Buddha_A Very Short Introduction
Page 9
Or in other words the propensities of greed, hatred, and delusion which cause us to injure others through evil deeds are exactly the same propensities which cause us to suffer ourselves by being reborn in life after life. The moral cause in transmigration is equivalent to the cause of suffering. But this raises a fundamental question: how exactly does this cause work? For a doctrine of a Self or soul it is easy enough. The Self acts, causes consequences to itself, and is reborn again according to its deserts. The basic structure is in its own terms plausible, so the details are not so important. But what if there is no Self?
The answer (as it appears at D II no. 15) works backwards from the appearance of a new body and mind, a new psychophysical entity. How did this appear? It appeared through the descent of consciousness into a mother’s womb. On the face of it this is primitive, going back to earlier Indian ideas of an homunculus descending into the womb; and it is speculative, going beyond the Buddha’s brief of attending only to what he could witness himself. But later Buddhist commentators are clear that this descent is metaphorical, as we might say ‘darkness descended on him’ if someone fell unconscious. Moreover this enlivening consciousness is not an independent entity, a disguised Self, but is composed of causes and conditions.
So what in turn were these preceding conditions? One was the act of physical generation, but more important was a previous impulse. Here impulse is to be understood as intention or mental action, bearing a moral quality and informing by that quality the nature of the new psychophysical entity. If the impulse was good, the new body and mind will be well endowed and fortunately placed, if not it will be poorly endowed and unfortunate.
And now comes the key question: what is this mysterious impulse? It is in fact nothing other than the final impulse, the dying thought, of the previous mind and body. It is nothing like a Self, but is merely a last energy which leaps the gap from life to life rather like – as a later Buddhist source puts it – a flame leaping from one candle wick to another. Nor is it free of preceding conditions, for it is the product of the dispositions formed by habitual mental actions conducted under the veil of ignorance and desire within the previous life. And thus one can trace the process back – to beginningless time, in fact.
In this account there is no underlying entity, but there is a stream of events which has its own history. This history is borne forward, not by a Self or soul, but by the complex interaction of the causes, conditions, and effects summarized under craving and suffering. To understand this interaction is to understand the nature and origins of the human condition. Many canonical accounts treat this as the substance of the awakening itself: the Buddha called it dependent co-origination (paṭicca samuppāda). It was dependent in that the causes and conditions necessarily interact with each other, as do fuel, heat, oxygen, and so forth in the production of fire. No one of them is finally independent, as a Self or soul might be. So dependent co-origination served two functions: it refuted the idea of an independent permanent soul, and it described the origin of suffering. The doctrine attached to dependent co-origination includes everything I have discussed under the first two Noble Truths, though it is phrased somewhat differently. It usually (but not always) comprises twelve factors. These range from those describing the psychophysical entity, such as sense organs and feeling, to the descriptions of the sources of suffering, namely ignorance, craving, clinging, and impulses. And of course it includes suffering as well. Though we might speculate that, as a doctrine, dependent co-origination appeared after the Four Noble Truths, it was in fact already inherent in them, in the Buddha’s understanding of craving and suffering, and of the interactions through which craving causes suffering.
The cure for suffering
The third Noble Truth, the Truth of the Cessation of Suffering, certifies that the disease of suffering is actually curable. Though there is no permanent moral person, the impersonal process is corrigible. One can achieve liberation. Within the Four Noble Truths this is a relatively colourless doctrine, fulfilling the form of the medical diagnosis. But it did speak to an important body of opinion held at the Buddha’s time. This was represented especially by the Ājīvikas, who held that the process of rebirth is an automatic, mechanical one: every being must, whatever he does, be reborn in every possible condition, and every being is destined ultimately to attain salvation, so special effort is pointless. An Ājīvika might well have asked the Buddha whether his own doctrine of dependent co-origination did not in effect lead to just such a conclusion. Do not these causes and conditions, however complex, lead in the end to a mechanically predestined result, rather like an intricate clockwork wound up and set ticking? To this the Buddha’s answer was that, though one’s endowments and capacities are formed by circumstances in previous lives, one still has the ability, within the confines of this present life, to alter voluntarily one’s behaviour. One can dispel ignorance by seeing the world as it is, as it is described in the Four Noble Truths. And one can control craving by the measured renouncer’s discipline promulgated by the Buddha.
The fourth Noble Truth is the Truth of the Path Leading to the Cessation of Suffering. This contains the prescription, the medicine. This is usually given as the Noble Eightfold Path, but already in canonical sources this list is conveniently broken down into three constituents: moral self-discipline or morality, meditation, and wisdom (sīla, samādhi paññā). Morality consists of a pacific, truthful, upright, and thoroughly disciplined way of life, reasoned to cause harm neither to oneself nor to others. For the Buddha’s monks this meant a life of mendicancy, of poverty but not of self-mortification, of celibacy and of gentle honesty. Though the Buddha and his renunciant disciples elaborated a monastic disciplinary code consistent with Buddhist principles, this was probably in essence not far different from the code with which the Buddha began, a code inspired by the moral ideals then current among the wanderers and renouncers.
The second part of the path is meditation. Part of meditation is allied with morality: the attempt to restrain one’s senses from what is immoral and to create good, wholesome, and skilful frames of mind within which to work. The counterpart to this is the avoidance not only of bad actions but of bad frames of mind, which lead not to clarity but to delusion. Against this background the basic skill is concentration, coupled with equanimity, and this meditative control is then the basis of insight meditation. Insight meditation, however, is not practised only by sitting in quiet solitude. For it demands a general attitude of self-recollection, of clear consciousness, of awareness of one’s surroundings, one’s experiences, and one’s actions and their consequences moment by moment, day by day. As it was taught to his pupils this meditative discipline is relatively systematized, but the Buddha fulfilled it unsystematically in the course of his search. These first two parts of the path could be thought of as a battery of skills rather like those of a painter: draftsmanship, the use of colour, the depiction of perspective, and so forth. As these skills blend into a greater skill, that of painting itself, so all the individual exercises of morality and meditation blend into a single alert and calm way of life.
But the abilities of the painter must be wedded to a sensibility, a way of seeing the world. And analogously the third part of the path – wisdom – demands a radically new way of perceiving experience. One facet of this new perception is, quite simply, seeing the world as it is, and for the Buddha this meant seeing by means of the Four Noble Truths and dependent co-origination: in such-and-such a way is experience evanescent, devoid of abiding self, and painfully flawed. In such-and-such a way does craving reproduce this suffering again and again.
The other facet is a new attitude, a new habit of mind, which grows out of the equanimity of meditation. One can now stand aloof from experience. One can see the dangers in it and turn away. One can observe, yet not pursue, even fleeting pleasures and aspirations as they flicker before the mind’s eye. Perhaps the most compact statement of this sensibility is found in the stock prescription that the monk should ‘no
t cling to the here and now, not grasp after situations, relinquish easily’. Or again:
[the monk] neither constructs in his mind, nor wills in order to produce, any state of mind or body, or the destruction of any such state. By not so willing anything in the world, he grasps after nothing; by not grasping, he is not anxious; he is therefore fully calmed within. (M III 244)
One should neither look forward to coming experiences, nor clutch at present ones, but let them all slip easily through one’s fingers.
The Buddha took this to great lengths. In the Simile of the Raft (M I no. 22) he instances the case of a man who, faced by a flood, builds a raft from wood lying about and floats safely to the other side. The Buddha asks whether it would be rational for the man, having reached the other side, to put the raft on his head and carry it with him. The answer is that it would assuredly not be rational. Just so, concludes the Buddha, it is irrational to cling even to the profitable states of mind created by morality and meditation, still less to unprofitable states of mind. (This presupposes, of course, that through habituation and training the profitable practices are now second nature to the monk.) The same applies to ideas: to indulge in speculations and theories about the past or future, eternity, the fate of the world, and so forth, is to lose oneself in ‘a tangle of views, a thicket of views’. Instead one is to view the world simply, directly, with the perception achieved in insight meditation. This perception, like the artist’s way of seeing, is highly cultivated, but it is nevertheless immediate and uncomplicated by reflection. One is to hover in a sensibility which the Buddha describes in one of his most poetic descriptions of liberation, where the flood refers to the painful stream of birth and death: ‘if I stood still, I sank; if I struggled, I was carried away. Thus by neither standing still nor struggling, I crossed the flood’ (S I 1).
This is Nirvana, the ‘blowing out’ of the passions and frustrations of existence. The Buddha asserted that to speculate about the frame of mind of one thus awakened and liberated is to invite confusion and madness. But despite this useful advice, such speculation played a great part in subsequent Buddhist history, as it must in our assessment of the claims of Buddhism to our assent. The accounts of awakening in the canon foster the impression that one is either awakened or not, liberated or not, and that the switch from one to the other is practically instantaneous and irreversible. However, one of the issues in the first great schism in Buddhism, a few generations after the Buddha’s death, was whether a liberated person can, even temporarily, backslide from awakening. And by the same token later schools conducted debates over whether awakening was instantaneous or gradual.
What these difficulties point to is a problem inherent in the language used in the canon to describe such impalpable matters: for the purposes of a narrative, the story of the Buddha’s awakening, a sudden, dramatic, and decisive transformation is required. And this is plausible to the extent that the awakening was a matter of certainty, of the knowledge that ‘what was to be done has been done’. The Buddha realized that he had fulfilled all the requirements for liberation and no longer had to struggle arduously forward. But the liberation is a different matter, for here we are speaking of a wholesale transformation in the human constitution. It seems implausible that this transformation, as it is described in the canonical sources, could be other than gradual, a slow mastering of the whole wide field of one’s behaviour and thought. In this respect the awakening had to be further certified and shown to be practically effective in the course of subsequent experience. We may accept that the Buddha was awakened one moonlit night, but the liberation was an extended, indeed a life-long affair.
3. In this profoundly tranquil sculpture, the Buddha has just passed on to final Nirvana. What happens to an enlightened person at death is one of the questions, like that of the beginning and end of the world, which the Buddha said cannot sensibly be answered. Nirvana is a state beyond human thought, beyond life and death and reincarnation.
Theories of liberation
The question of whether the Buddha’s notion of liberation is a believable or a practicable one must I think be answered in the affirmative. True, we cannot say anything useful about the claim that liberation puts an end to the rigours of death and rebirth. That is beyond our ability to argue cogently and bring evidence. But this claim is – as is so characteristic of the Buddha’s style – linked to another more concrete claim, that liberation may be achieved in this life, and on this the Buddhist texts offer some grounds for discussion. It is not claimed that liberation puts an end to physical pain this side of the grave, for painfulness is admitted to be the nature of the body. (Someone accomplished in the Absorptions or Meditative Planes, however, might be able temporarily to anaesthetize himself by such meditation.) It is rather mental suffering, the extra and unnecessary anguish of existence, that is progressively dispelled by the Buddhist training. Moreover, the sources give us a relatively clear view of the effect of the training: the Buddha’s monks ‘do not repent the past nor brood over the future. They live in the present. Hence they are radiant’ (S I 5).
The principle underlying the elaborate training is one directed precisely to this end of living radiantly in the present. The Buddha called the principle ‘thorough reflection’ (yoniso manasikāra), a considered and meticulous pragmatism about the consequences of each practice in the Middle Path. ‘For him who reflects thoroughly, cares and troubles which have not yet arisen do not arise, and those already arisen disappear’ (M I 7). What this means in effect is that any practice must be seen to conduce to present welfare as well as to long-term transformation. There is no doubt a tension here. On the one hand, the monk’s life is strenuous, and he must undertake practices which are at first quite uncomfortable. But on the other hand, since the practices are not designed as self-mortification, their fruits are not deferred indefinitely, but are witnessed and adjudged useful within a manageable period. What was difficult becomes second nature, an occasion not for anguish but for cool, indeed intellectually pleasurable, reflection on the nature and demands of experience in the mind and body. Furthermore, the monk is bolstered in this by the evaluation, repeatedly stressed in the texts, that such a life is not merely escape, but a noble and heroic vocation; and this evaluation is in turn certified by his fellow monks and by the surrounding society which prizes such fortitude.
Moreover, the present mastery of one field of the training not only produces benefits in itself, but also is seen as leading forward naturally to further mastery. Thus, for example, the monk’s mastery of moral discipline produces a lack of remorse, a freedom from regret and anxiety. Because one commits no injury to oneself or others, one’s conscience is clear, and this leads of itself to a serenity upon which meditative accomplishments may then be founded. This progressive mastery is considered to lead to the very summit, an aloofness from all the accidents of experience.
From our point of view what is important about this process is its naturalness. One of the most intractable problems of a project such as the Buddha’s is that desire is an enemy, but the final goal of liberation is one that the monk desires, wills. How is it possible to give up that impassioned will towards liberation itself? On the Buddha’s account one wills the present object of training – e.g. to attain moral discipline – and the consequences fall into place. Thus, for example, ‘there is no need for one well disciplined, endowed with moral discipline, to will with the intention “let me do away with remorse”. For this is the way of things, O monks, that moral discipline does away with remorse’ (A V 2). As one wills, and then relaxes into, each stage of practice the next stage is prepared. The final stage is attained not by strenuous willing at all, but by the now habitual relaxation.
The Buddha held the human constitution to be such that it could be laid bare to fruitful investigation through insight meditation and decisively transformed through the Buddhist training. The internal coherence of this view is difficult to fault, but our ultimate assent must be founded in experience, in empirical
evidence. I can offer only my experience from fieldwork with meditating forest monks in contemporary Sri Lanka. Many monks were evidently healthy and content, ‘radiant’ and ‘without remorse’, and this in itself impressed me. Yet to be fair this may have been only the fruit of a quiet life, since I simply was not with any of the monks for the long years necessary to have witnessed and understood some slow metamorphosis of character through the Buddhist discipline.
There were, however, three traits of the monks which did seem directly pursuant upon the Buddhist training. The first was an interested, indeed fascinated, absorption in what they called their ‘work’, which referred to the hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute prosecution of the daily round – study, careful eating, hygiene, meditation, exercise – which makes up the monk’s life. In the reflective execution of these ordinary tasks they clearly found tremendous satisfaction. But, second, some did nevertheless also pour tremendous energy and years of their lives into long-term projects, such as the founding of forest hermitages. Yet they still remained without anxiety and relatively indifferent to the results of their efforts. They were both remarkably successful and remarkably uninterested in success. These deep-seated attitudes were far enough from ordinary life and close enough to the Buddhist ideal of living in the present that I had no difficulty in attributing them to the monastic discipline.