Just A Little Dust

I’ve been noticing — both recently and many times before — that the way most writers thinking in secular ways about the Early Buddhist Texts (EBTs) approach those texts is very different from my approach, and I’m wondering if I’m on the right track here (am I seeing this accurately?) or if I’m mistaken. I’d love to hear what you think.

What I find is that the approach I’ve been seeing is for most thinkers, researchers, academics — writers all — to read the suttas and when they find something that they see as self-contradictory, or confusing, or even not matching with their experience of reality or what’s evidenced by Buddhist practice, they seem to think to themselves, “Something is wrong here,” and their instinctive reaction is to either assume there is some corruption to the texts they’re reading, or that the Buddha just got it wrong. Next step is then to try to set it right.

In the case of Stephen Batchelor, his main solution seems to be to work at inventing Buddhism 2.0: the corrected version. He has in the past said he approached the texts by throwing out anything that might’ve been said by other thinkers in the Buddha’s time and keeping only what’s unique to the Buddha. In his conversation with Dhivan Thomas Jones,  Batchelor often says he thinks the things in the suttas he disagrees with are later additions.

I found this approach, also, in Doug Smith’s posts on The Secular Buddhist website, for example with “Can Dependent Origination Be Saved?” which opens with a statement I firmly disagree with: “…it is a deeply problematic attempt to reconcile kammic rebirth with a potential awakening into non-self.” This comes from accepting — without apparently questioning the proposition — that the traditional interpretation of what the Buddha was saying is correct. I agree that there’s something deeply problematic there: if that was what the Buddha was doing, it would be problematic, but there’s another possible reason it’s seen as problematic, which is that we’ve misunderstood what the Buddha was doing, and it was not that problematic thing.

Currently I’m working through a paper written by Roderick Bucknell — also on dependent arising — where he uses the same approach, basically saying, “Something seems not quite right here, let’s see if we can figure out what went wrong.” I don’t know if his approach is secular, but the paper does not seem to advocate for any particular tradition, nor deal with faith, so it’s secular enough to provide another example for the sake of this discussion.

My Approach Is Different

Looking at those approaches leads me to wonder if part of the reason my work isn’t well understood might be because I have a very different approach to reading the suttas. Perhaps what I’m saying is being judged from within their understanding of what should be done, and how it should be done, and so it simply seems wrong from the outset, and their interpretation of what I’m saying is colored by that discomfort with what might seem like an off-kilter view.

I’m sure that’s not the only problem, of course. I’m well aware that presenting a piecemeal view of the Buddha’s lessons that’s quite different in some important respects doesn’t work well because each piece lacks all the supporting pieces. Much the same happens when non-Buddhists are first presented with isolated bits of the Buddha’s teachings, for example one often short-handed down to “All life is suffering.” Without the context, that doesn’t sound like an appealing view of life at all. (It’s also not something the Buddha ever said.)

Here, then, is my approach: I read the suttas trying to understand how they can be internally consistent, and to the greatest degree possible, saying things visible to anyone at any time if they just know where and how to look for them.

If the folks I’ve described find something that seems internally inconsistent, or not matching reality, they conclude that it must be wrong in some way. Either a corruption, or the Buddha was just wrong.

If I find something that seems internally inconsistent, or not reflective of visible reality, I conclude that I have not yet understood it.

They want to fix it: find the corruption, throw that bit out. Rewrite Buddhism.

I want to study more to figure out where my understanding is lacking. Maybe I will, finally, decide that on certain points, there is no corruption, nor is there something missing, the Buddha was just wrong, but so far I’ve not found a clear example where that was the case. I do believe there are some corruptions. For example, I agree with Analayo that the Buddha didn’t see women as inferior. I can recall one thing the Buddha says that I can’t find a basis for, and that is his comments on having one’s last thoughts be in line with the dhamma — not sure what that’s about; have no evidence for its usefulness — but it’s a small point and simply set aside until I get more information.

Mostly I’ve just found evidence that we’ve not understood what he’s saying as well as we like to think we have: “Needs more work.” When I get a fresh new understanding, it’s invariably a good match for reality.

Men and Women

There’s something else interesting about this. It seems to me — here’s another theory of mine, please tell me what you think — that this division in approaches is largely reflective of something we commonly hear about a difference between men and women. When a problem is being discussed, men have a strong tendency to want to fix it, whereas women tend to just want to air it. Women sharing a problem with other women instinctively listen thoroughly because we recognize that what we most want is to be heard. Fixing might also be offered woman-to-woman, but listening to hear and acknowledge the hearing is usually foremost.

I believe my approach to the text has its heart in thinking like a woman. As a mother of children, when they were wee tots, I had to accept the proposition that they weren’t going to be speaking to me with eloquence and precision. I had to listen hard for meaning. The intent behind the words was far, far more important than the words themselves. And that listening wasn’t just about interpreting the words, it was also about recognizing a very different understanding of the world than my own. To quote George Miller:

“To understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true and try to imagine what it could be true of.”¹

I’ve always recognized in myself a belief that it’s far more important to aim for accurate understanding in any conversation, discussion, or debate, than it is “to win” or win over the other participants. I understood this to be true of me long before I had children. Is this “female instinct” passed on by our genes as a useful trait for the one who’s going to nurse and nurture a wordless infant? Or is it not nature but nurture: a lesson society teaches us? It hardly matters which is true, especially for the purposes of this blog post.

What’s important is to recognize that my focus, when reading the suttas, is to try to understand the Buddha’s words as “true” and to get enough information about the worldviews and ways of speaking in his time to be able to get to an understanding of “what it could be true of”.

I don’t start from the premise that if there are things in there that “seem wrong” that they “are wrong”. Instead I assume I’ve got it wrong. I need to listen like a mother. I need to work at understanding. It hardly matters to me if, in the end, what the Buddha is teaching disagrees with my worldview or approach to things. If I can find no way to reconcile what’s there other than “He’s wrong” then at least I’ve understood and rejected the teachings from a place of solid understanding, not from a place of my own ignorance and biases.

In all honesty, I find the approach that just throws out much of the Buddha’s lessons — dismissed as just wrong — and coming up with one’s own New Improved version to be a mistake, and hubris to boot. The approach I’ve taken reveals to me the mind of someone who saw so clearly into human nature, found an unimaginably brilliant solution to problems we inadvertently create for ourselves, and expressed them with supreme elegance in the style of his times. Throwing that out — and imagining any one of us can build something better — is tragic.

1. George Miller, Princeton professor and psychologist, as quoted in Wikipedia[↩]