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by Stephen
Batchelor
This unpublished
essay was written for a conference on Buddhism and Psychology in Los
Angeles in May 1998.
Buddhism:
Here is a poem that
suggests, I hope, the theme of this essay. The writer is Nagarjuna. He
lived in India about seven hundred years after the Buddha.
Someone
Blocked by confusion
I survive by forging a destiny
Through impulsive acts.
Self-consciously
I enter situations
Where personality unfolds
And world impacts
On my sensitive soul.
Personality creates
Self-consciousness
Just as attention,
The eye and a colourful shape
Trigger vision.
Impact is the
meeting
Of self-consciousness
Senses and world.
It leads to experience
I crave to have and avoid.
Craving makes me cling
To sensuality, opinions
Rules and selves.
Clinging is to
insist
On being someone;
Not to cling
Is to be free to be no one.
To be someone is to
be
Self-conscious, impulsive,
Thinking, feeling body,
Which is born, ages, dies,
Suffers torment, grief, pain,
Depression, anxiety.
Anguish emerges
When someone is born.
Impulsive acts
Are the root of life.
Fools are impulsive
But the wise see things as they are.
When confusion stops
Through practising insight
Impulsive acts will cease.
By stopping this
That won’t happen.
Anguish will end. [1]
It would undermine
the power of Nagarjuna’s poem to dissect it for general psychological
truths. When a poem speaks to us, it doesn’t impart information, which we
can retain and analyse, but responds to the questions life poses. It helps
us experience ourselves in another way. Yet both Buddhist tradition and
Western scholars insist on regarding Nagarjuna as a philosopher rather
than a poet. He is known as the founder of the Madhyamaka school and
considered the personification of Buddhist critical thought. Nagarjuna’s
poems are buried beneath an overlay of systematic polemic. His verses are
reduced to logical propositions. Poetry is abandoned in favour of reason.
The status of
Buddhism is as problematic as that of Nagarjuna. The word "Buddhism" has
no exact equivalent in the Asian societies where the Buddha’s teachings
flourished. It was coined by Western scholars in the 19th century in order
to describe the diverse views and practices found through Asia that trace
themselves to the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama. Scholars likewise
regard as normative the institutional structures such as monasteries and
temples common in Asian societies. They assume what they call "Buddhism"
to be a religion, broadly comparable to what we understand by the word
"religion" in the West.
Such assumptions are
difficult to weed out once they have taken root. If we assume Nagarjuna to
be a philosopher, we will want to spell out his position -- although he
refuses to be drawn into any such stance. If we assume Buddhism to be a
religion, we will want to know what it has to say about God -- even though
Buddha never used a term that suggests what we in the West mean by "God."
So is Buddhism a
psychology or psychotherapy? While the interface between Buddhism and
these fields is a fruitful area of contemporary intercultural dialogue, it
is as problematic to equate Buddhism with psychology or psychotherapy as
it is with philosophy or religion. In each case, we fall prey to the same
tendency to identify Buddhism with something comparable in our own
culture. Such identification makes it easier to grasp what otherwise
appears amorphous, ambiguous and confusing.
It is not that
Buddhism has nothing of interest to say to psychologists, theologians or
philosophers. We could mine any number of seams within it and uncover a
range of psychological, philosophical and even theological material. But
this mining metaphor suggests another question: what kind of thing is it
in which these "seams" occur? I find it useful to think of "Buddhism" as a
culture. Or more precisely: a culture of awakening. [2] As a culture of
awakening, the term "Buddhism" denotes an internally-coherent set of
values and goals ( "awakening," "intelligence," "compassion,"
"non-violence," etc.) to be realized through a range of philosophical,
psychological, ethical, social, contemplative and artistic practices. To
reduce it to any one of these values or practices would undermine its
integrity as a culture. Just as (following the Buddha’s example of the
blind men and the elephant) we would fail to honor the integrity of an
elephant if we identify it with either its trunk, its legs or its tail.
To think of
"Buddhism" as a transnational and transethnic culture of awakening forces
us to compare it with Western culture in its totality rather than with any
one of Western culture’s many aspects. The very attempt to identify
Buddhism with a particular component of Western culture betrays the
(probably unconscious but nonetheless hubristic) exercise of Western
cultural hegemony. While it may be convenient to treat Buddhism as an
oriental outpost of psychology, philosophy or religion, to do so
effectively contains the Dharma (as Buddhists call Buddhism) within a
manageable and familiar compartment of Western discourse. By thus making
Buddhism our own, we neutralize the strange disquiet of its otherness, and
find ourselves confidently announcing the immanent emergence of "Western
Buddhism." [3]
Mind:
As soon as we start
regarding Buddhism as a psychology or psychotherapy, we determine in
advance the kind of questions we are going to ask of it. We assume and
expect Buddhism to have something worthwhile to say about the nature of
mind. And given the way that certain schools of Buddhism have evolved, we
do find doctrines and practices that confer to "mind" (citta / manas /
vijnana / hsin / sems / rig pa) exactly the sort of primacy we might
expect. We are pleasantly surprised to find how psychologically astute
this ancient tradition turns out to be.
This is nothing new.
Ever since Westerners have been interested in Buddhism, they have read
their own preoccupations and desires into its texts. From Schopenhauer
onwards, Western advocates of Buddhism have been impressed by the
compatibility of its teachings with their own way of seeing the world.
Buddhist teachings have confirmed the views of theosophists, fascists,
environmentalists, rationalists, quantum physicists and new-age shamans
alike.
From a wide range of
available canonical materials we tend to choose only those texts that
confirm what we are already predisposed to find there. Given the
prevailing interest in psychology, translators translate, writers write
and publishers publish texts that affirm the pre-eminence of psychological
insight in Buddhism. In response to this interest, Asian Buddhist teachers
offer courses on Buddhist psychology. A similar process must have happened
when Buddhism found its way into other non-Indian cultures (such as China,
Japan and Tibet) in the past. Buddhist practices will only be taken up if
they can be articulated in a way that responds to the specific needs of
people living at specific times and places. The forms Buddhism assumes are
to a considerable degree contingent upon the cultures in which it finds
itself. So in a secular and psychologically literate culture, it is hardly
surprising that Buddhism is presented as secular and psychologically
literate so that answers can be found for our secular and psychological
problems.
Collapse into a
solipsistic tailspin is avoided, however, by an equal pull in the opposite
direction. Whenever it finds itself in a new situation, Buddhism is faced
with a dilemma. It has to find a language which appeals and makes sense to
its audience, while presenting ideas and practices that are
counter-intuitive and unsettling. The Buddha described what he taught as
"going against the stream" (patisotagami). Just as we may be attracted to
the Buddhist analysis of the psychological origins of anguish, we may be
intuitively uncomfortable with the language of nirvana, no-self and
emptiness. To engage with Buddhism is not only to pursue ideas that
resonate with one’s own intuitions, but also to confront ideas that
conflict with one’s own intuitions.
In the early Pali
discourses, the Buddha rarely confers on "mind" (citta / mano / vinnana)
the sort of primacy it has come to assume in the later contemplative
traditions, which have become so prominent in the transmission of Buddhism
to the West (e.g Zen, Dzogchen, Mahamudra, Vipassana). [4] In describing
experience, the historic Buddha uses neither mentalist ("mind") nor
dualistic ("body and mind") language. His most common frame of reference
is that of five "aggregates" (skandha): physicality (rupa), feeling-tone (vedana),
perception (samjna), impulse (samskara) and consciousness (vijnana). This
list strikes Western readers as awkward and puzzling. [5] We do not
intuitively think of or feel about ourselves as five interactive
"aggregates." It’s hard to imagine people anywhere intuitively relating to
themselves in this way.
Confusion about and
resistance to the idea of "aggregates" is illustrated by how it is
sometimes assumed that the aggregate of physicality (rupa) refers to the
body alone. This allows us to treat the five aggregates as an elaborate
way of talking about "body and mind." But traditional texts make it quite
clear that physicality refers to the entire range of material conditions
both inside and outside our bodies. It includes not only the sense-organs
but also their objects: colours/shapes, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile
sensations, as well as such disparate things as space, gender, heat,
nutriment, decay, impermanence and so on. [6] As we study this model, a
picture emerges of a seamless, dynamic process of experience, where not
only the body/mind split but also the subject/object split is dissolved.
Learning to experience things in terms of these five aggregates thus
erodes our sense of being "a mind inside a body inside a world."
Nagarjuna (the
author of the poem cited above) is often regarded as the first distinctive
voice to emerge from Buddhist tradition after the historical Buddha. In
his seminal work Verses from the Center (Prajnanama mulamadhyamaka karika),
he both recovers the spirit of the early tradition and launches the
movement of critical and imaginative thinking that came to be known as
Mahayana Buddhism. Intelligence consists of twenty-seven poems, each of
which is a playful and unsettling reflection on a central theme of
Buddhist teaching (e.g. conditions, senses, aggregates, actions, anguish,
self, time, nirvana, views etc.). Yet not one of the poems takes "mind" as
its theme. The term "mind" is barely mentioned in the entire work of four
hundred and fifty stanzas.
Given the failure of
the Pali texts and Nagarjuna’s Verses to emphasize the primacy of "mind,"
how are we to account for the subsequent outpouring of mentalist language
in both philosophical and contemplative doctrines during the following
centuries?
Only after Nagarjuna
did there begin a systematic development of Buddhist philosophy. The
emergence of formal logic and epistemology in India around the time of
Nagarjuna provided a new language in which ideas could be articulated and
debated. Four broad schools of Buddhist doctrinal philosophy (siddhanta)
emerged from this context of conflicting theories. In Western terms, these
schools encompassed philosophical ideas we might label as "realist," "nominalist"
and "idealist" (though other ideas lend themselves less easily to such
comparisons).
One of the most
influential trends came to be known as the Cittamatra ("Mind Only")
school. Here mind is regarded as the substance (dravya) of reality itself.
By failing to recognize this, beings find themselves trapped in a
subject/object dualism, in which they unwittingly assume the existence of
an external non-mental world. Through both logical reflection and
meditation practice, the yogin is able to see through this illusion of
duality and come to rest in a liberating insight of "non-duality," in
which the whole of reality is realized to be the nature of mind alone.
Although the
Cittamatra’s central claim is counter-intuitive, its terms of reference
affirm the commonsense assumption that experience starts with a sense of
mind/body duality. For the Cittamatra, the sense of being "a mind inside a
body inside a world" is mistaken because we fail to recognize that world
and body in fact exist "inside" mind. While this inversion of commonsense
can only be realized through mystical intuition, the Cittamatra
nonetheless developed an intricate mentalist vocabulary to provide a
rational explanation of their views.
Another trend, known
as the Madhyamaka (Centrist) school (whose proponents saw themselves as
successors to Nagarjuna), sought to refute the mentalist views of the
Cittamatra. They never entirely succeeded. As a result, most of the
contemplative traditions of Mahayana Buddhism today bear the imprint of
Cittamatra thought.
In many of the
Buddhist meditative traditions "Enlightenment" (bodhi) is assumed to be a
private illumination occurring inside the confines of one’s mind. It is an
exclusively psychological event, sometimes described as a realization of
"true mind," "one mind," "innate awareness." This kind of language
reinforces a tendency in the Buddhist community toward a subjective
mysticism. [7] The solitary contemplative who spends all his or her time
meditating is viewed as the exemplary practitioner of the Dharma. Futile
discussions about whether someone is "enlightened" or not (or to what
degree) follow, premised on the notion of a person having had or not had
particular subjective and hence non-public insights.
This privatization
of Buddhism with its accompanying cult of Enlightenment also strengthens
the idea of a subtle (mental, nominal or energetic) entity that survives
physical death to be reborn in another body. Yet the Pali tradition, while
accepting the notion of rebirth, refrains from explaining it in terms of
such body/mind dualism. (One of the questions the Buddha famously refused
to answer is whether mind and body are the same or different.) To this day
Theravada tradition speaks of all five aggregates being immediately
reconfigured through the force of craving and action the moment after
death. Exactly how this works is unclear, but it illustrates again how
"mind" is not given the primacy attributed to it in later tradition.
Experience:
Buddhism is
essentially concerned with how we perceive and respond to reality in such
a way that we experience anguish, and with how we can transform those
perceptions and responses so that the experience of anguish is resolved.
While this process may lead to asking legitimate philosophical,
psychological and religious questions, such questions are of secondary
concern. Yet throughout its history in Asia Buddhism has offered many
answers to such questions, sometimes by drawing on and elaborating
traditional Indian ideas, sometimes by adapting ideas from other
traditions, and sometimes by developing original theories of its own. One
of the tasks of a contemporary interpretation of Buddhism is to
differentiate between teachings which address primary existential
questions and those concerned with secondary philosophical, psychological
and religious questions.
By distinguishing
between primary and secondary questions, we learn to differentiate the
core liberative project of Buddhist practice, which is not contingent on
historical time and place, from philosophical, psychological and religious
projects, which support the core project but are historically and
situationally contingent. Since Buddhist practice never has and never can
operate in a cultural void, the line between its core and secondary
projects will always be blurred. In principle, though, as long as dharma
practice remains true to its core, it should be free to discard theories
and disciplines that are no longer supportive and acquire others that are.
In practice, this has been the key to Buddhism’s survival. Each time it
has moved from one cultural situation to another, it has succeeded in
reinventing itself by doing precisely this.
To understand the
liberative project at the core of Buddhist practice, we need to know what
kind of liberation is envisioned. What does one seek to be free from? What
is the nature of unfreedom?
In the classic
formulation of the "twelve links of contingent emergence" (pratityasamutpada),
the Buddha traces the source of unfreedom to an existential confusion (avidya).
This confusion describes a "stance" in which the five aggregates are
configured in such a way that we feel ourselves to be "a self inside a
mind inside a body inside a world." Each element of this Russian-doll
reality is experienced as a discrete, isolated thing. Intellectually, we
might regard such a description of experience as naive. But this confusion
is not an intellectual problem and will not be resolved by intellectual
solutions.
Such confusion is
experienced as feeling "blocked." Having configured "self," "mind," "body"
and "world" as discrete things, each feels cut-off from the other, thus
blocking the flow of life. This leads to degrees of alienation, in which
we feel "out of touch" with our body, our emotions, other people, the
environment etc. Although there are moments (with nature, a lover, a
child, through art, psychotropic drugs, or in meditation) when the blocks
are temporarily removed, their vengeful return leads to a depressed
feeling of being trapped in a destiny over which one has no control.
Yet despite having
glimpsed a vital, unblocked, interactive and interpenetrating reality, we
still insist on the "self inside a mind inside a body inside a world"
version that depression reinforces. Moreover, we continue to be
preoccupied with strategies to ensure the survival of such "a self inside
a mind." Such strategies are often unconscious, impulsive and habitual,
frequently driven by social expectations and pressures. In longing to be
someone who stands out, we become inwardly absorbed in our destiny as an
acutely sensitive, self-conscious personality. Such introversion
intensifies the subject/object split, which in turn intensifies the
feeling of being blocked.
What one refers to
as "my experience" springs from the impact between an inwardly absorbed
subject and an unreliable, unpredictable world. What primarily matters in
"my experience" is whether I like it or not. If I do, I’ll adopt
strategies to sustain or repeat it. If not, I’ll do whatever I can to
avoid it. The tension between "self" and "world" becomes dominated by a
Janus-faced craving: pulling toward one things associated with pleasure
and pushing away whatever is associated with pain. The pull/push dynamic
of this thirst describes the underlying struggle to create a safe and
secure space for the "self" to inhabit inside "mind," "body" and "world."
It is also the pre-condition for obsessive and addictive behavior. Such
behavior focuses on acquiring and repeating sensual experiences that are
sufficiently intense to obliterate the unease of feeling alienated and
blocked. The push/pull dynamic, with its inevitable mood swings, also
seeks to stabilize itself by obsessive beliefs and opinions, which try to
define and defend the space inhabited by "self." Further control is sought
through attachment to (often arbitrary) rules and codes that provide the
"self" with conviction in its moral authority.
Such obsessive
clinging seeks to sustain the compartmentalized sense of reality
configured by existential confusion. It intensifies a fixed and solidified
sense of "self," which is felt to be both the agent and object of its
obsessions. In moments of lucidity, the inherent contradictions and even
absurdity of this situation may become apparent. But one cannot simply
choose not to cling. One realizes in such moments the extent to which one
is locked into strategies that keep one trapped. The very insistence on
being "someone" blocks the tantalizing freedom of being no one. This
hypnotic fixation drives us helplessly into conflict with a reality which
displays those very features against which we seek to secure our "selves":
elusiveness, ambiguity, unpredictability and utter disregard for the
ambitions of "selves." Aging and death, the inevitable consequences of
birth, become intolerable. As soon as "someone" is born, the anguish of
torment, grief, pain, depression and anxiety is inevitable.[8]
The core liberative
project of Buddhist practice is rooted in an intuitive understanding of
how existential confusion configures an alienated and blocked sense of
reality that predisposes us to impulsive and obsessive behavior that
generates anguish. It is not particularly difficult to grasp the logic of
this process. Indeed, what has been described might sound like no more
than a psychologized account of the somewhat tragic but unavoidable lot of
being human. "Self," "mind," "body," "world" seem so self-evidently
discrete that we find it hard to imagine them otherwise. Yet the claim of
Buddhism is not merely one of making life more tolerable, but of
re-intuiting our experience in such a way that behavior that generates
anguish stops. It is not surprising that traditional texts speak of the
project of liberation as taking many lifetimes to complete. Even if one
doesn’t believe in rebirth, a multi-life model serves as a powerful
metaphor to suggest the radically counter-intuitive nature of the task at
hand. It implies that to release the grip of existential confusion -- in
such a way that makes a difference -- requires far longer than the brief
span of a single human life.
From this
perspective, the prospect of a solitary "self" diligently practicing
"Buddhism" in the privacy of its own "mind" and "body" in the hope of
gaining "Enlightenment" so it can engage in compassionate acts in the
"world" seems not merely doomed but comic. The earnest spiritual ambition
that colors the prose of so many Dharma books is at variance with the
ironic self-regard and humility one might expect from a more sober reading
of the traditional texts. The Buddhist emphasis on self-reliance has
nothing in common with the narcissistic individualism of the late 20th
century. Such self-reliance comes from an unromantic assessment of one’s
situation, which leads to engaging in a practice to dismantle the very
assumptions of a discrete "self," "mind," "body" and "world."
The rhetoric of the
solitary quest for Enlightenment, which is found in all Asian Buddhist
traditions, has to be understood against the backdrop of societies in
which the concept of individualism as we know it did not exist. The
Buddha’s invitation to men and women to "go forth from home to
homelessness" encouraged a degree of individualism that was radical in its
time. But to assume that this seizing of personal initiative was broadly
similar to that of ambitious Western individualism would be a mistake. For
liberation was understood to take place over several lifetimes within a
defined community (sangha), with the aim of dismantling the fiction of an
inherently existent "self." Moreover, the Buddha described this process as
a path, which required the cultivation (bhavana) of a broad range of
skills, covering everything from worldview, to ethics, livelihood and
mindfulness.
So instead of seeing
dharma practice as performed by individuals, why not regard it as
performed by communities? Instead of seeing it as a private religious or
psychotherapeutic process that offers solace in this life, why not regard
it as a cultural process of liberation that evolves over generations? Why
do we tend to evaluate the Buddhist tradition in terms of its exemplary
personalities? Why not turn this assumption on its head and evaluate it in
terms of the communities, societies and cultures of awakening that
produced such people? Might the counter-intuitive challenge of the
Buddha’s teaching impel us to imagine a communal and cultural practice of
Dharma as a corrective to the current emphasis on individual practice?
What does "going forth from home to homelessness" mean when "homelessness"
best describes the condition we are already in? For a postmodern alienated
individual, shouldn’t this formula be reversed? Wouldn’t "home" as a locus
of community and culture be a more appropriate metaphor for what Buddhist
practice seeks to realize?
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Notes
1 This is a working
draft of a free verse translation of the Tibetan text of Nagarjuna's
Prajnanama Mulamadhyamaka Karika chapter 26, "Investigation of the Twelve
Links of Being." Cf: Jay Garfield (tr.) The Fundamental Wisdom of the
Middle Way. New York/Oxford: OUP, 1995, pp. 77-8. Since delivering this
paper, I have published a complete poetic translation of Nagarjuna's great
work. See Stephen Batchelor. Verses from the Center: A Buddhist Vision of
the Sublime. New York: Riverhead, 2000.
2 This idea is
further developed in my Buddhism Without Beliefs. New York: Riverhead,
1997, pp. 19-20 and passim.
3 Curiously, we do
not speak of the emergence of "Western Hinduism " or "Western Islam. "
4 When primacy is
attributed to mind (as in the opening verses of the Dhammapada), it is
moral rather than ontological in nature. Mind is seen as the paradoxically
free-but-unfree source of mental, verbal and physical acts, which generate
and color experience.
5 And is not helped
by the fact that no two translators can agree on how to render the terms.
6 These examples are
taken from Ven. Nyanatiloka. Buddhist Dictionary. Kandy: BPS, 1980, p.
102-3.
7 Although I have
suggested here that the tendency to subjective mysticism derives from
Cittamatra thinking, one could also argue that Cittamatra thought arose
from a growing interest in subjective mystical experience. Another name
for Cittamatra is "Yogacara" ( "practitioners of yoga "), which suggests
the importance of spiritual practice and mystical insight as a basis for
Cittamatra ideas. This raises the question: why did the Buddhist community
become preoccupied with these experiences and ideas? To explore this
important question would lead to social and historical considerations,
which are beyond the scope of this paper.
8 A similar attempt
to outline the 12 Links in contemporary psychological language is found in
Buddhism Without Beliefs. pp. 67-74.
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