Tags
Abhidhamma, Aśvaghoṣa, John Dunne, Pema Chödrön, Śāntideva, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), Theragāthā, Tibet, Wangchuk Dorje
Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart is a beautiful and valuable work on dealing with difficult circumstances. What strikes me in it is how Chödrön – despite being a monk herself – takes a position so deeply at odds with traditional Indian Buddhism.
Chödrön refers to the traditional Buddhist “three marks” (tilakkhaṇa or trilakṣaṇa) of existence: everything is impermanent, suffering, and non-self. This idea goes back to very early texts. But Chödrön does with it is something quite different from the earlier idea:
Even though they accurately describe the rock-bottom qualities of our existence, these words sound threatening. It’s easy to get the idea that there is something wrong with impermanence, suffering, and egolessness, which is like thinking that there is something wrong with our fundamental situation. But there’s nothing wrong with impermanence, suffering, and egolessness; they can be celebrated. Our fundamental situation is joyful. (59)
Here’s the problem with this passage: the classical Indian Buddhist texts are quite clear that in fact there is something wrong with our fundamental situation. She is disagreeing with them, whether or not she acknowledges it.
Aśvaghoṣa’s Buddha refuses to take joy in our fundamental situation: “I do not despise objects. I know them to be at the heart of human affairs. / But seeing the world to be impermanent, my mind does not delight in them.” (Buddhacarita IV.85) This is very typical of early Indian Buddhist texts. The Kathāvatthu says “all conditioned things are, without distinction, cinderheaps” (II.8). The Theragāthā says: “the body is oozing foulness — always. Bound together with sixty sinews, plastered with a stucco of muscle, wrapped in a jacket of skin, this foul body is of no worth at all.” The goal, in the Pali texts, is to get out of “our fundamental situation” – to escape saṃsāra, the wheel of rebirth, into a nirvāṇa that is beyond it.
Nor does this world-rejecting attitude change with Indian Mahāyāna. Śāntideva – on whom Chödrön has written an entire commentary – tells us to reject romantic relationships on the grounds of their impermanence: “For what person is it appropriate to be attached to impermanent beings, when that person is impermanent, when a loved one may not be seen again for thousands of lives?” (BCA VIII.5) He regularly criticizes sexual pleasure on the grounds that the body is disgusting and foul. His criticism is not just of attachment to things, but of the things themselves. That is why the bodhisattva must renounce the world in every birth (ŚS 14).
Thus Chödrön is doing something far removed from the Buddha when she speaks of impermanence in this way: “in the process of trying to deny that things are always changing, we lose our sense of the sacredness of life. We tend to forget that we are a part of the natural scheme of things.” (60) Classically, the natural scheme of things is bad, and we’re trying to get out of it! Thus interdependence is not something to be embraced; quite the opposite. Interdependence (pratītya samutpāda), in Indian Buddhist texts, is a bit like alcoholism: it is absolutely essential that we be aware of its existence, in order to escape it. I’ve highlighted points like these several times before on Love of All Wisdom: classical Indian Buddhists see the world’s impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and essencelessness as reasons to reject it.
Now here’s the thing, though: I don’t think that that classical Indian view is correct! I stress aspects of Buddhism that I find unappealing because I think we can learn a lot from them; I have done so myself. But on the question of rejecting the world, I have effectively already sided with Chödrön: I don’t think that the impermanence of things is a reason to reject them. I don’t think that the classical Buddhists have made the case for the view that it is – and furthermore, if the evidence doesn’t support rebirth, as I don’t think it does, then world-rejection may well lead us to suicide or even murder. Far better to embrace the goods of worldly life.
And yet, like Chödrön, I say all of that as a faithful Buddhist. Which, finally, leads me to embrace Chödrön’s words as the wise advice they are, coming from someone in the Buddha’s lineage who has devoted her life to its path. Śāntideva would never say any of the following, and I don’t care:
Who ever got the idea that we could have pleasure without pain? It’s promoted rather widely in this world, and we buy it. But pain and pleasure go together, they are inseparable. They can be celebrated. Birth is painful and delightful. Death is painful and delightful. (60)
I had described another work of Chödrön’s as Buddhism watered down – but watered down in a good way, like opening up a cask-strength Scotch. And I think the same is true here. This isn’t the Buddha’s Buddhism, but it doesn’t need to be.
I don’t know Tibetan tradition all that well, and I don’t know how traditional Chödrön’s views are in Tibet (as opposed to India). I don’t see anything like Chödrön’s approach in, say, Künzang Sönam’s commentary on Śāntideva. But they could be. I think here of the “nondual mindfulness” that John Dunne finds in the sixteenth-century work of Wangchuk Dorje: there, a popular modernized Buddhist view not found in classical India (in this case present-moment mindfulness) does turn out to have historical antecedent in Tibet.
Even if this view is new to Chödrön and other modern Buddhists, though, I don’t think that’s sufficient reason to reject it. When we take refuge in the Buddha, we want, at some level, to stay faithful to him and his wisdom – but that faith doesn’t need to be blind. I do not believe that the Buddha was omniscient. He said some wrong and awful things about women, after all. Śāntideva’s views were quite different from the Buddha’s own, and probably in some respects an improvement on them. He wouldn’t have admitted that, but we can and should. We can potentially improve on his views too – and I think Chödrön does! I’d just like us to acknowledge that that’s what we’re doing.
There are strong Yogachara and Tantric strands in Tibetan Buddhism. Both of these take common Buddhism as a granted basis, but their “advanced” point of view means that they are concerned with what things may look like for the Buddha or an enlightened being — not just for a confused ordinary individual.
The reasoning may then go: the Buddha walks on this world and, in some way or another, sees the same objects we do; otherwise he’d be seen to bump into trees! But the Buddha is beyond suffering and his perception is (by definition) truthful. So there can’t be anything intrinsically wrong with the trees and other objects themselves. Once you’ve come to this conclusion, it’s pretty easy to retrofit it with regular Madhyamaka: if objects have no intrinsic nature of their own, they surely can’t have a negative one. The problem can only lie within the subject, the unenlightened individual.
Tantra goes a step beyond this, and asserts that the ultimate nature of reality is both empty and blissful. Not only are outer objects themselves neutral, but if you drop the conditioning that stands in the way, then relating to them becomes dynamic bliss.
So Pema Chödrön may be reflecting more of her tradition than it looks. Which I guess doesn’t prevent her from also echoing modern imperatives to be “life-affirming”!
Yeah, that’s the part I was neutral about in the post, because I don’t know Tibetan tantra very well. I do find it pretty weird: proclaiming its loyalty to Śāntideva while also proclaiming things he would strongly disagree with. What I have seen in my studies of tantra so far, though, is that the advanced/ordinary distinction is crucial: this sort of thing can be beneficial to someone who’s already gone through a long training process in a more basic nature-rejecting Buddhism like Śāntideva’s. But if you just give it to a random person picking up a paperback on the street, it’s going to hurt them. I see this in particular in discussions of anger, where people advocate that ordinary people practise “tantric anger” even against the advice of texts that say that’s going to hurt them.
I would add that this view is not distinctively tantric; it’s part of the shared heritage of what we now call the Mahāyāna traditions. The boldest historical statement of it that comes to mind is in the relatively early Nirvāṇa Sūtra, the earliest versions of which date back to 2nd century CE in India if not earlier (if correct, that would be even earlier than the period, as skaladom said, that gave rise to Yogācāra). As Brook Ziporyn summarized in Emptiness and Omnipresence (Indiana University Press, 2016, p. 63):
So when Thich Nhat Hanh, in his summary of Buddhist doctrine, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching (Parallax Press, 1998, pp. 22, 131), said repeatedly “that nirvana, the joy of completely extinguishing our ideas and concepts, rather than suffering, is one of the Three Dharma Seals” and cited various sutras and commentaries, he was not making a radical modern break from tradition, as it might seem to be to Theravādin ears. At the same time, he said that the other two marks are impermanence and nonself, just like Theravādins would say.
Pema Chödrön kept the suffering in the three marks but nevertheless ended up saying something not so different from Thich Nhat Hanh. A modern Buddhist in the East Asian traditions, after millennia of philosophical innovations and syncretisms, has a considerable range of doctrinal variation to work with while still staying firmly planted in tradition. I would say that the degree to which a Buddhist teacher can coherently integrate such doctrinal variation is a measure of the teacher’s philosophical maturity.
Yeah, that’s a good point. These are definitely not pan-Mahāyāna views; they’re not Śāntideva’s, for sure. But there do seem to be versions of them in some classical Indian texts. I don’t know the Nirvana Sutra, but the Vimalakīrti, say, definitely goes in directions very different from Śāntideva’s.
Amod, I have an article in the upcoming issue of Tricycle that looks at the complex interactions between authenticity to a tradition and personal authenticity, and argues that Buddhism has always been reinventing itself across cultural boundaries and temporal eras. It ends with the following thoughts on Buddhist modernism:
“There are, however, aspects of Buddhism that are uniquely suited to our postmodern sensibilities. The doctrine of emptiness fits hand-in-glove with the process-relational aspects of postmodernism—the understanding that at bottom there is no bottom: no unchanging essence that stands behind us or anything else. It’s process and flux all the way down, and the bits and pieces we borrow to create ourselves are not “ours” but borrowed from our culture, memes afloat in the hive mind. The question is, which borrowings and adoptions carry something valuable forward — liberate and actualize potentials in a positive way—and what criteria should we adopt to evaluate our progress? Modern Western Buddhism reinforces and develops several criteria—presence, awareness, immediacy, whole-heartedness, integrity, openness, and interconnection — that resonate with Western romanticism, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and existentialism and wed them to a humanist ethics of empathy, mutual understanding, compassion, fairness, justice, and liberation.
Is this modern Western Buddhism an “authentic” Buddhism? It’s not your grandfather’s Buddhism. It’s not Theravāda. It’s not Bodhidharma Zen. It’s not Dōgen Zen. But Western Buddhism is completely authentic in another sense. It’s authentic in that we can completely get behind it. It’s a platform on which we can authentically practice without pretense and without cutting off or eliding what we sense deeply and irrevocably in our bones.
Will it take us to the Other Shore? Do we still believe in that other shore—a final destination that is permanent, wholly transcendent, and beyond all suffering? What our modern Western Buddhism can do is move us continually forward beyond our selves, breaking the chains of habit, prejudice, and character, opening us to deeper levels of interconnectedness, opening our hearts, lessening our clinging and egocentricity, developing our equanimity and acceptance, and enabling the continual questioning that makes our never-ending journey an adventure worth living. It’s not another shore exactly, but it’s a process we can authentically devote ourselves to.
Modern Western Buddhism isn’t the final version Buddhism; it’s just ours. The next historical era will require something new—something drawing different water from the Buddhist well and blending it with insights specific to its time and place. Alfred North Whitehead wrote that “philosophy can never revert to its old position after the shock of a great philosopher.” Every great philosopher changes the world so that we can never quite see things the same way again. We can’t live as if Hume, Descartes, Kant, Hegel or Nietzsche never existed — whether we’ve read and understood them or not, our culture has been changed by them, and we’ve been changed along with them. In the future some new philosopher will think new thoughts, invent new metaphors, address new problems, and change the ways our descendants will understand and practice the Dharma. As a 2,500 year old conversation on awakening and liberation, the well of Buddhism is deep — it will always have something valuable to contribute. And once again, it will be reborn, the same but different.”
Taigen Dan Leighton and Kaz Tanahashi translated a passage of Dōgen (in Shōbōgenzō Gyōbutsu Igi) with the felicitous phrase “the path of going beyond buddha”.
“Authenticity” is such a weird concept. It means so many different things. One of the reasons I refer to expressive (or qualitative) individualism is that those terms have a specificity that “authenticity” doesn’t have. “Is it authentic?” is a question I’d personally rather not be asking.
What I would like to ask is: is it faithful, in the sense of śraddhā? Are we still putting our trust in the Buddha even as we respectfully disagree with him? It remains an easy and slippery path to just do whatever we were planning on doing anyway and not let ourselves be challenged and improved by something beyond ourselves. That’s why it’s important to me to have something like faith – and therefore why “did the Pali suttas or Śāntideva actually say that?” is a question that is relevant to, though not decisive of, “do I believe it?”
I have no worries about the term, authenticity. It is only a term, related, OUAT, to the noun we phrase as *reality*. Now, I suppose the idea has lost meaning—because weirdness is where we live…our choice(s), see. What I HAVE proposed as CONTEXTUAL
reality is, likewise, changeable.The outcome of the US election demonstrates this, aptly.
The winner of the presidential seat is, clearly, a self-centered person who cares little for the seat he will occupy again. He won. That is all that mattered to him. That contextual aspect of his reality is undeniable:reality is whatever HE says it is. Of course. It worked before, and, has worked again…the Biden presidency was a fluke; stolen, etc. Another term has crept forward, again. Well, part of it, anyway:populist, or, populism. Awhile back, for fewer than forty-eight hours, a term emerged. Authoritarian populism.
That characterization was summarily dropped. Populism, by itself, does not sound so threatening, without the authoritarian modifier. Context is important. Follow breadcrumbs. Connect the dots.It is not difficult, if one understands context.
Well, I apologize for the rant on politics. My mind was wrapped around that enigma.
So, on *improving on the buddha*. Buddhism is pretty old, right? If, it is not older than Judaism,Islam, and Christianity, then what I intend to say here has less meaning than I think, and you need not read further. That allowed, it appears to me improvements on the other faiths mentioned have had mixed reviews. Women are treated with disdain, in some disciplines and cultures. I do not know enough to comment on the Buddhist view, so, I won’t comment there. I can only be *fair witness* to what the facts may be, if I know what facts are asserted, and indeed, if those ARE truly facts. Slippery ground.
Would the buddha have known teachings needed improvements? I doubt the buddha thought about it. Would Judaism, Islam and, yes, Christianity have considered such things? More slippery ground. I can neither support or reject this improvement notion.
Someone said: you can’t change history. That is right. Well, I will try to stay out of Davidson’s “propositional attitudes”…even though, those led me to the notion of conrextual reality.
closing to my last remark: the term I use is conTEXTual. Yes, the error is embarrassing. Done. Are we supposed to IMPROVE upon any faith/teaching? I don’t know, but do not think so. Re-cycling belief suggests the originator was mistaken. That seems wrong, to me. I suggest few, if ANY, were wrong: That notion enters the realm of axiology. deontology, and so on…over time, we have re-woven that, suiting contexts.
If, and only if, you can *joots*…jump outside of (your) system, read Schwitzgabel’s blog on dreams, today. I like what he does—he knows—pretty sure. You are alright, too.