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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But if one takes up the resulting position – neither supernatural nor political – then one has relatively little company in the history of philosophy. From Yavanayāna Buddhists to Unitarian Universalists, those who have sought to move beyond the supernatural have typically also believed in political engagement. The vast majority of political quietists like Śāntideva believed in a vast panoply of unseen worlds far beyond those supported by empirically tested evidence.

I continue to wonder: is there something I’m missing? Is there some reason why so many in the end tend to supernaturalism, politics, or both? (Epicurus is perhaps the clearest example of a figure who avoided both supernaturalism and politics – but Epicureanism as a system did not last, and even those who sought to resurrect Epicurus’s philosophy have sometimes ditched his anti-politics.)

Last time I mused on the subject, I turned to an explanation from Simone Weil: “Atheist materialism is necessarily revolutionary, because to orient oneself toward an absolute good down here, one must place it in the future.” Humans, Weil seems to imply, will always seek some sort of absolute perfection: the choice is to seek it in an otherworldly realm, or in the future of this one. Eric Voegelin appeared to see the same choice as Weil, and view the latter choice as disastrous: there will always be an “eschaton,” a Final End that human life aspires to, and if we immanentize it – that is, set it in this world instead of a transcendent world beyond – then we will end up with totalitarian states that goosestep over the messy imperfections inevitable in human life. Whether or not there were any other world in which to transcend, according to Voegelin, the absence of belief in such an other world leads us to terror in this one.

But I asked before: do we really have to seek an absolute good? What about just seeking modest improvements, trying to minimize suffering without eliminating it? As non-supernaturalists, shouldn’t we just try and make sure that people set their eyes lower than Weil and Voegelin do?

Well, one answer that comes to mind for that question is: death. The existence of a final death seems to pose a major problem for any sort of egoistic consequentialism, any idea that one should seek out the best consequences for oneself – including the virtue and tranquility that Epicurus himself seeks. For eventually, there will be no further consequences no matter what one does. At the last moment of one’s life, there is no future, nothing to maximize and no reason to do anything. And at the previous moment, all the egoist can act for is something better in that last moment. In the earlier moments of life, the moments that one can improve will run out before one knows it. As important as this one life looks while we’re in it, it begins to look pretty small when one faces impending death, whether it is impending in seconds or in decades.

By contrast, an absolute good – an “eschaton” – outlasts the individual self, it is something bigger to strive for. Even striving for the good of one’s immediate circle of friends and relatives seems hollow when their death will follow in a few decades as well. But the state – that offers the promise of something more lasting. The Jacobins are long dead, but the capitalist world unleashed by the French Revolution is still with us. The possibility of a classless communist society offers the same intoxicating thought of a world in which one’s contributions live on long after death, a world where one’s life is more important than its mere length.

Politics, then, offers a way to transcend death through what Freud called cathexis – as might one’s children and one’s work. We break down the boundaries of our selves and identify them with something that outlasts ourselves, such as a state or new classless society.

But there remains a basic problem with transcending death through cathexis in this way: the object of cathexis has no guarantee of immortality either. Lenin’s classless society lies in ruins today. What guarantee have we that the perfect society we think we’re building will not do the same? Let alone the more minor improvements we might make to politics as it is. This seems to me the greatest problem with descent philosophies of whatever variety: however much one might accomplish, in the end it comes to naught. Lucretius is right that when we die we won’t care about that nothingness. But that doesn’t stop it from casting a shadow over all we do in life, raising questions about the point of it all, whether it’s really worth bothering or we’re just fooling ourselves.

And so I start to turn to ascent philosophies, views that turn us in some respect away from the world we see. But then we are back to the original problem: most ascent philosophies, especially the ascending intimacy philosophies, are supernaturalist. They depend on an afterlife, turn us away from this world toward the one that is supposed to come after death – but to one who doesn’t believe in the supernatural, it would seem like there is no such thing.

However, those philosophies of the afterlife have one thing in common with the descent philosophies. They both put the absolute good, the eschaton, in the future, whether a transcendent or immanent future. A great appeal to me of Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta philosophy is that it gives us an eschaton which is beyond time itself, and therefore essentially not in the future. We have an absolute good that is already there at all times; it’s just a matter of realizing it. Does Śaṅkara get us entirely beyond the supernaturalism-or-politics quandary? Probably not – he believed in rebirth himself, after all, and the main point of bothering to realize the absolute good would be that one would do so in the future and avoid the suffering attached to future ignorant births. It makes for an interesting alternative way of viewing the problem, but not necessarily a solution to it.

One can always argue the details of this textual question in any given case. In Śāntideva’s case it’s not only a matter of arguing whether “his” two major works (the Bodhicaryāvatāra and the Śikṣā Samuccaya) were written by the same person; it’s also the fact that these texts may themselves be the work of multiple writers, in that there’s an early version of the Bodhicaryāvatāra (the “Dunhuang recension”) which differs from the received version known to tradition. But there’s an issue here much bigger than the interpretation of any one thinker: should one even try to find the coherent views of an individual author?

Gyatso greatly admired the works of Jacques Derrida, who threw doubt on the idea of authorship, and often focused on the “margins” of texts in order to highlight inconsistencies and ways in which the texts break down. Her course on Buddhist philosophy highlighted parallels between the work of Derrida and of Nāgārjuna. In some respects it’s not hard to see why: Derrida questions the idea of the subject or self, as most Buddhist thinkers do. If the self is unreal, as so many Buddhist thinkers have said, then so is the author. Thus perhaps Śāntideva’s disavowal of his own originality and profundity at the beginning of the Bodhicaryāvatāra. (I have tended to insist that the difference between Derrida and Buddhist Madhyamaka philosophy is that Madhyamaka has a point. But that’s a topic for another time.)

It does help, I think, to be careful with questions of authorship – to think carefully about what one means when one speaks of “Śāntideva” (or “Plato”), when the texts come to us from such questionable sources. But I also think it’s all too easy to take the point too far. When one discards the search for coherence entirely, one discards most of one’s ability to learn from the texts one reads.

From the first draft of my proposal to the final draft of my dissertation, my research was guided by this quote from Thomas Kuhn:

When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer, I continue, when those passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning. (from p. xii of his The Essential Tension)

Significant words here include “important thinker” and “sensible person.” You might find plenty of contradictions or other absurdities in the ramblings of an everyday, average person. But the writers of great works like the Bodhicaryāvatāra put a lot of thought into those works, and their value has repeatedly been discovered anew by thinkers in the generations that follow them. They’re not going to drop random inconsistencies into their work and just think “oh, that’s okay.” If there are contradictions, they’re going to be there for a good reason; at the very least, contradictions need to be explained.

It was this method of looking for coherence that allowed me to find what I think is the most innovative and important part of my dissertation’s interpretation of Śāntideva: the idea that gifts benefit the recipient through the gift encounter and not the gift object. I was looking at the combination of Śāntideva’s advice that material goods are harmful, and the fact that he urges one to give those gifts to others for their own benefit. Was there a way these two ideas could go together without contradicting each other? Sure enough, there was – you just had to get rid of the idea, which seems like common sense to us but not to Śāntideva, that the purpose of gift-giving is to ensure that the recipient possesses the gift. I could have shrugged my shoulders and said “well, this is a composite text, of course it contradicts itself.” But if I had, if I hadn’t taken contradiction in the important thinker as a problem, I wouldn’t have seen what I came to see.

As far as I know, it was just such an approach that led Kuhn to write his most famous work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. As a physicist, Kuhn was trying to read Aristotle’s Physics, and found it full of what appeared to be unpardonable errors in logic and observation. Just from looking at the world around him, Aristotle should have known better. Now Kuhn could easily have said “well, we all contradict ourselves and make dumb mistakes; why should we expect better of Aristotle?” But he didn’t. He did expect better from the thinker whose works had been taken as canonical for a thousand years, and rightly so. Once he did, it fell into place: Aristotle was asking entirely different questions, for different purposes, from the questions a Newtonian physicist would ask. Aristotle’s work would make perfect sense if one’s underlying assumptions changed.

More broadly, I think, it’s this search for coherence in the great and admired minds of the past that leads us to find genuinely new insights, ones that change our current perspective. In constructive study, where one seeks to learn from a tradition and not merely about it, there is always the danger that one will only find what one was already looking for – pick out the ideas one already agrees with, and not be challenged by them. One of the best ways to avoid this, to learn something genuinely new, is to focus on those “apparent absurdities,” the things that don’t make sense, and ask how somebody intelligent could have believed them. One might not come to believe in the thing one thought was absurd; but one will likely come to see the world in a new way that will challenge other ideas.

Ethical egoism of some description – say, as advocated by Epicurus – is a perfectly respectable philosophical position. One can say that one’s reasons to benefit others are all ultimately based on benefit to oneself, if one’s own self-interest is rightly understood. Neither Paul has a great deal of sympathy for this position, as far as I can tell, but it is not what they take as a target for their attack.

Rather, they reserve their greatest ire for a position that derives other-orientation from ātmanism – or at least from nondualism. Though Śāntideva is the last to believe in an ātman, he, like Vivekānanda, nevertheless gets to altruism by deconstructing the self, saying the differences we perceive between selves are not ultimately real. Śaṅkara and Buddhaghosa would likewise have taken the first step and deconstructed the self, saying the different human selves we perceive are; but what they would not have done would have been to take this as a justification for altruism. As with Epicurus, our primary goal needs to be our own liberation from suffering. This conclusion, the Pauls take as logically acceptable, though they disagree with it.

But the next step that Śāntideva and Vivekānanda take and Śaṅkara and Buddhaghosa do not – to say that Epicurean egoism is not acceptable because the individual self it defends is unreal – is a step too far, in the Paul’s eyes. For by deconstructing egoism, they reason, Śāntideva and Vivekānanda also effectively deconstruct altruism. (Williams’s chapter is entitled “How Śāntideva destroyed the bodhisattva path”!) If there is no self, there can be no other about which to be concerned; nor can there even be suffering to be prevented.

But neither Paul says this because they wish to advocate an Epicurean egoism, to take us back to the egoistic nondualism of a Śaṅkara. They want us to be altruistic – but only on the right grounds, and these grounds are grounds of encounter. For there to be real altruism, there must be real others; and therefore altruism must come out of encounter and not out of ātmanism or nondualism.

And while up to now I’ve discussed this issue in the sectarian terms of Catholics attacking Buddhists, I think the distinction made here also shows up in contemporary analytical ethics. Derek Parfit has argued for altruism on grounds which even he identified as analogous Buddhist non-self – the self is not a real entity from moment to moment, and so we should not privilege it over others. Mark Siderits has recently taken up, at book length, the similarities between Parfit’s view and those of Buddhist thinkers like Śāntideva.

I used to think there were close similarities between Parfit’s (and Śāntideva’s) view and that of Christine Korsgaard, who – like them – argues that full-blown egoism is not rational. But the Catholic Pauls pushed me to see the differences between them. For Korsgaard criticizes egoism in a very different way, one that they could endorse.

Korsgaard, it turns out, does not deconstruct the ego itself – only egoism. The self, on her account, is quite real; but its reasons for action are not fundamentally egoistic. In everyday life, “We do not seem to need a reason to take the reasons of others into account. We seem to need a reason not to. Certainly we do things because others want us to, ask us to, tell us to, all the time…. We respond with the alacrity of obedient soldiers to telephones and doorbell and cries for help.” (The Sources of Normativity 140-1) Korsgaard tries to argue that reasons for action are public in their very nature; each individual’s reasons for acting are not separate from the reasons of other individuals. And one of the fundamental ways in which reasons apply to others is obligation, which comes out of respect for others’ humanity or personhood. If I am blithely torturing a stranger (Korsgaard’s example, derived from Thomas Nagel) and the stranger asks “How would you like it if I did that to you?” I can continue to torture the stranger, but not in the way I did before, for the stranger has now obligated me.

There are very strong echoes here – possibly uninentional – of Emmanuel Lévinas, the Jewish archetypical philosopher of obligation and encounter. Obligation is not a concept that shows up in Śāntideva – or, for that matter, in Aristotle. Korsgaard’s own introduction notes that it was the Christians – surely under the influence of Jewish law tradition – who began to move the mainstream of Western philosophy away from concepts of excellence (or virtue) and toward concepts of obligation. And this obligation always seems to be an obligation toward someone irreducibly different from oneself. The Advaitic ātman might have good reason to reduce its own ignorance, but it is not obligated to do so.

So, leaving aside egoistic philosophies for the moment, we can draw boundaries between two quite different justifications for altruism, two different ways in which egoism can be considered an error. In Korsgaard, Lévinas and I think the Catholic Pauls, we get an encounter variety of altruism, where each separate and individual self is in part constituted by binding obligations to others (whether other people or God). Whereas in Śāntideva, Parfit and Vivekānanda, we get a nondualist variety of altruism, one based on the idea that the selves themselves are not really real. The Catholic Pauls attack the second because they wish to move us toward the first.

So far, it’s pretty much the usual story of 19th-century reform. But Hacker takes his critique much further than the basic historical point, and this is where it gets interesting to me. Hacker’s special ire, beyond his general disdain for modern Hinduism, is reserved for the “tat tvam asi ethic”, the idea that because we are all ultimately one infinite spirit (“you are that,” as the Chāndogya Upaniṣad supposedly claims), we should help each other because we are really helping ourselves. For Hacker, it is not merely the case that classical Advaita Vedānta thinkers never adopted an altruistic or activistic ethics based on the tat tvam asi of the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, but that they could not have. For, Hacker claims, “From the philosophical point of view, to base the tat tvam asi ethic on the foundation of the Vedāntic monism of consciousness is a logical impossibility.” (“Schopenhauer and Hindu ethics,” p. 305) On the next page he goes on to describe the tat tvam asi ethic not merely as a “logical impossibility” but as a “logical monstrosity.” (p. 305, my emphasis) Hacker wants to show the tat tvam asi ethic is a modern invention because, in his mind, the great Vedāntic sages of old were way too wise to ever have fallen for such a load of garbage.

What is it about Vivekānanda’s tat tvam asi ethic, in Hacker’s mind, that makes it logically impossible and even monstrous? For Hacker, genuinely ethical behaviour – by which he means altruistic behaviour – depends on the existence of separate persons, whose differences are irreducible:

Ethical behavior presupposes an interpersonal relationship, which loses its metaphysical justification if individual personhood has no ultimate reality…. Neither the monism of will nor the monism of consciousness or spirit has a real place for the concept of person. But when this concept is not taken seriously, ethics remains on a naturalistic level; that is, there is no true ethics, good and evil have no truly metaphysical relevance, and ultimately there are only ways of realizing or veiling the impersonal universal One…. There is no sense in which an identification of a “that” with a “thou,” such as we have in tat tvam asi, can explain why good and bad behavior exist. Interpersonal relationship is not identity, and it is certainly not identity of a person with an impersonal being.

As philosophical argument I do not think this goes very far, not by itself anyway. Much of it depends on the semi-tautological identification of “ethics” with altruism. If one acknowledges that an ethics can be based on self-interest and that other-interest can be grounded in self-interest, then there seems little logical problem here: the tat tvam asi ethic might not really or ultimately be altruistic, but so what? Even in historical terms, Hacker seems to be on poor ground in believing that such a monistic ethic is purely modern. Hugh van Skyhawk, replying to Hacker in the 74th (1993) volume of the Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, argued that a similar view was found in the sixteenth-century Marathi poet-saint Eknath (also spelled Ekanāth or Ekanātha). Eknath told his listeners (in Skyhawk’s translation) that the true yogī “immediately gives up his own interests and ventures into difficulties for the sake of others”; and argues for such altruism on strongly nondualist grounds:

He, for whom there is no more “I” and “mine” and “thee” and “thine” by virtue of the contact with the worship of the divine non-duality and the Self is called the highest bhakta. If he gives his fortune (nijavitta) to another, no misgivings arise in his citta. He does not even sense a trace of alienation. No feelings of doubt arise. The object in the right hand is given to the left hand. Who is the giver here? Who is the receiver?

Overall, then, Hacker’s arguments against monist ethics aren’t particularly persuasive. What excites me about Hacker’s arguments is his reasons for making them. Wilhelm Halbfass’s introduction to his collection of Hacker’s writings stresses the increasing importance in Hacker’s work of his conversion to Roman Catholicism. And Catholicism, it seems to me, stresses encounter over ātmanism: it is all about one’s relationship to a God with whom one is not identical.

The point is highlighted in the much more powerful arguments of another Catholic Paul, Paul Williams. Williams, to my knowledge, says nothing about Hacker in his work; since Williams is a Buddhologist, he may well be entirely unaware of Hacker. And yet Williams’s criticism of Śāntideva (in the final chapters of his Altruism and Reality parallels Hacker’s criticism of Vivekānanda in remarkable ways. Among Śāntideva’s most famous passages (now even excerpted in an introductory ethics text) is his “equalization of self and other” in verses VIII.90-119 of the Bodhicaryāvatāra, in which he argues that, since the self is an illusion (a standard Buddhist view), egoistic action does not make logical sense and we should be altruistic (an innovation of his). Śāntideva is not a monist like Vivekānanda; he is strongly opposed to the Vedāntic idea of a universal cosmic self. Nevertheless, there is a close parallel in that both Śāntideva and Vivekānanda try to deconstruct our ideas of self in order to deconstruct ethical egoism and urge altruistic action. And so Williams’s criticisms of Śāntideva turn out on similar lines to Hacker’s criticisms of Vivekānanda.

Unlike Hacker, Williams makes no attempt at historical criticism; Williams has no doubt that Śāntideva actually believed all this. He simply thinks that Śāntideva is dead wrong. In thinking and arguing this, he has provoked a strong reaction among Buddhologists, no less than five of whom (Barbra Clayton, John Pettit, Jon Wetlesen, Mark Siderits and José Cabezón) have tried to refute him in print. I’m not going to examine today whether Williams is right or wrong (it is a complex question); but I want to explore important points in his arguments.

What Williams claims, against Śāntideva, is that there can be no compassion unless there are persons feeling the compassion for other persons. Compassion requires the existence of persons feeling suffering; without sufferers, there is no suffering and no compassion. (T.R. (Thill) Raghunath made a similar argument in a recent comment.) If the self is deconstructed, so too is suffering, and indeed perhaps all reasons for action.

Both Paul Hacker and Paul Williams, then, are trying to tell us: you cannot have it both ways. Either you can have a nondual view (monist or otherwise) that deconstructs our everyday selves, or you can have the commitment to altruistic alleviation of others’ suffering. The two don’t make sense together; and the first certainly isn’t an argument for the second.

Such a view seems to me to have profound roots in the Abrahamic monotheisms; while the Pauls in question are Catholic, one could surely also imagine it being made by a Jew. For indeed the criticism reminds me strongly of Emmanuel Lévinas and his insistence on the irreducible otherness of other people – with God as the ultimate other. (For breaking down the distinction between himself and God, al-Hallāj was tortured and killed.) The ethical deconstruction of self seems important to a nondual view of the world; but to refute such nonduality seems central to theism. (But not only Abrahamic theism: the nineteenth-century Bengali devotional poet Ramprasad Sen criticized nondualism by saying “I want to taste sugar, not to become sugar.”)

Perhaps the boldest statement of this point was the 1962 article “Schopenhauer and Hindu ethics,” by the late German Indologist Paul Hacker (now translated in a collection of Hacker’s writings by Hacker’s student Wilhelm Halbfass). Hacker is reacting against what was until that point a commonplace in the presentation of Indian philosophy – an interpretation presented as uncomplicated fact, for example, in Hajime Nakamura’s A Comparative History of Ideas – which turns out to have a far more modern provenance.

The commonplace in question is what Hacker calls the tat tvam asi ethic, an idea found above all in the works of Swami Vivekānanda. This ethic is Vivekānanda’s influential attempt to use Advaita Vedānta to support an altruistically engaged politics, closely parallel to what would come to be called Engaged Buddhism; it would later be picked up enthusiastically by other modern Hindu thinkers like Radhakrishnan. Tat tvam asi is the Chāndogya Upaniṣad’s famous teaching that “you are that,” that each of us individual people is ultimately identical to the supreme principle of the universe, brahman. This idea of personal identity with brahman is standard in the Advaita Vedānta tradition of Śaṅkara and others. (Joel Brereton argued, in an article helpfully reproduced here, that tat tvam asi‘s original meaning in the Chāndogya is actually quite different, but that’s another story.) But Vivekānanda adds something else: an ethics of altruism. Because each of us is identical with brahman, we are therefore also all each identical with everyone else. And therefore if we really understood how things were, we would help out everyone else:

There are moments when every man feels that he is one with the universe, and he rushes forth to express it, whether he knows it or not. This expression of oneness is what we call love and sympathy, and it is the basis of all our ethics and morality. This is summed up in the Vedånta philosophy by the celebrated aphorism, Tat Tvam Asi, “Thou art That.” To every man, this is taught: Thou art one with this Universal Being, and, as such, every soul that exists, is your soul; and every body that exists, is your body; and in hurting any one, you hurt yourself, in loving any one, you love yourself. (Collected Works of Swami Vivekānanda, Mayavati Memorial Edition, I.388-9)

Against this “tat tvam asi ethic,” Hacker thinks he has found a smoking gun of sorts. A scholar with a background in Engaged Buddhism and similar movements might expect that such political engagement is a modern Indian invention; but Hacker goes a step further. For him this ethic is not even Indian at all, but an invention of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. In his 1841 work On the Basis of Morality, which identified compassion as the fundamental basis for morality, Schopenhauer claimed:

In Sanskrit tat tvam asi (this art thou) is the formula, the standing expression, for this knowledge. It is this that bursts forth as compassion on which all genuine, i.e. disinterested, virtue therefore depends, and whose real expression is every good deed. In the last resort, it is this knowledge to which every appeal to gentleness, leniency, loving-kindness, and mercy instead of justice, is directed. For such an appeal is a reminder of that respect in which we are all one and the same entity. (Schopenhauer, E.F.J. Payne translation, p. 210)

And according to Hacker, Vivekānanda only believed in the tat tvam asi ethic because he got it from Schopenhauer! It happened indirectly, through the well connected Indologist Paul Deussen – a mutual friend of Schopenhauer and Vivekānanda (and Nietzsche), who believed that tat tvam asi could be a strong support for compassion and activism (though it had not actually been such in Indian history). Looking through Vivekānanda’s writings, Hacker finds that before Vivekānanda met Deussen in September 1896, he lamented that Vedānta (specifically meaning Advaita) was an impediment to altruism and social service. Based on the journals of others present at the 1896 meeting, Deussen and Vivekānanda almost certainly discussed the tat tvam asi ethic there; and after that meeting, Vivekānanda began giving a great number of enthusiastic speeches proclaiming that Advaita Vedānta offered the highest support for compassion and social activism. (Both Hacker and Vivekānanda tend to use the concepts of morality, compassion, activism and social service almost interchangeably; I think my dissertation demonstrates that this is a great conflation, but that too is another story.) Hacker concludes that the link between Vedānta and compassion was effectively conjured up by Schopenhauer, and adopted by modern Indians only because Schopenhauer’s idea passed to Vivekānanda through Deussen.

Is Hacker’s account right? Dermot Killingley’s “Vivekānanda’s Western message from the East” (in William Radice’s unfortunately OOP Swami Vivekānanda and the Modernization of Hinduism) has demonstrated that it is likely overstated. Killingley shows that Vivekānanda had started making some claims similar to the tat tvam asi ethic before he had met Deussen. The encounter with Deussen probably crystallized the idea of the tat tvam asi ethic in Vivekānanda’s mind, but he had had most of the basic idea already. Like the Engaged Buddhists, Vivekānanda had already been searching for ways to bring together his ancient tradition with the modern Western idea of political engagement; his encounter with a Westerner helped him develop the idea, but the Westerner doesn’t deserve all the credit. And as with Yavanayāna Buddhism, the idea’s modern provenance should not necessarily discredit it.

The story Hacker tells is an interesting one. But from the point of view of my current philosophical interests, still more interesting are the reasons why he tells it. I will turn to that point next time.

I’ll admit often feeling a certain impatience with philosophers of encounter like Lévinas (which probably makes me what Skholiast called an “ātmanist”). It has never been clear to me why, exactly, we’re supposed to be so limitlessly bound by “the Other” (usually with the capital letters). Lévinas’s philosophy strikes me as ruthlessly Abrahamic: at its core is a bowing and scraping before God, drastically opposed to any embrace of the divine with ourselves, parallel to Sirhindī‘s insistence on God’s distance from his creation. As I noted in the comments to that post, Sirhindī advocated not merely intolerance to, but subjugation of, indigenous Indian traditions. Likewise Davis, in our conversation after his talk, noted that Lévinas uses the term “pagan” in an extraordinarily negative sense; his Abrahamism reminds me of Tertullian asking rhetorically “What has Athens do to with Jerusalem?” And while I am somewhat uncomfortable with the lack of humility expressed in a humanist view, I’m even more uncomfortable with trusting an Abrahamic god.

Davis’s talk, however, helped me put many of these ideas in perspective. Nishida’s thought, it turns out, is close to Lévinas’s in a number of ways, though far removed from Abrahamic traditions. (Intriguingly, Nishida even wrote a book entitled I and Thou, while apparently entirely unaware of Buber‘s work of the same title.) Nishida tells us that “there is no universal that would subsume I and thou,” for that would deny the individuality and otherness of the two terms. The other must remain other. Nishida has a Zen take on the matter rather than an Abrahamic one: there must be something shared between the self and the other or no encounter can take place; but one must speak of this shared universal as emptying itself out, a “None” rather than a “One.”

But why should we think this way? A particularly evocative quote in Davis’s talk helped give me a clue in explanation: “I am truly myself by way of not being myself; I live by dying.” Now it seems like we are dealing with the paradoxes of hedonism: when all we seek is our own happiness, we don’t get it. We are most fulfilled when we live for something bigger than ourselves; a life centred entirely on the self will fail even on its own terms. Perhaps I’m getting more sympathetic to this sort of view as I approach marriage – realizing the fulfillment in a life choice that requires a certain self-overcoming, requires you to live for someone else as they live for you.