The three schools in question are the Sophists in Greece, the Cārvāka or Lokāyata in India, and the Mohists in China. They are of crucial importance to any cross-cultural philosopher, because by running against the grain of the later tradition they break most of our stereotypes about that culture’s philosophy as a whole. In most general attempts to characterize the nature of Indian philosophy, for example, the words “except the Cārvākas” come up a lot.

For when one tries to characterize Indian philosophy in general, the words “religious” and “spiritual” usually come up a lot. As unhelpful as those words can sometimes be, they do point to something real that is generally shared across most Indian philosophy: an ascent orientation. The majority of Indian thinkers see everyday life in the world as a site of suffering, something to be transcended and moved beyond; and there is usually an element of the supernatural closely connected with this attempt to transcendence.

The Cārvākas, on the other hand, are said to deny all this. I say “said to” because the works of the Cārvākas are almost entirely lost to us, more than those of the Sophists or Mohists; the only surviving text that even could be considered Cārvāka is Jayarāśi’s Tattvopaplavasiṃha, whose status as a Cārvāka text is quite disputed. (The comments to that post are a great introduction to the question of whether Jayarāśi was really a Cārvāka.) Because Indian tradition was largely preserved orally, we have few fragments of oppositional traditions; people didn’t usually bother memorizing the texts of their opponents, except for brief refutations. But from the refutations that do survive, it seems that the Cārvākas denied the existence of anything that could not be perceived – thus denying karma and rebirth along with any attempt to transcend bodily existence, and advocating some form of hedonistic ethics. This is a strong example of a descent orientation, quite far removed from the Buddhist and brahmanical views that survive in Indian philosophy.

So too, the history of East Asian philosophy has been characterized above all by an intimacy orientation, characteristic especially of Confucianism. East Asian thought has typically rested on a valuing of close family connections above any sort of universal humanity, and relied heavily on nonverbal knowing; thus there is often a lack of explicit polemical argument.

But in Mozi, for whom the Mohist school is named, we find little of this. (Since his name is usually transliterated with “Mo” rather than “Moh”, it would be more strictly accurate to call the school the “Moist” school, but the resulting jokes would be too distracting.) Mozi is an interesting figure here because there are some respects in which he remains an intimacy thinker – for example, not positing a dualism between subject and object, and continuing to emphasize social cues as well as explicit argument. But he rejects several of the most typical intimacy views, views which have later been taken to be characteristically Chinese. Most notably, he rejects partiality to family and friends in favour of a quasi-utilitarian universal concern. And he makes rational arguments in an explicit, polemical, and uncompromising manner.

As for the West, its philosophy – at least until the time of Nietzsche – is widely characterized as a search for truth, with that truth typically seen as correspondence with a reality external to the self. Medieval Christianity and Islam identified this truth with God; the ancient Greeks and the modern Europeans had varying beliefs about God or gods and their relations to truth, but truth remained at the heart of their concerns. And the ideal was to reach this truth through rational argument, conceived of as distinct from rhetorical appeals to emotion.

This ideal of philosophy comes largely out of the works of Plato – and he developed it in contrast to the Sophists. The Sophists were teachers of rhetoric, the equivalent of spin doctors and advertisers, who aimed for their words to be practically effective, make a political difference. Effectiveness rather than truth was the standard by which they judged. If one were to compare East Asian and Western thought by taking Mozi and Gorgias the Sophist as their representative figures, one would gain a very unusual view of the differences between the traditions!

Now Mozi is almost never taken as a paradigmatic thinker of East Asian thought, nor Gorgias of Western (or the Cārvākas of South Asia). And this is for good reason. Western, South Asian and East Asian thought would all have turned out very differently had Sophism, Cārvāka or Mohism emerged as the dominant philosophical tendency in the medieval era. But the fact is they did not so emerge, and so the vast majority of thought in each of these places did indeed take the direction we now associate with it: ascending South Asia, intimacy East Asia, rational truth-seeking West.

So what then is the significance of these oppositional traditions? Well, especially, they forced the mainstream tradition to react – and to become philosophical. I’ve been thinking about these issues in reading Chad Hansen‘s fascinating A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought, which often seems to me more Mohist than Daoist. Hansen points out that there is little explicit argument in Confucius, only a collection of “wise sayings” hearkening back to earlier tradition. It is Confucius’s successor Mencius who first argues for Confucianism; his arguments are not as polemical or analytical as Mozi’s (and Hansen doesn’t think they work very well), but arguments they nevertheless are. Hansen claims, plausibly, that Mencius was spurred to make these defences of the tradition primarily because of Mozi’s challenges.

The Sophists seem to have had a very similar role in the West: until their time, ethical reflection had been left to the poets and tragedians. The Sophists challenged existing pieties, in a way that led to the explicit philosophical reflection of Plato and Aristotle. Confucianism and later Greek thought could not have been nearly as robut without the challenges of the Mohists and Sophists.

And the Cārvākas? Because of the aforementioned lack of sources, we need to be more conjectural here. But we may note that they flourished in the era of the wandering sages, which gave birth to both the Buddha and the founders of Jainism – an era, like ancient Athens or the Warring States era of Confucius and Mozi, where many different philosophies thrived. It could well have been their challenge that led the other schools to define themselves in response.

My first response was that these two are perennial questions, questions that recur throughout the history of philosophy around the world. While I continue to think more or less that that’s the case, I don’t think it did enough to say what’s important about these particular two categories. As I noted later, there are plenty of perennial questions beyond these two. But at the same time, I do see something special about these two classification schemes that merits particular attention to them.

For one thing, they reach very deep. The other perennial questions I named in the later post – free will and human nature – do have ramifications both theoretical and practical, but I’m not sure that they colour the overall tenor of a philosophy the way ascent-descent and intimacy-integrity do. A philosopher’s position on free will or human nature seems to me less likely to affect her views on the basic nature of reality and knowledge, say, than these two do. I’m not entirely sure that this point holds up well, but it’s probably worth mentioning.

The more powerful reason to work with these two classification schemes, I think, is that they name perhaps the most abiding differences between philosophical traditions. I don’t think it’s terribly controversial to say that the modern West generally takes an orientation of integrity descent, in its secularism and its atomistic individualism. Thomas Kasulis’s book, from which I draw the intimacy-integrity distinction, takes the modern West as the paradigm of an integrity approach; Ken Wilber, in theorizing ascent and descent, identifies the recent history of the West with the “dominance of the descenders.”

What I find particularly interesting about these classifications, though, is that they don’t merely name distinctions between the West and the non-West, or modern and non-modern. Those kinds of distinctions have been done and done to death, especially in the early- and mid-20th century sociological work that asked why the rest of the world hadn’t “modernized” the way the West had. (Max Weber’s work is probably the most famous in this genre, but far more of them were written.)

Rather, these classifications also catch distinctions between the major non-Western philosophical traditions, those of East Asia (especially China and Japan) and South Asia (especially India). I noted previously that Kasulis’s intimacy-integrity distinction at first struck me as just another forgettable example of the attempts to characterize the modern West against the rest of the world, until Parimal Patil pointed out the fact – right under my nose – that in nearly every aspect of Kasulis’s classification, classical Indian thought had an integrity orientation at least as strong as the West’s. Ever since then, I’ve found the classification indispensable. One might similarly note that the ascent orientation in classical Chinese thought is not significantly stronger than it is in the modern West – not, at least, until Buddhism begins to arrive there from India.

In other words, Kasulis could not have written a book characterizing ancient India as an intimacy culture in the way that he did with modern Japan. Wilber, meanwhile, notes that contemporary Westerners (especially of his baby boom generation) are much more likely to recognize a lack of intimacy in their own culture than a lack of ascent; he reserves significant criticism for the widespread ecological views that exalt our interdependence with nature but do not recognize a spiritual dimension in which we strive for something beyond it. And it can be no coincidence that, with such a project, Wilber refers far more often to Indian tradition than to Chinese. Nor, conversely, is it a coincidence that Alasdair MacIntyre – whose philosophical writings have long been aimed at moving contemporary Western thought to a more intimacy-oriented worldview derived from ancient Greece – has written significantly on Confucian thought, but said absolutely nothing (that I’m aware of) about anything Indian or Buddhist.

It seems to me, then, that when modern Westerners turn to other traditions to seek something missing in their own, they look to China if they think the “something missing” has to do with intimacy, and India if it has to do with ascent. A notable exception to this tendency (of looking to India for ascent and China for intimacy) is Yavanayāna Buddhism, which looks to the Buddha’s Indian Buddhism for an intimacy philosophy that celebrates the interdependence of all things – something it is not. But I suspect the chief reason it can do this is the presence of East Asian Buddhism, which does celebrate interdependence in a way that would be quite alien to the Buddha himself. In this respect, I think Yavanayāna is the exception that proves the rule.

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/

So far I’ve explored two major perennial questions: ascent versus descent and intimacy versus integrity. I have taken these as two different axes along which philosophies can be classified – in their ethics and soteriology as well as their metaphysics and epistemology.

But why should we treat these as exhausting the perennial questions? I think there’s value in limiting the number of questions we treat as perennial – in being prepared to say “those are different aspects of the same question” or “those are different ways of asking the same question” rather than allowing the questions to proliferate randomly. But that’s not to say the number of questions should be limited to merely two – though it’s certainly interesting to consider the two as axes on a single graph.

For there are other questions which are similarly widespread and have similar ramifications. A little while ago I pointed to Mou Zongsan’s distinction between “perfect” and “separation” theories; these map onto the distinction I discussed earlier between ātmanism and encounter, but Mou effectively tries to show that ātmanism-encounter is its own perennial question, distinct from the integrity-ascent and intimacy-descent positions they might seem to map onto.

Other perennial questions are significantly better known than the debates I have discussed above. One of these is human nature: the question that finds its most classic expression in the ancient Confucian debates between Mencius and Xunzi, but is also well expressed in the West in Rousseau and Augustine, among others. So too, I suspect it is at the heart of the changes in Buddhism as it moved from India to Mencian China. At its heart, this is a metaphysical question about what human beings are and what makes them so – a question which is also open to at least some empirical verification or falsification. But it is also an ethical question. If human beings are naturally good, they need far less ethical correction, need to watch themselves or be watched far less, than if they are systematically prone to error and wrongness. It extends into soteriology: a good human nature makes sudden liberation more plausible. And at several points the recent debates over “common sense” extended this question into epistemology. To what extent are human reasoning processes naturally good enough to lead us to the truth, and to what extent are they so prone to error that they need regular and systematic correction?

Then there is the similarly metaphysical question of free will – much less subject to empirical verification. The empirical methods of natural science assume that the world is made of causal processes whose workings can be ascertained; this very assumption begs the metaphysical question at issue. But it too has significant ramifications in ethics and politics. Free will is a fundamental assumption behind the characteristic organizing concepts of modern liberalism: rights, respect, autonomy. The idea that individual choices are to be respected qua choices – as opposed to their being instrumental to other goods like happiness – implies that something about these choices gives them a different status from other phenomena in the universe. So you can’t get even close to a Kantian ethics without free will – but consequentialist ethics can do fine without it. I’m told that Fyodor Dostoevsky even saw this point as the fundamental difference between the worldviews of Protestantism and Catholicism: Protestants sacralize individual autonomous choice even if it leads to overall misery; Catholics want an order that produces general happiness even if it leads to tyranny over individual choice. (Whether his characterization was accurate, let alone whether Eastern Orthodox churches provide the appropriate synthesis he thinks they do, is a separate topic.)

The idea of free will has been particularly important in the West, but it has not been limited to that context. It is important enough to Śāntideva that he spends several difficult verses refuting it. Very much like Nietzsche, Śāntideva believes that the idea of free will is harmful and dangerous because it leads us to blame others: their actions have causes just like a stomach upset does, so we should not get angry at them any more than we get angry at our stomach bile. And I think points of view like Śāntideva’s tend to frame the left-right axis in Canadian politics, and in other countries where God is not a serious political issue. The right believes criminals make free choices, and so deserve their punishment, while the left seeks to reduce the causes of crime; and if people’s fates in society largely come down to their free choices, then the government has less of a duty to help those whose fates turned out poorly.

The questions I’ve listed – ascent/descent, intimacy/integrity, ātmanism/encounter, free will, human nature – hardly exhaust the list of perennial questions either. In future weeks I’m hoping to examine others. But I’m returning to the idea of perennial questions now because I suspect that it may form part of a highly fruitful method in cross-cultural philosophy. Too much cross-cultural philosophy so far has been dominated by the idea of a philosophia perennis, a single universal philosophy shared across cultures. That idea is usually taken to refer to some sort of Advaitic mystical monism, a single cosmic truth that can be known through mystical experience. And while ideas of that sort are indeed present in many cultures, they’re rarely all that widespread. Most people do not believe this so-called perennial philosophy. Moreover, there’s an odd parallel between that sort of perennialism and the view of “common sense” recently advocated on this blog by Thill Raghunath and others. Though Thill describes “common sense” as excluding “religious” ideas (which I suspect includes the “perennial” mystical monism), he shares with the perennialists a common view of human access to truth: all humans, across cultures, share an innate faculty which allows them access to truth, but most humans access this faculty so little that they are enmeshed in delusion. (As I noted above, epistemologically this seems to put both Thill and the perennialists on the side of the human nature debate that stresses our natural goodness.)

What is truly universal to me in philosophy, it seems, are not the answers but the questions; and that is why I think the cross-cultural study of philosophy should devote more time to these questions. To the extent that the answers are universal as well, it seems to me that multiple and contradictory answers are universal: both mystical Ascent and a “common sense” Descent are found across cultures. The student of cross-cultural philosophy should pay attention to both sides.

In August I will be taking some vacation time with my wife and my friends. So there will be no blog post next week; posts may be sporadic for the rest of the month as well.

It’s a shame that the world lost such a great singer so early. And yet, the same louche excess that killed Winehouse was part of the appeal of her songs. Nobody wants to hear a soulful voice sing “I ate all my vegetables and flossed daily,” even if this idea is put in more poetic cadences.

Since her death I’ve been thinking about the 20th-century French philosopher Simone Weil – who was not much older than Winehouse when she died herself. Weil’s most famous work Gravity and Grace is regularly quoted for this line: “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvellous, intoxicating.” Winehouse’s self-destruction was an evil in the wider sense of that word; one suspects it may have been gloomy and monotonous for her, as romantic and varied as it was for us. Though the evils she faced were real enough for her and those close to her, this nonfiction story may as well have been imaginary for most of us, the ones who knew her only as a voice and a moving image.

Weil’s quote offers an implicit criticism of Martha Nussbaum’s thesis, in “Transcending humanity,” which attacks the attempt to transcend everyday human life in part on the grounds that the transcendent life is less interesting. In Homer’s Odyssey, we readers want Odysseus to refuse the nymph Calypso’s offer of permanent bliss with her outside the human world, because the story wouldn’t be interesting if he took it:

What story would be left, if he made the other choice? Plato saw the answer clearly: no story at all, but only praises of the goodness of good gods and heroes. Unfortunately for Plato, readers brought up on Homer would be likely to find that prospect about as appealing as twenty-four books of description of Calypso’s unchanging island. Readers, too, want to be where the action is. (Love’s Knowledge 367)

What Nussbaum skirts around, though, is the distinction between the Odyssey’s story and those we might make for ourselves – between the lives we wish to hear about and the ones we wish to live. I think the Mahābhārata may be the greatest story ever told; but I would never wish the tragic fates of its heroes on myself or any of my loved ones. Those lives are filled with romantic and varied imaginary evils. To trudge through those evils every day would indeed be gloomy and barren.

The point in turn casts some doubt on the actively engaged human ideal that Nussbaum endorses – an ideal standing in contrast to the peaceful monastic life sought by Platonists like Augustine (as well as the immortality sought by so many Daoists). Nobody writes stories about a monk immersed in contemplative retreat. Unless that monk’s meditative journey is interrupted, he has to leave that retreat for a pilgrimage (the Journey to the West) or face inner demons (the Buddha under the bo tree) – that is, unless the monk faces imaginary evils. (Ironically enough, Simone Weil’s own life turned out to be fascinating, in part because she pushed the monastic ideal too far – seeking self-denial, she died young of a disease caused in part by starvation.) But this lack of interest does nothing to invalidate the monastic life. It doesn’t make for a good story, but maybe that’s a good thing.

By saying all this I’m expressing the counterpoint to the things I said earlier this year in commenting on Penelope Trunk: while there is something to be said for a life that’s interesting and not merely happy, there’s something else to be said for happiness too. For fictional characters, interest is much more important than happiness; for real people, that’s not so clear. Looking back recently at my own reasons for rejecting monasticism, I notice that it’s not about choosing interest over happiness, so much as choosing a different kind of happiness: active joy versus blissful contentment.

Amy Winehouse’s life was not long, and it does not sound to me like it was happy. But it was definitely interesting. The world is richer for its having taken place. I hope that’s what she wanted.

While you’re there, you may also be interested in checking out the previous interview conducted with Clower’s Chico colleague Daniel Veidlinger, by my co-host Scott Mitchell. (If that name sounds familiar to longtime readers, it could be because I’ve briefly engaged with Scott on this blog before.)

I mention this now because that first podcast is with Jason Clower on his The Unlikely Buddhologist, the study I recently mentioned of 20th-century Confucian Mou Zongsan. The podcast is there to explore Clower’s ideas; here I’d like to add my own.

The book asks why Mou, a committed Confucian, spent a great deal of time thinking and writing about Buddhism. Its answer is that Mou found East Asian Buddhists expressing metaphysical distinctions with a clarity that the Confucians had not. Mou is deeply concerned with the metaphysics of value – specifically, the relationship between ultimate value and existing things. One might refer to this as the relationship between goodness and truth, or between God and world, even creator and creation. Mou thinks the Buddhists provide conceptual tools to discuss this relationship which the Confucians didn’t have.

The key metaphysical distinction Mou takes from the Buddhists is between “perfect theories” (yuanjiao 圓教), monist theories according to which existing things are ultimately identical to the one good, and “separation theories” (biejiao 別教) in which they are fundamentally distinct. Mou identifies Tiantai Buddhism as the key example of perfect theory, and Yogācāra as separation theory; both believe in “buddha nature” as an ultimate value in the universe, but for Tiantai we are identical with it in a way we are not for Yogācāra (or so Mou claims). He is a strong advocate of “perfect theory,” and with that monism he sets his Confucianism apart from many others’. Especially, he rejects the thought of Zhu Xi, probably the most influential Confucian thinker since ancient days, because Zhu insists that Heaven (tian 天, the ultimate source of goodness in Confucianism) is separate from the human mind.

The debate Mou examines between perfect and separation theories may seem like the kind of abstract technical debate that is relevant only to Buddhist-influenced neo-Confucians. But I don’t think it is. I’m coming to think the distinction is quite a powerful one for cross-cultural philosophy – because it applies even to traditions Mou doesn’t really think about or care about. It seems to me that in key respects it is the same debate that I – following Skholiast – have previously characterized as a debate between ātmanism and encounter.

Perfect theories are “ātmanist”: they claim that created things, trees and jars and human beings, reveal themselves in the end as equivalent to the ultimate truth or good. The idea of ultimate “encounter,” by contrast, requires that the ultimate source of value (Heaven, Buddha-nature, God) remain ultimately distinct from flawed, fallen worldly beings. Here’s the thing: I spoke of this debate primarily in the terms of Indian Sufism. Sufis typically aim at an experience of mystical oneness with God; the Indian Sufis debated whether this meant that human beings really were one with God, or whether God must ultimately be irreducibly distinct from us. That is exactly what’s at issue between perfect theory and separation theory as Mou describes them – even though Indian Sufism is a tradition which, to my knowledge, Mou had absolutely nothing to do with.

It goes further. Skholiast, in setting out the terms of ātmanism and encounter, was drawing on still other traditions. He used the term “ātmanist” to refer to Ken Wilber, who draws perhaps most heavily from Aurobindo, and clearly draws the term from Advaita Vedānta, the tradition whose central teaching is that everything is all one ātman (self). And “encounter,” with which Skholiast contrasts Wilber and Advaita, draws heavily on the thought of 20th-century Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas. Yet neither Judaism and Vedānta registered much on Mou’s radar either – when he looked outside of China philosophically it was mainly to Kant, with occasional references to Christianity and Indian Buddhism.

It seems to me, then, that in exploring perfect and separation theories, Mou is asking a perennial question. Across very different philosophical contexts, people have struggled at length with perfect and separation theories, the question of the relationship between ultimate value and everyday things. It’s a question well worth thinking about.

Mou’s answer also bears some thought, because it leads in a fairly distinctive direction. The perennial questions I’ve most commonly examined have been the questions of ascent vs. descent and intimacy vs. integrity. How do perfect and separation theories (ātmanism and encounter) relate to these questions? At first, perfect theories seem to map relatively well onto theories of integrity ascent, like Advaita, which aim to transcend this world for a solitary unity, and theories of intimacy descent, like those of Lévinas or Martha Nussbaum, which embrace the physical world and its relationships. Integrity-ascent views, like perfect theories, point us at a metaphysical unity we can identify with if we cast off our mistaken identifications with the physical world. Intimacy-descent views, like separation theories, warn us of the arrogance of a quest for perfection and ask us to embrace a flawed world that will never fit a perfect good.

Mou, however, flips this all around. His metaphysical “perfect theory” is combined with an ethics of intimacy descent. In practical terms, Mou is resolutely Confucian. Not for him any monastic rejection of worldly goods; the human life is best lived in the everyday world of work and family. We live best when we recognize that ultimate metaphysical value is found right in all of these everyday things. Mou is unusual in thinking that perfect theory makes a good fit with an intimacy-descent life. His approach resembles that of the Bhagavad Gītā: act in the finite with your eye on the infinite. Moreover, I think it gets around the objection that Nussbaum makes to the Gītā’s kind of view: she claims that one isn’t really living in the material world if one doesn’t identify with it, if one goes through the motions like a “play-actor.” Here Mou’s view of perfect theory is distinct: unlike Advaita, the material world for him is no illusion. Heaven or buddha-nature, the source of ultimate value and goodness, are all there in the material world, and that’s exactly why it’s so important to live in it and play by its rules.

I am not here to write about dreadful editorial decisions, however, but rather the content of the book. Lopez undertakes what has become one of the most standard methodologies in the contemporary academic humanities: following Foucault and ultimately Nietzsche, it is typically known as genealogy. One starts with a widely used contemporary concept and goes on to show the history of its usage, in order to create doubts among those who might otherwise use it. This has already been done plenty of times both for the concepts of “Buddhism” and of “science”; Lopez’s project here is instead a genealogy of the joint concept of “Buddhism and science,” the frequent form of inquiry that tries to link the two conceptually or analytically. As is typical for contemporary genealogies ever since Edward Said (though not for Foucault’s own and certainly not Nietzsche’s), Lopez finds the origins of “Buddhism and science” in the colonial nineteenth century. He shows us that claims about Buddhism’s compatibility with science remain remarkably consistent from the late 19th century to the early 21st, even though the science itself has changed drastically.

Now what is the purpose of showing us this point? From Nietzsche onward, the genealogical method has never been neutral. The point has always been to undermine. Lopez doesn’t like “Buddhism and science” any more than Nietzsche liked morality. But Lopez is shier than Nietzsche in proclaiming his distaste for the topic of his genealogy. In a followup article published in the “religion and science” journal Zygon last December, Lopez brings out an “argumentative thesis” which, he claims, was only “implied” in his book:

that claims for the compatibility of Buddhism and science have been made in surprisingly consistent rhetorical forms over the course of more than a century and a half, years in which huge advances have occurred in the natural sciences. What is understood by “Buddhism” also has changed considerably over the period. That the claim has remained the same while the meaning of the two nouns — Buddhism, science — has changed so greatly raises a simple question that should give us pause: If Buddhism (however this abstract noun is understood) was compatible with the science of the nineteenth century, how can it also be compatible with the science of the twenty-first? Perhaps it never was, and perhaps it is not now. The more interesting question is why the claim continues to be made.

Now of all the seemingly innocuous words that merit a genealogy of their own, perhaps the most important is this “interesting,” so often claimed without argument. What interests tenured scholars of ancient languages is, to put it mildly, often not what interests most people who now live or ever have lived. So when such a scholar uses the word “interesting” as an adjective to denote a property intrinsic to his subject matter itself, as opposed to merely claiming his own personal interest in the subject, we should at least be alert to what makes it so supposedly interesting. In this particular case, the question of “why the claim [of Buddhism's compatibility with science] continues to be made” is only more interesting if the claim happens to be false. If it is true that Buddhism (however understood) is compatible in important respects with the science of whatever century, the question at issue — why the claim of compatibility is made — ceases to be an interesting one for anyone without an obsessive interest in minutiae. For if this claim is true, then the odds are that that’s the reason it’s being made.

But to actually declare the claim false? That is where Lopez, like most Buddhologists of the present age, refuses to go. In the Zygon article he casually tosses off this bombshell in the middle of a sentence: “no scholar of Buddhism can say what Buddhism should be.” (Lest I be accused of quoting Lopez out of context, I’ll give the whole sentence: “For, although no scholar of Buddhism can say what Buddhism should be, a scholar can say, or at least speculate on the basis of historical evidence, what Buddhism has been for Buddhists across Asia, extending back over more than two millennia.” (891)) The claim is of course false. Buddhism should be a tradition that teaches us important, provocative and potentially true ideas about the nature of reality, how we should live in it, and the practices that will best enable us to do so. I have a PhD in South Asian Buddhism from Harvard University; I am therefore a scholar of Buddhism. And I have just said what Buddhism should be. Obviously, a scholar of Buddhism can say this.

What Lopez presumably means to say is that scholars should not say what Buddhism should be. But the “implied argumentative thesis” above, and indeed the whole book, are important precisely because of their implications for what Buddhism should be. Lopez’s timid rhetorical questions and “perhaps” are a still-timid way of phrasing the motivation behind the book: Lopez likely wants to claim that Buddhism and science are not compatible, not without doing violence to one or the other. If his genealogy were as forceful as Nietzsche’s, he would be able to come right out and say this. But just as Robert Gimello’s class contained a Catholic apologetic disguised as neutral Buddhist studies, so Lopez keeps up the engaged and partisan genealogical method under the guise of neutrality.

Lopez and Gimello share a familiar critique of modernist Buddhism, the Buddhism I have called Yavanayāna. Lopez claims he is trying to call attention to what is lost when it is claimed that Buddhism and science are compatible. I would say that that’s fair enough – except that this mournful scholarly expression of loss always seems to be directed against the Yavanayāna target. You don’t hear such scholars worry about what is lost in Chinese schools of Buddhism that proclaim that material things have an enduring or even eternal existence and we are all already buddhas – directly contradicting some of the most fundamental teachings of the early Buddhist schools. If you’re going to try and worry us about what is lost in “Buddhism and science,” when are you going to try and worry us about what is lost in Tiantai?

Bryan Van Norden’s recent translation of Mencius challenges this interpretation. He translates 4B12 as “Great people do not lose the hearts of their ‘children.’” And he notes that in this he is following the early commentator Zhao Qi – for whom “children” refers to the subjects of a ruler, whose hearts must be won over. Nothing here about babies or children being naturally good.

Van Norden could be right about Mencius to this point; I’m far from a Mencius scholar and wouldn’t be able to tell. What struck me as far more surprising, though, is what Van Norden says next. He adds: “I think that Zhu Xi is led to this reading [that the great man doesn't lose a natural childlike heart] because of the Buddhist influence on his thought, which encouraged him to seek something akin to a pure, underlying Buddha-nature as the source of the Way.”

Here, I did a double-take. Wait, you seriously think Zhu Xi got the idea of a naturally good humanity from Buddhism? That’s the exact opposite of traditional Buddhist views – that’s like saying Jewish influence made you an atheist.

But then, Marx and Freud – two of history’s most famous atheists – were Jewish. And as it turns out, this optimistic view of human nature actually does show up a lot in Buddhism – just not in Indian Buddhism. I was reminded of all this while reading Jason Clower’s The Unlikely Buddhologist, on the 20th-century Confucian thinker Mou Zongsan. Mou is firmly committed to Mencius’s idea that human nature is good – and he praises those systems of Buddhism which accept this idea, the ones that claim we all have an “original enlightenment” or “Buddha nature.” He acknowledges that such an idea, tathāgatagarbha in Sanskrit, may have had its roots in India; but Indian philosophers never did a lot with it. Clower says: “It was only in China, Mou thinks, with its indigenous Mencian tradition of optimistic universalism, that such a theory had a chance to grow and flourish.” (114)

Now this account sounded a lot more plausible to me. Notice, though, how it seems diametrically opposite to Van Norden’s. For Mou, the negative early Indian Buddhist view of human nature could be supplanted in China because of the influence of Mencius. For Van Norden, we misread Mencius by attributing to him an overly positive view of human nature that actually originates in Buddhism.

So does any of this matter for constructive philosophical reflection? Well, it seems to me, it does matter how we view human nature – and that view is going to be tied to the rest of our philosophical commitments.

The way we view humans’ natural tendencies has implications for the way we cultivate ourselves. This point came out in the comments on last week’s post. Jim Wilton, commenting about Gretchen Rubin, linked her approach to the Zen thinker Shunryū Suzuki. Both, in some respect, take the view that happiness comes in some respect from letting our true self, our “original nature,” shine through. Jim is probably right that Suzuki’s Zen view is deeper than Rubin’s, but they’re going in the same direction. It seems to me a different direction from the one that Elisa Freschi sensibly recommended on the same post: the things you don’t like (say, the particulars in novels as opposed to philosophical abstractions) can also be your blind spots. By cultivating desires for things you’re not naturally predisposed to, you can make yourself more whole. Our natural tendencies may lead us to exacerbate our flaws, not our virtues.

And so to the contrast between South and East Asian Buddhism. It’s no coincidence that the idea of sudden liberation flourished among the East Asians, who also took a much sunnier view of human nature – whether or not we see that view as beginning with Mencius. If you think that our original natures are basically and generally good, then getting in touch with that basic goodness is something you can do more or less suddenly, immediately. You just have to remember it. But if our basic nature is one that keeps us mired in suffering, as the South Asian Buddhists generally believed, then it’s going to be a long, slow, gradual, potentially painful slog getting us out of it to somewhere better.

Something clearly changed in Buddhism as it went from South to East Asia, from India to China. It seems likely to me that it came from Confucian influences, including those of Mencius. But even if the change came about somewhere else on the way, it still has big consequences for ideas about life and how we should live it.

The understandable reactions to the essay’s pessimism nevertheless surprised me. For as I wrote it, I felt light, happy, life-affirming. Why? Well, the first part is easy. Rejecting Marx’s form of hope, political hope, is something I found essential to living a happy life. Right now I’m quite excited about tomorrow’s Canadian election – where the socialist NDP, which I’ve long supported, seems poised for an unprecedented breakthrough. But it is as a spectator sport, the excitement of a Boston fan seeing the Red Sox on the cusp of winning the World Series, where one shrugs and gets on with life if one’s favoured team turns out to lose as it has so many times in the past. If my happiness were tied to a real hope that politics in Canada or the US were going to get significantly better – as it was in my teens – I would be setting myself up for crushing disappointment. No, I continue to endorse at least some form of the anti-politics that I learned from Buddhism: we cannot let our well-being be tied too closely to the external goods of politics, things we cannot control. It is best to free ourselves from political hopes and focus on our own virtues, which we can control. I feel so much better ever since I’ve given up hope.

But there’s a problem here. This move from the external to the internal, from what we can’t control to what we can, is characteristic of the Hellenistic Greek philosophers, the Stoics and Epicureans. But Augustine’s perceptive critique is directed squarely at these Hellenistics: we cannot actually be as good as we think we can. The Stoics move us from hope about politics to hope about virtue. But in Augustine’s diagnosis, that hope too is bound to disappoint. Our bad habits persist; we enlist reason in the name of self-improvement, but too often it turns into rationalization. More than that, even virtue can be a matter more of luck than of effort. This is the main theme of John Rawls’s early Christian writings, which I have been finding more interesting and thought-provoking than the later political theory that made Rawls famous. Our patient endurance or our honesty themselves arise as a result of the biological and social circumstances that made them possible. The clearest example may be the case of Phineas Gage, whose former virtues of self-discipline and respectfulness nearly disappeared after he suffered brain damage. (Such a line of reasoning does suggest a denial of free will which sits uncomfortably with Rawls’s and Augustine’s other Christian convictions, but never mind: I am not concerned with whether the claim is Christian but with whether it is true.) We cannot put our hopes in our virtue, but only in God.

Now this kind of hope seems to propose a greater problem, require a greater pessimism, than does Marx’s. If politics is a problem with no solution, then fine, withdraw from politics and focus on ourselves. But what if our own virtue is a problem with no solution? If we can’t really be all that good, as Augustine says, but his God does not exist and would not deserve worship even if he did? How can such a conclusion lead us to anything but darkness and misery?

Looking back on it, I think that Buddhists provide a helpful answer, and that – as Jim Wilton argued – I may have counted the Buddhist critique of hope out too quickly. And the reason has to do with an important debate within Buddhist tradition, one that I don’t think I’ve explored enough yet: the debate between sudden and gradual liberation.

In traditional Indian Buddhism, my graduate area of study, liberation from suffering is a long, slow, painstaking, gradual process. It doesn’t just take years; it takes millennia, as you work to improve yourself across multiple rebirths to become a perfected person, an arhat or bodhisattva. But in East Asia, and above all in the Ch’an/Zen tradition – to which Jim’s comments about kōans refer – liberation comes suddenly, is experienced in a single moment. I had long been skeptical of the sudden-awakening school. It sounds too much like the worst hippie clichés of Yavanayāna Buddhism, where you don’t actually have to do anything, you can just be yourself as you are and you’ll be perfectly enlightened. It seemed to get you out of all the hard work of making yourself a better person.

And yet in contexts like the present one, I come to see the wisdom in the sudden-liberation approach. For one thing, it makes it a lot easier to take the unscientific concept of rebirth out of the picture. But more importantly, it reflects a psychological truth about the achievement of happiness: that as long as one’s attention is focused primarily on happiness, one will not have it. The same is true of several virtues: if one strives to be an exemplar of perfect humility, one will not be very humble. The sleep study noted by James Maas, demonstrating that it’s harder to fall asleep when you’re trying to do so, seems to me like it can be analogically extended to a lot of noble human goals. At some point along the path, you have to stop trying and just be.

All this, I think, is why Jim effectively defended my earlier characterization of Buddhism as a critique of hope, and rejected my later presentation of the Third Noble Truth as a form of hope, the hope of nirvana. At some point along the path, a good Buddhist stops hoping; as long as there’s hope, there’s attachment and not liberation.

And I think that Jim – with the East Asian Buddhist traditions – thereby puts his finger on the reason I felt so happy after that pessimistic post, better than I had myself. The last sentence of the post struck me as upbeat then and still does: “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.” What I was trying to get at is a transition from the future to the present – an ability to enjoy life and be good just as things are, even in the face of one’s own insurmountable imperfections.

To say that is to risk the very pitfall that made me so suspicious of sudden liberation in the first place: thinking that one is already great just as one is and doesn’t need any improving, leaving one’s weaknesses and problems to fester. But then it seems to me that finding this balance is its own kind of virtue – and like any other virtue, it is a mean between two vices. I don’t know what to call it, but it seems like a sort of meta-virtue: the ability to maintain the effort at cultivating one’s own virtue, while still remaining immersed in the moment of the virtues one already has.