Tags
Buddhaghosa, Cloud of Unknowing, early writings, mystical experience, Ninian Smart, perennialism, phenomenology
I think one often learns the most about a philosopher from those points where her views change. With that in mind, I’d like to highlight a way I think my own thought has changed recently. Ten years ago on this blog, I posted an essay that I had written ten years before that, for Robert M. Gimello’s graduate course on Buddhist meditation traditions. That paper critiques Ninian Smart’s chapter “What would Buddhaghosa have made of The Cloud of Unknowing?” (in Steven Katz’s Mysticism and Language). My now twenty-year-old essay tears Smart to pieces for his comparison between Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhimagga and the fourteenth-century English The Cloud of Unknowing. And in the light of my more recent thoughts on mystical experience, I now think that tearing up went too far.
The Visuddhimagga and the Cloud both describe, in Smart’s words, a “systematic effort to blot out sense perception, memories, and imaginings of the world of our sensory environment and of corresponding inner states.” Neither text’s author ever claims to have done this themselves, successfully or otherwise. Smart seems to assume that they did, and my essay makes a lot of that unjustified assumption. But I think I went too far when I said this:
Similarities in actual experience lead us to believe that perhaps there is something perennial in human nature, or in the reality of the universe, that is conducive to such an experience across cultural boundaries. Similarities in textual prescription, if they do not reflect actual experiences, are mere curiosities, of mostly antiquarian interest.
That last line, I think, is wrong in a couple of ways. Similarities in prescription can easily be of more than antiquarian interest – prescription is what ethics is about, after all, and such similarities could provide common ground for ethical dialogue. But beyond that, I don’t think it’s true, or even likely, that similarities in textual prescription do not reflect actual experiences!
Indeed, we can’t assume that either Buddhaghosa or the Cloud of Unknowing author had the experiences they describe, when nothing in their respective texts says that they did. Yet they did feel the need to record a description of these experiences anyway. And that strongly suggests to me that someone must have had or claimed to have these experiences and recounted them, even if we now only hear it second- or third- or fourth-hand. I can’t really think of a reason why someone would go to such length to make such an experience up and recount it in such detail from scratch – especially if they’re not claiming to have had it themselves, since they wouldn’t get the prestige that might come from impressing people with their own experience.
So it seems to me likely that, indeed, the Visuddhimagga and the Cloud are respectively each describing experiences that someone in Sri Lanka and medieval England actually had, whether or not that someone was the author. And so they do “lead us to believe that perhaps there is something perennial in human nature, or in the reality of the universe, that is conducive to such an experience across cultural boundaries.” Not every “mystical experience” is like what either of these texts describe, but the described experience seems to be something available to humans in multiple and very different cultural contexts – and yes, it could also be that some drugs may give us quick access to such an experience.
There is a place where I think the essay, and the critics of universal mystical experience, still have a point. And that is on the question of significance. The Cloud author speaks of the state in question as an experience of God; Buddhaghosa obviously does not. Smart says that whether the experience is of God “depends on a much wider set of conditions than can be drawn from the mystical experience itself, but it is a wider set that could be put on one side by Buddhaghosa.” And I asked: “Buddhaghosa could put the language of God on one side in order to compare ‘the experience itself’. The question is, why would he want to?”
The latter question doesn’t have to be rhetorical. It does remain rhetorical in the context of Smart’s article, which never actually asks it. As I understand them, the Cloud author prescribes a path to experience God; Buddhaghosa prescribes a path to clear away the mental hindrances that keep us in suffering. These are different things. For neither thinker is it the experience itself that matters most; the experience is for something, and that purpose is what really matters. Smart’s “could be put on one side” neglects those questions of purpose and significance – in line with a Wilberian or Theosophical approach that says, against all historical evidence, that the core of the world’s great traditions is in replicable experience.
All that said, though, it’s not so hard to imagine Buddhaghosa encountering a text like the Cloud and indeed “putting the language of God on one side.” (Since to imagine such an encounter is already science-fictional, let’s further assume for this thought experiment that Buddhaghosa was one person, rather than a committee, as Maria Heim has argued.) Buddhist and non-Buddhist traditions in India drew from each other’s practices and theories. It’s not so hard to imagine Buddhaghosa saying, for example: “you mlecchas have strange and false beliefs about your big deva. Yet the practices you describe take you to a jhāna. Perhaps then you have other practices that could be helpful for us on our path.”
A comparative philosopher like myself strives to be more open to other traditions than would a stricter Buddhist like Buddhaghosa. So I as a Buddhist have even more reason to say something like that than Buddhaghosa would have: it is at least possible that the different experiences are illuminating a common reality. For that reason, I no longer think similarities between the Visuddhimagga and the Cloud are “mere curiosities, of mostly antiquarian interest.” My old essay closes as follows:
Smart has succeeded at the very modest task he set himself at the beginning of his chapter: to establish “that there are phenomenological similarities between the differing practices despite the contrast in language and style between Buddhaghosa and the author of the Cloud of Unknowing.” But we might well ask: who cares?
Who cares? Twenty years later, it turns out that I do.
Who cares about phenomenological experiences, indeed? I’m glad you do, because I care too… not only that, but I would say, on a slightly idealistic take, that phenomenological experiences and abstract ideas about them, are all we have to go with.
Now, given that abstract ideas can just proliferate on their own like a rainforest of mutant viruses, what is there that can keep them in check, moored to some kind of reality? If we go a bit scientific on them, the only thing that make an abstract idea every so slightly falsifiable, is if this idea makes some kind of prediction of possible future experiences, which can then happen or not. Whether it’s about growing turnips or, say, attaining jhāna, there is a sense in which these ideas that predict future experiences can be put into pratice and validated. Otherwise ideas can just grow, mutate and combine with each other, and you end up with discussions about angels on pins, or about the infallibility of the Buddha or the Pope, or the shape of Mt. Meru, or who knows what.
When people first think of religions, they often grab on to beliefs about creator God or gods, and the origin of the universe, and indeed nearly all religions have something to offer in this area. But these ideas are utterly unconnected to experience – the origin of the universe _already happened_, so unless you take it as a huge metaphor on the arising of experience in the present moment or some such, such ideas are nothing more than narratives that a culture comes up with, and eventually changes or discards. What is a God that cannot be actually experienced, but an empty idea floating in the path dependencies of culture?
Since I’m taking a contrarian tone today, here is my working hypothesis: spiritual traditions are great at preserving a bunch of methods, along with supporting narratives helpful in applying them, and criteria for validating the experiences that these methods give rise to… and they rather suck at everything else, especially at 1) talking about the outer world, and 2) understanding themselves.
Religions saying weird and wacko things about the outer world is well known and not surprising – in the absence of an experiential tether to keep things in tune, there’s nothing to prevent thought from divering, so you get essentially random metaphysics. Buddhism has its share, and they are quite similar to the kinds of speculation that ancient Greeks and others were producing at the time. Christianity got famously stuck with Aristotelian metaphysics for a good part of the Middle Ages.
But the more interesting point that I want to make is that, for all their scholastic sophistication, a traditions’s intellectual understanding of itself, of how its methods came about, why they work and how they produce the results they do, can also be wildly off. And as long as the methods themselves do work, and the intellectual explanation is sophisticated enough to satisfy its adherents, they will be happily transmitted into the future and elaborated upon.
Indeed, if we take as a common basis that all these things are happening to human beings, the shared arena for them is whatever a human being is – whether anyone has a good description of it or not.
So in that sense, yes, I don’t find it at all surprising that Buddhaghosha and the author of the Cloud of unknowing could be talking about similar phenomenological experiences… and that “meeting God” and “clearing away the mental hindrances that keep us suffering” could ultimately be reasonably imperfect descriptions of the same thing.
skaladom: “I would say, on a slightly idealistic take, that phenomenological experiences and abstract ideas about them, are all we have to go with.”
Not quite true: Today we have instruments connected to computers that can collect data independently enough of our phenomenological experiences and abstract ideas about them: for example, various neuroimaging systems. Of course, these systems are of no help when the subjects are dead people but could provide another data set when comparing experiences of living people. I don’t know whether available data analysis methods are fine-grained enough to help answer the question that interests Amod.
Amod said, “it is at least possible that the different experiences are illuminating a common reality”, and I agree: the different experiences are illuminating a common reality of human brains in their bodies and world.
As I commented a few posts back: “The truth in perennialism is probably due to human universals (homologous experiences corresponding to homologous biotic processes) whereas the falsity in it is probably due to human diversity.” That’s not saying much but does seem to be the larger point here, from a naturalistic perspective.
By the way, “phenomenological experiences” isn’t the best term, and I shouldn’t have followed skaladom in using it. It would be better to say there are first-person experiences (or experiencing), first-person phenomenological reports, further elaborations on the meanings of those experiences and reports by the person experiencing, further elaborations on the meanings of those reports by other people, and objective data about the person who is experiencing. So the term “phenomenological experiences” should be replaced by either “experiences/experiencing” or “phenomenological reports” depending on the context.
I see that the term “phenomenological experiences” is very widely used in the literature, and I don’t understand why, since it seems redundant. The term may be used to disambiguate the term “experiences”, which could be misinterpreted to mean “expertise” or “history” in some contexts? But in the present context such misinterpretation doesn’t seem to be a danger.
And the term “experiential reports” could be better than “phenomenological reports” in contexts where the latter term might imply that a person is doing phenomenology in the modern sense when they are not.
This may not be relevant in the minds of all who have written and/or commented on this topic. Phenomenology is approached differently at times. When Carl Jung wrote on what he called synchronicity, he was talking about experiences anyone might have, whether they paid attention to those of not. Whether those are one-time chance occurrences or something more depends in part on if or when something like them happens again, and whether an experiencer pays attention the second time ’round. Most people will not, unless they hold some interest in these phenomena or have sufficient recall to notice their repetition. Chance occurrences are not necessarily meaningless. And people, cultural and social backgrounds notwithstanding, report similar chance occurrences, showing, I think, commonality across socio-economic strata and historical milieu. The Newton-Leibniz feud over the calculus may have been more than a chance occurrence. Great minds do not always think alike when they are not working together.
Paul said: “Whether those are one-time chance occurrences or something more depends in part on if or when something like them happens again…”
On the other hand, if one perceives synchronicity constantly everywhere, one may be well advised to consult a psychiatrist!
For a clinician, phenomenological similarities can help diagnose a disorder. That’s another answer to the question “Who cares about phenomenological similarities?”—mental health professionals do!