Bhikkhu Cintita

Category: Psychology

  • Dhamma is found in experience, not theory

    What do we mean by “knowledge and vision of things as they are”? This question is asked less frequently than it deserves. Many may assume that it is ineffable, and that we’ll know it when we finally see it. Nonetheless, the early texts do provide some substantial clarity about what to expect. Consider the following exchange between the wanderer Kokanada of a non-Buddhist sect and the Buddha’s right-hand monk Ānanada,

    K: “How is it, sir? Do you hold the view ‘The world is eternal; this alone is true, anything else is wrong’?”

    Ā: “I don’t hold such a view, friend.”

    K: “Then do you hold the view ‘The world is not eternal; this alone is true, anything else is wrong’?”

    Ā: “I don’t hold such a view, friend.”

    Kokanada then asks further questions in this vein, such as whether the world is finite or infinite, whether the soul and the body are the same or different, and whether or not the Tathāgata exists after death. Each of Kokanada’s questions evokes in the same reply,

    Ā: “I don’t hold such a view, friend.”

    Kokanada seems taken aback at Ānanda’s apparent obliviousness,

    K: “Could it then be that you do not know and see?”

    Ā: “It isn’t the case, friend, that I do not know and see. I know and see.”

    K: “How, friend, should the meaning of this statement be understood?”

    Ā: “‘The world is eternal; this alone is true, anything else is wrong,’ friend, this is a speculative view.”

    … and so on for each of Kokanada’s questions.

    Ā: “To the extent, friend, that there is a speculative view, a basis for views, a foundation for views, obsession with views, the origination of views, and the uprooting of views, I know and see this. When I know and see this, why should I say: ‘I do not know and see.’ I know, friend, I see.” (AN 10.96)

    If there have ever been instances of two people talking right past one another, this is certainly one of them. Notice that Kokanada’s questions were all existential. He was probing for clarity about the Buddhist ontological stance on what was really true of the world “out there.” But we know that the Buddha famously left such questions unanswered (MN 63, MN 72). Ānanda’s responses to these questions, on the other hand, were explained epistemically. He was concerned with how the heck such existential views might get into one’s head, into the world “in here,” in the first place, as speculation, then as obsession, and with how we might rid ourselves of such vexing notions.

    The difference between these two perspectives was quite radical for the time. Traditionally the resolution of the human condition had been sought “out there,” through understanding to cosmological forces speculated to be at work “out there,” so that we might control or adapt to them. (We can think of our modern pursuit of happiness in much the same way, but through understanding economic and social forces at work “out there,” so that we might use them for personal success.) For this reason, the answers to existential questions were crucial. For the Buddha, the resolution of the question was to be sought “in here,” in the human capacity or incapacity to apprehend the world properly. The human mind is the origin of our experience, even of our experience of what we think is the world “out there.” Therefore, experience and the cognitive architecture that produces experience are the primary themes that run throughout the early wisdom teachings.

    The experience produced by our cognitive architecture is primarily of a world “out there,” an “objective reality” that appears to us to transcend experience, in the sense that it would be there even if we were not here to experience it. In this “objective reality” all the objects exist that we desire, fear, own or obsess over. In this “objective reality” existential, ontological and metaphysical views seem reasonable. As part of our experience we almost always take at face value that most of what we experience simply reflects this “objective reality” directly. Not only that, but immediate access to this outer world is simply there, effortlessly; all we have to do is show up,

    There it is: your plush arm chair, the cat on your lap, the pipe in your mouth, a cup of tea, a snifter of cognac and a dog-eared copy of Buddhist Life/Buddhist Path on your side table.

    Simple reflection on the science of this scenario shows that it cannot be so simple. As you sit in your arm chair, your brain sits in your skull in total darkness and total silence, communicating with whatever is “out there” through raw neural impulses originating in your retina, your eardrum, etc. If the brain in your fathom-long body is the source of your experience, then anything beyond neural sense impulses must be fabricated in the brain (or through the emergent mental processes running on your brain architecture). A lot of mental activity goes on from the impingement of neural impulses to the production of your cozy experience, no matter how vivid and immediate your experience seems.

    In fact, we have no direct access to such a reality independent of the filter of human cognition which produces our experience. A fundamental principle to keep in mind is,

    Experiencing things as real is not the same as experiencing real things.

    For all we know, we live in a the computer-generated Matrix®, or in a dream. Maybe what is really right side up is systematically converted to up side down before we experience it.

    The Buddha was perhaps the ultimate skeptic about our ability to know what is really going on “out there.” This would explain the Buddha’s reluctance to answer questions of existence. The Buddha also persistently reminds us of the unreliability of what we experience as reality “out there” when he points out the worldling’s vexing habit of seeing permanence in the impermanent, pleasure in suffering, beauty in the ugly, and self where there is none, habits that lead to a life of broken promises and pain when things turn out otherwise. It also explains the Buddha’s routine refusal to endorse views. For the Buddha, we have no basis for ever knowing if any view is really true or false objectively “out there”:

    There are five things, Bhāradvāja, that may turn out in two different ways here and now. What five? Faith, approval, oral tradition, reasoned cogitation, and reflective acceptance of a view. These five things may turn out in two different ways here and now.

    Now something may be fully accepted out of faith, yet it may be empty, hollow, and false; but something else may not be fully accepted out of faith, yet it may be factual, true, and unmistaken. [as for faith, so for approval, oral tradition, reasoned cogitation, and reflective acceptance of a view] (MN 95 ii170)

    Views, by their very nature are presumptive (maññita), and for the Buddha,

    Presumption is a disease, presumption is a tumor, presumption is a dart. By overcoming all presumptions, bhikkhu, one is called a sage at peace. And the sage at peace is not born, does not age, does not die; he is not shaken and does not yearn. For there is nothing present in him by which he might be born. (MN 140 iii246)

    Nonetheless, what we presume are parts our experiential world, and they are eliminated only by the sage at peace, who has learned to experience the world otherwise.

    In his wisdom teachings, the Buddha explicitly limits the word ‘world’ (loka) to refer to this world as we experience it, without attributing to it any special status as “real,”

    In this fathom-long living body, along with its percep­tions and thoughts, lies the world, the arising of the world, and the cessation of the world. (AN 4.45)

    Right at the beginning of the Dhammapada we find,

    Mind precedes all phenomena. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-made. (Dhp 1)

    Phenomenology is a field in modern philosophy that began similarly with the primacy of experience, as a challenge to the metaphysical premise of science that there is a real, objective world that transcends human experience, but that humans have special access to by other means. Accordingly, the Buddha has been described as a phenomenologist by some modern Buddhist thinkers. Loka seems to refer precisely to the phenomenal world, what the early modern phenomenologists call the life world (Lebenswelt). It is our world of experience.

    In any case, what goes on in some reality that transcends experience is not critical to practice. Practice occurs squarely in the world as we experience it, or as it appears to us. It is in this world that suffering arises, that our incentive for practice arises, that the factors arise that inform our kammic decisions (which constitute our practice), that we experience the fruits of practice, that we are able to track our progress, that we gain confidence in the Dhamma, and it is in this world that we awaken.

    Unfortunately, Dhamma is rarely taught or understood from this phenomenological perspective. I would caution that without this perspective the Dhamma is commonly misinterpreted, often trivialized, and often left obscure. To unlock Dhamma’s secrets start with practice experience, not theory.

    Excerpt from my forthcoming revision of
    Dependent Coarising, “1. The mechanics of experience.”

  • Q&A w/BC: Moments of insight

    Anne:

    Can you describe in writing one of your most powerful experiences during meditation?

    BC:

    There is a tendency for modern practitioners to seek after dramatic, unanticipated, immediately life-altering experiences, to which they can attribute either awakening itself, a glimpse of awakening, or a less defined but nonetheless “mystical” experience. Some practitioners are obsessed with achieving such experiences. That might be what you are expecting me to have had, Anne. Seeking such experiences is craving, and certainly detrimental to practice. Accordingly, I try to discourage attributing too much importance to the wonder of such experiences. Though they will occur, the Buddha seems to have had little no or interest in the drama of such experiences, while giving attention to the growing sense of well-being that comes with successful practice to surpass mundane pleasure. We do not practice in order to have dramatic experiences, we practice in order to develop wisdom (as a support for virtue). In the process, however, we do come to see the world in radically different ways. Sometimes we cannot help but be astonished by what we see.

    The experiences I’m referring to are sudden moments of insight associated with wisdom contemplation, in which something that was previously unclear becomes clear. Within the early Buddhist context, they occur particularly in Dhamma investigation (satipaṭṭhāna, vipassanā) within a meditative state (jhāna or samādhi). My book Rethinking Satipaṭṭhāna describes the mechanics of this practice, including what I am about to relate. Outside of the Buddhist context, insight experiences can also arise spontaneously, I suspect especially in children, where they can be disorienting and frightening in the absence of any preparation. In any case, they come suddenly, like a spark but occasionally like a lightning strike. They seem to bubble up from the unconscious mind, then make us want to shout, “Aha!” “Aha” experiences also come with with a conviction, almost a certainty, that one has seen into some deep truth.

    However, the insight experience is typically at best poorly explained in conceptual terms. It is a product of intuition. Concepts generally do not do justice to the experience itself. Tejaniya Sayadaw, a Burmese meditation teacher, gives an example of an insight he once had as a meditation student. The best he could describe it conceptually was, “You can smell only with the nose.” Excited, he told other monks about this great insight, but they all laughed at him. He finally went to his teacher, who acknowledged the depth of this insight, but advised, “When you have an insight, don’t tell the other monks about it. They will think you are crazy.”

    Common broad themes in these experiences are impermanence, non-self, the falling away of the distinction between subjective and objective experience, the nature and depth of suffering, and the mental constructedness of what we presume to be an independent reality“ out there.” The Buddha takes great pains to prime us for insights into such realms through his various Dhamma teachings. Being bound to language, he does this in conceptual terms. Many teachers and scholars accordingly take these conceptual teachings as philosophy, valuable in themselves. In fact, the Buddha’s concern seems to be limited to inducing the practitioner to be able to experience these teachings directly and non-conceptually. He expresses this achievement as “dwelling, having touched X with the body.” We do this through contemplation (in jhāna!) and discovering what the Buddha is talking about in our own experience, making it our own. Aha!

    The closest simple and readily available analogy I’ve found in the mundane world is “Magic Eye” images, 2D patterns that when stared at suddenly (aha) reveal content that appears in 3D. I recommend that beginning practitioners play around with these (I’ve acquired a couple of books of such images for both our Austin and Minnesota libraries). A similar, even simpler effect is found in staring at a Neker’s cube:

    Is the marked corner the closest to you, or the furthest from you? Once the mind has snapped into one interpretation, most people have difficulty snapping into the alternative interpretation. Discovering the alternative is then bound to produce an “aha” experience. One would think that the more firmly the mind is fixed on one interpretation, the more dramatic the discovery of the other will be. One might furthermore even conclude that the more open-minded one is, the more astonishing their insight experiences will be, if and when they eventually do occur.

    One of my favorite wisdom practices is contemplation of the five aggregates, a teaching that leads to insight into the inseparability of mind from the objective, independent world “out there.” Effectively, it teaches the constructedness of reality. (Modern quantum physics seems to have become a precisely focused continuation of this exercise, beginning with the split beam experiment.) Once over twenty years ago I was sitting zazen many hours each day at Tassajara Zen Mountain Monastery in the California coastal mountains, where I lived for almost a year and a half. One is unlikely to learn the five aggregates in Zen, since one is given only vague ideas of what to look for in meditation, most importantly “emptiness” and “non-duality,” with little explanation. Zen takes pride in being a tradition “beyond words and letters,” which in my experience seems to have the effect that insights are few and far between, but it is a whopper if and when one happens to occur.

    I must have had a very fixed idea at this time about the reality of an objective, independent world “out there,” for on this occasion something seemed to snap. I left the meditation hall and felt the world had shifted. I looked up at the tall mountains all around and saw clearly that I was in them and they were in me. There was no separation. I took a walk up the hill up to Suzuki Roshi’s burial sight and spent some time dwelling there in what I had touched. Then suddenly, after about 4 or 5 hours, I snapped back, and couldn’t recover my new interpretation of the world, only a vivid memory of it. I knew I should label the experience “non-duality,” but the label seemed meaningless in view the depth of the experience itself. It was only years later, when I was grounded in the Buddha’s teachings, that I could understand the various experiential facets of this little drama, and even begin explain it conceptually, to the satisfaction of philosophers, but inadequately from the perspective of practitioners. If I had started with the Buddha’s more detailed teachings, I think the drama would have been distributed over many smaller moments of insight.

  • The Wonder of Intrinsic Motivation

    During my days in graduate school, where I studied theoretical linguistics (of all things), I happened to have a conversation with a young man outside my normal circle that went something like this:

    “So, what do you do?”

    “I am a linguistics graduate student.”

    “Oh? What is linguistics?”

    “Well, …,” I very briefly explained that linguistics is the science that studies human language as a natural phenomenon and how much it fascinated me.

    “Is it, um, something you can make a lot of money doing?” he asked.

    “Hmmm, I’ve never thought about it. I suppose not.”

    “Why would you do something that takes so much work if you can’t make a lot of money? And why would you not think about it?”

    Why indeed? Nothing I said from that point on made the least sense to him. What he said made sense to me, but had a twisted logic to it, and the conversation quickly devolved into mutual bewilderment. For me, after all, this was human language we were talking about. Where was this guy’s sense of wonder?

    I didn’t realize it at the time, but the two of us were talking from opposite sides of a chasm, a deep gash through the middle of our culture with profound implications for human psychological and spiritual well-being, for the very direction of people’s lives, for the structure of our economy, and for the way children are brought up and educated. This guy represented what seems to be the dominant, utilitarian view in our culture, one that speaks of maturity, rationality and purpose. Mine was the more foolhardy, silly view that something can be worth doing for its own sake. I consider myself fortunate to have since lived a life of “silliness,” which, many years later as a rather elderly, scholarly Buddhist monk, I continue to live to this day.

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