Commentary on Than Geoff's Essay "The Integrity of Emptiness"

A friend recently sent an essay from 2006 by Than Geoff (Thanissaro Bhikkhu) on emptiness. Than Geoff studied meditation and Buddhism in Thailand for many years and ordained there as a Buddhist monk. He is a prolific writer, speaker, and meditation teacher and a member of the Forest Monks, a school in Thai Buddhism that advocates living in the forest and meditating in the wilderness like the Buddha did. The essay has lots of good advice about life and meditation practice, but I believe he makes an error in his assumptions about how the human mind works and a quite fundamental error when talking about emptiness.

Than Geoff starts by asserting that a metaphysical view on emptiness basically isn't much help if you are addicted to alcohol or other unskillful behaviors. He says that the problem is tactical: you believe that drinking alcohol to excess will increase your happiness more than the negative impact it will have on your short and long term health, family and work relations, and your ability to function in society. He then states that the solution needs to be tactical. A view that alcohol is somehow empty of any real existence isn't going to help you become unaddicted and lead to skillful behaviors that foster longer term happiness. While this advice is sound on the surface, it represents a misunderstanding of the neurobiology of addiction. Most people that suffer from some kind of addictive behavior don't really make a cognitive tradeoff ("alcohol today == more happiness for me today but less tomorrow!").

Marc Lewis, a neuroscientist and former professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, outlines the problem clearly in this recent essay at Aeon. The problem is that the human system consisting of the brain, body, and mind falls into a dynamic attractor that basically generates a lot of negative side effects for the person, but they can't get out of it by simple cognitive reasoning because other, stronger parts of the brain that are unresponsive to logic are in control, namely those involved in emotions and reward/punishment. Dynamic attractors are states in dynamical systems that are stable but not static, in that they can continue running through the exactly same states for a long time undisturbed. What is needed to break out of such an attractor is some emotional push. Lewis gives the example of a woman who was addicted to opiate pain killers. The woman was caught on a camera in her mother-in-law's bedroom stealing pills. The emotional trauma of being confronted with the evidence forced her into therapy and then she stopped. Lewis is also quite critical of the dominant meme regarding addiction, of medicalizing it and treating it as a disease.

But back to Than Geoff. Than Geoff goes on to say that the Buddha talked about emptiness in three distinct ways in the Pali Canon:

1. As an approach to meditation,
2. As an attribute to the senses and their objects,
3. As a state of concentration.

In the first approach, more really was involved than meditation. The approach was to practice in general. Than Geoff starts by discussing a sutta in which the Buddha talks with his son, Rahula, about skillful and unskillful action, an aspect of sila. He recommends for Rahula to reflect on an action before undertaking it, and note whether any harm will come out of it. Similarly, the Buddha recommended that monks go from a village to the forest for meditation and note that the forest was empty of any of the disturbances that the monk would encounter in a village. And finally, the Buddha recommended when trying to attain the higher jhanas, to note the disturbance due to emotional tones in the mind when in the lower jhanas and drop them. Each of these tactical actions consists of seeing how cognitively dropping some set of actions/thoughts results in a reduction of harm, where "harm" in the case of the jhanas is interpreted to mean emotional disturbance. So one can  see progressing through the improvement of sila (noting the absence of certain negative emotional states associated with unskillful actions), to basic vipassana meditation (noting the absence of village distractions in the forest), through to the higher jhanas (the disturbance caused by piti in the 3rd jhana which is gone in the 4th). The result of applying the cognitive corrective is that the resulting mind states are empty of in some sense harmful attributes.

I believe this approach to meditation practice could be valuable, but it has really never worked for me. My meditation is only under loose cognitive control, and typically I need to just establish an intention to reach some state and either I do or I don't. Typically, when I'm really sitting well, cognitive factors will drop away and my mind will be working at a more intuitive level, with a high degree of somatic (body-centered) feeling involved. Its never worked for me, for example when in access concentration, to say to myself: "This mind state is disturbed by thinking. First jhana, where there is no thinking, would be much more pleasant so I will drop thinking." On the other hand, the tactical cognitive approach has worked quite well for me in the area of skillful v.s. unskillful action. In the past, I've been able to keep my weight down by considering the consequences (more difficulty walking, less agility, the risk of diabetes and heart disease, etc.) of eating too much and exercising too little.

Than Geoff says that the second way the Buddha talks about emptiness is as an attribute to the senses and their objects. In Samyutta Nikaya 35.85, the Buddha recommends to Ananda to note that the world and the six senses (hearing, seeing, touching, tasting, smelling, and the mind sense) are empty of self or anything pertaining to self. From a philosophical standpoint, the Theravada holds that the self is empty, that is, there is no object within a person that exists from its own side which constitutes the self, nor is there anything out in the world that constitutes such a self. That doesn't mean that the self does not exist, just that it is not a self-existent thing. The self is like a car*, in that it consists of parts which are conceptually designated by the term "self" for economy of cognitive processing. The self has no existence from its own side, if any of the constituent parts were missing, so would be the self. The Theravada holds that many objects are also constituted as aggregates of smaller objects, and therefore are just conceptual. Not-self or non-self is one of the three Marks of Existence (the other two being impermanence and suffering). Than Geoff goes on to discuss some practical aspects of the not-self view.

The problem is, if you drill down into the Theravada philosophical view, emptiness isn't an attribute, its the fundamental basis of all reality. Saying emptiness is an attribute of some object is like saying that space is an attribute of the universe. Saying space is an attribute means that the universe can appear either with or without space, which is of course nonsense because space (and of course time) defines the universe. Similarly, according to the Madhyamika view of Nagarjuna, emptiness is not optional. Nothing in the universe of samsara and nirvana has any real, self-existence from its own side. Nagarjuna presents the philosophical argument for this view in his Mulamadhyamikakarika (Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way) which I've been studying for the last 5 months. You can see some of my previous blog posts on the topic here and here.

The final way Than Geoff identifies the Buddha talking about emptiness is as a state of concentration, namely the 9th jhana (5th formless jhana), cessation, or nirodha samapatti. In a couple suttas, the Buddha recommends pursuing the above mentioned approach, noting the unpleasant nature of particular emotional attributes or sensations, beyond the form jhanas into complete cessation of all sensory and cognitive activity. This attainment is quite distinct from a path moment, which occurs quite suddenly and as a result of cultivating awareness of the three Marks of Existence, not the impact of some mind states on your relaxation and pleasure as for nirodha.

I suspect that Than Geoff's motivation in writing this essay was to appeal to people who were having difficulty with sila related problems like addictions or with basic meditation practice. As evidence, I would note that he spends relatively little time on the third way he identifies the Buddha as having talked about emptiness, with respect to the other two. Getting into nirodha is quite an advanced attainment, in some reports, only open to people who have achieved the 4th path moment, so it would be of little interest to folks with more basic problems. But I think he could have done a better job by leaving emptiness out of the picture, and just talked about not-self. Not-self is good for dealing with all kinds of problems and perfectly consistent with the Theravada philosophical approach. Emptiness is somewhat deeper and more tricky, and best left to Mahayana philosophers like Nagarjuna.

* The traditional analogy is to a chariot, but when was the last time you saw a chariot?

Image source: http://awakeningtimes.com

Nagarjuna and John Calvin

John Calvin by the Renaissance painter Hans Holbein

After reading through Khenpo Rimpoche’s commentary on Nagarjuna last summer and writing a commentary on the commentary, I decided to engage with Nagarjuna somewhat more directly. Nagarjuna was a Buddhist monk who lived in India in the second or third centuries AD but surprisingly little else is known about his life. He wrote a body of work in Sanskirt, some of which is still available and others of which is only available in Chinese or Tibetan translation. Nagarjuna's work is second only to the Buddha’s in the development of Buddhist philosophy. He is known as the “Philosopher of Emptiness”, since he established emptiness as the foundational principle of the Mahayana. 

His primary work is the Mula-madhyamak-karikas (also known as the Karikas), or, in English, The Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way. This work consists of 27 verses (actually, in English, short chapters) that are structured as a kind of dialog with opponents. In the text, an opponent brings up an objection to emptiness as the fundamental nature of reality and Nagarjuna counters with arguments. The chapters are difficult to read, kind of like a differential topology text, and after struggling with them for a while, I finally paged to the end of the book and read through an essay by Richard Jones, the Karikas translator.

One particular chapter stands out as the key to the entire work: Chapter 2. Chapter 2 is about Motion. I read through the chapter six or seven times and still didn’t quite get it. He seemed to be saying something akin to the Greek philosopher Zeno (about which more later) but then it didn’t quite seem to be the exactly same thing. I asked my Mahamudra teacher about the chapter but he said that when he was studying with Khenpo Rimpoche, Khenpo never taught anything about Chapter 2, and I don't recall it having been discussed in Khenpo's commentary either. Actually, that is not surprising because the chapter is not concerned with traditional religious topics, like suffering and rebirth, topics which would interest a Tibetan lama but is more something physicists would care about. 

The argument in the chapter on Motion illustrates Nagarjuna’s basic argument on emptiness and goes something like this. Suppose the world consisted of self-existent entities. A self-existent entity is one which has no cause, exists for all time, never changes, and cannot possibly have any influence on any other entity nor be influenced itself by any such entity. Given that, it would be impossible for a self-existent entity to move, because that would involve it changing in some fashion (now it is at place <x,y,z> and then it moves to place <x’,y’,z’>). Since in practice, we see movement all the time, self-existent entities cannot possibly exist. The rest of the Karikas go on to develop this argument in various forms against other objections to emptiness. 

Nagarajuna’s philosophy is that reality is empty of any self-existing entity. Any entities that we see are ephemeral, arising due to causes and conditions and disappearing when the causes and conditions for their disappearance arise. They do in some fashion represent whatever the underlying reality is, but the tendency to view reality as a collection of self-existent entities is the fundamental delusion, the root ignorance, that causes suffering. The process by which the mind generates suffering is dependent arising, the tendency to grasp onto objects or reject them (attraction or aversion) because we are attracted to or repelled by their attributes. But emptiness is not a view or thing, it is just simply the underlying condition of reality, just as space is the underlying condition of the universe. Enlightened individuals view reality as free of such self-existing entities, as more a collection of processes, causes and conditions arising and passing away. 

Zeno, the Greek philosopher, faced exactly the same dilemma when contemplating movement. How is it possible for a self-existing entity to move? His conclusion was exactly the opposite of Nagarjuna’s, that self-existing entities did exist but that movement is an illusion. Nagarjuna's position never gained much traction in Western philosophy whereas Zeno's position became the basis of all Western religions. The Judeo-Christo-Islamic position, for example, is that God is a self-existing entity. The Buddhist position is that the gods are as ephemeral as other creatures in samsara. The king of the gods (Brahma in the Indian religious tradition) who believes he is eternal suffers from a misperception because when he came into existence, there were no other gods or other entities and he had no memory of not existing.

The Christian notion of the soul is another example of a self-existing entity. Because the soul lives on for eternity, it can't possibly change. If it did change, it would be something else. Traditional Catholic doctrine teaches that redemption is possible by doing good works, participating in the sacraments of confession and communion, and other ways (receiving indulgences from the pope, etc.). But how could these acts ever affect something that is eternal, in fact, how could sin or redemption ever occur? Because a person is ephemeral and changing, there can't possibly be any interaction between the soul and the physical person.

Possibly this dilemma was what led John Calvin to his doctrine of predestination. Calvin's predestination (technically double predestination because it applies both to the saved and the damned) holds that God decided at the beginning of time whose soul would be saved and whose would be damned and nothing you can do in your life can have any effect on your soul's fate. Your soul remains untouched by anything your physical body does, as must necessarily be the case for a self-existent entity such as a soul. The contrast between Nagarjuna and Calvin couldn't be more striking. In Nagarjuna's philosophy, reality is fluid and changing, free of hindrance if we can change our perception to see the fluidity. In Calvin's, reality was fixed at the time of Creation and is completely impossible to change, like a computer program written by God when He booted up Creation and burned into an SSD.

Image source: wikipedia.com