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Chan/Zen 禪, conventional/ultimate, intimacy/integrity, Ken Wilber, Milindapañhā, Thomas P. Kasulis
I have frequently discussed how early Indian Buddhism, like Jainism, takes an integrity perspective in an ethical or practical sense. I’ve said less about the theoretical side of its integrity approach. But I think that side is very much there. And it’s that link between theoretical and practical philosophy that makes the concepts of intimacy and integrity so appealing: they go “all the way down”.
I find it particularly important to discuss the theoretical integrity of early Buddhism because I think this is a place where Thomas P. Kasulis – from whom I take the very concepts of intimacy and integrity – has misapplied his own theory.
Kasulis’s book illustrates the intimacy/integrity distinction on the self with a helpful set of diagrams that I reproduce here. (The diagrams are entirely Kasulis’s creation and I reproduce them here in the spirit of scholarly dialogue and fair use.) His figures 12 and 13 illustrate the difference between an intimacy and integrity view of the self. In each of these
figures there is a self a surrounded by other entities b through i. On the intimacy model (figure 13), the self a overlaps with b through i, such that it is constituted at least in part by its relations with them; on the integrity model (figure 12), it exists independently of them, connected only by an external relation R.
Now how does this apply to Buddhism? Kasulis, a Buddhologist himself, creates another diagram, figure 14, which he claims depicts the Buddhist self. This figure depicts the Buddhist self as the extreme version of the intimacy self: the self is now wholly constituted by the other entities it overlaps with. The question is: is this depiction accurate?
Kasulis is an expert on Japanese Buddhism and especially Zen. It would not surprise me if Zen Buddhists typically understand the self in just this way, as the extreme of intimacy. But if that is so, it just goes to show how remote East Asian Buddhism is from the Indian tradition that grew up around the original figure of the Buddha.
It is of course true that early Buddhists, as found in the Pali texts, critique the concept of an individual self. But that doesn’t mean that they view the self as consisting in a web of larger wholes. The problem here reminds me of what Ken Wilber used to call the pre/trans fallacy: the modern West is so hung up on the individual self that we tend to conflate different conceptions of what isn’t self, even when they’re opposite. In Wilber’s account of psychological development (which I suspect is accurate), this means that we mistakenly associate an unhealthy failure to form adequate ego boundaries with a spiritually advanced transcendence of selfishness.
Kasulis’s problem is not quite the same thing. It’s not necessarily that one Buddhist view of the self is worse than the other (as is the case in Wilber’s pre-trans fallacy) but that they are nevertheless deeply and importantly different, to the point of being almost opposite.
Specifically: to critique the self by claiming it’s really larger wholes is very different than to critique the self by claiming it’s really smaller parts. And that latter is just what early Buddhism does: not holism but reductionism. Probably the most famous discussion of the self in the early texts is the exchange in the Milindapañhā (Questions of King Menander). Nāgasena, the Buddhist monk who is this text’s protagonist, denies that his name has any real referent: “I am known as Nāgasena but that is only a designation in common use, for no permanent individual can be found.” This much might fit Kasulis’s description. But let’s see how Nāgasena replies when King Menander engages in debate with him. The king says that if Nāgasena’s claim were true, it wouldn’t make any sense to speak of Nāgasena at all. Nāgasena asks him whether conversely it would make sense to speak of a chariot, and the king agrees. After some discussion they establish that although a chariot cannot be identified with any of its parts, “it is because it has all these parts that it comes under the term ‘chariot’.” And so Nāgasena offers his theory of the self:
Even so it is because of the thirty-two kinds of organic matter in a human body and the five aggregates of being that I come under the term “Nāgasena”. As it was said by Sister Vajīra in the presence of the Blessed One, “Just as it is by the existence of the various parts that the word ‘Chariot’ is used, just so is it that when the aggregates of being are there we talk of a being.” (Bhikkhu Pesala translation)
Notice how Nāgasena’s argument works here. The self is not being equated with its overlapping wholes, but with its component parts, the five aggregates. In Kasulis’s diagrams, this self would look less like Figure 14 and more like a diagram where the self a is a fuzzy conceptual line around component parts j through q – each of which is related to other component parts only by an external relation R, just as it is to the other items (b through i) outside the postulated self. Graphic design is not my forte, but I hope the drawing beside this paragraph illustrates the main point: the early Buddhist self is the opposite of what Kasulis depicts as the Buddhist self, in that it reduces even more to component parts linked by external relations.)
Why does this metaphysical discussion of self matter? Because it’s at the heart of bigger questions of intimacy and integrity. Metaphysically as ethically, Indian Buddhist thinkers follow their Jain forebears in insisting on separation, distinction and reduction rather than union and wholeness. And the point bears on modern questions as well. Modern ethical or political holists, thinkers in intimacy, like to complain that modern thought views individuals as too “atomized”. (One finds this phrasing in thinkers as far apart as Hannah Arendt on the left and Francis Fukuyama on the right.) But the Pali Buddhist critique is that we don’t think of individuals as atomized enough!
In the Pali texts, certainly the Milindapañhā but also the suttas and Abhidhamma, over and over the self is literally atomized: broken down into the five aggregates. Unlike Democritus, Epicurus and modern physics, Pali Buddhism does not have a materialist atomic theory. But an atomic theory it has – and the importance of that theory, the reason it’s so frequently stressed, is as a way to break down the self, literally atomize it into its smallest component parts.
Thinking through these points has adjusted the way I think about early Buddhism and its relation to Jainism. Jains, unlike Buddhists, believe in and even exalt the independent self; because of that, I used to see non-self as something that put Buddhism a bit closer to intimacy, on the intimacy-integrity spectrum, than was Jainism. But now I see that that’s not true. Non-self is exactly the same integrity that characterizes Jainism. In a certain sense it’s even more so, for it carries on the reduction of wholes in an even more thoroughgoing way.
You’re undoubtedly correct that there’s nothing in early Indian Buddhism that points to the intimate connection of the self with broader realms of existence. It’s critique of atman is based solely on the self’s impermanence, rather than its interdependance, the interdependence critique relying on later developments: Nagarjuna sunyata and subsequent Sino-Japanese interpretations of it. Nevertheless, I wonder if you may be over-emphasizing the reductionistic aspects of the chariot metaphor and the use early Buddhism makes of the skandas. I’m not so sure that early Buddhists were trying to come up with a complete ontology. By saying the self was “nothing but the five aggregates,” they were mostly pointing to the self’s impermanence; that there was no additional essence that kept the self permanent in the face of the skandas’s changing nature. It’s the absence of the self’s unchanging essence that was important and the soteriological use the early Buddhists made of that fact, rather than the idea that the self was ontologically reducible to its constituent elements. I’m not really a great expert here, and my shift in emphasis probably does not affect your main point, but I feel the need to be cautious about interpreting early Buddhist concepts through modern ontological lenses.
Thought-provoking post, Seth; good to see you here. You’re right that this Buddhist reductionism isn’t quite so fully spelled out in the Milindapañhā or texts related to it (like many of the suttas). I wouldn’t say that it’s only about the self’s impermanence, though; anattā usually gets treated as a mark of existence related to but separate from anicca (and dukkha). What those specifically mean and how they relate might not really get spelled out until the Abhidhamma. Still, I wouldn’t say at all that the fully reductionist account is a merely modern one, because you certainly do find it in the Abhidhamma texts, which have long been an accepted part of Theravāda. Their dating relative to the other Pali texts is somewhat controversial, but they sure aren’t modern.
Great post, Amod – glad to see the early Buddhist-y stuff. A few thoughts came up as I read it:
1) Gook call on Kasulis… I used his “Buddhist Philosophy” book in a course a few years back and had to ‘correct’ several misreadings of Indian Buddhist Philosophy using P. Williams books and other sources. Seeing that he is primarily a philosopher and Japan expert, it might make sense that he was indeed reading (mis-reading) earlier Buddhism through a skewed lens.
2) It’s difficult to see how early Buddhism can be an atomism in the way you describe. This is because the parts are not identified as the self, nor do they make up any actual self. I would depict the ‘self’ in a diagram with a dashed line: if we do not see clearly, it appears to be a solid, real line. But when we actually look at it, we see that there is no circle (no self). The ‘self’ we think we see in any of the aggregates is a mistaken view that we are to eventually overcome. The use of the aggregates/atoms is a didactic device to get monks to look more closely. If we look at any of these atoms more closely, we see that they too are made up of dashed lines/separate parts – and so it goes ‘all the way down’. Thus early (and I think later Indian) Buddhism was more of an ‘eliminitavism’ in regards to the self; not that ‘it’ was to be eliminated, but that the false view of ‘it’ was to be eliminated through whatever analytical means necessary.
So, that thing I said about not being good at graphic design? That. :) I actually wanted to make the line indicating the self dotted, and the tool I was using didn’t seem to have an option to do that. I made it faded in colour as a closest approximation.
However, I wouldn’t apply that to the atoms themselves. As I understand it, in the Pali texts and especially the Abhidhamma, reductionism stops with the atoms – that’s why I call it an atomism. Many Buddhists certainly go deeper. Śāntideva certainly does; he claims that any atom or similarly ultimately small particle (quark etc.) is not really an atom in that it still has directions from which it can be approached (up, down, left, right), and those directions can be broken down further too. But that all is clearly part of a Madhyamaka project of breaking down everything. I don’t think it does go that far in early or Theravāda, non-Madhyamaka Buddhism. The way the two truths are treated in both traditions is instructive. Śāntideva says that the paramārtha satya is anabhilāpya, unspeakable; I don’t think that claim is made in Pali texts. (It’s made about nibbāna specifically, but that’s not quite the same thing.) As I understand it, when the two truths are spoken of in Pali, the ultimate truth refers to the atoms and the conventional truth refers to constructs like the self – the self is not really real, just a convenient heuristic that we can use to refer to the reality that is the atoms.
Great post Amod.
In my studies of Tibetan Buddhism (and the approach is also valid, I believe, in Zen Buddhism) egolessness is always taught as two fold egolessness. Two fold egolessness is egolessness of self and egolessness of other.
You are accurate in decribing Buddhism’s treatment of ego as a concept that is subject to attachment that then creates suffering. An interesting point, though, is that concepts cannot be created without dualism. The definition of “concept” could, in fact, be dualistic thought. The Tibetans call this aspect of mind that engages in dualistic thought “sems”. So, based on this, self depends on other in the sense that it cannot be conceived of except in comparison with other.
Anytime you speak of qualities or characteristics, you are dealing in concept — and all of this is relative. For example, you cannot say that coffee is hot without a reference point of ice cream — or some “other” that creates a baseline for comparison. Another way to say this is that the true (non-relative) nature of both the coffee and the ice cream is egolessness. It is not only ineffable, it cannot be conceived of. This is why the heart sutra in its description of shunyata made up entirely of a list of “no eye, no ear, etc.” includes “there are no characteristics”.
To understand Buddhist interdependence, I think you need to consider it from this perspective — not that something exists because something else exists — but that existence itself is a concept and, like all concepts, cannot exist without “other”. It is tricky because you can’t say that things don’t exist either (that would be another concept). As Mipham the Great said, concepts are like the elephant that wades in the river to wash off the dust and then rolls in the dust to dry off the water (so we flip from eternalism toi nihilism and back). Ultimately, a process of abandoning concept and seeing the world directly is critical in Buddhism — and this is why meditation is so important.
Similar points here as in my comment to Justin, I think. The idea that all concepts need to be broken down is very much there in Śāntideva (and I would imagine even more so in the Tibetan traditions that follow him), though he’s nevertheless a reductionist in many of these respects. But I don’t think it’s there in the Pali Abhidhamma or in the early suttas (or related texts like the Milindapañhā). As far as I can tell, those really don’t see any problem with concepts in the general case, or even with dualism as such; the problem is specifically with the concept of the self, and more generally with other composite beings that are best broken down into their parts.
Egolessness is itself non-dual — unless you take the view that egolessness is non-existence or nihilism. And if you take that view, you are not a Buddhist, Theravadin Buddhist or otherwise.
And where I have seen analysis or argument for egolessness based on division of self into parts and the inability to identify a center (like peeling an onion or like the chariot metaphor) the argument never concedes that even the parts have inherent existence.
I’m not sure that I have seen any explicit claim that the parts have inherent existence either. The key thing, as far as I know, is that in pre-Mādhyamika texts there’s also no claim that they don’t. What’s important is the understanding that the self and similar composite entities can be broken down into parts.
I’m not sure what you mean by “egolessness is non-dual” if you are applying it to early Buddhist texts. If you mean that there’s no distinction between subject and object, I’m not sure that that’s quite right. It’s rather that the distinction becomes more complex: that the apparent subject is really a welter of cognitions, perceptions and so on, and each one exercises something that we might think of as a portion of subjectivity, but does not add up to a unified subject. Meanwhile form (rūpa) is perceived but does not itself perceive.
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Hi Amod, I’m a lurker on your blog as I lack the academic and probably intellectual chops to join in, but … when you say:
” Modern ethical or political holists, thinkers in intimacy, like to complain that modern thought views individuals as too “atomized”. (One finds this phrasing in thinkers as far apart as Hannah Arendt on the left and Francis Fukuyama on the right.) But the Pali Buddhist critique is that we don’t think of individuals as atomized enough!”
… it feels like you are comparing different categories. Surely ‘atomization’ in the sense Arendt, et al, mean it relates to the sociological / psychological problem of individuals/persons increasingly functioning as isolated ‘things’ amongst other ‘things’ rather than as beings-in-relation, whereas what you discuss above about the five aggregates is more of an epistemological / psychological matter?
Welcome, Kyoshin! Please don’t feel intimidated about “chops” – it is an important point to make. You’re quite right that the specific sense of “atomization” used by communitarians like Arendt and Fukuyama has to do with individual people functioning as isolated rather than being-in-relation; they’re not going down to a lower level than that, they are not thinking about the kind of Abhidhamma critiques of the self I’m talking about here. Still, I notice that you point out that both levels are in a sense psychological, which make sense; they are both in some sense about the self. And since all Buddhist traditions deny the self in some respect, it’s easy to see them as all being communitarian (as I suspect Japanese Buddhism generally is) – trying to see individuals as beings-in-relation as they do. But my point is that for the early Buddhists, there is a sense in which seeing primarily as beings-in-relation is itself the problem – just at a different level. We normally see fingers, words, emotions, perceptions and so on as “things that make up a self” – we see these as beings-in-relation to a personal self. But we see more clearly when we see them as isolated things – even as individuals in a sense, if we use those terms loosely.
Thanks for clarifying Amod. I wonder if you could clarify more as to why “for the early Buddhists […]seeing primarily as beings-in-relation is itself the problem’. I can see the difference but I’m unclear as to the nature of the critique. Perhaps that such a view tends toward a kind of monism?
Anyway your remarks are very interesting. I’ve practiced in Japanese traditions all of my thirteen years of Buddhist life but have often found myself dipping into European Existentialist thought, as a kind of antidote, at time when my sense of personal integrity has been threatened by the communitarian dimension of the culturally Japanese sangha in which I practice. When trying to explain this interest in Exsitentialism to friends I across this quotation from the entry on Sartre in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy which kind of hits the nail on the head for me in terms of the tightrope I’ve been trying to navigating on the whole intimacy-integrity thing:
“[Re: Sartre’s] concept of the human agent as not a self but a “presence to self.” This opening up of the Cartesian “thinking thing” supports a wide variety of alternative theories of the self while retaining the features of freedom and responsibility that, one can argue, have been central tenets of Western philosophy and law since the Greeks.”
Anyway thanks for your great blog.
Thank you! These are good questions and clarifications. I don’t think monism in anything like the usual sense is the problem here. What I mean is: in an everyday non-Buddhist context, I would normally,think of these fingers now typing as “my fingers”, of the thoughts being expressed here as “my thoughts”. The significance of the fingers and the thoughts – the parts – has to do with their being parts of the larger whole that is me. So in that normal way of thinking I am thinking of them as beings-in-relation to that larger entity, the self. What I should be doing, in the Abhidhammic approach, is avoid seeing them as beings in relation to that larger whole, and instead learn to see them properly as isolated things among other things. Does that make the critique clearer?
So far I have not engaged a lot philosophically with existentialism as such. I have a feeling that will change before too long – especially regarding Heidegger.
Thanks Amod, and apologies for all the typos in my last comment. Your further explanation is helpful. Much to think about. Best wishes, K