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

Disemboded Dharma

 In October, my wife and I visited a couple who are old friends and have for many years led a Zen meditation community in a small university town. They are now retired, but they are still involved with the community. Over the twenty years they've been teaching, they built the community up from a few folks sitting once a week in their living room to a community of around a hundred with a weekly program at their center. The center includes a meditation hall, sangha building, and they have plans for building a residence where a couple priests and some lay practitioners will live. Their dedication to the Dharma is really inspiring, and I always enjoy visiting with them.

Over dinner, we discussed practice. I mentioned that I've started practicing with a Mahamundra teacher in San Francisco. I do a once a week session with him over Skype because the traffic is so bad it would take an hour and a half to get there and an hour and a half to drive home, and that he sends me an mp3 of his weekly practice group session which I listen to. Also, that I participate in the DharmaOverground (aka DhO) web site discussion group. And that, in addition to daily meditation, was my practice now.

Sarah* was concerned that, more and more, Dharma practice was becoming disembodied. For over two millennia, Dharma practitioners lived near where their teachers lived and practiced with them in person. If the practitioners were monks, they lived in a monastery (vihara)  and practiced meditation together with their teacher. If the practitioners were lay people, they came up to the temple periodically and listened to dharma talks in person, or gave food to monks and heard a talk in the village. Direct contact, person to person, or, as Sarah and Victor*, her husband, put it: warm hand to warm hand, was how the Dharma was practiced. She felt that disembodied Dharma, as she called it, risked losing something, some essential connection that had sustained practice over the years, or perhaps risked turning it into a conceptual exercise. I think there is some truth to Sarah's concern. But on a larger scale, the problems involved in Internet Dharma are really the problems with the Internet in general.

I work over the Internet all the time without being in the same building or even on the same continent as the people I'm working with. I work back to Europe, a 9 hour time gap away. So when I wake up in the morning, my colleagues in Europe are at the end of their day, and we have maybe 3 hours to meet on line before they leave work. If they are up for it, we can also meet later in my morning after they've gone home, eaten dinner, and put the kids to bed. That rarely happens though, since they typically don't want to work for another hour after already working a full day, and I don't really mind waking up at 5 AM in time for a 6 AM meeting, especially when I can take the meeting at home, since in principle I'm a morning person . But after about 11 AM Pacific Time, they're no longer available. Still, using Skype, email, and other online collaboration tool, it is possible to work productively and accomplish our jobs, though the actual experience of working feels nothing like the 1980's and 1990's, when nobody worked remotely and you and your team were in the same building.

What's lost, I think, is the sense of being on a team and accomplishing the same goals, then celebrating them by going out to lunch or having a celebratory dinner. Working closely together with people, you get to know their particular work habits: when they come in, when they like to get together over the coffee machine for a chat, what kind of coffee or tea they like, when they are having trouble at home, etc. These are all the aspects of the human condition that I suppose one could read in a Facebook feed (I'm not a member of Facebook so I don't know) but talking with the person and experiencing their physical presence makes the experience more real. If your colleagues are a 9 hour time gap away and you only see them in person every six months, you are not a part of their lives in any real fashion, and they are not part of yours. You share tasks and accomplish them, but that's it. I think the same could be true of an "Internet sangha".

For Internet Dharma practitioners, because you are disconnected from the source of what you are viewing, you have a hard time judging the authenticity of what is offered for viewing. We can see this in the recent concern about "fake news", or, what in the past would have been called lies dressed up as legitimate news stories. The source is often obscure. In the past, when people lived in the same village all their lives, they knew the back stories on the lives of others in the village, and could judge the authenticity of a story by weighing the source. But when you see someone posting to a Dharma discussion group that they've studied with "Wazu Tulku", achieved the 14th bhumi, and are now qualified to judge where others are on the path, you really can't tell whether they are qualified to teach or not. Of course, the same problem can happen if you practice in person with someone, but it's easier to see whether a person has the kind of qualities you would expect of a teacher, in other words, whether they are a person who has undergone long years of meditative training and therefore understands well how their mind works.


The other problem with Internet dharma has to do with Dharma superstars. The Internet has a tendency to force any area that utilizes it as a medium into a "winner take all" situation. So Amazon is practically the only retail store on the Internet, Google is the practically the only search engine, etc. There are of course others but the top player always gets more hits than anyone else. With Dharma, what that means is that the superstar teachers get all the attention. An online retreat with a major Dharma teacher, one who has published several books or has a huge Youtube presence, is more likely to get attention than the blog of a minor Dharma practitioner who has only one ebook to his name 😊. Despite the fact that the Internet lowers the cost of reaching billions of people to almost nothing, the number of voices that actually get heard keeps shrinking since people only have so much attention and prefer to focus it on stuff that others are focused on.

The Internet isn't going away, though, and we as a society need to evolve the institutions and practices for countering the excesses. And Dharma isn't the only area where these excesses are beginning to manifest (and it isn't even, in my opinion, the area which is most critically in need of developing those practices).

Image source: http://realitysandwich.com/1256/sixthlevel_digital_dharma_seeing_deeper_seeing_wider/

*Names changed here

Book Review of "The Science of Enlightenment" by Shinzen Young

Shinzen Young's new book The Science of Enlightenment comes with 8 pages of recommendations from various Western meditation teachers, and they are not kidding. The book really is a great read, in that it summarizes Shinzen's teaching in 230 pages. If you would rather not spend time browsing his extensive collection of YouTube videos and the material on his web sites, then by all means get this book. Or get it as a reference. But don't expect to learn anything about science, though he does talk extensively about enlightenment. A disclaimer: I studied with Shinzen for two years and attended a couple of his residential retreats, so I'm familiar with his teaching from that angle as well.

Shinzen teaches that the goal of meditation is to develop better skills at achieving sensory clarity, concentration, and equanimity on the cushion, but also and more importantly, off, in everyday life. He recommends mindfulness meditation together with some amount of concentration. One of the hallmarks of Shinzen's teaching is that he has systematized and categorized the mindfulness or vipassana teaching in a way that is inspired by science and technology. Where most vipassana teachers who use Mahasi-style noting will tell you to note the arising of various sensory objects, they don't tell you what to use for the note. For example, you experience the arising of some feeling in your leg and you need try to figure out what to note. Is the feeling twisting, throbbing, or something else? With Shinzen, it's easy, you note the feeling as "feel out", in other words, feeling associated with the body, and then go on to the next sensory experience. "Feel in" is feeling associated with emotions, and so forth for the other two sense modalities (see and hear). Shinzen presents his system in a concrete and no nonsense manner.

He also talks about Flow and Gone. Flow happens when mindfulness of sensory objects becomes more or less constant. Shinzen's definition of Flow is a bit different than the definition in the the positive psychology community, where it is used to indicate the rewarding feeling that comes from entering a highly concentrated state. He does talk about that, but he doesn't use the term "Flow" for it. Flow for Shinzen means impermanence present in your sensory experience. In that sense, impermanence becomes something that you actually experience, and not an abstract philosophical concept.

Whereas Flow is about continuing, Gone is about ending. Gone is when some sensory experience suddenly comes to an end. The experience may not end for very long, but it must end. A vague impression doesn't count. Gone is really everywhere, even when you move your eyes from one scene to the next, a Gone happens as the scene shifts. As Shinzen says, one Gone is as good as another, and All Gone is the equivalent to a Therevada Path Moment, which counts as an enlightenment experience of which there are four: stream enterer, once returner, non-returner, and arhat, with the arhat being full liberation. All Gone is when your experience vanishes completely for some period of time, then returns. This may sound as if you've passed out or something, but it's not. When experience comes back online, you feel a tremendous burst of energy and positive affect, sometimes lasting for days.

Perhaps the least accessible chapters are the last two. In the second to last, Shinzen discusses his everyday experience now, after having undergone several of the Theravada Path Moments (he doesn't say how many he has experienced but its clear he's experienced several).  His specific way of looking at experience involves what he calls expansion and contraction.  In this view, experience expands out of what he calls the Source (most Buddhists would call it emptiness) and contracts back into that. He tends to agentify emptiness in a way that I think is inconsistent with the Madhyamaka and would probably be frowned upon by Nagarjuna but fits into his overall program of trying to find parallels in mystic traditions worldwide, including the theistic traditions, such as Christianity and Islam where emptiness is a Person. He provides a considerable amount of detail about this view, but the detail could be confusing and perhaps somewhat offputting for someone who hasn't experienced a Path Moment.

In the last chapter, he describes his vision about the merger of science, technology, and spirituality. He uses a particular brain disease, athymhormia, that occurs for people who have a stroke or otherwise have a brain lesion in a particular part of the brain, as an analog for enlightenment. They lose their sense of agenticity and just sit around, waiting for someone to address them. If you ask them to do something or pose a question, they do what you ask or provide a perfectly logical answer, but then relapse into silence. To me, this seems the weakest part of the book. As Shinzen notes earlier in the book, people who have profound enlightenment experiences tend to have rather strong personalities, and don't sit around like dishrags waiting for someone to tell them what to do.

What I think Shinzen misses here is that science and technology is all about mechanism, first discovering the series of cause-effect steps behind some natural or man-made phenomenon, in the science, then figuring out how to harness those steps for human benefit, in the technology. Nobody has a clue what the precise sequence of cause-effect steps are behind consciousness, to say nothing of enlightened consciousness. While real progress is being made, neuroscientists are far from understanding the whole picture, and it will likely be many years before they've worked it out.

So, overall, a definite two thumbs up, written in Shinzen's informal and entertaining style. If you have an opportunity to practice with Shinzen, I would definitely recommend it, especially if you want to practice in the hard-core or pragmatic Dharma style. His practice is definitely pragmatic and his retreats can be hard-core if you want to practice that way. He'll meet you where you are, whether you are just looking to improve your baseline everyday mind state or you want to go all the way to enlightenment.

Image source: goodreads.com

Belief or Faith?

 I've been thinking over the last couple days about the difference between faith and belief. Somehow, I get the feeling that these are two different things, though they are of course connected. 

The way I understand it, belief is basically a cognitive thing, in which you hold that a set of properties, for want of a better word, about the world are true. Belief isn't entirely based on facts. Emotions and biases, which are ingrained emotional predilections towards particular beliefs, can play a big role, as can other beliefs. In fact, social science research has shown that many people won't change their beliefs when presented with evidence to the contrary, for example with global warming deniers. They will make up all kinds of excuses to cling to their beliefs.

Faith, on the other hand, is somewhat trickier. Basically, it seems to me to be a purely emotional thing, a feeling that something feels right, a connection. So it might be part of a romantic relationship, that you have faith that your partner will treat you fairly and so you feel comfortable extending him or her unconditional love. Or it might be part of the relationship you have with a teacher, that you have faith they will guide you well on your path to awakening. For a Christian of course, faith in Jesus is important, that Jesus will stand by them and help them in times of trouble. Or it might, as in Theravada, be part of your relationship with yourself. In Theravada, faith that you have the capacity to wake up is an important part of achieving the confidence to practice meditation, to put in the effort every day needed to walk the path. 

Where the two connect seems to me to be when you hold a belief that then leads to faith. This is the classical Christian situation. In order to have faith that Jesus will stand by you in times of trouble, you need to believe that God actually, in some way or another, exists, and that what the New Testament says about Jesus is true. This belief is based on the 2,000 year old teachings of the Church, if you are Catholic, or, if you are fundamentalist, on the teachings in the Bible, or, if you are a charismatic Christian, on your own experience of the Holy Spirit. Similarly, for Theravada Buddhists, if you have faith in your capacity to wake up, you need to believe that waking up is possible. That belief is based on the Pali Canon which contains the Buddha's teachings, that he walked the path and woke up, and therefore you can too. For many Buddhist mediators, their faith in their ability to wake up is based on the experience of actually having done it, and having talked with others who have done it.

Holding a belief that doesn't lead to faith is of course possible and vice versa. You can believe that global warming isn't happening or that it is, and not have any emotional connection to the belief. In that case, the belief is a loosely held view and probably isn't connected to any strong emotion. Faith in people tends to be based on one's experience with them over the years. Experience with a teacher leads to faith in them, without any specific belief, except maybe an acknowledgement of their competence in Dharma.

In the Pali Canon, the Buddha cautions against holding fixed views, in other words, not holding strong beliefs. Not holding strong beliefs seems from the above cited research to be quite contrary to the basic human psychological tendency. In order to get motivated to do something - vote for a political candidate, change jobs to a new company, etc. - you need to have a strong belief that your actions will somehow change your situation or the situation of others. Otherwise, people find it difficult to take action, and if they don't take action, then often a situation continues that really needs to change. 

But maybe, instead of strong belief, what you need instead is strong faith in the power of your actions to cause change. Then you can set your intention, take action, and not be attached to the consequences. Naturally, you and others will have to live with the consequences, so it makes a lot of sense to align the intention with wisdom and compassion, rather than greed, hatred, and delusion. In the end, I think all you can do is have faith that your positive intentions will somehow lead to positive results, then act.
  

Image source: http://zoyanaumchik.blogspot.com

Short Comment on Nagarjuna's "The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way"

Well, strictly speaking, since I don't read or speak Tibetan, this is a comment on Khenpo Tsueltrim  Gyamtso's very fine commentary on Nagarjuna 's text, The Sun of Wisdom,  published by Shambhala in 2003. But to continue...

The whole point of Nagarjuna's text seems to be to negate the view that anything substantially exists or substantially doesn't exists, that is, the view that something exists "for real" or that nothing exists "for real". Khenpo Rimpoche claims there are three views corresponding to the three Turnings of the Wheel:

1. The view that there are substantially existent entities, like suffering, cause and effect, etc.
2. The view that there are no substantially existent entities,
3. The view that it is impossible to say from our experience whether there is or is not a substantially existing reality and that true reality transcends both existence and nonexistence.

The second stage corresponds to the Heart Sutra, the third to the Prasangika Madhymaka school. 

From reading Khenpo Rimpoche's commentary, it seems that Nagarajuna means the third view to be a cognitive strategy, that is a way of approaching the world that has specific benefits, rather than an ontological view, or a statement about what reality "really" is. He mentions that the Buddha used the first view as a way to encourage people to practice, the second view to discourage strong practitioners from becoming attached to the views of suffering and samsara as real, and the third view to discourage practitioners from becoming attached to emptiness as real. Becoming attached to suffering and samsara as real can lead practitioners to religious dogmatism. Becoming attached to them as unreal can lead to the "emptiness disease", where practitioners say "well, if it's all just empty, then it doesn't matter if I do X" where X is some word or act of a questionable ethical nature. In another text which I can't find a reference to at the moment, Nagarjuna likens being attached to emptiness as real to grabbing a snake by the tail: it will flip around and bite you. The Prasangika Madhymaka view espoused by Nagarjuna seems motivated by the Buddha's underlying teaching to "hold no fixed views". Several times, in the suttas, the Buddha states that this is an important cognitive strategy.

The text consists of 27 Chapters, plus opening and closing Homage. Each chapter refutes the reality and unreality of some important aspect of practice, like cause and effect, that one of the schools of  Buddhism at the time held to be substantially existent, then refutes the unreality of that, and asserts that since you can't logically prove either the reality or unreality of that thing, you need to assert its emptiness. Khenpo Rimpoche then says that "Y is like Y in a dream" where Y is whatever the chapter is refuting. Or, maybe another way of looking at it "Y is like Y in a computer simulation". In a computer simulation, Y has no reality outside of the computer simulation and therefore cannot possibly be substantially existent.

What I find puzzling, though, is the basic logical argument for proving that Y isn't substantially exisitent. Take, for example, cause and effect. It goes something like this:

• Effects can't arise from themselves because if they did, then there would be no arising, just the effect because the arising would never end,
• Effects don't arise from a cause different from themselves, because if they did, they would be able to arise from anything at all and not a specific cause,
• Effects don't arise from both a cause different than themselves and themselves because of the logical fallacy in the first two positions,
• Effects don't arise from nothing at all because then they would either always arise or never arise due to the effect being unrelated to the cause

This argument follows the basic underlying four valued Indian logic of "it can't be this, or that or both or neither".

The problem is, I've just spent a couple of years studying statistical causality off and on between other aspects of my day job and the second point, that effects don't  arise from a cause different than themselves, is patently flawed. It's possible to take a bunch of data, analyze it, and draw out a specific cause. When the effect is diabetes and the cause is obesity, then there are very specific and consequent results from altering the cause. There is a clear health benefit in reduced diabetes from reducing obesity. Sometimes in a statistical causality study there are confounding factors that are known and can change the results, often times reversing them from what the actual effect may be, but there are ways of controlling for confounding factors if you know they are there.

Now, I'd venture that statistical causality didn't exist in the 2nd century AD, approximately the time Nagarjuna lived, so one can hardly blame him. He used the best argument he knew given the general state of knowledge of the time. But I think there is an even more powerful argument for emptiness, and it lies in the nature of statistical causality itself.

The problem is it is impossible to predict, with 100% accuracy, anything. Any event, outcome, measurement, etc. is always subject to the potential for multiple possible results. Consider for example something as simple as throwing a ball up in the air. Physics 101 teaches that Newton's laws of motion apply, and that the ball reaches a height determined by its initial velocity, minus the reduction in velocity due to the pull of gravity. If you refine it a bit more, you can add air resistance, which of course varies depending on what altitude you are at. But there's more. What happens if it's a windy day? The ball won't go straight up in the air, it will curve, and the actual trajectory won't be predictable because it will depend on the wind speed and direction. And yet more. While it's not highly probable, what happens if there's an earthquake (something to consider if you live in California)? The surface of the earth will jerk around and the ball may hit the ground during the crest or trough of one of the seismic waves.

Khenpo Rimpoche sort of mentions this in the runup to the discussion of the four points of the argument above, in that a particular effect isn't the result of a single cause but the result of multiple causes. But not only that, which of these causes happens to occur around a particular instance of the effect is probabilistc, not deterministic. If there were some substantial reality, then effects would be completely predictable from their causes. That emptiness, itself, isn't real just follows from the observation that there is no underlying substrate to this kind of probabilistic structure of experienced reality.

For me, the lesson for everyday practice seems to be this. When you generalize from your experience and abstract that into some fixed set of rules, the actual experience gets left behind and becomes just a set of theoretical abstractions that, in the end, may or may not be matched the next time that set of conditions occurs. So keeping a more fluid view seems a cognitive strategy that is more likely to accommodate whatever the world happens to dish up at any particular moment.




Image courtesy of http://gadensamtenling.org/

The Role of Altered States of Consciousness in Buddhist Practice, Revisited

So this topic, altered states of consciousness (ASCs), has been one that I've been returning to periodically in this blog, primarily because I've got a fair amount of experience with it in my practice. In Meditative Attainments Part II: Altered States, I talked about a naturalistic explanation for the meditative attainments based on ASCs. In my review of Stephen Batchelor's new book, I talked about Batchelor's mistrust of ASCs. In this post, I want to talk about what role I believe ASCs play in practice. This post was partly inspired by a podcast from Mathew O'Connell and Stuart of the Imperfect Buddha series, in which ASCs are called "peak experiences", and where they talk about what comes after enlightenment.

 While I feel ASCs are important for practice, I think calling them "peak" is a mischaracterization. "Peak" implies that they are somehow privileged above other experiences. This kind of thinking leads people to view them as preferred and somehow superior to other experiences, which, in turn, leads to their pursuit. But the pursuit of ASCs is, in its own way, not any different from the pursuit of any experience (buying new consumer goods, a gourmet meal, etc.) and will in the end just lead to disappointment, since they can't really be cultivated in any predictible way. OK, so psychedelic drugs can predictably generate ASCs, but ASCs that lead to wisdom (praja) resulting from psychedelic drugs are rare in my experience.

I think a better characterization would be "summarizing". The ASCs coming out of meditation practice summarize the experience of the practice over a particular time period. An example is the "flashing" of experience through high equanimity towards first path, when a path moment causes experience to disappear for a moment then reappear but with the world looking slightly different. The "flashing" is a kind of quick repetition of the "arising, passing", "arising, passing" experience of impermanence, which then leads to the "gone" of the path moment, an experience of not-self coupled with impermanence. The path moment is an ASC and summarizes and nails down the wisdom of not-self and impermanence gained through the previous stages of the path. Thus, ASCs can act as a powerful and very direct confirmation of the teachings, a confirmation that is difficult or impossible to forget or ignore. The important point is the practice leading toward prajna, and that is what should be pursued.

One issue is that not all practitioners experience ASCs. Stephen Batchelor, for example, obviously hasn't and there are many other excellent practitioners and teachers like Batchelor who haven't. This doesn't mean that they aren't practicing correctly or that their practice is somehow otherwise flawed or that what they have to say about practice (with the exception of their tendency to dismiss ASCs) is somehow wrong. The same insight into prajna that are gained through ASCs are also available through more gentle means. But on the other hand, practitioners who do experience ASCs - the experiences of the so-called "hard core" dharma practitioners - shouldn't be dismissed. ASCs are a powerful and difficult path that can result in personality disruption, sometimes leading to psychosis and, yes, even death. So they are not for everyone because they can be dangerous. The Sufis talk a lot about this topic in their literature of awakening, and some stories about their teachers, called "pirs", portray the pirs giving teachings from a psychiatric hospital. But because they are impossible to ignore and so powerful, ASCs tend to be more effective in driving home the message in a shorter period of time.

One other point about ASCs and practice that I think is important to stress is that they need to be kept in context. By this I mean that you need to be careful about interpreting them outside of their role in providing insight into prajna. This can lead to a kind of overemphasizing them and, in particular, constructing stories around them that can lead to harm to yourself and others. The pull toward constructing stories around them is really, really hard to resist. I think we can see that just by looking at the literature from Buddhist and other spiritual practice over the last two and a half millennia. Of course, to a certain extent, we would today not be aware of the experiences of the Buddha and other exceptional teachers if these stories didn't exist, but in today's world, the kind of stories that your mind wants to create about these experiences are somewhat detrimental to getting the laundry done and showing up at work on time. 

And finally, ASCs and what comes after enlightenment, as the Imperfect Buddha podcast puts it. This statement makes a kind of category error in that there is an implicit assumption that enlightenment is a single event. Actually, its more like a process, with an occasional summarizing event, either an ASC if one is on the hard core dharma path or maybe a sudden insight if one isn't, that more or less cap a period of growth. This category error is one that is almost universal in the Dharma community, probably driven again by the stories reporting on the ASCs of prominent teachers like the Buddha from the past. But there's always more to explore and learn, and as Batchelor and many others have pointed out in recent years, even the Buddha's thinking evolved over his more than 40 years of teaching. The whole story didn't come to him all at once, suddenly, under the Bodhi Tree that night so long ago in Bodhgaya.