How can we reconcile Buddhism with expressive individualism (“be yourself”) and with natural science? When I had previously turned to Wilfrid Sellars for help on this question, I had compared Sellars’s view to two Buddhist metaphysical positions on ultimate truth, which are quite different from each other. One of these was Buddhaghosa’s view that ultimate truth is reductionist, and I no longer find that comparison helpful. But I also turned to Śāntideva’s view that the ultimate is normatively inert, with no good or bad involved. Śāntideva’s view rejects Buddhaghosa’s in some very important ways – and I think that philosophically his metaphysics is considerably more powerful.
That’s a big deal for me because, having come to my Buddhism in Thailand, I have generally viewed myself as a Theravādin like Buddhaghosa. I’ve been skeptical of the most famous piece of Śāntideva’s metaphysics, his ethical deconstruction of self and other in chapter VIII of the Bodhicaryāvatāra. I’m not convinced by his or any other argument for a universal impartial altruism – a key Mahāyāna doctrine. Yet I do now find myself moving closer to a Mahāyāna or at least Madhyamaka view, because of a different aspect of Śāntideva’s metaphysics: the metaphysics of emptiness in chapter IX, which I think are considerably deeper.
In that chapter, like Buddhaghosa or a modern physicist, Śāntideva breaks reality up into the smallest possible parts, called aṇus in Sanskrit. Most people translate aṇu as “atom”, based on the literal meaning of “atom” (Greek a-tomos, indivisible) – but the irony of modern physics is that what we today call “atoms” are divisible. For that reason I translate aṇu as “quark”, since quarks are (as far as I know) the smallest part we recognize in our modern cosmology. But it’s the next step Śāntideva takes, after dividing things into quarks, that gets really interesting. He claims that “that quark too can be divided into directional parts” (IX.86) – that is, you can still approach a quark from the left or the right, the bottom or the top, which means it must have sides, and those effectively constitute further parts. But then, he says: “The directional parts, because they have no component parts, are just empty space. Therefore the quark does not exist” (IX.87). If you take the next step after reductionism, you get to śūnyatā, emptiness or zero-ness.
This is all important to Śāntideva because we get attached to things, and seeing things’ ultimate emptiness helps break that attachment:
When all things are empty in this way, what can be received, what taken away? Who can be honoured or humiliated by whom? From what can there be happiness and misery, what can be liked and what loathed? What craving can there be? For what is that craving, when examined as to its true nature? (BCA IX.151-2)
Now Buddhaghosa’s reductionist view had previously drawn me because I had seen it, a little clumsily, as close to natural science. But if anything Śāntideva’s view is at least as close. Sellars’s idea of the scientific image draws heavily on physicist Arthur Eddington’s idea of “two tables”, from Eddington’s The Nature of the Physical World: the table he is writing on is at once a commonsense and familiar object that appears before our eyes (“It has extension; it is comparatively permanent; it is coloured; above all it is substantial”) and a “scientific table”. The latter is not a part of “that world which spontaneously appears around me when I open my eyes”, but rather “part of a world which in more devious ways has forced itself on my attention”, one which makes for a more satisfying explanation in a wider range of circumstances. But here is Eddington’s own description of the scientific table:
My scientific table is mostly emptiness. Sparsely scattered in that emptiness are numerous electric charges rushing about with great speed; but their combined bulk amounts to less than a billionth of the bulk of the table itself.
Mostly emptiness! Exactly that English word most commonly used to translate the Buddhist Sanskrit śūnyatā (even if that’s not the ideal translation). On this great physicist’s account, what distinguishes the scientific table from the manifest, observable one is not merely that the table is made of atoms, but also that the table is mostly empty space. In a purely physical sense, we are all mostly empty – though of course the “mostly” does a lot of work!
Physically, it would seem, everything is mostly empty space. Mentally, consciousness – mind – had a beginning and it will have an end. There’s a reason people ask the question “why is there something rather than nothing?” Nothing is the natural baseline. It turns out that even something mostly is nothing. The question is why this qualified nothing arose – why we are, why everything is, mostly nothing rather than all nothing, as The Princess Bride might put it. Everything we care about is in that “mostly nothing”, that fragile substratum like sea foam. In that way we are like dust in the wind. And yathābhūtadassana as I understand it requires acknowledging this, embracing it.
That is not to repeat the mistake of homogenizing the two: on Śāntideva’s view the ultimate reality is ineffable. For him it is not that the truer reality is mostly empty space, but it is in some sense all empty space, which is not what Eddington’s physics implies. Still, it is very significant that if we keep going from either of the reductions I proposed in the past – the natural-scientific reduction or the Buddhist abhidhammic reduction – we get a further reduction that lands us in some form of emptiness. And so, I think, if we are trying to harmonize Buddhism and natural science, we likely do it better with emptiness than with atomistic reductionism.
Cross-posted on the Indian Philosophy Blog.
EDIT (15 Dec 2024): I misstated the physicist Eddington’s first name as David. It is Arthur.
Amod, what I am not sure of is what the ethical implications of a recognition of emptiness or mostly emptiness are. Eddington’s table may be mostly empty space, but that doesn’t reduce its value to me as an object to place things on top of. My daughter and son may be mostly empty space (and 70% water!) that does not lessen my love for and attachment to them. The Buddhist idea that the apprehension of emptiness helps mitigate our tendency to care about or attach to things seems, to me, an empty claim. There may be many good reasons for lessening our attachments to many things, but the ultimate physical or empty nature of reality is not one of them. It is like the Theravada idea of detaching from our bodies by doing charnal ground meditations—don’t get attached since you will soon be rotting flesh and then dust. Yes, but I would like this body as it is right now to persist in a healthy state as long as I can manage it. This is a reasonable part of my happiness, even if my ultimate control of its wellbeing is limited.
I have come to understand Śāntideva’s claim as being close to Richard Carlson’s self-help phrase, “don’t sweat the small stuff, and it’s all small stuff.” For Śāntideva the “small stuff” is quite literal. But more importantly: it is our habit to cling and be attached to a vast number of things in the world without even realizing it. Śāntideva wants us to take a step back from that everyday clinging, by seeing there’s an ultimate unreality to all the objects of it. For him this is quite wide-ranging – we shouldn’t be attached to anything – and I don’t follow him that far. But I think it does give us an important sense of perspective, one that is based above all on getting us out of our everyday way of being. We do not typically see things as they truly are, and that leads us into a misery-inducing state that attaches them far more importance than we should legitimately give them.
There’s an epistemological sense of śūnyatā that seems to be largely missing from the comparison to Eddington’s table in this post, but it’s important and can be connected to Eddington’s philosophy of science. The epistemological sense is that “ultimate reality” is empty of the apparent entities, distinctions, qualities, characteristics, etc., that we want to impute to it. To some degree this is expressed in the statement that “on Śāntideva’s view the ultimate reality is ineffable.” But that has nothing to do with the “emptiness” of Eddington’s table (in his 1927 Gifford lectures), which is very much an imputed quality or characteristic.
Eddington does have a lot to say about epistemology in his later book The Philosophy of Physical Science (1939). Here’s an excerpt from that book:
I’ve cut out a lot in the ellipsis but that last sentence is what gets us to the epistemological sense of śūnyatā: “If we remove all subjectivity we remove all the fundamental laws of nature and all the constants of nature.”
I think the post’s conclusion is plausible—”if we are trying to harmonize Buddhism and natural science, we likely do it better with emptiness”—but I don’t think Amod has successfully argued from Eddington’s scientific model of a table to that conclusion. But I think there is a path from Eddington’s epistemology to that conclusion.
I’m a little surprised by Seth’s initial comment, given that Seth is a Zen priest and surely has chanted the Heart Sutra innumerable times. What does the Heart Sutra mean to him, what is its value to him? “Shariputra, form does not differ from emptiness; emptiness does not differ from form. That which is form is emptiness, that which is emptiness is form. The same is true of feelings, perceptions, impulses, consciousness…” Seth said, “I would like this body as it is right now to persist in a healthy state as long as I can manage it.” But surely Seth is aware that he could die at any moment? How does he relate that awareness to the Heart Sutra?
I think part of why Seth’s response seems so incongruous for a Zen priest is because, as I said at the start of my comment, there’s an important epistemological sense to emptiness, but Seth is responding to Amod’s metaphysical sense. Seth said, “There may be many good reasons for lessening our attachments to many things, but the ultimate physical or empty nature of reality is not one of them.” That accepts Amod’s metaphysical sense. But on the epistemological sense, emptiness is about our understanding of subjectivity. And in my experience, this view of emptiness does indeed relieve suffering.
Thanks. I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at with the subjectivity point. How is “If we remove all subjectivity we remove all the fundamental laws of nature and all the constants of nature” a view that relieves suffering?
Oh, I didn’t intend to claim that Eddington’s epistemology relieves suffering; I switched topic in my last two paragraphs and started talking about Buddhist śūnyatā.
My point about Eddington was that his epistemology is very much closer to Buddhist śūnyatā than his scientific model of a table; the latter strikes me as unrelated to śūnyatā and Madhyamaka philosophy. For me, what relieves suffering about śūnyatā is recognizing just how subjective my experienced world is. As Zen teacher Kōshō Uchiyama put it, “When you clearly understand that this whole world you see is really the world of the self only, and that when you die you die with this whole world, the conventional system of values will disappear.”
Uchiyama’s sentence, and the one from Eddington, sounds like subjective idealism when taken in isolation apart from any systematic philosophical exposition, and indeed Eddington was accused of just such a position, for example by James Murphy in Where Is Science Going by Max Planck (1932): “If you say that the scientist is content to secure mathematical logic in his mental construct, then you will quickly be quoted in support of the subjective idealism championed by modern scientists such as Sir Arthur Eddington.”
But I would characterize my own position as perspectival realism, which takes the best (that is, what I think is true) from subjective idealism and scientific realism. I think your attempt to associate Buddhist śūnyatā with the emptiness of Eddington’s table is barking up the wrong tree, because for me the major lesson of Buddhist analyses of śūnyatā is the subjectivity or perspectivity of our models of the world.
I remembered a point that Mark Siderits made about Madhyamaka philosophy in his book The Buddha’s Teachings as Philosophy, specifically the section “The soteriological point of Madhyamaka emptiness” (Hackett, 2022, pp. 167–170, emphasis added) which felicitously ends by advising against “metaphysical table pounding”:
Contra the Mādhyamikas, I think some metaphysical table pounding is useful if we want to come to know more through inquiry about how things hang together—if only to find out, through the pounding, how we were wrong (though we are unlikely to falsify everything, so we’ll still come out with some worldview). But śūnyatā isn’t about a particular model of the table, but rather about how no model of a table (or of anything else) is “ultimate reality” and that they are all useful fictions: this is an epistemological truth that Mādhyamikas and many modern philosophers/scientists could agree on despite other differences in their philosophies. One question where they would differ is the definition and criteria of “usefulness”.
By the way, here’s a scientific realist criticism of Eddington, from Mario Bunge’s Foundations of Physics (Springer, 1967, p. 70, emphasis added):
I think Siderits’s characterization of Madhyamaka is absolutely wrong, in a way that can be discerned fairly quickly by looking at the texts. Agree with them or not, Madhyamaka texts are quite clear that nonattachment follows from the metaphysical recognition that things are empty; insofar as they are advocating that we end metaphysical views it is because they are in some sense advocating an end to all views, including our everyday views of the everyday world. They do not advocate any sort of “quietism” that silences metaphysical speculation and has us go back to a non-metaphysical view; quite the opposite. (I’ll be presenting on this point at the APA in New York in January, so you can expect to hear more on this topic, in future posts and/or an article.)
That said, something like my previous question remains: which view of emptiness is it that you think relieves suffering, and how does it do so?
OK, I can well imagine that Mark Siderits is wrong about Madhyamaka. I’m looking forward to reading more from you on that topic in future writings. I’m no expert on the Madhyamaka texts.
In my own Buddhist modernist view (insofar as it’s Buddhist), emptiness doesn’t really play a metaphysical role. It plays an epistemological role, or perhaps more accurately a metametaphysical role. I’m not antimetaphysical, or a metaphysical quietist as Siderits would say, but I don’t use the concept of emptiness taken from Buddhism metaphysically. So what you’re trying to do here with Eddington’s table doesn’t seem fruitful to me. If you keep pursuing that line of thought, you could say more about why you think emptiness is so metaphysically promising.
To repeat the view of emptiness that I usually take: emptiness refers to how “ultimate reality” is empty of the apparent entities, distinctions, qualities, characteristics, etc., that we want to impute to it.
The way that this view relieves suffering for me personally—and I’m not going to try to exhaustively catalog all the ways here, but just to give as much of a general characterization as I can at the moment—is by promoting disidentification from all those entities, distinctions, qualities, characteristics, etc., that I want to impute to reality, including, it should be no surprise, “self”. I think this promotes much more cognitive flexibility than I would otherwise have, which is very good for psychological health as some modern cognitive therapists have claimed (there are various models of the processes by which this occurs). Again, that’s not an exhaustive answer but I think that is a big part of it. That cognitive flexibility should also facilitate inquiry that will lead to better knowledge over time.
I mentioned relief of suffering in the context of the Heart Sutra in Zen practice, so I could say something more about that too. Zen, in my understanding, generally emphasizes what Eshin Nishimura called “transcendence into the senses” rather than transcendence into an invisible realm of reality via abstract theorizing. This doesn’t mean that there is no metaphysical speculation in the Zen tradition, but on this “transcendence into the senses” view, what generally relives suffering (especially when we’ve been doing too much abstract thinking) is absorption into and expansion of our sensory awareness with the trust that this sensory realm is itself (a perspective on) the working of ultimate reality (“form is emptiness, emptiness is form”: here “emptiness” refers to ultimate reality, but there’s no attempt to characterize it apart from absorption in the senses, so again here the term “emptiness” is functioning not metaphysically but metametaphysically). And this relieves suffering, in part, by giving our poor minds a rest from the exhausting philosophical task of trying to figure out how everything hangs together abstractly or in signs.
Thanks. I’d agree that disidentification is a crucial part of Buddhist practice in general, and that an idea of emptiness is connected to it. The shortest way that I’d sum up the benefits of metaphysical emptiness is a recognition that one’s disidentified perspective is accurate.
Nathan, my awareness that I can easily die at any moment (and as an old person, and as a survivor of cancer, a subdural hematoma, etc. this is a profound part of my everyday awareness) does nothing to attenuate my wish that I go on living for another day, and that I do my best to accompish this, fully aware of the limits of my powers. The fact that all relationships eventually end through change, separation, or death does nothing to make my relationships less dear and important to me. The fact that nothing possesses self-nature but all things dependently arise out of causes and conditions does nothing to change the things, people, places, and circumstances I prefer. Democracy is very fragile, but I care a great deal about it. There may be nothing to hang on to, but there is a great deal to value, prefer, and work to see that it hangs on a little longer if possible.
Thanks, Seth. I can’t claim that there aren’t times when I feel much the same way as you. Lately I’m in state of mind in which the wish to go on living for another day is not so strong—not that I’m suicidal, but I’m not at all certain that the world is better off with me than without me, despite my attempts to improve myself and the world, so the enthusiasm to preserve myself is not so strong. And this is not at all an unpleasant state of mind, a bit of a relief actually. It is as if you and I are currently in different “dharma positions” in Dongshan’s “five ranks” or “five degrees”, like different phases of the moon. Perhaps I’ll be closer to your position before long.
I am sorry. I don’t see any sort of dichotomy here. In my limited view, Buddhism and expressive individualism are different paths, or perhaps, separate realities—although pragmatists might claim neither represent reality at all. I could, and have, asserted reality is contextual, consisting in interests, motives and preferences—the IMP notion I have advanced before. Nor can I grasp a “physics of emptyness”, much less how THAT correlates with Buddhism or expressive individualism. Let’s push the envelope further, by reducing the comparative word salad to Buddhism and individualism. That clears away an obfuscation. Clarifies, for me, the necessary distinction, or as a dear friend and I have agreed, undresses the word salad. Physics does not account for emptiness—that is not what it is about. Metaphysics, MAY, somehow, attempt this…or, may be little more than a wild ass guess. My dear friend thinks so. Matters of spirit are metaphysical, which may account for emptiness. I’m not sure of that, either.