I’m going to begin this week not with God, but with Buddhism. Because I think one of the most deep and important elements of Buddhist tradition is precisely its atheism. That atheism is, indeed, a great part of what brought me to Buddhism in the first place. The teaching on suffering was what really got me hooked on Buddhism, but it wasn’t what had got me interested in the first place; indeed, it had initially repelled me. Even despite my repulsion, I’d done a lot of reading on Buddhism during my time in Thailand; that was what made it possible for me to see how Buddhism applied directly to my life, when the time came for me to make that grand discovery. And why? Well, part of it, as I’ve said in telling the story here, was that the temples were so gorgeous and I was drawn into the worldview behind them. But there was also something that had drawn me to Buddhism well before I ever saw a Thai temple, and that was its atheism. In a journal that I wrote while travelling around India at age 19, I had noted that “in my Indian travels it was Buddhism, more than Hinduism or Islam, which seemed the most profound and interesting of the Indian religions — probably because it’s not technically a religion at all. You can be an agnostic or even an atheist and still be a Buddhist, because God or Gods don’t figure.”

I still think this is something remarkable about Buddhism, at least in its Theravāda variant. Unlike Epicureanism, a similarly atheistic tradition which died out within a century or two, Buddhist tradition survived for thousands of years while denying that there were gods out there. And I don’t think it’s just me for whom this is an appealing point: in an atheistic age where we are more aware than ever of the hideous sufferings that befall our fellow human beings, and where Darwin managed to dispense with God as the explanation for life’s diversity, Buddhism provides the kind of wise and enduring tradition that the various theisms provide, without having that God at the core. It is significant in this respect that an outspoken atheist like Sam Harris has spoken highly of “Buddhist wisdom,” even as he wishes to divorce it from “religion.”

But just as Buddhism has some of the advantages of atheism, it can also face its disadvantages – and especially, the one I first spoke of three weeks ago. I discussed the ways that the atheistic thinkers of early twentieth-century analytic philosophy, like Ayer and Moore, struggle to make sense of ideas of value and goodness, often giving highly implausible responses. But I am increasingly thinking that Buddhists face the same difficulty.

Damien Keown, widely regarded as one of the most prominent experts on Buddhist ethics, has increasingly begun putting forth the view that there is no such thing: that Buddhism is “morality without ethics,” in that Buddhists do little to justify the claims they make about what we should and shouldn’t do. I have disputed this claim in my dissertation; in Śāntideva I have found many arguments why certain actions are good and others are bad. I think such arguments are found in other Buddhist thinkers as well. But I also think there is a certain way in which Keown is on to something. The most persuasive of Śāntideva’s ethical arguments appeal to values Śāntideva expects us to already have. They have a means-end approach: since we all wish to end suffering, we should therefore take whatever action is being recommended (avoid anger, avoid lust, and so on.)

But why should we wish to end suffering? What makes suffering bad? Śāntideva responds to this question directly, in a way that no other Buddhist (that I am aware of) does. But I do not find his very brief answer satisfactory. It occurs in Bodhicaryāvatāra verse VIII.103, within his famous equalization of self and other, in which he argues that since the self is unreal, one should prevent everyone’s suffering and not only one’s own. Having said this, he entertains an objection (pūrvapakṣa) to the effect of “Why is suffering to be prevented?” (kasmān nivāryaṃ cet) and responds with sarveṣām avivādataḥ: literally “Because of the non-dispute of everyone.” Or in Crosby and Skilton’s simpler and crisper translation: “No one disputes that!”

But this won’t do. It is not just that his imagined objector does indeed seem to be disputing that suffering should be prevented. What Śāntideva is doing here is very similar to Mill’s argument in Utilitarianism that the only reason one can give for finding happiness or pleasure (or anything else) desirable is “that people do actually desire it.” G.E. Moore thought this the classic example of a “naturalistic fallacy,” of illegitimately deriving a “should” from an “is,” in that “desirable” means what should be desired rather than what is; it does not mean “able to be desired” in the way that “visible” means “able to be seen.” But as Alasdair MacIntyre points out in A Short History of Ethics, there is a way to read Mill which does not rest on linguistic equivocation, and I think the same applies to Śāntideva (changing “pleasure” to “the absence of suffering”):

He treats the thesis that all men desire pleasure as a factual assertion which guarantees the success of an ad hominem appeal to anyone who denies his conclusion. If anyone denies that pleasure is desirable, then we can ask him, But don’t you desire it? and we know in advance that he must answer yes, and consequently must admit that pleasure is desirable.

I think Śāntideva’s argument is most persuasively read as just this sort of “ad hominem appeal.” But this is still insufficient. For one thing, many would indeed argue against ending suffering – most notably Nietzsche, who believed that suffering can ennoble us and make us better people. Or even Penelope Trunk, who, after considerable reflection, decided she would rather suffer because happiness is boring. One could, I suppose, bite the bullet and say “fine, then, those people don’t need Buddhism and their life will be perfectly good without it,” but this is not a response that would be acceptable to the vast majority of Buddhist tradition to date – certainly not to Śāntideva himself.

Moreover, Śāntideva’s very argument rests on denying one of our most deeply felt beliefs – the existence of a self. If even our basic selfhood – the one sole thing that Descartes thought completely indubitable – is available for dispute, then surely the prevention of suffering is as well. One might well reply to the ad hominem: “Well, yes, I believe my suffering should be prevented. But I also believe that there’s a self, and that that’s the whole reason it makes sense to prevent any suffering at all. If you really knock down the self, you knock down the prevention of suffering – and maybe the existence of suffering – with it.” (This point is roughly similar to Paul Williams’s objection.)

In short, Śāntideva – possibly the most sophisticated ethical theorist in Buddhist tradition – fails, like the twentieth-century analytic philosophers, to provide a satisfactory account of why we should value the things we do value. And I suspect that this is not a coincidence: that Buddhists, like empiricists, have a hard time justifying their value system because they do not assign value a place underlying the metaphysics of reality. The obvious objection to the claim is karma; but karma is held to be a potentially observable causal law of the universe, comparable in theory to the laws discovered by scientists. Karma does not make things valuable, and so it does not suffice as an explanation of the nature of value.

McMahan’s chapters are topical rather than chronological, so that he can examine the various features of the transition to Buddhist modernism. Naturally, he rounds up the most common topics: the asserted compatibility between Buddhism and science, and the idea of meditation as the most central Buddhist practice. He takes a genuinely balanced perspective on these topics that’s a welcome antidote to others. But he also touches on a few less widely noticed topics: interdependence, nature, and ordinary life. During the interview, I began to think about how closely these topics are connected with each other – and how they share a history in Buddhism that goes back long before the rise of Yavanayāna.

McMahan, more than most observers of Yavanayāna, rightly notes the extent to which Buddhist modernists affirm the very phenomena that the early Buddhists were most suspicious of. I’ve noted before how Yavanayāna Buddhists often treat “interdependence” as something to be celebrated and rejoiced in – the very opposite of the Buddha of the Pali suttas, for whom it was something to be escaped. But McMahan extends the point to two other phenomena I’d thought less about: nature and everyday life. The old texts see the forest as a fearful place, full of dangerous animals, far from contemporary ideas of celebrating nature and our harmony with it.

And in what seems to me the most original and insightful of McMahan’s contributions, he points to the way that Yavanayāna Buddhists tend to treat “mindfulness” as an appreciation of the beauties and even sacrality of everyday life in the world of mundane work and family. Drawing on Charles Taylor‘s work, McMahan notes that modernity in the West has characteristically involved just this kind of orientation. Using the term found in Ken Wilber and Martha Nussbaum, I have characterized it as Descent. Indeed for McMahan, the affirmation of everyday life is found most characteristically in modern novels, especially those of James Joyce, which highlight the subtle and particular details of everyday experience and consciousness; and it is Joyce whom Nussbaum takes, in Upheavals of Thought, as the ultimate paradigm of the descent she advocates.

It strikes me that the affirmations of interdependence and nature are themselves forms of Descent – embracing the connections of the material world with all its flaws and imperfections, avoiding attempts to transcend it. The advocates of affirming nature and interdependence tend to see themselves as opposing scientistic and technological views of the world that attack nature; but I think they’re also in their way opposed to the early Buddhist texts’ quest for an other-worldly (lokottara) nibbāna/nirvana. Buddhist modernism, then, seems to be characterized by a move from Ascent to Descent orientation – as, it would seem, is modernity in general. (I might argue that in many respects Buddhist modernism is also a move from an integrity orientation to an intimacy orientation – and in this respect it is against the grain of modernity in general. But that could be a post of its own.)

But there’s more to the story of Buddhist Ascent and Descent than this. McMahan is rightly ready in his book to note that none of the features of Buddhist modernism have been entirely novel; they all had some precedents in premodern tradition. But those precedents were found far more often in Mahāyāna than in Theravāda – and above all in East Asian Mahāyāna. Yavanayāna has a stronger Descent orientation than does Ch’an or Tiantai; but those in turn have a stronger Descent orientation than the older Indian Mahāyāna, which in turn is more of a Descent than the oldest Buddhism recorded in Pali (or Gandhari or other ancient Indian languages).

So perhaps the most interesting thing about this story is that it is in some sense linear. Depending on one’s own orientation, one could view it either as progress or as decline; but it is a continuous progress or decline, moving toward one point and away from the other. The Buddhism of the Pali suttas is not all that far removed from its contemporary rival Jainism, about as thoroughgoing an Ascent tradition as one could name – a tradition whose monks practised self-mortification in order to achieve a superhuman state of transcendental solitude. Perhaps one could even identify early Jainism as the very first step, before early Buddhism, in an Ascent-Descent movement whose latest stage is Yavanayāna.

With the rise of Mahāyāna, Indian Buddhism takes a Descending step, especially under the influence of Nāgārjuna. Nāgārjuna claims that saṃsāra and nirvana are not different from one another; nirvana is merely this world viewed properly. This statement sounds like an affirmation of everyday life, a descent, and it will be used that way later; but it only goes so far. For Indian Mahāyānists like Śāntideva, the important thing is that we normally view this world improperly, and that wrong view mires us in the terrible suffering that constitutes everyday life. Transcending that everyday world is still paramount, and one is best suited to do it as a monk, leaving work and family behind. Nature, too, remains suspect – the Indian Pure Land sūtras describe a world of beautiful buildings and carefully manicured gardens, and view it as a marked improvement on the chaotic and dangerous nature that normally surrounds us.

East Asian Buddhism, as I understand it, takes a step past Indian Mahāyāna toward Descent and immanence. For pre-Buddhist East Asian thought was already far less anthropocentric than Indian thought, more oriented to what we in the West would call nature; and Buddhism in East Asia absorbed such an orientation to the physical world. McMahan notes that classical Ch’an/Zen literature is full of stories of monks liberated at the sight of mundane natural images, like a frog jumping into a pond; this is not an idea one would find in India. Relatedly, the Huayan tradition begins to talk about interdependence in something like the positive light it takes on in Yavanayāna. For the Huayan thinker Fazang, we do not need to transcend the world, not even through knowledge of its illusory nature as in Nāgārjuna or Śāntideva: interdependence or dependent origination is the “marvelous manifestation of the cosmic Buddha,” so properly seeing the world means only “seeing it as the wonder as it is.” And East Asia also introduces the idea of sudden liberation: taking Nāgārjuna a step further, liberation is now something we can achieve not only in this life but in this moment, right here and now. (It increasingly seems to me that the Chinese and Japanese changed Buddhism at least as much as the modern West ever did.)

Despite all of this, East Asian Buddhism still retains an emphasis on monkhood. Buddhists soften their criticisms of family life when they defend the tradition in China, to win acceptance in a society whose ways of ethical thinking are heavily Confucian; but they continue to emphasize the detached, ritualized life of the monk. Ch’an and Zen affirm the everyday world, but McMahan notes that it is the monk‘s everyday world. He notes that the Zen master Dōgen had said “There is no gap between practice and enlightenment or zazen and daily life.” But, says McMahan, “In contrast to contemporary interpretations of Zen spontaneity however, this meant an intensive formalization of every activity, from meditation to using the bathroom.” (234-5) The “practice” spoken of was not merely being mindful of events in the everyday household life, but in the ritualized life of a monk. “True spontaneity, on this model, was not doing whatever one wanted; it could only come about when the extremely formal gestures and acts that made up the monastic life became ‘natural’ and effortless. Then they could be understood as expressions of buddha-nature.” (235)

Here Yavanayāna takes one more Descending step. Even though some of its most influential figures (like Anagarika Dharmapala and Thich Nhat Hanh) were and are monks, Yavanayāna Buddhists tend to downplay the importance of monasticism. Indeed, S.N. Goenka‘s organizations effectively prohibit it. One is allowed to live at a Goenka vipassanā meditation centre (and help run its activities) for a period of a few months; but one may not do it for the long term. Even if one wishes to, one cannot leave worldly society for a Goenka Buddhist society, in the way that the most devout would have been expected to follow in traditional Buddhist societies. That path of Ascent is forbidden. From the original disparagement of everyday life, Buddhists – even Theravādins like Goenka – have now moved to requiring it.

EDIT: Due to a technical glitch, the podcast was not yet available when this post first appeared. It is now available: http://newbooksinbuddhiststudies.com/2011/09/02/david-mcmahan-the-making-of-buddhist-modernism-oxford-up-2008/

Salomon argues that the manuscripts disprove an earlier model of Buddhist history – according to which there was an original council of Buddhists which established the first Buddhist canon, transmitted to disciples more or less verbatim. Instead, they show us that very different Buddhist texts were transmitted in very different places from very early on; the evidence doesn’t give us a first text that we can come back to.

The question is: what does that point imply? Heuman quotes Salomon to the effect that “none of the existing Buddhist collections of early Indian scriptures—not the Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese, nor even the Gandhari—’can be privileged as the most authentic or original words of the Buddha.’” (The first part of the quote, with the italics, is Heuman’s.) Heuman uses this claim to argue against Buddhist sectarian disputes: “Sectarian authority claims assume solid essentialist ground. That type of ground is just not there.” Let us assume for the purposes of this post that Salomon’s historical conclusions are correct. Does Heuman’s critique of sectarianism really follow?

Heuman claims: “Every school of Buddhism stakes its authority, and indeed its very identity, on its historical connection to this original first canon,” the canon established by the First Buddhist Council. But do they really? It is not the Council that was taken to have the perfect knowledge that liberates us, but rather the Buddha himself. Every tradition of Buddhism claims that its core teachings were taught by him.

And we have long known that the Mahāyāna claim to this effect is hogwash. I briefly discussed the evidence for this point before, and I am aware of no scholar with any training in historical methods who seriously contests it. Heuman quotes Paul Harrison to the effect that the Mahāyāna is much older than we had previously thought – but even he doesn’t buy the claim that the Mahāyāna was actually an esoteric teaching preached by the Buddha himself.

Rather, Salomon’s claims question further the ability of the Pali canon – the Theravāda sacred texts – to accurately represent the words of the Buddha. We have long known that the Pali texts were compiled several hundreds of years after his death by the Sri Lankan philosopher-monk Buddhaghosa (whose name, perhaps aptly, means “Voice of the Buddha”); the Kharoṣṭhī fragments cast further doubt on the accuracy of the texts he compiled. So the Pali texts are probably further from the claims of the historical Buddha than we might have thought.

But what does any of this do to undermine sectarian differences? Well, perhaps this evidence provides a way for Mahāyānists to proclaim to Theravādins: “Nyah-nyah!” They can turn the historical evidence that favoured the Theravādins on its head: maybe our texts weren’t really spoken by the Buddha, but neither are yours.

But what follows from such a point? Definitely not the “anti-essentialist” view that Heuman tries to argue, according to which “all Buddhists are 100 percent Buddhist.” That claim begs the big question: who counts as really Buddhist in the first place? As I’ve said before, if all people who call themselves Buddhists are Buddhists, then Dick Cheney can be a Buddhist simply by calling himself a Buddhist, even as he continues to promote mass murder and environmental pillage for the sake of oil profiteering. What that comes out to meaning, in the end, is that it matters not a whit whether you’re a Buddhist or not. Buddhism, on such a view, means nothing at all. And yet somehow the people who say these sorts of things still seem to call themselves “Buddhist practitioners,” as if the Buddha and his words actually mattered and were important somehow. The Heumans of the world want to have it both ways: following the Buddha matters, except that it doesn’t.

In discussing Heuman’s article, Justin Whitaker quotes Richard Gombrich to this effect: “The exegesis of the Pali canon has not yet advanced much beyond where the exegesis of the Bible stood in the middle of the 19th century…” This quote, I think, is correct. And what follows from it is that anyone who cares about the teachings of the historical Buddha should support textual studies like Salomon’s that will help us piece together the difficult task of reconstructing his ideas as best we can, just as biblical criticism has helped us to show how far the New Testament diverges from the words of the historical Jesus. What doesn’t follow is our saying: “Well, hey, we can’t actually know what the Buddha really said anyway, so we might as well just accept everything called Buddhism as genuine Buddhism.” As soon as we say this, we are saying that Buddhism doesn’t matter and there is no reason for anyone to bother calling themselves a Buddhist or engaging in any sorts of Buddhist practice.

The whole point of being a Buddhist or doing Buddhist practice is that that practice is better than other things one could be doing, or that those ideas are truer than others one could believe. (If one didn’t believe that, one would have no reason to be a Buddhist.) If one can accept that Buddhism is better than not-Buddhism, why is it so hard to accept that one kind of Buddhism could be better than another?

Now there are plenty of grounds other than connection to the historical Buddha on which one could argue for one tradition over another. It can sometimes be puzzling why the founder’s words are privileged so much – although I think there are some valid reasons to do so. By all means, say that Mahāyāna or Yavanayāna are an improvement over the teachings of the historical Buddha. Perhaps even try to argue that the Mahāyāna is closer to the Buddha’s words than we might have thought. Or make the theological claim that the different traditions are different skillful means, as long as you understand that that is a theological claim which goes against the self-understanding of most practitioners. Just don’t pretend that crucial questions which divide Buddhist practitioners from one another – should we seek our own liberation or everyone’s? Were there other buddhas after Gotama Buddha? – don’t matter.

Meanwhile, a couple of related recent American events you might not have heard of. In Maine, newly elected Republican governor Paul LePage has ordered the removal of a mural in the state Department of Labour depicting the state’s labour history, along with the renaming of conference rooms named after César Chávez and other labour organizers. The governor’s spokesman proclaimed that these symbols are “not in keeping with the department’s pro-business goals.” At the symbolic level too, the government has explicitly picked a side in a class struggle.

The same battles come up in the federal government, where House Republicans have prepared a measure to deny food stamps – the main US provision to ensure people do not starve – to striking workers. If you fight for better labour conditions, the logic appears to go, you deserve to die hungry. Some irony that all this is taking place around the 100th anniversary of the industrial disaster that helped create labour laws and labour movement in the US. (Keep in mind, too, that unions are already extraordinarily weak in the US; less than 10% of private-sector employees belong to a union, and even in the public sector the number is less than 40%.)

It has been hard for me to go through the past couple of weeks without hearing the voice of Karl Marx saying “I told you so”: class struggles are real, and the government takes the side of the property owners. It’s true that these active gratuitous assaults on labour movement are all perpetrated by Republicans, but they are just further assaults on unions that were already weakened with Democratic complicity. (Republicans have recently taken on the sadly amusing habit of calling Obama a “socialist.” Would that it were so.) I haven’t been a Marxist for a long time, but this year’s events go a long way toward making me one – not just in terms of the problem of alienation, where I’ve already discussed my agreement with Marx, but also with respect to his more central issue of class conflict.

But what I also said about Marx before still applies: he was wrong about the future. There was and will be no new preferable order. The Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson quoted an anonymous “someone” as having said “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”; as it turns out, Jameson himself had said something like this in an earlier work. I think it’s hard to dispute this quote. There is a varied number of disasters, some narrowly averted, that could mean the end of humanity: global nuclear war, emerging pandemic, change to the natural environment that comes too quickly for us to stop. But humanity going on after capitalism? It’s not entirely unthinkable, but at this point it’s very difficult to envision what that would look like, when the only really serious attempt at an alternative not only failed, but destroyed millions of lives and families along the way.

Just as before, I think there’s a close parallel between Marxism and Christianity – though rather than Jesus and the early Christians, I’m thinking here of probably the most profound and influential Christian thinker, Augustine. What Marx and Augustine share, to use Greek medical terms, is a combination of penetrating diagnosis and wrong prognosis. Augustine is quite right to point out his central “chastened intellectualist” theme of human weakness: when we make attempts at self-improvement, the persistence of our bad habits shows us just how hard it is to be better, even how much we rationalize the bad habits to ourselves. When we place our individual weakness beside the terrible crimes committed by other human beings – some of the worst having been committed in Marx’s own name – it is easy to see the power of Augustine’s mistrust of human virtue, like Marx’s insights into class conflict and alienation.

Yet Augustine’s way forward is no better than Marx’s. In his eyes, our troubles will be resolved by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ if we open ourselves up to his grace, allowing ourselves a perfectly virtuous and happy life after death. But I’ve noted before that I don’t see any reason to believe in such a thing; and even if I did, I would have significant objections to worshipping the God he describes, who damns human beings to eternal torment.

Augustine and Marx, then, both insightfully diagnose a problem but leave us without a good solution. I used to think Buddhism offered us a good way out of this dilemma, through a critique of hope: accept that the world is not as it should be, and just deal with reducing your suffering. But then Buddhists have their own kind of hope, which I also find wrong-headed: the idea that suffering can be entirely eliminated, that we can reach a state of nirvana. In Buddhism too, we face a powerful and perceptive diagnosis in the Second Noble Truth, with a misinformed prognosis in the Third.

What the poor prognoses of Marx, Augustine and the Pali suttas all share, indeed, is hope, optimism: an optimism entirely uncalled for given their pessimistic diagnoses. There isn’t going to be a new social order, and we’re going to remain surrounded by a suffering that ends in death. Nor, as the Stoics and Epicureans that Augustine criticized might think, will we be able to make ourselves good enough to transcend our evil or our suffering. No, things don’t look good for humans, and there’s no straightforward solution in sight. All we can do is keep stumbling through the evils of life – we can pursue the difficult, but worthy and surmountable, task of finding enough joy, truth and interest in life to make it well worth living.

Aristotle tells us everyone agrees the purpose of life is eudaimonia. It was once the standard to translate this term as “happiness.” This translation has started to fall out of favour, to be replaced by “flourishing” – and rightly so. For it’s pretty clear that whatever eudaimonia is – and I think Aristotle deliberately makes it hard to pin down – it is not what we usually understand by “happiness.”

Consider: near the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle tells us that everyone agrees that eudaimonia is the ultimate purpose of human life; we just don’t agree what constitutes it. But if this eudaimonia were happiness, how would we explain someone like Trunk, who has spent a great deal of time thinking about happiness – only to reject it? “I don’t want to be happy,” she says. “I want idle time to let my mind wander because the unhappy result is so interesting.”

Trunk identifies happiness with contentment, in a move similar to the utilitarians who identified it with pleasure. Now it’s true that many will say pleasure or contentment is not real happiness, that true happiness consists of something larger than that state of mind – but I suspect that they primarily do this because they are wedded to older and mostly extinct uses of “happiness,” ones that survive mostly in translations of Aristotle. Etymologically, “happy” used to mean something like “fortunate” or “blessed.” But outside of a few idioms (“a happy coincidence”), we rarely use the term this way in English anymore. Rather, happiness is about contentment or pleasure, a pleasant, enjoyable, perhaps peaceful state of mind. And for Trunk, that’s not good enough.

Trunk’s rejection of mere happiness is far from a truism. It’s not only the utilitarians (such as Neil Sinhababu) who defend happiness in this sense – a view we could reasonably call hedonism. The ancient Epicureans practised a “sophisticated” hedonism, in which we should find the happiness that comes with freedom from mental disturbance. Such a hedonism is arguably quite Buddhist as well: while the early Buddhist texts are often cagey about what exactly nibbāna implies, what descriptions there are sound a lot like Epicurean ataraxia. Tranquility. Peace. Freedom from disturbance. Above all, an end to suffering. This sounds a lot more like happiness.

But is this really the best goal to pursue? At least, is it the only goal worth pursuing? I am finding myself increasingly persuaded by Trunk’s position. We’ll have plenty of time for freedom from disturbance once we’re dead. Life gives us a shot at something more.

What is that “something more”? Trunk often contrasts the happy life with the interesting life. This point comes out in her posts about New York, which I’ve discussed before: life in rural Wisconsin is happy, but it’s not interesting. Life in New York is interesting, but it isn’t happy. But maybe that’s okay. Martha Nussbaum makes a similar point in “Transcending humanity,” the last chapter of her Love’s Knowledge: when the nymph Calypso offers Odysseus a chance to live with her in immortal bliss, we hope he turns it down, for we would lose the rest of the story. To be sure, a truly interesting life is often something we would only wish on somebody else, especially somebody fictional. One thinks of the apocryphal “Chinese curse”: “May you live in interesting times.” The reason this phrase is popular (and attributed, probably falsely, to the Chinese) is the idea that being interesting may be a curse, even though it’s something we often want. And while it’s true that often, on reflection, things get interesting in a way that on reflection we don’t want, that’s not necessarily the case.

The idea of this “curse” suggests that if we really thought about it, we’d realize that being happy is more important than being interesting. But is that necessarily true? Trunk doesn’t think so, at least for herself. Some of us, at least, would willingly accept a life that’s more exciting in exchange for its being less happy. Imagining myself in my eighties or nineties – knowing my death would come before too long – I would like to be able to look back on a life that’s been full and interesting, not merely happy. (It’s relevant here that for Aristotle, eudaimonia is an activity, as contentment and pleasure are not.)

Beyond Trunk’s post, there’s a point I tried to make to make to Neil Sinhababu: it seems there must be something good about truth in its own right; it’s basically self-contradictory to think otherwise. What follows from the goodness of truth, again, is harder to establish, but it’s another aim that seems like, in some cases at least, it’s worth pursuing at the expense of happiness.

The tougher question is what we do to decide or arbitrate among these competing ends: truth, interest, happiness. I suspect the question can’t really be decided in the general case; one must learn what’s more important in particular cases, and learn that through experience as one learns any other skills. I think this is a very Aristotelian answer, and it’s one reason I begin to see the vagueness in Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia as an asset rather than a flaw.

Deneen’s speech is a “defence of culture.” Following one Romano Guardini, Deneen understands culture in a specific sense that ties it essentially to nature, history and society. Culture thus defined is a tradition of interacting with nature and other humans, suspicious of change, deferring to the past and ready to pass it on to future generations. When defined this way, Deneen says, the enemy of culture is liberalism, the contemporary politics of individual choice and freedom at a great remove from nature, history and society. (In this sense, most of the libertarian American Tea Partiers are consummate liberals; liberalism is generally the ideology of both the modern left and the modern right.) Liberalism, Deneen says, endorses an “anti-culture,” or at least monoculture, in which the priority of individual over collective goods is everywhere enshrined. The particular kind of collective goods Deneen has in mind, I think, have above all to do with raising a family – for example, the ability to raise one’s children in an environment that is not thoroughly sexualized by scantily-clad magazine covers, Lady Gaga, Internet pornography and Bratz dolls. (The example is mine, but it’s true to Deneen’s position as I understand it.) Perhaps the most telling line in the piece, and the one that inspired me to write this entry, is this quote from Bertrand de Jouvenel: the political philosophers of liberalism are “childless men who have forgotten their childhood.”

I find Deneen’s definition of culture strange, but I won’t dwell on that point. I’m more interested in the essay because of the way it cogently expresses the critique of liberalism, as made by a literal conservatism rooted in nature and family. And I think there’s something missing from this analysis, something put in acute focus by a knowledge of South Asian traditions.

For liberalism, I submit, is not the only tradition that opposes “culture” in Deneen’s sense, wishes to free human beings against the bonds of nature and family. Rather, Indian “renouncer” traditions have been engaged in this project for hundreds of years. The Buddhist First Noble Truth, that all the conditioned things around us in the world are suffering, is relatively well known. But plenty of his non-Buddhist contemporaries said something very much like it. Classical Jain tradition, as expressed in the Tattvārtha Sūtra, aims to free the human subject from the material world and its bonds, into a liberated state called kaivalya (aloneness) – as do the Yoga Sūtras, often considered “Hindu.” One might hesitate to refer to early Buddhism as individualist, since it so readily deconstructs the self, but the same cannot be said about these other traditions – which, in some form in another, also survive to this day in India and its diaspora.

And these different Indian traditions find their social expression in monkhood – a deliberate rejection of family. Their thinkers and theorists are childless men by choice; it is not that they have forgotten their childhood, so much as they wish to transcend it. The fact of our past childhood should not be denied, but it should also not weigh down on our transcendent futures.

Now such traditions are of course far removed from the modern liberalism Deneen criticizes. Monks, more or less by definition, don’t have sex. To Jains and Buddhists and yogins, sex and related worldly pleasures are among the worst of the fetters that bind us to the world of suffering – to society and history and nature. Deneen’s conservative traditionalism has important commonalities with the Indian renouncers, most obviously a suspicion of open, or permissive, sexuality. And yet the renouncers share a great deal with liberal modernity that they do not share with the family-oriented culture embraced by Deneen. I tried to get at this point when I identified asceticism, libertinism and traditionalism as three distinct ways of life, but since then I’ve come back to thinking that the point is best expressed in Thomas Kasulis’s distinction between intimacy and integrity worldviews: modern liberalism’s integrity orientation is shared by the classical Indian renouncers.

More germane to Deneen’s points about culture, these renouncers also share modernity’s universalism. For the Jains or early Buddhists there would be no problem if everyone around the world adopted a common Jain or Buddhist culture, aimed at the renunciation of suffering. While Christians and Muslims would often believe a similar thing, their universalism is still self-consciously and essentially tied to particular historical events in a way that Buddhism, like modern liberalism, is not. Thus to the extent that Buddhists care about the “authenticity” of Buddhist teachings, it is only because the historical Buddha happened to be the only awakened one in our era.

Yet nevertheless Buddhists do look back to the Buddha’s teachings. The past great thinker is still treated as worthy of reverence. And this much, Buddhists do share with Deneen’s traditionalists, against modernity. For Deneen, if we look to the future as a place to be liberated from the past – as our increasingly science- and technology-focused education systems effectively do – we will lose something of the greatest human importance, our best guides to living well.

And on this score, if little else, I agree with Deneen. I have learned far more about living well from the Buddha and Lucretius and Aristotle than I have from contemporary philosophy or even psychology. At the same time, I do have one foot firmly planted in the universalist and individualist world of modern liberalism, to the point of not intending to have children. I suppose this all makes for a key reason Buddhism continues to hold such appeal for me: it allows us to return to the past for guidance, and yet in an individualistic way that does not bind us too closely to nature and society. (Stoicism and Epicureanism do the same things, in a way, but they have lost Buddhism’s continuity to the present day.)

No doubt Deneen and his colleagues would criticize such a view as shallow, an attempt to have one’s historical cake and eat it too. There’s a lot to such a view, and developing a critique of it would take far more than this one post. But I will start by saying that attempts at synthesis do not have to be shallow. Traditions change, develop and grow as they encounter each other – and such encounters are happening today to an unprecedented degree.

I generally lean toward saying no – and an uncertain no. I leave the possibility open that something will be revealed to me that I can be absolutely certain of; but I don’t think one exists. The happy thing about this kind of uncertainty is there’s no contradiction in it. While “there is no truth” is a contradiction because it asserts that the truth is there is no truth, and “we cannot know anything” is a contradiction because it implies that it can be known that nothing can be known, the same is not true about “we cannot be certain about anything.” The last can be asserted as a statement that is merely highly probable; it doesn’t need to be certain to be true, and therefore can be true without contradicting itself.

Still, I do think there’s one circumstance where real certainty is possible – though it is merely a hypothetical circumstance. My thoughts here go back to an exchange on an early post of mine, dealing with C.S. Lewis’s “trilemma” about Jesus. Lewis tries to argue against those who see Jesus as a great human moral teacher. Following from the (highly arguable) claim that Jesus claimed he was the only begotten son of God, Lewis tells us we have only three options: Jesus actually was the only son of God; he was lying; or he was insane. I pointed to the example of Mohandas Gandhi as someone who was at least a little bit insane, and yet also a great moral teacher. Defending Lewis, commenter DJR argued that – assuming Jesus did in fact believe he was the Son – such a belief is far more insane than Gandhi’s morally questionable beliefs and quirks. In my reply I noted:

Suppose you actually were the only begotten Son of God. How would you know? Whatever certainty you might have, whatever reasons you might have to justify the belief, couldn’t there also be someone who wasn’t the Son and had the same beliefs and certainty? Psychologically, from the inside, it would seem hard to tell the difference, unless there’s something I’m missing. The upshot of all this would seem to be: if Jesus the Christ can be relied on as a great moral teacher, then why can’t Jesus the mere human being? The core belief is true in one case and false in another, but it’s very difficult to tell which.

But I realize in retrospect that there would be a way to know. If you really were the Son of God as that idea is typically understood, you would know everything. And if you knew everything, then you could be certain that you were the Son – and you could be certain of everything else too.

I say this because I think the necessity of doubt follows from our status as finite and limited human beings. Whatever we’re most confident of, there are always other very smart people out there who have thought about the issue at length. They may very well have come up with something that we didn’t. Even assuming (as I do) that truth as such is out there and does not vary from person to person, we still can’t have absolutely reliable access to it as individuals; we could always be wrong.

A genuinely omniscient being, on the other hand, would have no such constraint. Such a being, by definition, would already know every argument that had ever made or ever would be. (And someone who was such a being could likely verify this knowledge with little difficulty.) Only in this position of omniscience would one eliminate the need for doubt, and have absolute certainty.

I suspect these points are among the reasons for the widespread popularity of belief in omniscient beings. Even early Buddhists, whose beliefs don’t depend on any kind of divinity, still claim that the buddhas are omniscient. The thing is, such a belief helps wrap up a tricky philosophical problem: given that our knowledge as finite humans is necessarily limited and partial and subjective, how can we say anything about what’s actually or objectively true? If you posit an omniscient being, you can be done with it in a sense: the objective truth was found by that guy over there, whose knowledge isn’t finite. This step seems to have been taken most explicitly by the Jains, with their theory of anekāntavāda: they argued that we each see a limited side or part of the truth, but it is only the tīrthaṅkaras, the fully liberated beings, who can see the whole thing.

The problem with taking such a step, of course, is that then you, as a finite human being, still have to establish that the tīrthaṅkaras or the buddhas or Jesus or whatever similar beings actually were omniscient. I’ve yet to see a good argument for that, and that’s why I don’t believe that there are omniscient beings. But I understand the urge to create them.

My critique of Wallis’s older work is hardly limited to Wallis; one could make it about a great number of works produced in contemporary religious studies. Anne Monius encouraged her students to ask of the texts and rituals they study: “Why bother?” and “So what?” Why do people bother doing this, and what is its significance for their culture? What she never asked students was to turn those same questions on ourselves: ask of our own work, “Why bother?” and “So what?” But it seems to me like these are the most pressing questions to ask of a work like Mediating the Power of Buddhas.

No such problem exists in the Buddhist Manifesto! Here, we find a call to arms, a clear vision for Buddhist life and thought, intended to transform Buddhists’ own understanding of themselves and their tradition. And no surprise, Wallis published this after he left Georgia and took a position at the Won Institute of Graduate Studies – a new postsecondary institution focused on applied Buddhist teaching, the integration of Buddhist thought and practice. A document like this would have been laughed out of court in any of the major academic journals pertaining to Buddhism. From what I observed of Wallis’s old department at Georgia, if he had published this before receiving tenure there, I’m betting he never would have attained it.

I am delighted that Wallis has found an environment where he can speak up and say the things that really matter, and I am very encouraged that he has published the Buddhist Manifesto. In a spirit of sympathetic cooperation, I’d like to investigate some of its claims further.

The upshot of the document is to draw a distinction between “Gotama,” the original or ultimate Buddha, and “Buddha,” an imagined figure created by later tradition. It proceeds in what I think is the spirit of Walpola Rahula, attributing to Gotama a view that looks very much like what I have called Yavanayāna Buddhism: a heavy emphasis on meditation, and a criticism of “religion.” “Religion” here refers to the colourful rituals, stories, temples, paintings which everywhere form a component of Buddhism as it is practised, but which Wallis, like Rahula, takes to be inessential. (Wallis, with refreshing frankness, acknowledges the beauty of these “religious” phenomena but is concerned about them as a distraction from the more important projects of meditation and awakening: “I love it all! Don’t you? But can we ask: at what cost, our love?”)

But what makes this figure of Gotama; how is he different from the Buddha known to “religion”? What makes Wallis’s manifesto different, and what I think distinguishes him from the likes of Rahula, is that Wallis does not try to claim that his Gotama is the person we will find historically at the beginning of Buddhist tradition if we use academic historical methods to separate out the original from the later accretions. (He is moving away, then, from the kind of approach taken by the Jesus Seminar.) He recognizes that, given the data, such a project is likely not even possible:

I will begin by saying that I am not interested in the old philologists’ project of separating out the original (good) teachings of Gotama from later (bad) accretions. Given what we now know of the textual history of the Buddhist canons (e.g., that they are heavily edited translations of older oral compositions), that project is no longer viable. (p2)

But if not on the basis of historical accuracy, then on what ground do we separate “Gotama” from “Buddha” – and follow the former rather than the latter? As far as I can tell, Wallis identifies his fundamental premise, his first principle, as this: “Gotama was an unsurpassed scientist of the real.” Gotama, here, seems almost to be defined as that figure who had the most important things figured out. Most of what Wallis says takes off as demonstrative argument from this first principle. But why should we accept it? What is the dialectical argument that would lead us to this first principle?

Wallis says his premises – the one about Gotama above and those which follow from it, such as a distinction between Gotama and the traditional Buddha – are “obvious, fair, and accurate.” All of these terms are debatable; as my recent posts on “common sense” should indicate, I’m rather skeptical of appeals to the “obvious.” More important overall seems to be Wallis’s following claim for these premises: “They constitute our starting point as Buddhist practitioners.” (p3) And later he adds “It is so basic to Buddhism that it hardly requires comment.” (p5) Here Wallis’s strategy reminds me of Protestant theologian Karl Barth, who starts with the assumption that his readers are all Christians and doesn’t bother addressing any others, so that the fact of that Christianity can be the opening point for debate. Wallis, speaking to Buddhists, asks: what constitutes your Buddhism? What is the purpose and the point of it – and how much of your practice actually has to do with that purpose?

I daresay that most Buddhists throughout history, and even most Buddhists alive today, would identify their Buddhism very differently. One thinks perhaps of the Burmese Buddhists found in Melford Spiro’s anthropological study Buddhism and Society, for whom interactions of the Buddha were first about magic spells for mundane purposes and secondarily about acquiring good karma; awakening was a distant goal. Such Buddhists, I think, are in some sense the proper target for Wallis’s arguments. It would be fascinating to see their responses to claims like his – defending a more aesthetic or more ritualized Buddhism. So far, too much of that defence has been left to outsider scholars, people who do little more than point out the fact that far more Buddhists in history have been concerned with ritual and stories than with meditation. Wallis raises a fair point, which those scholarly works do little to answer: maybe those Buddhists are wrong.

Lindsay’s talk – I hope I will be interpreting it correctly – delved far enough into the technical details of Buddhist theoretical debates that some introductory remarks are in order. Those familiar with these debates should feel free to skip down a couple of paragraphs. Buddhist teaching deliberately and thoughtfully attacks certain aspects of common sense and common linguistic usage, and yet nevertheless needs to make some use of that linguistic usage. This point is most universally applicable to the existence of the self, which most Buddhists deny – and yet, from the historical Buddha onward, nevertheless refer to (“I tell you there is no self.”) So Buddhists nearly always accept some idea of “two truths”: an ultimate (saṃvṛti or paramārtha) truth, according to which there is no self, and a conventional (vyavahārika) truth according to which there is a self. The conventional truth is not truth in the strictest sense; it is a teaching device employed for pragmatic purposes, because nobody would get to the ultimate truth if not through the conventional. (I have not yet discussed this distinction in a blog post, but it has come up a number of times in comment discussions, most notably on this post.)

Where Buddhists have their greatest disagreements is on the nature of the ultimate truth. The earliest Buddhist philosophers, the composers of the Abhidhamma, took it merely as atomism and reductionism: at the conventional level we can speak of a self, but ultimately the self is nothing more than its mental and physical component parts. Those parts, however, are real and can all be spoken of in language without serious difficulty. It was this latter view that was challenged by Nāgārjuna and the Madhyamaka school: here, even the atoms and components are unreal, and the ultimate reality is at some level ineffable, inexpressible. (I had some comparative thoughts on the transition from Abhidhamma to Madhyamaka here.)

The Tibetans divided the Madhyamaka school further than this. How radical, they asked, was Nāgārjuna’s skepticism? They distinguished a moderate skepticism associated with Bhāvaviveka (a thinker who goes by several names) and the Svātantrika school, and a more radical skepticism associated with Candrakīrti and his Prāsaṅgika school. (The “Svātantrika” and “Prāsaṅgika” names were a later, retroactive invention of Tibetan commentators, who also identified Śāntideva as a Prāsaṅgika; they remain the object of some dispute among Western scholars today.) Bhāvaviveka argued that there were at least two kinds of ultimate truth (and therefore, effectively, at least three truths): a transcendent (lokottara) truth free of concepts, and a “pure but worldly” (suddhalaukika) truth that could be expressed in concepts but was nevertheless true. Candrakīrti denied the existence of this “pure but worldly” truth – the real truth, the truth that was not merely a pragmatic means of teaching, could not be expressed in words. (On this he quotes Nāgārjuna: “If I had any position, then I would have a flaw [in my argument]. But I have no position; therefore I have no flaw at all.”)

To return to Lindsay’s talk: his tentative conclusion, as I understand it, was that Burnyeat’s criticisms of Sextus Empiricus apply to Candrakīrti and the Prāsaṅgikas, but perhaps not to Bhāvaviveka and the Svātantrikas. Sextus (according to Burnyeat) had argued that to achieve mental tranquility (ataraxia), one must banish all beliefs from one’s mind – a claim with remarkable parallels to Śāntideva’s in Bodhicaryāvatāra IX.34: “When neither an entity nor a nonentity remain before thought, then thought, with no object, is pacified because it has no other destination.” (Tibetan hagiographies held this verse in very high esteem – they said that as Śāntideva recited it, he floated up into the air and disappeared, so that the rest of the text was read by a disembodied voice.)

In his chapter “Can the sceptic live his scepticism?”, Burnyeat argues that in order for the Skeptic to genuinely attain the peace of mind he seeks, he must actually hold such a belief, and be satisfied with it – which is contrary to the view that all beliefs must be banished. Lindsay was largely persuaded by Burnyeat’s critique, but thought that Bhāvaviveka – unlike Candrakīrti – might be able to get around it because he owns up to the view that some beliefs are necessary and theses should be advanced.

My own thoughts after this talk moved away from Burnyeat; I was trying to think about how a Prāsaṅgika view might itself be lived. It seems to me that a Prāsaṅgika view would claim that, rather than being a view strictly speaking, it would be what is left over once all views are gone. But why would we expect that someone in such a situation would become liberated, get the Buddhist equivalent of ataraxia? Here I think it may be important to consider the common Buddhist claim that the teachings are like a snake which can be wrongly grasped – and the fact that Candrakīrti, Śāntideva, Bhāvaviveka, Nāgārjuna and the historical Buddha were all monks, who had devoted their lives to cultivating good Buddhist practice. In Śāntideva I get the sense that once they are liberated and fully understand ultimate truth, buddhas continue doing good out of habit; without beliefs there is no longer anything that can deter them from doing so. Buddhist texts never suggest, as far as I know, that one can learn this ultimate truth without already being extremely virtuous. But suppose, hypothetically, that one could – it might then turn out to be a bad thing. If somehow I (or most of my readers), living a life that involves making money and having sex and seeking out delicious foods, were to reach the ultimate truth and a state without belief, it would make things worse, because I’d be stuck in that state instead of in bodhisattvahood.

In this, MacIntyre skirts around on an idea that endures through the history of the Abrahamic traditions: that the ultimate truth is tied to one single historical event, time, place and/or people. It begins with the idea recorded in the Book of Exodus that the Hebrews/Israelites/Jews are God’s chosen people, and continues with the idea that the single human person Jesus of Nazareth was the only begotten human son of God. The Qur’an, too, is a single set of revelations made in a small geographic area to one human person, not adequately translatable (so the claim goes) into a language other than the original, which is better than any other revelation that has been or will be made.

It is in this context that I am intrigued by the Buddhist claim that there are multiple buddhas. While this claim is much more pronounced in the Mahāyāna, it is clearly there from the early Pali Buddhist texts. The Pali texts speak all the time of buddhas at different times and places in the universe. These buddhas include many pratyekabuddhas – people who attained liberation on their own, but didn’t teach it to anyone else.

What is striking to me about this view is its universality – comparable to the universalist self-conception of modern science and liberalism. Like early Buddhists, liberal scientists believe that the most important truths happened to be found in one particular historical context – the enlightenment of the historical Buddha or the experiments of Westerners from the 16th century or so onward – but there is nothing necessary, or essential, about these events happening in this particular place. Anybody who had done the right experiments with the right equipment could have found out the truths of science – and anyone who had done the right earlier experiments could have made the right equipment. So too, it happens to be that in our era Siddhattha Gotama was the only one who found out the truth on his own, and the only one who can let us find out the truth in our lifetime. But it’s not only possible that people could have done the same in other eras, it’s already happened. Even we could do it – but it would be much, much harder than listening to his teachings. (The idea that we not only could but should do it is what led to the birth of the Mahāyāna, a far more universalist tradition.)

In this way the Buddhists are distinct not merely from the Abrahamic traditions, but from the Vedic traditions they reacted against. In the Brāḥmaṇa texts, the Sanskrit sounds and words of the Vedas are absolutely central to the truth of the universe; and the brahmin varṇa (caste) has privileged access to it. Buddhism was not only more egalitarian about caste; it was also more egalitarian about linguistic and geographic origin, which is surely among the reasons it spread far wider than the Vedic traditions did.

So as it turns out, we see a tension between universal and particular views of truth (and our relation to it) in South Asia as well as the West. I don’t know as much about the East Asian case, but I suspect the same issues were faced there, since early Confucians had a tendency to treat non-Chinese as barbarians.

In nearly all of these cases, the universalist side looks far more sympathetic than the particularist – at least to those of us who are outside each particularist tradition that claims the truth as its own. But the particularists still may be on to something, as MacIntyre notices; I don’t think his way of generalizing from “this tradition” to “a tradition” succeeds, but we may need to think along similar lines. One should unhesitatingly grant the important point of modern scientists, that there is no inherent link between their historical circumstances and the truths they have found. Aliens could have discovered the same ideas, as other buddhas discovered the truth of the dharma. But just as in our age (according to the Pali tradition) only one person actually did find out the Buddha’s truth, so on this earth only the West actually did create modern science, and the various liberal modern ideas that came along with it. There were preconditions in Indian culture that made it possible for Siddhattha Gautama to be liberated there; he only meditated on enlightenment after he’d been a monk for a long time, in one of the relatively few cultural contexts that made monasticism possible at the time. So too, the particular situation of Renaissance Europe made the Western Enlightenment and the growth of modern science and liberalism possible. As I noted last time, our access to universal truth can only come through our particular, historically conditioned, human minds.