Bhikkhu Cintita

Category: Dharma

  • Faith V

    Uposatha Day, New Moon, June 1, 2011

    The Buddha on Faith

    The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. The trite subjects of human efforts, possessions, outward success, luxury have always seemed to me contemptible. — Albert Einstein.

    The Buddha had a lot to say about faith, but the broadest overview is afforded by two discourses delivered in response to people not already on the Buddhist path. These are the Kalama Sutta and the Canki Sutta. The first concerns a people called the Kalamas who live in a town called Kesaputta. They are confused by the bewildering variety of religious views and the certainty of their advocates. The sutta suggests that the immediate source of confusion are the questions of karma and rebirth, which confuses people to this day, but the Buddha’s answer answers a far more general question, How does one know where to place one’s faith? The Buddha was, apparently, the latest in a series of religious teachers to pass through Kesaputta, so they challenged him:

    “Lord, there are some priests & contemplatives who come to Kesaputta. They expound & glorify their own doctrines, but as for the doctrines of others, they deprecate them, revile them, show contempt for them, & disparage them. And then other priests & contemplatives come to Kesaputta. They expound & glorify their own doctrines, but as for the doctrines of others, they deprecate them, revile them, show contempt for them, & disparage them. They leave us absolutely uncertain & in doubt: Which of these venerable priests & contemplatives are speaking the truth, and which ones are lying?”

    This is a question that makes perfect sense in modern America, in fact not only in the religious realm but, with a little tweaking of the wording, in others as well; consider politics. Here is the Buddha’s oft-quoted response.

    “Of course you are uncertain, Kalamas. Of course you are in doubt. When there are reasons for doubt, uncertainty is born. So in this case, Kalamas, don’t go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, ‘This contemplative is our teacher.’ When you know for yourselves that, “These qualities are unskillful; these qualities are blameworthy; these qualities are criticized by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to harm & to suffering” — then you should abandon them.

    The last part of this is later stated in its positive form:

    When you know for yourselves that, “These qualities are skillful; these qualities are blameless; these qualities are praised by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to welfare & to happiness” — then you should enter & remain in them.

    The Buddha then introduces by way of example greed, Aversion and Delusion (the Three Poisons in Buddhism) and non-greed, non-aversion and non-delusion as qualities to test, and the Kalamas agree that each of the first group leads to harm and suffering, while the each of the second to welfare and happiness. Along similar lines the Buddha then extols the qualities of kindness, compassion, appreciation and equanimity (the Brahmaviharas in Buddhism) as sources of welfare and happiness.

    The “don’t go by” list and the “when you know for yourselves” lists should be studied carefully. They use reason and discernment, in the midst of uncertainty, to sort out faith.

    The “don’t go by” list can be broken into two primary parts: The Buddha disparages unquestioned faith in religious tradition on the one hand, and in inference and logic on the other.

    Against religious tradition. The Buddha’s position is states as, “don’t go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, …, or by the thought, ‘This contemplative is our teacher.’” In the Canki Sutta (MN 95) a whippersnapper of a brahmin, a sixteen-year-old master of the Vedic literature, asks the Buddha directly:

    “Master Gotama, with regard to the ancient hymns of the brahmans — passed down through oral transmission & included in their canon — the brahmans have come to the definite conclusion that ‘Only this is true; anything else is worthless.’ What does Master Gotama have to say to this?”

    The Buddha begins his answer with a counter question:

    “Tell me, Bharadvaja, is there among the brahmans even one brahman who says, ‘This I know; this I see; only this is true; anything else is worthless?’”

    “No, Master Gotama.”

    The Buddha is concerned here with discernment, direct seeing, knowing for oneself, in contrast to accepting something purely on faith. He then explains the problem of religious tradition with the analogy of the blind leading the blind, each great teacher taking the word of the preceding teacher rather than seeing the truth directly for himself, such that no one no matter how far back you look actually knows, sees with his own eyes. He concludes that brahmins can reliably discern, “I have faith in this,” and preserve truth, but not “Only this is true; anything else is worthless.”

    This applies to Buddhism as well. One can preserve a belief, for instance, for many generations, without anyone directly knowing it is true. And in practice this happens. The difference is the emphasis the Buddhism as a matter of principle puts on turning faith eventually into directly seeing for oneself. The Buddha is not disparaging faith, only emphasizing that it should be recognized for what it is. For instance, a student of the Buddha might have in faith the belief that suffering arises from craving, but not yet be able to see it directly for herself. Nevertheless, the faith functions as a working assumption which is to be investigated and even challenged, until it is seen directly. Buddhism is preserved as long as there are in every generation people who know the core teachings directly. Others follow along in faith. Modern science also operates under a remarkably similar application of faith.

    Against inference and logic. The Buddha’s position is stated as, “don’t go by … logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, …” In the Canki Sutta the Buddha declares,

    Some things are well-reasoned and yet vain, empty, & false. Some things are not well-reasoned, and yet they are genuine, factual, & unmistaken. Some things are well-pondered and yet vain, empty, & false. Some things are not well-pondered, and yet they are genuine, factual, & unmistaken. In these cases it isn’t proper for a knowledgeable person who safeguards the truth to come to a definite conclusion, ‘Only this is true; anything else is worthless.’

    Keep in mind, the Buddha was a very clear and rational thinker and wielded this skill himself to promote understanding; he could not have meant to disparage all rational thought. I think, rather, the principle here is, Keep it Simple. A common expression of the Buddha was, “a thicket of views, a wilderness of views, a contortion of views, a writhing of views.” First, inference and logic produces conclusions that are no better than the premises one starts with, which themselves are mostly based in faith. Moreover there is a strong tendency to move systems of thought toward abstraction to get them to work and thereby away from what is directly discernible, and then to become so infatuated with systems of thought that they become your reality. Finally, we seem to be very adept at rationalization, that is, reverse-engineering our reasoning to derive the conclusions we were already determined to derive for unreasonable purposes. At some point reasoning overwhelms and obscures discernment.

    For instance, it is advisable when considering a political issue — maybe a congressman has introduced a bill and you are pondering whether to endorse it personally — to keep in mind: Who are the stakeholders? Who suffers if it is enacted? Who suffers if it is not enacted? Is there a mechanism that will be there counter the suffering? In view of compassion, ideology — whether Marxist, capitalist, libertarian, or whatever — often becomes remarkably specious.

    The “when you know for yourselves” list also can be broken into two parts. The Buddha recommends entering and remaining in any quality that is both skillful, beneficial or blameless on the one hand, and approved by wise people on the other.

    In favor of benefit. The Buddha’s position is stated as, “When you know for yourselves that ‘These qualities are unskillful … blameworthy … when adopted & carried out, lead to harm & to suffering‘… then you should abandon them,” and, “When you know for yourselves that ‘These qualities are skillful … blameless … when adopted & carried out, lead to welfare & to happiness‘… then you should enter & remain in them.”

    “When you know for yourselves …,” shows that the Buddha trusts the determination of this substantially to individual discernment. This, along with the mistrust of religious tradition, gives the Kalama Sutta its reputation as a license to free thought, or even to design your own religion. Notice, however, that the criteria are rather rigorous. First, “knowing for yourselves” is a strong obligation that few are capable of. Furthermore, this recommends that faith should be based on purely ethical criteria; in fact, no mention is made that you must discern that something is true, only that we discern it to be virtuous. The various terms used here are described in many places in the Suttas, but the Buddha’s advice to his own novice son, Rahula, is probably the best known source (MN 61). Skillfulness has to do with not being rooted in Greed, Hate and Delusion. The harm and suffering means for self and other, which in the Buddha’s ethics coincide remarkably.

    In favor of approval by the wise. The Buddha’s position is stated as, “[If]… these qualities are criticized by the wise … then you should abandon them,” and, “[If]… these qualities are praised by the wise … then you should enter & remain in them.”

    If we have let loose traditional doctrine, who are these wise guys? Since benefit has such a strong criterion for discernment, sometimes in matters that are deep and hard to see, and the untrained mind has such poor discernment, few of us can determine what to abandon or to remain and abide in on our own, unless we have great attainment in the practice. We need help. The problem the Buddha pointed to in traditional religious faith is that it loses its grounding in knowing. The wise are exactly those grounded in knowing, those who see things as they really are, who discern directly and accurately, not people who merely memorize scripture. Recall the Buddha’s recommendation in the Mangala (Blessing) Sutta:

    Not to associate with fools,
    to associate with the wise,
    to honor those who are worthy of honor.
    this is the highest blessing.

    The question then becomes, How do we recognize the wise? This includes the perennial question, How do we find a teacher? The Buddha gives this answer in the Canki Sutta:

    “There is the case, Bharadvaja, where a monk lives in dependence on a certain village or town. Then a householder or householder’s son goes to him and observes him with regard to three mental qualities — qualities based on greed, qualities based on aversion, qualities based on delusion: ‘Are there in this venerable one any such qualities based on [ greed / aversion / delusion] that, with his mind overcome by these qualities, he might say, “I know,” while not knowing, or say, “I see,” while not seeing; or that he might urge another to act in a way that was for his/her long-term harm & pain?’ As he observes him, he comes to know, ‘There are in this venerable one no such qualities based on [ greed / aversion / delusion] … His bodily behavior & verbal behavior are those of one not [ greedy / aversive / deluded ]. And the Dhamma he teaches is deep, hard to see, hard to realize, tranquil, refined, beyond the scope of conjecture, subtle, to-be-experienced by the wise. This Dhamma can’t easily be taught by a person who’s [ greedy / aversive / deluded ].

    Once again the Buddha underscores the importance of Greed, Aversion and Delusion and their opposites in discerning human intentionality. These are powerful criteria. For instance, consider that a teacher might be acting under the motivation to secure wealth or reputation, or sex, all instances of Greed and all conflicts of interest in his teaching role. If a teacher harbors prejudice or ill-will toward someone or some group of people, or fear of competing doctrines (all Aversion), or has fixed understandings and strong dogmatic views (Delusion) this should raise red flags. Probably less visible is the depth of the teachers understanding, but time and experience in working with a teacher will either establish confidence or, if the student feels she has repeatedly been unable to verify what is being taught in her own experience then confidence might diminish. Faith in the teacher is a kind of faith and therefore one that should be evaluated ultimately in terms of whether the student is developing in a skillful, harmless way for the benefit and happiness of all.

    Notice that in the Buddha’s exposition he has not proved anything wholly in terms of reason and discernment. To accept the Buddha’s account of faith itself requires faith, for instance faith in virtue as a worthy human value, faith in the unskillfulness of greed, aversion and delusion and the skillfulness of non-greed, non-aversion and non-delusion. In modern terms, these faith in these few elements bootstrap the rest of faith. This is a reasoned and discerning understanding of faith.

    Next week I would like to provide examples of this systematic accounting of faith, as a kind of workbook to go along with this main text. In the following week I intend to discuss Wielding Faith, that is, how it is used as a faculty, with a strong emotive element, in support of our practice and development.

  • Faith IV

    Uposatha Day, Last Quarter Moon, May 25, 2011

    Origins of Faith

    It is important for us to understand the nature of faith because faith, like fire, is a powerful thing and we cannot get away from it; it is a source of great benefit when it directs our actions skillfully; it is highly toxic when it leads us woefully astray. It also serves as an instrument with which to manipulate others, and to be manipulated, for benefit or harm.

    Most of what we believe, most of which we are devoted to, is a matter of faith. None of us actually know enough for it to be otherwise. We all like to think of ourselves as rationalists, but even a cursory examination of what we believe or put our hearts into reveals that not much arises purely from reason and discernment.

    We are, on the other hand, rationalizers: We think we discover a rational basis for our beliefs and devotions after the fact, that is, after they have already arisen on some other basis. Have you ever noticed that you personally are one of those rare people who has the uncanny ability to be right, right in your social and political insight, in your understanding of religion, and so on? Have you ever noticed that others, in spite of their faulty and sometimes totally wacky notions, nevertheless almost always erroneously think they are right? This, I speculate, is the result of rationalization of personal faith, applied to our own but not to others’.

    This is not to say that faith is beyond rational thought, nor that rational thought is beyond faith. In fact rational examination of faith might reveal where it gets us into trouble and where it is likely to yield benefit. But the relationship between faith and reason is complex. I would like this week to consider how faith arises. We will quickly see that the causes and conditions are quite diverse. I thought this might be a useful exercise before we let the Buddha cut to the chase. For one thing many of these conditions have evolved since the Buddha’s time. This will be a fairly random set of observations on my part. I invite readers to follow my lead and post their own observations.

    Family. Much of our faith is simply absorbed from our elders in the family. If the older generations are conservatives, we become conservatives, if they are racists, we become racists, if they place great value on the sanctity of marriage, so do we, if they put stock in education and reading, so do we, if they have great faith in Science or believe in the literal word of the Bible, so do we. This kind of faith is acquired by the youngster prior to the development of an active faculty for discernment or reason, and yet can remain strong and unquestioned throughout his life. This is not to say that one of the other factors below will not later override our early faith, but generally this will be done with difficulty and often traumatically. Family faith is also not necessarily a hazard; it is a means to communicate the acquired wisdom of many generations.

    First impressions. First impressions lead to what looks like simple inductive reasoning yet is based on only the one instance, not enough to be considered truly rational. For example, suppose you meet an Eskimo for the first time, and he insults you, steals a can of salmon from your cupboard when you are not looking, accepts a beer from you but then passes out on your floor, lets his sled dogs eat your hamster, etc. Most likely the belief, “Eskimos are jerks,” will set in. Of course your personal experience might not be remotely typical, you only have met one Eskimo, yet that belief can become so entrenched that only repeated encounters, and repeated disregard of evidence, will finally dislodge the belief that Eskimos are all jerks. By the same token, it is much easier to convince someone of the veracity of Global Warming on a hot day than on a cold day.

    Herd Instict. If everyone around us believes something or values something, we generally fall into line. When I was young everyone I knew was anti-establishment and wanted to make love not war, and sure enough, that became my profile. If every time we turn on the radio someone or other is denouncing President Obama as a Muslim Marxist-Fascist, then pretty soon we start to believe he is like this, even without evidence or explanation, even without knowing what a Marxist or a Fascist is beyond bad names you call someone you don’t like. Many of our social values seem to be instilled this way, such as belief in America (for my American readers, Uganda for Ugandan readers, etc.), Democracy, Liberty, Human Rights, Free Enterprise, Capitalism, Fairness, etc. Interestingly many of these, like the Self, become values of great devotion without discernible referents. For instance, many patriotic Americans seem not to like or even want to be nice to the bulk of other Americans, hate the American government, don’t like nature much and so don’t appreciate the great natural beauty of the vast American landscape, yet cling with both hands to some abstraction called “America.”

    Respect. We tend to follow the example of people we encounter and for one reason or another respect or revere. If our teachers are adherents of the Chicago School of Economics, we also become adherents. If our best friend puts a lot of value in personal appearance, we might also lean in this direction. If we meet someone who devotes all of their energy to helping the poor and disadvantaged, we might embrace that role ourselves. Many of us choose role models at some point to try to emulate. Respect or veneration opens us up to the knowledge, beliefs, views and values of another. Without respect for our teachers we could not learn, without respect for scholarship our worlds are much smaller, without respect for T.V. pundits we would lost the opportunity to be so misinformed. Respect is itself a form of faith, of putting our heart on someone or a human institution or source of information.

    Viewpoints and Values. Most of our viewpoints and values arise in one of the other ways listed here. However once a viewpoint or value is adopted, as in the case of the first impression, it becomes a condition for additional points of faith, often derived in part by reasoning. An American patriot, or one who believes America is “good,” generally ends up with faith in many other propositions, such as America’s foreign policy is benevolent, America’s democracy is exemplary, America is the source of most international foreign aid, Americans are brave, America has been given a special role by God on the world stage, America is above international law. Similarly faith in the Free Market or the Capitalist system as a force of good commonly supports additional points of faith, that it maximizes efficient allocation of resources, that government or popular oversight is unnecessary, that people get rich in proportion to the good they produce for the world, and so on. Of course a scientific theory also gives rise to many consequences, but it is incumbent on the th eorists that these be testable, grounded in discernment.

    Viewpoints are particularly pernicious, and it is no wonder the Buddha was particularly unsupportive of them. In Buddhism “view” and “Wrong View” (ditthi and micchaditthi) are generally taken as synonyms, except for the few things specified as “Right View” (sammaditthi). We tend to think of them as the stuff of rational thought, which is true, but they also arise in the midst of great uncertainty, that is, at least partially out of faith, and then not only spawn many other beliefs of diminishing certainty, but tend to justify themselves as they become the lens through which we interpret reality. So, for instance, with faith in the Free Market one no longer sees rich people or profiteers, but captains of industry (and, I suppose, their families), one tends to view long commutes in massive smog-choked traffic in positive terms as opulence afforded by an efficient market, all the while confirming one’s faith. With faith in a despot, or in the dictatorship of the proletariat, one no longer sees opposition to government policy as legitimate, but rather intrusions of the forces of decadence or even malicious foreign influence. Of course sweeping viewpoints, like “Whatever the Bible says is true,” or “Whatever the Government does is bad,” spawn many absurdities, and indeed people end up believing the darnedest things. Both science a Buddhism are relatively disciplined about viewpoints, but otherwise the well-placed viewpoint is an uncommon thing.

    Greed. Greed and Hatred are the major emotional factors driving out behavior outside of what we believe or value, and function even in a world of pure discernment and reason. As the Buddha pointed out, they are great distorters of reality, that is, sources of ungrounded belief. Our neediness typically gives rise to its own justification. The greed of the elite is accompanied by faith in privilege, or in distorted views of the contribution it is making to society, such as civilizing primitive people, or creating wealth that drives the economy for the benefit of all. Grasping after prestige or personal identity tends to produce strong opinions simply as a means of showing off an imagined aptitude for discernment. Thwarted greed tends to produce anger toward human obstacles, which then spins off elements of faith. Lust produces the notion, “He/she is the most beautiful man/woman in the world,” at least until the next day.

    Hatred. Along with greed, hatred tends to promote faith in Good and Evil, forces let loose in the universe that happen to correspond remarkably well with our own sense of personal comfort level. Anger induces us to make unfounded attributions of intentionality. In fact scapegoating is a common attribute of anger; anger will build up like an electrical charge in a cloud, then quite arbitrarily look for a lightning rod, a damp tree or some schmo flying a kite to discharge on.

    Aversion toward what might be a well-founded discernible or rational belief, suggested by a faithful source of evidence, can lead to faith in the opposite of that belief. This is denial. In spite of all the symptoms or the lab tests, one denies that a love one is dying of cancer. In spite of environmental and social decay and collapse, one denies that the economy can’t just carry on how it has always carried on. This is the distorting effect of hatred.

    All of the forgoing might give the impression that faith is a very powerful yet confused and often frightening force. This is verified when you consider what a confused and often frightening place the world is. But notice that this is not confined to religious faith, which can also be confused and often frightening. However religion has become a scapegoat of choice, it is the schmo flying a kite that we most like to discharge our ire on.

    Manipulation. It gets worse. Faith, in modern times had been supplemented by another powerful yet confused and frightening force.

    My mother, in her eighties and not always of clear mind, one day received in the mail a notification that she was the first prize winner in a sweepstakes. She was instructed to reply and verify that she was who she thought she was, and to claim her eye-poppingly large prize. She had enough faith in the goodwill of the sweepstake organizers and in her own propensity for unsolicited good luck that she replied. She also had faith in the desirability of receiving such an influx of wealth (a faith belied by empirical studies of the fates of lottery winners). This naturally led to an exchange of more correspondence and ultimately a request for payment of some small fee so that the funds could be released from a foreign account, and in good faith she paid the small fee. The funds however were never released, and instead a barrage of similar notifications began arriving in her mailbox, notifications that she had won this or that.

    What I found particularly novel is that she began receiving phone calls and letters from psychics, who reported spontaneous visions or favorable signs that came to them out of the blue concerning this elderly woman in San Francisco, whom they out of kindness undertook to forewarn so that she be prepared for fabulous wealth. My mother also began to receive notifications from banks confirming the movement of large sums of money into mysterious accounts. In her state of twilight discernment, she viewed this as confirmation of her faith that she was about to become enormously wealthy, as soon as a couple of fees had been paid to comply with government regulations.

    She was not only paying small fees right and left but even began friendly correspondence with the various psychics who had contacted her, who for the most part seemed to be real people advising real clients. Pretty soon my mother was receiving a stack full of notices in her daily mail, and her retiree back account was nearly drained.

    Several aspects of this experience are striking. One is the essential role of faith in the goodness of other people’s intentions. I had before this incident admired my mother for her innocence in this regard. Like friendship, this is a faith that tends to inspire good intentions in others, and certainly helps keep one’s own intentions in line. Losing this faith, I dare say, is the first step in losing one’s own integrity, yet at the same time it is a kind of gullibility. Second is the unscrupulousness evident in the exploitation of that faith, … and of the elderly. My brother’s reaction to these events is that people like that should be taken out and shot. The worst part is that the wanton exploitation by another of this faith leads to cynicism. Third is the level of organization assembled in order to provide many sources of evidence for the illusion of forthcoming winnings, suggesting metaphors of dark forces at work with long arms.

    Unfortunately this is the nature of our times. The same thing happens to manipulate public opinion and influence public policy. Some newsworthy event, such as a major oil spill or a major uprising in Uzbekistan, occurs that naturally calls into question in the public mind some business enterprise or political concern, and demands a neutralizing response. Within a day editorials are being written, pundits and politicians are offering their views and corporations are issuing statements, with such remarkable consistency that the neutralizing response becomes publicly acceptable, no matter how absurd.

    What’s more, the science of public manipulation has become quite sophisticated and is at constant work manufacturing faith in carefully constructed illusions, justifying wars with no inherent merit, promoting growth of an unsustainable economic order, dulling responses to impending crises, and of course inducing people to buy things they don’t need with money they don’t have, all for the worst of human intentions. And religious organizations have not been exempt from the mass marketing paradigm, or perhaps I should write “religious” organizations, because religiosity may often be part of the illusion.

    It is a task of Buddhism to bring order to faith. It is not to eliminate it; that would be to eliminate thought, to eliminate meaning. It is to make faith skillful, to encourage those aspects that bring about beneficial results and to discourage those that bring about harm, to make our faith more rational and less delusional.

  • Faith III

    Uposatha Day, Full Moon, May 17, 2011
    Faith Part III: Devotion

    Not to associate with fools,
    to associate with the wise,
    to honor those who are worthy of honor.
    this is the highest blessing.

    To reside in a suitable locality,
    to have done meritorious actions in the past,
    to set oneself on the right course.
    this is the highest blessing.

    Vast-learning, handicraft,
    a highly-trained discipline,
    pleasant speech.
    this is the highest blessing.

    Supporting father and mother,
    cherishing wife and children,
    peaceful occupations.
    this is the highest blessing.

    Liberality, righteous conduct,
    the helping of relatives,
    blameless actions.
    this is the highest blessing.

    To cease and abstain from evil,
    forbearance with respect to intoxicants,
    steadfastness in virtue.
    this is the highest blessing.

    Reverence, humility,
    contentment, gratitude,
    opportune hearing of the Dhamma.
    This is the highest blessing.

    Patience, accommodation,
    seeing renunciants,
    religious discussions at due times.
    This is the highest blessing.

    Self control, the holy life,
    perception of the Noble Truths,
    The realization of Nibbana.
    This is the highest blessing.

    He whose mind does not flutter
    by contact with worldly contingencies,
    sorrowless, stainless, and secure.
    This is the highest blessing

    — Mangala Sutta

    Belief is the smaller part of faith, devotion is the greater part. Recall that faith informs our activities and decisions on a basis other than what we know, on a basis other than discernment and sound reasoning. Our undermost motives will be found neither in beliefs nor in knowledge, but rather in where we decide to place our hearts. This is in what we embrace as values, whom and what we respect, what aspirations we set for ourselves, the meanings we discover in things, our understanding of how we meet each new day. Without this kind of faith there is nothing to get you out of bed in the morning.

    The opening quote is from the famous Mangala Sutta in which the Buddha enumerates thirty-eight blessings, values that have been cherished by Buddhists ever since, personal attributes or activities to be encouraged in daily life. Looking around in our very pluralistic culture, you have to be struck by how extreme the variations in people’s values are. I could compose a Mangala Sutta that negates virtually every blessing the Buddha lists and produce something very consistent with quite conventional modern American values. In fact, … I think I will: …

    Not to associate with the meek,
    to associate with celebrities,
    to watch others grovel.
    this is the highest blessing.

    To reside in splendor,
    to have accumulated great wealth,
    to look stunning.
    this is the highest blessing.

    Vast-earning, craftiness,
    a highly-trained staff,
    biting speech.
    this is the highest blessing.

    Not having to support father and mother,
    not burdened by the nagging of wife and children,
    undemanding occupations, shopping.
    this is the highest blessing.

    Conservatility, being right,
    elevating oneself,
    blam    ing others.
    this is the highest blessing.

    To enjoy what the wise discredit,
    wine, women and song,
    getting what one wants.
    this is the highest blessing.

    Being awesome,
    getting more, instant gratification,
    being a cut above the rest.
    This is the highest blessing.

    Never being put on hold,
    sneaking intoxicants,
    avoiding religious discussions.
    This is the highest blessing.

    Control, the worldly life,
    vague references to the Noble Truths,
    Acting like you’re enlightened.
    This is the highest blessing.

    He who tirelessly achieves personal advantage
    under all worldly contingencies,
    admired, dominant, and secure.
    This is the highest blessing.

    A complete list of Buddhist values that supplement those of the Mangala Sutta would have to include the Brahma Viharas of Kindness, Compassion, Appreciation of others’ good fortune (I’ll be darned if anyone has found a good English word for this; it is simply “mudita” in Pali) and Equnimity; the objects of the Three Trainings of the Noble Eightfold Path of Wisdom, Virtue and Serenity; the objects of Right Resolve of Renunciation, Kindness and Generosity; the opposites of the Three Poisons, which would be non-Greed, non-Hatred and non-Delusion; and so on. Other values, many non-Buddhist, that people embrace, are Fatherhood, Motherhood and Family, Personal Charm, Nation, Race, Class, Friendship, Loyalty, Honesty, Aggressiveness, Hard Work, Personal Responsibility, Leisure, Freedom, Health, Youth, Old Age, Mother Earth, Power, Duty, Pride, Fun, Sexuality, Democracy, Free Market Capitalism, Human Rights, the Bill of Rights, Intelligence, Not Being Too Smart, Having Cool Shoes, Happiness, Fame.

    It is often observed that Christianity in particular puts a stronger effort on belief than most other religions although on devotion as well. Karen Armstrong maintains, however, that that is a misunderstanding. In English, in any case, the word “belief” comes from a source that meant hold dear, and is actually related to the world “love.” This is a meaning more closely related to devotion than certitude regarding a propositional truth. Her suggestion is that where it occurs in the King James Bible it should be read with its earlier meaning. In any case, you can quickly see that religions, though each advocates some set of values, are not the only, or even primary source of values. Many are culturally determined even for the non-religious, some such as happiness, safety and health are virtually universal.

    Values, unlike beliefs, are strictly speaking beyond the reach of discernment or reason; they are not true nor false, though they can be evaluated only in terms of other values.You can embrace any value you want without fear of illogic, though sometimes embracing two values can lead to contradiction. My brother, who is quite irreligious, delights when a group of door-to-door evangelicals visits because of a game plan he has discovered. They inevitably try to establish a connection by appeal some value that the bathrobed or pajamaed host is likely to share, such as, “Don’t you despair of the level of violence in today’s world?” to which my brother pauses pregnantly, looks into the distance with a contemplative demeanor then replies wistfully, “No.” They never have a counterargument.

    However, embracing values does have consequences for our behaviors and states of mind, and to a large extent is a consequence of human psychology and evolutionary history. In this way values are subject rational understanding, and that understanding can inform our choice of values. For instance, you might value drinking with buddies but discover that it leads to drunkenness, addiction, irresponsibility and ultimately impinges adversely on family and happiness, which you value even more. If you are wise you will give up the value you place in drinking with friends. Essentially one of the things the Buddha did was to work out rationally the consequences of the range of potential values, the factors of mind, personality and social intercourse to isolate those that together are conducive to well-being. The Buddha described his teachings as as “Against the Stream” because they come up with a set of values that are often counter to uninformed human nature, though grounding these in a very reasoned way in human psychology.

    Related to values is the respect or devotion we place on certain people, institutions and practices. Respect for the wise, for those you want to emulate, for instance, for Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, or Sarah Palin, and for those we choose to care for, is an important part of personal development. Respect for the Buddha, the Dhamma and Buddhist teachers is the starting place of Buddhist practice. Respect for the various Buddhist practices includes their encouragement and support in others. Friendship is a kind of mutually shared faith in each other.

    A life without these devotional aspects of faith in various forms, most typically not religious, is unthinkable. It would be a life devoid of meaning or worth. Even with them it has plenty of trouble acquiring meaning or worth. A property of devotion and values is wholeheartedness, which includes steadfastness or unwavering adherence. One of the ways we establish or strengthen wholeheartedness is through vow, sometimes performed publicly and ceremonially, so that if you forget your vow your friends will be sure to remind you. A major vow is what initiates marriage. I entered an important turning point in my own Buddhist understanding and practice upon reading in Uchiyama Roshi’s Seven Points of Zen Practice in Opening the Hand of Thought,

    Live by Vow, and root it deeply.

    I had before that early time, after a failed marriage, simply thought of vow as the un–strategic error of cutting off my options, of burning my bridges behind me. So the encounter with this short phrase shocked me at first but subsequently my thoughts kept returning to it;it would not let go. I began to realize that what was truly worthwhile in my life, including my incipient Buddhist practice, was already cobbled together from many vows big and small, most of which were implicit. The mass of small implicit vows is how I understand devotion (“devotion” is simply an inflection of the root “vow”). An option, after all,  becomes useful only once the alternatives are cut off. Understanding this seems to open my mind to embrace the many aspects of Buddha’s teachings more readily as a matter faith

    Next week, rather than jumping directly into the Buddha’s Kalama Sutta and the supplementary Canki Sutta, I would like to discuss where all these different and varying kinds of faith, whether in the form of belief or devotion; in the area of religion, science, politics, entertainment; useful or problematic, come from. Why do we get it into our heads, in the absence of proper evidence, discernible and reasoned, to take something on faith? Given that we understand that we all inevitably do it, what is it that informs or inspires our faith? If this whole discussion of faith seems a bit confused, you can look forward to the clear light of understanding that the Buddha shines on this dark and misunderstood realm.

  • Faith II

    Uposatha Day, First Quarter Moon, May 10, 2011

    “It takes a lot of faith to do zazen [Zen Buddhist practice], otherwise you’d never do something so stupid.”
    – Rev. Shohaku Okumura

    Last week I introduced the notion of faith as a space in which we all spend most of our waking time, the space that exists between our ability to discern and reason and know, and our need to act in all manner of daily affairs and of lifetime commitments. One of the difficulties in talking about faith is that most people have some fixed ideas — generally adopted on faith — about it, often as some kind of higher good, or alternatively as a kind of human weakness, gullibility or laziness in thinking. I hope I impress upon the leader over and over in this short series of posts that whether we have or act on faith is not a choice in the realm of human possibility, only whether our faith is skillful or unskillful. The Buddha’s view is that faith is a faculty of the human mind. As such it is a topic of investigation and understanding as a part of human psychology, and is subject on the one hand to training and development of skill, or on the other to neglect and misuse.

    I want this week to open up the topic of the content of faith, that is, what is it we have faith in. In subsequent weeks we will look at the origin of, or influences on our faith, and the emotive properties of faith. To repeat my own definition from last week, anything that can be said to inform our actions and activities and life decisions that is beyond the scope of rational discernment and reasoning fits under faith.

    I would like to cast our net far, but let me at least zoom in to make some early reference to Buddhist faith so we don’t lose track of our primary concern. Buddhist faith will also provide some interesting examples of some universal points. The Pali word saddha is generally that which is translated as faith. Sometimes it is said that the primary object of faith is in the enlightenment of the Buddha. A secondary object of faith is in kamma (Sanskrit, karma). These two make sense: If Buddhism is primarily concerned with the perfection of human character, the Buddha’s enlightenment provides the example of what we are all capable of, and kamma is the developmental model that shows how attention to our actions gets us there. (Please keep in mind that karma in Buddhism is quite distinct from alternative models of karma in various Hindu traditions, with which it is commonly confused. Last year I wrote a long series on the Buddhist developmental model, “From Thought to Destiny.”) Saddha is also commonly associated with the Three Refuges, or Triple Treasure. Going for Refuge is a matter of putting faith in the authority of the Buddha, the Dhamma (Sanskrit, Dharma) and the Sangha. When we take refuge in the Buddha we recognize the Buddha’s enlightenment, as well as his wisdom as a teacher capable of accurately expressing what he realized, and of setting in motion a means to propagate his teachings and extending their influence into the future. When we take refuge in the Buddha we place our faith in the accuracy of what the Buddha taught, and in the efficacy of the various practices and of the way of life he recommends. When we take refuge in the Sangha we place our faith in the Buddhist adepts responsible here and now for conveying, exemplifying and maintaining the integrity of the teachings.

    The Dhamma is somewhat distinct in that by and large it treats faith as provisional, something that is progressively replaced with direct discernment as one’s practice develops. Recall Sariputta’s (he was the Buddha’s foremost disciple in wisdom) words in the opening quote last week, “I don’t take it on faith. I know.” The Dhamma is a sophisticated doctrinal system, but one open to investigation, ehipassika, “to be seen for oneself.” Investigation, in turn, is a progressive process, a possibility that depends on, and opens up more and more with continued practice. Therefore at the outset one necessarily starts with a lot of faith, faith that the Buddha knew what he was talking about and that it has been successfully conveyed in the Dhamma and through the Sangha to you. But what the Buddha taught included clear instructions that enable you to investigate for yourself, gradually to see what the Buddha saw. As Rev. Okumura expresses in the opening quote above, we start with little discernment — we cannot see for ourselves the sense of zazen — andso without faith we would not start at all. However, through investigation based on our experience of practice, discernment progressively replaces faith, and at the same time the intensity of faith in the rest grows through repeated confirmation.

    What enables this development of discernment is that the Dhamma is really a nuts-and-bolts system, with relatively little in the way of lofty and sweeping truths, for instance, about the existence of God or the origin of the universe, rather primarily confined to pointers to elements of present experience, things you can see with a degree of training and practice. But more about this later.

    So, now zooming back out from Buddhism, we ask, What are the elements or contents of faith? Naturally much of the content of faith has the form of beliefs, for instance, the belief that heaven and hell are real places, that God is an animate being, that free markets ensure the optimal use of resources, that walking under a ladder or breaking a mirror is bad luck, or that craving is the source of suffering. Notice that for all of us, individually, virtually all common beliefs are matters of faith, for instance, that the moon orbits around the sun or that water is made of oxygen and hydrogen, since we rely on some other authority to stand behind these beliefs whose infallibility most of us cannot generally prove rationally. We believe in scientific “truths” for the most part because we have faith in science, and we trust that scientists discern or establish these beliefs on a rational basis.

    What does the scientist have faith in? He has faith in the data provided by other scientists, but further than that, he has faith in the correctness of the scientific method, in the existence of an objective world in which certain propositions are true that humans have the capacity know, none of which can be rationally established with certainty. Moreover, the individual scientist, doing what is known as normal science, works and is invested in a certain paradigm or broad theoretical framework, which acts as a lens through which data is interpreted and given meaning. That individual scientist has faith in that paradigm. It is faith because belief in it is not arrived at rationally by that scientist through considering all possible alternatives, but rather through faith in the authority of that scientist’s elders, usually especially his dissertation advisor. Other scientists will at the same time have faith in competing paradigms, but virtually any scientist has allegiance to some particular paradigm or another. Science is riddled with faith.

    If we grant that belief in science can arise through faith, we should also acknowledge the ongoing impetus in science to investigate, including to challenge accepted beliefs or to improve their rational basis over time. This ensures progress over time toward aligning belief with some rational empirically grounded criteria of truth (notice, however, that the existence or nature of such criteria is a matter of faith). There is a trend in science that moves toward knowing and away from faith, but not a accomplished goal. This is not so different from the spirit of investigation alive in Buddhism that Sariputta refers to, but is uncommon in most areas of human interest. This raises an interesting question about these other areas: Are they just sloppier than science about what is true and what is not, or do they have good reasons for believing something without a reasonable basis for whether it is actually true or not? In other words, is faith at least sometimes preferable to knowing?

    The human capacity for denial illustrates the tendency to ignore reason to grasp at a more comforting proposition out of faith. For instance, the notion of eternal life protects us from the horror of future non-existence. Or you may choose to tell a victim of a clearly about-to-become fatal accident, “You’re going to be O.K.” to protect him from the shock of a more objective appraisal. And, the implicit and comforting view that “all beef” on the package means something like ground steak, protects us from the uncomfortable recognition about what body parts the hot dogs we are eating really are made of. Buddhism, seemingly in contrast to most religious faith, is not generally prone to encouraging denial, often lending the impression of Buddhism as pessimistic: “What makes you think,” the Buddhist asks, “that you exist even now?” On a cautionary note, I am sure most readers are aware of the often serious dangers of denial, for instance, denial of the lump growing under the skin, of an increasing burden of personal debt or of the accelerating rate of severe weather events.

    On the side of more skillful applications of belief based in faith, there are cases in which faith gives rise to truth. William James points out the power of faith to provide its own verification. Most of the cases involve cooperation among people. A group of die-hard strict rationalists would be hard put to exhibit any cooperative behavior at all, or even to develop friendships. Each would think along the lines of, “It is wasted effort for me even to think about doing my part of this proposed collaborative task before I have good evidence that those other people intend to do their part of the task,” then put their efforts on hold to await such evidence. Or they would reason, “Why should I be friends with him when I have no basis for suspecting that he wants to be friends with me?” If they are all thinking like this then nothing gets done and no friendships are forged. These are generally not people you want on your basketball team, in your platoon, among your squad of circus acrobats or in your construction crew. These are also not people prone to have dates on Saturday nights. Why? Because they lack sufficient faith. Collaborative behavior requires at least one person daring enough to have faith in the intentions of others, and then to begin to act on that basis. It is faith that inspires. James states, “Who gains promotions, boons, appointments, but the man in whose life they are seen to play the part of live hypotheses, who discounts [doubts about?] them, sacrifices other things for their sake before they have come, and takes risks for them in advance? His faith acts on the powers above him as a claim, and creates its own verification.” In fact, I would suggest a supplementary pattern of human development is to learn to live up to the faith place in you be others.

    A notable form of faith would be in that which is discernibly questionable or false. However, these are sometimes skillful as well! All myth falls into this category, but may nonetheless provide lessons and examples that inform skillful actions. In weeks past (see “Buddhism with Beliefs”)I have talked about the skillfulness of the belief in the existence of two pillars of Western culture, whose actual empirical existence is questionable: Money and God. The skill in believing in God can perhaps best be illustrated from the perspective of Buddhism which makes no use of such faith. Buddhism holds that there is a mythical element running through most human thought — in fact, even through virtually all of science — an element whose existence has no support in discernment or reason, but which people consistently accept on faith. Furthermore Buddhism holds that faith in this element is an example of unskillful faith. This is, of course, faith in the existence of things, including in the existence of our selves, as separate entities. As we have just seen in the series on non-self, faith in this myth gets us into a lot of trouble. As we have also seen, it is no trivial task to shake our-selves loose from this kind of faith. One way to look at God is as a means of fighting fire with fire, as a means of offsetting the consequences of an unskillful myth with another myth. Faith in God does for us much of which losing faith in the self does: It dethrones the self from the center of the universe.

    In summary, much of faith has the form of beliefs. We all adopt many of our beliefs on the basis of very little hard evidence, often unskillfully but also skillfully and sometimes even as a matter of necessity. I have focused this week on belief, but next week we will see that the content of most of faith does not concern belief at all, but rather values and commitments that are difficult to express propositionally, and which also resist a basis in pure discernment and reason. Next week I will turn to the contents that are not belief. Probably in two weeks I will consider The Kalamas Sutta, a well-known and important statement of the Buddha’s views on religious faith and reason with which many readers will already be familiar. In the pipeline is also a discussion of the emotive aspects of faith. Does this sound good?

  • Faith I

    Uposatha Day, New Moon, May 2, 2011

    The Buddha asked Sariputta, “Do you take it on faith that these five strengths — faith, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment— lead to the deathless?”

    Sariputta answered, “No, I don’t take it on faith. I know.”

    Humans live in the midst of a perennial dilemma. This has critical implications for Buddhist practice, but also for everything else we undertake, secular or sacred, worldly or spiritual, in relation to business, to taking care of one’s family, to choosing what to wear for a hot date, to taking out the trash, to picking out a movie to watch this evening, and to voting. We are creatures of volition and virtually every volitional choice we make runs squarely into this vexing dilemma.

    The dilemma is that there is a huge gap between what we know and what we need to know. Faith is any strategy we make use of to fill this gap.

    Just to take a few examples: If you want to order a movie from Netflix your plan is probably to watch and enjoy that movie. However you have no way of knowing with certainty that you will enjoy it until you have already watched it! Discernment can carry you far in your selection, for instance, in dependence of advice of trusted friends or previous experience with the movies by a particular director or actress. Still your selection requires at least a small leap of faith, a pregnant pause before the click of the button.

    If I first embark on the Buddhist path, my plan may be to find happiness or satisfaction in my life. However, Buddhism comprises a very sophisticated set of teachings and practices which to begin with I can scarcely comprehend or even quite imagine. Discernment might depend on anything from vague impressions about Buddhism gleaned from some of the Netflix movies I have seen, to a history of happy encounters with practicing Buddhists, but ultimately, unlike Sariputta above, I am likely to have very little idea of what I am getting myself into. Embarking on this path requires a huge leap of faith, a deep breath before you get out of your car and enter the temple or meditation space for the first time.

    The flood waters are rising and huts at the river’s edge are already being swept away. The villagers panic as they recognize the foolishness of building their village against a sheer cliff. Most of them begin running frantically back and then forth along the river bank. The chief, on the other hand, grabbing up his youngest daughter in one hand and his embellished staff of authority in the other, shouts, “Follow me, villagers!” and plunges into the water. Many others follow immediately. Still others, the more timid, wait until they ascertain the chief’s ascent up the opposite river bank, but many of these are tragically swept away in the still rising waters for having hesitated.

    George is confused about Global Warming. His TV keeps telling him it is a Liberal plot, or alternatively a hoax perpetrated by rogue scientists greedy for research funding, yet many of his seemingly smart friends tell him that is nonsense, that the threat is very real and broadly recognized by real scientists. Without the research skills necessary to seek out reliable sources, he doesn’t know whether to believe in Global Warming or not, and his decision can make a difference in how he votes in the next election, or ever whether he should stop driving his car so much and start taking the bus to work. He is quite bewildered. However, one day, in a flash of insight, but with no further evidence one way or the other, about the veracity of Global Warmin, George makes a leap of faith and decides that he will believe in Global Warming. His insight had come about this way: He first imagined that Global Warming was real, and then considered what we should be doing about it in that case, and what (Scenario One) would happen if we did not do what should be done. Secondly, he imagined that Global Warming was not real, then thought about what (Scenario Two) would happen if we uselessly did what did not need to be done. He realized Scenario One was far grimmer than Scenario Two, and decided that Scenario One was the one we should prepare for.

    Faith is often set against reason in many people’s minds. However, as you see I’ve described and exemplified it, it is actually a necessary complement to reason. Reason and discernment will  almost always carry us only so far — that is the dilemma — and faith is necessary to leap the rest of the way. Also, as the last example points out, wise faith will often contain an element of reasoning, an internal logic in the midst of uncertainty. We can describe faith as para-rational. But we should recognize that it is a critical element of the human cognitive apparatus and one that we utilize ubiquitously in the face of the pervasive uncertainty of our world. There are instances, however, in which faith becomes so rigid it does in fact, generally ill-advisedly, set itself in opposition to discernment and reason. But as a general issue the choice between reason and faith is not an option in our lives; we need both, we use both.

    With the permission of my kind readership, I thought I would undertake in the next few weeks to consider this little-studied element of human cognition that we call faith Now, IWe will of course have a particular interest in the role of faith in Buddhism and I would like to describe the Buddha’s very insightful teachings on faith. However this is an open-ended topic and I invite readers to bring in their experiences and thoughts around faith in other religious traditions, many of which treat faith quite differently from Buddhism, or in other aspects of life. like managing your investment portfolio.  I hope we will have some discussion, in fact, of the role of faith in modern science, which I think is considerable.

    We will discover, I think, that faith is a very fascinating and complex phenomenon, something that can have qualities that vary in several different dimensions. These qualities may be specific to how faith manifests in particular individuals, and may be characteristic of particular cultures or religions. Let me conclude by pointing to some of the dimensions of the space we will explore for the next few weeks in the form of a few questions.

    1. What is the basis of our faith? If faith reaches where discernment and reason cannot, what is it that informs our faith? Advice of wise teachers and holy scriptures are undoubtedly common bases of faith. Respect and devotion are clearly factors recommended in Buddhism. What is the role of courage?

    2. What is the stuff of our faith? Does faith require belief, or how fixed or provisional can beliefs be as they play a role in faith? Can faith be open-minded, and involve joy in exploring the unknown? What is the role of vows, for instance, marriage vows, in faith? What kind of energy or power does faith possess.

    3. How adaptable and resilient is our faith? What happens in the face of new information that allows us to extend our discernment but contradicts the conclusions of our faith? What happens when our faith is challenged by others? How do faith and critical inquiry coexist?

    4. How conducive is our faith to wholesome and productive, wise, skillful and virtuous, thought and action? What are the consequences for the mind (tranquility, suffering, etc.) when our faith wavers? When does energy degrade in the face of uncertainty, turning to despair, cynicism, pessimism?

    Again, I would like to invite readers to participate in the discussion by posting comments. I am gratified that the number of readers of this little blog has been steadily increasing. I now have about 45 visible subscribers and average over 100 hits a day to this Web site overall. This is, of course, not wild popularity, but I have always anticipated a rather select audience. However, at the same time the readership has grown the amount of feedback I receive has diminished; perhaps people sense that we are not such an intimate group as before. I would like to encourage your comments, and also over the coming months suggestions of topics you would like to see discussed here. Thank you.

  • The Self Collapses, Concluding this Series.

    Uposatha Day, Last Quarter Moon, April 26, 2011

    In the many weeks past we have seen that the self is a fabrication that begins with a single faulty thought but which acquires a whole architecture as it extends its scope and influence and develops layers of protection. We begin by staking a greatest claim in Me, the Self. And this becomes, naturally, the source of our greatest delusions, our greatest suffering and our greatest misguided efforts. The claims then extends to those things that the Self identifies itself with: this body, this mind, this intellect, this sparkling personality, this style of attire. This grows to the things the Self thinks it possesses, that is, the external things the Self stakes a claim to: this spouse, this car, this bank account, these power tools, this power. We not only think of the self as a separate thing, we begin to separation to the entire world into two parts, into Good and Evil, based on the self’s concerns, based on Me, what is Mine and what I want and despise. And our behaviors become marked with self-interest, by manipulating the world for personal advantage, exploiting its resources and protecting from its danger. The whole emotional tenor of our lives shifts away from the simple joy of being alive toward greater levels of pain and suffering. Furthermore we find ourselves increasingly mired in a world of our own making but that seems to be swallowing us up. The Buddha has pointed to the source of the problem and given us a path for its undoing.

    Having a self is like taking a new roommate into your apartment, who may initially present himself as a nice guy but who turns out to be a jerk. After a month you can list all of his faults in detail, which he is invariably totally clueless about. After two months you are ready to throw him out. The problem is that the more stuff he has, the more bills he has been paying, the more signatures he has placed on leases and contracts and accounts, the more people he has given the apartment phone number to, the harder it is to throw him out. You need to find an alternative for paying the bills, to sort through and haggle over the CDs, to let his friends know he cannot be reached here, and so on.

    What is more, in the case of the self, the roommate is you! You just hadn’t noticed your faults before, even though you had already been living with you all your life. You will now understand why you have always been so miserable and why everyone else seems to think you are a jerk: You have been just living with a jerky roommate: You. So your task is to kick you out. And that is the heart of Buddhist practice: kicking you out of your apartment. The apartment will be fine on its own, for …

    Mere suffering exists, no sufferer is found; The deeds are, but no doer of the deeds is there; Nibbāna is, but not the man that enters it; The path is, but no traveler on it is seen. (VisuddhiMagga XVI)

    I have been making use of the metaphor of the self as having an architecture, in fact of the self as a wooden bridge that cannot be destroyed at any single structural point but must be weakened at various points at once until the entire thing comes crashing down. In this regard I have unleashed termites that stand for the various parts of the path of practice the Buddha has given us, the Noble Eightfold Path. In this concluding episode we get to watch the bridge collapse into the abyss below.

    Through Virtue we transform our behavior in the world directly. In the self-centered life our speech, our actions and our livelihood are beams and rafters that support and reinforce the self. The Buddha’s practices of Right Speech, Right Action and Right Livelihood are termites that eat away at those beams and rafters.

    Through Cultivation of Mind we transform our emotive impulses. In the self-centered life our thoughts tend toward lust and anger, our intentions are impulsive and rooted in greed, hate and delusion, and our minds are feverish and endlessly disturbed. The Buddha’s practices of Right Effort, Right Mindfulness and Right Concentration are termites that eat away at those beams and rafters. Of course termites are social insects; they nourish each other back at the mound, and the energy, focus and clear awareness provided by the termites of cultivation makes a big difference in the work of all of the other termites.

    Through Wisdom we transform our conceptualizations and perceptions. The self-centered life began with a faulty fabrication and proceeded to fabricate a complex and biased model of reality and our place in it. The Buddha’s practices of Right View and Right Resolve are termites that eat away at those beams and rafters. This is where the wood is hardest and is generally the last point at which the bridge breaks when the rest is already collapsing. In the Fabricated World that we take as reality things exist in and of themselves, and if not permanently, then at least with a lifespan. You, your Self, has a life span, you are born, you live and you die. When you see through that Empty world there is only continuous change everywhere, you are hard put to find something that behaves with a well-defined birth, lifespan and death. There is no Self that can be pointed to that abides so long, there is similarly no birth, only an evolution from whatever preceded and no death, only an evolution to whatever follows. The reality recognized when this last part of the collapsing bridge is carried away is therefore sometimes known as the Deathless.

    The self gets a bad rap in Buddhist circles and I want to conclude with a few mixed words on its behalf. First, the fabrication of a self clearly has a function in our survivability as a species and in the evolutionary scheme of things, as I pointed out some weeks ago. It is not an accident of nature. Moreover, it must have a continuing function in the simple survival of the arahant. The arahant will not have the intentionality of common folks, her activities will be driven by mere functionality on behalf of kindness and compassion rather than on self-interest, yet if she is to be a teacher and an inspiration to others and a factor in perpetuating the sasana, she has to eat, she has to avoid getting run over by a truck, she has to continue to have some loosely working but not domineering concept of a self as circumstances require. After all, our whole ability to reason and deal with a complex and uncertain world is based in our capacity for fabrication.

    Second, for most of us it is the self the brings us into Buddhist practice in the first place. The self suffers; contentment and happiness are elusive to the self. The self in its quest to manipulate the situation on its own behalf often begins to look outside the box of raw impulse and recognizes in Buddhist practice a resource to be used to get the happiness it seeks. As it enters into Buddhist practice it is encouraged to actually find a new sense of well-being. Practice then becomes a struggle between the self’s new path of Self-improvement and its more ingrained and impulsive patterns of thought and behavior. We can in fact travel a long way down the path with a firm idea of Self-improvement in mind. Ultimately, though, the self is playing a cruel hoax on itself. This is that when the path nears its end, the self will not have improved itself, nor acquired any special characteristics at all; it will simply be absent, its last remnants lost in the bridge’s resounding Kafwump! We start out thinking we are practicing for ourselves but that is O.K., because in the end we discover we have been practicing in spite or ourselves all along. And yet benefit has accrued.

    Buddhism is about looking outside the box with the eye of wisdom. It is about seeing how our rich emotional lives, though providing good material for Italian opera, keep us constantly on edge, perpetually dissatisfied and trapped inwardly in a drama from which we cannot get free, all the while thrashing about outwardly in a world of our own fabrication in horribly harmful ways. It is about transforming this unbounded insanity that we all seem to be endowed with and to live in the midst of, and instead to live worthwhile, satisfying and harmless lives, by liberating our actions from our basest emotions, by developing skill in our actions, turning away from our untutored emotional reactiveness. This is growing up fully, to let go of the tyranny of the fabricated self, which is, after all, hardly more real than a donut hole, a shadow, a cloud or a lump of foam.

  • Non-Self and Buddhist Practice – Part Five

    Uposatha Day, Full Moon, April 18, 2011

    Right Concentration (Samma-Samadhi) is the final step on the Noble Eightfold Path, the culmination of the Path, the last termite implicated in the destruction of the structure of the self.

    The Termite of Right Concentration.

    Right Concentration is a different kind of step because it is not actually something you do, but rather a natural consequence of the preceding seven steps. The five steps immediately prior to concentration involve volitional actions, practices in the purest sense. These are the three Virtue steps of Right Speech, Right Action and Right Livelihood, and the first two meditation steps of Right Effort and Right Mindfulness. All of these are things we do over and over in the Buddhist life, things we make choices about, individual actions of body, speech and mind. The initial two steps of the Noble Eightfold Path, on the other hand, which make up the Wisdom group of Right View and Right Resolve, are practices of a less discrete sort: they are matters of study, contemplation and commitment, but still things we do in some sense. Right Concentration is the consequence of all of these steps. As such the steps leading up to Right Concentration are like building a fire: we start with some newspaper, then kindling, then logs, of course oxygen is available without effort, and we add heat (say as a spark from a flint stone), and a flame arises. Right Concentration is like the fire, it is a rarified quality of mind, call it concentrated wholesomeness.

    Now, concentration is common in meditation practices, Buddhist and non-Buddhist, and it is also something that sometimes arises spontaneously, or when something is of utmost importance and urgency. But these instances of concentration are generally not Right Concentration. For instance, a hunter or a sniper commonly has extremely strong concentration just before a kill. A dog, or particularly a cat, similarly seems to have unblinking concentration when stalking prey. A hunter’s concentration, as deep as it may be, is not Right Concentration, because it is based in the intention to kill; it lacks at a minimum the backing of Right Resolve, Right Action, Right Livelihood and Right Effort. Concentration also seems to arise naturally when there is danger, when the cost of making a mistake is high, or when something provokes lust. But here concentration would arise as an accomplice of the self. Concentration typically brings temporary euphoria, a blissful feeling; in fact, some people engage in dangerous activities like bungee jumping or driving fast for recreation … on purpose, probably to induce states of blissful concentration.

    In most forms of non-Buddhist meditation concentration is achieved almost exclusively through Mindfulness, which we looked at last week. There we learned that Mindfulness is a practice of remembering to keep the mind on a single task, most commonly holding one’s attention on a single object. This is a simple yet difficult exercise that can quickly lead to the arising of a very stable quality of mind. These forms of meditation also tend to produce temporary feelings of bliss without the cost or risk of sky diving or alligator wrestling.

    Right Concentration is not something we do; it is instead a mental space that we dwell in and explore at every opportunity. We make use of the other steps of the Noble Eightfold Path to do this, much as a smith produces in his forge a fire of the desired size and temperature by feeding it with the right kind and amount of wood or coal, by the skillful use of the bellows, and so on. As we attend to our concentration we bring the other factors of the Noble Eightfold Path to bear in a focuses and coordinated way to move our concentration in the direction we would like. We will see that the benefits of Right Concentration ultimately feed back into the effectiveness all of the other steps in the Noble Eightfold Path, as if the Termite of Right Concentration kicks back pep pills, or growth hormones, to all of the other termites.

    In Right Concentration two qualities are highlighted, serenity and clarity. These are captured in the metaphor of a forest pond. If kids are splashing in the pond, someone is throwing in a stick for his dog to swim out and fetch, another is jumping out of a tree, plunging into the water holding his nose, and a motorboat is pushing up waves, pulling a water-skier, the pond will be neither serene nor clear. Our minds are like this in their normal state, jumping around like a money or coming at us with a constant stream of useless thoughts. However, when the kids have gone, the dog is snoozing at home, the motorboat and water skis have been taken out of the water and are out on the highway somewhere, the pond has a chance to settle and after a time the surface becomes like glass. From one angle we see the reflection of the trees against the sky and the setting sun. From another we can look down into the depths of the water and see fish, crabs, growing plants every pebble at the bottom of the pond as clear as can be. Serenity and clarity arise in unison.

    And so it is with the mind, normally churned into a frenzy by our self-centered delusions, our self-centered aspirations, our unvirtuous speech and action, our ignoble livelihood, our runaway unskillful thoughts and our unsteady minds. As each of these departs, our thoughts begin to float rather than rush past, they are kind, and sometimes stop altogether, we can see what is there prior to our fabrications and how our fabrications arise. Serenity and clarity arise in unison. At some point we flip into a state in which serenity and clarity come effortlessly, Effort and Mindfulness are no longer a chore, we simply dwell there.

    We can fruitfully explore this space of concentration in various ways. We can, for instance, go into deeper and deeper levels of serenity, or we can apply our clarity in certain directions. This is why we often talk about serenity (samatha) and insight (vipassana) meditation. The Buddha actually never really talked about two separate kinds of meditation, since serenity and clarity always arise together, but by choice of object of mindfulness, for instance, we seem often to favor one over another. Attending to something highly localized like the touch of the breath at the edge of the nostrils, for instance, can propel us into deep states of concentration, quantified as jhanas. Attending to something like the decaying of the body is less focused but opens up theme of investigation in which clarity can be of particular efficacy. Also as we get up from the meditation cushion and begin to move about in the world, the depth of our concentration tends to let up, but with training does not disappear altogether and can also be recalled in an instant. Thereby the clarity of concentration has many fruitful opportunities to alight on new subjects throughout the day.

    Right Concentration is a quality of mind that is already imbued with the qualities acquired through the seven practices that precede it. It includes the habit of contemplating the arising and cause of suffering, the nature of impermanence and the notion of non-self. It includes the aspirations toward kindness and renunciation, and the many practices of virtue. It includes the practice of weeding and watering in the garden of the unskillful and the skillful. And of course it includes mindful of various wholesome things. As such the concentrated mind tends to settle into and become even clearer about these qualities. This is what I mean by concentrated wholesomeness. From the perspective of clarity is is like turning a magnifying glass on each of these aspects of practice; in effect in Right Concentration we walk the whole Path anew but at a much more refined and detailed level. Our contemplations become very sharp, we begin to see directly impermanence and emptiness. Our aspirations are brought into relief and any deviation from renunciation, kindness or non-harming is immediately noticeable. The whole process of acting in the world, from inception of intention to tracing of consequences comes into sharp focus, and we begin to act decisively without entangling ourselves in justifications. Skillful or unskillful qualities of thoughts jump out at us as soon as they arise, we can feel the tension in the unskillful.

    The self does not fare well in the world of the rightly concentrated mind. The self’s tendencies toward fabrication, excuse and manipulation settle down and appear as cheap trickery. The pain of maintaining a self or acting out the self’s demands becomes all too clear. The self is discovered to be elusive as a primary phenomenon of actual experience; no matter how hard we look for it all we see is the flux and contingency of the things imagined to be a self, to belong to a self or to contain a self.

    Right Concentration is the last of the termites chewing on the trestle of the self and all of its supports. Next week we will see what happens when the bridge collapses.

  • Non-Self and Buddhist Practice – Part Four

    Uposatha Day, First Quarter Moon, April 11, 2011

    To recap the discussion of previous weeks, the recalcitrant sense of self is a fabrication that gives rise to a vast structure of additional fabrications, emotions and intentions and behaviors that together cause us and others huge problems. We are considering the Noble Eightfold Path from the perspective of undermining or eating away this whole tangled structure, like a wooden bridge, each of the steps eating away, termite-like, at some crossbeam manifestation of the sense of self. We have considered so far the two Wisdom termites, named Right View and Right Resolve, and the three Virtue termites, who call themselves Right Speech, Right Action and Right Livelihood. Remaining are the termites of the cutivation of mind: Right Effort, Right Mindfulness and Right Concentration.

    The Termite of Right Effort.

    Our task is like that of a gardener, one pulls out the unskillful weeds and waters the skillful flowers, shrubs, vegetables and herbs and thereby give the desired shape to the garden. Right Resolve and Right Effort are the bookends to the Ethical Conduct Group. Right Resolve is the outline of how we conduct ourselves in the world, selflessly, with kindness and with compassion. Right Speech, Action and Livelihood are our proper verbal and physical activities. Right Effort drops down to the level of intention, the mental qualities we bring into our activities. These mental factors, like the actions they may give rise to, are sorted in terms of skillful and unskillful.

    Unskillful thoughts emanate from the self. You can tell because they are implicated in all the problems we have seen are caused by the fabrication of self. They result in unvirtuous behavior when we listen to them. They distort our perception of reality, ultimately entangling us in samsara. They are stressful or even painful, and even destroy our health. Most important for our concerns, they reaffirm and strengthen the hold of the self. Unskillful thoughts are those rooted in the infamous Three Poisons in Buddhist doctrine, Greed, Hatred or Delusion, and are bad news.

    The Termite of Right Effort eats unskillful thoughts. He eats the ones that are already there, sometimes reemerging from force of habit. He even gets ahead of the game by eating the conditions that would otherwise allow new unskillful thoughts to arise. He even shores up skillful thoughts that do not come from nor reaffirm the self, the skillful thoughts that unskillful thoughts seek to displace, and even cultivates conditions that encourage skillful thoughts. This is a very busy termite, we hope at work continuously throughout the day.

    Suppose Skipper has some cookies on his desk, receives a phone call and is gazing out the window while focused on the call. Lust arises in you for one of his cookies. That sense of lust is unskillful. It is a form of greed that arises from the self’s search for personal advantage, that arises when the self is presented with a new resource. If you listen to this unskillful thought you might steal Skipper’s cookie, thus depriving him of what is his and failing to live up to standards of virtue. The intention to steal is another unskillful thought. You begin to scheme and justify, “He won’t notice that one is missing. Besides I gave him a drink of water once and he owes me. And I’ll go on a diet next week, for sure.” You are now entangled in a thicket of unskillful thoughts. Then if you actually steal a cookie you will reinforce a habit pattern that will lead to more greed in the future that will entrench the self even further.

    How do you know when a thought is unskillful? There is an easy way, once you learn to recognize suffering (dukkha) as it arises. You will be surprised how ubiquitous suffering is when you start looking, even when you think you are having fun. Unskillful thoughts are almost always tinged with suffering. Before spotting the cookie you might be quite happy, having not a care in the world. Then you spot the cookie, the unskillful thought arises and you have a problem: You don’t have the cookie. As you review your alternatives you can hardly stand not having that cookie, you become anxious and restless. That is suffering, the mark of an unskillful thought, and you discover how deep that suffering goes. That is out-of-sync-edness, the gap between our stake in formations and the way the world really is. You will experience this with thoughts characterized by restlessness, agitation, conceit, jealousy, guilt, pride, greed, miserliness, thoughts of revenge, envy, grumpiness, anger, hatred, rage, sorrow, fear, bias, delusion, stubbornness, narrow-mindedness, torpor, complacency, affection, lust, and so on. Contrast these with thoughts of generosity, renunciation, loving-kindness, compassion, equanimity, pliancy, stillness of mind, mindfulness, and so on.

    Right Effort belongs to the cultivation of mind, or meditation group because it deals with the purification of thoughts. In a sense it covers the some ground as the virtue group but at a more refined level, at the level of thought rather than the visible manifestations of the self in speech and bodily action. Because it seeks purity of thought it belongs to the cultivation of mind or meditation group rather than to the virtue group. However, unskillful thoughts tend to give rise to unvirtuous, that is harmful, visible behaviors. So, when your thoughts feel unskillful, have the tinge of stress, that is a red flag that you are about to do something you will later regret. And when you are doing something you discover to be harmful, that is a good indication that your thoughts have slipped into the realm of the unskillful. With virtue and with Right Effort joy and peace grow in the mind.

    The Termite of Right Mindfulness.

    Right Mindfulness is still more refined than Right Effort. Whereas the latter sorts out the various thoughts that arise or might arise throughout the day, Right Mindfulness keeps the mind in a rare place, generally defined in terms of a specific harmless mental or physical task, where only skillful thoughts are allowed entry, and in particular where the self is a stranger. Mindfulness is briefly to remember what it is you are doing, it is staying on task or taking up a new task at the proper time. It is not a simple quality that emerges in the mind, like serenity, awareness or concentration, but rather something the mind engages in actively, a learned skill. In fact it underlies almost any other skill, inside and outside of Buddhism. For instance cooking requires mindfulness so that food does not burn and all ingredients are added at the right time. Following the Precepts requires mindfulness lest you steal, squash or molest without thinking. The opposite of mindfulness is distraction, the mind becoming detached from the task at hand, going off on its own. It requires keeping the mind to some degree fixed.

    Right Mindfulness (notice that most of the last paragraph was about mindfulness without the “Right”) is the basis of meditation practice. Classically it is to maintain some object in focus in the mind, to keep on top of this task, an object that will not thereby involve itself causally with unskillful thoughts or unvirtuous actions. The Buddha’s instructions are to keep the mind there, “ardent, clear comprehending,” and “independent not clinging to anything in the world,” “having subdued longing and grief for the world.”

    The most familiar example of Right Mindfulness is following the breath. For instance, you discover the movement accompanying your breathing in the belly. This will take ardency, because your mind will wander in an instant otherwise. You feel the whole process of the breath, clear about whether it is long or short, deep or shallow, noting the beginning of the in breath, the middle and the falling away, then the same for the out breath. All those things of te world that want to occupy your attention you just put aside. Of course it rarely goes smoothly, even for experienced meditators, so you need to give attention to the causal factors according to which such a mindfulness exercise can succeed, for instance, through stabilizing the body with an erect non-moving posture, through stilling the unskillful thoughts most likely to lead to distraction through Right Effort, either before beginning the exercise or whenever mindfulness wanes and the object of meditation is lost. Aside from the breath, among the other objects of mindfulness are decaying corpses, the variety of body parts, feelings as they arise and fall, the mind or awareness itself, principles of doctrine, or even the arising of unskillful thoughts.

    In Zen meditation, called zazen in Japanese, there is a tendency to take the task at hand, to which mindfulness adheres, as a physical task rather than as a mental one. This has led some Zen teachers to state that zazen is not meditation, that it is something you do with the body than with the mind, that it has no object upon which to focus. All agree, however, as far as I can see, that zazen has to do with mindfulness. For instance, shikantaza, the common Soto Zen form of “meditation,” and possibly at the historical root of Zen practice in China, means literally “just sitting.” An advantage of wrapping mindfulness around physical tasks is that all physical tasks become opportunities for zazen: just as you have just sitting, you have just walking, just eating, just pealing potatoes. Ritual activities, for instance, offering incense or bowing, present particularly fruitful opportunities for mindfulness practice.

    The key zazen is in the “just …,” in the shikan-, part which we prefix to our tasks. This expresses independence or seclusion, detachment from the distractions of the world. For instance, just pealing potatoes means not thinking about payday or listening to music at the same time. For this reason the mind is very much involved, and in fact Right Effort is a useful preparation. What seems to happen, in fact, is that the focus of the mind settles on the (movement of) the physical objects involved in performing the task at hand, that is, the knife, the feet, the posture, the stick of incense, and more importantly on mindfulness itself, on the mind’s task of staying on task. The result is something akin to what the Buddha called Watching the mind (cittanupassana), the third of the four foundations of mindfulness, with the encouragement to do this throughout the day. I find it fascinating how closely Zen stays to the intent of the Buddha but in a radically different conceptual framework, generally one that wastes no words. I speculate that the difference in this case is that China at the time Buddhism arrived, was a very formal ritual Confucian culture and shikan-[task] harnessed the energy of existing practices in the service of Buddhist attainment.

    How does the Termite of Right Mindfulness chew away at the supports that help sustain the sense of self. Right Mindfulness takes us into an active domain of thought and action in which the self has no currency. We take a task that itself is independent of self-centered concerns, an arbitrary mental task, a ritual activity or a duty in which the self has no obvious stake. Then we put our attention fully on that task and do not allow the pursuit of personal advantage. This is a domain which frustrates the self’s interests, schemes and views and in which the self’s stress, anxiety, unvirtuous impulses and samsaric trouble-making find no home. With Right Mindfulness, joy and peace grow even stronger in the mind.

  • Non-Self and Buddhist Practice – Part Two

    Uposatha Day, Last Quarter Moon, March 27, 2011

    We have been looking in previous weeks at the various ways we create, then extend, then strengthen the sense of being a substantial separate self, until we are thoroughly invested in a framework of mutually supporting views, interests and activities that not only make it hard to see that we are dealing with a mental fabrication in the first place, but are also the source of our self-centered scheming, of the anguish of life, and of our imprisonment in our wordly roles and identities. However, last week we started considering the Buddhist practices that, termite-like, eat away at these various manifestations until — Crash! — the whole framework, bridge-like, comes tumbling down. Last week we looked at simple religiosity and the first step, Right View, on the Noble Eightfold Path, the master checklist of Buddhist practice. This week we move further along the Path.

    The Termite of Right Resolve.

    The flickering fabrication of self is an almost constant companion. It is scheming, like a politician or a car salesman; it is demanding, either wanting things like a small child on a shopping trip, or disliking things, like a teenager in a poetry class. It insists on an unrealistic sense of coherence of identity, like Indiana Jones. On the positive side, if life or limb is at issue it does reliably respond, like a bold and noble firefighter. Many of us place total faith in the self, we follow its schemes, we respond to its demands, and we try to live out its identity. As we do all these, we just make the self more and more real; it flickers less.

    Notice that we seem to have two anthropomorphisms here, two people doing things: the self, which is natural, since part of the fabrication is that of a self that does things, and “we”: What is this “we”? “We” is something that gives us a subject for the English verbs I employ. If the self falls away — and this at least momentary flickering out of existence is a very real experience in Buddhist practice — what remains is thought without a thinker, a walk without a walker, experience without an experiencer, decision without a decider, and verbs without subjects. So I use “we,” “I” and “you” as English grammar requires an an alternative to a long series of passive constructions.

    For the Buddhist Right Resolve is to the intention to develop a character of highest Virtue, one that embodies Renunciation, Good Will and Harmlessness. These qualities flow in humans quite naturally whenever our little companion dozes off, flickers out, or otherwise lets down his stake in things. Otherwise Right Resolve sets us quite counter to our constant companion’s interests and objections, and puts him on notice that he will no longer sit in the driver’s seat. Right Resolve arises from the conviction and understanding that our companion self has been driving perilously fast, hogging the road, scaring pedestrians, squashing squirrels and armadillos, throwing beer bottles out the window, heading in the wrong direction and getting hopelessly lost.

    It is important to notice that Right Resolve distinguishes between renunciation and deprivation, or the morbid asceticism of the kind that the Buddha practiced for six years before discovering the Middle Way. It seems that neglecting the fundamental needs of the body, for instance. by starving or subjecting oneself to extreme heat or cold, awakens the bold and noble firefighter in the companion self, that is, awakens the self to the most fundamental purpose of preserving the living organism. While this is a noble cause, it also serves to strengthen his flickering hand. The Middle Way is not to deprive body and mind of what is essential to their well-being, but to cease to be a stakeholder in all the extras of life. In other words, the Buddha discovered the Middle Way; what has been called the Upper Middle Way is a modern development, and not what the Buddha had in mind.

    With the “Me First in All Things” out of the equation, Right Resolve is able to extend the wish for the benefit of all and the recognition of the enormous suffering of the world to govern our involvement in the world. This becomes our compass. However, we are still at the beginning of our practice, for implementing Right Resolve in all aspects our our activities of bodily, verbal and mental behavior and development in spite of the kicking, screaming and scheming of our very determined and clever constant companion, is an exacting task. The Termite of Right Resolve must feel like it is trying to chew a board of walnut, … or petrified wood, but it has helpers: other termites.

    The Termite of Right Speech.

    The Termites of Right Speech, Right Action and Right Livelihood eat away at the behaviors the flickering companion of self would otherwise call for in the world. Self-centered activities in the world generally center around protecting our stakes, or in enhancing them by seeking personal advantage and affirming our attachments and obsessions, our personal identities from which in all their specialness everything flows, our appearance, our reputation as brilliant wits or stunning beauties, or even our frumpiness, our stuff in all its envy-inspiring abundance. All this is fabricated, its importance resting only in our minds, and therefore sources of our delusions, our suffering and our misguided efforts.

    The search for personal advantage entails trying to get what the fortress self wants and to avert what it fears or finds distasteful. As long as behavior conforms with the fabrication of self and its associated fabrications it will be based in greed, hatred and delusion, and will serve to keep the fabrication of self happily in its dominating role. If, on the other hand, behavior conforms to some standard other than self view, and avoids intentionality based on greed, hatred and delusion, the function and significance of the fabrication of self will weaken. If the self is kept out of the driver’s seat, it tends to doze off more, or in any case after a while quits complaining so much. Buddhist practice is to do something in spite of the self. The prominent alternative to looking for personal advantage is the practice of virtue, to seek the benefit of all, and to harm no one.

    Speech is a primary instrument for our companion selves to get their way, and to express and enhance themselves. To begin with, all of the views we have that give rise to our samsaric selves, the many stories about who we are, find expression in speech, and when they do others buy into the same stories, which strengthens our own commitment to stick with them. Idle chatter is a kind of paint brush we use to show the world what we mean by “Me.”

    Worse yet, the self uses speech in its schemes to manipulate others. A primary means is to get others to share our aversions, in particular to dislike what are obstacles to its grand designs, enlisting them as co-conspirators in the removal of those obstacles. This inclines us to use harsh speech, to malign and slander others. Beyond this function we use harsh speech as a tool of vengeance, to threaten and attack those who stand in the way of the self’s schemes. Mutually shared aversions tend to be a way of cementing self-serving alliances and friendships, and in fact we tend to run wild with harsh speech that serves no further purpose, while, in our delusion, overlooking the consequences. Consider that racism, sexism, nationalism and eventually war and ethnic cleansing are all driven by many acts of harsh and often idle speech. Consider that the basis of harsh speech is hatred, which will both grow in the speaker and be inspired in the hearer, to the detriment of both.

    Also among the self’s tools of manipulation is false speech, speech that intentionally distorts the view others have of reality so that they will behave in a manner appropriate to the self’s needs. Much speech is harsh and false at the same time, for instance, serving vengeance or to turn one person or group against another. Much is kindly and false, for instance, serving to induce people in a friendly manner to buy things that will ultimately fail to produce the anticipated results, such as wealth or a wild sex life. Much is idle and false, for instance, serving to gain respect for falsified qualities and accomplishments. Various kinds of speech are not strictly false, but like false speech serve to manipulate the views and behaviors of others, for instance, by exaggeration or evoking needs in other selves like pride and lust. False speech, aside from leaving others with faulty information, progressively undermines our trust in each other, a trust which underlies the efficacy of verbal communication in the first place, a trust which a society requires to function.

    Right Speech is not to engage in idle, harsh or false speech, but rather to speak with a purpose, to speak kindly and to speak the truth. Because of the infectious nature of idle, harsh and false speech it is important to eschew people who do engage in them. This chews away at one of the self’s most immediate supports; in fact the self will likely object vehemently. But this is our Buddhist practice, it is our resolve.

    Unfortunately idle, harsh and false speech are rampant in the Communication Age, in fact they have become a major industry. Blatant lies, character assassination, insult, frivolous gossip about celebrities are matters of daily consumption. When exposed to these influences, we not only learn self-serving behaviors by example, we are often manipulated to repeat further what has been communicated in the service of other selves. What is particularly alarming is that, with media consolidation significantly alternative viewpoints that may at least give an inkling of a discoverable truth behind the punditry are generally absent in a strikingly broad range of not only commercial media sources. Our Buddhist practice is to eschew (and the task of the Termite of Right Speech to chew …) such influences in favor of truth, kindness and value, where we can find these.

  • Non-Self and Buddhist Practice – Part One of, oh, about Three

    Uposatha Day, Full Moon, March 19, 2011

    Impermanent are compounded things,
    Prone to rise and fall.
    Having risen, they’re destroyed,
    Their passing truest bliss.

    Suffering are compounded things,
    Prone to rise and fall.
    Having risen, they’re destroyed,
    Their passing truest bliss.

    Without self are compounded things,
    Prone to rise and fall.
    Having risen, they’re destroyed,
    Their passing truest bliss.

    So, we have this self thing, or rather don’t have it but think we do. The self is at least in part a product of the human mind, it is a fabricated or compounded thing. We have seen in the previous weeks that the self is both necessary for the function of sustaining human life, and the source of all that ails us. What are we to do? This is right at the locus of the Buddhist project: it is a matter of training the mind with regard to the human dilemma.

    The self is a fabrication, but not an isolated fabrication; it gives rise to a vast structure of additional fabrications, emotions and intentions and behaviors that are sustained by and help sustain that self. With the sense of self springs forth the resolve to get for it what it wants, and to protect it from what it fears, to engage in acts of speech body and mind on behalf of the self. It gives rise not only to a self-centered intentionality but also to a self-centered conceptualization of the world, populated with additional fabrications that best serve self-interests and cleansed of fabrications that don’t. Any development of qualities of mindfulness, concentration or mental purity are simply distractions from self-centered impulses.

    This mesh of fabrications, emotions and behaviors is like a wooden bridge designed to retain its structural integrity even as some individual part might fail or be devoured by termites. For this reason it is impossible to remove the self alone; you would just get a self-shaped hole that would then be fabricated back into something substantial, like the hole of a donut. For instance, if your stake is too strong in fame and gain or your actions are directed exclusively by greed and hatred, you will have too much energy invested to let go of the fabrication of the self that provides justification for this investment.

    By way of analogy, it is hard to let go of the notion that money has a substantial existence as long as you are earning, spending and investing it. It is hard to let go of the reality of Santa Clause as long as you are leaving cookies for him that disappear in the night, as long as he leaves cool toys for you by morning, not to mention spotting him getting kissed by your mom. It is hard to let go of the notion that God exists as long as you are praying to Him, as long as He is blessing you with His presence and as long as He intervenes in the world for your benefit. It is easier to sustain the sense of presence of a departed loved-one as long as you keep his bedroom as it was, and his chair in front of the T.V. Your intellect might tell you otherwise, but the stake you place in these things is nevertheless too great to let go of them any further than intellectually.

    The task in Buddhist practice is to loosen the grip of the self and all of its manifestations, partly through proper understanding and aspiration, partly through giving up the behaviors rooted in the self, and partly through gaining awareness and deconstructing the actual processes by which selves are fabricated by the mind and through which these in turn give rise to having a stake in them, and to suffering. It is necessary to focus not only on the delusion of self, but at the same time on its manifestations because these all reinforce each other.

    Given the embeddedness of the self in a greater structure of fabrications, intentions, behaviors, connections and attachments, it is important to recognize that the termites of practice cannot simply attack the self, they must seek to eat away at the various parts of the entire wooden bridge until the whole thing collapses under its own burdensome weight, plunging the self, its fabrications and urges, and self-centered behaviors into the depths below to be washed away by a torrent and carried into the clear blue sea.

    On the Noble Eightfold Path the mind is tuned, honed, sharpened, tempered, straightened, turned and distilled into an instrument of Virtue, Serenity and Wisdom. The sense of self, tweaked, twisted, thinned, stretched, readjusted and spun, does not make it through to the end of the Path. This is the ultimate triumph of selflessness. I would like to consider how the termites of practice eat away at the bridge of self-centeredness with regard to each of the steps of the Noble Eightfold Path, but to begin with the religiosity that is prior to the Path.

    The Termite of Simple Religiosity.

    I’ve written elsewhere about the importance of religiosity in Buddhism. It seems to be a universal function of almost all religion to in some way or another weaken the grip of the self or the stake we place in the self. One way in which religion does this is by dethroning the self from the central role we tend to accord it by replacing it with a higher being, a higher truth or a higher purpose. God commonly serves this function. The closest equivalent in Buddhism is devotion to the Triple Gem as a guide to a life entirely outside the grasp of the self. The Buddha realized that life, the Dharma instructs us how to realize that life and the Sangha inspires us with living examples of devotion to that life. Even before the Buddhist child has any understanding of what that life involves the reverence for an alternative to self-centered life begins to gnaw at the grip of the self. Entering into an understanding of the Dharma takes the Buddhist into the company of the Sangha onto the Noble Eightfold Path toward the attainment of the Buddha.

    In addition, many practices running through all religiosity, including Buddhist, are physical expressions of selflessness, including bowing, which seems to be a natural embodiment or enactment with deep roots, and including the various expressions of respect or veneration. It somehow has an inherent capacity to confront self-centered attitudes. Ritual also has the capacity to step outside of self-centered behaviors and attitudes, insofar as they are actions that are fixed and prescribed rather than driven by self-centered volition. They also are generally connected with, and therefore reinforce, the elements of higher truth described in the last paragraph, generally as expressions of reverence.

    Religious communities also tend to foster an environment relatively safe from otherwise pervasive samsaric conditions, such as competition and anxiety overload. The Buddhist community in particular has generosity in its veins, and various means of promoting and ecouraging this as a fundamental value, so that for the member of that community the need to protect personal interests naturally wanes.

    All of these things serve to eat at and weaken that entrenched sense of self. Religiosity has the capacity also to encourage wholesome mental factors such as kindness and tranquility. This is the beginning of qualities further developed in the Noble Eightfold Path, which will itself as a whole further develop selflessness.

    The Termite of Right View.

    Right View develops on three levels, through familiarity with the teachings of the Dharma, through reflection and finally through insight beyond conceptual thinking, seeing things directly as they are. Familiarity with the teachings and reflection are not sufficient for the full development of Right View, because they do not in themselves shake up our world in the way Buddhist practice calls for. For example, a theoretical physicist while on campus inhabits a curious intellectual word of strings of vibrating probabilities that have already jumped this way or that depending on who is observing at the moment, but at home inhabits the same old world—wife, dog, kids, dinner, TV—that most of us inhabit; the one does not impinge on the other. Not-self should impinge. If it does not impinge you will continue to be caught up in suffering, in Greed, in Hatred, in misperceptions, in unskillful and harmful behaviors. So far in this series of posts on Non-Self I have attempted to impart Right View of the first two levels. At its best this should provide the closest jumping off point from which to plunge into an experience beyond concepts, beyond language that will call forth a radical reorientation.

    To understand insight beyond conceptual thinking, consider what the potter knows. The potter goes beyond mere conceptualizations of his domain and learns the materials and tools by feel or intuition, in ways that cannot readily be put into words. In fact, much of what the potter knows from experience is known not by the brain but by the fingers. By the same token, the greater part of Right View is a direct experience of the way things are, unmediated by conceptual thought. When we got into the path we found ourselves actually working with the material of life, just as the potter works with his or her materials and tools. Very prominent in the Buddhist path is the mind itself, which is the primary material we work with.

    What is it that the Buddhist practitioner sees directly? In short, the three marks of existence: impermanence, suffering and not-self, along with the Four Noble Truths, which connect relate suffering causally to the misperception of self and its consequences. We become aware of a world in constant flux, where changes propagate continuously through an ever evolving network of contingencies, in which we seek in vain for any semblance of solid ground, any constant we can grab onto. But as soon as we grasp something we think we can rely on it begins to melt away in the constant flux of existence. It is painful when our hopes and plans cannot keep pace with reality. What we seek more than anything in this flowing network of contingencies is a self, a constant reference point, a lasting identity, and trying to hold on to this becomes the most painful thing of all. No wonder we had always felt so insecure and anxious. The only way out is for our minds to become as open and as fluid as the world.

    The termite of Right View can chew away at our conventional misunderstandings to help us see what is needed directly, but he will not succeed without the aid of all of the termites of the Noble Eightfold Path.

    Next Week: The Termites of Right Resolve, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness and Right Concentration.