Additional comments on Buddhism

After reviewing assignments or getting certain questions I often send out messages through Nicenet dealing with points that have come up.  For each section I am going to include some of these past messages and occasionally add to them.

UNDERSTANDING AND MISUNDERSTANDING ASIAN TRADITIONS

As I review all the postings for the last few weeks, one thing that strikes me is a tendency to see Asian traditions as somehow flat and joyless.  One reason I encourage viewing some of the YouTube videos is that it might counter this tendency somewhat. 

Keep in mind that Hindu religion (what most people practice when they come to the shrines and temples) is quite colorful and noisy, completely in keeping with the concept that kama  (pleasure) is one of the four goals of the ordinary adult (the one in the householder stage).  It's supposed to be fun!  The same holds with shrines and temples in the Buddhist and Daoist traditions.

The world of the forest ascetics that I discussed in an early lecture was something quite different.  Here there was typically a harsh lifestyle that emphasized fasting and sleep deprivation on the theory that the "true" self (atman or purusha)had to be liberated from the care of mind and body alike.  In theory it was what the retired householder, his affairs now in order, might pursue in order better to achieve the goal of moksha (liberation) and so move close to ending the cycle of rebirth.  In practice, it often became a way for individuals to escape the limits of the caste system in that a "holy man" would be respected no matter what his family origins.

Buddhism as a reform movement posed two ways of living properly. One was for the ordinary person and would emphasize a higher degree of compassion for all living things and a greater restraint on how to get ahead (don't kill, steal, lie, and so on) than might always have been expected before.  The other was for those intent on moving faster to escaping the wheel of rebirth by life in a monastic community that was far more restrained but still quite moderate compared with the lifestyle of the Hindu holy man.  In Southeast Asia particularly, all young males were encouraged to spend at least a few months as monks while it would not be unusual for someone retired to resume such a life (a sharp contrast with with the Western monastic life in that Western monks are expected to make lifetime commitments).   

One key to the difference between the Hindu and Buddhist approaches I've described is that the distinction between "soul" and body is not at all the same.  For the classical Yoga tradition, the soul (purusha) is the catalyst that allows the individual to function both mentally and physically, so the key to liberation is a greater control first of the body then of the mind as a way of the purusha becoming free (think of getting the platinum--a very precious metal--out of the catalytic converter in your car so that you could do something else with it).  For Buddhism, both mind and body are manifestations of the flow of consciousness that ultimately is the Buddha nature.  In other words, there is no "soul" in the sense of some permanent reality just trapped in the world, so physical deprivation for its own sake would make no sense at all.

Later we'll be looking at Western monasticism, which at its beginning did involve an extreme asceticism and then, with the great founders such as Benedict and Basil, came to resemble something very much like what you have now already met in Asia.


ABOUT BUDDHISM


Hinduism, you have already learned, is not one tradition but a great number of traditions (this is where we have the image of river with many tributaries, or of a tree with many branches).  Buddhism, in contrast, began as a single tradition that rapidly diversified to the point that, a few decades back, it was considered a major achievement for representatives from different branches to agree on a basic statement of principles.  As you read you'll note a few of the key distinctions:

(1) There are those who see nirvana as the complete extinction of personal consciousness (like blowing out a candle) and those who see it as a kind of heaven in which individual consciousness is retained and heightened.  This is one thing that separates the Theravada (Hinayana) and Mahayana traditions.

(2) There are those who insist on personal effort alone (the point of the Zen saying "if you should meet the Buddha, kill him") and those who insist on drawing on the merits of the Buddha (the logic behind chanting, as in Tibetan Buddhism or the Nichiren tradition).  I make use of the Japanese terms to distinguish these: jiriki (self-effort) and tariki (dependence on another).

However, there are some very important things most traditions have in common.  One is the role of the monastic life, even if it is only on a temporary basis.  When I was in Thailand and Cambodia last summer I found young monks everywhere, but most saw this as only a rite of passage.  Here too it is necessary to make a distinction between a formal priesthood and monastic life.  In Japan, for instance, all Zen priests--those in charge of a temple--have spent an appropriate time in a monastery in order to be certified, but they are typically married and as often as not themselves the children of priests. 

How important is Buddhism in Asia?  In Japan we now have a predominantly secular society with temples decreasing in significance.  In Thailand and Cambodia Buddhism is close to being a state religion.  In Vietnam both Buddhism and Christianity remain under considerable pressure from the Communist state, but one thing that struck me when I was there (in the summer of 2004 my wife and I spent a month in Ho Chih Minh City teaching English to a group of Jesuit seminarians and brothers) was how on a highway we would see lifesize religious images (the Madonna or the Sacred Heart for Christians, Kwan Yin for Buddhists) mounted on rooftops and lit with neon halos as well as numerous rather ornate temples and churches.  In China there has been a government effort to support both Daoist and Buddhist temples as cultural centers attracting tourists.  Tibet, of course, is another story, with the Dalai Lama still in exile and a concentrated effort on the part of the Chinese government to control the Buddhist centers still in existence.

In the United States there has always been more of an effort to assimilate so that, for instance, a Buddhist church would have services not that different in form from what would be expected at a Christian church.  As more people from Asia have immigrated we also see a resurgence of more traditional ethnic patterns.  However, even in those religious centers intended primarily for immigrants there is generally a great willingness to welcome non-Asians, not as potential converts but as neighbors.  I do encourage as many of you as can to take advantage of this as you study both Hinduism and Buddhism.  One visit to a temple with time to chat with someone there is worth many hours of just reading about these traditions.  Just keep in mind that there will be considerable variety in beliefs and practices, just as there is in Christianity.



SOMETHING ABOUT INDIAN METAPHYSICS

Metaphysics is the area of philosophy that discusses what is supposed to be ultimately real.  In the West, from the time of the Greeks, there has been a contrast between materialism (only the physical world is real, so consciousness is just a byproduct) and idealism (only consciousness is real, so the material world is essentially illusory) with an in-between position of dualism (both matter and consciousness--the mind or soul--are real). 

In Hinduism we saw the idealist idea (characteristic of Vedanta) that there might be just one ultimate substance (Brahman) with everything else an illusion as well as the dualist approach (from Samkhya/Yoga) that there is both an ultimate physical reality and, as it were, atoms of consciousness.  (Yes, there is a materialist approach also in Indian philosophy, but clearly it would not be relevant to Indian religion.)

A key difference between Western and Indian views, though, is how whatever we ordinarily call our minds are meant to be "real" in Western thought but "illusions" in Indian thought with a "real" consciousness (atman or purusha) lacking any kind of personal quality.

Buddhism, which denies the reality of an ultimate substance in favor of the idea of an ultimate flow of consciousness, can be considered idealist.  Like Yoga in the Hindu tradition, Buddhist meditation attempts to reach a deeper level of consciousess (the Buddha mind) by stripping away the sense of a personal self.  As with Yoga with the notion of samadhi, Buddhist thought describes the experience of getting there as profoundly blissful--a sense of being what we really are, which is not what we ordinarily think. Given the background idea of reincarnation, so that we are all a succession of different "me's" or selves, try to understand how this represents the idea of release from the wheel of rebirth.

How the idea of divinity fits into all this is still another issue.  The idea of a personal transcendent God (creator and lawgiver and so on) is just not part of the Indian vision.  Brahman (for Vedanta) is close enough to an idea of God as an eternal substance, yet we can also have a complicated vision of gods, angels and demons, and whatever else that share the universe with humans that altogether express aspects of the eternal reality (all part of the show, as we might translate the term "maya").  In the Western vision angels and demons are like human souls in having been created out of nothing by God with one difference being that angels and demons (the rebellious angels) existed from the beginning (whatever that is supposed to mean) while human souls keep getting created as time goes on.

Samkhya and Yoga are technically atheist, although Yoga allows for the idea of what one might call a big brother Purusha (referred to as Ishvara) who is the model for what we attempt to do in liberating our own purushas from the entanglement of being linked with prakriti.  One way of expressing this is that we look to divinity for inspiration but not for assistance.  "God" doesn't care.

Buddhist philosophy is also technically atheist, although Buddhists typically dislike being identified in this way.  Again, the concept is that there is just an eternal flow in which we all are caught up--and this is not a God outside creating and managing the events that occur.  Eventually, Buddhists believe, all sentient beings will gain enlightenment and the show is over.

These are difficult thoughts, I know.  The technical stuff of philosophy is often intimidating (you might ask how is someone supposed to understand the answers when the questions do not seem to make sense), but try to get at least the bare outline of what we are talking about. 


FREEDOM FROM TANHA

First off, some of you did not quite get the goal of the assignment in having you do some additional research on line (this was one reason for my asking you to indicate your sources). The task was to see how those who are experts on the Buddhist tradition deal with whether there is a real inconsistency in the goal (desire?) to be free of desire.

As you are perhaps noting from this week's lecture material on Chinese tradition, it is always difficult to translate from one language to another when there are significant cultural differences. Here is the irony of the situation: we must rely on translations to get into the culture of another time or place, yet the translations themselves become a problem because the meanings we attach to various words inevitably reflect our own culture. Often enough we try to get around the problem by using paraphrases of one sort or another, although this itself runs the risk of misinterpreting an author's intentions.

A key example is the term "virtue." It is used to translate both Greek and Chinese writers. but our problem is that we have a notion of virtue as something goody-goody when in both Greek and Chinese the original words do not suggest this at all. The Greek word arete connotes any type of excellence, while the Mandarin Chinese word de
connotes the power that something has. Long ago the English word "virtue" also suggested power as well (as when in a marriage ceremony someone says "by virtue of the authority vested in me"), but that has rather faded out so that we are left with the more prissy sense, especially when it refers to whether a woman has yet had sex. Obviously this is going to make reading philosophy, Greek or Chinese, something of a problem.

One typical solution is just not to attempt a translation but to keep an original term intact. We do this, for instance, with the word "karma" since translating it literally as "action" does not begin to capture the meaning it has in Indian thought. Perhaps this is what should have happened with the term tanha but it didn't, and as a result we have the question that I posed for the assignment.

Many of you favored an opposition of material and spiritual goals in explaining what tanha meant, but this, I think, misses the point that an intense asceticism (the pursuit of a spiritual release characteristic of the Yoga approach) was precisely what Gautama came to reject (just as later it was rejected by the Bhagavad Gita). Closer, I think, was the observation that some of you made that "the middle way" of the Buddhist does not reject the material world in favor of some kind of prayerful utopia.

I do think the most appropriate translation of tanha is probably the word "craving," since this suggests the kind of addiction that interferes with ordinary activities. Its opposite is "letting go," which means that there can still be ordinary enjoyment. In Cambodia out by an ancient temple I watched monks come to beg food from a stand where I was eating, and I noticed that the people running the stand did try to make sure they were giving the monks something delicious, and this was definitely appreciated. The point would be that the monk could enjoy a treat, but if it did not happen he would not be upset. Not being a monk, I would find it a lot more difficult not to have expectations--and experience a measure of frustration if they were not met.