Gandhi

The essence of all of the policies of all of the men I mentioned in the last post is aiming for non-violent solutions for political and social problems but Gandhi seems to have inspired all of the others so I’ll start with him (even if he was Hindu).

He was born and raised in the Indian region of Gujarat in the late 19^th Century where at the time the very non-violent religion Jainism that I mentioned in one of my earliest Buddhism posts was quite common. Jainism most likely influenced the young Gandhi. Incidentally, the founder of Jainism and Siddhartha may have been actual contemporaries and known of each other’s work. Gandhi thought at length about the concept noted as the main special focus of Jainism of doing no harm (expressed in Sanskrit as ahimsa). There is much written about Gandhi (and all of these men) but ahimsa is the central feature of his ideas (along with engagement with problems) that they all took on.

Another feature of his early ideas is that he recognised and regretted (as did others of my list of wise men) that, between Globalisation and the modern era population explosion, the environment was no longer conducive to the retreat into the wilderness of the wise person, which was so often the inspiration for religious regeneration in earlier eras. The wilderness had gone. Buddhism, too, could be mined (and was) in order to find the inspiration for the environmental movement that arose in the last century or so in the West. On a deeper level, he saw the environmental challenge as a destruction of habitat that would inevitably lead to conflict. Retreat was no longer possible. The question for our three thinkers was ‘how to be’ with the conflict.

The conflict Gandhi faced was between ‘Indian’ British Indians and their colonisers, the British Indians among the British Indians and Britain. His way to be was ‘peaceful’ yet ‘struggling’. A Muslim woman in a documentary recently compared this approach to her interpretation of jihad and indeed there was always significant Muslim support for Gandhi’s approach (and even for Gandhi himself). Thich Nhat Hanh’s problem was the colonialist Vietnam War (he led a Buddhist delegation to the Paris Peace Talks). The Dalai Lama’s problem was an alleged invasion and suppression of Tibet and its culture and politics by the Chinese pouvoirs-en-place-ont-été. MLK’s bug-bear was the colonisation of the poor of the US by the US ruling class (and globally) and of US ex-slaves. These men (and Aung San Suu Kyi – a Theravada Buddhist) have also contributed their non-violent ahimsa ideals directly to environmentalism.

Gandhi studied law in England and was then fortuitously invited to practise in South Africa in a practice that helped many Indians there. In England he had been especially influenced by learning of Jesus’s “Sermon on the Mount” and Christianity more generally and the social ideas of people like Tolstoy.

In South Africa he became committed to the welfare of Indians and he tells of having been asked to leave a first class carriage despite holding a valid ticket. He cites what then happened as his first approach to non-violent protest. He at first refused and upon being manhandled out of the carriage attempted to resume it whereupon he was further ‘roughed up’ and later arrested.

In Hindu terms, he was a karma yogi, meaning an active practitioner, and is known to have said something to the effect of “whoever thinks religion has nothing to do with politics knows nothing about religion and nothing about politics”. He repeated the name of the god, Ram, as a general spiritual practice and was reportedly repeating it as he died at the hands of an assassin.

Returning to an India during the First World War that knew him well as a defender of the Indians of South Africa, he set up a “Tolstoy” ashram (commune). He apparently also had some correspondence with Tolstoy. He was immediately asked to join the independence movement and, with the Indian National Congress Party, set to work on organising non-violent civil disobedience. His belief was that a few hundred Brits could hardly resist the civil disobedience of (at that time) a population of 600 million British Indians for very long and that violence could thus easily be avoided. He also tried to establish ecumenism among Indian British Indians (the ‘Indians’ of ‘British India’ - now Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis but probably not so focused on the Burmese or the natives of the Aden Settlement which were also considered British Indians until 1937) especially working on the fraught relationship between Hindus and Muslims. He also worked to end discrimination against the ‘lower’ castes in Hinduism.

Some of his philosophising can be easily seen to compare to Mahayana Buddhism. He argued for non-violence based on the truth (satya) and compassion. The truth is known as a result of turning away from the exterior world in order to gain wisdom but compassion turns the wise person back to resolve the problems of the exterior world. He differs from it to the extent that he saw non-violence as a means inextricably causally linked to truth as an end whereas a Buddhist would tend to not make such a clear causal link between the two.

He saw non-violence not as a mere non-action but as a positive force. He encouraged ‘holding on to truth (Satyagraha)’ meaning in the case of struggles with others actually believing in the truth of the best nature of your ‘opponent’. As a theist, he saw this best nature as deriving in some way from the Ultimate Truth. So his model wasn’t adversarial; it wasn’t about “us” and “them”. Being ‘friends’ with the better nature of an adversary meant that one couldn’t contemplate violence against her or him and also that only these peaceful means could lead to peaceful ends. Here are three rough paraphrases of quotes that illustrate his philosophy:

There are no roads to peace; peace is the only road.

An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.

Befriending one who believes you to be an enemy is the quintessence of religion.

After a life of preaching non-violence as a Hindu (though he never regarded Jainist ahimsa as an absolute requirement in conflict) he was emphatically rejected by a member of his own faith when he was assassinated by a Hindu militant in 1947 who apparently thought he was too soft on Muslims.

The ‘Discovery’ of Buddhism

When Buddhism was first ‘discovered’ in China (by Europeans), it was thought to possibly be indigenous. Works of Indian Buddhism weren’t discovered by Europeans until around the 1820s. When Europeans finally discovered Buddhism, it also took some time to dawn on them that Siddhartha was an actual historical figure. It was discovered soon after the great predictions of Schopenhauer that I mentioned in the last post and almost immediately had a significant impact in the US.

When, in the 19^th Century, the wealthy Ralph Waldo Emerson and his friend and protégé, the creative Henry David Thoreau, led a Romantic movement in the US called the New England Transcendentalists they could by then draw on Buddhism as one of the Indian viewpoints that were then so in vogue among Romantic movements. They firstly rejected in a rather Sramana and Buddhist style the American idea that it was somehow virtuous to be wealthy. Their main direct influence, though, was a translation by Jones from the Sanskrit of The Laws of Manu (not a Buddhist work).

Thoreau in particular enjoyed the wilderness and is also linked to the so-called 'National Parks movement' that led (as a first major success) to the establishment of Yellowstone National Park as the first National Park. He is possibly the most cited writer of all time due to his many talents and has inspired many a scholar to study Sanskrit (because it interested him). The Transcendentalists produced the first translation of the Lotus Sutra into English, which was, of course, a famous Buddhist work (along with being the first to translate various Hindu texts).

While it was not seen by Romantics as proper to control the East (as the Eastern ideas themselves revealed), the East certainly was still considered ‘the Other’ and examined especially with a view to what Eastern ideas could do for the West (perhaps not surprisingly still the most important thing from the point of view of the Westerners). It was a potential source for Western spiritual re-birth. The idea of what came to be called the Perennial Philosophy school was that perhaps India still possessed a key to universal truths possibly once also held in the West.

In a time of French interest in the Indian subcontinent inspired by the work of Baron Admiral Guy-Victor Duperré, Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron searched for the ancient works of Zoroastrianism in this connection (and found the ancient Hindu Upanishad scriptures translated from the Sanskrit into Persian instead, which he, in turn, translated into Latin). His work was the origin of the theosophy movement begun by Perennial Philosophers, Madame Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott, who later professed to be Buddhists. I will discuss their link to Gandhi and thus to “Engaged Buddhism” in the next post.

So the West has been primed by the important Romantic movements of the last two centuries to have a special interest in Sanskrit writings and Buddhism (“Engaged Buddhism” at that). The activist movements of the 1960s (including the “Engaged Buddhists” and others that I consider in the next posts) that continue to have influence today were clearly sympathetic to these earlier movements. Thus, a long history of cultural ‘priming’ is potentially ready to yet bear more fruit.

More on the Three ‘Turnings’

Examining the idea of three ‘turnings’ again, we may strengthen our understanding of the history of Buddhism, so let’s give it a go.

The first turning was the basic teaching of the four noble truths and whatever else was taught in the discourses (Suttas/Sutras) in the Pali Nikayas/Sanskrit agamas, initial guidelines for religious orders (in the vinayas in both languages) and the idea of non-self (the idea of the skandhas was especially developed in the abhidharma and its commentaries also initially in both Pali and Sanskrit). This can be seen as Siddhartha’s ‘turning’ towards teaching a kind of ‘Middle Way’, the melding of the best of the Bramana and the Sramana ideas of India’s major religious tendencies.

The second turning was first called and is still regarded as Vaipulya (an extension) and not a repudiation of the first (as with the third). It was not uncritical of the abhidharmas, however. It represented, in fact, a ‘turning’ away from an excessive reliance upon an intellectual understanding of them. True understanding was beyond intellectual understanding and to underscore the great incomprehensibility of it all, ‘turning’ towards the intensely strange idea of no thing-ness became central to the ‘turning’ away from the intellect. This was arguably to ultimately aid in truly understanding the abhidharmas, however, not to supplant them.

The ‘turning’ was also, concurrently, and perhaps consolingly, to the relatively pro-social and thus most likely relatively comforting Bodhisattva ideal. It also ‘turned’ towards an explanation of cosmology admittedly in negative terms, explaining, as an extension of the idea of non-self, not what the universe (including nirvana) was, but what it was not. In this sense it may also be seen as true to the reluctance of Siddhartha to fully explain what the universe actually was and at the same time as a kind of answer to the questions; in effect, then, another ‘middle way’ and another partial answer.

Was the third turning, then, the full answer? What ‘turn’ happened? The ‘turn’ was indeed towards bringing an understanding of what is in contrast to what ‘it’ isn’t within the reach of the adept and even potentially the layperson. It was a ‘turning’ back to society, then (and back to reality, perhaps, albeit a rather magical one). No thing-ness could possess qualities, it taught, such as the radiance (prabhasvara – a special technical word in Buddhism that I’ll come back to) and beauty attainable by the Bodhisattva (among other qualities). It also ‘turned’ towards teaching the potential of all of us (even the meanest devil) to achieve this radiance by virtue of our innate Buddha Natures. It was thus not only humanist but in fact everythingist. The ten bhumis were taught for the Bodhisattva path (as I mentioned in an earlier post, the Arhat, either as a hermit or in a religious community, only had to get to number six and may or may not be re-born) and one could also, as a regular or even a religiously honoured layperson, simply choose to gain merit, by leading a good life, for a later, better re-birth).

So there were four main Buddhist Siddhantas (orthodoxies) of the three turnings in India: those of the first turning, Sarvastivada, represented by the Abhidharmakosa of Vasubandhu, and Sautrantika, outright rejecters of the abhidharma; that of the second turning, represented by the Madhyamika school, stressing emptiness and scripturally represented by the Mulamadhyamakakarika; and that of the third turning, represented by the Yogacara school and scripturally represented by the treatises of Maitreya-Asanga. They all argued over which turning represented the highest teaching of Siddhartha while the Theravadans were down in Sri Lanka doing their own Sarvastivadan thing and regarding all of the Indian versions including Sarvastivada as bastardised Siddhantas.

How did it ‘Stack Up’ in India and Elsewhere and Why? Some Sociology of Religion

So Buddhism was a Hindu Sramana venture but Siddhartha indicated that the Veda (that at this time hadn’t been written down) were not necessary for Buddhists to learn. Equally, there were no efficacious Brahman rituals that he prescribed. It was all down to the individual and becoming aware of a subtle truth that he clearly felt would be extremely difficult if not impossible for anybody to fully understand in one lifetime. The orthodox Hindu starting-point for learning the religion today is thus some revealed text or other of the Veda but the Buddhist one is internal and empirical and guided purely by humans.

The lack of emphasis on any social policy in any of the teachings was one of the things that enabled Buddhism to be widely adopted in areas like China, where accepted social systems already existed. Another was the appeal to rationality that remains one of its appeals in the West today. Orthodox Bramana Hinduism would have seemed an imposition in China based upon an alleged revelation. Siddhartha’s language could be fiery and urgent, however, in the Sramana tradition. He likened the world to a house on fire and used another fire metaphor when he suggested people regard their metaphorical hair as being on fire.

He was certainly a happy Buddha, however, and by no means a pessimist. The traditions make it clear that his enlightenment fairly shone from him from the beginning. He apparently actually glowed and had become even more beautiful.

I’ve given possible reasons for Buddhism’s acceptance worldwide but why (and how) did Buddhism spread in India in the first place? Were there special reasons for its success there?

It spread there partly for the same reasons that it spread elsewhere and partly for peculiarly Indian reasons.

Indian religion always seems to have sought answers to questions we would regard as philosophical but also answers to questions that were about wisdom and it appeared to the Indians that a man so clearly brimming with enlightenment must have found some answers worth discussing of both of those kinds. The glow and beauty of his enlightenment apparently rubbed off on many of his early monks and nuns, too. Siddhartha attributed their phenomenally rude health and glowing state when that was remarked upon to their practice (that he had instituted) of living in the moment and refraining from self-mortification.

Socially, a new merchant class had recently developed in India that saw in Buddhism a new religion that met their needs better than what had been on offer (it perhaps seemed to them a relatively positive social message coming from the Sramana view that must have seemed to combine the best and discard the worst of both the Sramana and Bramana views and also seemed practical to a pragmatic class). They bought land for the monks and several kings, too, sought his advice in his 45 years of enlightenment before what is called his parinibbana (in Pali, or parinirvana in Sanskrit), his human ‘death’ as a Buddha, and traditionally as an octogenarian.

Early European scholars of the sociology and nature of eastern religions such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Max Weber appear to have underestimated Buddhism as escapist and unduly pessimistic (a pessimism that was certainly a trait of Schopenhauer himself) at least from an Indian point of view. Weber was of course attempting to explain the absence of western capitalism in the East in terms of his theory of a uniquely western protestant ethic of work. Siddhartha certainly did not reject the world (or business) out of hand.

A contrasting unorthodox view that perhaps, by comparision, helps make Buddhism appear more reasonable is Jainism. It was started perhaps a few centuries before Buddhism and its doctrine is that bad karma literally weighs a person down. As a result, practitioners don’t kill even plants (or fires!) They are very strict about this as they regard an action as the same as an intention for karmic-consequence purposes. Killing is called himsa and non-killing is called ahimsa. Their monks allow their laypeople to light and ‘kill’ fires (and plants, presumably, as they cook the monks’ obviously vegetarian meals) and therefore suffer the bad karma for the monks. They believe their asceticism 'burns off' the bad karma somehow to produce the desired freedom of moksa and non-existence (the Indian Sramana goal in some sense analogous to the Buddhist nirvana).

What then unified/cohered Buddhism? Was it Indianness?

Its Indian ideas, as developed both in India and further afield, is the first answer. So what are its Indian ideas? The idea of karma is one. The earliest Indian Buddhists attempted to understand and write about Buddhism in a context of Indian ideas. They sought to produce a ‘higher’ dharma (religion), an abhidharma (an overarching philosophy).

No split comparable to the split between religions like Christianity and Islam and Western philosophy occurred in India in a comparable period. Another word for religion in India today besides dharma is darsana which literally means “view” and may also mean any reasoned philosophical view. I will seek to explain how Buddhist philosophy is a version of Indian social and political philosophy in these posts (and also note its connections today to international non-harm and environmentalist movements). In its earliest centuries Buddhism was a ‘view’ that existed along with at least six major orthodox Hindu ‘views’ (i.e. views that accepted the Veda as authorities) and other unorthodox views such as the views of the grammarians, the Jaina, the materialists and the sceptics.

Was Siddhartha a reformer of Hinduism, the religion? There is some truth to this claim but we mustn’t confuse the Hinduism of today with the Hinduism of his time and we must understand what the idea of Hinduism is and was. The major gods of Hinduism today (e.g. Vishnu and Shiva) were not well known in his time, if at all. A major popular Hindu scripture of today, the Bhagavad Gita, introduced Krishna for the first time after the death of Siddhartha. Much of today’s Hindu philosophy hadn’t been developed and the temples, pilgrimage and iconography of today weren’t yet part of so-called Hinduism while Siddhartha lived. Moreover the very idea of Hinduism as one religion is really a 19^th Century British invention.

There can be said to have been two streams within the ‘Hinduism’ that Siddhartha would have known if we can define it as the sum of his indigenous Indian religious milieus.

The Bramana stream (Brahmanism) was a stream dominated by a caste and class of Brahmin priestly families and concerned with propitiation of the gods and the promotion of worldly harmony by rituals. Divine forces or powers (called devas) were said to need this harmonisation by humans. The families handed down this knowledge (Veda) as scriptures. The one that originated earliest was called the Rgveda. Devas could exist in our minds, our bodies, in fires (fire devas were called Agni), in winds, in the moon, the stars and the planets, in fact, anywhere, and in movements that were both actual and arguably metaphorical. The proper regulation of society (done by the Brahmans) was called rta.

The Sramana (Strivers) stream sought a transcendental overcoming of this life. They were the renunciates that most interested Siddhartha. They sought to get away from the rta and from society and its Brahman values and strove for liberation (moksa) from the world itself.

Generally corresponding with this division were two attitudes to the cosmos but especially to the world and the world of humanity, the Pravriti (engagement – turning towards) of the Bramana stream and the Nivriti (disengagement – turning away) of the Strivers. It was also possible, however, to be of the Bramana stream and yet still cultivate Nivriti. It was accepted that these streams and attitudes could all coexist in Indian thought. Both views also survived into Buddhism.

In essence, the first view held that the earth was basically a good thing. It was divinely created and divinely inhabited, after all. The devas had also pronounced that society was good. As a result, humans owed a debt of gratitude from birth as their lives were deemed things of value and they were thus obliged to be good people and contribute to society as required by the priests for the betterment of the world order.

In the second view, the earth was nothing but a thing of repeated death and rebirth, the domain of the ravages of time, decay, suffering, illusions, destruction and other bad things, to be overcome in some way if possible. It naturally dwelt on the idea of reincarnation and its meanings.

The second answer to how Buddhism cohered in its earliest context is its canonical ideas (and those ideas drew on Hindu ones especially of the Nivriti persuasion). Prominent among these is the idea from the three major canons (in Pali, Chinese and Tibetan) that all Buddhists accept: the idea of the Four Noble Truths, samudaya, dukkha, nirvana and marga (path or road), that happen to roughly correspond with the mainly Nivriti ideas of karma, samsara, moksa and yoga.

Karma (samudaya) is the idea that the universe operates under a law of moral cause and effect. The idea is sometimes expressed with a metaphor, actions being seeds for results which are ‘germinated’ when conditions are right. The results may arrive in a future life or in the current life of the actor. Rebirths as punishments such as being born in a hellish realm or as ghosts or unfortunate dumb animals or creatures are features of this view of the cosmos.

Good karma alone was held to not be sufficient to end the reincarnation cycle; it could lead to achievement of blissful godhead or deva-head, though, but even those ended in death eventually, often after millions of years. Buddhist literature details how devas come to die, not aware until the last moment of their impending death (preceded by the fading of flowers around them, the development of body odour and being consequently shunned by other devas equally blissfully unaware that this will one day be their own fate also).

Buddhist thought given to what else could be done to achieve a final end besides good karma led to the conclusion that humanity is best placed of all beings to achieve it: the gods are too self-satisfied, ghosts and those in hell realms are too preoccupied with being tormented and animals are too unintelligent and dumb. It’s thus achieved in part by apprehending a reality not accessible to the other classes of being, becoming aware of reality. Humans thus have, or are at least able to cultivate, agency brought about by this cultivated awareness that allows them the opportunity to eventually overcome their karmic habits and thereby karma itself.

Samsara (dukkha) is the cycle of birth and rebirth itself that karma causes (and its enveloping cosmos that the Nivriti generally despise so). As mentioned, it’s really up to humans to end it, according to Buddhists (by the Buddhist marga).

Yoga (marga for Buddhists) is the name given to any spiritual discipline designed to cultivate the awareness that can ultimately lead to this end of samsara, Moksa or nirvana.

Moksa (liberation from samsara) - Nirvana for Buddhists - is the end of samsara itself for the soul concerned.

So the renunciates already had these ideas down and yoga (marga) and moksa (nirvana) was their goal, too, but of course had subtly different beliefs and hence also subtle differences in their aims.

Buddhists focused on the idea that suffering in some form is what leads to rebirth, karma (samudaya) was its cause, samsara (dukkha) was the experience of it (even when serenely lying on a beautiful beach the reality that we will not always be there is a form of suffering), yoga (marga, or the Buddhist eightfold method or path) was the path to ending it and moksa (nirvana) was its end.

Bad karma is said to be either the result of greed, hate/aversion or delusion and in the related cosmology the place and form of rebirth is believed to be directly related to the balance between these attitudes in the current life. Karma is thus defined by intention so inadvertent killing of an ant, for example, receives a lesser penalty than deliberately killing one (provided due care is taken not to kill ants, of course).