Christmas appears to have a dual message in our culture. ‘Rampant consumerism’ is one half, and ‘The True Meaning Of Christmas ™’ is the second. While there are exceptions that focus more on family and loved ones and generosity, references to TTMOC largely also include references to the birth of Jesus.

I think Ben is on to something important: an unreflective understanding of Christmas can turn into a simple consumerism. So, many who do reflect on Christmas either refuse to celebrate it at all or try to make it entirely about Jesus. I think both reactions, but especially the latter, are examples of single-mindedness as a problem: an attempt to pick out one single meaning that’s most important and ignore the details. But for those of us who genuinely enjoy Christmas, the details can be the most important part.

In my reply to Ben’s first comment I pointed to trees, wreaths, “Deck the Halls” – trappings of North American and at least some European Christmas that have no clear connection to Jesus but also don’t require any consumerism. Ben replied that those elements of Christmas scarcely have any meaning left if one takes out the two alternatives of consumerism and the Christian “true meaning”: people do them only because their family did when they were young and it leaves them with happy associations.

In my reply at the time, I focused on the performative implications of the rituals, on what they do: nobody really agrees on what Diwali “means,” but it never really seems to matter. They bring us together as families and as a larger cultural community – which is why some non-Christian Indians celebrate Christmas when they come to North America, and why my immediate family (who do not identify as Hindu) celebrated Diwali in India. Along with weddings and funerals, Christmas seems to me the closest North American analogue to the traditional familial rituals that Confucius viewed as crucial to a good life. In this light I also pointed a while ago to Frits Staal‘s conception of ritual as “rules without meaning.” While I had previously disparaged performance theory – the idea that the important thing about a traditional action is not what it means but what it does – I did come to realize that sometimes that can indeed be true, and thought about the point especially with regard to Christmas.

So far this has been a summing up of things I’ve said before, in one manner or another. But more recently I’ve been thinking in a different direction about Christmas rituals. I’ve come to think their meaning does matter, even for us non-Christians – but in a way that doesn’t have to do with Jesus. Christmas, as a traditional ritual passed down through history, has multiple meanings of which the significance of Jesus of Nazareth is only one.

On another post about Christmas, my wife Caitlin referred to the origins of Christmas in pre-Christian ritual. And I’ve lately been thinking about Christmas differently because of her, as well. She loves Christmas, but dislikes the rest of the winter season, because she loves being out in sunlight.

And only after being with her did it occur to me that Christmas is in many respects a ritual about darkness. Like (the Western) New Year’s Day, its timing is linked to the winter solstice – the shortest day of the year. In the northern hemisphere, 25 December is far from the coldest time of year, but give or take a week, it is the darkest. And a great deal of its rituals focus on lights shining against that darkness – often lighting candles, but nowadays especially the small coloured lights on strings that, in North America, are known as “Christmas lights” whatever time of year they appear. So too, the English-language Christmas carols about Jesus’s birth repeatedly return to the theme of darkness and night, whether in their titles (“Silent Night,” “O Holy Night”) or in their content (when “O Little Town of Bethlehem” proclaims “But in thy dark street shineth the everlasting light”).

The emphasis on darkness and night doesn’t come from the Bible. As far as I can tell, the biblical accounts of Jesus’s birth mention only once that it took place at night, and that in passing: “In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night.” (Luke 2:8) Moreover, the biblical authors did not deem it important to fix a date for Jesus’s birth; it is generally agreed that the date of Christmas was chosen to coincide with a preexisting festival occurring near the winter solstice, though there is some debate as to which one.

I don’t know enough about the history of Christmas to say when and how the various night- and darkness-related aspects of its mythology emerged. But it seems likely to me that these have less to do with the birth of Jesus itself than with the timing of the festival at the winter solstice. The idea of light in the darkness makes some sense as a Christian metaphor for the presence of Jesus in a non-Christian world, but that doesn’t seem enough to explain the ubiquity of light and darkness language in the tradition, especially given the seasonal timing. (In this respect the celebration of Christmas by non-Christians feels less odd to me than its celebration by Australians.)

Here the meaning of Christmas seems to be: our year is now at its very darkest, but the light is coming, and even at the darkness we will hold back that darkness with lights of our own. One can read this as an allegory for Jesus, but one doesn’t have to. No wonder the Puritans, zealous exemplars of Protestant single-mindedness, sought to ban Christmas as a form of “popery” – there is so much in it that is not primarily about Jesus or his role in saving human beings. And those are the things I love about it.

No posts for the next two weeks, as I’ll be taking a break for Christmas – and for the New Year.

One of the more interesting elements of teaching at Stonehill was explaining Protestantism to a student body composed largely of ethnic Catholics. I remember giving a lecture on the history of Protestantism and having a student ask, “But what do Protestants believe?” It was a great question, for in my focus on history I’d neglected to say much about, say, the relative emphasis on the Bible or on Mary. The fault was mine for naïvely assuming it would be something students already knew. And so in later versions of the course, I gave students a much more detailed account of the differences between Protestantism and Catholicism, and in turn these differences became much clearer to me myself.

I particularly came to realize how evangelical Protestantism – the growing Protestant wing of which fundamentalist Protestantism is basically a subset – is basically a more extreme form of Protestantism itself, “more extreme” in the sense of being much more characteristically Protestant and less Catholic. And what I found central in evangelicalism specifically but to some extent in Protestantism generally is something analogous, and perhaps even homologous, to modernism.

This central thing might be called single-mindedness: the tendency to focus on “what’s really important,” at the expense of the ancillary details. That’s the attitude behind all the ugly modernist architecture: the most important thing is to give people a comfortable, hygienic, convenient place to live. You can do without all those frivolous aesthetic details; focus on the big stuff, and people will learn to like it, as they should.

This same tendency seems to me to underlie evangelical Protestantism. The really important thing is the saving power of Jesus Christ; the rest, one might say, is gravy. And so evangelicals typically congregate in highly modern buildings, most notoriously the “megachurches” like Lakewood Church in Houston, a former sports arena, and often play rock music in their services. You don’t need the beauty and mystery of a centuries-old cathedral and its incense and pipe organ; you need Jesus.

The older, non-evangelical streams of Protestantism, such as Anglicanism and Lutheranism – usually referred to in the US as “mainline” – do not take this extreme approach. They still meet in the old churches, pray in an older style. And yet I think their founders, too, had something of the modernist tendency to privilege the big picture over the details. For Luther as I understand him, Christian tradition had become needlessly packed with irrelevant accretions. History still mattered to him – but the history that mattered was the history recounted in the Bible, not anything that had happened since then. All those sacraments and rituals were of a piece with selling indulgences. One may note that Luther derives a great deal of his thought from Augustine, and Augustine shares some of this same single-mindedness of focus. Augustine in his work expresses a worried ambivalence about liturgical music – he’s all for it if the lyrics bring people into Christian tradition, but he’s worried that it will be counterproductive if people start enjoying the music for its own sake. (And while many of Augustine’s views did become part of official Catholic tradition, they were typically tempered by the more worldly Aristotelian views of Thomas Aquinas.)

This kind of single-mindedness is not confined to Christianity or secularism, either. This single-mindedness is also the most prominent feature of the Salafi or Wahhabi strain of contemporary Islam. At first glance, Salafi tradition is as opposed to modernism as can be, for it claims that Islamic tradition was perfected in its first few centuries and every following innovation is worthless or worse. But the Salafis share with the modernists a single-minded disdain for the details of established tradition. And aesthetically the two come to look very similar. In recent years the Saudi Arabian state, which officially endorses Salafi Islam, has deliberately destroyed most of the historic sites of old Mecca and Medina, partially to make room for more infrastructure for pilgrims, but just as much because of Salafi ideology. People offered veneration and prayer at many of those sites, such as the grave of Muhammad’s mother. But to a Salafi, such activity is idolatrous, associating partners with God and compromising his unity. Better not to have them around. (Evangelicals, I might note, often take a similar attitude to many Catholic traditions, especially the reverence for Mary.)

Further musings on philosophical single-mindedness next week.

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/

Teaching students who did not want to be there was not always a joy. The wonderful advantage of teaching Stonehill’s required courses, though, was that there was almost no restriction on content. My love of big cross-cultural questions does not play well with the specialization taught in grad school and encouraged in academic publishing, where one must learn one thing and nothing else. But I could design these courses the way I wanted. The religion department had decided it wanted one common reference point that upper-year students could turn back to, and it had decided on the book of Exodus. But as long as you taught Exodus, the rest of the course was all up to you.

And so one semester I decided I wanted to learn more about Western monotheisms, and entitled my intro religion course “God in the West.” All that Buddhism and “Hinduism” I’d studied in grad school – never mind that. Because that was stuff I already knew pretty well. One of the things I hoped to impart to my students was a love of learning; and so I decided I would teach them a subject I wanted to learn about myself.

And learn I did. The course gave me a chance to really think with the monotheisms, especially Christianity – and in so doing I moved considerably closer to atheism. For I’d wanted to challenge my students’ complacent, mellow, liberal moralistic-therapeutic deism by showing it criticized from both sides: both the severe conservatism of an Augustine, calling for more Christian piety, and the problem of suffering, which effectively calls for less.

Until I taught that course, I had never really paid much attention to the problem of suffering. I thought it didn’t really matter, since I didn’t believe in an omnipotent omnibenevolent God in the first place; I hadn’t been raised with such a belief and never saw a reason to adopt it. But in teaching Christianity I attempted to think with it, in its terms, and I saw just how serious a problem this is. Until that point I had seen myself as vaguely theist; I believed in a capital-T Truth like the Platonic Good, a universal which seemed a lot like God. But as I saw my students grapple with theodicy, it hit home for me that this “philosopher’s God” really has little to do with what most people understand God to be. For them, God is there actively moving the universe along; things are the way they are because God wants them to be. But given the vast and terrible suffering in the universe – including all the suffering that has nothing to do with human free will – it seems like a cruel joke to describe such a God as omnibenevolent, universally good. An omnibenevolent and omnipotent God was really nowhere even close to anything I believed in.

I tried to teach a few theologians who would defend God, but their justifications seemed enormously unsatisfying. The best I could find was Richard Swinburne‘s case for a “half-finished universe,” extending the free-will defence so that it is our job to perfect the world and end suffering. Putting aside the question of whether this is even possible (as with similar questions one could ask of Buddhists), it still hardly seems an adequate resolution. How can this be fair to all the people whose lives are cruelly, brutally sacrificed in pursuit of this perfection? They don’t get to see the perfect world to come. Swinburne seems to advocate an oddly Maoist God, who can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs; this celestial utopian scarcely seems better than the earthly utopians like Mao and Stalin, whom we rightly judge today as murderers.

In some respects my students’ answer seemed better than Swinburne’s: it could all be made worthwhile and redeemed by the ultimate promise of an afterlife in heaven. Within the system that seems more consistent to me; but one still would need to find evidence for the existence of this heavenly afterlife, and I’ve never heard of any.

In short, having attempted to take the Christian God seriously for the length of a course, I came out much more predisposed against him. I would be reluctant to say, though, that teaching the course made me an atheist. For the word “atheist” is usually claimed today by the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, sneering know-nothings who thrive on contempt and disdain for anything alien to their worldview. It’s an attitude I already disliked, and if anything I came out of the very same course disliking it more.

For while I ended up thinking less of God, I also ended up thinking more of that much-maligned text attributed to him, the Hebrew Bible. Though I do think it’s ultimately philosophically inconsistent, I came to admire the book of Ecclesiastes not only for its poetic beauty, but also its attempt to reflect on the harsh world we live in, in which the righteous so often suffer and the wicked thrive. Ecclesiastes is an admirable early attempt to face this world with open eyes.

Perhaps more importantly, I also had my students read A.J. Jacobs’s highly enjoyable The Year of Living Biblically, which is exactly what it sounds like. Jacobs, a secular New York Jew, decided he’d one-up all the fundamentalists by trying his best to follow all the Bible’s commandments to the best of his ability. The original idea was to remind people how ridiculous the Bible commandments really are. And yet Jacobs found his life improving by following several of the commands – and not just the popular ones like loving your neighbour. Obeying the injunction to wear only white, he found himself becoming more cheerful, having a sunny disposition; refusing to use swear words, he found himself watching his emotions and avoiding trivial anger. These turned out not to be ridiculous after all – even when he didn’t have to do so for his book, Jacobs continued wearing white and saying prayers of thanksgiving.

Biblical commands, like the injunctions in dharmaśāstra, are not ethics; they are not philosophy. There is little reasoning or argument given there; one is merely ordered to do this and not do that. And yet Jacobs’s experience helps remind us that someone wrote those texts, and put those commands in there for a reason. Many of those reasons may have lost their force today; but some of them haven’t. Following those commands worked for a lot of people for a long time; it would take a truly heroic leap of cynicism to believe millions of people followed them for thousands of years entirely out of stupidity or gullibility. We cannot and should not swallow the ideas and practices of history’s traditions in their entirety; but we ignore or casually dismiss them at our peril.

Americans have typically greeted bin Laden’s death with jubilation and celebration, often waving American flags and chanting “U.S.A.” But some minority voices, such as Linton Weeks at NPR radio and Pamela Gerloff of the Huffington Post, have raised questions about this celebration. Is it really a good idea to celebrate a human death, even the death of one’s enemy?

This all makes a good occasion to revisit an earlier short post of mine, one of my favourites. The thing that affected me most at my one Goenka meditation retreat was not the meditation practice in general, but the closing practice of karmic redirection, because it specifically involved wishing George W. Bush well – and, more generally, wishing one’s enemies well. What applies to Bush here applies to bin Laden – the two men are of course enemies of each other, but I also consider them both enemies of mine.

A couple months ago, Thill questioned the value of Goenka’s practice – not over its efficacy, but over the values that underlie it. Thill asks: “Is wishing the enemy well actually a case of masochism since the enemy is a person who wants to harm us?… What if the enemy is a sadist whose happiness consists in seeing you suffer? Then, wishing this enemy happiness is tantamount to wishing one’s own suffering!”

As Jim Wilton rightly noted in his replies, wishing enemies well does not entail wishing them success in their aims, or wishing that their desires be fulfilled. This is as true of one’s friends as of one’s enemies. If my friend is addicted to crack cocaine, wishing him well does not mean that I wish he find more crack to smoke. Indeed I wish him the exact opposite. What he needs most is a change in the structure of his desires; he will probably be better off with the desires unfulfilled, as that would bring about the relevant change. And the same applies to people with evil or hateful aims: wishing them a good and happy life carries with it the wish that they improve and become better people. Thill’s comments here have assumed a simplistic understanding of happiness that equates it with the satisfaction of desire, when often what is needed for a long-term and stable happiness is the exact opposite.

In reply to Jim, Thill makes an important point: “note the element of self-interest in all this. In wishing all that for your enemy, you are also wishing a change in your enemy’s attitude towards you. It is all tantamount to wishing that he or she is in a condition in which he or she ceases to be your enemy!” That’s true. But even if one characterizes it as self-interested, one should notice what such wishing for one’s enemy’s virtue doesn’t imply: namely revenge. One wishes that, in spite of the bad things the enemy has done, he might still become better and happier, in the process ceasing to be an enemy. One does not take the enemy’s violent and painful death as an occasion for celebration.

Now let me clarify: this is not a call for pacifism. Shortly after the September 11 attacks, I sat in on a class at Harvard where the professor’s response to the attacks was “I think we should set up an exchange program, so that people in our countries can better understand each other.” (Students applauded.) I was stunned at the naïveté expressed there. We are not talking about people who express frustrating differences at the ballot box (like, say, Québec separatists – most of the time). We are talking about people who want to kill you, and have just killed several of your fellow countrymen simply because they were your fellow countrymen; they would do it to you if given the chance – like on an exchange program.

Gandhi, to whom Thill refers in this context, was considerably more sophisticated than said professor. Gandhi understood that his pacifism would cause great suffering, even many deaths, to his own side; but that it was worth it to achieve his goals in a morally upstanding way. It’s worth celebrating the success of Gandhi’s nonviolent methods against colonialism – and those of Martin Luther King, who derived many of his methods from Gandhi. But Gandhi and King were facing enemies who believed in justice over power, in the rule of law, in the value of human life. The goals of the British Empire and of the American South were to preserve an unjust and discriminatory social order which they believed to be benign. The goals of the Nazis, by contrast, were extermination. If an Indian stood fearlessly in front of a British soldier’s gun, the soldier would rightly fear the public repercussions of shooting. If a Jew stood fearlessly in front of a Nazi gun, she would merely save the Nazi the work of rounding her up. Bin Laden, in this respect, was far more akin to the Nazis – his attacks weren’t even to make demands, the destruction itself was the goal. (It is worth noting that Bush, however, would have been significantly more akin to the British Empire.) I agree with Thill on this much: one often must fight against one’s enemies, and sometimes this does require violence.

This violence is, however, regrettable. In war, killing another human being can be – and often is – the best course of action. But it is a tragic right action, and one should be aware of this fact. Thill claimed in another context: “Even if you want to kill a dog or a horse in order to put it out of misery and you do it skillfully, it would still be a gross distortion to describe this act as one which gives pleasure to the agent.” That is, one feels compassion, a painful emotion occasioned by another’s suffering. I discussed compassion myself in response to Thill’s post, noting that because we are not perfect or ideal people, we need remind ourselves that others’ pain is a bad thing (even if a hypothetical perfect person might need feel no regrets). The killing of an enemy, it seems to me, fits under exactly this class of action: necessary but regrettable, a proper occasion for compassion. Finding and punishing bin Laden was an important goal, and it is good that the US government under Obama succeeded in accomplishing this goal. And yet even so, it is not an occasion for celebration, but for sadness that it had to come to this.

Harris’s article returns us to the most famous passage in Śāntideva’s work: the meditation on the equalization of self and other in Bodhicaryāvatāra chapter VIII, in which Śāntideva takes metaphysical arguments for the nonexistence of self (Buddhist anātman) and uses them as a premise to argue for altruism, ethical selflessness. He asks: “Since both others and myself dislike fear and suffering, what is special about my self that I protect it and not another?” The self that I was three minutes ago is a different entity from the self I will be three minutes from now; the present self has as much reason to protect others as it does its future self. He adds: if you object that suffering should be prevented only by the one it belongs to, well, your foot’s suffering does not belong to your hand, so why should the hand do anything to protect the foot?

The Catholic Buddhologist Paul Williams has criticized this passage in depth, arguing that altruism makes no sense without selves. I’ve discussed Williams’s criticisms twice before, though I haven’t taken a position on the debate yet. I will note that several Buddhologists have already come to Śāntideva’s defence on these arguments – with varying degrees of success.

Harris is the first writer I’m aware of to defend Williams’s position (other than Williams himself). His article goes at length over the defences mounted by Mark Siderits and John Pettit, and concludes that neither adequately escapes the basic dilemma Williams has pointed to: if the self does not really exist in any sense that implies it should be privileged over others, then why should we think suffering is really bad in any sense that requires it be prevented?

Harris does finally part company from Williams, but only in his final remarks, which I think deserve additional scrutiny. Having argued that Śāntideva’s arguments in BCA VIII are not convincing, he now claims that Śāntideva’s arguments here are not supposed to be convincing; instead they are to be meditated on. He says that it is the Bodhicaryāvatāra’s ninth chapter, dealing with the virtue of theoretical understanding (prajñā), in which Śāntideva openly considers his opponents’ views and refutes them; the altruism argument is in the previous chapter, which is explicitly about the virtue of meditative concentration (dhyāna). The point isn’t to persuade people of the value of a Mahāyāna Buddhist path; it’s a meditative aid for those who are already on the path. In such a context, a contradiction doesn’t matter so much. One may switch back and forth between a perspective where suffering selves are real and their suffering should be prevented, and a perspective where they aren’t and we need to diminish our attachment to them.

Let’s accept for the sake of argument that Harris is right, and Śāntideva’s arguments about altruism don’t need to stand up to rational scrutiny because they are primarily meditative aids. If that’s so, here’s the problem: what makes these verses interesting and valuable is precisely their status as potentially persuasive arguments. Arguments for particular ethical positions, perhaps especially for Mahāyāna altruism, are relatively unusual in Buddhist tradition. This is why Damien Keown has argued in Buddhist Studies from India to America (falsely, in my view) that there is no such thing as Buddhist ethics. Śāntideva’s argument appears as one of the most preeminent counterexamples, though not the only one.

That this argument is taken as an argument is the reason – it may be the only reason – it has attracted so much attention in recent years. A 1998 reader in ethics includes BCA verses VIII.89-140 alongside readings from Aristotle’s Ethics and Kant’s Grounding – and Xunzi, Aquinas and Epicurus – precisely because it makes an argument for a Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophical ethics. David Cooper, the reader’s editor, says: “Although both authors [Śāntideva and Tsong kha pa, who also has a selection in the book] speak of ‘methods’ for inducing a compassionate attitude, we might instead think of these as arguments for why one ought to adopt such an attitude.”

So if Harris is right and Śāntideva didn’t intend the arguments to be taken seriously as arguments, this is quite a sad thing. If Harris is correct, the likely lesson to be taken is that we should stop paying such close attention to this part of Śāntideva’s work, for it isn’t really worthy of it. Better to look at parts of the BCA that make a genuine contribution, such as its sixth chapter’s beautiful thoughts on anger. If this section is worth our taking seriously at all as cross-cultural philosophers, it is because it offers an argument for Mahāyāna altruism, and is not merely a guide for meditation.

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 agree that not all knowledge is a product of logic. This is one of the reasons I have spent a great deal of time discussing what Thomas Kasulis calls intimacy worldviews, background approaches to philosophy that are not derived from direct argument. I agree with the thinkers in such traditions that truth is not merely something expressed in linguistic propositions.

Where I disagree strongly, however, is on the view that such non-logical knowledge can be a source of genuine certainty. Jim’s first example of such knowledge is the “eureka” moments of natural science: points where a discovery is made in a flash, a leap. I agree that such moments, though likely impossible without a long and disciplined prior process of rigorous logical reasoning, themselves include something more than logic; this example is an important argument for an intimacy worldview. The question is: are such moments free from doubt? I think the answer must be no. I don’t think one would have to probe the history of science very long to find a “eureka” moment whose resulting insight turned out to be largely false. I remember that writing my dissertation involved moments of insight which later reflection revealed to be untrue.

Jim refers to the knowledge faculty that produces such moments as “intuition.” He attempts to define “intuition” as a knowledge based on direct perception. But it seems to me that direct perception is among the most unreliable of all sources of knowledge – mirages, ropes misperceived as snakes, eye diseases or whatever example of illusion one might wish to cite.

I suspect that the underlying question in this discussion might be the kind of knowledge derived from mystical experience, the kind of wordless realization obtained in meditation. That possibility came up in the discussion that led to my old post on certainty, where a friend claimed that he reached absolute certainty in his Sufi chanting. But I said then and say now: such experiences lead to a feeling of certainty, but it could be a felt certainty of falsehood rather than truth. I suspect any of us could find a militant fanatic, of whatever stripe we disagree with, who derived his fanaticism from a cultivated vision.

Direct perception, intuition, mystical experience, aha experiences: I don’t intend to denigrate any of these as potential sources of knowledge. But are they sources of certain knowledge, indubitable knowledge? The answer must be no. Indeed, I would argue that they are less reliable sources than is boring old logic; for logic can proceed with the kind of inexorable rigour that rules out impossibilities. As I’ve said before, if there is certain knowledge to be found, it is likely to be there, in the kind of logical certainty sought by Plato.

Still, I want to note an important point of agreement between Jim and myself. In a comment on another post he claimed: “From my point of view (and I think Amod’s as well), doubt is more an openness to what exists than a negative statement or a disagreement.” I like this claim and I think it expresses something true and important. I see doubt as essential given our status as imperfect, non-omniscient beings – there is always more to be learned. Doubt is an intellectual manifestation of the key virtue of humility – a key virtue for monotheists and other encounter traditions, taken a step further by doubting even God. And so too with mystical experience and its directly perceived or intuited cousins: this, too, must be doubted. It is as capable of generating improper pride and arrogance as any of the works of logic and reason. We should not and will not find true certainty there.

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.

Not agreeing with Feser’s Augustinian presuppositions, I also don’t agree with his conclusions. I do think that some unambiguous lies can be right because of their consequences, at the very least in extreme cases like the murderer at the door who asks you whether you’re sheltering his next victim (to which Feser refers, as did Kant). But that’s not what’s interesting about Feser’s post, nor is it his point (at least, not directly). Rather, he’s asking what a lie actually is. For him this question is vital because it directly implies which behaviours with respect to the truth are ever permitted and which are not. But it’s still an essential question for those of us who believe that there is something merely bad about all lying, even if that badness can on occasion be outweighed by other factors. Which speech acts possess that intrinsic badness?

Feser says many profound and interesting things in response to this question, but I was particularly struck by one of the first, on pleasantries, and I’m going to spend today’s post riffing on that point. According to Feser, it is not a lie to say “I’m fine, thanks” in reply to “how are you?” when you are not feeling fine, for in such a context “I’m fine, thanks” does not actually mean that you are feeling fine or doing well.

Only in such a context can one make sense of what I have found perhaps the most annoying behaviour of Massachusetts natives: the habit of responding to the phrase “Hi, how are you doing?” with another “Hi, how are you doing?” Such a response would never be uttered by an Ontarian in response to another Ontarian, any more than they would say “Can you tell me how to get to the bank?” in response to “Can you tell me how to get to the bank?” (In my experience, this has also been true of most of the rest of the English-speaking world.) I have always believed that “How are you doing?” is an actual question, and therefore merits an actual response. So, in recent years when I have been convinced of the vital importance of truth-telling, if I am not feeling well I have tried to respond to this question with a shrug and a “meh” – or a similar response that implies that, while I am not feeling particularly well at the moment, it’s not a particularly big deal and the questioner should feel no obligation to distract herself with concern about it.

Feser’s approach, while intended to explain away a pleasantry that is in some sense false, also helps explain pleasantries like the Massachusetts greeting that are literally nonsensical. In Massachusetts, the phrase “how are you?” does not mean anything more than “hello,” and people are occasionally startled when the question receives an answer. The words themselves have no semantic meaning at all.

I’m reminded here of Frits Staal‘s study of Vedic sacrifices and recitation. It has long been noted that many Indians in history (including some still alive) have been able to recite all the words of the Vedas without knowing a single word of the Sanskrit language in which they were composed. Staal used his study of Vedic practitioners to argue against those who searched for an intellectual meaning to every ritual, especially to ritual words like mantras, magic spells. He would claim that many rituals are “rules without meaning” – comparing them and the words spoken in them, instructively, to birdsong. (Insert a joke about Twitter here if you wish.)

If we think of pleasantries as analogous to birdsong, I think we learn something important about them – and we do not necessarily diminish these activities for doing so. Since Aristotle it has been a commonplace that human beings are rational animals – and the “animal” is often just as important as the “rational.” We have a need for wordless reassurance, just like our pets.

One might even apply the term more generally to all the kinds of human behaviours that Confucians call “rites” (li 禮) – patterns of interpersonal behaviour sanctioned by tradition, from solemn ceremonies like weddings and funerals to polite gestures like pleasantries. If we think of pleasantries and other speech rites like birdsong in this way, we return to something like the performance theory of ritual that I had criticized in this post: analyzing spoken words in terms of what they do rather than what they mean. But as I later noted, my earlier criticism was too harsh: many rites should be thought of in terms of what they do rather than what they mean, but we should be clear to include our own rites among these. And here it’s worth noting that this applies to rites that consist solely of words, such as “How are you doing?”. Sometimes, we mean what we say. Sometimes, we just chirp it.

Speaking of rites, I don’t expect to post on Sunday, because I’ll likely be busy with festivities for American Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving to my American readers!