Posts
Thursday, May 31, 2012
A research question...
Can either Utilitarianism or Rights-based arguments provide the basis for a moral obligation to be vegetarian?
Promise to self - pen to proverbial paper soon. And it's 20,000 words.
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Ethical Vegetarianism
So, a ten-thousand word dissertation required on ethical vegetarianism. I playing with 'Eating animals is wrong' as a stark thesis. Wrong why? Ethically, economically, environmentally, health-wise - take your pick. Quite how to fine tune the arguments into a structured, coherent and philosophical account, I am not sure.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
6 modules behind me
I just emailed my last essay - see previous post - and now I am free to embark upon my dissertation... I need to narrow the subject down, but am definitely going to do something in the 'ethical vegetarianism' arena. I'm not sure if the dissertation needs to be original research, or can be review of existing literature. Anyway, for now I have a lot of reading to start.
I'm also going to be a TOK Team Leader for the IB this exam session. So that will, no doubt, give me plenty to do. Not only marking, but supervising marking. The initial examiner training material is already available.
I'm also going to be a TOK Team Leader for the IB this exam session. So that will, no doubt, give me plenty to do. Not only marking, but supervising marking. The initial examiner training material is already available.
Does the Buddhist theory of no-self contradict the concepts of karma and rebirth?
In this essay I shall be looking at three central notions within the Buddhist tradition – those of karma, rebirth (or reincarnation, though a distinction between these terms will become apparent) and no-self. It has been traditionally hard for many Western scholars of Buddhism to come to terms with the relationship between these concepts, in particularly the rather intuitively contradictory notion of no-self. It is my aim to show that the no-self theory does not directly contradict the philosophy of karma and of re-birth, but can be seen to co-exist logically.
In the discourse between King Melinda and the Buddhist monk Nagsena , the king asks the monk how rebirth can take place without the transmigration of something. He asks, in fact, the intuitive question – if there is no ‘self’ existing, what is it which survives to be reborn in another life, and what is it that accrues either positive or negative karma and can be seen to be rewarded or punished in future incarnations for the actions of past lives?
I wish to look first at general Indian philosophical ideas about self and the early thinking behind karma and rebirth. I hope to be able to show how Buddha demonstrated that anatman can logically allow for both karma and rebirth.
At around the time of the Buddha, there were many philosophies of the self. The Upanishads put forth the self as a stable and constant substance – atman. This substance may change in terms of qualities over time, but not in quantity. In other words there is always just the one self behind the changing circumstances of each individual’s existence. I may grow fat and change my musical tastes, but the ‘me’ that undergoes these changes remains constant. Atman is an extension of this generally acceptable recognition of the permanence of self over time within one lifetime, to permanence of self over many lifetimes.
Buddha argues that this is a fallacy and there is no self. For Buddha, persons are composed of five aggregates – skandhas – physical and mental processes of which our experience of ourselves is composed. If there were such anything as a self, it would have to be in the five aggregates, but since these are, by their nature, impermanent, a permanent self is impossible.
“According to the Buddhist tradition, both physical and mental phenomena arise, exist, and pass away within a vast, interrelated network of causes and conditions. This continual process of arising, existing, and passing away is the process of dependent origination, one of the core notions of Buddhist thought. Buddhism argues further that all entities, events, and processes have no substantial reality outside of this dynamic matrix of dependent origination. So, things like chariots, pots, and persons are ultimately empty of fixed or intrinsic nature.”
This, clearly, is one of the biggest challenges for adherents of Buddhism – accepting the hugely counter-intuitive claim that no ‘self’ exists. One common argument put forth against no-self here is that the Buddha himself refers to a self in his own teachings. However, it can be seen that ‘I’ is merely a helpful designator. Gowans identifies a ‘process self’ to which he says the ‘I’ refers – but the very use of the word propagates the concept the Buddha is eschewing. That which we perceive as a self is merely a series of interconnected happenings, the skandhas. Gowans refers to these as a ‘nexus of processes such as experiencing, remembering, imagining and feeling’ – usually what we would come to accept as self-consciousness. Whilst ultimately there are no selves, the Buddha used references to a process self to make his teachings accessible to those still attached to a self of concrete substance. Other proponents of no-self theory suggest that it is possible to ‘eliminate the notion of the self and its identity, and yet on pragmatic grounds continue to permit the use of the language of personal identity.’
Perhaps the most famous non-Buddhist exponent of this conceptualization of ‘personhood’ is David Hume. He expressed it thus:
For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other ['perception' is here a general word for any mental activity] of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception… '[mankind] are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.'
Hume’s doubts are echoed by a more modern Buddhist commentary:
Where is the self? Is it the totality of the body? Is it in the body at all? What is its relation to the body? As you read this - try to find it. Paradoxically while you will have little doubt about the fact of your existence, the precise location or mode of being of what you appear to be is very far from obvious. Similarly, if you seek to locate the roots of experience, whether of sensation, volition, thought or awareness, you again find yourself tumbling into an absence of certainty, into a great doubt.
Part of the issue is certainly our perception of self as continuous over time. It seems clear to me that I am today a very different person as a forty-four year old father of two, spouse, teacher, author to the person I was as a newly arrived University undergraduate. However, the very language I am compelled to use reinforces continuity, in that I am talking of ‘me’ in both cases. A less personal account would talk of there being a forty-four year old and there having been an undergraduate, without personal pronouns to confuse the issue. Hume directly says that all ‘nice and subtle’ issues surrounding personal identity are more to do with grammar than with philosophy – presaging Wittgenstein’s more radical approach. However, whilst it is very clearly true that these people are different, I think it would be absurd to claim that the former was not the latter in some sense. I cannot realistically claim to be a truly different person, as evidenced by ongoing legal trails of Nazi war criminals, for example. I would still be held accountable for actions carried out by my previous self. Raymond Martin suggests that there is a distinction between what Buddhists might accept and that which Western philosophers feel comfortable accepting in relation to an understanding about the self. He states that some Western philosophers - reductionists who hold a ‘metaphysical view that does not commit one to any particular normative theory or to any view about how on relational grounds personal identity over time should be understood’ - would be comfortable with the Mahayana Buddhist idea that the self is a fiction ultimately but that conventionally can be held to exist for pragmatic purposes. However, they might not be prepared to go as far as to accept that brains, bodies and associated psychological events are equally only conventionally real and ultimately non-existent. Philosophers such as Hume and, more recently, Derek Parfit (sometimes known as ‘bundle theorists’ for their idea, akin to skandhas or aggregates in Buddhism, that we are bundles of experiences at any one moment in time, rather than a conscious ego doing the experiencing) have suggested that what we call a person is firstly a series of thoughts, feelings, associations and other mental events which is, secondly, knitted together through a variety of causal events of which memory is one of the most important. For Parfit, selves are much like clubs or associations: ‘Does the Maryland Philosophy Club exist as a thing in its own right? The answer would seem to be no. For there to be a Maryland philosophy club is nothing more than for there to be certain people who have decided to associate with one another for certain purposes and talk about that association in a particular way. The club has no individuality or integrity in its own right…’ He is not denying that for conventional purposes one can talk of a club doing this, or supporting that, but that ultimately the club is only collection of essences, contingent for its identity upon causal relations. Hume clearly stated a similar view, referring to the soul as ‘a republic or commonwealth, in which the several members are united by the reciprocities of government and subordination, and give rise to other persons, who propagate the same republic, in the incessant changes of its parts'. Thus it is that for Buddhists, the self exists as a collection of experiences but not as an enduring, unchanging atman as espoused by earlier Hindu belief and as commonly accepted in both secular and religious Western thought.
Karma and rebirth were around as philosophical traditions long before Buddhism. It was widely believed that beings died and were then reborn in some way. Human beings, and indeed all other living creatures, did not live only one life, but returned again and again to this world in an unremitting progression of death and rebirth. In India, this is known still as samsara, or “wandering” from one life to the next one. Initially, the idea of samsara may seem to be an opportunity, a possibility to enjoy some of the things we missed in this life or to make reparations (as in ‘Groundhog Day’), but in ancient India, samsara was an encumbrance. It was a burden to be escaped through one of two routes: performance of good actions (karma) in anticipation of a better rebirth or renouncing action altogether and bringing the cycle of death and rebirth to an end. In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, a sage named Yajñavalkya compares this series of human lives to the movement of a caterpillar from one blade of grass to another: “It is like this. As a caterpillar, when it comes to the tip of a blade of grass, reaches out to a new foothold and draws itself onto it, so the self (atman), after it has knocked down this body and rendered it unconscious, reaches out to a new foothold and draws itself onto it.” Karma was the universal law governing this rebirth – making sure that intention of actions was reflected in the outcome of future and present lives. Karma, then, determines where (that is, in which plane of existence) and as what (that is, what kind of being) a being will be reborn as. So whilst someone may have recently led a good and honest (or moral) life, they might still be reborn as a slug or into a lower plane of existence as the result of negative karma accumulated from lives previous to the last one. One question here might be why did the current life not reflect such karmic justice? Swami Shivananda states:
“If the virtuous man who has not done any evil act in this birth suffers, this is due to some wrong act that he may have committed in his previous birth. He will have his compensation in his next birth. If the wicked man who daily does many evil actions apparently enjoys this birth, this is due to some good Karma he must have done in his previous birth. He will have compensation in his next birth. He will suffer in the next birth. The law of compensation is inexorable and relentless.”
In some commentaries, it is suggested that this is a rather facile response which essentially explains any and all apparent inconsistencies in moral standing, injustices in the world and individual ‘luck’ and is, of course, empirically impossible to argue. Karma was certainly used historically within Hindu traditions to negate complaints about present-life situations. Laurence Mills suggests a kinder interpretation, however, arguing that teaching of re-birth gives value to life and brings a sense of justice to the seeming chaos of injustice apparent in the modern world. Rebirth, he argues, can explain why the evil seem to prosper and the virtuous may lead unhappy lives.
The central question, however, is not whether the teaching of rebirth offers moral succour to those in need (which well it might, much in the same way as the promissory rewards of heaven and hell in Christianity) but whether karma and rebirth can logically persist as doctrines in the face of no self. The Consistency objection certainly maintains that they cannot. If there is no constant and consistent self, what is it that karma affects? White frames the issue thus, paraphrasing Griffiths on survival after death: ‘Buddhist karmic theory is caught in a contradiction: in order to explain survival of death and re-birth, Buddhists have to suppose that there is an atman, but according to the anatman doctrine which they accept, there is no such thing.’ Additionally, if a person is merely a series of interconnected events and dispositions which are ever changing, then any karmic come-uppance will be affecting a different set of skandhas, or a different ‘person’. This objection was perhaps first enunciated by the Greek comic playwright Epicharmus. He tells of a debtor arguing to his creditor that, given the changing nature of the world, he is no longer the same person who borrowed the money and thus cannot be held accountable for its return. The creditor knocks the debtor to the ground and, in the face of the latter’s protestations, claims to be a different person to he that hit the debtor just moments ago, and is thus falsely accused. This tongue in cheek objection is actually very real – the implication of no-self on moral theory is potentially huge.
Two principal objections pertain to karmic morality. Firstly, it is clear from many sayings of the Buddha and later writings that all is suffering and that the suffering is felt at an individual level. It is the individual, a distinct person, who experiences suffering. Karmic theory would suggest that, since the person ceases to exist at death as no ‘self’ continues into a new body, then the person lumbered with serving the karmic death of the previous life is in fact a different person. This seems impossible to justify. A second objection relates to the very possibility of nirvana, or escape from the cycle of rebirth and death. Buddhist thinking has those born with heavy karmic debt to work through accepting their lot with resignation, happy in the knowledge that they are working towards a better rebirth. In reality, such compassionate understanding and acceptance of one’s lot might be harder to swallow, and resulting indignation and disaffection can only increase negative karma. As such, karmic debt can only grow for the vast majority of those unlikely to achieve enlightenment. Ernest Valea, in a paper on the logical contradictions within Buddhism, offers two examples from World War II to make these points. Firstly, he suggests that for an individual, such as Hitler, many lives would be required to pay off the karmic debt acquired. However, there would be no connection between the person of Hitler, and the child born with Hitler’s karmic debt. The child would have no awareness of ‘its’ previous monstrous crimes, and would live a harsh and cruel life. This procedure would repeat countless times as Hitler’s debt was worked through. In this entire regime of repayment of karmic debt, Hitler himself, who ceased to exist at his own physical death, repays nothing. In addition to this, each person living under the gloom of Hitler’s karma would undoubtedly feel resentment and indignation, thus increasing rather than decreasing the karmic debt. Valea goes on to discuss the plight of the Jews, suggesting that under karmic law, the genocide should not cause us to raise an eyebrow, as clearly they were being justly punished for previous bad karma; this line of reasoning justifies any and all conceivable crime. In a further twist, Valea suggests that the guards who killed the Jews would in turn be ‘punished’ for their crimes, and their executioners in turn would be ‘punished’ and so on in a never-ending cycle of karmic retribution. It is examples such as these which led Griffiths to call Buddhist karmic theory ‘morally repugnant’.
Much of the confusion here might be down to a Western conceptualisation of karma as having intent. It is true that karma – or action – is accrued by individuals in line with their intentions (so that unintended consequences do not attract karma). However, karma itself, the doctrine, is not some God-like figure passing judgement; karma itself has no intention and hence cannot punish or reward. These are ideas borrowed from a religious (with a capital ‘R’) understanding of justice. Suppose, answers Nagasena in conversation with King Milanda,
‘that a man were to set fire to a village by careless use of an oil lamp. Would the king find him guilty, or would he accept the argument, "The flame of the lamp... was one thing; the fire which burnt your village was another thing?”
"In spite of whatever the man might say, the one fire was produced from the other.”
"Just so, great king, it is one name-and-form which has its end in death, and another name-and-form which is reborn. But the second is the result of the first, and is therefore not set free from its evil deeds.” Milindapaiha p. 47 (SBE)
Buddha’s response to the kinds of objections raised by Valea is the idea of interdependent arising. All things – or processes – are directly in existence as a result of the immediately preceding state of affairs – or processes. The skandhas which make me who I am right now are such as they are because of the make-up of the skandhas which came before them moments ago – and so on into the future. Buddha, then, proposed a sequence of causality which ensures unbroken continuity from one state of existence to the next. My current set of aggregates or skandhas are the result of the previous karma accumulated by my immediately preceding skandhas. An example of this is also offered by Nagasena. He postulates a lamp burning all night. ‘Is it the same flame that burns in the first watch of the night, Sir, and in the second? ... Just so, O king is the continuity of a person or thing dharma maintained. One comes into being and another passes away; and the rebirth is, as it were, simultaneous. Thus neither as the same nor as another does one go on.’
Interdependent (or dependent) arising can also be used to contest the objection to no-self raised by rebirth. The objection is similar to that which arises in the case of karma. If no permanent self exists, and there is no self to pass on to a new life, exactly what is it that is being reborn? The idea of dependent or interdependent arising states that the skandhas at the time of death are causally linked to the skandhas which cross the threshold of death and in turn give rise to a new set of skandhas. If the validity of interdependent arising were to be shown as faulty, there would perhaps be a serious problem for the philosophies of no-self, karma and rebirth, but Gowans insists that the Buddha’s teachings, as and of themselves, do appear to be consistent and non-contradictory. Gowans states that ‘understanding {dependent origination} is equivalent to understanding Buddha’s teaching as a whole.’
There would appear, then, to be a number of misunderstandings which give rise to the conception that karma and re-birth are a contradiction to the notion of no-self.
Firstly, it must be understood that there is no generic one-definition Buddhist version of either karma or re-birth which one can encapsulate as discrete and hence attempt either to contradict or support. Whilst it would be an exaggeration to say that there are as many versions of Buddhism as there are Buddhists, there is certainly an element of truth to this line of reasoning. There are substantial differences between as well as within the major Buddhist schools – Mahayana and Theravada. Their versions of the karma and re-birth story are radically different. Hence the first major misunderstanding is that there is a single coherent no-self theory within Buddhism which can be contested. Much as one can quote-mine the Bible to find support for directly conflicting stands on any number of issues, so one can turn to ‘Buddhism’ and find the same. Mahayana Buddhism, for example, reinterprets no-self as ‘emptiness’ in a far more radical manner than the Pali Canons of earlier Buddhism. The Heart Sutra – a ‘clarifying’ summary of a wider range of Mahayana Buddhist scripts – states that ‘Form is precisely emptiness And emptiness precisely form’ and places such emptiness at the very centre of its philosophy. Not only is there no self, but the idea of emptiness expands to encompass all that there is, or rather isn’t, a pre-cursor of Kant’s noumena, perhaps, unknowable given our tools for knowledge. ‘This is the root of the Mahayana. So also, however, is the opposite realisation. If all form is precisely emptiness, emptiness nonetheless appears to us as form.’ Within the context of this greater understanding of no-self, the idea of karma plays a much diminished role. Although the term karma as used by Buddhists has the roots within the Hindu word interpreted most often as a form of destiny or duty, the Buddhist word is used much differently. Alexander Berzin describes karma under the Indo-Tibetan tradition as being ‘merely’ the impulse to perform an act – the mental urge to what he then terms as karmic action. These may even be what Western secular philosophy would term as ‘unconscious urges’. The results or consequences are only apparent if the urge, or karma, is acted upon. ‘…from the point of view of the Indian Mahayana tenet systems and all Tibetan traditions of them, except Gelug Prasangika, karma is exclusively a mental factor, an impulse. It is the impulse that draws us toward a specific experience or object. More specifically, it is the impulse that brings us toward an activity, whether doing, saying, or thinking something.’
Secondly, there is a tacit assumption, in much of the literature rebuking no-self as inconsistent and flawed, that the idea of karma is related to a theory of ethics. Again, the various schools of Buddhism have a wide ranging take on what karma is and is not. In the Theravada school, certainly as widely practised in Thailand, for example, karma is seen as reward and punishment – just dessert for intentional actions performed in this or a previous life. There is even disagreement over the impact of intentional and unintentional acts, as evidenced by the previous example of the inadvertent fire caused by the careless owner of the lamp. However, the Theravada school, though often proclaimed as the closest to Buddha himself, grew as a direct response to the status quo of traditional Indian thought and has been identified by some as being shaped to suit the existing hierarchical structure of the caste system, for example. Karma and re-birth together could explain the apparent inconsistencies of earthly existence as well as maintaining structures which society and culture deemed necessary. (Ananda himself drew together the monks of his time, openly chastising them for the creation of hierarchy and the attachment to ritual, telling them they were missing the essence of the Buddha’s message. ‘Thus it is said that in the early Sangha there was no hierarchy and locus of authority; while the leaders and older monks deserved respect and privilege in etiquette, they could only advise and instruct, not legislate or compel. The elders did not possess Episcopal authority; at best they were the chief teachers of the order.’ )
In subsequent more developed versions of Buddhist theory, karma plays no such sanctioning role. Karma can be likened to an energy flow, or a tide in the sea – it certainly causes effects, as a strong wind might fell a tree, but to speculate about the intention of the wind, or the concept of justice for the tree, is to impose another set of understandings which has no place in any meaningful account of karma. ‘…the whole idea of guilt and punishment… is alien to the Buddhist view of Karma. To say she deserved it implies there is somebody else sending punishment. Buddhism never says that.’ Damien Keown underlines this very clearly. ‘Karma is not a system of rewards and punishments meted out by God but a kind of natural law akin to the law of gravity...karma as a religious concept is concerned not with just any actions but with actions of a particular kind. Karmic actions are moral actions, and the Buddha defined karma by reference to moral choices and the acts consequent upon them. He stated, ‘It is intention, O monks, that I call karma; having willed one acts through body, speech, or mind’ (A.iii.415)’
Thirdly, much of the Buddhist tradition, being written hundreds of years after the Buddha, can be seen as open to interpretation. Buddha himself claimed to speak in languages suited to his audience, and much of what is accepted Buddhist lore can be seen through such filters. It is often claimed, for example, that Buddha himself remembered a range of past lives, recalling historical detail and an essence of himself in each incarnation. This would seem to directly contradict no-self and place an unsurpassable barrier to the understanding of the Buddha’s message. If the Buddha himself can recall past lives with biographical detail, then clearly something of himself has survived, to be re-expressed in each new life – that something is a self by any other name. However, seen in a light of parable, the Buddha’s stories of previous lives serve to underline and elucidate various aspects of Buddhist thought for those follower’s requiring explanations at such a level. One can see obvious parallels in the modern Christian debate over the literal interpretation of the Creation story versus the papal acceptance of biological evolution as fact. In much the same way, Tibetan Buddhism has clung to many images of gods and goddesses, which seems to be in contradiction to the accepted non-deity version of Buddhism favoured elsewhere. Monks within that tradition will answer clearly that of course there are not literal gods, but that the stories of the gods serve a function for those who require such an exposition of Buddha’s teachings. Thich Nhat Hanh makes this precise point: ‘When I read any scripture, Christian or Buddhist, I always keep in mind that whatever Jesus or the Buddha said was to a particular person or group on a particular occasion. I try to understand the context in which they spoke to understand their meaning. What they said may be less important than how they said it…But if we analyse their words to find the deepest meaning without understanding the relationships between the speaker and his listeners, we may miss the point.’ The personification of various Buddha traits is both a product of and a service to our innate story-telling nature and over thousands of years a blurring of lines between parable and reality is inevitable.
Thich Nhat Hanh cuts to the very heart of the Buddha’s message when he suggests that in effect, attachment of any kind is the thing which needs transcending. He says that the Buddha used no-self as a means to react against his epoch, and specifically against what he saw as the damaging notion of atman as adopted by the Brahman priests of his time. But, an attachment to no-self was equally an attachment, and the message of the Buddha was to free oneself of attachment, not to re-attach to a different doctrine. ‘…when Buddhists began worshipping the idea of emptiness, [Buddha] said, “It is worse if you get caught in the non-self of a flower than if you belief in the self of a flower.”
No-self was intended as an instrument of meditation, and those who have forgotten this confuse the means with the end (famously, confuse the finger pointing to the moon with the moon itself). Seen thus, as a tool to further enlightenment, no-self can be seen as in no way contradicting the contingent philosophies of karma and re-birth. Ajahan Jagaro discusses this concept of logical consistency in a speech to the Buddhist Society of Victoria in 1997. He emphasizes the lack of self as being the central point of karma – it is only when we accept no-self that we can possibly comprehend the orderliness and natural regime of karma. ‘There is no contradiction at all in the teaching of anatta and kamma. They flow together very well because of the law of dependent origination and the law of kamma. That is why it works the way it does, without anybody ordering it. It is orderly by its very nature…. It does not matter whether people have different religious beliefs, if they have the law of kamma by whatever word they call it, they can live together. It does not contradict with the law of anatta. Because there is no one driving, no one in the driver's seat, the laws operate and everything is orderly. No punishment, no reward, on favours, just orderly.’
All are intrinsically and essentially bound together in a fluid and at times subjectively interpreted, holistic view of personhood. The Buddha is often attributed with refusing to answer direct questions about the nature of existence. Many areas of Buddhism, perhaps most notably Zen Buddhism, focus far more strenuously on practice of Buddhism rather than its scholarly study and breaking down into logical perceptions. There are perhaps good reasons for this. At some level, accepting either existence or non-existence of the self can have dubious ethical consequences. If, as a result of physical death, the self continues on, then it seems hardly important what the body does. An unchanging and eternal self will not be affected by the actions of a mere body. Likewise, if with physical death the self ends, then there is no logical restraint upon actions of the body, as no sanctions can exist. Some ethical theorists suggest that morality requires such restraints, though perhaps a growing secular or even atheist movement might beg to differ. In the case where things exist through interdependent arsing, however, both absolute existence and non-existence are impossible. Perhaps then to seek answers to Buddhism’s apparent internal paradoxes is to miss the message. The Buddha famously gives the example of a man wounded by a poison arrow , who is desperate to know the source of his injury to the nth degree before allowing himself to be treated and so dies for the lack of the treatment he could have received had he simply let go of his questions. The Buddha left unanswered certain metaphysical questions because metaphysical theories are not useful, ‘not conductive to aversion, detachment, cessation, tranquillity, penetration, realization, and nirvana. There are repeated warnings about becoming enmeshed in views, or being fettered with views.’
Bibliography
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Mills, Laurence-Khantipalo Buddhism Explained Silkworm 1999
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Parfit, Derek Reasons and Persons 1984 OUP
Rahula, Walpola What the Buddha Taught Grove Press, 1972
Siderits, Mark (Ed), ‘Self, No Self? Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological, and Indian Traditions’ Seoul National University 2010
Siderits, Mark Buddhism as Philosophy: An Introduction Hackett 2007
Siderits, Mark, Thompson, Evan, Zahavi, Dan (Eds) Self, No Self?, Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological, and Indian Traditions 2010, Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2011
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Web sources
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Crook, John ‘The Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra’ 1992 http://www.westernchanfellowship.org/lib/wcf////the-prajnaparamita-heart-sutra/
D'Amato, Mario, Jay L. Garfield, and Tom J. F. Tillemans (ed) ‘Pointing at the Moon - Buddhism, Logic, Analytic Philosophy’ New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Scholarship Online. Oxford University Press. 23 May 2011
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In the discourse between King Melinda and the Buddhist monk Nagsena , the king asks the monk how rebirth can take place without the transmigration of something. He asks, in fact, the intuitive question – if there is no ‘self’ existing, what is it which survives to be reborn in another life, and what is it that accrues either positive or negative karma and can be seen to be rewarded or punished in future incarnations for the actions of past lives?
I wish to look first at general Indian philosophical ideas about self and the early thinking behind karma and rebirth. I hope to be able to show how Buddha demonstrated that anatman can logically allow for both karma and rebirth.
At around the time of the Buddha, there were many philosophies of the self. The Upanishads put forth the self as a stable and constant substance – atman. This substance may change in terms of qualities over time, but not in quantity. In other words there is always just the one self behind the changing circumstances of each individual’s existence. I may grow fat and change my musical tastes, but the ‘me’ that undergoes these changes remains constant. Atman is an extension of this generally acceptable recognition of the permanence of self over time within one lifetime, to permanence of self over many lifetimes.
Buddha argues that this is a fallacy and there is no self. For Buddha, persons are composed of five aggregates – skandhas – physical and mental processes of which our experience of ourselves is composed. If there were such anything as a self, it would have to be in the five aggregates, but since these are, by their nature, impermanent, a permanent self is impossible.
“According to the Buddhist tradition, both physical and mental phenomena arise, exist, and pass away within a vast, interrelated network of causes and conditions. This continual process of arising, existing, and passing away is the process of dependent origination, one of the core notions of Buddhist thought. Buddhism argues further that all entities, events, and processes have no substantial reality outside of this dynamic matrix of dependent origination. So, things like chariots, pots, and persons are ultimately empty of fixed or intrinsic nature.”
This, clearly, is one of the biggest challenges for adherents of Buddhism – accepting the hugely counter-intuitive claim that no ‘self’ exists. One common argument put forth against no-self here is that the Buddha himself refers to a self in his own teachings. However, it can be seen that ‘I’ is merely a helpful designator. Gowans identifies a ‘process self’ to which he says the ‘I’ refers – but the very use of the word propagates the concept the Buddha is eschewing. That which we perceive as a self is merely a series of interconnected happenings, the skandhas. Gowans refers to these as a ‘nexus of processes such as experiencing, remembering, imagining and feeling’ – usually what we would come to accept as self-consciousness. Whilst ultimately there are no selves, the Buddha used references to a process self to make his teachings accessible to those still attached to a self of concrete substance. Other proponents of no-self theory suggest that it is possible to ‘eliminate the notion of the self and its identity, and yet on pragmatic grounds continue to permit the use of the language of personal identity.’
Perhaps the most famous non-Buddhist exponent of this conceptualization of ‘personhood’ is David Hume. He expressed it thus:
For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other ['perception' is here a general word for any mental activity] of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception… '[mankind] are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.'
Hume’s doubts are echoed by a more modern Buddhist commentary:
Where is the self? Is it the totality of the body? Is it in the body at all? What is its relation to the body? As you read this - try to find it. Paradoxically while you will have little doubt about the fact of your existence, the precise location or mode of being of what you appear to be is very far from obvious. Similarly, if you seek to locate the roots of experience, whether of sensation, volition, thought or awareness, you again find yourself tumbling into an absence of certainty, into a great doubt.
Part of the issue is certainly our perception of self as continuous over time. It seems clear to me that I am today a very different person as a forty-four year old father of two, spouse, teacher, author to the person I was as a newly arrived University undergraduate. However, the very language I am compelled to use reinforces continuity, in that I am talking of ‘me’ in both cases. A less personal account would talk of there being a forty-four year old and there having been an undergraduate, without personal pronouns to confuse the issue. Hume directly says that all ‘nice and subtle’ issues surrounding personal identity are more to do with grammar than with philosophy – presaging Wittgenstein’s more radical approach. However, whilst it is very clearly true that these people are different, I think it would be absurd to claim that the former was not the latter in some sense. I cannot realistically claim to be a truly different person, as evidenced by ongoing legal trails of Nazi war criminals, for example. I would still be held accountable for actions carried out by my previous self. Raymond Martin suggests that there is a distinction between what Buddhists might accept and that which Western philosophers feel comfortable accepting in relation to an understanding about the self. He states that some Western philosophers - reductionists who hold a ‘metaphysical view that does not commit one to any particular normative theory or to any view about how on relational grounds personal identity over time should be understood’ - would be comfortable with the Mahayana Buddhist idea that the self is a fiction ultimately but that conventionally can be held to exist for pragmatic purposes. However, they might not be prepared to go as far as to accept that brains, bodies and associated psychological events are equally only conventionally real and ultimately non-existent. Philosophers such as Hume and, more recently, Derek Parfit (sometimes known as ‘bundle theorists’ for their idea, akin to skandhas or aggregates in Buddhism, that we are bundles of experiences at any one moment in time, rather than a conscious ego doing the experiencing) have suggested that what we call a person is firstly a series of thoughts, feelings, associations and other mental events which is, secondly, knitted together through a variety of causal events of which memory is one of the most important. For Parfit, selves are much like clubs or associations: ‘Does the Maryland Philosophy Club exist as a thing in its own right? The answer would seem to be no. For there to be a Maryland philosophy club is nothing more than for there to be certain people who have decided to associate with one another for certain purposes and talk about that association in a particular way. The club has no individuality or integrity in its own right…’ He is not denying that for conventional purposes one can talk of a club doing this, or supporting that, but that ultimately the club is only collection of essences, contingent for its identity upon causal relations. Hume clearly stated a similar view, referring to the soul as ‘a republic or commonwealth, in which the several members are united by the reciprocities of government and subordination, and give rise to other persons, who propagate the same republic, in the incessant changes of its parts'. Thus it is that for Buddhists, the self exists as a collection of experiences but not as an enduring, unchanging atman as espoused by earlier Hindu belief and as commonly accepted in both secular and religious Western thought.
Karma and rebirth were around as philosophical traditions long before Buddhism. It was widely believed that beings died and were then reborn in some way. Human beings, and indeed all other living creatures, did not live only one life, but returned again and again to this world in an unremitting progression of death and rebirth. In India, this is known still as samsara, or “wandering” from one life to the next one. Initially, the idea of samsara may seem to be an opportunity, a possibility to enjoy some of the things we missed in this life or to make reparations (as in ‘Groundhog Day’), but in ancient India, samsara was an encumbrance. It was a burden to be escaped through one of two routes: performance of good actions (karma) in anticipation of a better rebirth or renouncing action altogether and bringing the cycle of death and rebirth to an end. In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, a sage named Yajñavalkya compares this series of human lives to the movement of a caterpillar from one blade of grass to another: “It is like this. As a caterpillar, when it comes to the tip of a blade of grass, reaches out to a new foothold and draws itself onto it, so the self (atman), after it has knocked down this body and rendered it unconscious, reaches out to a new foothold and draws itself onto it.” Karma was the universal law governing this rebirth – making sure that intention of actions was reflected in the outcome of future and present lives. Karma, then, determines where (that is, in which plane of existence) and as what (that is, what kind of being) a being will be reborn as. So whilst someone may have recently led a good and honest (or moral) life, they might still be reborn as a slug or into a lower plane of existence as the result of negative karma accumulated from lives previous to the last one. One question here might be why did the current life not reflect such karmic justice? Swami Shivananda states:
“If the virtuous man who has not done any evil act in this birth suffers, this is due to some wrong act that he may have committed in his previous birth. He will have his compensation in his next birth. If the wicked man who daily does many evil actions apparently enjoys this birth, this is due to some good Karma he must have done in his previous birth. He will have compensation in his next birth. He will suffer in the next birth. The law of compensation is inexorable and relentless.”
In some commentaries, it is suggested that this is a rather facile response which essentially explains any and all apparent inconsistencies in moral standing, injustices in the world and individual ‘luck’ and is, of course, empirically impossible to argue. Karma was certainly used historically within Hindu traditions to negate complaints about present-life situations. Laurence Mills suggests a kinder interpretation, however, arguing that teaching of re-birth gives value to life and brings a sense of justice to the seeming chaos of injustice apparent in the modern world. Rebirth, he argues, can explain why the evil seem to prosper and the virtuous may lead unhappy lives.
The central question, however, is not whether the teaching of rebirth offers moral succour to those in need (which well it might, much in the same way as the promissory rewards of heaven and hell in Christianity) but whether karma and rebirth can logically persist as doctrines in the face of no self. The Consistency objection certainly maintains that they cannot. If there is no constant and consistent self, what is it that karma affects? White frames the issue thus, paraphrasing Griffiths on survival after death: ‘Buddhist karmic theory is caught in a contradiction: in order to explain survival of death and re-birth, Buddhists have to suppose that there is an atman, but according to the anatman doctrine which they accept, there is no such thing.’ Additionally, if a person is merely a series of interconnected events and dispositions which are ever changing, then any karmic come-uppance will be affecting a different set of skandhas, or a different ‘person’. This objection was perhaps first enunciated by the Greek comic playwright Epicharmus. He tells of a debtor arguing to his creditor that, given the changing nature of the world, he is no longer the same person who borrowed the money and thus cannot be held accountable for its return. The creditor knocks the debtor to the ground and, in the face of the latter’s protestations, claims to be a different person to he that hit the debtor just moments ago, and is thus falsely accused. This tongue in cheek objection is actually very real – the implication of no-self on moral theory is potentially huge.
Two principal objections pertain to karmic morality. Firstly, it is clear from many sayings of the Buddha and later writings that all is suffering and that the suffering is felt at an individual level. It is the individual, a distinct person, who experiences suffering. Karmic theory would suggest that, since the person ceases to exist at death as no ‘self’ continues into a new body, then the person lumbered with serving the karmic death of the previous life is in fact a different person. This seems impossible to justify. A second objection relates to the very possibility of nirvana, or escape from the cycle of rebirth and death. Buddhist thinking has those born with heavy karmic debt to work through accepting their lot with resignation, happy in the knowledge that they are working towards a better rebirth. In reality, such compassionate understanding and acceptance of one’s lot might be harder to swallow, and resulting indignation and disaffection can only increase negative karma. As such, karmic debt can only grow for the vast majority of those unlikely to achieve enlightenment. Ernest Valea, in a paper on the logical contradictions within Buddhism, offers two examples from World War II to make these points. Firstly, he suggests that for an individual, such as Hitler, many lives would be required to pay off the karmic debt acquired. However, there would be no connection between the person of Hitler, and the child born with Hitler’s karmic debt. The child would have no awareness of ‘its’ previous monstrous crimes, and would live a harsh and cruel life. This procedure would repeat countless times as Hitler’s debt was worked through. In this entire regime of repayment of karmic debt, Hitler himself, who ceased to exist at his own physical death, repays nothing. In addition to this, each person living under the gloom of Hitler’s karma would undoubtedly feel resentment and indignation, thus increasing rather than decreasing the karmic debt. Valea goes on to discuss the plight of the Jews, suggesting that under karmic law, the genocide should not cause us to raise an eyebrow, as clearly they were being justly punished for previous bad karma; this line of reasoning justifies any and all conceivable crime. In a further twist, Valea suggests that the guards who killed the Jews would in turn be ‘punished’ for their crimes, and their executioners in turn would be ‘punished’ and so on in a never-ending cycle of karmic retribution. It is examples such as these which led Griffiths to call Buddhist karmic theory ‘morally repugnant’.
Much of the confusion here might be down to a Western conceptualisation of karma as having intent. It is true that karma – or action – is accrued by individuals in line with their intentions (so that unintended consequences do not attract karma). However, karma itself, the doctrine, is not some God-like figure passing judgement; karma itself has no intention and hence cannot punish or reward. These are ideas borrowed from a religious (with a capital ‘R’) understanding of justice. Suppose, answers Nagasena in conversation with King Milanda,
‘that a man were to set fire to a village by careless use of an oil lamp. Would the king find him guilty, or would he accept the argument, "The flame of the lamp... was one thing; the fire which burnt your village was another thing?”
"In spite of whatever the man might say, the one fire was produced from the other.”
"Just so, great king, it is one name-and-form which has its end in death, and another name-and-form which is reborn. But the second is the result of the first, and is therefore not set free from its evil deeds.” Milindapaiha p. 47 (SBE)
Buddha’s response to the kinds of objections raised by Valea is the idea of interdependent arising. All things – or processes – are directly in existence as a result of the immediately preceding state of affairs – or processes. The skandhas which make me who I am right now are such as they are because of the make-up of the skandhas which came before them moments ago – and so on into the future. Buddha, then, proposed a sequence of causality which ensures unbroken continuity from one state of existence to the next. My current set of aggregates or skandhas are the result of the previous karma accumulated by my immediately preceding skandhas. An example of this is also offered by Nagasena. He postulates a lamp burning all night. ‘Is it the same flame that burns in the first watch of the night, Sir, and in the second? ... Just so, O king is the continuity of a person or thing dharma maintained. One comes into being and another passes away; and the rebirth is, as it were, simultaneous. Thus neither as the same nor as another does one go on.’
Interdependent (or dependent) arising can also be used to contest the objection to no-self raised by rebirth. The objection is similar to that which arises in the case of karma. If no permanent self exists, and there is no self to pass on to a new life, exactly what is it that is being reborn? The idea of dependent or interdependent arising states that the skandhas at the time of death are causally linked to the skandhas which cross the threshold of death and in turn give rise to a new set of skandhas. If the validity of interdependent arising were to be shown as faulty, there would perhaps be a serious problem for the philosophies of no-self, karma and rebirth, but Gowans insists that the Buddha’s teachings, as and of themselves, do appear to be consistent and non-contradictory. Gowans states that ‘understanding {dependent origination} is equivalent to understanding Buddha’s teaching as a whole.’
There would appear, then, to be a number of misunderstandings which give rise to the conception that karma and re-birth are a contradiction to the notion of no-self.
Firstly, it must be understood that there is no generic one-definition Buddhist version of either karma or re-birth which one can encapsulate as discrete and hence attempt either to contradict or support. Whilst it would be an exaggeration to say that there are as many versions of Buddhism as there are Buddhists, there is certainly an element of truth to this line of reasoning. There are substantial differences between as well as within the major Buddhist schools – Mahayana and Theravada. Their versions of the karma and re-birth story are radically different. Hence the first major misunderstanding is that there is a single coherent no-self theory within Buddhism which can be contested. Much as one can quote-mine the Bible to find support for directly conflicting stands on any number of issues, so one can turn to ‘Buddhism’ and find the same. Mahayana Buddhism, for example, reinterprets no-self as ‘emptiness’ in a far more radical manner than the Pali Canons of earlier Buddhism. The Heart Sutra – a ‘clarifying’ summary of a wider range of Mahayana Buddhist scripts – states that ‘Form is precisely emptiness And emptiness precisely form’ and places such emptiness at the very centre of its philosophy. Not only is there no self, but the idea of emptiness expands to encompass all that there is, or rather isn’t, a pre-cursor of Kant’s noumena, perhaps, unknowable given our tools for knowledge. ‘This is the root of the Mahayana. So also, however, is the opposite realisation. If all form is precisely emptiness, emptiness nonetheless appears to us as form.’ Within the context of this greater understanding of no-self, the idea of karma plays a much diminished role. Although the term karma as used by Buddhists has the roots within the Hindu word interpreted most often as a form of destiny or duty, the Buddhist word is used much differently. Alexander Berzin describes karma under the Indo-Tibetan tradition as being ‘merely’ the impulse to perform an act – the mental urge to what he then terms as karmic action. These may even be what Western secular philosophy would term as ‘unconscious urges’. The results or consequences are only apparent if the urge, or karma, is acted upon. ‘…from the point of view of the Indian Mahayana tenet systems and all Tibetan traditions of them, except Gelug Prasangika, karma is exclusively a mental factor, an impulse. It is the impulse that draws us toward a specific experience or object. More specifically, it is the impulse that brings us toward an activity, whether doing, saying, or thinking something.’
Secondly, there is a tacit assumption, in much of the literature rebuking no-self as inconsistent and flawed, that the idea of karma is related to a theory of ethics. Again, the various schools of Buddhism have a wide ranging take on what karma is and is not. In the Theravada school, certainly as widely practised in Thailand, for example, karma is seen as reward and punishment – just dessert for intentional actions performed in this or a previous life. There is even disagreement over the impact of intentional and unintentional acts, as evidenced by the previous example of the inadvertent fire caused by the careless owner of the lamp. However, the Theravada school, though often proclaimed as the closest to Buddha himself, grew as a direct response to the status quo of traditional Indian thought and has been identified by some as being shaped to suit the existing hierarchical structure of the caste system, for example. Karma and re-birth together could explain the apparent inconsistencies of earthly existence as well as maintaining structures which society and culture deemed necessary. (Ananda himself drew together the monks of his time, openly chastising them for the creation of hierarchy and the attachment to ritual, telling them they were missing the essence of the Buddha’s message. ‘Thus it is said that in the early Sangha there was no hierarchy and locus of authority; while the leaders and older monks deserved respect and privilege in etiquette, they could only advise and instruct, not legislate or compel. The elders did not possess Episcopal authority; at best they were the chief teachers of the order.’ )
In subsequent more developed versions of Buddhist theory, karma plays no such sanctioning role. Karma can be likened to an energy flow, or a tide in the sea – it certainly causes effects, as a strong wind might fell a tree, but to speculate about the intention of the wind, or the concept of justice for the tree, is to impose another set of understandings which has no place in any meaningful account of karma. ‘…the whole idea of guilt and punishment… is alien to the Buddhist view of Karma. To say she deserved it implies there is somebody else sending punishment. Buddhism never says that.’ Damien Keown underlines this very clearly. ‘Karma is not a system of rewards and punishments meted out by God but a kind of natural law akin to the law of gravity...karma as a religious concept is concerned not with just any actions but with actions of a particular kind. Karmic actions are moral actions, and the Buddha defined karma by reference to moral choices and the acts consequent upon them. He stated, ‘It is intention, O monks, that I call karma; having willed one acts through body, speech, or mind’ (A.iii.415)’
Thirdly, much of the Buddhist tradition, being written hundreds of years after the Buddha, can be seen as open to interpretation. Buddha himself claimed to speak in languages suited to his audience, and much of what is accepted Buddhist lore can be seen through such filters. It is often claimed, for example, that Buddha himself remembered a range of past lives, recalling historical detail and an essence of himself in each incarnation. This would seem to directly contradict no-self and place an unsurpassable barrier to the understanding of the Buddha’s message. If the Buddha himself can recall past lives with biographical detail, then clearly something of himself has survived, to be re-expressed in each new life – that something is a self by any other name. However, seen in a light of parable, the Buddha’s stories of previous lives serve to underline and elucidate various aspects of Buddhist thought for those follower’s requiring explanations at such a level. One can see obvious parallels in the modern Christian debate over the literal interpretation of the Creation story versus the papal acceptance of biological evolution as fact. In much the same way, Tibetan Buddhism has clung to many images of gods and goddesses, which seems to be in contradiction to the accepted non-deity version of Buddhism favoured elsewhere. Monks within that tradition will answer clearly that of course there are not literal gods, but that the stories of the gods serve a function for those who require such an exposition of Buddha’s teachings. Thich Nhat Hanh makes this precise point: ‘When I read any scripture, Christian or Buddhist, I always keep in mind that whatever Jesus or the Buddha said was to a particular person or group on a particular occasion. I try to understand the context in which they spoke to understand their meaning. What they said may be less important than how they said it…But if we analyse their words to find the deepest meaning without understanding the relationships between the speaker and his listeners, we may miss the point.’ The personification of various Buddha traits is both a product of and a service to our innate story-telling nature and over thousands of years a blurring of lines between parable and reality is inevitable.
Thich Nhat Hanh cuts to the very heart of the Buddha’s message when he suggests that in effect, attachment of any kind is the thing which needs transcending. He says that the Buddha used no-self as a means to react against his epoch, and specifically against what he saw as the damaging notion of atman as adopted by the Brahman priests of his time. But, an attachment to no-self was equally an attachment, and the message of the Buddha was to free oneself of attachment, not to re-attach to a different doctrine. ‘…when Buddhists began worshipping the idea of emptiness, [Buddha] said, “It is worse if you get caught in the non-self of a flower than if you belief in the self of a flower.”
No-self was intended as an instrument of meditation, and those who have forgotten this confuse the means with the end (famously, confuse the finger pointing to the moon with the moon itself). Seen thus, as a tool to further enlightenment, no-self can be seen as in no way contradicting the contingent philosophies of karma and re-birth. Ajahan Jagaro discusses this concept of logical consistency in a speech to the Buddhist Society of Victoria in 1997. He emphasizes the lack of self as being the central point of karma – it is only when we accept no-self that we can possibly comprehend the orderliness and natural regime of karma. ‘There is no contradiction at all in the teaching of anatta and kamma. They flow together very well because of the law of dependent origination and the law of kamma. That is why it works the way it does, without anybody ordering it. It is orderly by its very nature…. It does not matter whether people have different religious beliefs, if they have the law of kamma by whatever word they call it, they can live together. It does not contradict with the law of anatta. Because there is no one driving, no one in the driver's seat, the laws operate and everything is orderly. No punishment, no reward, on favours, just orderly.’
All are intrinsically and essentially bound together in a fluid and at times subjectively interpreted, holistic view of personhood. The Buddha is often attributed with refusing to answer direct questions about the nature of existence. Many areas of Buddhism, perhaps most notably Zen Buddhism, focus far more strenuously on practice of Buddhism rather than its scholarly study and breaking down into logical perceptions. There are perhaps good reasons for this. At some level, accepting either existence or non-existence of the self can have dubious ethical consequences. If, as a result of physical death, the self continues on, then it seems hardly important what the body does. An unchanging and eternal self will not be affected by the actions of a mere body. Likewise, if with physical death the self ends, then there is no logical restraint upon actions of the body, as no sanctions can exist. Some ethical theorists suggest that morality requires such restraints, though perhaps a growing secular or even atheist movement might beg to differ. In the case where things exist through interdependent arsing, however, both absolute existence and non-existence are impossible. Perhaps then to seek answers to Buddhism’s apparent internal paradoxes is to miss the message. The Buddha famously gives the example of a man wounded by a poison arrow , who is desperate to know the source of his injury to the nth degree before allowing himself to be treated and so dies for the lack of the treatment he could have received had he simply let go of his questions. The Buddha left unanswered certain metaphysical questions because metaphysical theories are not useful, ‘not conductive to aversion, detachment, cessation, tranquillity, penetration, realization, and nirvana. There are repeated warnings about becoming enmeshed in views, or being fettered with views.’
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