Category Archives: Buddhism

Owen Flanagan, The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized

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After proposing my own interpretation of a Buddhist doctrine recently, I enjoyed Owen Flanagan’s book about Buddhism. Flanagan (a proponent and practitioner of analytical philosophy and natural science) read a lot of classical Buddhist texts, interviewed the 14th Dalai Lama on several occasions, talked to many other Buddhists, reviewed the results of brain research on Buddhist monks, and explored scholarly literature from East and West. He concludes that:

  1. The Buddha’s own metaphysics and epistemology are strikingly consistent with modern science–a point made by Einstein and others but worked out here in more detail;
  2. Buddhist ethics is appealing from a modern liberal’s perspective, complementing liberalism with its deeper account of a good inner life, but offering a thin account of justice that needs development;
  3. Buddhist philosophy and practice might have some bearing on personal happiness, but that is a complex matter, and the causal link is by no means automatic. Becoming a Buddhist won’t just make you happy, but Buddhism has interesting things to say about happiness (what it is and how to pursue it).
  4. The brain science related to Buddhism is interesting and worth pursuing but has been hyped beyond recognition. The most straightforward causal hypothesis is not about Buddhism and happiness but about the impact of particular forms of meditation on mental health. The studies on that question are inconclusive. In Flanagan’s view, there are also empirical questions regarding the impact of Buddhism on happiness, but they cannot be settled by brain science alone, because Buddhism is much more than meditation, and happiness is a contested term requiring normative analysis.

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rebirth without metaphysics

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Death, according to Martin Heidegger, was a fundamental fact about human existence. Life was movement through time toward an end.

Birth, for Heidegger’s critical ex-student Hannah Arendt, was the fundamental fact about human beings as moral or political creatures. At birth, our life course is maximally open, unpredictable, and, in that sense, free. Birth or “natality” symbolizes our power to start anew.*

Rebirth, for the man we call the Buddha, was the fundamental fact about life. At least according to one tradition, he did not mean a literal transfer of the soul into a different body at death. When one of his monks taught that doctrine, the Buddha apparently rebuked him, saying, “From whom have you heard, you foolish man …, that I have explained the dharma in that way? Foolish man, have I not declared in many ways that consciousness is dependently arisen …?”**

What then did he mean? Here is a sympathetic reconstruction:

  1. I cannot directly perceive my self or its effects. All I perceive is a sequence of sensations, judgments, desires, and other ideas. The Buddha is a strict empiricist. If we cannot perceive something by any means, it is nothing. As David Hume wrote, I am “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”
  2. Each of these ideas has a cause. It does not arise from nothing but depends on something before it. We might identity the causes of ideas as other ideas or as physical processes in the brain. That is merely a difference in the level of analysis. Either way, the core premise is “dependent origination” (pratityasamutpada). Every idea is part of a long causal chain.
  3. My ideas do not have the same span as my life. When I was one day old, I had none of the ideas that now fill my brain. Many of the ideas that I had when I was 5 or 15 are forgotten, although their indirect effects may linger. Some of the ideas in my mind today were in my father’s head before I was born. I will forget some of my ideas while they still are alive in other minds.
  4. I was not born free, in the sense of having a self capable of choosing its beliefs and desires. I was born as a thinking organism which learned its beliefs and desires from experience, strongly shaped by the already-living people around me. As Karl Mannheim wrote in 1928, “even if the rest of one’s life consisted in one long process of negation and destruction of the natural world view acquired in youth, the determining influence of these early impressions would still be predominant.”
  5. My thoughts may have consequences (“karma”) for others, going beyond my lifespan. Even if you sharply disagree with me, by sharing my idea with you, I have affected you.
  6. If the self is a bundle of constantly changing ideas that are caused by other people’s ideas and shared in part with other people, then the moment of my biological birth was not the beginning of “me,” nor will my biological death be the end. The bundle that is me is constantly being reborn, in my consciousness and in other minds.
  7. Notwithstanding 6, different minds are not the same. I am not you. Individuality is real, in some sense, and biological death matters.
  8. Notwithstanding 2, the sensation we have of choosing and controlling our ideas is valid (morally, if not metaphysically).

Rebirth captures this combination. A birth is a new beginning but not ex nihilo. It is wonderful but not literally miraculous, being the result of regular natural processes.  It marks a break with a past, yet the newborn is completely dependent on and thoroughly influenced by adults. We might view rebirth as a metaphor for life, but if one thinks (with the Buddha and Hume) that the “self” is fictional or metaphorical, then what is metaphorical is the assertion that life begins in infancy. Literally, life is continuous renewal, and that makes rebirth more literal than birth.

*This paper argues that the contrast between Heidegger and Arendt on birth/death is overblown.
**Quoted in Pankaj Mishra, An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World.

service-learning, the Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad

The phrase “service-learning” seems to date from 1966. Nowadays, it means organized opportunities in schools or other educational institutions that combine community service with academic instruction as part of a curriculum or program of study. Since the late 1960s, the concept has been institutionalized with federal and state legislation, formal policies in schools and colleges, advocacy groups, and a body of scholarship. In 2008, approximately 35% of American high schools offered service-learning.

It is a much older idea, though. Buddhism, for example, emphasizes that true wisdom comes from serving others. “The Buddha himself bathed and clothed sick bhiksus [monks], cleaned their rooms, attended their daily routines, comforted their bodies and minds, and threaded the needle for aged bhiksus to relieve the pain of their poor eyesight” (Yun, 2008). The Buddha’s enlightenment came from his compassion, which grew from his service.

About 500 years later, in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus uses the example of a woman who has washed his feet–an act of service–to teach his disciples about the forgiveness of sins (Luke 7:38).

The Arabic word sadaqah (which is etymologically and conceptually similar to tzedakah in Hebrew) refers to voluntary acts of charity or service that are both virtuous in themselves and signs of faith. In Islam, sadaqah can be educational. Abu Huraira, a companion of the Prophet Muhammad who died about 1200 years after the Buddha, reported that Muhammad said: “Verily what a believer continues to receive (in the form of reward) for his action and his virtues after his death is the knowledge which he acquired and then disseminated.”

Even secular service-learning is a venerable tradition. Three famous examples from before World War II are Hull-House, the Chicago settlement founded by Jane Addams, which closely connected education to service; the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, which educated generations of labor and civil rights leaders using service experiences; and the Civilian Conservation Corps, which provided a whole curriculum along with its public work opportunities.

These days, I frequently argue in public discussions that the essential rationale for service-learning is moral; its moral premises deserve critical reflection; and empirical research that links service-learning to various outcomes (such as higher test scores) is mostly beside the point. I understand the tactical advantages of showing that what we value as an intrinsic good–in this case, service plus reflection–also pays off in standard utilitarian ways. But we shouldn’t let our tactics obscure our fundamental commitments. Nor should we leave our moral commitments unchallenged, because there are critical responses to the ideal of “service.”

two paths to abstraction

1. At first, artists depict the world as they think it actually is. They even show heaven and other eternal and transcendent scenes in terms of their own times, places, and styles. Then they realize that they have a manner, a method, and a style of representation; and many such styles are possible. They learn to imitate art from distant places and times, which requires a certain sympathy or compassion. Their ability to represent the world as depicted by others reduces their attachment to their own style, which begins to seem arbitrary. For example, it seems arbitrary that the center of a flat piece of art should always appear to recede into the distance, and that one side of each object should be visible. Why not show all the sides at once, as in cubism? Gradually, artists’ enthusiasm for any form of representative art diminishes. One important option becomes renunciation, in the form of minimalism and abstraction. Showing the world in any style means embodiment; but the mind can transcend the body. True art then becomes not the naive representation of the world, nor a sentimental imitation of someone else’s naive style, but just a field of color on a canvas. That seems the way to make the artist’s arbitrary will and narrow prejudices disappear, and beauty appear.

2. The Buddha’s “Karaniya Metta Sutta,” translated by the Amaravati Sangha:

Even as a mother protects with her life

Her child, her only child,

So with a boundless heart

Should one cherish all living beings;

Radiating kindness over the entire world:

Spreading upwards to the skies,

And downwards to the depths;

Outwards and unbounded,

Free from drowsiness,

One should sustain this recollection.

This is said to be the sublime abiding.

By not holding to fixed views,

The pure-hearted one, having clarity of vision,

Being freed from all sense desires,

Is not born again into this world.

The image is Ad Rheinhart, “Abstract Painting” (1951-2). (Rheinhart, influenced by Zen through his friend Thomas Merton, sought to make painting as “a free, unmanipulated, unmanipulatable, useless, unmarketable, irreducible, unphotographable, unreproducible, inexplicable icon.”)