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The Passive Voice

January 24th, 2013 . Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments »

Today I was listening to a radio interview with Tracy Kidder (“The Soul of a New Machine”) talking about non-fiction writing as pertains to his newest book, Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction and he was asked whether using the passive voice was appropriate. I really liked his answer, which was that it was, “when the thing done is more important than the doer.”

The subject of the passive voice came up during the Intensive Pali Course taught by Professor Gombrich earlier this month. He had mentioned in the handout for the course that there seems to be a particular fondness for the use of the passive in the suttas, and prior to the course, I had wondered about this, so when the subject came up in class, I asked whether this was peculiar to the suttas, or a wider feature of much of the works we have from around this time (which are largely in Sanskrit). His answer was that it was part of a wider trend, not limited to the Pali canon. I remarked that I had wondered if perhaps the passive voice was used in Buddhist texts because of the understanding that there was no self to be the doer of the acts. His answer to this was an amused comment that I should not overthink things.

But that is, of course, what I do. I overthink. I suspect it’s necessary to come up with theories like these about why things were the way they were in order to see anything new. And while my first theory turns out not to be a good fit for the facts, that only means I need to broaden the concept and see where it gets me.

This is part of a long conversation I have been having with anyone who has the slightest interest in the subject of how the structure of our language shapes our view of the world, or conversely, how our view of the world shapes our language — that’s a chicken-and-egg sort of issue, really; the two no doubt go round and round. I have discussed this with Spanish teachers, wondering aloud if the classification of nouns into masculine and feminine affects how we see things, and how we see what is masculine or feminine about people, as a result, for example, of what ideas and characteristics we attach masculinity and femininity to. With my father-in-law, I rued the increasing loss of languages, like Welsh, because with them go the loss of particular points of view.

It seems to me that the pervasive use of the passive voice in which, as Tracy Kidder points out in the quote above, ” the thing done is more important than the doer” has to have an effect on the way people of the time saw the world. In some sense, it may have made it easier for the Buddha to come up with his understanding that it is our actions that are critical in our relationships with other, in the effects we have on those around us, which may have led to his asking himself what it was that caused any given individual to perform this action and not some other — with his answer being that it is our intention that is important. And then there arises the next question: what causes go into the formation of our intentions?

Two of the other three points he brings up as being distinctive in the Pali also support the same possibility: Read the rest of this entry »

Dependent Arising In Context

January 13th, 2013 . Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

I’ve put together a book that contains my paper “Burning Yourself” as published in the second volume of the Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, as well as the series of blog posts about a pragmatic understanding of each link in the chain that was published on the Secular Buddhist Association website earlier this year. It also includes the post just previous to this one (on sankhara) and a new and fairly lengthy introduction to the whole volume that outlines a hypothesis about what might have gone into the process of losing the context for dependent origination in the first place. This compilation is called “Dependent Arising In Context” and is available at createspace (where the royalty scheme is most favorable) as well as on Amazon.com.

 

In a few months I plan to make it available on Kindle and hopefully in other ebook versions. This is all part of a learning process for me, an experiment in coming to understand where we are nowadays in the change from traditional publishing to the free-for-all system that seems to be taking over.

 

The Words of Dependent Arising: Sankhara

August 15th, 2012 . Posted in Bhikkhu Bodhi, Bhikkhu Nanamoli, causation, interdependence, Nanavira Thera, paticca samuppada, sankhara, Translating | 5 Comments »
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aka “Everything you wanted to know about sankharas but were afraid to ask.”

Over on the blog at the Secular Buddhist Association website, I did a series on a secular approach to dependent arising, and in the comments for the second post, I was asked if I could give specific examples of sankharas, because the suttas we have — and the word choices used in the translations (“formations” “fabrications” “activities”) or lack of them (some translations just skip the word altogether) make it very difficult to understand what is being said. I said I’d give it a try, but in a brief survey of the many mentions of sankhara, I found that there aren’t “examples” as such, at least not in the way that one might have examples of something like vedana (feelings, experiences) which are described sometimes as pleasant, unpleasant, or neither, and we are given stories that can be seen to illustrate these, like the one of the jealous guy who sees his woman talking to another man — the feelings that arise there are examples of vedana, and the thoughts that arise, and ideas for what to do about the situation afterward could be seen to express the tanha and upadana that follow.

But the sankharas don’t get treated that way, probably because they aren’t so much things that happen in our lives, rather, they are underlying tendencies or overall concepts that affect our lives. They get described in a variety of ways, some of which tell us what they look like when they become visible. They become visible as “the actions that are a result of their impact on us”, so we could say that the action the jealous man takes is a sankhara because it is a sankhara-made-visible. But his jealousy is also a sankhara, too, it’s a sankhara-keenly-felt.

Because sankhara is the second term in a conditional chain of events, really, every step afterward is a sankhara in that same sense: the consciousness that arises next is sankhara-consciousness, because sankhara drives it, and in just the same way, it drives every step thereafter.

In working on this, I came to see that what a sankhara is, is a drive. It has limitations on it, like ignorance does (as described in the blogpost just before this one). When I say it is “a drive” I don’t mean just any old drive. It is a very specific drive: a drive for the existence of and protection of and knowledge of the self, a very driven-drive, a slightly over-the-top drive on the best of days, and a very over-the-top drive on the worst of them.

It gets this meaning from the Prajapati myth that is embedded in the first five steps of dependent arising, where sankhara is the craving for existence that brings the universe into being. This leads me to believe that “drive” may be the best all-around translation of sankhara. We can also see the way in which the steps after sankharas are all sankharas, themselves: because every step drives the next.

To test this out, and since I’m not finding jealousy-level examples of sankhara-as-a-drive in the suttas, I figured the next best thing was to find suttas in which sankharas are discussed or described, and see if putting the word “drive” in there makes those sections easier to understand. Read the rest of this entry »

The Words of Dependent Arising: Ignorance

August 10th, 2012 . Posted in avijja, Bhikkhu Bodhi, context, interdependence, paticca samuppada, Thanissaro Bhikkhu, Translating, vedana | 1 Comment »
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This is the first in a series of articles in which I’d like to explore the language used in the ancient Pali texts to describe dependent origination (paṭicca samuppāda aka interdependence, dependent co-arising, and so on, with dependent arising being my preferred translation). Perhaps I’ll go on to look at a few other words, too, because many of our modern translations need to be reconsidered.

My intention is not to tell anyone what words they should use, but through writing these posts, to engage in a dialog with the larger community of Buddhist practitioners, and scholars, in whatever media they communicate, about what the Pali words actually mean, how they are similar to, or different from the words we use to translate them, and to consider the issues that make translating them such a problem. I am hoping that a light discussion of the Pali words, and their context, will also be interesting enough to those who enjoy reading the Buddhist texts to encourage more people to explore the words used, and the Pali language, via some of the fanastic tools that are freely available on the internet (see “Tools for Translations” on the Buddhist links page). Talking about the words particular to dependent arising should also be a useful way of clarifying what each of the links are about, and how they fit together — and the more ways we have of describing what’s being said, the broader the access to the insights, since different people have different approaches to learning. Read the rest of this entry »

Jayarava’s “The World”

May 22nd, 2012 . Posted in loka, responses to blogs &c | No Comments »
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Over on his blog, Jayarava has a new post up on a subject dear to my heart: “the world” (loka in Pali). I had written a comment to send him before I discovered that he has closed the blog to all comments, so I am just going to post it here. It is not my expectation that Jayarava will actually read this or comment on it — when a person is tired of the blogosphere’s dialog, they deserve a break — it’s just here to put a pin in the word “loka” since I spent some time writing this up.

Hey Jayarava,

For a long time I assumed that when the Buddha spoke of “the world” (loka) he was actually talking about people; I supposed it was a sort of reference to samsara, and the way we create what we mistake for the actual world in more-or-less the same way we create what we mistake for a self. I still think this is the correct interpretation, but that the Buddha was being more specific than making references to samsara: he seems to be referring to Prajāpati’s story of creation, and the way that the First Man was the Cosmos, and when he split himself up into the individuality of name-and-form, each individual was, in a sense, the world. So when he talks (in, for example, SN 12.10) about his pre-enlightenment wondering about “This world, alas, has fallen into sore distress. There is being born, growing old, dying, passing over and being reborn…” he is clearly not talking about planet Earth as “this world” but about us as individuals — each and every one of us as bits of Prajāpati/the Cosmos. He’s actually talking about atta/anatta — that which we mistake for the self.

So in the Rohitassa sutta, when he talks about not being able to walk to the end of the world, he starts by answering the question as if it is meant literally, but when he says that we do have to reach the end of the cosmos, he is saying we have to put an end to that false sense of self. This is, I believe, a teensy-tiny model of dependent arising’s two levels: the literal (as conceived by folks back then) and what he is really talking about.

The reference was probably clearer to the people of the times than it is to us, because the word you mention, byama (‘an-arm-span’) is actually a reference to the measurement of the altar in sacrifices that used the model of the Prajāpati story. Joanna Jurewicz points this out in her year-2000 article “Playing With Fire” on p. 79 “A general example could be provided by the famous declaration of the Buddha that in this “fathom-long body” (vyāmamatte kalevara) is the world, its origin, its cessation, and the path which leads to its cessation. The Sanskrit term vyāmamāttra appears in SB 1.2.5.14 denoting the measure of the altar. It has the shape of a man and is not only the counterpart of the sacrificer but also the manifested counterpart of the Creator (Prajāpati)…”

By this reasoning, Ananda’s answer is that when *we* talk about “the world” we are talking about how we perceive and conceive it as something that has to come to an end. Buddhaghosa is also right, since sankharas have everything to do with the way we construct (perceive) self and world. The Loka Sutta, too, is consistent with this understanding, in that the world that arises is our perception of the world as being ours/us/self/in reference to us (because the Prajāpati myth says it is), and of course what arises from those kinds of perceptions is dukkha. As an aside I’m going to toss out a postulate of my hypothesis, that the five khanda will turn out to refer to the five layers of the altar that is self / Prajāpati / the World (though I have yet to find any solid evidence for it, it would make sense). I also wonder if Buddhaghosa’s comment about “wood and grass” is a reference to what gets burned during sacrifices — the sacrificial objects also being equated to atta.

I believe the language of the world-as-self refers back to dependent arising, as you will probably gather if you read the paper I wrote on it just out in the Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies. The structure I see in dependent arising speaks both to “rebirth as real” and “the world of experience” and in so doing explains why both can be found in the suttas.

As always, thanks for this and all the insightful articles you write.

Buddhism in Midland, Texas. And Two Darts

January 18th, 2012 . Posted in local | 3 Comments »
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I live in the old home town of President George Bush, and spend lots of time in the library where Laura worked. This is a conservative town, and as far as I know, there aren’t many Buddhists in it, but for those who are here, or are interested in learning a little about Buddhism, we do have weekly meetings that vary in location, style, and subject.  For the next two weeks we’re just doing a little socializing and hanging out, and then there’s a round of official talks that work well as an introduction to what Buddhism is about, led by my one and only in-person dharma teacher, who is very good at explaining the concepts. You can find out more about us through Meetup.com or you can come find me on Facebook (easiest through the Skeptical Buddhist group’s page there).  It is not necessary to want to become a Buddhist to join us; open-minded interest in what it’s about is all that’s needed.

Tonight was the last of a series of six introductory meetings, and toward the end I was asking about the “two darts” that were mentioned earlier. The first dart is the pain that life deals us all by itself — everyone gets to experience this, whether it’s physical ailments and limitations, or the loss of those we love, or shared sorrows over world events, or whatever — and the second dart is the one we deal ourselves through the ways we attach to those pains and draw them into us or draw them out in time. There are the “why me”s and the “it doesn’t have to be like this, we can put it all back”s and the numerous ways in which we add to what’s already there.  We had already been talking about reality, aligning ourselves with reality — -“that might be a form of nirvana”- — and I was thinking about how often I hear the words “delusion” and “illusion” in Buddhism, and how misunderstood they seem to me to be sometimes, and wanted to clarify a point, but I think I did not do a very good job of making what I was saying clear.  So I thought I’d try again here.

The subject of illusion came up in an accurate context: that we tend to build up our illusions of what is or can be.  That seems to be the heart of the issue, precisely to the point.  It is when our illusions get described as delusions that some line begins to get crossed with connotations in which the victim (as the perpetrator of the delusion) begins to get blamed for it, and all the ways we interpret the world get dismissed along with those delusions as fictions, as samsara, as nothing but fake suffering.  (Not that this is what was being taught in the meeting — far from it — the teaching was far more accurate than that.)  But I often want to make the point that while we sometimes delude ourselves into thinking that we can make things different than they are (which is being out of alignment with reality), or that things are all about us when they are not, even if we are doing it to ourselves, it’s not illusory suffering.  When the first dart hits, that’s real pain we feel, and when we hit ourselves with the second dart — however we manage it — that is real pain too.  The point is just this: that second dart is UNNECESSARY pain.

We are doing it to ourselves, but don’t blame the perpetrator who is also the victim too much because, for the most part, we are simply so unclear on what is happening that we don’t even recognize how we manage to hurt ourselves. As was pointed out in the meeting by our well-spoken teacher, the practice is all about slowing things down enough to see how and what arises out of events.  The point, it seems clear to me, is to allow ourselves to see the first dart hit, and see what comes about afterwards that has us aiming that next dart at ourselves in response; to learn the skills to pay enough attention to see the process happening. Sometimes it happens quickly, sometimes more slowly, but the more often we manage to be mindful of what is happening, and what we feel as a result, and what our first instinct is, the more chances we get — the more choices we open up — to bring wiser behavior into being, so we don’t hit ourselves with that second dart that usually causes very real, but unnecessary pain.

Dependent Arising Is Not Interdependent

November 4th, 2011 . Posted in interdependence, paticca samuppada, Possibilities | 8 Comments »
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It’s been a long time since my last post and here’s the reason why: this has been a really difficult post to write. I knew what I wanted to say — it’s laid out in the pieces of my previous posts on “Possibilities” for ways to understand what the Buddha taught — but every time I tried to write it, I found that what I am certain of (that Dependent Arising doesn’t describe interdependence) ran into conflict with what I also know (that interdependence is a valid concept within Buddhism). I have been having trouble with these two facts for a year or more; what on earth made me think I could resolve that conflict in one short post? So I wrote, and rewrote, and wrote again, getting nowhere.

The resolution came by way of my friend Ian, whom I know enjoys the writings of Thich Nhat Hahn (TNH), who writes quite a bit about “interbeing” — a variant way of describing interdependence. I felt sure that what I understood TNH to be saying about how we are all interrelated was true, was observable in everyday life, and if it was true then it would have to be consistent with the Buddha’s dharma if what I see — that the Buddha was dead-accurate in his assessment of the human condition — was also true. Every time I tried to think about these two things — interdependence is true; dependent arising is not interdependence — my brain felt like it had the flu. Then I asked Ian to describe TNH’s interbeing, and it all became quite clear.

Before we get to that, let’s talk about why Dependent Arising is not about interdependence. Read the rest of this entry »

Possibilities: Karma, Merit and Vipaka

August 5th, 2011 . Posted in Angulimala, causation, dukkha, kamma, Modern Teachers and Translators, Possibilities, vipaka aka merit | 6 Comments »
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In my last post, I described a different way of looking at “truth” that divided up what we experience into things that are “necessarily real” — objects and other phenomenon that are independent of individuals, usually measurable in some way — and those that are “unnecessarily real” — that is, we really experience these things, but we can do without them (they are unnecessary). The “unnecessarily real” usually aren’t measurable by any scientific method, and they may or may not be desirable (a smile is unnecessarily real, because it comes and goes, but it’s worth keeping around). The focus of that post was on dukkha, and how we add layers of meaning to our experiences, and in that way we create unnecessary dukkha — but it’s important to recognize that dukkha is real in this sense, not a delusion; people do genuinely suffer.

In just the way that dukkha is unnecessarily real — it is something we create that we can learn to stop creating, and live without — karma, too, is unnecessarily real. We know that both fit in the category of “unnecessarily real” because the Buddha’s system is all about the ending of karma, and through that, the ending of dukkha.

Karma

The Buddha talks about four kinds of karma: the good stuff, the bad stuff, the neutral stuff, and the karma that ends karma Read the rest of this entry »

Not Necessarily Real: Absolute Truth vs Samsaric Truth

July 20th, 2011 . Posted in Critical thinking, dhamma, direct experience, dukkha, Possibilities | 4 Comments »
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Possibilities: Truth

I have recently been working on a different way of looking at the classical Buddhist division of “truth” into higher and lower realities, or “absolute truth” and “delusion”. The Buddha didn’t make these divisions in his discourses, and I find those ways of looking at things unhelpful, if not downright harmful since they lead people to be dismissive of others’ suffering as “delusion”. This is why I’ve been looking for a different way of explaining what the Buddha may have seen, and the phrase I have come up with is that some things are “necessarily real” and some things are not.

Those phenomena which are “necessarily real” — solid objects are the easiest example of these things — are things that have an existence apart from the momentary whims of humans, things that are generally measurable by science (though there are undoubtedly things that are “necessarily real” but that we have yet to figure out how to measure); and there are things that are “unnecessarily real” — things which *may* be measurable by science, but that are optional; for example, a smile. That last category is of things we create on the fly, whether consciously or not (like the smile), things that are *ours* because no one else can take them away from us without our cooperation. Someone can have an effect on us that plays a part in us ceasing to smile, but it is still our choice to smile or not — no one can actually lift the smile off our faces because it’s not just *in* our faces.

Read the rest of this entry »

Possibilities: Causation

July 15th, 2011 . Posted in causation, kamma, paticca samuppada, Possibilities, Rebirth, Thanissaro Bhikkhu | 2 Comments »
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This post and the next few step away from my usual anchor of discussing “What the Buddha Taught” as (very precisely) stated in texts found in the Pali canon. Instead it is a look at what’s stated in the canon a bit vaguely, with the intent to then examine what we can see for ourselves in our lives, and to try to match the canon with the what we can see. It’s an attempt to take the Buddha’s statements and ask if we are correctly interpreting them or if, perhaps, we sometimes over-extend our definitions of the concepts to say more than they are meant to say.

The posts will cover:

(1) That the Buddha’s “causation” is not “cause and effect” but “effect and cause”.

(2) That the division of truth into “Absolute” and “Delusion” is harmful; a more useful view would be of “necessary” and “unnecessary”.

(3) That karma is real but, in my own way of putting it, it is “not necessarily real”, but is a little more real than some things.

(4) That “interdependence” is not what Dependent Arising describes. Nor is it the arising of “this” from “that” in every case. 

Causation

When this is, that is.

From the arising of this comes the arising of that.

When this isn’t, that isn’t.

From the cessation of this comes the cessation of that.

[Udana 1.3 translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu]

In his book on Dependent Arising, “The Shape of Suffering” Thanissaro Bhikkhu states of the above that:

“The Arising of A will, at some point in time, cause the arising of B. The ceasing of A will, at some point in time, cause the ceasing of B.”

While I agree with the latter statement — because if condition A is required for condition B to come into existence, then removing condition A means B cannot come about — the earlier statement makes for a deterministic universe, and it is not consistently observable in the complex universe in which we live. Also, it seems it was not what the Buddha meant.

Some of my recent explorations in Pali (see for example “Where One Becomes One’s Natural Self“) have led me to look at the ways in which the Buddha says that action A does not always lead to result B. Much as we might wish (because the thought is comforting) that the universe always squares things up in the end or, at least, that the cosmos is predictable, it isn’t — though we often reason as if it was.

To use a purely mechanical example of this sort of causation we could say:

From the arising of a seed, comes the arising of a new tree.

From the cessation of seeds, comes the cessation of new trees.

But it does not follow that with the arising of a seed there is *always* a tree. Read the rest of this entry »

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