Any serious contemporary Buddhist intellectual needs to think through the connection between Buddhist ideas and the relevant claims of natural science. Many of us, too, are expressive individualists: we believe that there is something valuable in the project of discovering one’s true self. The expressive individualist view of self-discovery and self-expression – put perhaps in most recent terms as “let your freak flag fly” – is that’s an uncomfortable fit with a tradition that has proclaimed for millennia that there is no true self.
There are at least three different metaphysical understandings underlying each of Buddhism, natural science, and expressive individualism, and at least at first glance they all appear to be in conflict. Resolving this conflict is not easy, and recently my views on how to do it best have significantly changed. I often find I get the best sense of what’s important in other people’s philosophies by figuring out what they changed and why, so I thought it would be helpful to show the changes in my own.
Monism is the idea that everything is, or is ultimately reducible to, one. This is not quite the same as nondualism, a term increasingly common in mystical circles. Nondualism is the idea that everything is not two or more – not more than one. Nondualism and monism are very similar concepts, but they’re not exactly the same.
I’m speaking here of each term’s deepest metaphysical meaning, where it refers to the ultimate nature of the universe (each term can be used in other ways as well). The general core idea of nondualism is quite widespread: that is, that the most ultimate reality should not be identified with the many plural distinct things we typically observe and the distinctions between them. The ultimate is not dual or plural, and especially, at the ultimate level there is no distinction between subject and object. Yet all of that still doesn’t necessarily mean that the ultimate is one.
It doesn’t sit very well with many modern readers, including myself, to put a high value on shame. We often find shame to be something that cripples us, makes us burn with embarrassment in a way that inhibits our doing good. Too often I look to some minor misdeed of mine, sometimes even just a joke that failed to land, and instinctively beat myself up for it. Yet detailed introductions to Pali Buddhist texts will often note that these texts prize the mental states of hiri and ottappa, two Pali terms which are both often translated “shame”. It is important to pay attention to the parts of a tradition we disagree with, especially if it’s our own tradition; they can be the ones we learn from the most. So I don’t want to dismiss the texts’ valuation of what looks like shame.
And yet one day while looking through the suttas for something unrelated, I chanced upon something that is much less commonly remarked on: the Pali texts also contain a critique of shame. Or at least of something that could be translated as “shame” just as reasonably as hiri and ottappa can be. That something is kukkucca.
This is the first time I’ve ever reposted an old Love of All Wisdom post, because, despite its being nearly twenty years old now, I think it’s timelier than ever.
I first posted the following piece in 2016 when Trump won the first time – but I wrote it in 2005, after George W. Bush won the second time. I had been furious at Bush’s endorsement of torture and devastation of the climate throughout his first term I had been able to comfort myself with the thought that he didn’t really win: after all, even leaving aside all the voting irregularities, his opponent had also got more votes than he did. But in 2004 no such comfort was available to me; that disaster of a president had won a decisive victory including even the popular vote, and I had to find some way of coming to terms with the awful world he was going to keep building. I wrote this piece in my personal journal, for myself, and I have kept its original stream-of-consciousness style, reflecting my raw thought process as I processed.
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.
I don’t wish at the moment to weigh in on the terrible current conflict in Israel and Palestine, save to offer my condolences to anyone whose loved ones are hurt by its horrors. I salute those on either side who are still striving, in the midst of it all, for a world where both Jews and Arabs can go about their lives in peace and freedom. But I have no idea how to get there; if there is a way, it will require the complex and difficult work of diplomats and politicians more than philosophers, and ones who know that situation far better than I do. What I hope I can offer today is merely a bit of historical perspective. That is: most of us alive today have only known a world where Jews and Muslims make headlines for being at each other’s throats. But it wasn’t always that way.
The years of the Abbasid caliphate‘s reign in Baghdad, from the 8th to 13th centuries, are often considered the Muslim golden age, where Muslim societies were the envy of the world for their civilizational achievements from poetry to medicine. 20th-century South Asian poets like Hali and Iqbal looked back with envy and nostalgia to that golden age, lamenting how far they had fallen from it under British colonialism.
What’s less frequently noted is that that era was also a Jewish golden age.
Seth Zuihō Segall, longtime friend of Love of All Wisdom and author of The House We Live In, will be offering an eight-week online course, called The Seven Universal Virtues, offered through Tricycle magazine. On each virtue, Seth will be in conversation with another thinker; I’m doing the one on temperance. (Others include Sharon Salzberg, Stephen Batchelor, Jack Petranker.) The course takes inspiration from Aristotle, the Buddha and Confucius and their shared point that good lives are those that cultivate virtue and wisdom through practice and study.
You can enroll for access to approximately six hours of material, plus contemplative exercises and two live Q&A sessions with Segall on October 22 and November 10. The course starts begins on September 30, so sign up today if you’re interested. You can learn more by watching a preview lesson.
Not long ago, Donald Trump exercised his usual penchant for making headlines by offending people, with comments about Kamala Harris “happening to turn black” and asking “Is she Indian or is she black?” In the latter question, Trump was doing what racial questionnaires have asked us racially mixed people to do for our whole lives: “Are you [ ] Black [ ] Asian [ ] White? Pick one.” (Wizards of the Coast, meanwhile, is now proud to newly erase mixed people from a game that actually represented us back in the ’80s.)
Nothing in Trump’s remarks is welcoming to racially mixed people, of course. Most news outlets and commenters predictably responded to them with righteous indignation. And that indignation might feel affirming to me… if I thought that those outlets really were trying to acknowledge racially mixed people as racially mixed. But they don’t actually do that.
News outlets regularly describe Harris simply as black, simply as Asian, or simply as both, depending on context. In the context of Trump’s remarks, nearly every story reporting on or replying to Trump’s comments will present some variant of this claim, embedded in a subordinate clause as an obvious matter of fact: “Harris, who is both Black and Asian American…”
To which I cheerfully respond: “Yes! Like Barack Obama, who is both black and white! Right?
We can say with confidence that, someday, there will be no more human beings. That means that we are fooling ourselves if, as Simone Weil claims atheists must do, we seek an absolute good in a human future, revolutionary or otherwise. The human species and its creations, ultimately, are just like individual humans: ultimately, this too shall pass.
I don’t want to knock attempts to make progress in the world. My life, and so many others, are immeasurably better than were those hundreds of years ago, in the short time we have on this planet. As Peter Berger rightly noted, “remind yourself that, in any historical painting depicting a scene prior to the mid-19th century, 80 percent of the people in the picture are suffering severe tooth pain.” That progress matters. But we must not lose sight that there is no more ultimacy to that progress than there is to progressive improvement within our own individual lives.
This is what Martin Hägglund’s work misses: the “realm of freedom” he envisions cannot be our telos, our ultimate end. I have found Hägglund’s work very helpful because it envisions a utopia that actually seems relatively utopian to me – and by doing so, shows us the limits of utopia itself. Even if we can envision a material utopia that we take do be as desirable as that one seems, and we think that utopia is possible, we need to recognize that that utopia is not our ultimate end; our ultimate end is a literal end, human extinction. (That’s not even to mention the point that even in a material utopia we will have tons of other problems to deal with.)
NASA image of a dying star from the James Webb Space Telescope. This will be the eventual fate of the sun.
How then should we live our lives, knowing that, individually and collectively, they must end? It seems to me that this realization helps us shift our attention from the future to the present, in a myriad of ways – recognizing the need to be here now, to use a once-popular phrase. Multiple traditions point us to the importance of such a present-orientation. I think it is at the heart of George Grant’s Daoism. William Christian’s introduction to Grant’s Time as History says: “Grant found [Nietzsche’s] doctrine of eternal recurrence of the identical an attractive correction to the view of time as history: ‘It is… a doctrine of the trans-historical whole of nature.'” Most traditional cosmologies do not understand time as a progress of history, but as in some respects cyclical or recurrent, and there is something about such traditional views that helps us attune ourselves to the present rather than focus obsessively on the future.
When I was in grad school, a big academic fashion was to heap scorn on the idea that mystical experience could be something cross-cultural: everything was reducible to social context, and the similarities of experience didn’t really matter, as I had once argued myself. But the roots of that idea were often more asserted than argued: the famous article by Steven Katz, which inaugurated the approach, didn’t bother to justify its assumption that “There are NO pure (unmediated) experiences“, assuming perhaps that italics and capital letters were the only support necessary.
A little while ago I noted how Robert Forman’s collection of essays illustrate “cool” mystical experiences, where distinctions of senses and self drop away and the mind ceases to fluctuate, in sources as varied as the Indian Yoga Sūtras, the Ukrainian Hasidic Dov Baer and the German mystic Meister Eckhart. Something similar seems to be going on in the Sri Lankan systematizer Buddhaghosa and the medieval English Cloud of Unknowing, which both involve, in Ninan Smart’s terms, a “systematic effort to blot out sense perception, memories, and imaginings of the world of our sensory environment and of corresponding inner states.” And it turns out that once your mind is no longer prejudged to deny any cross-cultural similarity, you start noticing it in a lot of other places.
