Category Archives: Buddhism

on philosophy as a way of life

(San Antonio, TX) Here I briefly introduce schools of thought–Indian and European–that have combined introspective mental exercises with reasoning about moral principles and critical analysis of social systems. I contrast their integrated approach to forms of philosophy that construct comprehensive models of ethics by using reasons alone. This essay will be the introduction to a book on mapping moral networks, which is a new introspective exercise.

–“I should have given that man some change. He looked hungry.”
–“He would have used it for drugs or alcohol.”
–“Maybe he has that right—it’s his life!”
–“If you’re going to try to help the homeless, you should donate to the Downtown Shelter. They spend the money on real needs. Plus, it’s tax-deductible.”
–“That’s not realistic advice. While I am talking to a homeless person, I have homelessness on my mind. Once I get back home, the thought is gone. I’d never remember to mail off a check.”
–“Perhaps we should set aside some time every day to practice compassion and remember people who are suffering.”
–“Yes, I guess I’m for compassion—but handing someone money seems to create the wrong kind of relationship. What did Emerson write? ‘Though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.’”
–“Maybe we should think about why some people are homeless in the first place and what policies would end that situation.”

This little dialog shows a pair of human beings doing several valuable things. They display emotions, some expressed with enthusiasm and some with regret. They exchange reasons. But they know that their reasons may not actually influence them deeply because they have habits that they would have to counteract by altering their regular routines. They cite rules—such as the tax deduction for charity and the shelter’s ban on alcohol—that are meant to improve and regulate people’s behavior. Finally, one speaker (perhaps showing off) cites an influential thinker from the past whose argument seems relevant.

Each of these modes of thought can be practiced at a high level. Instead of quickly asserting moral beliefs, we can develop whole arguments: chains of reasons that carry from a premise to a conclusion. If the argument persuades, it joins the list of things you believe, and you have been changed. Anyone who is serious about being a good person must struggle to get the reasons right and then act according to the conclusions.

But because our wills are weak, we also need enforced rules that guide or constrain us. And just as we can reason about our own choices (“Should I give a dollar to this homeless person?”), so we can reason about laws, regulations, social norms, and institutions. We can ask whether the rules that are in place are acceptable and, if not, how they should change. As Alexander Hamilton wrote on the first page of the Federalist Papers, laws are meant to arise from “reflection and choice” rather than “accident and force.” Political thinkers have often offered elaborate arguments about how institutions should be designed to improve people’s behavior.

Meanwhile, we can learn reflective practices such as confession, memorization, visualization, meditation, autobiographical reflection, and prayer. These methods are more personal than arguments, for they work directly on an individual’s beliefs, emotions, and habits. They are less coercive but more individualized than rules and laws, for we enforce these practices on ourselves. They tend to require practice and repetition to achieve their goals. You can read an argument once in order to evaluate it, but you must repeat a mental exercise for it to affect your psychology. In the 1500s, Michel de Montaigne observed, “Even when we apply our minds willingly to reason and instruction, they are rarely powerful enough to carry us all the way to action, unless we also exercise and train the soul by experience for the path on which we would send it” (II.6). But self-discipline without reason is blind, potentially turning us into worse rather than better people. Think of terrorists who have overcome their habits of peacefulness and tolerance to make themselves into killers; their fault is not a lack of discipline but a poor choice of means and (often) ends.

Finally, we can take the interpretation of other people’s thoughts to high levels of sophistication and rigor. Instead of just quoting a snippet of Emerson, we can make a full study of his ideas in their context. Cultural critique and intellectual history help us understand where we come from and what influences us. After all, we believe what we do in large measure because other people have formed and shaped our thoughts. No one invents her whole worldview from scratch. Since we begin with the traditions that have developed so far, it is important to understand them. Reasoning or self-discipline requires a critical understanding of the materials with which we construct our thoughts, which are ideas that our predecessors have invented.

It makes sense to put these modes together because we are reasonable creatures (capable of offering and sharing reasons for what we do), but we are also emotional and habitual creatures (requiring either external rules or mental discipline and practice to improve ourselves), political creatures (living in communities structured by laws and norms that people make and change), and historical creatures (shaped by the heritage of past thought).

In some periods, it has been common to combine argumentation about personal choices and social institutions, mental exercises, and the critical study of past thinkers. In other times–including our own–these elements have come apart. Here I will offer a very short and suggestive review of that history to support the thesis that now is a time to put the pieces back together. Continue reading →

avoiding the labels of East and West

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(Hartford, CT) Between the 320s and the 130s BCE, there were kingdoms in what is now Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, and Turkmenistan that had monarchs with Greek names who communicated in both Greek and Pali, who honored both Olympian gods and Buddha, and who had diplomatic relationships, marriages, and wars with both Mediterranean and South Asian neighbors. Here, for example, is a coin of king Strato I and his consort Agathokleia. They are named on one side in Greek. On the other side, in the Kharosthi script, it says, “King Strato, Savior and of the Dharma.” The figure is Athena, but other coins from the Greco-Bactrian kingdoms show the Buddhist wheel.

These kingdoms are fascinating because they may have influenced the ideas and art of Mahayana Buddhism, on one side, and Hellenistic philosophy and Judeo-Christian monasticism, on the other. Discussing them, however, can be politically sensitive. Ever since they were rediscovered, scholars–both Indian and European–have identified the Greek aspects of these communities with Europe, with colonialism, and with whiteness, and the Indian aspects of these communities with Asia, with independence, and with darker skin. Thus proponents of the British empire have accentuated the Greeks’ contribution to “Hellenistic India,” whereas anti-colonial scholars have either dismissed it or viewed it critically. This is a helpful overview of the historiography by Rachel Mairs.

I’m no expert, but I have a strong instinct that these categories are false and misleading. I happen to be white (of European extraction) and I studied some Greek. But the Greek cultural aspect of the Greco-Bactrian kingdoms is deeply alien to me. In their militarism, monarchism, paganism, misogyny, and peculiar metaphysics, the ancient Hellenes are far more remote than modern Indians are. If I had to choose between the ethics of a Greek circa 200 BC and a Buddhist of the same time, I would select the latter as both more persuasive and more familiar. The British imperialists who came to dominate South Asia in the late 1700s were not much more similar to ancient Greeks than I am, although they thought they belonged to the “classical tradition.”

The Greeks themselves distinguished between Europe and Asia and named “India” as that part of Asia that lay beyond the Indus River. But those are arbitrary distinctions, as my family and I recalled when we stood on either side of the Europe/Asia border in Turkey several times this summer. Ancient Indians tended to call the Greeks “Yona,” which refers to the Ionian Sea. It lies between Italy and Greece, but if Indians had called the Greeks “Aegeans” instead, that name would have encompassed both Asia and Europe (per the Greeks’ own distinction.)

Race is a hugely influential category today, but ancients did not divide people up that way. When the Greek emperor Seleukos and the Indian emperor Chandragupta sealed a peace treaty by arranging a marriage between their children, no one thought that a white person was marrying a person of color. Some Greeks may have thought that the marriage involved a barbarian, but that meant someone who couldn’t speak Greek. Barbarians were people who said “bar bar bar”: unintelligible foreign words. The important divisions involved language, not skin color.

If you can drop the association of Greeks with Europe and Mauryans with India, what really jumps out is the continuity of culture and history from North India to southern Italy in that era. The philosophical milieu of Siddhartha Gautama resembled that of Socrates. Both men lived in city-states that would be overrun in the late 4th century BCE by monarchical empires. In both cases, a polytheistic background culture allowed reflection on abstract fundamentals that yielded agnostic and atheist ideas. In both circumstances, the essential question was how to achieve equanimity despite the intrinsic cruelty of life. And both regions traded intensively with each other. Once we drop the division between East and West, we can learn to read Sextus Empiricus and Marcus Aurelius as guides to meditation and Nagarjuna as a systematic metaphysician much like Aristotle.

[See also when east and west were one; Jesus was a person of color, and strange lives (last paragraph)].

Ito Jakuchu at the National Gallery

Hegel and the Buddha

three truths and a question about happiness

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I am a cheerful guy, happy with my work and family life, able to enjoy mundane events and relish extraordinary experiences. But for me, as for virtually everyone, an undercurrent of sorrow and fear is never completely absent. The sorrow is for pain and loss; the fear is anticipation of more. The individuals who are suffering or who will inevitably suffer include the billions of strangers whose pain is superficially noted in the newspaper; the hundreds of strangers whose tragedies are vividly described every day; one’s close friends and family (including the ones who happen to be healthy, safe, young, and happy today); and oneself. The Buddha was right that the First Noble Truth is suffering.

I respect, and perhaps envy, people who believe that suffering is limited or illusory because a reward follows death. I may envy, but I do not respect, people who simply don’t care, who live for themselves or in the moment and push suffering out of their minds. Even if not caring were possible, it seems dishonorable.

I can imagine a state that requires neither supernatural intervention nor moral oblivion. This state would be difficult to attain, and in fact I do not expect to see it. But it violates no laws of nature. I take some consolation merely in envisioning it.

In the state that I imagine, I would live a life partly devoted to improving or repairing the world. Here is why: Complex and intricate systems are more likely to survive and reproduce if they have an inner drive. That is true of trees, cities, and anthills: they strive to grow, which is why they are prevalent. But they don’t know that they are striving, hence they do not suffer. Sentience is a particular kind of will that is useful for promoting survival. We happen to have it and it explains why we have grown to number seven billion. Because every sentient system is vulnerable and ultimately dies, sentience introduces fear and suffering into the universe. That is a version of the Buddha’s Second Noble Truth.

At the same time—and on this point I think the Buddha might disagree—the existence of animals and other complex, fragile, sentient systems creates opportunities to reduce suffering and to promote at least a transient security and happiness. If one envisions, helps to create, enhances, or preserves a garden, a city, an institution, or a life, it does not become immortal, but one’s work reduces the suffering and enhances the flourishing of sentient beings, including oneself.

Note that “service” will not quite capture what it takes to improve the world. It is not about acting for others, but participating in the development and maintenance of complex systems that include oneself. Much evidence suggests that people who work in that way are happier: not liberated from the fundamental reality of suffering, but absorbed pleasurably in their activity while it lasts.

To devote oneself with perfect efficiency and relentless focus to public work would be excessive. If everyone did that, there would be no point to any of it: we would be taking in each other’s laundry. Or (to use another analogy) it would be like envisioning and building a great cathedral which no one ever visited for prayer or pleasure. So, in the state that I imagine, I would place work in balance with two other activities. One is intimacy, time with family and friends, whom I would treat with partiality and loyalty regardless of their needs. The other is pleasurable appreciation of the complex systems around me, especially people and animals, society, nature, and art.

Co-construction, intimacy, and appreciation are already components of my life, and of most other lives. But I don’t manage them with what could be called equanimity. Here is a little fable about how life could be lived better.

One day, I would go to my doctor’s office for a checkup. I would chose to do that because my life, although fragile and limited, has value, and it is my duty to preserve it if the means are reasonable. On the way to the doctor’s office, I would not be able to work or to spend time with the people I love, so I would appreciate the world. Instead of fruitlessly fretting about the tasks ahead, or even about more important causes and issues, I would be absorbed appreciatively in physical things. They could be evidently beautiful objects: the changing leaves glimpsed through a bus window. Or they could be objects whose beauty is easily overlooked: the impasto of scraps on the wet floor of the bus. One can always turn inside– to the reality of one’s own breath, the feel of one’s weight–or to language and imagination.

On this occasion, the doctor would have news for me: a brain tumor, giving me at most three months to live. As I left her office, I would have different thoughts from when I had entered. I would have to change priorities, giving more attention to planning an orderly succession and documenting my work than to launching new projects. I might be in a bit of a hurry after the appointment, because there would be a lot to do. Yet I wouldn’t feel fundamentally different. I knew my life was limited that morning; it is still limited now. It always promised suffering, but it also offered opportunities for absorption and construction. I would still have those opportunities.

On my way to the next activity–since once more I could neither accomplish work nor spend time with beloved people–I would again become thoroughly absorbed in the contemplation of physical objects, present or imagined. My immanent death would not be on my mind. I would heed the Buddha’s Third Noble Truth: suffering ceases with the abandonment of excessive attachment. Another way to put this point is that we are constantly being reborn, so the moments of biological birth and death are less important than we presume.

This fable illustrates a state that violates no laws of nature or of reason. In fact, perfectly rational people would never regret facts they cannot control. The obstacles to attaining equanimity are not external: rules, forces, or demands from outside. They are my own emotions. The Fourth (and final) Noble Truth is something like this: freedom of suffering is possible if one exercises the correct discipline, which is not merely a matter of managing emotions and thoughts but also of living right with other people. (It is what Owen Flanagan helpfully calls “equanimity-in-community.”) If that Truth is true, it offers me just as much consolation as I would derive from news of an afterlife. It represents a perfect solution: suffering would have no sting. Death would be like a wall bordering a field: visible, significant, but in no sense spoiling the space it surrounds.

This Fourth Truth could, however, be false if our physical constitutions simply preclude our attaining equanimity. But one thing is clear: we can envision that state. The question is whether dwelling with that thought and pursuing its actual attainment can take us on the right path.

Peter Levine

A Blog for Civic Renewal