Karma and Logic

Tibetan Wheel of Life

Nagarajuna has an interesting view on karma. His view is that it is not subject to analysis. This means that you can't approach it logically. The Tibetans classify karma (including rebirth) as the only one of the Buddha's teachings which is Extremely Hidden, which means that it is impossible to find evidence for it. Teachings which are classified as Hidden, like dependent arising, are subject to analysis and evidence can be found, but it requires careful attention. The evidence for other teachings, like on metta, is clearly visible for all to see.

What does this mean? Well, it means that describing a mechanism for karma and rebirth is impossible. By "mechanism", I mean a cause and effect sequence that explains how they work. The mechanism for rebirth comes down to: it's driven by your karma. And the mechanism for karma comes down to: unknown. Incidentally, that karma is the "cause" of rebirth need not be the case. It is possible that someone might be reborn with no connection to the meritorious or unmeritorious acts in their life; in fact, the Buddha explicitly refuted this in one of the suttas.

Why is this a problem? It's particularly a problem for rebirth because from what we know about how humans and other animals come into existence, on the physical side and increasingly on the psychological side, there is always a sequence of causal events and their effects, that determine the outcome, namely the coming into existence of a new being. This sequence of causal events doesn't have a place in it for "this dying person here is reborn as that being there" without any intervening events on the physical and psychological side. For this reason, most Secular Buddhists reject belief in karma and rebirth. Note the use of "events" here, I'm abiding by the modern view of causality, that a cause and effect sequence is primarily the arising of one or several causal events that come together to fashion the effect. This is different from the ancient Indian view, in which a cause was viewed as an object, and the effect was too.

Now, I would argue there is some evidence for karma and rebirth, but it's reliability is somewhat suspect.* As I described in the book, I've had visions of past lives of myself and others during meditation, other contemporary practitioners have as well, and from the sutta reports, the Buddha did too. I think the Buddha probably took these visions at face value, since they reinforced the cultural view that karma and rebirth exist. In addition, it gave him the opportunity to comfort family members who came to him in absolute grief due to the passing of a loved one**. My theory is that he would go off to meditate, go into a deep jhana state, and when he came out, a vision would arise of the next life of the family's departed member. Then he would go back and tell them, to their great relief. Unless of course the vision was of an unfortunate rebirth, in which case the Buddha could use that as a lesson for why ethical behavior is important, hopefully prompting any family members who had the same tendencies to clean up their act.

So karma and rebirth are basically a matter of belief. Though I don't have any proof, I also think whether or not you have visions of past and future lives depends on whether or not you believe in rebirth, as I talk about in the Epilog to the book. What does that say about the actual existence of karma and rebirth? Who knows! Like I said at the beginning, it's impossible to gather any evidence, either physical or psychological, for it. You either believe in it or you don't.

But if you don't, it's not like the Christian view of belief, that you are going to hell if you don't believe in God. It's more like if you don't believe in the science behind global warming and continue to pollute, the planet is going to cook regardless of your belief. In other words, the view is that karma works whether you believe in it or not, and that your next life will depend on how you comport yourself in this life. If you do good acts, then you'll be reborn in a happy destination, if not, well then too late. People in the Secular Buddhist community, like Stephen Batchelor, are perfectly in harmony with the Buddha's teachings if they don't believe in rebirth.

Despite what some Buddhist Web sites and teachers say, you can be a perfectly good Buddhist and not believe in karma and rebirth. The important point is not to behave like a self-centered jerk, and try to bring some generosity and compassion to your interactions with others and yourself. Whether or not you get reborn into a better next life..well, I guess you'll just have to wait and see, eh?



* Another body of evidence comes from Ian Stephanson a former professor at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, who  conducted research by interviewing young children about their memories of past lives. I feel this is in the same category as meditative visions, namely there is no plausible hypothesis about how the memories could have gotten from the former life to the current one, so their cause must be something different.

** This is contrary to the predominant Secular Buddhist view, that the stories in the suttas about the Buddha's visions on past and future lives were added by later editors, to reinforce a particular theological view of the universe.

Image source: buddhaweekly.com

Nirvana: A Fifth View

Mt. Kangchanjunga, Nepal

In a blogpost of April, 2015 titled Meditative Attainments: Four Views of Nirvana, I described four views of Nirvana from different traditions. After spending the last half year studying Nagrajuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika, I think I now understand a fifth view, or maybe lack of view is a better way to put it. Because that is what Nagarjuna's view of nirvana is, the lack of any fixed view at all.

It's difficult to see how this could be possible. Language forces our thinking into classifying the world into objects and what they do, nouns and verbs, with prepositions acting as a kind of relational glue. This observation provides the first hint about one property of this non-view: it is difficult to describe in language. And, to the extent we use language to communicate, the non-view of no fixed view is difficult to communicate at all. The commentators to the Karikas nevertheless felt that the Buddha and other enlightened beings have to communicate with students about what liberation is like, and so they have to use some kind of language.

From the Theravada/Early Buddhist perspective, the Buddha's teaching is all about abandoning desire and aversion through the realization that the self is just a constructed entity and not something fixed. This realization does not come easy. The deep altered states of consciousness coming from the path and fruit (magga and phala) moments in the four stages of enlightenment are needed to sever the bonds between sense perception and the constructed entity of the self. Wynne in his excellent essay "Early Buddhist Teaching as Proto-sunyavada" describes this as "no-self".

Nagarjuna's view which is based on some threads in the Nikayas from the Buddha's teaching, is that, actually, the whole world is a cognitive construction, just like the feeling of self. This isn't to suppose that Nagarjuna was a solipsist or a subjective idealist, in other words, that he believed there is no reality outside of his mind. Rather, his position is that there is an objective reality, but we can never know it as more than an approximation. That's because we construct a view of objective reality from our sense data and the cognitive context we bring to that data. The sense data is constrained by the kinds of events our sense organs can experience. For example, some bees can see into the ultraviolet but humans can't, so bees have a different view of the world than we do. The cognitive context contains such properties as our gender, our native language and any other languages in which we are fluent, our culture, the time and place in which our lives play out, and so forth.


These properties and our limited sense data cause us to interpret the world in particular ways that, if they were to occur to someone else, say a women from the 25th century with genetic enhancements that allow her to see into the ultraviolet who was raised on Mars or a monk from 200 BC India who achieved liberation on the banks of the Niranjara River (aka the Buddha), would result in a different interpretation. Complete liberation from the process by which we construct reality from sense data and our cognitive context seems unlikely to be possible on a permanent basis, though I believe it is possible to experience the constructed nature of reality just like it is possible to experience the constructed nature of the self, through meditation. Being able to realize the constructed nature of our views on reality and treating them lightly, as a hypothesis, rather than as a fixed, immovable, universal, and unending truth is what I believe is Nagarjuna's Fifth View of Nirvana.




Image source:wikipedia.com

Book Review of A Guided Tour of Hell by Sam Bercholz

Picture of the Cosmology of Hell from the Book Jacket

Hell is a topic that most Westerners would rather avoid. Indeed, Sam Bercholz said at his talk I attended on Saturday that when he read Paltrul Rinpoche's Words of My Perfect Teacher, he paged through the descriptions of hell, thinking them to be for Tibetan peasants, and he ignored Dante's Inferno for the Paradiso. But after suffering a massive heart attack at the Palm Springs airport and having a sextuple bypass, Bercholz was in the intensive care ward slowly recovering when he flatlined and literally died. While the medical personnel were frantically trying to revive him, he had a near death experience, but it was not the peaceful, "Tunnel of Light" experience widely reported in the New Age literature. It was an experience of hell. 

This book is a collaboration between Bercholz and an extraordinarily talented Tibetan painter from Los Angeles, Pema Namdol Thaye. The book is lavishly illustrated with Thaye's pictures, and Bercholz subtitles the book "A Graphic Memoir", making the comparison with graphic novels and comics. The pictures of hell are in color, while other pictures depicting Bercholz' life, including a previous near death experience in which he experienced the "Tunnel of Light", are in black in white. Hell in Thaye's depiction bifurcates into two, the hot hells - a roiling place of lava, sulfur and smoke where beings are packed so tightly that some beings are parts of others - and the cold hells were everything is frozen, including the beings who ended up there. Bercholz said that the hot hells are where beings end up whose minds tend toward anger and hatred, while the cold hells are those where beings end up whose minds tend toward disdain.

Bercholz and Thaye spent many hours talking about Bercholz's experience but the power of the pictures comes from Thaye's experience of having visited hell too. As a young child in Tibet, Thaye always wanted to paint pictures of hell, and he is one of a small group of "hell travelers", along with Bercholz: those who have visited hell and returned to speak about it. Bercholz says that the only reason he was able to survive the experience was that he was accompanied on his visit by the Buddha of Hell, a compassionate presence who literally held Bercholz in his hands, and Jhana Sophia, the embodiment of wisdom. Bercholz says that even in hell it is possible to become enlightened and escape. The hell dwellers just need to realize compassion for themselves and those suffering around them, and they will see Jhana Sophia and the Buddha of Hell, and be reborn in another, less suffering intensive realm. But the hell dwellers are so caught up in their own anger and distain that they don't see these two beings.

Most of the pictures show hell as a modern cityscape, not the traditional Tibetan architecture nor even the Renaissance landscape of Dante in his Inferno. Bercholz says that before he entered hell, he encountered Yama, the Lord of Death and the embodiment of impermanence, and that Yama was the only aspect of the entire experience that looked like the traditional Tibetan depiction. A long time student of Tibetan Buddhism whose teachers include Choam Trugpa Rinpoche, Bercholz says that after he was revived, he was surprised that hell looked a bit like a big city having expected that it would look like Tibet, but that after some research in the experience of hell in other cultures, people universally experience it in ways that are consistent with their experience in their life.

Bercholz says that this is due to our "habit of space and time". Being dead, you no longer have a body to ground your experience in the material world so the continuity of your mind begins to construct experiences based on your habits during your life. If that includes habitual anger, hatred, and distain, then you will experience hell. Even though the book is structured as a series of vignettes telling the stories of the suffering beings he met in hell, Bercholz is clear that the actual experience was completely nonconceptual. The stories are an attempt to render this deep, nonconceptual experience into the "and then this happened, and then I met this being and she told me her story..." by which humans pass on their experience to each other. 

I've personally always been interested in hell, read Dante's Inferno with interest when I was in college, and have been a fan of Hieronymus Bosch's art. The description of the Buddhist hells have also drawn my attention, particularly the "Hell of the Iron Doors", where the suffering being is in a room of hot iron and there are doors open on the four walls, but as they run to escape the room, the door slams shut. What exactly hell is or isn't is another question, but from Bercholz' and others description, something seems to be there. Unfortunately, while his and Thaye's book is a fascinating read, the way such an experience is communicated, through stories, is unlikely to reach the people who really need to hear it, those whose lives are ruled by habitual anger, hatred, and disdain. If they could for one minute experience the intensity of the suffering that they are causing others through an experience of hell (100% suffering, 100% of the time), they would likely reconsider their behavior.

So if you are interested in hell or just want to check out some fabulous contemporary Tibetan art, I'd recommend buying the book.
 
Image source: forwardreviews.com

Was Nagarjuna a Well Poisoner?

In today’s New York Times, Alexander George writes in the periodic philosophy column, The Stone, about well poisoners. The essay was specifically directed at the current occupant of the White House, and questioned whether his continued denigration of scientific facts as “lies” and his accusations that the mainstream media promotes “fake news” will end up poisoning the public discourse so that people finally are unable to discuss serious issues based on facts. He cites the case of the Dutch art forger van Meegeren who successfully forged paintings by Vermeer. Van Meegeren was able to do so by managing to convince a prominent Vermeer collector, whose collection was used as the yardstick against which to compare questionable works, that a forgery was an authentic Vermeer. While today it’s completely obvious that van Meegeren’s work looks nothing like Vermeer’s, that move allowed him to pass off his forgeries as authentic. 

George states that this move in philosophy is called “poisoning the well”, and that behind every philosophical skeptic is a well poisoner. He cites the case of Descartes, who, in his work Meditations on First Philosophy completely deconstructs your everyday experience to show that none of your beliefs about the everyday world can be trusted. Descartes does this by raising arguments about the trustworthiness of your senses, and raises the possibility that you are dreaming. According to George, Descartes pulls himself out of his tailspin to his satisfaction, but not to many philosophers’. This kind of move is called “well poisoning” because, like an enemy army trying to cut off the water supply to a village, it is more efficient to poison the well (convince you that you cannot trust what you experience) than to turn off the water at the individual houses (argue each case individually).

Though I’ve never read Meditations on First Philosophy, George’s descriptions of how Descartes argued sounded an awful lot like Nagarjuna’s arguments in the Karikas. So the question arose for me: was Nagarjuna a well poisoner, like Descartes?

Overall, I think not, but with respect to metaphysics, most certainly. What Nagarjuna does is poison the well for those who try to argue philosophically about ultimate reality and metaphysics. He firmly establishes that reality is empty of any ultimate and self-existing objects, and only consists of ephemeral cause and effect events, which he says are “like a dream”. Not that they are a dream, he just uses dreaming as a metaphor. Nagarjuna’s tactics are rather the opposite of a well poisoner, to argue each individual case. Precisely because he wants to completely deconstruct the notion of an ultimate reality with self-existing objects, he cannot base his arguments on any assumed, overarching philosophical framework or view. Even emptiness isn’t such a framework, Nagarjuna says that people who believe emptiness is a view are “incurable”. So we can only talk about reality from a conventional, cause and effect standpoint, not from an ultimate standpoint. Curiously enough, that’s the conclusion I came to (before I even knew a whole lot about Nagarjuna’s thinking) in my practice memoir, Silicon Valley Monk. That’s why I subtitled it: From Metaphysics to Reality on the Buddhist Path.

Image source: http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Poison

Conventional Reality and Ultimate Reality

This post is another in a series of posts on Nagarjuna and emptiness that I've been spinning out of a study I've been doing on Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika since August (you can read other posts in the series here, here, and here). What I would like to talk about here is the "Two Truths" doctrine. Zen teachers talk occasionally about it and I have the impression that Tibetan teachers talk about it somewhat more. The idea behind the Two Truths is that reality consists of a collection of truths that are conventional in the sense of being about cause and effect in everyday life, and then ultimate truth which is about the way reality really is when you penetrate conventional reality through meditation coupled with philosophical analysis.

What the the ancient Indian philosophers who came up with the doctrine had in mind when they spoke of conventional truths were things like "if I plant this seed, a mango tree will grow and after a period of time will bear fruit". This is a clear instance of causality, namely seed -> tree -> fruit (at some point). Today, I think we could include such statements as "the intense gravitational field at the event horizon of a black hole causes the emission of virtual quantum particles when the quantum vacuum breaks down, generates a particle pair, and one particle is swallowed by the black hole while the other is emitted", a process sometimes called "Hawking radiation" because it causes black holes, previously thought not to radiate (which is why they were called "black"), to emit energy. While such statements have little or nothing to do with everyday life like mango seeds and trees (in India at least, we don't see many mango trees in Silicon Valley), they do represent a clear instance of cause and effect, and my impression is that conventional truths are basically about cause and effect.

What then is an ultimate truth? The Vedic philosophers who preceded the Buddha and continued via Brahmanism into Nagarjuna's time thought that an ultimate truth was something that would be true forever, that it was essentially immortal. And that objects that were ultimately real (hence part of ultimate reality) would have an existence from their own side, and not be dependent on causes and conditions to exist. The Vedic philosophers posited the existence of an ultimate self. The Abhidharmykas who followed the Buddha rejected the existence of an ultimate self, but posited that experience was composed of objects, called dharmas, that had ultimate existence, and that experience could be broken down into these objects, but no further. In addition, they believed that causality operated upon these objects, since they were the fundamental atoms of experience.

Nagarjuna, on the other hand, argued in the Karikas that the only statement you can make about ultimate reality is that all things are empty of any ultimate existence. His argument was based on a simple observation: if an object has ultimate existence, it can never change. Not only that, it can never interact with anything else. So the dharmas that Abhidharmykas posited couldn't possibly be subject to cause and effect and therefore either didn't exist or were subject to cause and effect and actually are part of conventional reality. Every time you try to pin down ultimate reality, you come back to emptiness: that reality is completely empty of any abiding characteristic and you cannot designate anything as ultimately real. When looking for ultimate reality, logic becomes slippery and it becomes impossible to make any statement at all about it. Chandrikirti, one of Nagarjuna's interpreters, complained about this, and many śūnyavādins (early Mayahanists who accepted emptiness as the nature of reality) were profoundly uncomfortable with the situation. 

So how does this look from 2000 years into the future?  Modern science has a different view of cause and effect than the ancient Indian philosophers. In Nagarjuna's time, cause and effect were a matter of one object somehow causing the appearance of or becoming another object. In the Karikas, Nagarjuna effectively demolishes the proposition that cause and effect can operate on ultimately real objects, establishing that the nature of reality is empty of any inherently existing objects. The modern view is that cause and effect is more a matter of events. For example, in his groundbreaking work Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference, Judah Pearl develops a calculus of causality grounded in Bayesian graphical network theory. The structure of the causal models he describes are all based on a graph of events with a probability on the arc between one event, the cause, and another, the effect, giving the probability that a particular cause will result in a particular effect. The probabilities are calculated using Bayes Theorem with data from observations of previous cause-effect transitions, or estimates based on models and later refined with data. Events are the stuff of experience, like the ancient dharmas, but, unlike the Abhidarmykas notion, they arise and pass away like the light of flickering fireflies on a summer night, or like the passing content of your Facebook feed, completely empty of any inherent existence. 



Image source:  angelsinnature.files.wordpress.com

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.

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