Tags
Augustine, autobiography, Chan/Zen 禪, Disengaged Buddhism, John Dunne, Nancy Houfek, Pali suttas, Śāntideva, skholiast (blogger), Wangchuk Dorje
Years ago, in a difficult period of my life, I had looked for philosophical help and explicitly found it in Buddhism and not Daoism, rejecting Daoism and its sudden-liberation views in about the strongest possible terms. But that wasn’t the whole story.
I had already been trying to apply the four-stage model of skill development, taught to me by Nancy Houfek, in which one progresses from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence to unconscious competence. Trying to find a peaceful mind in those difficult days, I was all too conscious of my own incompetence, and Daoism provided no guidance that I could discern on how one could make the all-important step to conscious competence. But it is eight years later now, eight years I have spent working on my mindfulness through a nightly prayer ritual and, increasingly, meditation. I’ve gotten better at stopping my harmful thoughts when I put my mind to it; I think I’ve acquired a certain degree of conscious competence. The next step seems to be making it a habit, making it unconscious competence. And when it comes to that, the Daoists might have a point.
We still have reason to be wary of accepting our harmful emotions. It is all too easy to say “I’m great just the way I am”, in a way that allows one’s bad habits to perpetuate. I believe as much as ever that it’s hugely important to become better and we need to work at it. But there’s a certain point at which that work itself comes to require working less hard. Skholiast has summed up his philosophy as “Philosophy works by not-working.” And while I wouldn’t go that far – in the early stages of self-improvement I think it takes arduous work to put philosophy into practice – there is still a point at which I think that that’s right. The move from conscious to unconscious competence must be a move to a kind of deliberate not-working.
One of the most important lessons of the Disengaged Buddhists, I think, is that we must accept those bad things in the world that we cannot change. This is the lesson I take from the Cakkavatti Sīhanāda Sutta’s view of historical time, where things will get worse before they get better. But there’s a deeper and harder kind of acceptance that we also need, one which twelve years ago) I’d associated with Daoist-influenced Chan Buddhism. That is: sometimes we have to accept the bad things in ourselves too!
I’ve long admired Augustine’s insight into how deep the badness in human nature can go. I think that possibly the greatest danger of an expressive individualist worldview is to say people are totally fine just as they are and don’t need to change; then we stop any self-improvement and are left at the mercy of our worst tendencies. Augustine knows all too well how much is wrong with our everyday state of being, and commits in life to fixing it.
But at some level Augustine winds up too aware of that badness. In the last chapters of the Confessions he frets at length about how, after a lifetime of trying to control his bad impulses, they still show up. His solution is to say that we are ultimately incapable of fixing ourselves, our sin is too great to be addressed by anything but the grace of the son of God. But that solution has its problems even if you believe in Augustine’s God: God’s forgiveness may get you eternal life in the next life, but you’re still stuck as a miserable sinner in this one. And it works even less well if if you do not believe in his God, as I do not.
Like Augustine I don’t think we can achieve human perfection in this life, but unlike Augustine (or Kant or classical Buddhists) I don’t think we get future lives into which we can put off that perfection. There are amazing exemplars of virtue, like Thich Quang Duc, but I imagine that even he experienced regular pangs of fear, shame, anger, jealousy. Those negative emotions, those kleśas, are very hard to control, and perhaps even impossible to eradicate. They are always dangerous, not just for the bad actions they lead us to, but for the suffering that they cause us directly, tearing us up inside. But – the crucial part – we can make that suffering a lot worse by fighting and resisting the emotions.
This is a lesson I don’t think Augustine handles well. His work is full of hand-wringing at the bad mental states he has tried and failed to eradicate – and it doesn’t seem to me that the hand-wringing helps. Sure, we should try and fix what we can – but given that we can’t perfect ourselves, as Augustine agrees, could we not just accept that being imperfect is okay? It seems to me that by virtue of wanting to improve himself more, Augustine improves himself less – by adding an additional layer of craving and fretting that doesn’t need to be there.
Here there is a tremendous value in those modern mindfulness meditation traditions that John Dunne calls “nondual” (whether or not the word “nondual” is the best choice to describe them) – traditions that would look odd in Śāntideva’s Indian context but make more sense in Daoist-influenced East Asia. One of the major features that set “nondual” meditation traditions (like Chan/Zen 禪) apart from classical traditions (like Śāntideva’s) is their non-judgemental character: you just observe your mental states going by; unlike Śāntideva, you don’t actively try to get rid of them. You notice both helpful and unhelpful mental states, and let them come and go. And in my experience of doing this, at least, it turns out that for Śāntideva’s goal of having fewer unhelpful states, this is actually more effective than actively fighting them. In the words of the Tibetan Wangchuk Dorje:
Some say that one should deliberately suppress thoughts to be abandoned, but if one does so, then it will just increase conceptuality and it will be difficult for concentration (samādhi) to arise. Therefore, whatever thought arises, one should not see the thought as a fault, one should just let it go and intently settle on the thought itself. (quoted in Dunne 265)
There’s a certain point at which the self-improvement we need is a self-improvement-by-not-self-improvement – to make ourselves better by accepting ourselves as we are, with our flaws. It’s a paradox, but a true one: one of the ways to make oneself better is to accept the ways one has not (yet, at least) made oneself better. We need a discernment of what we can and can’t change in ourselves, and be at peace with the latter. The Serenity Prayer applies within ourselves as well as to the rest of the world.
The central paradox is this: It remains essential to a good human life that one strive to improve oneself. But one of the most important improvements, virtues, is itself to be more accepting of intractable imperfections – not only in the world outside oneself, but within oneself too.
Very interesting, as always.
The perfect de (virtue) is without de.
It’s one of the central ideas of the Daodejing – the idea that if one identifies and strives for one specific virtue, no matter one’s intentions, the very act of attempting to attain said virtue will undermine one’s attempts. You can’t achieve peace of mind, however one wants to call it, by consciously making the attempt to achieve it.
Brook Ziporyn puts it better than I ever could:
https://voices.uchicago.edu/ziporyn/interpreting-the-daodejing-the-minimally-discernible-position-supplement-to-liveright-edition-2023/
Thanks, Chris! This is great. When I started writing this series it felt like what I’m currently moving toward is Daoist, but as I wrote it all the sources I could think of were East Asian Buddhist rather than Daoist proper. This helps confirm that my original intuition was not mistaken: it is a Daoist idea. I will need to go read Ziporyn’s translation of the Laozi!
Are you familiar with Ziporyn’s work on Tiantai Buddhism? I think the Buddhist-Daoist synthesis you articulate is most clearly expressed in Tiantai Buddhism, and particularly as described in Ziporyn’s two books “Evil and/or/as the Good” and “Being and Ambiguity.” I’d go there instead of the Daode Jing or other Daoist texts, if I were you.
Thanks, Josh, and welcome. I have read Ziporyn’s Emptiness and Omnipresence, which I thought was excellent, and I’ll be talking about it in the next post.
I think it’s worth noting (and so I will note) that there’s a large literature on questions of psychological and behavioral change in modern psychology, including much empirical research on the processes that make change more likely to be successful.
I haven’t studied Augustine, but my guess is that it’s likely that he didn’t have the requisite psychological knowledge needed to make his change attempts successful. (This need not be seen as anachronistic: some Buddhists in Augustine’s time period already had pretty sophisticated psychology, so it’s possible that some of what he needed already had been invented by others in his time but was not accessible to him.)
It’s also important to note that personal change may require more than one’s own efforts, even one’s own efforts to accept oneself. The efforts of other people may be needed: their acceptance and support. In my experience, this is one of the great strengths of a wisdom community or sangha where there are people with psychological knowledge and experience: everyone can give acceptance and support to others, while the more experienced people in the community can also be models of self-acceptance and change. If some community members also happen to be professional psychologists with modern psychological knowledge of change, as happens to be the case in some wisdom communities, so much the better! The social context is important.
Additional psychological knowledge might have helped Augustine some, but I don’t think it would have been sufficient. Even contemporary psychology, while it has a lot of tools for managing conditions like anxiety and depression, in many cases can’t make them go away entirely. (To say nothing of normal but often harmful affects like anger and fear.) It’s the remainder, the stuff it would be good to fix but you can’t, that he’s really concerned about.
To be clear, I would include managing psychological conditions under the category of change. Even managing them is a change from not managing them. And any increase in self-acceptance is also a change, as you seem to say in the post. And even in those less dramatic kinds of change, the social context can be important: more change may possible with facilitative others than without them.
Thinking about this more, I really would emphasize the importance of psychological knowledge and psychoeducation. In my own life such knowledge has been an important part of change, whether that change is managing or overcoming problems.
I could give many examples, but I’ll just mention one that is kind of funny for me now since it’s a problem that I completely overcame or eliminated: I used to have paruresis, which is a kind of social phobia that makes it impossible to pee when other people are around, which is a big problem when a guy needs to use a public restroom. What is interesting and relevant to the question of psychological knowledge is that for some years I had this condition but didn’t know it was a psychological condition; I just thought something was wrong with my urinary system (and, being a little embarrassed, I didn’t tell others about it). I would go into a public restroom and I just couldn’t LET GO. There was no conscious anxiety, only nonfunctional bladder release. I didn’t realize what was going on until I came across a description of the condition in a psychology book. Once I learned what the condition was and how it’s treated, I was able to eliminate the problem over the course of some years.
The course of my paruresis showed, in retrospect, a change like the four stages of competence: At first I had the condition very unconsciously: it just happened to me without my even knowing what it was. When I learned what paruresis is, I had a kind of conscious incompetence about it: now I knew what it was, but it still happened to me without my control. Here, I think, is where acceptance was an important part of the treatment. If I had started to freak out that I had a psychological condition that I couldn’t control, it may have made the condition worse. Both increased knowledge and increased acceptance were important parts of the course of treatment. I couldn’t make the problem stop by brute force of will; it required a long period of acceptance of the problem while practicing the kinds of techniques that reduce the problem. It may be that there are some people who never overcome paruresis and have to use a catheter and accept the condition, but in my case it was eminently treatable and eliminable over some years.
I’ve been able to make great progress on other psychological issues like this one, so in general I’m optimistic about the possibility of change with proper knowledge and treatment.
Thanks for letting me talk at length about peeing on your blog, LOL.
No worries on the peeing – I’ve always tried to make the blog a place for open discussion, and hey, in the previous post I just announced I’d no longer be providing content warnings when I say “shit”.
It’s good to get a reminder that a lot of things can change with knowledge, but do you really think that’s the case with everything? As far as I can tell, conditions like depression often require drugs for treatment, and can sometimes even be “refractory” – not curable in any way we know about.
“… but do you really think that’s the case with everything?” No, some conditions are intractable. We’re going to get old, get sick, and die, as someone once said. There’s no fixing that. If we’re talking about conditions for which the four stages of competence are relevant, then knowledge is always going to be relevant, I would think. (How else would we differentiate competence from incompetence?) Anyway, I’m looking forward to learning where you’re going with this in the next post.
Did not know of Houfek’s work. Always admired Jean Piaget and his tracking of the developmental stages in children. Never was much on riddles, like: what is the sound of one hand clapping? My own assessment parallels Piaget, in that I think people emerge into what I call responsive consciousness, all else being favorable to the emergence. As with the Swiss doctor’s ideas, development of responsiveness requires attention and intention. A spam caller (this morning) ask to speak with my wife, giving her first name. I had challenged his spiel and derailed his train of thought. In his befuddlement, he then asked (using her first name) if I was her. I replied: do I sound like ( )? He said he must not have heard my voice. And, of course, he did not…his attention/intention was attuned to reaching her, not be. I would not have disturbed her, in any case. So, responsiveness demands attention, intention and focus. He never stood a chance. As for the sound of one hand clapping? There are numerous responses. Care for a can or bottle of vegetable juice? How about giving your child a swat on the behind?
I should clarify that Houfek didn’t invent the four-stage model; she’s the one who taught it to me. I had originally credited it to Martin Broadwell based on Wikipedia, but Nathan pointed out that the Wikipedia entry had already changed, so the earliest listed source is a textbook by Frank De Phillips et al – though since that’s merely the earliest listed, it’s possible that even De Phillips is getting it from somewhere else. I gave Houfek credit because I at least know that that’s where I learned about it.