American University philosopher Karin Meyers made an important contribution to Buddhist philosophical studies with her 2016 essay “The damned topics of Buddhist philosophy“. The essay (available free online) has never been formally published, though it clearly deserves to be: when I met Meyers recently, she noted that people have already discussed and commented on it more than any other piece she ever wrote. While I disagree with Meyers’s substantive conclusions, I think she takes an often methodologically wrong-headed field and points it in the right direction.

Meyers calls “damned” those Buddhist topics that would typically be called “supernatural” (a term that she dislikes but I have no problem with myself). That is, “topics such as rebirth, karma, non-human beings and realms, siddhis, devotional and contemplative practices, and even aspects of Buddhist soteriology.” And she claims:

Although such topics are described and analyzed by textual historians and anthropologists, they tend to be avoided or dismissed by philosophers. This is not because they are inherently immune to rational scrutiny or lack philosophical relevance. Instead, I suspect it is because of an implicit and often unacknowledged allegiance to certain modernist assumptions—namely, physicalism and epistemologies that privilege a cognicentric empiricism restricted to the five senses, as well as rationalistic and disembodied ways of knowing. Basic Buddhist doctrines and traditional forms of Buddhism directly challenge these assumptions.

Meyers is absolutely right that these topics are not immune to rational scrutiny. Many might not survive such scrutiny. But that’s all the more reason for them to receive it! And too often, they do not.

Consider the claim (of the Tibetan historian Butön) that when Śāntideva recited verse IX.34 of the Bodhicaryāvatāra, he levitated into the air and disappeared, with the remainder of the text being recited by a disembodied voice. This claim deserves discussion and examination. On a historical level – one which would be disputed by few scholars – the claim points us to the enormous importance that Tibetan scholars attached to this verse, the significance of a nondual metaphysics to his thought, in ways I had once avoided.

But Butön is also making a particular factual claim – that a human being did levitate into the air and turn himself invisible in front of an audience of spectators – and that necessarily implies a more general factual claim, that levitating and turning invisible in this way is a thing which at least some human beings can do. (Siddhi, a term Meyers uses above, is a typical term used to refer to such super-powers.) If we are to regard medieval Tibetan scholars seriously as partners in scholarship, rather than denigrate them with patronizing embarrassment the way one might with a four-year-old, then we must take such claims seriously.

Now it is crucial that to reject the claim is indeed to take it seriously – if one does so with engagement, evidence, argument. What refuses to take the claim seriously is the simple dodging of the question, avoiding the question as if it just doesn’t matter. It does matter. Being able to turn invisible or levitate would be extremely useful to human beings in a wide variety of contexts. If it were actually possible to do that, that fact would be extremely important to know!

It is also true that one does not need to investigate every question that is related to one’s research; we scholars are all too familiar with the way related questions can expand drastically and crowd out the core questions that concern us most. It is possible to take a purely ethnographic or textual approach, where the only question one is investigating is about what the people one is studying happen to believe, whether or not those beliefs are true. One can leave the questions of their truth to other scholars in related fields.

The problem is that too often those questions of truth get shunted to the side, even in contexts – philosophical, ethical – where they are relevant. I recall a workshop in my Harvard grad-school days twenty years ago that was supposedly on the question of “the Real” in religious studies, led by a visiting scholar who studied spirit mediums. I found myself frustrated because the scholar seemed to keep dodging and stalling on the question of whether spirit mediums’ purported abilities were real. That is: can they actually talk to the dead? If the scholar had simply been willing to answer that she didn’t think so, I would have been fine with it, but she never was willing to go there. I tried to point out: my grandmother died the year before I was born. If these mediums really could talk to the dead as they said they could, that’s a huge deal, because I want to talk to her!

I don’t think that they can, but I’m interested to hear debate on that, and for that reason I really welcome what Meyers brings to the table. Because while I’m much more of a skeptic than Meyers is, I agree with her on one really big thing: the one thing that the question of supernaturalism is not, is unimportant or irrelevant to Buddhist studies. I’ve put a lot of time and effort into the project of developing a conception of karma that doesn’t depend on the supernatural; there’d be no need to do any of that if I thought that the traditional supernatural conception were true, that we are reborn at death in a way shaped by our ethical conduct in the present life.

In the context of Buddhist studies, the most important “damned topics” are those questions of karma and rebirth – important because a great deal of traditional Buddhist thought have hinged on the answers to them. There’s a lot more to say about those questions and answers, and I’ll turn to them next time.