After reviewing assignments or
getting certain questions I often send out messages through Nicenet
dealing with points that have come up. For each section I am
going to
include some of these past messages and occasionally add to them.
UNDERSTANDING AND MISUNDERSTANDING ASIAN TRADITIONS
As I review all the postings
for the last few weeks, one thing that
strikes me is a tendency to see Asian traditions as somehow flat and
joyless. One reason I encourage viewing some of the YouTube videos is that it might counter this tendency
somewhat.
Keep in mind that Hindu
religion
(what most people practice when they come to the shrines and temples)
is quite colorful and noisy, completely in keeping with the concept
that kama (pleasure) is
one of the four goals of the ordinary adult
(the one in the householder stage). It's supposed to be
fun! The same
holds with shrines and temples in the Buddhist and Daoist traditions.
The
world of the forest ascetics that I discussed in an early lecture was
something quite different. Here there was typically a harsh
lifestyle
that emphasized fasting and sleep deprivation on the theory that the "true" self (atman or purusha)had
to be liberated from the care of mind and body alike. In theory
it was
what the retired householder, his affairs now in order, might pursue in
order better to achieve the goal of moksha
(liberation) and so move
close to ending the cycle of rebirth. In practice, it often
became a
way for individuals to escape the limits of the caste system in that a "holy man" would be respected
no matter what his family origins.
Buddhism as a reform movement
posed two ways of living properly. One was for the ordinary person and
would emphasize a higher degree of compassion for all living things and
a greater restraint on how to get ahead (don't kill, steal, lie, and so
on) than might always have been expected before. The other was
for
those intent on moving faster to escaping the wheel of rebirth by life
in a monastic community that was far more restrained but still quite
moderate compared with the lifestyle of the Hindu holy man. In Southeast
Asia
particularly, all young males were encouraged to spend at least a few
months as monks while it would not be unusual for someone retired to
resume such a life (a sharp contrast with with the Western monastic life in that Western monks are expected to
make lifetime commitments).
One
key to the difference between the Hindu and Buddhist approaches I've
described is that the distinction between "soul" and body is not at all
the same. For the classical Yoga tradition, the soul (purusha) is the
catalyst that allows the individual to function both mentally and
physically, so the key to liberation is a greater control first of the
body then of the mind as a way of the purusha
becoming free (think of
getting the platinum--a very precious metal--out of the catalytic
converter in your car so that you could do something else with
it).
For Buddhism, both mind and body are manifestations of the flow of
consciousness that ultimately is the Buddha nature. In other
words,
there is no "soul" in the sense of some permanent reality just trapped
in the world, so physical deprivation for its own sake would make no
sense at all.
Later we'll be looking at Western
monasticism,
which at its beginning did involve an extreme asceticism and then, with
the great founders such as Benedict and Basil, came to resemble
something very much like what you have now already met in Asia.
ABOUT BUDDHISM
Hinduism, you have already
learned, is not one tradition but a great
number of traditions (this is where we have the image of river with
many tributaries, or of a tree with many branches). Buddhism, in
contrast, began as a single tradition that rapidly diversified to the
point that, a few decades back, it was considered a major achievement
for representatives from different branches to agree on a basic
statement of principles. As you read you'll note a few of the key
distinctions:
(1) There are those who see nirvana
as the
complete extinction of personal consciousness (like blowing out a
candle) and those who see it as a kind of heaven in which individual
consciousness is retained and heightened. This is one thing that
separates the Theravada (Hinayana) and Mahayana traditions.
(2) There are those who insist on
personal effort alone (the point of the Zen saying "if you should meet
the Buddha, kill him") and those who insist on
drawing on the merits of the Buddha (the logic behind chanting, as in Tibetan Buddhism
or the Nichiren tradition). I make use of the Japanese terms to
distinguish these: jiriki
(self-effort) and tariki
(dependence on
another).
However, there are some very
important things most traditions have in common. One is the role
of the monastic life, even if it is only on a temporary
basis. When I was in Thailand and Cambodia
last summer I found young monks everywhere, but most saw this as only a
rite of passage. Here too it is necessary to make a distinction
between a formal priesthood and monastic life. In Japan,
for instance, all Zen priests--those in charge of a temple--have spent
an appropriate time in a monastery in order to be certified, but they
are typically married and as often as not themselves the children of
priests.
How important is Buddhism in
Asia? In Japan we now
have a predominantly secular society with temples decreasing in
significance. In Thailand and Cambodia Buddhism is close to being
a state religion. In Vietnam both Buddhism
and Christianity remain under
considerable pressure from the Communist state,
but one thing that struck me when I was there (in the summer of 2004 my
wife and I spent a month in Ho Chih Minh City teaching English to a
group of Jesuit seminarians and brothers) was how on a highway we would
see lifesize religious images (the Madonna or the Sacred
Heart for Christians, Kwan
Yin
for Buddhists) mounted on rooftops and lit with neon halos as well as
numerous rather ornate temples and churches. In China there has
been a
government effort to support both Daoist and Buddhist temples as cultural centers
attracting tourists. Tibet, of course, is another story, with the
Dalai Lama still in exile and a concentrated effort
on the part of the Chinese government to control the Buddhist centers still in
existence.
In
the United States there has always been more of an effort to assimilate
so that, for instance, a Buddhist church would have services not that
different in form from what would be expected at a Christian
church.
As more people from Asia have immigrated we also see a resurgence of
more traditional ethnic patterns. However, even in those
religious
centers intended primarily for immigrants there is generally a great
willingness to welcome non-Asians, not as potential converts but as
neighbors. I do encourage as many of you as can to take advantage
of
this as you study both Hinduism and Buddhism. One visit to a
temple
with time to chat with someone there is worth many hours of just
reading about these traditions. Just keep in mind that there will
be
considerable variety in beliefs and practices, just as there is in
Christianity.
SOMETHING ABOUT INDIAN METAPHYSICS
Metaphysics is the area of
philosophy that discusses what is supposed
to be ultimately real. In the West, from the time of the Greeks,
there
has been a contrast between materialism (only the physical world is
real, so consciousness is just a byproduct) and idealism (only
consciousness is real, so the material world is essentially illusory)
with an in-between position of dualism (both matter and
consciousness--the mind or soul--are real).
In Hinduism we saw the idealist idea
(characteristic of Vedanta) that there might be just one ultimate
substance (Brahman)
with everything else an illusion as well as the dualist approach (from
Samkhya/Yoga) that there is both an ultimate physical reality and, as
it were, atoms of consciousness. (Yes, there is a materialist
approach
also in Indian philosophy, but clearly it would not be relevant to Indian religion.)
A
key difference between Western and Indian views, though, is how
whatever we ordinarily call our minds are meant to be "real" in Western
thought but "illusions" in
Indian thought with a "real" consciousness (atman or purusha) lacking any kind of
personal quality.
Buddhism,
which denies the reality of an ultimate substance in favor of the idea
of an ultimate flow of consciousness, can be considered idealist.
Like
Yoga in
the Hindu tradition, Buddhist meditation
attempts to reach a deeper level of consciousess (the Buddha mind) by
stripping away the sense of a personal self. As with Yoga with
the
notion of samadhi, Buddhist
thought describes the experience of getting
there as profoundly blissful--a sense of being what we really are,
which is not what we ordinarily think. Given the background idea of
reincarnation, so that we are all a succession of different "me's" or
selves, try to understand how this represents the idea of release from
the wheel of rebirth.
How the idea of divinity fits into
all
this is still another issue. The idea of a personal transcendent
God
(creator and lawgiver and so on) is just not part of the Indian
vision. Brahman (for Vedanta) is close enough to an idea of God
as an
eternal substance, yet we can also have a complicated vision of gods, angels
and demons,
and whatever else that share the universe with humans that altogether
express aspects of the eternal reality (all part of the show, as we
might translate the term "maya"). In the Western vision angels
and
demons are like human souls in having been created out of nothing by
God with one difference being that angels and demons (the rebellious
angels) existed from the beginning (whatever that is supposed to mean)
while human souls keep getting created as time goes on.
Samkhya and Yoga are technically atheist,
although Yoga allows for the idea of what one might call a big brother Purusha
(referred to as Ishvara) who is the model for what we attempt to do in
liberating our own purushas from the entanglement of being linked with
prakriti. One way of expressing this is that we look to divinity
for
inspiration but not for assistance. "God" doesn't care.
Buddhist philosophy
is also technically atheist, although Buddhists typically dislike being
identified in this way. Again, the concept is that there is just
an
eternal flow in which we all are caught up--and this is not a God
outside creating and managing the events that occur. Eventually,
Buddhists believe, all sentient beings will gain enlightenment and the
show is over.
These are difficult thoughts, I
know. The technical stuff of philosophy
is often intimidating (you might ask how is someone supposed to
understand the answers when the questions do not seem to make sense),
but try to get at least the bare outline of what we are talking
about.
FREEDOM FROM TANHA
First off, some of you did not
quite get the goal of the assignment in
having you do some additional research on line (this was one reason for
my asking you to indicate your sources). The task was to see how those
who are experts on the Buddhist tradition deal with whether there is a
real inconsistency in the goal (desire?) to be free of desire.
As
you are perhaps noting from this week's lecture material on Chinese
tradition, it is always difficult to translate from one language to
another when there are significant cultural differences. Here is the
irony of the situation: we must rely on translations to get into the
culture of another time or place, yet the translations themselves
become a problem because the meanings we attach to various words
inevitably reflect our own culture. Often enough we try to get around
the problem by using paraphrases of one sort or another, although this
itself runs the risk of misinterpreting an author's intentions.
A
key example is the term "virtue." It is used to translate both Greek
and Chinese writers. but our problem is that we have a notion of virtue
as something goody-goody when in both Greek and Chinese the original
words do not suggest this at all. The Greek word arete connotes any
type of excellence, while the Mandarin Chinese word de
connotes the
power that something has. Long ago the English word "virtue" also
suggested power as well (as when in a marriage ceremony someone says
"by virtue of the authority vested in me"), but that has rather faded
out so that we are left with the more prissy sense, especially when it
refers to whether a woman has yet had sex. Obviously this is going to
make reading philosophy, Greek or Chinese, something of a problem.
One
typical solution is just not to attempt a translation but to keep an
original term intact. We do this, for instance, with the word "karma"
since translating it literally as "action" does not begin to capture
the meaning it has in Indian thought. Perhaps this is what should have
happened with the term tanha
but it didn't, and as a result we have
the question that I posed for the assignment.
Many of you
favored an opposition of material and spiritual goals in explaining
what tanha meant, but this, I
think, misses the point that an intense
asceticism (the pursuit of a spiritual release characteristic of the
Yoga approach) was precisely what Gautama came to reject (just as later
it was rejected by the Bhagavad Gita).
Closer, I think, was the
observation that some of you made that "the middle way" of the Buddhist
does not reject the material world in favor of some kind of prayerful
utopia.
I do think the most appropriate
translation of tanha
is probably the word "craving," since this suggests the kind of
addiction that interferes with ordinary activities. Its opposite is
"letting go," which means that there can still be ordinary enjoyment.
In Cambodia out by an ancient temple I watched monks come to beg food
from a stand where I was eating, and I noticed that the people running
the stand did try to make sure they were giving the monks something
delicious, and this was definitely appreciated. The point would be that
the monk could enjoy a treat, but if it did not happen he would not be
upset. Not being a monk, I would find it a lot more difficult not to
have expectations--and experience a measure of frustration if they were
not met.
