The Abhidharma in some more detail (and compared with work in Western Philosophy)

It was considered necessary to systematise Siddhartha’s teachings so that the educated might better judge the validity of Buddhism and this was the aim of the abhidharmas in the various canons though as I’ve written in an earlier post they were little more than lists. They do contain metaphysical ideas, psychological ideas and attempts at formulating a somewhat systematic cosmology. Theravadans have traditionally considered that prajña required this aid. Coincidentally both of the earliest canons had seven books of abhidharma.

The abhidharmas have cosmology (including discussion of world systems), psychology (in its study of mind and mind-states) and simple ontology (metaphysics – analysis of the building blocks of existence).

In the western study of ontology there are three basic positions: materialism holds that all is matter, idealism that all is consciousness and dualism that all is either matter, consciousness or some combination. The abhidharmas have a different idea that the western philosophers hadn’t considered (and that I’ll get to soon). The problem for dualists has always been where (if at all) do the supernatural mind and natural body (matter) connect? Descartes thought that for human purposes it was in the human pineal gland. Materialists say simply that mind is merely matter arranged in a particular way and idealists of course assert that matter is merely a by-product of mind.

The abhidharma ontology claims instead that everything is made up of dharmas. It also claims that anything up to 37 of them can arise and die in the click of a finger. Dharmas are a combination of thing and event (c.f. particle v wave?) They naturally arise and die in groups as they are considered interdependent things (unless they are unconditioned ones such as the dharmas of air in some conceptions or of nirvana). Are they anything like the atoms posited within materialism? Perhaps some are but likely not all. The theory is quite esoteric. In the abhidharma of the Theravadan Canon there are 82 dharmas and in the Sarvastivadan one there are 75 dharma groups (divided, of course, between the 5 skandas).

Here are some quotes from Western philosophers that also reflect this:

For my part, when I enter into myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat, cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any ‘thing’ but the perception . . . I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in perpetual flux and movement (David Hume, “A Treatise on Human Nature”, 1739).

The notion of things that have a constitution in themselves is a dogmatic idea with which one must break absolutely (Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Will to Power” (Kaufmann trans., 1968 )).

Again, this idea is superimposed in the abhidharma on ancient Indian analogies and ‘rope-snake’ stories and the idea of ultimate truth is further elucidated. Here’s something of the argument: In our minds, if we saw a rope and thought it was a snake, we might put up some kind of a fence to protect others from the ‘snake’. The problem for us was the shadow which created an illusion and we might expect some praise but someone who knew it was a rope might disappoint us. For them it is an ‘idea (vijnapti)’ of a snake that is of course illusory and a superimposition on ultimate reality. The problem (if there is one) is thus the idea that led to our unnecessary work (fence-building) and not the ‘snake’ and this is what must be realised. Ego and self is that ‘snake’. It’s really those dharmas. The one problem with the analogy that the abhidharma recognises is that an ‘ego’ can perform the function of an ego (as a ‘table’, too, can that of a table) but a ‘rope/snake’ could never fully perform that of a snake; hence we can use conventional reality in real life. Nevertheless our ‘problems’ are not the problems we see and therefore we need also to see the ultimate reality so the ‘snake’ can be a ‘tool’ (and we also don’t need to kill it).

In real life we can see the effect of these kinds of real delusions in illnesses such as anorexia nervosa. A person living with the condition may see fat ‘snaking’ around her/his body. All illusions eventually lead to disillusion but the disillusion is better for us ultimately that the illusion.

Our normal conventional life and deemed ‘reality’ is a superimposition over all of this actual reality. Does a book have any universal quality of “bookness” to work with? If so then it is what we call a book. The Central Conception of Buddhism is a useful text that explores these questions. So abhidharma’s aim is to categorise ultimate truths. All the canons may be potentially added to if further intellectual or enlightening work is done or further material considered relevant is discovered.

The Kashmiri abhidharma now lost to us in its original Sanskrit was apparently especially notable for its theory of ontology. It also divides things between what actually exists (dravyatah) and what exists as a name. I discussed this as the idea of two truths in an earlier post with ‘person’, especially, being of the second type. The constituents of reality are examined (dharmas) for the better understanding of what it is. The five skandas are therefore further divided. Form, for example has at least five parts including fire (heat), earth (solidity), water (connectedness) and air (motion). Samskaras are also examined, classified and subdivided.

This all attempts to answer the question: can we list what we need to know about reality? The dharma of air is regarded by some Buddhist scholars as an unconditioned dharma along with the dharma of nirvana but this is disputed. Nirvana certainly is considered fully unconditioned. So ‘person’ came to be seen as an interactive stream of some 75 to 80 dharma forms. Also ‘fire’ is heat; it doesn’t possess it as an attribute as it does not have a selfhood. All of the conditioned dharmas are considered to have only a momentary existence. They don’t therefore have time to move anywhere; they simply arise and cease to exist in a moment. They can be discovered during meditation. The abhidharmic lists are generally thought to probably be expansions of lists taught directly by Siddhartha during his lifetime on earth.

The Third Noble Truth (Nirvana – the Cessation of Dukkha)

Nirvana is extremely difficult to define but here goes! It is the experience of the cessation of unsatisfactoriness. Was that too easy? Well, you may be right. It is achieved during the lifetime of a person very rarely. When that person dies s/he may or may not achieve parinirvana which means an end to samsara and rebirths. Parinirvana is the final death of a Buddha (such a one will not be reborn in any conventional form).

It is not annihilation, however, despite what Schopenhauer claimed. Weber also thought that Buddhism was a selfish seeking of annihilation. Siddhartha said that he taught nirvana. Buddhists see it as like the blowing out of a candle (the flame thought to be being extinguished is not representative of existence but reflects the impairment only the causes of unsatisfactoriness; nothing is truly extinguished in achieving nirvana just as the flame merely takes another form of existence).

Awareness of the truth is at the heart of this as the prime cause of suffering is delusion concerning the truth of existence. Awareness in itself is effectively becoming unconditioned (asamskrta). This awareness unleashes the purest of freedoms, not any excursion to any heavenly place or time.

Nirvana may be some supreme level of bliss or joy. Early texts generally say that it exists but it isn’t possible to tell in what sense. It is apparently not an event but a continual and realisable reality of experience. A Buddhist is permitted to aspire (chandas) to it but not to crave (trsna) it, as craving is a desire and nirvana is all about the absence of desire. That’s probably as clear as mud and that’s possibly as it should be. Nirvana is not easy. I'll next get into how Buddhists say we can eventually get there.

Buddha’s Early Life as an Indian Model for Indians and others

Still drawing on the common/canonical traditions, I’ll now outline Siddhartha’s early life in a little more detail (to the extent it is relevant to Buddhist philosophy). The truth of the stories may, of course, be a matter of belief but their main historical claims are that they are derived from sources that claim to be direct teachings or discourses (sutras) of the enlightened Siddhartha, himself, including the rules for the religious orders (vinaya) he personally laid down for his monks and nuns. Their actual truth as individual historical facts is regarded as ultimately subordinate to the underlying truth they are hoped to enable a Buddhist to realise:

He had already had many births and they had much in common with the earlier lives of other Buddhas. He had been a Bodhisattva in all his other lives which meant that he had always been somewhat enlightened and in the process of perfecting himself in those lives (and seeking to teach others, in the Mahayana view - for more on which, see later posts).

He descended from heavenly realms into his mother’s womb this time to be born painlessly through his mother’s (Maya’s) side as a prince with a perfect pedigree. Maya is also Sanskrit for illusion and some form of symbolism may be intended.

He was handsome in the extreme, stately, talented and brilliant. He was, in fact, perfect in every way as a human and had at least three great personal palaces: one for winter, one for summer and one for the wet season. He also had a perfect wife and son. The portents were clearly good.

A soothsayer had predicted at his birth that he would either be a great king or a renunciate so from a narrative point of view this introduces a dramatic tension lacking in the story of the perfect human above and his earlier lives also seem to have similarly had conflicts in them. His father sought that he should follow the first path and set about making sure the painful realities of life, suffering and death that might lead one to become a renunciate were completely hidden from him and in his youth the strategy appeared to have worked. In some ways, his father can be seen as a symbol for the values of society (similar to today’s consumerism and youth culture, etc.)

In his 20s, though, he happened to meet or see on four consecutive outings a decrepit old man, a sick man, a corpse and a mendicant/renunciate (some of the accounts suggest that devas were involved in arranging these ‘chance’ meetings or had even taken these forms themselves). As a result it was explained to him in turn that people grow old and decrepit, people get sick, people die and that some people choose to seek to escape from these things by becoming renunciates. This was a shock to his perfect but over-protected system. The over-protection then produced an over-reaction and he became a renunciate. He would go from over-protection to under-protection. He now despised and could not enjoy the society that had so utterly deceived him for so long.

At around the age of 29 he cut off his beautiful hair (classic renunciate chic), snuck away to the forest, changed clothes with a servant, whom he then sent home, and became a renunciate. He chose renunciation for six years seeking liberation in this way. He had renunciate companions and he took it to the extreme. He ate a single grain of rice each day for some time and at one point was on the verge of death. The story goes that some women offered him something like yoghurt which he accepted, earning the disapprobation of his companions, but of course saving his life. In the context in which these stories were disseminated, among the misogynist and extreme world of ascetics, accepting food in this way from women was seen as shocking and not at all the action of a true renunciate.

The story then leads us to a further search for the truth from two renowned master renunciates so we are led to understand that the sage is able to objectively absorb what they teach while being, in a sense, a renunciate of renunciation. The story goes that he learned all they were able to teach and came to see that their approach (of stopping the mind) was counter-productive.

So, on a full moon night one May, he sat down under a tree determined not to get up until he had learned how to realise the truth (remember that his mind had been primed beforehand by many auspicious earlier lives so this course may not be open to everyone). The rest is Buddhist history. He was tempted by the forces of delusion and temptation in the form of Mara, a deva or demon of some kind, but he found the way. He resisted its temptations and was now a Buddha.

His new way (between shutting the mind off and overstimulating it) was to enliven the mind and he came to view this approach (really living mindfully) as a middle way between the reproving, tormenting and denying asceticism and the numbing luxury of his earlier life. His key idea was that the mind should be focused by deep meditation rather than denied by it and that the focus needed to be on the reality of existence and even (or, really, especially) of the mind’s workings themselves.

After this (and after some hesitation that I'll discuss in a later post) he goes to his erstwhile renunciate ‘chums’, who had shunned him, as he realises that they will understand he now has something to teach them. They do immediate realise this and become his first monks (and the beginnings of the first Buddhist religious community that came to be called the sangha: one of the three so-called 'jewels' of Buddhism, along with the dharma itself and Buddha himself).

Some Context and an Overview

So now let’s begin with some context for what came to be the Buddhist worldview, its cosmology, and its metaphysics. This is in some ways central to Buddhist philosophy as the inner workings of the human are often regarded by it as microcosmic of th
ese universal “realities” (in other ways arguably not, as this was not a focus of Siddhartha at all, but it was certainly a context of his thoughts and of course of the thoughts of later Buddhist philosophers).

To do that context provision, here now begins a history of Indian religion and the historic Buddha’s place in it. In overview, Siddhartha propounded his ideas in a relatively narrow space (if still significant) of the Ganges valley and Nepalese civilisation areas. He had first joined a renunciate movement that argued that an end to all suffering was possible to renunciates. Upon realising what came to be the tenets of Buddhism, at Bodhigaya, he taught widely in north-east India after some apparent hesitation. At first he taught others of the renunciate movement as he naturally expected them to share more of his understanding and thus worldview but he eventually encouraged a large following of both religious orders (both monks and nuns) as well as laypeople. He taught (mainly to monks (Bhikkhus) and nuns (Bhikkhunis)) for the remaining 45 odd years of his life.

Around the time of his death, several of his major followers sought to collect all of his teachings together in one place. This was not in written form but a somewhat systematic oral collection in the form of an organised recitation (because of the conditions, literacywise, of the time).

Buddhism was first really widely popularised in India by a king Asoka, the first major Buddhist king, in the 3^rd Century BCE – around two centuries after Siddhartha ‘died’ (as a non-Buddhist I would say died but the meaning of his ‘death’ is not necessarily seen as straightforward within Buddhism). Asoka first converted to Buddhism and then united most of India under his rule and proselytised for Buddhism as far as Sri Lanka and Afghanistan. Even during this time no comprehensive written version of any major collection of Buddha’s teachings was made (the first accepted written canon was compiled in the Pali language in Sri Lanka two centuries later in the 1^st Century BCE.

Sri Lankan Buddhism eventually came to be known as Theravada. Theravada means “elders’ doctrine” (so- called on account of claiming to have the oldest universally accepted written versions of Buddhist ideas as its basis, as mentioned above). It spread to Southeast Asia including parts of Vietnam and possibly southern China.

What later came to be the dominant Indian form is today known as Mahayana (meaning “great vehicle” for reasons I will explain later – early practitioners called it vaipulya – expanded). This spread to Afghanistan and via the Silk Route as far as Korea and Japan (and from there also to parts of Vietnam). Important archaeological written artefacts buried near Dun Huang in both Sanskrit and Tibetan reveal how the transfer of views along the Silk Road and from Tibet occurred:The major orthodox Mahayana canon that we have today was eventually written in Chinese. This form of Buddhism was dominant in India until at least the 4^th and 5^th Centuries CE. An additional variation is a form of Mahayana called Vajrayana that achieved popularity especially in Tibet, Nepal and Bhutan. It appears to have spread there in two main waves from India in the 7^th and 11^th Centuries when Buddhism was under particular threat there (first from Islamic and then from Hindu fanaticism). A Tibetan canon appears to have been translated from Sanskrit writings not part of any other canon. There is also a Mongolian canon but it is substantially the Tibetan canon translated into Mongolian.

Introduction to my series of posts on Buddhist Philosophy (especially Indian)

I'm going to leave the Middle East to sort itself out for the moment. It seems to be giving it a red hot go and may have some success. Well done, Tunisians and Egyptians! In the meantime, this series should take almost forty posts so let's get started:

I’m going to discuss in the next few posts how the ideas of Buddhism developed (mainly in their areas of origin - mostly in the two major civilisation areas of northern India - the Punjab and the Ganges River valley) and what those ideas were.

This may be viewed as a counterpoint to my series on the ideas and resulting civilisation of Islam. The historical Buddha existed on this earth several centuries before the Common Era but the ideas he promulgated continued to be developed up to and during the time when Islam was also known on the Indian subcontinent. So, a thousand years of significant developments and reactions to invasion and other religious ideas occurred before the ideas now called Buddhism most fully solidified. It may be worth connecting the two areas later. I will also attempt to explore to some extent how North and Central Asian, Tibetan and Sri Lankan civilisations made their contributions.

The main context of Buddhism is, however, Indian religions of the time as they were developing and a developed language: Sanskrit (with a plurality of developing Indian philosophies mainly written in it). So I want to give a holistic view of how the ideas that I will outline and explain in context could come to be held in such high esteem in this context. This approach of enquiry into the coherence of ideas in context was encouraged by the historical Buddha himself. Most of the unusual terms I will bring up will therefore be Sanskrit words (the other early language of Indian Buddhism was Pali and I will sometimes also use Pali words).

One caveat I have to add now is that what is written about a religion over the centuries (and 'Written Buddhism' is my focus) may be seen as reflecting only one “elite” aspect among many aspects that may have subsisted in the religion. However, it is without doubt to my mind the most certain evidence of religious developments over a millennium we have (and of the attempt to make a coherent whole of the ideas of a religion evident). It also reflects non-elite practices and ideas to the extent that it offers commentary upon them. This 'Written Buddhism' may perhaps be regarded as the (allegedly) coherent core around which other ideas developed.

This Buddha was also called Sakyamuni (meaning sage of the Sakya – his royal tribe). Siddhartha was his actual given name and Gautama was his family name. I will usually call him the historical Buddha or Siddhartha in these posts rather than just the Buddha or Buddha or Sakyamuni or Tathagata because, firstly, I am not a Buddhist. Secondly, as Buddhism developed, it came to be understood that Buddhas have existed before the man many people call the Buddha and more Buddhas are expected by most Buddhists in the future (one is expected, by many Buddhists, to arise roughly each 10,000 years). The historical Buddha is the one Buddha known to both history and some Buddhists as the Buddha but he was/is not the Buddha in the sense of being the only Buddha. Rather he was/is the historical Buddha. So I want to avoid the confusion that calling him the Buddha would cause. Also I write was/is because he may be understood by some Buddhists to still exist in some sense but not because I believe that.

Finally, as with other religions, Buddhism encountered schisms and we may be tempted to think of the existence of Buddhisms as some think of the existence of Islams and Christianities as a result, rather than that of sole valid representatives of a religion but I want to seek the core first as a way to understand Buddhism (and therefore also the schisms) better. It is clear that, if we are to believe in the logical coherence of Buddhism (we may not end up wishing to, of course), the historical Buddha, at least, must have validly taught only one coherent set of things and not several contradictory sets of things. So I will focus first (in the next few posts) on the origins.