live on. But what about the Arhat, the holy one who has extinguished all such desires; does such a one continue to exist? When a wandering ascetic put this question, the Buddha said:
“The word reborn does not apply to him.”
“Then he is not reborn?”
“The term not-reborn does not apply to him.”
“To each and all of my questions, Gotama, you have replied in the negative. I am at a loss and bewildered.”
“You ought to be at a loss and bewildered, Vaccha. For this doctrine is profound, recondite, hard to comprehend, rare, excellent, beyond dialectic, subtle, only to be understood by the wise. Let me therefore question you. If there were a fire blazing in front of you, would you know it?”
“Yes, Gotama.”
“If the fire went out, would you know it had gone out?”
“Yes.”
“If now you were asked in what direction the fire had gone, whether to east, west, north, or south, could you give an answer?”
“The question is not rightly put, Gotama.”
Whereupon Buddha brought the discussion to a close by pointing out that “in just the same way” the ascetic had not rightly put his question. “Feelings, perceptions, forces, consciousness—everything by which the Arhat might be denoted has passed away for him. Profound, measureless, unfathomable, is the Arhat even as the mighty ocean; reborn does not apply to him nor not-reborn, nor any combination of such terms.”
Born and not-reborn are the two ends of a dimension that applies to the average person. This dimension simply does not apply to an Arhat, who has extinguished all desires, feelings, perceptions, forces, and consciousness.
It contributes to the understanding of this conversation to know that the Indians of that day thought that expiring flames do not really go out but return to the pure, invisible condition of fire they shared before they visibly appeared. But the real force of the dialogue lies elsewhere. In asking where the fire, conceded to have gone out, had gone, the Buddha was calling attention to the fact that some problems are posed so clumsily by our language as to preclude solution by their very formulation. The question of the illumined soul’s existence after death is such a case. If the Buddha had said, “Yes, it does live on,” his listeners would have assumed the persistence of our present mode of experiencing, which the Buddha did not intend. On the other hand, if he had said, “The enlightened soul ceases to exist,” his hearers would have assumed that he was consigning it to total extinction, which too he did not intend. On the basis of this rejection of extremes we cannot say much with certainty, but we can venture something. The ultimate destiny of the human spirit is a condition in which all identification with the historical experience of the finite self will disappear, while experience as such not only remains but is heightened beyond recognition. As an inconsequential dream vanishes completely on awakening, as the stars go out in deference to the morning sun, so individual awareness will be eclipsed in the blazing light of total awareness. Some say, “The dewdrop slips into the shining sea.” Others prefer to think of the dewdrop as opening to receive the sea itself.
The ultimate destiny of the human spirit is a condition in which all identification with the historical experience of the finite self will disappear, while experience as such not only remains but is heightened beyond recognition.
If we try to form a more detailed picture of the state of nirvana, we shall have to proceed without the Buddha’s help, not only because he realized almost to despair how far the condition transcends the power of words, but also because he refused to wheedle his hearers with previews of coming attractions. Even so, it is possible to form some notion of the logical goal toward which his Path points. We have seen that the Buddha regarded the world as one of lawful order in which events are governed by the pervading law of cause and effect. The life of the Arhat, however, is one of increasing independence from the causal order of nature. It does not violate that order, but the Arhat’s spirit grows in autonomy as the world’s hold decreases. In this sense the Arhat is increasingly free not only from the passions and worries of the world but also from its happenings in general. With every growth of inwardness, peace and freedom replace the turbulent bondage of those whose lives are prey to circumstance. As long as spirit remains tied to body, its freedom from the particular, the temporal, and the changing cannot be complete. But sever this connection with the Arhat’s final death, and freedom from the finite will be complete. We cannot imagine what the state would be like, but the trajectory toward it is discernible.
We cannot imagine what the state would be like, but the trajectory toward it is discernible. The Arhat’s spirit grows in autonomy as the world’s hold decreases.
Spiritual freedom brings largeness of life. The Buddha’s disciples sensed that he embodied immeasurably more of reality—and in that sense was more real—than anyone else they knew; and they testified from their own experience that advance along his path enlarged their lives as well. Their worlds seemed to expand, and with each step they felt themselves more alive than they had been before. As long as they were limited by their bodies, there were limits beyond which they could not go; but if all ties were loosed, might not they be completely free? Once more, we cannot concretely imagine such a state, but the logic of the progression seems clear. If increased freedom brings increased being, total freedom should be being itself.
A thousand questions remain, but the Buddha is silent.
Others abide our questions. Thou are free.
We ask and ask; thou smilest and art still.
If increased freedom brings increased being, total freedom should be being itself.
.
