Just A Little Dust

I seriously and deeply entered the blogosphere yesterday for the first time, looking for other blogs that related in some useful way to this one. I went looking for folks with interests similar or tangential to mine, who spoke about things that concern me here.

It’s not necessary for my enjoyment for bloggers to agree with me (in fact more power to people whose viewpoints vary) but it’s also nice to find kindred spirits, since my particular obsessions seem to be found only in the most obscure cracks of the tiniest little niches. I believe I’ve found one in Jayarava. Yesterday I responded to one of his posts from last October, which focused on the phrase “by karma, I mean intention”. I mentioned that I interpreted the Buddha’s “intention” as having as its source our underlying worldview, a worldview that is changed when one comes to deeply understand the way the world works. This change in us makes even unconscious actions draw from new experiential knowledge, leaving behind selfish motives. I then talked about how this makes Buddhist morality more effective because it comes from within us, instead of being applied from the outside.

I next started to make comments on two older posts but restrained myself because it felt as though I was getting too far behind the conversational curve, but when I got to his “Karma and Rebirth” even though it is more than two years old, I didn’t want to hold back anymore. Unfortunately my thoughts and questions got longer and longer and it was then that I realized I might not always carry on monologues in my posts here on Just A Little Dust — maybe it’s time for dialog in which someone else gets to start a new subject.

So here, let’s start with Jayarava’s

…growing belief that the Buddha was not offering an ontology, not offering us definite statements on “how things are”, but only ways in which we could experience for ourselves the way things are….

I believe he’s saying that the Buddha was not giving us a description of reality, of metaphysics, when he described karma and rebirth, but was offering it as a method of understanding that which “is beyond words”.

Next Jayarava brings up something relating to the point I answered in my first comment on “intention”, that:

My understanding of the Buddha’s message is that we are so caught up in the wash of sensory input and mental activity that we make categorical errors in interpreting our experience….

This agrees with my understanding that our default way of seeing life, of being in the world, the way that comes with karma and consequences of that karma, is to behave in certain ways not because we intend to act selfishly, but (more to the point) because we are by nature self-centered, with our own survival, and comfort, and gain as the unquestioned focus of how we operate, and of all the choices we make.

This is just another way of saying — and Jayarava makes this point next — that our craving and clinging to both sensory experience and our ideas are the cause of our suffering. He describes this with the Buddha’s metaphor of fire (as the burning of our craving), and the fuel that feeds the fire. This is the usual way of describing the issue at the center of human suffering in modern Buddhist texts: that clinging to sensuality and dogmatic views makes us act from greed, hatred and delusion (the three poisons), and as Jayarava says, the way to put out the fire is to take away the fuel, in this case by cutting off the three poisons.

Doesn’t that sound like Western morality, though? What we need to do to be liberated is give up these things by acting morally: follow these rules and you will be free. So if I say we need to act morally by letting go of greed, hatred, and delusion so that we can be free, this sounds like morality applied from the outside.

However, there’s more to it than that because, as Jayarava describes the Buddha’s system, the outside-in practice of morality is not simply a way to liberation: its purpose is actually to foster an environment in which one has the time and ability to focus long enough to get the clarity needed to see what’s going on. In other words, in order to reach liberation we need to start from a place of quiet and calm, and we can’t do that if we are caught up in chasing after sensuality, or the need for vengeance, or other forms of delusion. So we start by *applying* morality for the sake of the peace and quiet it offers. This allows us to learn enough to see clearly enough to understand the way things work deeply enough to let go of delusion, from the inside out.

I would describe this outside-in morality as being a smoker’s patch that gives us peace until time passes; meditation and mindfulness and study and discussion are the body throwing off the nicotine cravings so that we can actually be free of the addictions. So what starts off looking like the outside-in application of morality turns out to actually be supporting an understanding that makes morality come from within.

Jayarava next points out that nothing in the Buddha’s system of thought requires that this fire burn over the course of lifetimes. This is true, in fact the Buddha seems to be telling us that we can snuff out the fire in this lifetime. But what would it be like if the Buddha had taught that the unused results of our karma just expired when we did, if it didn’t follow and catch up with us in the next life?

Now suppose that we believe that when we die that we personally simply cease to exist. That we personally will never experience the consequences of our actions if they have not already manifested. This would be a major flaw in the program to restrain unethical behaviour. Ethical behaviour, let me repeat, is not an end in itself, but a necessary pre-requisite for bringing about the conditions (calm and concentration) where insight can arise. It would make more sense to inculcate a belief that there was no escape from the consequences of one’s actions, not even death, because that would make for a more effective training program in ethics.

“Ethical behaviour is not an end in itself” is the point at which my understanding begins to diverge from Jayarava’s, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

Generally speaking we only act unethically if we feel forced to by the circumstances (and therefore fully expect unpleasant consequences but accept them), or if we think we can get away with it!

This argument is a big part of the modern defense of Why Atheism Is Bad: the assumption is that humans will not act morally unless God is there to make them do so. It seems to me there is mounting evidence that this is a dogmatic and mistaken view of human behavior; it may well be that cooperation and morality are by now so “bred into us” as survival skills that the average human doesn’t need the carrot and the stick. Yet it goes against instinct, doesn’t it, to feel that humans will behave well without incentives. The fear is certainly there that if we proved that there was no cosmic ethical system the world would go mad, and I expect this fear was as evident in ancient India as it is in Christian circles now. The validity of that view isn’t really relevant to our discussion though (sorry! I digressed).

The Buddha is in effect acting like a parent or guardian in providing behavioural limits for a child. He does this because he knows that freedom from remorse is a necessary condition for a calm body and concentrated mind, which are in turn necessary for achieving insight into the nature of experience.

It’s the nicotine patch, giving us the calm to let enough time go by in which the poisons can dissipate. Of course, in Buddhist practice we are actually working hard at ingesting the wisdom that will make the poisons dissipate — such is the weakness of my metaphor — rather than just waiting passively for nicotine to leave the body.

To me it suggests that from a Buddhist perspective is it practically advantageous to believe that I personally will experience the consequences of my actions, death notwithstanding.

Make note of that “I personally”.

This comes really close to saying that the Buddha taught something he did not actually believe — something like a doctor who says, “This nicotine patch is good for you” while knowing that nicotine isn’t actually good for you. It’s a kind of oversimplification.

This is not to say anything about whether such a belief is true or not true, in either a relative or ultimate sense. It may even be untrue, and yet we are better off believing it . . . It is a provisional belief that can be abandoned on the attainment of insight, because it will then no longer be necessary.

I’m not sure I follow Jayarava’s logic with that last comment; I understand the provisional belief (the nicotine patch) but I don’t see where there is support in these arguments for a belief in rebirth being no longer necessary; I feel as though I’m missing a bridging thought which may have been provided but I haven’t connected it up.

This is not the same as agnosticism. It requires a commitment to taking responsibility for one’s actions now, in the past, and in whatever future may come. What is true in this case is that unless we can make some kind of imaginative leap which allows us to see the consequences of our actions coming home to us, we will continue to think that some actions (of body, speech or mind) do not matter. Everything we do, say, and think matters.

Again, I’m a little lost here, in fitting “agnosticism” or it’s not-ness into this argument. I don’t see agnosticism as having anything at all to do with refusing to take responsibility for one’s actions — although if we are stretching the definition to the Buddhist portrayal of Sanjaya the Sceptic, maybe I can see this, but in a modern definition of agnostic — in my definition of an agnostic (since I self-define that way) — the issue of taking responsibility or not doesn’t really come up.

On the other hand having a first step be “your actions have consequences for you in the future” initially described in the common understanding of the day as “Your actions result in the banking of merit or demerit toward a future life” makes perfect sense; it’s “This nicotine patch will do you good” without the detailed explanation of why nicotine is actually bad and how it is only good in this particular situation.

I think that a Buddhist approach to belief is fundamentally different to the prevailing Western notions. Instead of asking whether a belief is true or not, and arguing from that basis, we Buddhists ask ourselves “is it helpful”? Helpful is anything in the ethical sphere which helps us achieve calm and concentration. It is axiomatic for Buddhists that anything which is harmful to others cannot afford us calm and concentration – something which is borne out by experience.

This misses the mark, for me, and the point where we diverge is back at “Ethical behaviour is not an end in itself” — Jayarava posited that Buddhist ethical behavior is simply there to give the right environment in which the rest of the teaching can grow. I disagree with that limit, largely because I’ve seen the Buddha say that such-and-such must be done so that the sangha can grow, for the good of all; I see his primary concern always as the reduction of suffering not just in individuals, not simply for his followers, but for all. The more I study the canon, the more it seems to me that what is being described is exactly a moral arc: morality exactly for its own sake, since morality’s essence is all about reducing suffering.

“True” and “false” matter far less than kusala (helpful) and akusala (unhelpful). So any argument over whether karma and rebirth are “true” in the Western sense are kind of missing the point. It is better, ie more helpful, to believe that you cannot escape the consequences of your actions because that will make you more sensitive to how you act in the present. This approach frees us from having to explain every detail of the doctrine in rational terms, a task which I think is impossible in any case. It also means that we are not so likely to want to fight over the “truth”.

Perhaps, but it also fosters clinging to an unprovable belief, a belief quite bound up with the self.

While I agree that concerning ourselves with whether karmically induced rebirth is the way of the cosmos or not is unhelpful, I will say that what is central to the point is whether — and how, and why — the Buddha taught rebirth as such.

The idea that ethics matter only in serving the individual’s efforts at liberation makes the practice a self-centered one, which is also, ultimately, where any imaginable variation of rebirth leads as well. If what gets passed on to a future life is some unknown quantity or quality or force or phenomena or wave front (or whatever) which is not really about *me* in any specific way, then that one being that inherits my unused karmic force is of no more concern to me than *all* of the beings in the future — in fact, the vast number of beings in the future should be of greater concern than any one individual, and I should be considering my choices in those terms. If what is reborn is some aspect of my *self* that I’ll want to have a cushy place next time because I’ll know it if it’s not, then that is encouraging me to nurture a concern with my own suffering, with my self. So while at the outset it may be “practically advantageous to believe that I personally will experience the consequences of my actions, death notwithstanding” for the short term, in the long run it becomes an impediment to liberation because it fosters a concern with the self.