[12] Perennial Issues | The Karma of Questions - cf Huxley

[12] Perennial Issues | The Karma of Questions

Perennial Issues

Toward the end of World War II, Aldous Huxley published an anthology, The Perennial Philosophy, proposing that there is a common core of truths to all the world’s great religions. These truths clustered around three basic principles: 

that the Self is by nature divine, 

that this nature is identical with the divine Ground of Being, and 

that the ideal life is one spent in the quest to realize this non-dual truth.

In the years since Huxley published his anthology, the idea of a perennial philosophy has exerted wide influence. In particular, it has opened the minds of many Westerners to the idea that religions of the East, such as Buddhism, have something valuable to offer, and that the preference of one religion over another could be simply a matter of personal taste. 

People with a positive relationship to the Judeo-Christian tradition could adopt Buddhist teachings and practices without conflict; 

those with a negative relationship to the Judeo-Christian tradition could find spiritual nurture in Buddhism, free from the faith demands of the synagogue or the church. 

In this way, the idea of a perennial philosophy has eased the way of many Westerners into Buddhist thought and practice. 

And to this day, the principles of the perennial philosophy—as outlined by Huxley and the host of perennial philosophers who have followed in his wake—have provided an underpinning for how Buddhism is taught in the West. When Rumi is quoted in a Dhamma talk, the perennial philosophy is speaking.

But even though the idea of a perennial philosophy has provided an opening to the Dhamma, the question arises: Is it reliable? Has it distorted the Dhamma in the process? A good way to answer these questions is to take a closer look at the tenets of perennial philosophy, to see how they stand up to scrutiny on their own strengths, at the same time comparing them with what the Buddha taught.

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Perennial philosophers base their thinking on two claims. 

• The first is a fact-claim: all the great religious traditions of the world share a common core of beliefs. 
• The second is a value-claim: the commonality of these beliefs is proof that they are true.

The idea of such a perennial philosophy is attractive. It suggests a way of arriving at religious truths that are universal and objective, rather than culturally conditioned. It offers a plot of common ground where different religions, instead of fighting over their differences, can live in harmony and peace. In fact, some perennial philosophers maintain that the objectivity of perennial philosophy makes it so scientifically respectable that it can provide the framework by which all human knowledge—spiritual and scientific—can be brought together in an overarching theory that allots to each body of knowledge its proper function and place.

However, there are problems with both of the claims on which perennial philosophy is based—problems that undermine the validity of the perennial philosophers’ project and deflect their attention from more important issues that any quest for spiritual objectivity should address.

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The problems with the fact-claim derive from the methodology used for establishing the common core of the great traditions. The central question tackled by the perennial philosophy, we are told, is that of our true identity—“What is my true self?”—and the answer to that question is that our true self is identical with Being as a whole. We are all One, and our common identity extends to the ground and source of all things. To arrive at this answer, though, the perennial philosophers have had to discount many of the teachings—found in most of the world’s major religions—that posit a separate identity for each person, and a creator of the universe separate from its creation.

To get around this difficulty, perennial philosophers have tried to limit the range of what they mean by a “great religious tradition.” They draw the line around this concept in one of two ways. The first is to draw a distinction, inherited from the Romantics, between conventional religious doctrines and the insights of direct religious or mystical experience. Mystical experience is the direct apprehension of inner truths. Conventional doctrines are the corruption of those truths, formulated by people of a lower level of religious inspiration, influenced by social, cultural, or political factors. Thus perennial philosophers claim that they are justified in ignoring conventional doctrines and drawing their raw data only from reports of mystical experience, for these are closest to the truths of direct experience.

The problem here is that many accounts of direct religious experiences do not support the tenets of perennial philosophy. The Buddha’s Awakening is a case in point. That Awakening obviously qualifies as a direct religious experience, and yet the descriptions of it found in the earliest records, the Pāli canon, contain nothing to support the perennial philosophy’s answer to the question of personal identity. They don’t even address the question. In fact, there are passages in the Pāli canon where the Buddha denounces questions of identity and being—“Who am I? What am I? Do I exist? Do I not exist?” (MN 2)—as inappropriate entanglements blocking the path to Awakening.

Perennial philosophers have used two tactics to get around this difficulty. One is to cite the Pāli texts but to re-interpret them. The teaching on not-self, they say, is simply an indirect way of approaching the basic tenet of perennial philosophy: if one abandons one’s identification with the aggregates of the small self, one awakens to one’s identity with the larger self, the Oneness of the All. Even though the Awakening account makes no mention of a larger self or of any feelings of Oneness, the perennial philosophers assume by extrapolation from accounts in other traditions that they must have been present in the Buddha’s experience, and that either he neglected to mention them or his followers dropped them from their records. The problem here is that the Pāli canon assigns feelings of Oneness and non-duality to mundane levels of concentration, and not to the transcendent (AN 10:29). It also lumps views of an infinite self with views of a finite self as equally untenable (DN 15). In fact, MN 22 singles out the idea of an eternal self, at one with the cosmos, as “utterly and completely the teaching of a fool.” And even though the Pāli canon admits that its description of the Buddha’s Awakening is incomplete (SN 56:31), there is no reason to believe that the unexpressed essence of his Awakening would be expressed in a tenet that he explicitly said to abandon.

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This difficulty has led to a second tactic for dealing with the problem of the Pāli canon: to dismiss it entirely in favor of Mahayana texts that fit better with the tenets of perennial philosophy. Rather than treating Theravada Buddhism as a complete tradition with its own integrity, perennial philosophers adopt the Mahayana polemical stance that Theravada is simply an incomplete—Huxley called it “primitive”—fragment of a tradition that finds its explicit completion only in the Mahayana itself.

The perennial philosophers’ reasons for adopting this stance relate to the second way in which they delimit the meaning of “great religious tradition”: the implicit value-claim that non-dualism is superior to dualism or pluralism. The superiority of non-dualism, they say, is both conceptual and ethical. 

Conceptually it is more inclusive, encompassing a larger view. The erasing of distinctions is superior to the creation of distinctions. 

Ethically, non-dualism leads to acts of kindness and compassion: When people sense their essential Oneness, they are more likely to treat one another with the same care they would treat themselves. Thus the great religious traditions must, by definition, be non-dualistic.

Both the conceptual and the ethical arguments for non-dualism, however, are open to question. 

Conceptually, there is no proof that a non-dual view is necessarily more encompassing that a dual or pluralistic view. A person who has had a direct experience of duality may have touched something that lies outside the Oneness comprehended by the non-dualist. The Pāli interpretation of nibbāna is an example: nibbāna lies outside the Oneness of jhāna, and even the Allness of the All—the entire range of the six senses (including the mind) and their objects (SN 35:23; MN 49). It neither includes them nor acts as their ground or source (MN 1). (Passages that cite the Deathless as the ground of all things are mistranslations.) At the same time, there are many areas of life in which distinctions are clearly superior to a lack of distinctions. When you need brain surgery, you want a doctor who is clear about the distinction between skillful and unskillful methods. A person who sees distinctions may be detecting subtle differences that a non-dualist simply hasn’t noticed.

Ethically, the superiority of non-dualism is even harder to prove. To begin with, the notion of ethical superiority is in and of itself a dualistic position: if compassion is better than cruelty, there has to be a distinction between the two. Secondly, there is the problem of theodicy, the explanation for the source of evil in a just universe. If all things come from One Source, then where does evil come from? One common non-dualist answer is that it comes from ignorance of our essential Oneness, but that simply drives the question back another step: Where does ignorance come from, if not from the One Source? How can the One Source be ignorant of itself? Is it incompetent? Is it playing an inhumane game of hide-and-seek?

This issue of theodicy has been argued repeatedly over the ages in every tradition that posits a single source for the cosmos, and the non-dualist answers eventually come down to three: evil is either illusory or necessary or both. But if you can say that evil is illusory, it’s a sign that you’ve never been victimized by evil. If you say that it’s necessary, then what incentive is there for people not to do it? Those who want to do evil can simply say that they’re performing a necessary function in the world. This point is illustrated by the Indian legend of the murderer who met a philosophical non-dualist on the road and challenged him to give one reason, consistent with his philosophy, for why he shouldn’t allow himself to be stabbed. The non-dualist was unable to do so, and so met with his death.

Thus it’s apparent that the fact-claim of perennial philosophy—that it is giving voice to the essential message of all the world’s great religious traditions—depends on a very restricted definition of “all.” The great religious traditions are by definition those who agree with its principles. Those who don’t are lesser traditions and so may be discounted. This means that the perennial philosophers’ comments about “all great religions” are not simple observations about a range of phenomena whose boundaries are already widely accepted. Instead, they’re an attempt to define those boundaries—and a very exclusionary one at that. There’s no way that such a restricted vision of the world’s religious traditions could provide a rallying point that would unite them in peace and harmony. It simply adds one more divisive voice to the clamor.

However, even if the fact-claim of a perennial philosophy were better based, there would still be reason to question its value-claim: that consensus is proof of truth. Even if the great traditions did share a common core of beliefs, that would be no guarantee of their validity. No reputable body of knowledge has ever viewed simple consensus as proof of a proposition’s truth. The history of science is littered with truths that were once universally accepted and now no longer are. It’s also studded with stories of ideas that were originally rejected because they bucked the consensus but later were established as true. This shows that consensus is not proof. It’s valid only if it follows on proof. And the standards for proof are to be sought in the story of how one truth overthrows another. Invariably, as we read through history, we find that this happens because the new truth is better in one of two ways: either in terms of the method used to arrive at it or in terms of its uses, the beneficial actions it inspires. Galileo’s ideas on matter and acceleration were accepted over Aristotle’s because they were based on better experiments. Newton’s, and not Aristotle’s, are still used by NASA because they have been found more useful in getting rockets to Mars.

This historical fact suggests that truth-claims are established, not by consensus, but by human activity: the actions that lead to the discovery of truths and those that result from their acceptance. And if ever there were an issue that a scientific inquiry into religion should address, this is it: How should the relation between truth and activity best be understood, and how should it be applied to greatest advantage? If this issue is not addressed, how can we know what to do to find truths, or what to do with them once they’re found?

So far, however, perennial philosophers have had nothing to say on this topic. In fact, they repeatedly state that the question of which methods—or non-methods—the great religious have used to arrive at their consensus is immaterial. All that matters is that they agree. But what if all those methods were questionable? And what if their consensus creates more problems than it solves? As we have already noted, the non-dualistic stance proposed by the perennial philosophers, if carefully questioned, has trouble speaking to the reality of evil or providing an incentive against doing it. Thus they fail both tests for verifying truths: they are non-committal on the issue of what actions are needed to discover spiritual truths, and they propose a truth that unwittingly opens the door to evil actions that would result from accepting their claims.

So, given the weaknesses in the fact-claims and value-claims on which perennial philosophy is based, does that mean that the quest for objective spiritual truths is doomed to failure? Not necessarily. 

It simply means that the perennial philosophers have been asking the wrong questions and using a faulty methodology to answer them. 

A more fruitful line of inquiry would be to focus on the spiritual implications of the question raised above: How should the relation between truth and activity best be understood, and how should it be applied to greatest advantage? 

This question lies at the basis of the scientific method, so any scientific account of religion would have to begin here. This study could start by searching the religious traditions of the world, not for their fact-statements, but for their statements on what actions are needed to verify facts. These truth/action claims could then be compared and put to the test.

And this is an area where the Pāli canon has a great deal to say. Its descriptions of the Buddha’s Awakening—focusing on karma, causality, and the four noble truths—directly address the question of how truth and activity are related. The Buddha’s realizations concerning karma and causality focus on the way beliefs and actions influence one another. His insights into the four noble truths focus on the way karma and causality can best be put to use to bring an end to suffering. His Awakening provided answers to the questions of (1) what action is, (2) what the highest happiness is that action can produce, (3) what beliefs lead to the most skillful actions, and (4) what actions can provide an adequate test for those beliefs.

Furthermore, the Pāli canon contains explicit instructions on how the Buddha’s teachings are to be tested by others. His famous instructions to the Kālāmas (AN 3:65), that they should know for themselves, are accompanied by detailed standards—unfortunately, considerably less famous—on what procedures any valid “knowing for oneself” should entail.

“So in this case, Kālāmas, don’t go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, ‘This contemplative is our teacher.’ When you know for yourselves that, ‘These dhammas [teachings, mental qualities, actions] are unskillful; these qualities are blameworthy; these dhammas are criticized by the wise; these dhammas, when adopted & carried out, lead to harm & to suffering’—then you should abandon them…

“Don’t go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, ‘This contemplative is our teacher.’ When you know for yourselves that, ‘These dhammas are skillful; these dhammas are blameless; these dhammas are praised by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to well-being & to happiness’—then you should enter & remain in them.”

The canon also provides precise instructions for how to judge the results of one’s actions, and how to learn from one’s mistakes.

“Whenever you want to do a bodily action, you should reflect on it: ‘This bodily action I want to do—would it lead to self-affliction, to the affliction of others, or to both? Would it be an unskillful bodily action, with painful consequences, painful results?’ If, on reflection, you know that it would lead to self-affliction, to the affliction of others, or to both; it would be an unskillful bodily action with painful consequences, painful results, then any bodily action of that sort is absolutely unfit for you to do. But if on reflection you know that it would not cause affliction… it would be a skillful bodily action with pleasant consequences, pleasant results, then any bodily action of that sort is fit for you to do.

“While you are doing a bodily action, you should reflect on it: ‘This bodily action I am doing—is it leading to self-affliction, to the affliction of others, or to both? Is it an unskillful bodily action, with painful consequences, painful results?’ If, on reflection, you know that it is leading to self-affliction, to the affliction of others, or to both… you should give it up. But if on reflection you know that it is not… you may continue with it.

“Having done a bodily action, you should reflect on it: ‘This bodily action I have done—did it lead to self-affliction, to the affliction of others, or to both? Was it an unskillful bodily action, with painful consequences, painful results?’ If, on reflection, you know that it led to self-affliction, to the affliction of others, or to both; it was an unskillful bodily action with painful consequences, painful results, then you should confess it, reveal it, lay it open to the Teacher or to a knowledgeable companion in the holy life. // Having confessed it… you should exercise restraint in the future. But if on reflection you know that it did not lead to affliction… it was a skillful bodily action with pleasant consequences, pleasant results, then you should stay mentally refreshed & joyful, training day & night in skillful mental qualities.

[Similarly with verbal and mental actions, although the last paragraph on mental actions states:]

“Having done a mental action, you should reflect on it: ‘This mental action I have done—did it lead to self-affliction, to the affliction of others, or to both? Was it an unskillful mental action, with painful consequences, painful results?' If, on reflection, you know that it led to self-affliction, to the affliction of others, or to both… then you should feel distressed, ashamed, & disgusted with it.  // Feeling distressed, ashamed, & disgusted with it, you should exercise restraint in the future. But if on reflection you know that it did not lead to affliction… it was a skillful mental action with pleasant consequences, pleasant results, then you should stay mentally refreshed & joyful, training day & night in skillful mental qualities.”  — MN 61

Whether the canon’s standards for testing religious teachings are adequate and convincing may be subject to debate. But they provide a clear starting point for exploring the issue of what to do with fact-claims and value-claims—the first issue that any objective inquiry into spiritual truths should address.

[11] Five Piles of Bricks | The Karma of Questions

[11] Five Piles of Bricks | The Karma of Questions

Five Piles of Bricks

The Khandhas as Burden & Path

The Buddha’s Awakening gave him, among other things, a new perspective on the uses and limitations of words. He had discovered a reality—the Deathless—that no words could describe. At the same time, he discovered that the path to Awakening could be described, although it involved a new way of seeing and conceptualizing the problem of suffering and stress. Because ordinary concepts were often poor tools for teaching the path, he had to invent new concepts and to stretch pre-existing words to encompass those concepts so that others could taste Awakening themselves.

One of the new concepts most central to his teaching was that of the khandhas, which are most frequently translated into English as “aggregates.” Prior to the Buddha, the Pāli word khandha had very ordinary meanings: A khandha could be a pile, a bundle, a heap, a mass. It could also be the trunk of a tree. In his first sermon, though, the Buddha gave it a new, psychological meaning, introducing the term “clinging-khandhas” to summarize his analysis of the truth of stress and suffering. Throughout the remainder of his teaching career, he referred to these psychological khandhas time and again. Their importance in his teachings has thus been obvious to every generation of Buddhists ever since. Less obvious, though, has been the issue of how they are important: How should a meditator make use of the concept of the psychological khandhas? What questions are they meant to answer?

The most common response to these questions is best exemplified by two recent scholarly books devoted to the subject. Both treat the khandhas as the Buddha’s answer to the question, “What is a person?” To quote from the jacket of the first:

“If Buddhism denies a permanent self, how does it perceive identity? … What we conventionally call a ‘person’ can be understood in terms of five aggregates, the sum of which must not be taken for a permanent entity, since beings are nothing but an amalgam of ever-changing phenomena…. [W]ithout a thorough understanding of the five aggregates, we cannot grasp the liberation process at work within the individual, who is, after all, simply an amalgam of the five aggregates.”

From the introduction of the other:

”The third key teaching is given by the Buddha in contexts when he is asked about individual identity: when people want to know ‘what am I?’, ‘what is my real self?’. The Buddha says that individuality should be understood in terms of a combination of phenomena which appear to form the physical and mental continuum of an individual life. In such contexts, the human being is analysed into five constituents—the pañcakkhandha [five aggregates].”

This understanding of the khandhas isn’t confined to scholars. Almost any modern Buddhist meditation teacher would explain the khandhas in a similar way. And it isn’t a modern innovation. It was first proposed at the beginning of the common era in the commentaries to the early Buddhist canons—both the Theravādin and the Sārvastivādin, which formed the basis for Mahāyāna scholasticism.

However, once the commentaries used the khandhas to define what a person is, they spawned many of the controversies that have plagued Buddhist thinking ever since: “If a person is just khandhas, then what gets reborn?” “If a person is just khandhas, and the khandhas are annihilated on reaching total nibbāna, then isn’t total nibbāna the annihilation of the person?” “If a person is khandhas, and khandhas are interrelated with other khandhas, how can one person enter nibbāna without dragging everyone else along?”

A large part of the history of Buddhist thought has been the story of ingenious but unsuccessful attempts to settle these questions. It’s instructive to note, though, that the Pāli canon never quotes the Buddha as trying to answer them. In fact, it never quotes him as trying to define what a person is at all. Instead, it quotes him as saying that to define yourself in any way is to limit yourself, and that the question, “What am I?” is best ignored. This suggests that he formulated the concept of the khandhas to answer other, different questions. If, as meditators, we want to make the best use of this concept, we should look at what those original questions were, and determine how they apply to our practice.

The canon depicts the Buddha as saying that he taught only two topics: suffering and the end of suffering. A survey of the Pāli discourses shows him using the concept of the khandhas to answer the primary questions related to those topics: What is suffering? How is it caused? What can be done to bring those causes to an end?

The Buddha introduced the concept of the khandhas in his first sermon in response to the first of these questions. His short definition of suffering was “the five clinging-khandhas.” This fairly cryptic phrase can be fleshed out by drawing on other passages in the canon.

The five khandhas are bundles or piles of form, feeling, perception, fabrications, and consciousness. None of the texts explain why the Buddha used the word khandha to describe these things. The meaning of “tree trunk” may be relevant to the pervasive fire imagery in the canon—nibbāna being extinguishing of the fires of passion, aversion, and delusion—but none of the texts explicitly make this connection. The common and explicit image is of the khandhas as burdensome. We can think of them as piles of bricks we carry on our shoulders. However, these piles are best understood, not as objects, but as activities, for an important passage defines them in terms of their functions. Form—which covers physical phenomena of all sorts, both within and without the body—wears down or “de-forms.” Feeling feels pleasure, pain, and neither pleasure nor pain. Perception labels or identifies objects. Consciousness cognizes the six senses (counting the intellect as the sixth) along with their objects. Of the five khandhas, fabrication is the most complex. Passages in the canon define it as intention, but it includes a wide variety of activities, such as attention, evaluation, and all the active processes of the mind. It is also the most fundamental khandha, for its primary activity is to take the potential for the experience of form, feeling, etc.—coming from past actions—and turn it into the actual experience of those things in the present moment.

Thus intention is an integral part of our experience of all the khandhas—an important point, for this means that there is an element of intention in all suffering. This opens the possibility that suffering can be ended by changing our intentions—or abandoning them entirely—which is precisely the point of the Buddha’s teachings.

To understand how this happens, we have to look more closely at how suffering arises—or, in other words, how khandhas become clinging-khandhas.

When khandhas are experienced, the process of fabrication normally doesn’t simply stop there. If attention focuses on the khandhas’ attractive features—beautiful forms, pleasant feelings, etc.—it can give rise to passion and delight. This passion and delight can take many forms, but the most tenacious is the habitual act of fabricating a sense of me or mine, identifying with a particular khandha (or set of khandhas) or claiming possession of it.

This sense of me and mine is rarely static. It roams like an ameba, changing its contours as it changes location. Sometimes expansive, sometimes contracted, it can view itself as identical with a khandha, as possessing a khandha, as existing within a khandha, or as having a khandha existing within itself. At times feeling finite, at other times infinite, whatever shape it takes it’s always unstable and insecure, for the khandhas providing its food are simply activities and functions, inconstant and insubstantial. In the words of the canon, the khandhas are like foam, like a mirage, like the bubbles formed when rain falls on water. They’re heavy only because the iron grip of trying to cling to them is burdensome. As long as we’re addicted to passion and delight for these activities—as long as we cling to them—we’re bound to suffer.

The Buddhist approach to ending this clinging, however, is not simply to drop it. As with any addiction, the mind has to be gradually weaned away. Before we can reach the point of no intention, where we’re totally freed from the fabrication of khandhas, we have to change our intentions toward the khandhas so as to change their functions. Instead of using them for the purpose of constructing a self, we use them for the purpose of creating a path to the end of suffering. Instead of carrying piles of bricks on our shoulders, we take them off and lay them along the ground as pavement.

The first step in this process is to use the khandhas to construct the factors of the noble eightfold path. For example, Right Concentration: We maintain a steady perception focused on an aspect of form, such as the breath, and used directed thought and evaluation—which count as fabrications—to create feelings of pleasure and refreshment, which we spread through the body. In the beginning, it’s normal that we experience passion and delight for these feelings, and that consciousness follows along in line with them. This helps get us absorbed in mastering the skills of concentration.

Once we’ve gained the sense of strength and wellbeing that comes from mastering these skills, we can proceed to the second step: attending to the drawbacks of even the refined khandhas we experience in concentration, so as to undercut the passion and delight we might feel for them:

“Suppose that an archer or archer’s apprentice were to practice on a straw man or mound of clay, so that after a while he would become able to shoot long distances, to fire accurate shots in rapid succession, and to pierce great masses. In the same way, there is the case where a monk…enters & remains in the first jhāna: rapture & pleasure born of seclusion, accompanied by directed thought & evaluation. He regards whatever phenomena there that are connected with form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, & consciousness, as inconstant, stressful, a disease, a cancer, an arrow, painful, an affliction, alien, a disintegration, an emptiness, not-self. [Similarly with the other levels of jhāna.]”

The various ways of fostering dispassion are also khandhas, khandhas of perception. A standard list includes the following: the perception of inconstancy, the perception of not-self, the perception of unattractiveness, the perception of drawbacks (the diseases to which the body is subject), the perception of abandoning, the perception of distaste for every world, the perception of the undesirability of all fabrications. One of the most important of these perceptions is that of not-self. When the Buddha first introduced the concept of not-self in his second sermon, he also introduced a way of strengthening its impact with a series of questions based around the khandhas. Taking each khandha in turn, he asked: “Is it constant or inconstant?” Inconstant. “And is what is inconstant stressful or pleasurable?” Stressful. “And is it fitting to regard what is inconstant, stressful, subject to change as: ‘This is mine. This is my self. This is what I am’?” No.

These questions show the complex role the khandhas play in this second step of the path. The questions themselves are khandhas—of fabrication—and they use the concept of the khandhas to deconstruct any passion and delight that might center on the khandhas and create suffering. Thus, in this step, we use khandhas that point out the drawbacks of the khandhas.

If used unskillfully, though, these perceptions and fabrications can simply replace passion with its mirror image, aversion. This is why they have to be based on the first step—the wellbeing constructed in jhāna—and coupled with the third step, the perceptions of dispassion and cessation that incline the mind to the deathless: “This is peace, this is exquisite—the resolution of all fabrications; the relinquishment of all acquisitions; the ending of craving; dispassion; cessation; Unbinding.” In effect, these are perception-khandhas that point the mind beyond all khandhas.

The texts say that this three-step process can lead to one of two results. If, after undercutting passion and delight for the khandhas, the mind contains any residual passion for the perception of the deathless, it will attain the third level of Awakening, called non-return. If passion and delight are entirely eradicated, though, all clinging is entirely abandoned, the intentions that fabricate khandhas are dropped, and the mind totally released. The bricks of the pavement have turned into a runway, and the mind has taken off.

Into what? The authors of the discourses seem unwilling to say, even to the extent of describing it as a state of existence, non-existence, neither, or both.  As one of the discourses states, the freedom lying beyond the khandhas also lies beyond the realm to which language properly applies. There is also the very real practical problem that any preconceived notions of that freedom, if clung to as a perception-khandha, could easily act as an obstacle to its attainment. Still, there is also the possibility that, if properly used, such a perception-khandha might act as an aid on the path. So the discourses provide hints in the form of similes, referring to total freedom as:

The unfashioned, the end,

the effluent-less, the true, the beyond,

the subtle, the very-hard-to-see,

the ageless, permanence, the undecaying,

the featureless, non-elaboration,

peace, the deathless,

the exquisite, bliss, solace,

the exhaustion of craving,

the wonderful, the marvelous,

the secure, security,

unbinding,

the unafflicted, the passionless, the pure,

release, non-attachment,

the island, shelter, harbor, refuge,

the ultimate.

Other passages mention a consciousness in this freedom— “without feature or surface, without end, luminous all around”—lying outside of time and space, experienced when the six sense spheres stop functioning. In this it differs from the consciousness-khandha, which depends on the six sense spheres and can be described in such terms as near or far, past, present, or future. Consciousness without surface is thus the awareness of Awakening. And the freedom of this awareness carries over even when the awakened person returns to ordinary consciousness. As the Buddha said of himself:

“Freed, dissociated, & released from form, the Tathāgata dwells with unrestricted awareness. Freed, dissociated, & released from feeling … perception … fabrications … consciousness … birth … aging … death … suffering & stress … defilement, the Tathāgata dwells with unrestricted awareness.”

This shows again the importance of bringing the right questions to the teachings on the khandhas. If you use them to define what you are as a person, you tie yourself down to no purpose. The questions keep piling on. But if you use them to put an end to suffering, your questions fall away and you’re free. You never again cling to the khandhas and no longer need to use them to end your self-created suffering. As long as you’re still alive, you can employ the khandhas as needed for whatever skillful uses you see fit. After that, you’re liberated from all uses and needs, including the need to find words to describe that freedom to yourself or to anyone else.

[10] The Weight of Mountains | The Karma of Questions

[10] The Weight of Mountains | The Karma of Questions

The Weight of Mountains

Is a mountain heavy?

It may be heavy in and of itself, but as long as we don’t try to lift it up, it won’t be heavy for us.

This is a metaphor that one of my teachers, Ajaan Suwat, often used when explaining how to stop suffering from the problems of life. You don’t deny their existence—the mountains are heavy—and you don’t run away from them. As he would further explain, you deal with problems where you have to and solve them where you can. You simply learn how not to carry them around. That’s where the art of the practice lies: in living with real problems without making their reality burden the heart.

As a beginning step in mastering that art, it’s useful to look at the source for Ajaan Suwat’s metaphor—the Buddha’s teachings on dukkha—to get a fuller idea of how far the metaphor extends.

Dukkha is a word notoriously hard to translate into English. In the Pāli canon, it applies both to physical and to mental pain and dis-ease, ranging from intense anguish to the subtlest sense of being burdened or confined. The Pāli commentaries explain dukkha as “that which is hard to bear.” Ajaan MahaBoowa, a Thai forest master, translates it as “whatever puts a squeeze on the heart.” Although no single English term covers all of these meanings, the word “stress”—as a strain on body or mind—seems as close as English can get to the Pāli term; “suffering” can be used in places where “stress” seems too mild.

The Buddha focused his teachings on the issue of stress because he had found a method for transcending it. To understand that method, we have to see which parts of our experience are marked by stress. From his perspective, experience falls into two broad categories: compounded (saṅkhata)—put together from causal forces and processes—and uncompounded (asaṅkhata). All ordinary experience is compounded. Even such a simple act as looking at a flower is compounded, in that it depends on the physical conditions supporting the flower’s existence together with all the complex physical and mental factors involved in the act of seeing. The only experience that isn’t compounded is extraordinary—nirvana—for it doesn’t depend on causal factors of any kind.

Stress is totally absent from uncompounded experience. Its relation to compounded experience, though, is more complex. When the Buddha talked about dukkha in terms of the three common characteristics—inconstancy, stress, and not-self—he said that all compounded experiences are innately stressful. From this point of view, even flower-gazing is stressful despite the obvious pleasure it provides, for it relies on a fragile tension among the combined factors making up the experience.

Thus if we want to go beyond stress we’ll have to go beyond compounded experience. But this presents a problem: what will we use to reach the uncompounded? We can’t use uncompounded experience to get us there, because—by definition—it can’t play a role in any causal process. It can’t be used as a tool. So we need a way of using compounded experience to transcend itself.

To meet this need, the Buddha talked about dukkha in another context: the four noble truths. Here, for strategic purposes, he divided compounded experience into three truths—stress, its cause (craving), and the way to its cessation (the noble eightfold path). Uncompounded experience he left as the remaining truth: the cessation of stress. In defining the first truth he said that compounded experiences were stressful only when accompanied by clinging. In this sense, flower-gazing isn’t stressful unless we cling to the experience and try to base our happiness on it.

So it’s obvious that in these two contexts the Buddha is speaking of dukkha in two different senses. Ajaan Suwat’s mountain metaphor helps to explain how they are related. The heaviness of the mountain stands for dukkha as a common characteristic: the stress inherent in all compounded experiences. The fact that the mountain is heavy only for those who try to lift it stands for dukkha as a noble truth: the stress that comes only with clinging—the clinging that turns physical pain into mental pain, and turns aging, illness, and death into mental distress.

The Buddha taught dukkha as a common characteristic to make us reflect on the things we cling to: are they really worth holding onto? If not, why keep holding on? If life offered no pleasures better than those we already get from clinging, the Buddha’s insistence on the stress in things like flower-gazing might seem churlish and negative. But his purpose in getting us to reflect on the flip side of ordinary pleasures is to open our hearts to something very positive: the higher form of happiness, totally devoid of suffering and stress, that comes only with total letting go. So he also taught dukkha as a noble truth in order to focus our attention on where the real problem lies: not in the stressfulness of experiences, but in our ignorance in thinking we have to cling to them. And it’s a good thing, too, that this is where the issue lies. As long as there are mountains, there’s not much we can do about their inherent weight, but we can learn to break our habit of lifting them up and carrying them around. We can learn to stop clinging. That will put an end to our sufferings.

To understand how to let go effectively, it’s helpful to look at the Pāli word for clinging—upadāna—for it has a second meaning as well: the act of taking sustenance, as when a plant takes sustenance from the soil, or a fire from its fuel. This second meaning for upadāna applies to the mind as well. When the mind clings to an object, it’s feeding on that object. It’s trying to gain nourishment from sensory pleasures, possessions, relationships, recognition, status, whatever, to make up for the gnawing sense of emptiness it feels inside. Unfortunately, this mental nourishment is temporary at best, so we keep hungering for more. Yet no matter how much the mind may try to possess and control its food sources to guarantee a constant supply, they inevitably break down. The mind is then burdened with searching for new places to feed.

So the issue of stress comes down to the feeding habits of the mind. If the mind didn’t have to feed, it wouldn’t suffer. At the same time, it would no longer create hardships for the people and things it consumes—through possession and control—as food. If we want to end suffering for ourselves and at the same time relieve the hardships of others, we thus have to strengthen the mind to the point where it doesn’t have to feed, and then sharpen its discernment so that it doesn’t want to feed. When it neither needs nor wants to feed, it will let go without our having to tell it to.

The practice to end dukkha would be quick and easy if we could simply go straight for the discernment that puts an end to clinging. The feeding analogy, though, helps to explain why simply seeing the drawbacks of clinging isn’t enough to make us let go. If we’re not strong enough to go without sustenance, the mind will keep finding new ways to feed and cling. So we first have to learn healthy feeding habits that will strengthen the mind. Only then will it be in a position where it no longer needs to feed.

How does the mind feed and cling? The Pāli canon lists four ways:

(1) clinging to sensual passion for sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations;

(2) clinging to views about the world and the narratives of our lives;

(3) clinging to habits and practices—i.e., fixed ways of doing things; and

(4) clinging to doctrines of the self—i.e., ideas of whether or not we have a true identity, or of what that identity might be.

There’s rarely a moment when the ordinary mind isn’t clinging in at least one of these ways. Even when we abandon one form of clinging, it’s usually in favor of another. We may abandon a puritanical view because it interferes with sensual pleasure; or a sensual pleasure because it conflicts with a view about what we should do to stay healthy and fit. Our view of who we are may vary depending on which of our many senses of “I” is most pained, expanding into a sense of cosmic oneness when we feel confined by our small mind-body complex; and contracting into a small shell when we feel wounded from identifying with a cosmos so filled with cruelty and waste. When the insignificance of our finite self becomes oppressive again, we may jump at the idea that we have no self, but then that becomes oppressive.

So our minds jump from clinging to clinging like a bird trapped in a cage. When we realize we’re captive, we naturally search for a way out, but everywhere we turn seems to be another side of the cage. We may begin to wonder whether there is a way out, or whether talk of full release is simply an old archetypal ideal that has nothing to do with human reality. But the Buddha was a great strategist: he realized that one of the walls of the cage is actually a door, and that if we grasp it skillfully, it’ll swing wide open.

In other words, he found that the way to go beyond clinging is to turn our four ways of clinging into the path to their own abandoning. We’ll need a certain amount of sensory pleasure—in terms of adequate food, clothing, and shelter—to find the strength to go beyond sensual passion. We’ll need right view—seeing all things, including views, in terms of the four noble truths—to undermine our clinging to views. And we’ll need a regimen of the five ethical precepts and the practice of meditation to put the mind in a solid position where it can drop its clinging to habits and practices. Underlying all this, we’ll need a healthy sense of self-love, self-responsibility, and self-discipline to master the practices leading to the insight that cuts through our clinging to doctrines of the self.

So we start the path to the end of suffering, not by trying to drop our clingings immediately, but by learning to cling more strategically. In terms of the feeding analogy, we don’t try to starve the mind. We simply change its diet, weaning it away from junk food in favor of health food, developing inner qualities that will make it so strong that it won’t need to feed ever again.

The canon lists these qualities as five:

conviction in the principle of karma—that our happiness depends on our own actions;

persistence in abandoning unskillful qualities and developing skillful ones in their stead;

mindfulness;

concentration; and

discernment.

Of these, concentration—at the level of jhāna, or intense absorption—is the strength that the Buddhist tradition most often compares to good, healthy food. A discourse in the Aṅguttara Nikāya (7:63) compares the four levels of jhāna to the provisions used to stock a frontier fortress. Ajaan Lee, one of the Thai forest masters, compares them to the provisions needed on a journey through a lonely, desolate forest. Or as Dhammapada 200 says about the rapture of jhāna,

How very happily we live,

we who have nothing.

We will feed on rapture

like the Radiant gods.

As for discernment: When the mind is strengthened with the food of good concentration, it can begin contemplating the drawbacks of having to feed. This is the part of the Buddha’s teaching that—for many of us—goes most directly against the grain, because feeding, in every sense of the word, is our primary way of relating to and enjoying the world around us. Our most cherished sense of inter-connectedness with the world—what some people call our interbeing—is, at its most basic level, inter-eating. We feed on others, and they feed on us. Sometimes our relationships are mutually nourishing, sometimes not, but either way it’s hard to imagine any lasting relationship where some kind of physical or mental nourishment wasn’t being consumed. At the same time, feeding is the activity in which we experience the most intimate sense of ourselves. We define ourselves through the pleasures, people, ideas, and activities we keep returning to for nourishment.

So it’s hard for us to imagine a world, any possibility of enjoyment—even our very self—where we wouldn’t inter-eat. Our common resistance to the idea of no longer feeding—one of the Buddha’s most radically uncommon teachings—comes largely from a failure of the imagination. We can hardly conceive of what he’s trying to tell us. So he has to prescribe some strong medicine to jog our minds into new perspectives.

This is where his teachings on dukkha, or stress, come into play. When the mind is strong and well fed, it can begin to look objectively at the stress involved in having to feed. The teachings on dukkha as a common characteristic focus on the drawbacks of what the mind takes for food. Sometimes it latches onto out-and-out suffering. It clings to the body even when racked with pain. It clings to its preferences and relationships even when these bring anguish, grief, and despair. Sometimes the mind latches onto pleasures and joys, but pleasures and joys turn stressful when they deteriorate and change. In any event, everything the mind latches onto is by its very nature compounded, and there’s always at least a subtle level of stress inherent in keeping the compound going. This applies not only to gross, external conditions, but even to the most subtle levels of concentration in the mind.

When we see stress as a characteristic common to all the things we latch onto, it helps dispel their allure. Pleasures begin to ring hollow and false. Even our sufferings—which we can often glamorize with a perverse pride—begin to seem banal when reduced to their common characteristic of stress. This helps cut them down to size.

Of course, some people object to the idea of contemplating the dukkha inherent in the mind’s food, on the grounds that this contemplation doesn’t do justice to the many joys and satisfactions in life. The Buddha, however, never denies the existence of pleasure. He simply points out that if you focus on the allure of your food, you’ll never be able to outgrow your eating addictions. It would be like asking an alcoholic to muse on the subtle good flavors of scotch and wine.

Dukkha is inherent not only in the things on which we feed, but also in the very act of feeding. This is the focal point for the Buddha’s teaching on dukkha as a noble truth. If we have to feed, we’re a slave to our appetites. And can we trust ourselves to behave in honorable ways when the demands of these slave drivers aren’t met? Inter-eating is not always a pretty thing. At the same time, as long as we need to feed we’re prey to any uncertainties in our food sources, at the mercy of any people or forces with power over them. If we can’t do without them, we’re chained to them. The mind isn’t free to go places where there isn’t any food. And, as the Buddha guarantees, those are precisely the places—beyond our ordinary mental horizons—where the greatest happiness lies.

The purpose of these two contemplations—on the stress inherent both in the mind’s food and in the way it feeds—is to sensitize us to limitations that we otherwise accept, sometimes blithely, always blindly, without thought. Once the realization finally hits home that they’re not worth the price they entail, we lose all infatuation with our desire to feed. And, unlike the body, the mind can reach a level of strength where it no longer needs to cling or take in sustenance, even from the path of practice. When it becomes strong enough in conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment, it can open to a dimension—the deathless—where there is neither feeding nor being fed upon. That puts an end to the “feeder,” and there’s no more suffering with regard to food. In other words, once we’ve fully penetrated the deathless, dukkha as a common characteristic is no longer an issue; dukkha as a noble truth no longer exists.

This is where you discover something unexpected: the mountains you’ve been trying to lift are all a by-product of your feeding. When you stop feeding, no new mountains are formed. Although there may still be some past-karma mountains remaining around you, they’ll eventually wear away and no new ones will take their place. In the meantime, their weight is no longer a problem. Once you’ve finally stopped trying to lift them up, there’s nothing to hold you down.