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.

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.

I discussed this claim once before but want to return to it. The claim is, I think, overstated for rhetorical effect. Even in Śāntideva’s eyes, merely desiring others’ happiness will not make you happy – especially if you are misguided about the causes of their happiness, so that you try only to provide them with external goods rather than addressing the inner mental causes of their suffering. And yet from my experience, I would still say the claim is more true than not. There’s something self-defeating about searching after one’s own happiness itself. If one keeps one’s eye on this goal above all, one becomes too acutely aware of failures at it, too focused on one’s lack of happiness – “I’m trying so hard to be happy and yet I’m not; something must be wrong with me” – and the goal is inhibited. (In his book Power Sleep, psychologist James Maas noted a similar problem with respect to sleep: subjects offered $20 if they fell asleep quickly would take longer to fall asleep than subjects who were not offered the money.)

This “paradox of hedonism” (as Peter Railton calls it) is what comes to my mind when I hear Jesus’s paradox expressed in the books of Matthew and Luke: “Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it.” The alternative proffered to seeking one’s own life and happiness is different – following Jesus rather than seeking others’ happiness – but there is a commonality in the importance of looking to something bigger than oneself.

All this is another of the points that lead me to a foundational ethical point that I’ve been coming to more and more (and somewhat grudgingly): there must be more to the proper end of life than pleasure, and more even than happiness itself. One could argue (as Neil Sinhababu and other utilitarians indeed do) that a focus on others’ happiness is enough, but it strikes me that such an approach is still vulnerable to the paradox. Too much focus on others’ happiness can lead one to a despair just like that found when one focuses on one’s own happiness: one sees the billion miserable people out there, and seeing the fact only increases their number to a billion and one. (This problem was at the heart of my own conversion away from utilitarianism.)

As I noted before, Railton tries to save utilitarianism (or consequentialism more generally) by distinguishing between truth and justification: it could still be true that the only proper purpose of life is to be happy or to make others happy, but that for that very reason one is not justified in believing it is so. But I have a hard time accepting such a view. I’m reminded of Freud’s comment on a very similar viewpoint advocating useful fictions, Hans Vaihinger’s philosophy of the “as if”: Freud said that its demand “is one only a philosopher could put forward.” While ordinary unphilosophical people do indeed believe false things all the time, they usually do so merely because they haven’t thought about them; once they actually understand that something is false, that is sufficient reason for them to stop believing it. And we philosophers face a similar problem in the opposite direction: Railton’s or Vaihinger’s views seem to require that we not think too hard about our own philosophy lest we stop (or start!) believing it, which would appear to be the antithesis of what a philosopher does. Whether we’re philosophical or not, the call to deliberately believe false things seems to ring hollow. And therefore, for the reasons above, it seems to me that we can’t reasonably accept happiness as the sole aim of life.

I spent almost the entire decade living in the United States, except for two three-month stints in Toronto in 2001 and India in 2005. It was not the ideal decade in which to do this, for the US of this decade was the US of George W. Bush: a man who opposed almost everything I had ever stood for, whether substantively (torture, wars of choice, gutting environmental regulations), procedurally (incompetent patronage appointments for natural disasters, governing unilaterally without respect for other branches of government) or symbolically (insisting on suits and ties in the White House). I had grown up despising Ronald Reagan, but Reagan now looked like a saint compared to W – Reagan at least was competent. And in the face of all this, Americans returned him to office in 2004.

For my many American friends – the vast majority of them left-wingers like me – this decade was a time of powerlessness and rage. But they at least could vote, could contribute to political campaigns, could do something about it. For me, the powerlessness was doubled, and so, therefore, was the rage.

But it was also a time that I spent learning about Buddhism, having first become interested in it a few years before. Especially there was Śāntideva, on whom I decided to write my dissertation – and above all his views on anger and patient endurance, which I really began to think about after teaching them in a seminar. In a decade of rage and powerlessness, this was a lifeline.

I spoke a while ago of how S.N. Goenka’s karmic redirection (at a retreat in late 2005) had a tremendous healing effect for me: meditate on wishing your enemies well, and for me that meant George W. Bush. But that was only the second step for me; the process had begun a little earlier, in a way that was equally transformative.

At the end of 2004, when Bush was elected (any “re-” is at least arguable), my rage was at its height. Daily I devoured the news on left-wing political blogs like Daily Kos and Atrios’s Eschaton, full of people who shared my anger. Then as 2005 began I flew to India on a Shastri fellowship to study Buddhist Sanskrit. I was away from the Internet for the first week or two, and print news focused on Indian issues, not American ones. When I got my Internet back a week or so later, the first thing I did was open up Atrios – and shut it back down immediately, before I’d reading the first sentence.

In that moment I had just come to realize Śāntideva’s wisdom – I had come to see how anger was poisoning my soul. For in that week without exposure to American politics, the anger had subsided, and a peace had come with it – but in reading a half-dozen words of Atrios’s, the flame rekindled in an instant. I didn’t want that anymore. I wanted to be happy and peaceful; and I could be that way by leaving politics behind.

So far the most controversial feature of my scholarly work, as it developed in the latter half of the decade, has been my skepticism toward politically Engaged Buddhism, and a defence of political quietism like Śāntideva’s. I suspect that this view has cost me academic jobs: I remember well one interview where the interviewers had loved my earlier Marxist work, but the temperature in the room dropped rapidly when I gave my job talk on Śāntideva’s anti-politics. But it would have been hard for me to do otherwise in the face of the decade’s events: Buddhism had saved me from politics. It showed me that a better life was possible without angry political engagement.

Now, finally, at the end of the decade, the political landscape is dramatically different. For the first time in my lifetime, Canada’s government is further right than the US’s, most recently embarrassing itself with a disgraceful obstructionism at the Copenhagen conference. I no longer feel a terrible anger at the government of the country I live in. And yet there remain plenty of opportunities for such anger: first at Canada’s government, and second that even the new US government has done so little. Barack Obama promised us hope: but nothing has been done about climate change, the US remains mired in an Afghanistan war that looks seemingly pointless, and we have yet to see whether he can deliver even on his signature issue of health care.

And yet, one can remain happy. I’ve previously described Buddhism as a critique of hope. A good life has less to do with external situations – of you, of your country, of the world – and more to do with a peace within. With the abandonment of hope in politics can come the abandonment of anger, and a new tranquility. So Obama’s government feels less like a letdown to me than it does to many of my fellows on the left. Is he making the world better, giving us reason to hope? Perhaps not. But he’s at least stopping it from getting significantly worse. After the past decade, that’s reason enough to celebrate.

1. Everything is suffering (dukkha).
2. Suffering is caused by craving.
3. There is an end to suffering.
4. One can reach this end by following the Buddhist Noble Eightfold Path.

The Four Truths are central to the teaching of the early Pali suttas, so something like them was probably central to the teaching of the historical Buddha. There’s been a recent trend in Buddhist studies to disparage the Four Truths, on the ground that they were far removed from the practice of most Buddhists in history, whose lives (especially but not only in East Asia) focused much more on devotion and magic. But never mind. I’m far less concerned with learning about the historical structure of past Buddhist societies, and more with the question of whether these truths – undeniably revered and treated as truths by many Buddhists throughout history – are indeed true.

I noted before that the Second Noble Truth was of great importance in my own spiritual development. I would still count it as the most important thing I’ve learned from Buddhism. Maybe not all suffering comes from craving, but a huge chunk of it does.

But what about the other three? I was provoked to think about this point by comments made to my recent post on karma and theodicy, by Elisa Freschi and by James (no last name given, but his blog is The Supine Bovine). They were noting that we can’t expect to achieve human perfection (nirvana or buddhahood) in this lifetime. I added the caveat that a few traditions (usually tantric ones) believe that we can – but I certainly don’t share their belief, so the caveat is not that important.

But if we can’t achieve the ultimate end in this life, and we don’t get any additional lives to work with, then surely we will never get to that end. And that is to say that the Third Noble Truth is false. There isn’t an end to suffering – unless you count death, which is something of a copout, since it’s an end to joy and everything else as well. Given that I hold the two supporting beliefs – that we can’t achieve an end to suffering in this life, and that there is no rebirth – I am committed to denying the Third Noble Truth, and I thank James and Elisa for making me realize this.

Now, the First Noble Truth without the Third makes for an extraordinarily grim view of the world: everything is suffering, and there’s no way out. In other words, life sucks. Philosophical reflection leads us only to the realization that we must be miserable. But here’s the thing: I reject the First Noble Truth too. My earlier defence of marriage entails as much. There’s a prima facie strangeness to the claim that everything is suffering: one immediately wants to retort, “but what about joy? What about happiness?” The classic Buddhist response is that even happiness reveals itself to be suffering; even sukha is dukkha. Ultimately, the joy of love, like the joy of possession, becomes the pain of loss. But I don’t see this as true. Even if we see a thing’s true nature as being that which it will eventually become, then ultimately, as Lucretius reminds us, happiness ends not in suffering and loss, but in nothing at all – a state that is neutral, not painful. And in the meantime, we can have great joy here on earth; that joy really is joy, especially when it is enhanced by zest.

It seems to me, then, that while the Second Noble Truth basically is a truth, the First and the Third are not. And the Fourth? Well, there seems to be a lot of truth in the Buddhist path as a way of reducing suffering. Neuroscientist Richard Davidson used an fMRI machine to measure areas of the brain associated with happiness, and found that the monk Mathieu Ricard was off the charts compared to his other subjects. Davidson’s followed this up with a lot of other research about the effects of meditation on the brain, though I’d be interested to see research into the effects of other parts of Ricard’s path: Buddhist theoretical philosophy, practising Buddhist ethics, monasticism. But at any rate, it looks like at least parts of the Fourth Noble Truth are right on – when it comes to reducing suffering. The traditional claim is that it ends suffering, and that doesn’t seem to be the case. But to my mind, a major reduction is good enough.

This question of technique came up at least three times at the SACP. Peimin Ni – next year’s SACP president – argued that Mencius’s metaphysical theory of human nature is there not to justify his ethics, but to help provide practical guidance in shaping human conduct. Ni claimed that Mencius didn’t need metaphysics as a justification. Rather, because Mencius’s ethics “provides systematic instruction about how we can cultivate ourselves and lead better lives,” it “can be justified like any other practical theory, on its practical effectiveness.” This claim of practical effectiveness, I think, treats Mencius’s ethics too as a technique – a technique for becoming a good, virtuous, cultivated Confucian. But, I asked Ni in the question period, what if we don’t want to be practically effective at this goal? What if we just want to die with the most toys? On Ni’s reading, it seems to me, if we don’t already accept Mencius’s prescribed end, we have no justification offered as to why we should accept it. (Alas, my question came as one of about four or five different questions which Ni was asked to answer all at once, so as far as I can tell, he didn’t get to it.)

Before that was a panel on Christopher Chapple‘s new book Yoga and the Luminous, a book primarily about Patañjali’s Yoga Sutras, the classic philosophical text on yoga (meaning “spiritual discipline” or “spiritual practice” in a general sense, not just bodily exercises). According to Rita Sherma’s discussion of the book, Chapple says that Patañjali “brings together theological themes that might otherwise be seen as incompatible, by offering a technique.” Joseph Prabhu, the current SACP president, described this as “technological or instrumental language,” and offered some suspicion of it: yoga techniques were used in Vietnam, so that by meditating one can fight or kill more effectively. Chapple himself noted that the same was true in Iraq. Yoga then seems like a means that can be used for any end.

Finally, there was a talk I didn’t attend, but which sounded quite controversial according to some of its participants, who reported it as follows. Silong Li presented on the idea of a “Christian Zen,” Christians who practise Zen meditation. His respondent, Michael Barnhart, tore into the Christian Zen idea; for Barnhart, Zen and Christianity depend on metaphysical claims which are fundamentally incompatible with each other. Li defended himself by claiming that Zen meditation was – you guessed it – just a technique. A Buddhist means to Christian ends. I don’t think Barnhart had a chance to reply to that.

In most of these cases (except perhaps Ni’s), the rhetoric of technique allows one to sidestep Abrahamic exclusivity: you can do this without giving your heart to anyone besides Jesus. But it has its pitfalls too, as Prabhu noted: if Zen, or yoga, or vipassanā, is just a technique, then it is just like technology, which can be used for evil rather than for good. Chapple seemed to allow such a claim about yoga; one wonders whether Li or Goenka would do the same. I think they have reasons not to – for Ni, Mencius seems to be specifically offering a technique for goodness. But at that point, one wonders two things: first, aren’t you then promoting an end and not just a means – a goal that might effectively compete with Jesus or Jehovah for one’s loyalty in life? And second, as I said to Ni, do we then have any reason to pursue that end?

I gained a newfound respect for the practice, though, when I attended a vipassanā meditation retreat in S.N. Goenka’s tradition, in 2005. Many people I know swear by Goenka’s overall technique; it frankly didn’t do a lot for me. What made a huge difference, though, was at the very end of the retreat, when Goenka urged us to a practice very much like traditional pariṇāmanā. Wish everyone well, he said on his videotape. Think of people you know and wish them the best.

Fine, that’s the easy part. But then he said: wish your enemies well. Think of your enemies, and devote wishes to their being happy. So I thought: who is my greatest enemy? As a lifelong leftie, in 2005, it didn’t take me long to identify George W. Bush. And so, as part of the practice, I tried sincerely to wish that man well.

The experience was more than unsettling. I cried in the process. But it helped me grow a lot. I had spent a long time feeling such poisonous hatred for that man, which did terrible things to me and my own well-being – in a way that Śāntideva warns us about. It’s a terribly unnerving, but highly rewarding, thing to wish your enemies well. Since your enemies are only human it makes philosophical sense to do so, really, if your main aim is consequentialist – that is, to produce the best results for yourself or for humanity. The trick is that it requires you to give up retribution as a goal, and even for a consequentialist, that’s not easy.

UPDATE (29 June 2009): According to my blog stats, this post is getting almost as many hits today alone as it got in the previous three weeks it was online! I’m also seeing that people have been referred here from their Livejournal friends pages, but I can’t find any reference to the post on those pages. So I’m guessing someone referred to it from a friends-locked LJ post…? One way or another, I’m delighted to have you all here, I hope you’ve enjoyed the post, and I’d be happy to hear your comments below (and would also be happy to have you stick around and check out my other posts). I’m also a little curious about who linked to me and what they said!