2020/11/16

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Freedom from Buddha Nature
NAVIGATIONBooks/Head& Heart Together/Freedom from Buddha Nature
“What is the mind? The mind isn’t ‘is’ anything.


























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Freedom from Buddha Nature
NAVIGATION Books/Head& Heart Together/Freedom from Buddha Nature
“What is the mind? The mind isn’t ‘is’ anything.” — Ajaan Chah

“The mind is neither good nor evil, but it’s what knows good and knows evil. It’s what does good and does evil. And it’s what lets go of good and lets go of evil.” — Ajaan Lee


A brahman once asked the Buddha, “Will all the world reach release [Awakening], or half the world, or a third?” But the Buddha didn’t answer. Ven. Ānanda, concerned that the wanderer might misconstrue the Buddha’s silence, took the man aside and gave him an analogy: Imagine a fortress with a single gate. A wise gatekeeper would walk around the fortress and not see an opening in the wall big enough for even a cat to slip through. Because he’s wise, he would realize that his knowledge didn’t tell him how many people would come into the fortress, but it did tell him that whoever came into the fortress would have to come in through the gate. In the same way, the Buddha didn’t focus on how many people would reach Awakening but he did know that anyone who reached Awakening would have to follow the path he had found: abandoning the five hindrances, establishing the four frames of reference, and developing the seven factors for Awakening.


What’s striking about the Buddha’s knowledge is the implied “if”: If people want to gain Awakening they will have to follow this path, but the choice as to whether they want Awakening is theirs. The Buddha’s knowledge of the future didn’t mean that the future was preordained, for people are free to choose. They can take up a particular course of action and stick with it, or not, as they see fit.


The Buddha thus based all his teaching on freedom of choice. As he said, if everything were predetermined by the past, there would be no point in teaching a path to Awakening. The number of people who would reach Awakening would already have been set a long time ago, and they would have no need for a path or a teacher. Those preordained to awaken would get there inevitably as a result of a long-past action or an essential nature already built into the mind. Those preordained not to awaken wouldn’t stand a chance.


But these things are not preordained. No one is doomed never to awaken, but—until you’ve had your first sight of the deathless at stream-entry—neither is Awakening assured. It’s contingent on intentional actions chosen in each present moment. And even after stream-entry, you’re constantly faced with choices that will speed up final Awakening or slow it down. Nibbāna, of course, is independent and unconditioned; but the act of awakening to nibbāna depends on a path of practice that has to be willed. It happens only if you choose to give rise to its causes. This, as the Buddha noted, involves determining to do four things: not to neglect discernment, to preserve truth, to develop relinquishment, and to train for peace.


Assumptions about the Mind
To stick with these four determinations, the mind has to make some assumptions about itself: its power to do the necessary work and to receive the anticipated benefits. But one of the central features of the Buddha’s strategy as a teacher was that even though his primary focus was on the mind, he nowhere defined what the mind is. As he said, if you define yourself, you limit yourself. So instead he focused his assumptions on what the mind can do.


To begin with, the mind can change quickly. Normally a master of the apt simile, even the Buddha had to admit that he could find no adequate analogy for how quickly the mind can change. We might say that it can change in the twinkling of an eye, but it’s actually faster than that.


And it’s capable of all sorts of things. Neither inherently good nor inherently bad, it can do a huge variety of good and bad actions. As the Buddha said, the mind is more variegated than the animal kingdom. Think of the many species of fish in the sea, birds in the sky, animals on the land and under the ground, whether extant or extinct: All of these species are products of minds, and the mind can take on a wider variety of forms than even that.


This variety comes from the many different choices the mind makes under the influence of ignorance and defilement. But the mind doesn’t always have to be defiled. Past kamma is not entirely deterministic. Even though past kamma shapes the range of options open to the mind in the present, it doesn’t have to determine present kamma—the intentions by which the mind chooses to fabricate actual experiences from among those options. Thus present kamma can choose to continue creating the conditions for more ignorance, or not, because present choices are what keep ignorance alive. Although no one—not even a Buddha—can trace back to when the defilement of ignorance first began, the continued existence of ignorance depends on conditions continually provided by unskillful kamma. If these conditions are removed, ignorance will disband.


This is why the Buddha said that the mind is luminous, stained with defilements that come and go. Taken out of context, this statement might be construed as implying that the mind is inherently awakened. But in context the Buddha is simply saying that the mind, once stained, is not permanently stained. When the conditions for the stains are gone, the mind becomes luminous again. But this luminosity is not an awakened nature. As the Buddha states, this luminous mind can be developed. In the scheme of the four noble truths, if something is to be developed it’s not the goal; it’s part of the path to the goal. After this luminosity has been developed in the advanced stages of concentration, it’s abandoned once it has completed its work in helping to pierce through ignorance.


The fact that the mind’s own choices can pierce its own ignorance underlies the Buddha’s most important assumption about the mind: It can be trained to awaken, to see the causes of ignorance and to bring them to an end. The primary step in this training is the first determination: not to neglect discernment. This phrase may sound strange—to what extent do we consciously neglect discernment?—but it points to an important truth. Discernment is insight into how the mind fabricates its experiences. This process of fabrication is going on all the time right before our eyes—even nearer than our eyes—and yet part of the mind chooses to ignore it. We tend to be more interested in the experiences that result from the fabrication: the physical, mental, and emotional states we want to savor and enjoy. It’s like watching a play. We enjoy entering into the make-believe world on the stage, and prefer to ignore the noises made by the back-stage crew that would call the reality of that world into question.


This ignorance is willed, which is why we need an act of the will to see through it, to discern the back-stage machinations of the mind. Discernment thus has two sides: understanding and motivation. You have to understand the mind’s fabrications as fabrications, looking less for the what—i.e., what they are—than for the how—how they happen as part of a causal process. And you have to be motivated to develop this discernment, to see why you want it to influence the mind. Otherwise it won’t have the conditions to grow.


The understanding comes down to the basic insight of the Buddha’s Awakening, seeing things as actions and events in a pattern of cause and effect. It also involves seeing how some actions are unskillful, leading to stress and suffering, while others are skillful, bringing stress to an end; and that we have the freedom to choose skillful actions or not. This understanding—which forms the basic framework of the four noble truths—is called appropriate attention.


The motivation to develop appropriate attention grows from combining good will with this understanding. You set your sights on a happiness totally harmless. You see that if you make unskillful choices, you’re going to cause suffering; if you make skillful ones, you won’t. This motivation thus combines good will with heedfulness, the quality that underlies every step on the path. In fact, heedfulness lies at the root of all skillful qualities in the mind. Thus, in encouraging people to awaken, the Buddha never assumed that their Awakening would come from the innate goodness of their nature. He simply assumed something very blatant and ordinary: that people like pleasure and hate pain, and that they care about whether they can gain that pleasure and avoid that pain. It was a mark of his genius that he could see the potential for Awakening in this very common desire.


Building on Discernment
When you stick with the understanding and motivation provided by this first determination, it sets in motion the other three. For instance, the determination to preserve the truth grows from seeing the mind’s capacity to lie to itself about whether its actions are causing suffering. You want to be honest and vigilant in looking for and admitting suffering, even when you’re attached to the actions that cause it. This truthfulness relates to the path in two stages: first, when looking for unskillful actions that keep you off the path; and then, as the path nears fruition, looking for the subtle levels of stress caused even by skillful elements of the path—such as right concentration—once they have done their work and need to be let go for the sake of full liberation.


The determination to develop relinquishment can then build on this truthful assessment of what needs to be done. Relinquishment requires discernment as well, for not only do you need to see what’s skillful and what’s not; you also need to keep reminding yourself that you have the freedom to choose, and to be adept at talking yourself into doing skillful things you’re afraid of, and abandoning unskillful actions you like.


The determination to train for peace helps maintain your sense of direction in this process, for it reminds you that the only true happiness is peace of mind, and that you want to look for ever-increasing levels of peace as they become possible through the practice. This determination emulates the trait that the Buddha said was essential to his Awakening: the unwillingness to rest content with lesser levels of stillness when higher levels could be attained. In this way, the stages of concentration, instead of becoming obstacles or dangers on the path, serve as stepping-stones to greater sensitivity and, through that sensitivity, to the ultimate peace where all passion, aversion, and delusion grow still.


This peace thus grows from the simple choice to keep looking at the mind’s fabrications as processes, as actions and results. But to fully achieve this peace, your discernment has to be directed not only at the mind’s fabrication of the objects of its awareness, but also at its fabrications about itself and about the path it’s creating. Your sense of who you are is a fabrication, regardless of whether you see the mind as separate or interconnected, finite or infinite, good or bad. The path is also a fabrication: very subtle and sometimes seemingly effortless, but fabricated nonetheless. If these layers of inner fabrication aren’t seen for what they are—if you regard them as innate or inevitable—they can’t be deconstructed, and full Awakening can’t occur.


No Innate Nature
This is why the Buddha never advocated attributing an innate nature of any kind to the mind—good, bad, or Buddha. The idea of innate natures slipped into the Buddhist tradition in later centuries, when the principle of freedom was forgotten. Past bad kamma was seen as so totally deterministic that there seemed no way around it unless you assumed either an innate Buddha in the mind that could overpower it, or an external Buddha who would save you from it. But when you understand the principle of freedom—that past kamma doesn’t totally shape the present, and that present kamma can always be free to choose the skillful alternative—you realize that the idea of innate natures is unnecessary: excess baggage on the path.


And it bogs you down. If you assume that the mind is basically bad, you won’t feel capable of following the path, and will tend to look for outside help to do the work for you. If you assume that the mind is basically good, you’ll feel capable but will easily get complacent. This stands in the way of the heedfulness needed to get you on the path, and to keep you there when the path creates states of relative peace and ease that seem so trustworthy and real. If you assume a Buddha nature, you not only risk complacency but you also entangle yourself in metaphysical thorn patches: If something with an awakened nature can suffer, what good is it? How could something innately awakened become defiled? If your original Buddha nature became deluded, what’s to prevent it from becoming deluded after it’s re-awakened?


These points become especially important as you reach the subtle levels of fabrication on the more advanced stages of the path. If you’re primed to look for innate natures, you’ll tend to see innate natures, especially when you reach the luminous, non-dual stages of concentration called themeless, emptiness, and undirected. You’ll get stuck on whichever stage matches your assumptions about what your awakened nature is. But if you’re primed to look for the process of fabrication, you’ll see these stages as forms of fabrication, and this will enable you to deconstruct them, to pacify them, until you encounter the peace that’s not fabricated at all.


Exploring Freedom
So instead of making assumptions about innate natures or inevitable outcomes, the Buddha advised exploring the possibility of freedom as it’s immediately present each time you make a choice. Freedom is not a nature, and you don’t find it by looking for your hidden innate nature. You find freedom by looking at where it’s constantly showing itself: in the fact that your present intentions are not totally conditioned by the past. You catch your first glimmer of it as a range of possibilities from which you can choose and as your ability to act more skillfully—causing more pleasure and less pain—than you ordinarily might. Your sense of this freedom grows as you explore and exercise it, each time you choose the most skillful course of action heading in the direction of discernment, truthfulness, relinquishment, and peace. The choice to keep making skillful choices may require assumptions, but to keep the mind focused on the issue of fabrication the Buddha saw that these assumptions are best kept to a bare minimum: that the mind wants happiness, that it can choose courses of actions that promote happiness or thwart it, that it can change its ways, and that it can train itself to achieve the ultimate happiness where all fabrications fall away.


These assumptions are the Buddha’s starter kit of skillful means to get you on the path of good will, heedfulness, and appropriate attention. As with any journey, you do best to take along only the bare essentials so that you don’t weigh yourself down. This is especially true as you test the limits of freedom, for the closer you come to ultimate freedom, the more you find that things fall away. First the nouns of natures and identities fall away, as you focus on the verbs of action and choice. Then the verbs fall away, too. When the Buddha was asked who or what he was, he didn’t answer with a who or what. He said simply, “Awakened”: a past participle, a verb that has done its work. Similarly, when the suttas describe the Awakening of an arahant, they say that his or her mind is released from fermentations. But when they describe how this release is experienced, they simply say, “With release, there is the knowledge, ‘Released.’” No comment on what is released. Not even, as it’s sometimes translated, “It is released.” There’s no noun, no pronoun, just a past participle: “released.” That’s all, but it’s enough.




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The Buddha via the Bible
NAVIGATIONBooks/Head& Heart Together/The Buddha via the Bible
How Western Buddhists Read the Pāli Canon
Western culture learned how to read spiritual texts by reading the Bible. Not that we all read it the same way—quite the contrary. We’ve fought long, bloody wars over the issue. But most of the differences in our readings lie within a fairly tight constellation of ideas about authority and obligation, meaning and mystery, and the purpose of history and time. And even though those ideas grew from the peculiarities of the Bible and of Western history, we regard them as perfectly natural, and in some cases, even better than natural: modern. They’re so implicit in our mindset that when people rebel against the Bible’s authority, their notions of rebellion and authority often derive from the tradition they’re trying to reject.


So it’s only to be expected that when we encounter spiritual texts from other traditions, we approach them as we would the Bible. And because this tendency is so ingrained, we rarely realize what we’ve done.


For example, the way we read the Pāli Canon has largely been influenced by modern attitudes toward the Bible that date back to the German Romantics and American Transcendentalists—primarily Ralph Waldo Emerson. Even though we seldom read these thinkers outside of literature or history classes, their ideas permeate our culture through their influence on humanistic psychology, liberal spirituality, and the study of comparative religion: portals through which many of us first encounter the religions of other cultures. The question is, Do these ideas do justice to the Pāli Canon? Are we getting the most out of the Canon if we read it this way? We rarely ask these questions because our reading habits are invisible to us. We need fresh eyes to see how odd those habits are. And a good way to freshen our eyes is to look historically at the particulars of where these habits come from, and the unspoken assumptions behind them.


The Romantics and Transcendentalists formulated their ideas about reading the Bible in response to developments in linguistics, psychology, and historical scholarship in the 17th to 19th centuries. This is what makes them modern. They were addressing a culture that had grown skeptical toward organized religion and had embraced intellectual principles capable of challenging the Bible’s authority. Thus, to be taken seriously, they had to speak the language of universal historical and psychological laws. However, the actual content of those laws drew on ideas dating back through the Middle Ages to the Church Fathers—and even further, to the Bible itself: doctrines such as Paul’s dictum that the invisible things of God are clearly seen through the visible things He made; Augustine’s teaching on Christ the Inner Teacher, illuminating the mind; and John Cassian’s instructions on how to read the Bible metaphorically. So even though the Romantic/Transcendentalist view is modern and universal in its form, its actual substance is largely ancient and specific to the West.


In the complete version of this article—available at www.dhammatalks.org—I’ve traced how these ideas were shaped by developments in Western history. Here, however, I want to focus on the parallels between the psychological laws the Transcendentalists formulated for reading the Bible, and the assumptions that modern Dharma teachers bring to reading the Pāli Canon. My purpose is to show that, while these assumptions seem natural and universal to us, they are culturally limited and limiting: ill-suited for getting the most out of what the Canon provides.


The Transcendentalist approach to the Bible boils down to eight principles. The first principle concerns the nature of the universe; the second, the means by which the human mind can best connect with that nature; and the remaining six, the implications of the first two concerning how the Bible should be read. In the following discussion, the quotations illustrating each principle are from Emerson.


1. The universe is an organic whole composed of vital forces. (The technical term for this view is “monistic vitalism.”) This whole is essentially good because it is continuously impelled forward by the over-arching force of a benevolent creator—which Emerson called the Over-soul—operating both in external nature and in the inner recesses of the soul. People suffer because their social conditioning estranges them from the inner and outer influences of the Over-soul, depriving them of its sustaining, creative power. Thus the spiritual life is essentially a search for reconnection and oneness with the whole.


The simplest person, who in his integrity worships God, becomes God… the heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly in endless circulation through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one.


2. Reconnection and oneness are best found by adopting a receptive, open attitude toward the influences of nature on a sensory, pre-verbal level.


Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.


3. The Bible can comfort the soul estranged from nature, but it should not be granted absolute authority because the inspiration it records is only second-hand, interfering with the soul’s direct contact with the One.


The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it is profane to seek to interpose helps.


The saints and demigods whom history worships we are constrained to accept with a grain of allowance. Though in our lonely hours we draw a new strength out of their memory, yet, pressed on our attention, as they are by the thoughtless and customary, they fatigue and invade. The soul gives itself, alone, original, and pure, to the Lonely, Original, and Pure, who, on that condition, gladly inhabits, leads, and speaks through it.


4. The Bible’s message is also limited in that it was composed for a less enlightened stage in human history.


If, therefore, a man claims to know and speak of God, and carries you backward to the phraseology of some old mouldered nation in another country, in another world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion? Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul.


The idealism of Jesus… is a crude statement of the fact that all nature is the rapid efflux of goodness executing and organizing itself.


5. The Bible’s authority is actually dangerous in that it stifles the soul’s creative impulses, the most direct experience of the Over-soul’s vital force within.


The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul… The soul active sees absolute truth and utters truth, or creates.


When we have broken our god of tradition, and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with his presence.


What is that abridgement and selection we observe in all spiritual activity, but itself the creative impulse?


Yet see what strong intellects dare not yet hear God himself, unless he speak the phraseology of I know not what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul… When we have new perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded treasures as old rubbish.


6. Another limitation on the language of the Bible is that it is expressive rather than descriptive. In other words, unlike the meta-cultural laws of psychology, it does not describe universal human truths. Instead, it expresses through metaphor how the force of the Over-soul felt to particular people at particular times. Thus, to be relevant to the present, it is best read, not as a scholar would—trying to find what actually happened in the past, or what it meant to its authors—but as a poet might read the poetry of others, judging for him or herself what metaphors will be most useful for inspiring his or her own creative genius.


[One] must attain and maintain that lofty sight where poetry and annals are alike.


The Garden of Eden, the sun standing still in Gibeon, is poetry thenceforward to all nations. Who cares what the fact was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven as an immortal sign.


In the book I read, the good thought returns to me, as every truth will, the image of the whole soul. To the bad thought which I find in it, the same soul becomes a discerning, separating sword, and lops it away.


7. By reading the Bible creatively in this way, one is assisting in the progress of God’s will in the world.


Because the soul is progressive, it never quite repeats itself, but in every act attempts the production of a new and fairer whole…. We need not fear that we can lose any thing by the progress of the soul. The soul may be trusted to the end.


8. The Transcendentalists all agreed with the Romantics that the soul’s most trustworthy sense of morality came from a sense of interconnectedness within oneself and with others. They differed among themselves, though, in how this interconnectedness was best embodied. Emerson advocated focusing on the present-moment particulars of one’s ordinary activities. In his words, “The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.”


Other Transcendentalists, however—such as Orestes Brownson, Margaret Fuller, and Theodore Parker—insisted that true inner oneness was impossible in a society rent by injustice and inequality. Thus, they advocated reading the Bible prophetically, as God’s call to engage in progressive social work. Emerson, in turn, retorted that unless change came first from within, even the ideal social structure would be corrupted by the lack of inner contact with God. Thus the two camps reached a standoff.


Still, even the socially engaged Transcendentalists read the Bible creatively and metaphorically, seeking not its original message but a new message appropriate for modern needs. Brownson, for instance, followed the French socialist, Pierre Leroux, in interpreting the Last Supper as Jesus’ call to all Christians to drop artificial social divisions caused by wage labor, capitalist exploitation, external signs of status, etc., and to construct a new social system that would allow all humanity to celebrate their mutual interconnectedness.


Historians have traced how these eight principles—including the split in the eighth—have shaped American liberal spirituality in Christian, Reform Jewish, and New Age circles up to the present. Emerson’s way of phrasing these points may sound quaint, but the underlying principles are still familiar even to those who’ve never read him. Thus it’s only natural that Americans raised in these traditions, on coming to Buddhism, would bring these principles along. Emerson himself, in his later years, led the way in this direction through his selective appreciation of Hindu and Buddhist teachings—which he tended to conflate—and modern Western Buddhist teachers still apply all eight principles to the Pāli Canon even today.


In the following discussion I’ve illustrated these principles, as applied to the Canon, with quotations from both lay and monastic teachers. The teachers are left unnamed because I want to focus, not on individuals, but on what historians call a cultural syndrome, in which both the teachers and their audiences share responsibility for influencing one another: the teachers, by how they try to explain and persuade; the audiences, by what they’re inclined to accept or reject. Some of the teachers quoted here embrace Romantic/Transcendentalist ideas more fully than others, but the tendency is present, at least to some extent, in them all.


1. The first principle is that the Canon, like all spiritual texts, takes interconnectedness—the experience of unity within and without—as its basic theme. On attaining this unity, one drops the identity of one’s small self and embraces a new identity with the universe at large.


The goal [of Dhamma practice] is integration, through love and acceptance, openness and receptivity, leading to a unified wholeness of experience without the artificial boundaries of separate selfhood.


It is the goal of spiritual life to open to the reality that exists beyond our small sense of self. Through the gate of oneness we awaken to the ocean within us, we come to know in yet another way that the seas we swim in are not separate from all that lives. When our identity expands to include everything, we find a peace with the dance of the world. It is all ours, and our heart is full and empty, large enough to embrace it all.


2. The Canon’s prime contribution to human spirituality is its insight into how interconnectedness can be cultivated through systematic training in mindfulness, defined as an open, receptive, pre-verbal awareness. This provides a practical technique for fostering the sort of transparent religious consciousness that Emerson extolled. One teacher, in fact, describes mindfulness as “sacred awareness.”


Mindfulness is presence of mind, attentiveness or awareness. Yet the kind of awareness involved in mindfulness differs profoundly from the kind of awareness at work in our usual mode of consciousness… The mind is deliberately kept at the level of bare attention, a detached observation of what is happening within us and around us in the present moment. In the practice of right mindfulness the mind is trained to remain in the present, open, quiet, and alert, contemplating the present event. All judgements and interpretations have to be suspended, or if they occur, just registered and dropped. The task is simply to note whatever comes up just as it is occurring, riding the changes of events in the way a surfer rides the waves on the sea.


3. However, the Canon does not speak with final authority on how this receptive state should be used or how life should be led. This is because the nature of spiritual inspiration is purely individual and mysterious. Where the Transcendentalists spoke of following the soul, Western Buddhists speak of following the heart. As one teacher, who has stated that following one’s heart might mean taking the path of psychotropic drugs, has said:


No one can define for us exactly what our path should be.


[A]ll the teachings of books, maps, and beliefs have little to do with wisdom or compassion. At best they are a signpost, a finger pointing at the moon, or the leftover dialogue from a time when someone received some true spiritual nourishment…. We must discover within ourselves our own way to become conscious, to live a life of the spirit.


Religion and philosophy have their value, but in the end all we can do is open to mystery.


4. The Canon’s authority is also limited by the cultural circumstances in which it was composed. Several teachers, for example, have recommended dropping the Canon’s teachings on kamma because they were simply borrowed from the cultural presuppositions of the Buddha’s time:


Even the most creative, world-transforming individuals cannot stand on their own shoulders. They too remain dependent upon their cultural context, whether intellectual or spiritual—which is precisely what Buddhism’s emphasis on impermanence and causal interdependence implies. The Buddha also expressed his new, liberating insight in the only way he could, using the religious categories that his culture could understand. Inevitably, then, his way of expressing the dharma was a blend of the truly new… and the conventional religious thought of his time. Although the new transcends the conventional… the new cannot immediately and completely escape the conventional wisdom it surpasses.


5. Another reason to restrict the Canon’s authority is that its teachings can harm the sensitive psyche. Where Emerson warned against allowing the Bible to stifle individual creativity, Western Buddhists warn that the Canon’s talk of eliminating greed, aversion, and delusion ignores, in an unhealthy way, the realities of the human dimension.


If you go into ancient Indian philosophy, there is a great emphasis on perfection as the absolute, as the ideal. [But] is that archetype, is that ideal, what we actually experience?


The images we have been taught about perfection can be destructive to us. Instead of clinging to an inflated, superhuman view of perfection, we learn to allow ourselves the space of kindness.


6. Because the language of the Canon is archetypal, it should be read, not as descriptive, but as expressive and poetic. And that expression is best absorbed intuitively.


It’s never a matter of trying to figure it all out, rather we pick up these phrases and chew them over, taste them, digest them and let them energize us by virtue of their own nature.


Even these ostensibly literal maps may be better read as if they were a kind of poem, rich in possible meanings.


7. To read the Canon as poetry may yield new meanings unintended by the compilers, but that simply advances a process at work throughout Buddhist history. Some thinkers have explained this process as a form of vitalism, with Buddhism or the Dharma identified as the vital force. Sometimes the vitalism is explicit—as when one thinker defined Buddhism as “an inexpressible living force.” At other times, it is no less present for being implied:


The great strength of Buddhism throughout its history is that it has succeeded many times in reinventing itself according to the needs of its new host culture. What is happening today in the West is no different.


In each historical period, the Dharma finds new means to unfold its potential in ways precisely linked to that era’s distinctive conditions. Our own era provides the appropriate stage for the transcendent truth of the Dharma to bend back upon the world and engage human suffering at multiple levels, not in mere contemplation but in effective, relief-granting action.


8. As this last quotation shows, some thinkers recommend reading the Canon not only poetically but also prophetically as a source of moral imperatives for social action in our times. Because the Canon says little on the topic of social action, this requires a creative approach to the text.


We can root out thematically relevant Buddhist themes, texts, and archetypes and clarify them as core teachings for Buddhist based social change work.


Of the various themes found in the Pāli Canon, dependent co-arising—interpreted as interconnectedness—is most commonly cited as a source for social obligation, paralleling the way the Transcendentalists saw interconnectedness as the source of all moral feeling.


Numerous thinkers have hailed this prophetic reading of the Canon as a new turning of the Dhamma wheel, in which the Dhamma grows by absorbing advances in modern Western culture. Many are the lessons, they say, that the Dhamma must learn from the West, among them: democracy, equality, Gandhian nonviolence, humanistic psychology, ecofeminism, sustainable economics, systems theory, deep ecology, new paradigm science, and the Christian and Jewish examples of religious social action. We are assured that these developments are positive because the deepest forces of reality—within and without—can be trusted to the end.


We must be open to a variety of responses toward social change that come from no particular “authority” but are grounded in the radical creativity that comes when concepts fall away.


There is an underlying unity to all things, and a wise heart knows this as it knows the in-and-out of the breath. They are all part of a sacred whole in which we exist, and in the deepest way they are completely trustworthy. We need not fear the energies of this world or any other.


Often the trustworthiness of the mind is justified with a teaching drawn from the Mahāyāna: the principle of Buddha-nature present in all. This principle has no basis in the Pāli Canon, and so its adoption in Western Theravāda is frequently attributed to the popularity of Mahāyāna in Western Buddhism at large. Only rarely is the question asked, Why do Westerners find the Mahāyāna attractive? Is it because the Mahāyāna teaches doctrines we’re already predisposed to accept? Probably so—especially when you consider that although the principle of Buddha-nature is interpreted in many ways within the Mahāyāna itself, here in the West it’s primarily understood in the form closest to the Transcendentalist idea of innate goodness.


Compassion is our deepest nature. It arises from our interconnection with all things.


These eight principles for interpreting the Pāli Canon are often presented as meta-cultural truths but, as we have seen, they developed in the specific context of the Western engagement with the Bible. In other words, they’re historically conditioned. When we compare them to the Canon itself, we find that they directly contradict the Dhamma. At the same time, when teachers try to justify these principles on the basis of the Canon, we find that they’re invariably misreading the text.


1. The idea that spiritual life is a search for unity depends on the assumption that the universe is an organic whole, and that the whole is essentially good. The Canon, however, consistently portrays the goal of the spiritual life as transcendence: The world—which is synonymous with the All (SN 35:23)—is a dangerous river over which one has to cross to safety on the other side. The state of oneness or non-duality is conditioned (AN 10:29): still immersed in the river, unsafe. In reaching nibbāna, one is not returning to the source of things (MN 1), but reaching something never reached before (AN 5:77): a dimension beyond all space and time. And in attaining this dimension, one is not establishing a new identity, for all identities—even infinite ones (DN 15)—ultimately prevent that attainment, and so have to be dropped.


2. The Canon never defines mindfulness as an open, receptive, pre-verbal state. In fact, its standard definition for the faculty of mindfulness is the ability to keep things in mind. Thus, in the practice of right mindfulness, one is keeping one of four frames of reference in mind: body, feelings, mind, and mental qualities, remembering to stay with these things in and of themselves. And some of the more vivid analogies for the practice of mindfulness suggest anything but an open, receptive, non-judging state.


“Just as when a person whose turban or head was on fire would put forth extra desire, effort, diligence, endeavor, earnestness, mindfulness, and alertness to put out the fire on his turban or head; in the same way, the monk should put forth extra desire… mindfulness, and alertness for the abandoning of those evil, unskillful mental qualities.” — AN 10:51


“Suppose, monks, that a large crowd of people comes thronging together, saying, ‘The beauty queen! The beauty queen!’ And suppose that the beauty queen is highly accomplished at singing and dancing, so that an even greater crowd comes thronging, saying, ‘The beauty queen is singing! The beauty queen is dancing!’ Then a man comes along, desiring life and shrinking from death, desiring pleasure and abhorring pain. They say to him, ‘Now look here, mister. You must take this bowl filled to the brim with oil and carry it on your head in between the great crowd and the beauty queen. A man with a raised sword will follow right behind you, and wherever you spill even a drop of oil, right there will he cut off your head.’ Now what do you think, monks? Will that man, not paying attention to the bowl of oil, let himself get distracted outside?”


“No, lord.”


“I have given you this parable to convey a meaning. The meaning is this: The bowl filled to the brim with oil stands for mindfulness immersed in the body.” — SN 47:20


There’s a tendency, even among serious scholars, to mine in the Canon for passages presenting a more spacious, receptive picture of mindfulness. But this tendency, in addition to ignoring the basic definition of mindfulness, denies the essential unity among the factors of the path—one such scholar, to make his case, had to define right mindfulness and right effort as two mutually exclusive forms of practice. This suggests that the tendency to define mindfulness as an open, receptive, non-judging state comes from a source other than the Canon. It’s possible to find Asian roots for this tendency, in the schools of meditation that define mindfulness as bare awareness or mere noting. But the way the West has morphed these concepts in the direction of acceptance and affirmation has less to do with Asian tradition, and more to do with our cultural tendency to exalt a pre-verbal receptivity as the source for spiritual inspiration.


3. The Canon states clearly that there is only one path to nibbāna (DN 16). Trying to find awakening in ways apart from the noble eightfold path is like trying to squeeze oil from gravel, or milking a cow by twisting its horn (MN 126). The Buddha’s knowledge of the way to awakening is like that of an expert gatekeeper who knows, after encircling the walls of a city, that there’s only one way into the city: the gate he guards (AN 10:95).


One of the tests for determining whether one has reached the first level of awakening is if, on reflection, one realizes that no one outside the Buddha’s teaching teaches the true, accurate, way to the goal (SN 48:53). Although individual people may have to focus on issues particular to their temperament, the basic outline of the path is the same for all.


4. Obviously the Buddha’s language and metaphors were culturally conditioned, but it’s hard to identify any of his essential teachings as limited in that way. He claimed a knowledge of the past that far outstrips ours (DN 29; DN 1), and he’d often claim direct knowledge when stating that he was speaking for the past, present, and future when describing, for instance, how physical, verbal, and mental actions are to be purified (MN 61) and the highest emptiness that can be attained (MN 121). This is why the Dhamma is said to be timeless, and why the first level of awakening verifies that this is so.


At the same time, when people speak of essential Buddhist teachings that are limited by the cultural conventions of the Buddha’s time, they’re usually misinformed as to what those conventions were. For instance, with the doctrine of kamma: Even though the Buddha used the word kamma like his contemporaries, his conception of what kamma was and how it worked differed radically from theirs (AN 3:62; MN 101).


5. Similarly, people who describe the dangers of following a particular Buddhist teaching usually deal in caricatures. For instance, one teacher who warns of the dangers of the linear path to attainment describes that path as follows:


The linear path holds up an idealistic vision of the perfected human, a Buddha or saint or sage. In this vision, all greed, anger, fear, judgment, delusion, personal ego, and desire are uprooted forever, completely eliminated. What is left is an absolutely unwavering, radiant, pure human being who never experiences any difficulties, an illuminated sage who follows only the Tao or God’s will and never his or her own.


Although this may be a possible vision of the linear path, it differs in many crucial details from the vision offered in the Canon. The Buddha certainly passed judgment on people and taught clear criteria for what are and are not valid grounds for judgment (AN 7:64; AN 4:192; MN 110). He experienced difficulties in setting up the monastic Saṅgha. But that does not invalidate the fact that his greed, aversion, and delusion were gone.


As MN 22 states, there are dangers in grasping the Dhamma wrongly. In the context of that discourse, the Buddha is referring to people who grasp the Dhamma for the sake of argument; at present we might point out the dangers in grasping the teachings neurotically. But there are even greater dangers in misrepresenting the teachings, or in dragging them down to our own level, rather than using them to lift ourselves up. As the Buddha said, people who claim that he said what he didn’t say, or didn’t say what he did, are slandering him (AN 2:23). In doing so, they blind themselves to the Dhamma.


6. Although the Canon contains a few passages where the Buddha and his awakened disciples speak poetically and expressively of their attainment, those passages are rare. Far more common are the descriptive passages, in which the Buddha tells explicitly how to get to awakening. As he said in a famous simile, the knowledge gained in his awakening was like the leaves in the forest; the knowledge he taught, like the leaves in his hand (SN 56:31). And he chose those particular leaves because they served a purpose, helping others develop the skills needed for release. This point is supported by the imagery and analogies employed throughout the Canon. Although some of the more poetic passages draw images from nature, they are greatly outnumbered by analogies drawn from physical skills—cooking, farming, archery, carpentry—making the point that Dhamma practice is a skill that can be understood and mastered in ways similar to more ordinary skills.


The Buddha’s descriptions of the path are phrased primarily in psychological terms—just like the meta-cultural principles of the Transcendentalists and Romantics. Obviously, the Canon’s maps of mental processes differ from those proposed by Western psychology, but that doesn’t invalidate them. They were drawn for a particular purpose—to help attain the end of suffering—and they have to be tested fairly, not against our preferences, but against their ability to perform their intended function.


The poetic approach to the Canon overlooks the care with which the Buddha tried to make his instructions specific and clear. As he once commented (AN 2:46), there are two types of assemblies: those trained in bombast, and those trained in cross-questioning. In the former, the students are taught “literary works—the works of poets, artful in sound, artful in expression, the work of outsiders” and are not encouraged to pin down what the meaning of those beautiful words might be. In the latter—and here the Buddha was describing his own method of teaching—the students are taught the Dhamma and “when they have mastered that Dhamma, they cross-question one another about it and dissect it: ‘How is this? What is the meaning of this?’ They make open what isn’t open, make plain what isn’t plain, dispel doubt on its various doubtful points.” To treat such teachings as poetry distorts how and why they were taught.


7. A vitalist interpretation of Buddhist history does a disservice both to the Buddha’s teachings and to historical truth. To begin with, the Canon does not portray history as purposeful. Time moves in cycles, but those movements mean nothing. This is why the Buddha used the term saṁsāra—“wandering-on”—to describe the course of beings through time. Only if we decide to end this wandering will our lives develop purpose and direction. Otherwise, our course is aimless:


“Just as a stick thrown up in the air lands sometimes on its base, sometimes on its side, sometimes on its tip; in the same way, beings hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving, transmigrating and wandering on, sometimes go from this world to another world, sometimes come from another world to this.” — SN 15:9


Second, Buddhism does not have a will. It does not adapt; people adapt Buddhism to their various ends. And because the adapters are not always wise, there’s no guarantee that the adaptations are skillful. Just because other people have made changes in the Dhamma doesn’t automatically justify the changes we want to make. Think, for instance, of how some Mahāyāna traditions dropped the Vinaya’s procedures for dealing with teacher-student sexual abuse: Was this the Dhamma wisely adapting itself to their needs?


The Buddha foresaw that people would introduce what he called “synthetic Dhamma”—and when that happened, he said, the true Dhamma would disappear (SN 16:13). He compared the process to what happens when a wooden drum develops a crack, into which a peg is inserted, and then another crack, into which another peg is inserted, and so on until nothing is left of the original drum-body. All that remains is a mass of pegs, which cannot come near to producing the sound of the original drum (SN 20:7).


Some scholars have found the Canon’s warnings about the decay of the Dhamma ironic.


This strongly held view [that Buddhism should not change] seems a bit odd in a religion that also teaches that resistance to all-pervasive change is a root cause of misery.


The Buddha, however, didn’t embrace change, didn’t encourage change for the sake of change, and certainly didn’t define resistance to change as the cause of suffering. Suffering is caused by identifying with change or with things that change. Many are the discourses describing the perils of “going along with the flow” in terms of a river that can carry one to whirlpools, monsters, and demons (Iti 109). And as we noted above, a pervasive theme in the Canon is that true happiness is found only when one crosses over the river to the other side.


8. The Buddha was not a prophet, and he did not pretend to speak for God. Thus he was careful never to present his teachings as moral obligations. His shoulds were all conditional. As the first line of the Karaṇīya Mettā Sutta (Khp 9) states,


This is to be done by one skilled in aims


who wants to break through to the state of peace:


In other words, if you want to break through to a state of peace, then this is what you have to do. And although generosity is one of the things one must do to attain that goal, when the Buddha was asked where a gift should be given (SN 3:24), he responded, “Wherever the mind feels confidence.” This means that if we regard social action as a gift, there is no need to seek the Buddha’s sanction for feeling inspired to give in that way; we can just go ahead and do it—as long as our actions conform with the precepts. But it also means that we cannot use his words to impose a sense of obligation on others that they should give in the same way.


This is especially true in a teaching like the Buddha’s, which is strongly pragmatic, with each teaching focused on a particular end. To take those teachings out of context, applying them to other ends, distorts them. The teaching on dependent co-arising, which is often interpreted as the Canon’s version of interconnectedness, is a case in point. The factors in dependent co-arising are primarily internal, dealing with the psychology of suffering, and are aimed at showing how knowledge of the four noble truths can be applied to bring suffering to an end. There is nothing to celebrate in the way the ordinary interaction of these factors leads to suffering. To turn this teaching into a celebration of the interconnectedness of the universe, or as a guide to the moral imperative of social action, is to thwart its purpose and to open it to ridicule from people disinclined to accept its moral authority over their lives.


At the same time, the Canon questions the underlying assumption—which we’ve inherited not only from the Transcendentalists and Romantics, but also from their Enlightenment forebears—that human culture is evolving ever upwards. The early discourses present the opposite picture, that human life is getting worse as a sphere for Dhamma practice, and it’s easy to point out features of modern life that confirm this picture. To begin with, Dhamma practice is a skill, requiring the attitudes and mental abilities developed by physical skills, and yet we are a society whose physical skills are fast eroding away. Thus the mental virtues nurtured by physical skills have atrophied. At the same time, the social hierarchy required by skills—in which students apprentice themselves to a master—has mostly disappeared, so we’ve unlearned the attitudes needed to live in hierarchy in a healthy and productive way. We like to think that we’re shaping the Dhamma with our highest cultural ideals, but some of our lower ways are actually dominating the shape of Western Dhamma: The sense of neurotic entitlement produced by the culture of consumerism is a case in point, as are the hype of the mass media and the demands of the mass-market for a Dhamma that sells.


As for trusting the impulses of the mind: Try a thought experiment and take the above quote—that we must be open to the radical creativity that comes when concepts fall away—and imagine how it would sound in different contexts. Coming from a socially concerned Buddhist activist, it might not seem disconcerting. But coming from a rebel leader teaching child-soldiers in a civil-war torn country, or a greedy financier contemplating new financial instruments, it would be a cause for alarm.


The Buddha probably would have agreed with the Romantics and Transcendentalists that the human mind is essentially active in making sense of its surroundings. But he would have differed with their estimation that this activity is, at its root, divinely inspired. In his analysis of dependent co-arising, mental fabrication comes from ignorance (SN 12:2); the way to end suffering is to end that fabrication; and this requires an attitude, not of trust, but of heedful vigilance (DN 16). Thus heedfulness must extend both to one’s attitude toward one’s intuitions and to the ways with which one reads the Canon.


This point touches on what is probably the most central issue in why the Transcendentalist approach to reading the Bible is inappropriate for reading the Pāli Canon: the issue of authority. In the Bible, God’s authority is absolute because He is the creator of all. We, having been created for His inscrutable ends, must trust His authority absolutely. Although the Transcendentalists denied that the Bible carried God’s absolute authority, they did not deny the concept of absolute authority in and of itself; they simply moved it from the Bible and, bypassing other alternatives, placed it with the spontaneous intuitions of the heart. Following their lead, we as a culture tend to see the issue of authority as a simple either/or: either absolutely in the Bible or absolutely in our intuitions. As a result, when we read in the Kalama Sutta (AN 3:65), “Don’t go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture… or by the thought, ‘This contemplative is our teacher,” we skip over the words in the ellipsis and assume that there is only one other alternative, as stated in a message rubber-stamped on the back of an envelope I once received: “Follow your own sense of right and wrong—The Buddha.”


However, the words in the ellipsis are equally important: “Don’t go by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, or by probability.” In other words, you can’t go simply by what seems reasonable or agreeable to you. You can’t go simply by your intuitions. Instead, the Buddha recommends that you test a particular teaching from a variety of angles: Is it skillful? Is it blameless? Is it praised or criticized by the wise? When put into practice does it lead to harm and suffering, or to wellbeing and happiness?


This requires approaching the practice as a skill to be mastered, one that has already been mastered by the wise. Although a part of mastery is learning to gauge the results of your actions, that’s not the whole story. You must learn how to tap into the wisdom and experience of experts, and learn to gauge the results of your actions—at the very least—against standards they have set. This is why we read and study the Canon: to gain a clear understanding of what the wise have discovered, to open our minds to the questions they found fruitful, so that we can apply the wisdom of their expertise as we try to develop our own.


It’s in this context that we can understand the nature of the Buddha’s authority as presented in the Pāli discourses. He speaks, not with the authority of a creator, but with the authority of an expert. Only in the Vinaya does he assume the added authority of a lawgiver. In the discourses, he calls himself a doctor; a trainer; an admirable, experienced friend who has mastered a specific skill: putting an end to suffering. He provides explicit recommendations on how to act, speak, and think to bring about that result; instructions on how to develop qualities of mind that allow you to assess your actions accurately; and questions to ask yourself in measuring your progress along the way.


It’s up to us whether we want to accept or reject his expertise, but if we accept it he asks for our respect. This means, in the context of an apprentice culture—the culture set up in the Vinaya (Cv.VIII.11-12)—that you take at face value his instructions on how to end suffering and give them a serious try. Where the instructions are ambiguous, you use your ingenuity to fill in the blanks, but then you test the results against the standards the Buddha has set, making every effort to be heedful in reading accurately and fairly what you have done. This sort of test requires a serious commitment—for a sense of how serious, it’s instructive to read the biographies of the Thai forest masters. And because the commitment is so serious, the Buddha advises exercising careful judgment in choosing the person to whom you apprentice yourself (AN 4:192) and tells you what to look for before growing close to a teacher (MN 95). You can’t trust every teacher to be a genuinely admirable friend.


This is all very straightforward, but it requires stepping outside the limitations of our culturally conditioned ways. And again, it’s up to us whether we want to read the Pāli Canon on its own terms. If we don’t, we’re free to continue reading it poetically and prophetically, taking the Buddha’s instructions as grist for our own creative intuitions. But if that’s our approach, we’ll never be in a position to judge adequately whether his instructions for putting an end to suffering actually work.


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Beyond Nature
NAVIGATIONBooks/Meditations4/Beyond Nature
August 8, 2007
It’s good to come back to a place like this where you can hear the crickets chirping in the evening, the sound of the doves in the late afternoon. There’s something in the body and the mind that responds to being out in nature like this. The mind gets the chance to settle down, to put aside a lot of its cares. And for those of you who’ve been living in the city, cut off from nature, there’s often the thought that if only you could get back to nature and stay there, that would solve all your problems. But go ask people who live in nature all the time, and they can tell you a long list of problems they still suffer from, living out in nature.


Think about human history as a whole. The times when people get really romantic about nature are the times when they don’t have to live in it. The idea of romanticizing wilderness didn’t come into force in America until the frontier had been closed, and nature had been tamed to some extent — to the extent that human beings can tame nature. It’s important to keep this in mind as we practice. Coming out here doesn’t solve all your problems. What it does is that it gives you a place to practice, so you can look deeper into where the real problems are.


When the Buddha talked about how conditions cause suffering, he wasn’t talking just about your social conditioning. He was talking about conditions of nature. That chant we had just now — “the world is swept away” — doesn’t refer just to the human social world or your psychological world. It also refers to the world as a whole. Everything in nature is marked with inconstancy, stress, things that lie beyond your control. This applies not only to human beings but also to animals of every kind.


You sometimes hear people romanticizing the mental life of animals, that they don’t suffer because they don’t have a sense of self. That’s not the case. Animals often suffer more than we do. They live in constant fear, with no real understanding of what’s going on around them. All they know is that they’re hungry all the time, yet the need to go out and search for food forces them to place themselves in danger.


And you can read the writings of the forest monks: They certainly don’t romanticize nature. Even Ajaan Lee, when he talks about the advantages of living in the forest and the lessons you learn there, doesn’t talk about how nice it is to get back and be one with nature. His focus is more on how nature is a dangerous place where you have to learn to be heedful all the time.


We don’t suffer only because of our social conditioning. We suffer because we live in a world of inter-eating, where beings are constantly feeding on one another. We have this inner desire, this inner need to survive, to feed. To create, to keep these worlds that they call bhava — our emotional worlds, our mental worlds, and the physical world we live in — to keep our experience of these worlds going, to survive, requires that we feed on one another, emotionally, mentally, physically. And there’s suffering not only in being eaten, but also in having to eat.


So the conditions the Buddha’s talking about are not just social conditions. We don’t suffer only because we’re neurotic about our cravings. Craving in itself is a cause of suffering. It’s also the cause of continued being and becoming. This is how nature keeps going: Animals crave. People crave. This is how we keep going, this is how we survive, this is how we die, how we get reborn.


So the ways of nature are not an ideal to which we’re trying to return. They exemplify the problem, which is that as long as you have to feed, there’s going to be suffering. As long as your happiness depends on conditions of any kind, there’s going to be suffering and stress. The advantage of coming to a place like this is that you get to look deep inside the mind to see where the wellsprings of these cravings come from, this process of fabrication that lies deep within the mind.


As we meditate, we’re trying to study fabrication as we experience it. This is the conditioning process in the mind and in the body. The basic fabrication in terms of the body is the breath. And as for the mind, there are two types of fabrication: verbal and mental. Verbal fabrication is directed thought and evaluation. These are the processes with which you put sentences together in the mind. You focus on a topic and then you make comments about it. That conditions the mind. Then there’s purely mental fabrication, which is feeling and perception, “perception” here meaning the labels you apply to things, while “feeling” means the different feeling-tones of pleasure, pain, and neither pleasure nor pain.


Normally, the way we put these things together causes stress and suffering. If you do this with ignorance, you suffer. If you can learn how to do it with knowledge, you can turn these processes of fabrication into the path. This doesn’t mean that when you’re on the path you don’t suffer. It’s simply a different type of suffering. It’s a suffering that leads to the end of suffering, the kamma that leads to the end of kamma. There’s still going to be a subtle level of suffering in the breath even when you’re concentrated on it. The breath can get very subtle and very pleasant, even rapturous, but there’s still an element of stress there. But for the time being, you’re going to use that as a path.


In fact, you put all three types of fabrication together to get the mind into concentration. You think about the breath — that’s directed thought — and you evaluate the breath. You explore to see which ways of perceiving the breath help in the process of making it feel more comfortable, so you’ve got perception and feeling there as well.


In this way you’re taking the process of fabrication and turning it into a path to the end of fabrication. As you do this, you begin to see how much your intentions really do shape these things. The Buddha’s picture of your experience is not that you’re simply a passive observer of things, commenting on them. In other words, it’s not like watching a TV show. The TV show is a given, and you simply like it or dislike it or you’re neutral about it. That’s all. But that’s not the Buddha’s picture of experience. He says that you’re actively engaged in shaping your experience all the time. In fact, the extent to which your intentions are shaping your experience goes a lot deeper and is a lot more radical than you might imagine. This is one of the insights of Awakening: how much your present intentions are needed for you to experience even the present moment. As the Buddha points out, all of the aggregates — form, feeling, perception, fabrication, and consciousness — have an element of intention in them.


There are lots of different potentials from your past kamma that you can focus on in any given moment. Your choice of what to focus on is going to determine what you experience. For instance, there are potentials for different kinds of feelings. There are places in the body that, if you focused on them, could get you really tied up in anguish or pain. You could take the germs of a pain and build them into something really overwhelming. There are other places in the body where there’s a potential for pleasure. If you learn how to focus there, you can develop a strong sense of refreshment, rapture, wellbeing. Then you can let that pleasure and refreshment permeate and fill the body in the same way that the cool water in a spring coming from the bottom of a lake can fill the whole lake with its coolness.


So you have the choice of what you’re going to focus on now — which sensations in the body help create a sense of wellbeing, which ones could create a sense of dis-ease, what you’re going to think about, what you’re going to focus on. Those are choices you make all the time. You take these potentials and turn them into an actual experience. When you realize how you do this, you can learn how to make your choices more skillfully.


This is the advantage of coming out into a relatively natural place like this. It’s not totally natural. If we turned off the water, the avocado trees would die and the chaparral would take over. There wouldn’t be any shade during the day. So even here in the orchard it’s not totally natural. But at least there’s enough peace and quiet for you to look into the mind and see that the source of trouble is not your social conditioning as much as it’s just the plain old fact of conditioning or fabrication — this process of becoming, which is fed by craving. When you hear those crickets cricketing out there, they’re not doing it in total pleasure and joy. They’re hungry. When you watch the animals around in the orchard, you see that they’re hungry. They have to be wary as they venture out for food.


As a meditator, you have to be wary as well. Even when you create good states of concentration, that’s still a type of becoming. It still depends on causes and conditions. At least it puts the mind in a position where it can observe the process of becoming and dig deeper, to watch the conditioning, to see how it happens — and ultimately to dig down to an area where there’s no conditioning any more, which is something that stands outside of nature as we know it.


It’s not the case that the conditioned comes from the unconditioned. The way the Buddha explained causality is that causes and effects influence each other. An effect turns around and has an influence on its cause. So there’s no prime mover or first cause or ground of being in the Buddha’s teachings at all, for every cause can get shaped by its effects. And if anybody had been qualified to talk about Buddha nature, the Buddha would have been the one. But he never talked about Buddha nature at all, never said that Buddha nature was the ground of being. He simply noted that there are causes and conditions that affect one another.


So if something is going to be unconditioned, it has to lie outside of the causal process entirely — something that’s already there, but as long as you’re entangled in fabrication you’re not going to see it. The only way you can see it is if you turn the fabrication in the direction of the path, so that the way you breathe, the way you think, and the way you feel and perceive things is conditioned not by ignorance, but by knowledge, by awareness — in particular, awareness of which activities cause stress and which activities don’t. That kind of awareness you develop gradually. It’s a skill you work on as you get more and more sensitive both to the process of fabrication and to the stress that it causes even at very subtle levels. Ultimately, you bring the mind to the point where you realize that no matter which direction you fabricate, which direction you intend, there’s going to be stress. If your discernment is sharp, you drop all intention at that point. That’s when the mind opens up to this other dimension, which is totally separate.


So it’s not the case that we’re returning to a place we’ve come from. After all, as the Buddha points out, even little babies have their greed, anger, and delusion. It’s just that their faculties and bodies aren’t strong enough to act on those defilements very powerfully. But they suffer powerfully: You can see that very clearly. As soon as a child comes out of the womb, it cries. A lot of the child’s early life is spent in crying because it has all sorts of desires and yet can’t fulfill them. It has all sorts of pains but doesn’t know what to do about them. So we’re not trying to return to that state or to a state of nature like an animal. We’re trying to find something that goes beyond nature as we know it. After all, if we were simply returning to a state where we were before, what’s to prevent us from coming back out of that state again? If we could forget our true wonderful nature, was it really all that wonderful or true? And what would prevent us from forgetting it again?


So instead of returning to something old, we look at this process of fabrication that’s going on all the time to see if we can learn something new about it. Learn how to understand it, learn how to take it apart, use it as a path. Learn how, once it’s taken you as far as it can take you, you can let it go. That, as the Buddha said, allows us to see something we’ve never seen before: to attain the as yet unattained, to realize the as yet unrealized. In other words, we’re heading into totally new territory.


Keep that in mind as you practice. You can create wonderful luminous states in the mind, but remember that those, too, are fabricated. No matter what comes up in the practice, always learn how to familiarize yourself with it. And then learn to look for where there’s still a level of inconstancy and stress in here — because that perception of stress and inconstancy will be your way out.


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Buddhist Romanticism
NAVIGATIONBooks/Buddhist Romanticism/Buddhist Romanticism
Buddhist Romanticism is a result of a very natural human tendency: When presented with something foreign and new, people tend to see it in terms with which they already are familiar. Often they are totally unaware that they are doing this. If emotionally attached to their familiar way of viewing things, they will persist in holding to it even when shown that they are seeing only their own myths and projections, rather than what is actually there.


In most areas of life, this tendency is rightly regarded as a form of blindness, something to be overcome. However, in the transmission of the Dhamma to the West, even when people are aware that they are reshaping the Dhamma as they study and teach it, the Romantic principle that religion is an art form—creating myths in an ever-changing dialogue with ever-changing human needs—inclines them to regard this tendency as not only natural but also good. In extreme cases, they believe that there really is nothing “actually there.” In their eyes, the Dhamma itself is a body of myths, and they are doing it a favor by providing it with new myths in step with the times. There is very little recognition that something crucial and true is being lost.


Granted, there are some points on which Romantic religion and the Dhamma agree. Both see religion as a means for curing a spiritual disease; both regard the mind as having an active, interactive role in the world, shaping the world as it is being shaped by the world; both focus on the phenomenology of experience—consciousness as it is directly sensed, from within, as a primary source of knowledge; and both reject a deterministic or mechanical view of causality in favor of a more interactive one. But these points of similarity disguise deeper differences that can be recognized only when the larger structural differences separating the Dhamma from Romantic religion are made clear.


Those differences, in turn, will be acknowledged only when people can see that the Romantic viewpoint is actually getting in the way of their well-being, preventing them from gaining the most from their encounter with the Dhamma.


Thus the purpose of this chapter is threefold. The first purpose is to demonstrate that what is often taught and accepted as Buddhism in the West is actually Romantic religion dressed up in Buddhist garb. In other words, the basic structure of modern Buddhism is actually Romantic, with Buddhist elements reshaped so as to fit into the confines of that structure. This is why, as we noted in the Introduction, this tendency is best referred to as Buddhist Romanticism, rather than Romantic Buddhism.


The second purpose is to gain some distance from these Romantic assumptions by understanding why they hold attractions—and seeing that their attractions are dangerous, fostering an attitude of heedlessness that the Dhamma cites as the primary reason for making harmful and unskillful choices in life.


The third purpose is to expand on this last point, showing the practical implications of forcing the Dhamma into a Romantic mold. A main tenet of Buddhist Romanticism is one that can be traced back to Hölderlin: that your choice of a religious path is purely a matter of taste, and that whatever makes you feel good, peaceful, or whole at any given moment is perfectly valid. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter what you believe, as all beliefs are equally inadequate expressions of a feeling of Oneness. All that matters is learning how to use those beliefs to achieve their common goal, a temporary but personally very real impression of the Oneness of all Being.


From the perspective of the Dhamma, though, beliefs are not just feelings. They are a form of action. Actions have consequences both within and without, and it’s important to be clear that your choices do make a difference, particularly when you realize that the Dhamma does not aim at a feeling of Oneness, and regards Oneness as only a step to a higher goal: total freedom. To genuinely benefit from your powers of choice and from the possibility of this higher goal, you owe it to yourself to understand the practical implications of holding to different systems of belief.


Because its purpose is threefold, the main body of this chapter is divided into three main sections. The first section documents the existence of Romantic views in the talks and writings of modern teachers. At the same time, it shows how these views derive from the question and answer that provide the basic structure for Romantic spirituality—and thus the structure for Buddhist Romanticism. The second section discusses some of the possible reasons why Buddhist Romanticism holds an appeal for the modern world, and why that appeal is something to regard with distrust. The third section then contrasts the principles of Buddhist Romanticism with the Dhamma, pointing out some of the ways in which the choice of one over the other leads to radically different results.


The body of the chapter is then followed by a closing section that attempts to draw some conclusions from the preceding three.


VOICES OF BUDDHIST ROMANTICISM
Buddhist Romanticism is so pervasive in the modern understanding of the Dhamma that it is best approached, not as the work of specific individuals, but as a cultural syndrome: a general pattern of behavior in which modern Dhamma teachers and their audiences both share responsibility for influencing one another—the teachers, by how they try to explain and persuade; the audiences, by what they’re inclined to accept or reject.


Thus, this section quotes passages from modern Dhamma books, articles, interviews, and talks to illustrate the various features of Romantic religion contained in modern Dhamma, but without identifying the authors of the passages by name. I do this as a way of following the example set by the Buddha: When discussing the teachings of his contemporaries to non-monastic audiences, he would quote their teachings but without naming the teachers (DN 1; MN 60; MN 102), the purpose being to focus attention not on the person but on the teaching. In that way he could discuss the reasoning behind the teaching, and the consequences of following the teaching, all the while focused on showing how these points were true regardless of who espoused the teaching.


In the same way, I want to focus attention, not on individuals who may advocate Buddhist Romantic ideas, but on the cultural syndrome they express, along with the practical consequences of following that syndrome. It’s more important to know what Buddhist Romanticism is than to know who has been espousing it or to enter into fruitless debates about how Romantic a particular Buddhist teacher has to be in order to deserve the label, “Buddhist Romantic.” By focusing directly on the syndrome, you can then learn to recognize it wherever it appears in the future.


Some of the teachers quoted here are lay; others, monastic. Some make an effort to shape their Romantic ideas into a coherent worldview; others don’t. Some—and, ironically, these are among the most consistently Romantic in their own thought—misunderstand Romanticism to be nothing but anti-scientific emotionalism or egotism, and so have explicitly denounced it. But the tendency to Romanticize the Dhamma is present, at least to some extent, in them all.


We will follow the twenty points defining Romantic religion listed at the end of Chapter Four. However, because many of the passages quoted here cover several points at once, those points will be discussed together. Some of the points have been rephrased to reflect the fact, noted in the preceding chapter, that Buddhist Romanticism has followed such thinkers as James, Jung, and Maslow in dropping the idea of infinity from its view of the universe. Otherwise, only Point 18 in the original list is not explicitly present in the Theravāda version of Buddhist Romanticism, although it is strongly explicit in the Mahāyāna one. Still—as we will see—it is sometimes implicit in Theravāda Romanticism too.


These are the principles by which Buddhist Romanticism can be recognized:


The first three principles go together, as they describe both the basic question that the Dhamma is said to answer, and the answer it is said to provide.


1) The object of religion is not the end of suffering, but the relationship of humanity with the universe.


2) The universe is a vast organic unity.


3) Each human being is both an individual organism and a part of the vast organic unity of the universe.


“[W]ith the spiritual path, what we are aiming at is to penetrate the question of what we are.”


“According to the world’s great spiritual traditions and perennial philosophy, both East and West, the critical question that each of us must ask ourselves is ‘Who am I?’ Our response is of vital importance to our happiness and well-being. How at ease we feel in our body, mind, and in the world, as well as how we behave toward others and the environment all revolve around how we come to view ourselves in the larger scheme of things.…


“Instead of asking ‘Who am I?’ the question could become ‘Who are we?’ Our inquiry then becomes a community koan, a joint millennial project, and we all immediately become great saints—called Bodhisattvas in Buddhism—helping each other evolve.”


“The goal [of Dhamma practice] is integration, through love and acceptance, openness and receptivity, leading to a unified wholeness of experience without the artificial boundaries of separate selfhood.”


This vision of our place in the universe is presented not only as a religious ideal but also as a scientific fact.


“Ironically, the dividing intellect—in its incarnation as modern science—is showing us our oneness with all things. The physicists have found evidence that we are subatomically joined at the hip to absolutely everything else in creation… The evolutionary scientists tell us a story of our emergence from a long lineage of beings in what seems like a miraculous process of bubbling, twitching, struggling life, recreating itself as it interactively adjusts to the ever-changing conditions of earth ecology… [I]f we could somehow integrate our knowledge of interconnection and let it infuse our lives—that would mark a revolution in both consciousness and behavior. If we could experience our existence as part of the wondrous processes of biological and cosmic evolution, our lives would gain new meaning and joy.”


“What happens for us then is what every major religion has sought to offer—a shift in identification, a shift from the isolated ‘I’ to a new, vaster sense of what we are. This is understandable not only as a spiritual experience, but also, in scientific terms, as an evolutionary development. As living forms evolve on this planet, we move not only in the direction of diversification, but toward integration as well. Indeed, these two movements complement and enhance each other.… If we are all bodhisattvas, it is because that thrust to connect, that capacity to integrate with and through each other, is our true nature.”


In giving prime importance to questions of the relationship between self and world, Buddhist Romanticism takes basic Buddhist teachings—even those, such as dependent co-arising, that are meant to cut through questions of self-identity and becoming—and interprets them as if they were an answer to the question, “What is my self? What is my identity in relationship to the world?” And the answer becomes: Our identity is fluid and totally imbedded with the rest of the world; it finds its meaning as part of the evolution of all life.


Life as a whole, in this case, takes on the role of Schelling’s World Soul and Emerson’s Over-Soul. Its evolution is seen as purposeful. Individuals, as expressions of life, can find meaning in helping that purpose be achieved harmoniously.


“The Dharma vision of a co-arising world, alive with consciousness, is a powerful inspiration for the healing of the Earth.… It shows us our profound imbeddedness in the web of life.… I have been deeply inspired by the Buddha’s teaching of dependent co-arising. It fills me with a strong sense of connection and mutual responsibility with all beings.”


“The aim of all great spiritual traditions is to offer us relief from the dramas of self and history, to remind us that we are part of much grander projects than these. In that sense, I suggest that experiencing ourselves as part of biological evolution can be understood as a complete spiritual path. The fantastic story of evolving life and consciousness contains as many miracles as any bible and as much majesty as any pantheon of divinities. The drama of earthlife’s creative expression and the puzzle of where it might be leading can fill us with enough suspense and wonder to last at least a lifetime. And the idea that we are part of its unfolding can offer us meaning and purpose.”


Some teachers echo Emerson’s image of the universal ocean of life as a symbol of the answer to life’s prime spiritual question.


“It is the goal of spiritual life to open to the reality that exists beyond our small sense of self. Through the gate of oneness we awaken to the ocean within us, we come to know in yet another way that the seas we swim in are not separate from all that lives. When our identity expands to include everything, we find a peace with the dance of the world. It is all ours, and our heart is full and empty, large enough to embrace it all.”


* * *


The next two principles treat the nature of the basic spiritual illness that Buddhist Romanticism proposes to treat in light of its answer to the spiritual question, and the meditative experience that helps to cure that illness.


4) Human beings suffer when their sense of inner and outer unity is lost—when they feel divided within themselves and separated from the universe.


5) Despite its many expressions, the religious experience is the same for all: an intuition of Oneness that creates a feeling of unity with the universe and a feeling of unity within.


Buddhist Romantics often follow the early Romantics by citing a deep connection between finding inner unity and outer unity: Inner unity can be achieved by reconnecting with the outside world; outer unity, by reconnecting inside.


“Because my sense of self is an impermanent psychosocial construct, with no reality of its own, it is always insecure, haunted by dukkha [suffering] as long as I feel separate from the world I inhabit.”


“We create prisons, projections, self-limitations. Meditation teaches us to let them go and recognize our true nature: completeness, integration, and connectedness. In touch with our wholeness, there is no such thing as a stranger, not in ourselves or in others.”


Given that the universe, in the Romantic view, is already a Oneness, Buddhist Romantics need to explain how we lost that sense of Oneness to begin with. Thus, in their view, the ignorance causing suffering is not—as in the Buddha’s definition—an ignorance of the four noble truths. Instead, it is an ignorance of original Oneness.


“Through the power of ignorance in the mind, we restrict and narrow our sense of who we are as we go from a nondual awareness of the wholeness of the universe through the progressive levels of separation. First we separate the mind/body from the environment and limit ourselves through identifying with the organism. There is then a further narrowing in which we identify with the ego-mind.… Finally the mind itself becomes fragmented into those aspects we identify with because they are acceptable in light of our self-image, and those we repress because they are not.… The path of dharma is to heal these divisions.”


“We feel alienation, separation, lack of wholeness; we feel incomplete because if there is ‘I,’ then there is ‘you’ and we are apart, there is distinction and there is separation. If we see through this and we dissolve the belief in an absolute individual existence, then the sense of separation naturally dissolves because it has no basis. There is a recognition of wholeness.”


Buddhist Romantic writings on the issue of Oneness are often unspecific enough to lend themselves to any of the interpretations of this concept that the West has inherited from Romantic religion—or from other sources. However, the first passage above is an example of a common tendency when these writings get specific: to define Oneness in terms derived from Jung, as unity of body and mind, and unity between the ego and its shadow.


In other cases, inner Oneness is described in terms more reminiscent of Huxley: a non-dual consciousness in which the distinction between subject and object dissolves.


“This insight leads us to a contemplation of apparent subject and object—how the tension between the two generates the world of things and its experiencer, and more importantly how, when that duality is seen through, the heart’s liberation is the result.… This abandonment of subject/object dualities is largely contingent upon the correct apprehension of the perceptual process, and thus the breaking down of the apparent inside/outside dichotomy of the observer and the observed.”


Buddhist Romanticism holds that discovery of a pre-existing Oneness reveals our true identity—sometimes equated with the Mahāyāna concept of Buddha nature—and that this discovery is an experience and understanding at which all religious traditions aim.


“Beneath our struggles and beyond any desire to develop self, we can discover our Buddha nature, an inherent fearlessness and connectedness, integrity, and belonging. Like groundwater these essential qualities are our true nature, manifesting whenever we are able to let go of our limited sense of ourselves, our unworthiness, our deficiency, and our longing. The experience of our true self is luminous, sacred, and transforming. The peace and perfection of our true nature is one of the great mystical reflections of consciousness described beautifully in a hundred traditions, by Zen and Taoism, by Native Americans and Western mystics, and by many others.”


* * *


6) This feeling of unity is healing but totally immanent. In other words, (a) it is temporary and (b) it does not give direct experience of any transcendent, unconditioned dimension outside of space and time.


7) Any freedom offered by the religious experience—the highest freedom possible in an organic universe—thus does not transcend the laws of organic causation. It is conditioned and limited by forces within and without the individual.


8) Because the religious experience can give only a temporary feeling of unity, religious life is one of pursuing repeated religious experiences in hopes of gaining an improved feeling for that unity, but never fully achieving it.


“In the maturity of spiritual life, we move from the wisdom of transcendence to the wisdom of immanence.”


“Enlightenment does exist. It is possible to awaken. Unbounded freedom and joy, oneness with the Divine, awakening into a state of timeless grace—these experiences are more common than you know, and not far away. There is one further truth, however: They don’t last.”


“The raw material of dharma practice is ourself and our world, which are to be understood and transformed according to the vision and values of the dharma itself. This is not a process of self- or world-transcendence, but one of self- and world-creation.”


“Awakening is called the highest pleasure (paramam sukham), but the word is hardly adequate to express this paramount condition of ultimate well-being. It is not freedom from the conditions in which we find ourselves (no eternal bliss in this tradition) but it is freedom within them. Even though there is physical pain, we are capable of joy; even though there is mental sorrow, we are able to be well; and even though we are part of an impermanent, self-less flow of phenomena, we are nevertheless able to feel whole, complete, and deeply healthy.”


“The Buddha’s Third Noble Truth, and his most significant biological insight, is that… as humans we are able to see into our primal reactivity and in the process learn how to overcome some of it.…


Most of us will never get there, never arrive at a steady state of ‘happiness ever after’ or ‘perfect wisdom.’ Nature’s odds are against it. Humans seem to be novices at self-realization. And while mindfulness meditation may be an evolutionary sport, like evolution itself the game is never finished. One reason is that if we are indeed evolving, then we will always need remedial training in self-awareness.”


In maintaining the immanence of the Buddhist goal, some authors note that the Pāli Canon contains passages—such as §§46–50—clearly indicating that the goal is transcendent, and that these passages contradict what they are saying. One common way of dealing with this problem is to dismiss such passages as “rogue,” “later additions” to the Canon composed by “neurotic monks.” Another is to translate the passages in such a way as to mitigate their transcendent implications.


The immanence of the goal, according to Buddhist Romanticism, is nothing to be regretted. In fact, it is to be celebrated as an expression of the infinite creativity of life. This is one of the reasons that Buddhist Romantic writings, as in one of the examples under Point 3 above, often compare the spiritual life to a dance. Just as the novel provided the early Romantics with an example of a free-form genre, modern dance has provided a similar example for Buddhist Romanticism.


“We can find peace and freedom in the face of the mystery of life. In awakening to this harmony, we discover a treasure hidden in each difficulty. Hidden in the inevitable impermanence and loss of life, its very instability, is the enormous power of creativity. In the process of change, there arises an abundance of new forms, new births, new possibilities, new expressions of art, music, and life-forms by the millions. It is only because everything is changing that such bountiful and boundless creativity exists.”


“Our mission is not to escape from the world… but to fall in love with our world. We are made for that, because we co-arise with her—in a dance where we discover ourselves and lose ourselves over and over.”


The idea that no human being can awaken to a transcendent dimension is sometimes inferred from the fact that the Buddha himself, even after his awakening, kept encountering Māra, the embodiment of temptation. In line with some modern psychological theories, Māra is understood here not as an actual non-human being but as a symbol of the defilements still lurking in the Buddha’s heart.


“Unless we are prepared to regard the devil as a ghostly apparition who sits down and has conversations with Buddha, we cannot but understand him as a metaphoric way of describing Buddha’s own inner life. Although Buddha is said to have ‘conquered the forces of Mara’ on achieving awakening, that did not prevent Mara from harassing him until shortly before his death forty years later. Mara’s tireless efforts to undermine Buddha by accusing him of insincerity, self-deception, idleness, arrogance and aloofness are ways of describing the doubts within Buddha’s own mind.”


“No matter what version [of the Buddha’s awakening] we read, Mara does not go away. There is no state of enlightened retirement, no experience of awakening that places us outside the truth of change.… All spiritual life exists in an alternation of gain and loss, pleasure and pain.”


In other cases, the immanent view of awakening is simply asserted as superior to the transcendent, which—the argument goes—is dualistic and tends to foster indifference to the world at a time when the world is in urgent need of our love and attention.


“Buddhism also dualizes insofar as this world of samsara is distinguished from nirvana.… the contrast between the two worlds inevitably involves some devaluation of the lower one: so we are told that this realm of samsara is a place of suffering, craving, and delusion… the ultimate goal is individual salvation, which involves transcending this lower world by doing what is necessary to qualify for the higher one…


“Buddhists don’t aim at heaven: we want to awaken. But for us, too, salvation is individual: yes, I hope you will become enlightened also, but ultimately my highest well-being—my enlightenment—is distinct from yours. Or so we have been taught.…


“Needless to say, that is not an adequate response [to the eco-crisis].”


“Notions have arisen, and even been ascribed to the Buddha… that suffering is a spiritual mistake… These errors have perpetuated the popular stereotype of Buddhism as a world-denying religion, offering escape from this realm of suffering into some abstract, disembodied heaven.…


“The gate of the Dharma does not close behind us to secure us in a cloistered existence aloof from the turbulence and suffering of samsara, so much as it leads us out into a life of risk for the sake of all beings.”


* * *


9) Although the religious experience is not transcendent, it does carry with it an ability to see the commonplace events of the immanent world as sublime and miraculous. In fact, this ability is a sign of the authenticity of one’s sense of unity with the larger whole.


“To know ourselves as emerging from earthlife doesn’t in any way deny our divinity: it only seems to deny our exclusive divinity. The sacred is alive not just in us, but everywhere.”


“In relinquishing the obsession of being an isolated self, Buddha opens himself fearlessly and calmly to the tumult of the sublime.”


“Fear of being unspiritual puts up walls, isolates our heart from living, divides the world so that part of it is seen as not holy. These interior boundaries must be dissolved. There is an underlying unity to all things. All are part of a sacred whole in which we exist and in the deepest way they are completely trustworthy.”


* * *


10) (a) People have an innate desire and aptitude for the religious experience, and can induce it by cultivating an attitude of open receptivity to the universe.


“Openness leads to intimacy with all things.”


“When the mind is allowed to rest in that sense of complete clarity and choicelessness, we find that it is beyond dualism—no longer making preferences or being biased towards this over that. It is resting at the point of equipoise, where this and that and black and white and where you and I all meet; the space where all dualities arise from and where they dissolve.”


“This unity, this integration, comes from deeply accepting darkness and light, and therefore being able to be in both simultaneously. We must make a shift from one worldview to another, moving from trying to control the uncontrollable and instead learn how to connect, to open, to love no matter what is happening.”


“Just as a waiter attends to the needs of those at the table he serves, so one waits with unknowing astonishment at the quixotic play of life. In subordinating his own wants to those of the customer, a waiter abandons any expectation of what he may be next called to do. Constantly alert and ready to respond, the oddest request does not faze him. He neither ignores those he serves nor appears at the wrong time. He is invisible but always there when needed. Likewise, in asking ‘What is this thing?’ one does not strain ahead of oneself in anticipation of a result. One waits at ease for a response one cannot foresee and that might never come. The most one can ‘do’ is remain optimally receptive and alert.”


“As we open to what is actually happening in any given moment, whatever it is or might be, rather than running away from it, we become increasingly aware of our lives as one small part of a vast fabric made of an evanescent, fleeting, shimmering pattern of turnings. Letting go of the futile battle to control, we can find ourselves rewoven into the pattern of wholeness, into the immensity of life, always happening, always here, whether we’re aware of it or not.”


This attitude of acceptance is said to be developed through mindfulness practice, which—contrary to the Buddha’s definition of mindfulness as a function of active memory—is here defined as bare attention: an open, receptive, pre-verbal awareness of all things as they impinge on the senses.


“Mindfulness is best described as ‘a noninterfering, non-reactive awareness.’ It is pure knowing, without any of the projections of our ego or personality added to the knowing.”


“Mindfulness is presence of mind, attentiveness or awareness. Yet the kind of awareness involved in mindfulness differs profoundly from the kind of awareness at work in our usual mode of consciousness.… The mind is deliberately kept at the level of bare attention, a detached observation of what is happening within us and around us in the present moment. In the practice of right mindfulness the mind is trained to remain in the present, open, quiet, and alert, contemplating the present event. All judgements and interpretations have to be suspended, or if they occur, just registered and dropped. The task is simply to note whatever comes up just as it is occurring, riding the changes of events in the way a surfer rides the waves on the sea.”


* * *


10) (b) Because religion is a matter of taste, there is no one path for developing this attitude of receptivity. The most that any teacher can offer are his or her own opinions on the matter, in the event that they will resonate with other people. In fact, the refusal to follow any prescribed path is a sign of authenticity in Emerson’s sense of the word.


“No one can define for us exactly what our path should be.”


“To opt for a comforting, even a discomforting, explanation of what brought us here or what awaits us after death severely limits that very rare sense of mystery with which religion is essentially concerned.… [I]f my actions in the world are to stem from an authentic encounter with what is most vital and mysterious in life, then they surely need to be unclouded by either dogma or prevarication.…


“As far as anyone knows, we are alone in an inconceivably vast cosmos that has no interest at all in our fate. Even if other worlds like this exist elsewhere in the cosmos, they would not be mere repetitions of the awesomely complex configuration of biological, cultural and psychological conditions that are generating this world now. The path that has led you here and beckons you into an unknown future has likewise never appeared in exactly this way before and will not do so again. You are free to go straight ahead, turn right or turn left. Nothing is stopping you.”


* * *


11) One of the many ways to cultivate a receptivity to all things is through erotic love.


“The separation of the spiritual from the sensual, of the sacred from the relational and of the enlightened from the erotic no longer seems desirable. Certainly seeing how impossible the division has proven for the countless spiritual teachers of every tradition who have stumbled over their own longings has been instructive. In addition, having a family and a relationship has made it abundantly clear to me that they require the same dedication, passion and vision that a spiritual life demands. Now that spiritual life is in the hands of householders rather than monastics, the demands of desire are front and center, not hidden from view.”


“Buddhist texts are filled with stories about the impurities of the body, just like those you would find in the Catholic Church. And so there is a lot of confusion, because the body isn’t seen as a vehicle for sacredness, but more as something to transcend. In the lay community, we are not taught how to make it a deliberate part of our practice, guided into making sexual activity a wise part of our life. But the body could be, and it’s time for it. Sexuality can open us beyond ourselves, to grace, ecstasy, communion, oneness, and natural samadhi. Let us teach sexuality as a domain of practice and health instead of a realm of pathology or anti-spirituality.”


* * *


12) Another way to cultivate a receptivity to all things is to develop a tolerance of all religious expressions, viewing them aesthetically, as finite expressions of a feeling for the larger whole, without giving authority to any of them. In other words, one should read them as Schlegel recommended reading a novel: empathetically, but at the same time maintaining a sense of distance so as not to be confined by their point of view.


“The experience of wholeness will express itself in many ways. The spiritual journey does not present us with a pat formula for each of us to follow. We cannot be Mother Theresa or Gandhi or the Buddha. We have to be ourselves. We have to discover and connect with our own unique expression of the truth. To do that, we must learn to listen to and trust ourselves, to find our path of heart.”


“Religion and philosophy have their value, but in the end all we can do is open to mystery.”


* * *


13) In fact, the greatest religious texts, if granted too much authority, are actually harmful to genuine spiritual progress.


“The images we have been taught about perfection can be destructive to us. Instead of clinging to an inflated, superhuman view of perfection, we learn to allow ourselves the space of kindness.”


* * *


14) Because the mind is an organic part of the creatively expressive whole, it, too, is creatively expressive, so its natural response to a feeling of the larger whole is to want to express it.


15) However, because the mind is finite, any attempt to describe the experience of the larger whole is limited by one’s finite mode of thought, and also by one’s temperament and culture. Thus, religious statements and texts are not descriptive of reality, but simply an expression of the effect of that reality on a particular person’s individual nature. As expressions of feelings, religious statements do not need to be clear or consistent. They should be read as poetry and myths pointing to the inexpressible whole and speaking primarily to the feelings.


16) Because religious teachings are expressive only of one individual’s feelings, they have no authority over any other person’s expression of his or her feelings.


“[A]ll the teachings of books, maps, and beliefs have little to do with wisdom or compassion. At best they are a signpost, a finger pointing at the moon, or the leftover dialogue from a time when someone received some true spiritual nourishment.… We must discover within ourselves our own way to become conscious, to live a life of the spirit.”


“Even the most creative, world-transforming individuals cannot stand on their own shoulders. They too remain dependent upon their cultural context, whether intellectual or spiritual—which is precisely what Buddhism’s emphasis on impermanence and causal interdependence implies. The Buddha also expressed his new, liberating insight in the only way he could, using the religious categories that his culture could understand. Inevitably, then, his way of expressing the dharma was a blend of the truly new… and the conventional religious thought of his time. Although the new transcends the conventional… the new cannot immediately and completely escape the conventional wisdom it surpasses.”


“It’s never a matter of trying to figure it all out, rather we pick up these phrases and chew them over, taste them, digest them and let them energize us by virtue of their own nature.”


“Even these ostensibly literal maps may be better read as if they were a kind of poem, rich in possible meanings.”


* * *


17) Although a religious feeling may inspire a desire to formulate rules of behavior, those rules carry no authority, and are actually unnecessary. When one sees all of humanity as holy and one—and oneself as an organic part of that holy Oneness—there is no need for rules to govern one’s interactions with the rest of society. One’s behavior toward all naturally becomes loving and compassionate.


Buddhist Romantic explanations of morality can follow either of the patterns set by the Romantics: that morality derives from one’s sense of being part of a larger whole, or from the inspirations welling up from within one’s own awareness.


“Without the rigidity of concepts, the world becomes transparent and illuminated, as though lit from within. With this understanding, the interconnectedness of all that lives becomes very clear. We see that nothing is stagnant and nothing is fully separate, that who we are, what we are, is intimately woven into the nature of life itself. Out of this sense of connection, love and compassion arise.”


“Note that virtue is not required for the greening of the self or the emergence of the ecological self. The shift in identification at this point in our history is required precisely because moral exhortation doesn’t work, and because sermons seldom hinder us from following our self-interest as we conceive it.


“The obvious choice, then, is to extend our notions of self-interest. For example, it would not occur to me to plead with you, ‘Oh, don’t saw off your leg. That would be an act of violence.’ It wouldn’t occur to me because your leg is part of your body. Well, so are the trees in the Amazon rain basin. They are our external lungs. And we are beginning to realize that the world is our body.”


“The Buddha said that if we are deeply established in awareness, the precepts are not necessary.”


* * *


18) When one has a genuine appreciation for the organic unity of the universe, one sees how that unity transcends all ideas of right and wrong.


As noted above, this is the one principle of Romantic religion that is never explicitly professed in the Theravāda version of Buddhist Romanticism, although it is explicit in the Mahāyāna version. Still, it occasionally appears implicitly in Theravāda Romanticism, in assertions of the need to embrace all aspects of life. This is a point to which we will return in the last section of this chapter.


* * *


19) Although all religious expressions are valid, some are more evolved than others. They must be viewed under the framework of historicism, to understand where a particular religious teaching falls in the organic development of humanity and the universe as a whole.


20) Religious change is thus not only a fact. It is also a duty.


When these last two points are taken together with Point 16, we can see that Buddhist Romanticism carries within it the fundamental paradox at the heart of Romantic religion: No one can judge another person’s expression of the Dhamma, but some expressions are better than others. The best expressions are those that agree with the Romantic understanding of what religion is, how it comes about, and how it functions in the universe.


Sometimes modern changes in Buddhism are justified by the fact that people have already been changing Buddhism over the generations. Both sorts of changes, ancient and modern, are justified in vitalistic terms: sometimes explicitly—one teacher has described the Dhamma as an “inexpressible living force”—and other times implicitly, when Buddhism is described as the agent adapting itself, like an amoeba, to new environments.


“The great strength of Buddhism throughout its history is that it has succeeded many times in reinventing itself according to the needs of its new host culture. What is happening today in the West is no different.”


Given this organic view of the Buddhist tradition, it’s not surprising that the need to fashion a new Buddhism—or for Buddhism to refashion itself—is sometimes expressed as a Darwinian necessity.


“Looking at Buddhism as part of the spiritual heritage of humanity, I see it as subject to similar evolutionary pressures as other types of contemplative spirituality have felt.… As I now look at our situation, I distinguish three major domains in which human life participates. One I call the transcendent domain, which is the sphere of aspiration for classical contemplative spirituality. The second is the social domain, which includes our interpersonal relations as well as our political, social, and economic institutions. And the third is the natural domain, which includes our physical bodies, other sentient beings, and the natural environment. From my present perspective, a spirituality that privileges the transcendent and devalues the social and natural domains, or sees them at best as stepping stones to realization, is inadequate to our current needs. Such an orientation has led to a sharp division of duties that puts our future at risk.… This division also opens the doors of influence over our communal institutions to religious dogmatists and fundamentalists.


“As I see it, our collective future requires that we fashion an integral type of spirituality that can bridge the three domains of human life.”


In other cases, the Darwinian need for Buddhism to change is bolstered by an appeal to the Buddha’s own teachings on change:


“Since all schools of Buddhism also arise from conditions, they share the very nature of the conditioned things they tirelessly describe as transient, imperfect, and empty. This is true even of the original Indian form of the dharma at the time of Gautama himself. To say that Buddhism is empty is to recognize how it is nothing but an emergent property of unique and unrepeatable situations. Such an insight into the nature of things is entirely in keeping with the central Buddhist understanding of the inescapable contingency of existence (pratitya-samutpada [paṭicca samuppāda]).… This core insight into contingency emphasized how everything emerges from a shimmering matrix of changing conditions and is destined to change into something else.… In this way the non-essential vision of the dharma converges seamlessly with a historical and Darwinian evolutionary understanding of life.”


“This strongly held view [that Buddhism should not change] seems a bit odd in a religion that also teaches that resistance to all-pervasive change is a root cause of misery.”


Some of the strongest statements of the need to change Buddhism come from teachers who, following the example of the more politically involved Transcendentalists, give high priority to social action in their understanding of the spiritual life.


“In each historical period, the Dharma finds new means to unfold its potential in ways precisely linked to that era’s distinctive conditions. Our own era provides the appropriate stage for the transcendent truth of the Dharma to bend back upon the world and engage human suffering at multiple levels, not in mere contemplation but in effective, relief-granting action.”


“We must be open to a variety of responses toward social change that come from no particular ‘authority’ but are grounded in the radical creativity that comes when concepts fall away.”


Romantic changes to the Dhamma can take many forms. In some cases, they involve borrowing from other Buddhist religions, on the grounds that later forms of Buddhism were more developed than the earlier forms: hence the Mahāyāna teachings on Buddha nature and the bodhisattva path presented in otherwise Theravāda contexts. In other cases, these changes involve drawing on non-Buddhist religious traditions, as when Rumi’s ruminations on God are cited for their insight into the Dhamma. And in still other cases, the changes are drawn from non-religious traditions of all sorts.


Whatever the changes being proposed for Buddhism in the modern world, Buddhist Romantics present them as nothing to fear because they are rooted in forces in the human heart that they describe, echoing Emerson, as trustworthy to the end.


“There is an underlying unity to all things, and a wise heart knows this as it knows the in-and-out of the breath. They are all part of a sacred whole in which we exist, and in the deepest way they are completely trustworthy. We need not fear the energies of this world or any other.”


* * *


The passages quoted here have been drawn from the talks and writings of thirteen modern Dhamma teachers, but they could be multiplied many times over from the writings both of these teachers and of many others. As anyone who has read modern Dhamma books or listened to modern Dhamma talks could attest, the principles expressed in these passages are by no means atypical. They are the common coin of modern Buddhist discourse—so common that most Westerners accept them as Dhamma as a matter of faith, and are surprised to hear that they differ from the Buddha’s Dhamma in almost every respect.


In fact, some people are even offended to hear this—not because they feel betrayed by those who teach Buddhist Romanticism, but because they would rather continue to hold to Buddhist Romantic ideals. To get past that sense of being offended, it’s important to understand the false attractions that those ideals continue to hold.


THE APPEAL OF BUDDHIST ROMANTICISM
As many Western converts to the Dhamma will readily admit, it’s because of ideals such as wholeness within, Oneness without, and the universality of the religious experience that they left their earlier religious upbringing and started practicing Buddhism to begin with. And it’s easy to see why those ideals made such a conversion possible: To believe that all religions come from the same experience, and that differences in the expression of that experience are immaterial, makes it possible to ignore the exclusionary faith demands made by the monotheistic religions that dominate the West. Only when you feel safe to ignore those demands will you feel free to look elsewhere for alternative religious teachings that provide more nourishment for—and feel less oppressive to—the heart.


However, it’s one thing to hold to views to free yourself from an oppressive system of beliefs. It’s another to continue holding to them after having broken free. The common desire to continue holding to Buddhist Romantic ideas even after learning that they are not Buddhist suggests that there are other reasons why such ideas have an appeal in the modern world.


As we have seen, one of the prime reasons is that a strong current in Western thought over the past two centuries has come to view all religious activity in these terms. When Westerners come to Buddhism, they usually approach it through the doors of psychology, history of religions, or perennial philosophy, all of which are dominated by Romantic ways of thinking.


However, ideas do not survive simply because they have a long past. There also have to be factors in contemporary culture and society to help keep them alive.


A wide range of factors—philosophical, emotional, economic, and political—may be relevant here, but four aspects of modern culture in particular seem to have contributed to the creation and continued survival of Buddhist Romanticism.


The first is that modern society is more destructive of a sense of inner wholeness and outer connectedness than anything even the Romantics knew. Economically and politically, we are more and more dependent on wider and wider circles of other people, yet most of those dependencies are kept hidden from view. Our food and clothing come from the store, but how they got there, or who is responsible for ensuring a continual supply, we don’t know. When investigative reporters track down the web of connections from field to final product in our hands, the bare facts read like an exposé. Fashionable sweatshirts, for example, come from Uzbekistani cotton woven in Iran, sewn in South Korea, and stored in Kentucky: an unstable web of interdependencies that involve not a little suffering, both for the exploited producers and for those pushed out of the production web by cheaper labor. Our monetary supply, which keeps these interdependencies flowing, has been converted into electronic signals manipulated by international financiers of unknown allegiances and constantly open to cyber attack.


Whether or not we know these details, we intuitively sense the fragmentation and uncertainty inherent in such an unstable system. The result is that many of us feel a need for a sense of wholeness. For those who benefit from the hidden dependencies of modern life, a corollary need is a sense of reassurance that interconnectedness is reliable and benign—or, if not yet benign, that feasible reforms can make it that way. Such people want to hear that they can safely place their trust in the principle of interconnectedness without fear that it will turn on them or let them down. When Buddhist Romanticism affirms the Oneness of the universe and the benevolence of interconnectedness, it tells these people what they want to hear.


A second aspect of modern culture conducive to the popularity of Buddhist Romanticism is the overload of information poured into our eyes and ears every day. Never before have people been subjected to such a relentless barrage of data from strangers. The sheer amount of data challenges the mind’s ability to absorb it; the fact that it is coming from strangers leaves, at least on a sub-conscious level, a lingering doubt as to where to place our trust. Especially when we learn that much of the news twenty or thirty years ago was little more than propaganda, we instinctively suspect that the news of today will ultimately be revealed to be a fabric of lies as well.


Given that our ideas are shaped by the data we absorb, we begin to distrust even the thoughts going through our own minds. So we find it reassuring to be told that at least we can trust our feelings, that we can safely leave logical inconsistencies as mysteries, and that whatever religious beliefs speak to our feelings must be safe and true.


A third aspect of modern culture conducive to the survival of Buddhist Romanticism is that we are subject not only to a flood of data, but also to a flood of competing value systems: some promoted by religious and cultural traditions, some by academia, some by the commercial media. Exposed to all these conflicting values simultaneously, we find it impossible not to see ourselves judged as lacking in terms of one system of values or another. No matter where we look at ourselves, we see something that someone can condemn as substandard or wrong. So we feel comforted when told that the highest value system is embodied in a non-judging mind, open and receptive to all things, and that the judgments of others show only how narrow-minded they are.


A fourth aspect of modern culture conducive to the survival of Buddhist Romanticism is that people’s work lives, social lives, and search for entertainment, especially when conducted over the Internet, have come to consume so much of their mental energy and their time. Spiritual needs get squeezed into the few cracks of the day left vacant by other demands. Within those cracks, few people have the time to test differing religious teachings for their truth and effectiveness. Thus it’s reassuring to be told that the differences among religions don’t matter, that all paths lead to the same destination. This means that people can choose whichever path or mixture of paths they like—in the language of the Romantics, this would be termed an aesthetic choice—with no need to fear that their choices could possibly be a mistake or lead to harm.


Buddhist Romanticism, in speaking to these aspects of modern culture, provides solace to people suffering from the demands and uncertainties of modern life. But its solution in all four areas is to teach an attitude of heedlessness, regardless of whether it speaks in soothing terms of acceptance or in more rousing ways of the challenges of authenticity and the need for social engagement.


• To begin with, on the deepest level, Buddhist Romanticism teaches people to define their spiritual needs in ways that actually block the path to a transcendent happiness. By fostering an immanent rather than transcendent solution to suffering, Buddhist Romanticism encourages people to stay within the web of interdependencies that are causing them to suffer: to accept the vagaries of an interdependent, interconnected world and to define their desire for well-being totally within those vagaries. It’s as if Buddhist Romanticism finds people feeling anxious and unsafe because they are trying to sleep in the middle of the road, and so sells them pillows and blankets, at the same time deriding any desire to get out of the road as selfish, deluded, or sick.


On a more immediate level, Buddhist Romanticism, by celebrating our interconnected world, suggests that the Dhamma as a whole is blind to the suffering and instabilities inherent in that world. In doing so, it alienates those for whom the current system is obviously not benign, convincing them that the Dhamma is out of touch with reality. As a result, Buddhist Romanticism turns them away from the Dhamma, denying them the benefits that the Dhamma could otherwise offer.


• At the same time, by encouraging trust in one’s feelings, Buddhist Romanticism leaves people open to subliminal influences from those who would like to manipulate those feelings. As the Buddha pointed out, feelings are just as fabricated as thoughts, and any knowledge of the tactics of advertising should be enough to confirm his observation that our feelings are not really ours. They can often act against our better interests.


• As for a non-judging mind, the Buddha taught that the path to true happiness begins with the ability to judge one’s own actions fairly (MN 61), which also means learning how to judge the actions of others as to whether they are wise examples to follow (MN 95). The solution to the problem of conflicting value systems lies, not in abandoning one’s powers of judgment, but in learning how to use them adeptly through self-examination. When there are no standards for what should and shouldn’t be done, people are left unprotected (§8)—from their own unskillful mind states, and from the unskillful influences of others.


• Finally, by portraying the choice of a religious path as nothing more than a personal preference, Buddhist Romanticism blinds people to the fact that if they choose it over the Dhamma, their choice will carry consequences.


So as a service to those of us sleeping in the road, we need to look more carefully at what the consequences of that choice can be.


BUDDHIST ROMANTICISM VS. THE DHAMMA
The consequences of choosing Buddhist Romanticism over the Dhamma can best be appreciated by examining the practical implications of each of the principles of Buddhist Romanticism, point by point, and comparing them with the practical consequences of adopting the Dhamma instead. Because all the defining points of Buddhist Romanticism grow from Points 1 through 3, we will see that the practical implications of these first three points will keep echoing throughout the remaining ones.


* * *


• First, Points 1 through 3: the basic religious issue.


To define the basic issue of the spiritual life in terms of a relationship requires that you first define who the members of the relationship are. Once you define a person in relationship to a world—in Buddhist terms, this is a state of becoming—you are placing limitations on what that person can know or do (§20). This is especially true if you define people as organic parts of a larger, organic whole. As organisms subject to organic laws, they would not be able to know anything totally separate from those laws. As integral parts of a larger whole, they would have to subsume their felt needs to the larger purposes of the whole, and could not escape the whole without being annihilated.


All three of these points would force them to view as unrealistic, and even evil, their desire to find an end to suffering. They would be blocked from reaching unbinding, which is a dimension outside of the range of organic laws. Instead, they would have to accept their sufferings as necessary parts of the larger purpose of the organic whole, for otherwise they would risk going out of existence.


So to advance the notion that all beings are parts of a universal organic unity runs totally counter to the aims of the Dhamma.


One of the largest ironies of Buddhist Romanticism is that the teaching of dependent co-arising is often cited as proof that the Buddha shared the Romantic view that all things are part of the single interconnected whole that is the universe. This is ironic for two reasons.


The first is that dependent co-arising does not describe the status of the self within the universe; instead, it stands outside both “self” and “universe”—and thus outside of becoming—explaining becoming in terms of a framework that doesn’t derive from becoming at all. Its perspective is phenomenological, meaning that it describes processes as they are immediately experienced. From that perspective, it shows how ignorance gives rise to concepts of “self” and “universe,” how those concepts lead to suffering, and how suffering ends when ignorance of those processes is brought to an end. To reframe this teaching, limiting it to a description of what occurs in the universe or in the self, prevents it from leading beyond the universe and beyond the self.


The second reason why it’s ironic for Buddhist Romanticism to present dependent co-arising as a description of the Oneness of all things is that the Buddha explicitly cited dependent co-arising as a teaching that avoided the question of whether things are One or not (§25). In other words, his rejection of the teaching of the Oneness of the universe was so radical that he refused to get involved in the issue at all.


There are two possible reasons why the Buddha did not want to describe the universe as One. The first is that although he affirmed that concentration practice can lead to states of non-dual consciousness in which all experience is viewed as One, he noted that such states are fabricated (§24) and thus fall short of the goal. Only when a meditator learns to view all objects of awareness as something separate (§23) can he or she regard them with the detachment needed to overcome any clinging to them—an issue that we will discuss in more detail below, under Point 5. To regard the universe as One closes the door to this sense of separateness needed to reach to freedom.


The second possible reason for not wanting to describe the universe as One can easily be surmised from what we have repeatedly seen of the Romantic problems concerning the issue of freedom. There is no convincing way to explain how a part of a larger Oneness can exercise freedom of choice. At most, such a part can be allowed by other parts to follow its inner drives, but it cannot choose what those drives are. Otherwise, it would be like a stomach suddenly deciding that it wanted to switch jobs with the liver or to strike out on its own: The organism would die.


At the same time, given that all parts of an organic system act in constant reciprocity, there’s no way that any part of a larger whole can lay independent claim to its drives as truly its own. When a stomach starts secreting digestive juices, the signal comes from somewhere else. So if freedom means only the ability to follow one’s inner nature or drives, the fact that one’s drives are not really one’s own denies any independent freedom of choice.


For the purpose of Dhamma practice, this difficulty is fatal. To be able to choose skillful over unskillful actions, you first have to be free to choose your actions. Otherwise, the whole notion of a path of practice is meaningless.


So the basic question posed by Buddhist Romanticism and the answer it provides to that question impose, all in all, at least four severe limitations on the possibility of a path to the end of suffering.


The first limitation is that, by identifying a conditioned experience of Oneness as the goal of spiritual practice, Buddhist Romanticism encourages people to satisfy themselves with experiences falling far short of an unconditioned end to suffering and stress.


The second limitation is that, by defining individuals as organic parts of an organic whole, Buddhist Romanticism—implicitly or explicitly—defines their purpose in life: They are here to serve the purposes of the whole. When this is the case, that larger purpose overrides every person’s desire to put an end to his or her own suffering. People are here to further the goal of the earthlife, and should bear their sufferings with equanimity and joy, happy in the knowledge that they are advancing the goal of earthlife, whatever it is. Thus the Buddhist Romantic answer to the value question implicit in the four noble truths—Is the end of suffering a worthwhile goal?—is clearly a No.


The third limitation is that by defining the primary spiritual issue in terms of becoming—a self in relationship to a world—Buddhist Romanticism closes the door to any notion of a dimension beyond becoming. And because every state of becoming involves suffering, this closes off the possibility that suffering can be totally brought to an end. Thus the Buddhist Romantic answer to the question that set the Buddha-to-be on his quest—Is it possible to find a happiness free from aging, illness, and death?—is another clear No.


The fourth limitation is an even more basic restriction on the possibility of freedom, one that applies even if you don’t aim at ultimate release in this lifetime. In a world where you are an integral part of a larger whole, freedom of choice even in simple matters is impossible. Not only is the idea of a path of practice meaningless; so is the act of teaching any path—or anything—at all. If people have no choice in what they do, why bother to teach them? And why should they bother to listen to what other people say? Thus the Buddhist Romantic answer to one of the Buddha’s even more basic questions—Does the idea of a path of practice make sense?—contradicts itself. On the one hand, Buddhist Romantics teach meditation as a path of practice; on the other, their underlying assumption that the universe is One denies the freedom of choice needed for there to be the possibility of following a path.


The early Romantics, even though they couldn’t provide a satisfactory answer to the question of how freedom can be reconciled with a universal, interdependent Oneness, did at least grapple with the issue. Buddhist Romantics, however, never give it serious attention. At most, some of them assert the possibility of freedom and describe how malleable the causal connections in dependent co-arising can be—portraying them, for instance, as a jeweled net or shimmering matrix—but rarely pursue the issue further than that. If these images are examined carefully, though, they prove wanting in two ways.


The first is simply a matter of consistency: If all factors in the web are easily manipulated, then you yourself are easily manipulated. If you are nothing but a cipher in a shimmering matrix, what means do you have to exert a freely chosen force on any other part of the shimmer?


* * *


• The second way in which these images are wanting is less a matter of internal consistency and more a matter of truth, directly related to Point 4, the basic cause of suffering and its solution.


The Romantic idea that we suffer because we feel separate from the world, and that suffering stops during moments when we have overcome that sense of separation is, from the point of view of the Dhamma, only a partial—and very poor—understanding of suffering and its end. Even if we could constantly maintain a sense of Oneness with the causal connections that constitute the world, would that really end suffering? Is the world really a shimmering net of jewels, content simply to reflect one another and needing nothing else for their sustenance?


As the Buddha pointed out, we live in a world where the basic interaction is one of feeding off one another, emotionally and physically. Inter-being is inter-eating. If we’re jewels, we’re jewels with teeth—and those teeth are diamond-tipped, strong enough to shred other jewels to pieces. This is what it means to be a being, someone who has taken on becoming in a world where other beings have also become and have their sights on the same sources of food.


The Buddhist Romantic equation of suffering with a sense of a discrete, separate self is sometimes justified by the idea that such a sense of separateness is by its nature unstable. This, however, assumes that a connected sense of self—or a sense of oneself as a process-being, rather than a discrete being—would be any more stable. As the Dhamma repeatedly states, every sense of self is a fabrication, and all fabrications are unstable (§19, §22). They always need to feed. Even process-beings need to feed to keep the process going. And there is no single mouth in the interconnected universe that, when fed, would send the nourishment to all parts of the universal organism. Each process feels its own hunger and needs to feed itself from a limited range of food. So the switch from a discrete, separate sense of self to an all-embracing process-self would not solve the problem of suffering.


The image of the world that drove the Buddha to practice was one of fish competing for the water in a diminishing pool (§27). And as he famously said, even if it rained gold coins, that wouldn’t be enough to satisfy our sensual desires (§29). Only if we train the mind to a dimension where there is no felt hunger and no need to feed will we ever reach a genuine happiness. The need to feed cannot be ended simply by seeing ourselves as jewels reflecting a shimmering light. We have to uproot the source of our hunger by overcoming the need to be a being. If we choose to stay immersed in a web of conditions driven by hunger, we close ourselves to any possibility that suffering can be brought to an end.


* * *


• Point 5, the nature of the religious experience: As noted in Chapter Five, Schleiermacher’s belief that there was a single religious experience, identical for all human beings, grew from his own monotheistic, Pietist background, in which only one religious experience—a feeling of God’s presence—was possible. When translated into Romantic terms, in which the ultimate truth about reality was the infinite unity of the cosmos, this meant that the only possible religious experience was a feeling of that unity. And as we saw in Chapter Six, even as the West gained more knowledge about non-monotheistic religious traditions, the transmitters of Romantic religion never seriously challenged this part of Schleiermacher’s thesis. In some cases they questioned whether such an experience proved one’s unity with the cosmos, but in no case did they question whether this feeling of unity was the only possible experience that qualified as religious. And Buddhist Romanticism tends not to question this, either.


The Buddha’s map of spiritual experiences, however, differs from Schleiermacher’s in two important respects: one, in mapping out a wide variety of experiences that could be mistaken for the ultimate spiritual goal; and two, in asserting that the ultimate goal is not a feeling—not even a feeling of Oneness—but a direct experience of a dimension beyond feelings and beyond the senses (§§46–47; §54). At the same time, the Buddha offers many practical tests to ascertain whether an experience in meditation qualifies as the ultimate goal or not.


The Buddha does acknowledge that the Oneness of awareness achieved in right concentration is a central part of the path to the deathless, but it is not the goal (§23; §58). Because it is fabricated, it—like all the other factors of the path—has to be dropped when it has done its work. Otherwise, the opening to the deathless will never appear.


At the same time, the Buddha never encourages us to believe that the feeling or perception of Oneness felt in concentration should be taken as a sign that experience is really One. Quite the contrary: A meditator who wants to end ignorance and give rise to clear knowing has to view all objects of the mind as something separate (§24). This point applies to all the objects that Buddhist Romanticism advocates seeing as parts of a pre-existing unity: self and cosmos, mind and body, feelings and thoughts. To view these things as parts of a Oneness of which you are also a part makes it impossible to gain any distance from them. Without that sense of distance, you can’t clearly see and overcome your attachment for them.


For instance, to see the body as One with the mind makes it impossible to see how attachment to the body is a major source of suffering. To see your feelings as One with your reason makes it impossible to see their drawbacks or to catch the mind in the act of clinging to them. To see the self as One with the world—an interpretation that can easily be applied to the experience of concentration on very refined, infinite levels—is, in the Buddha’s estimation, one of the most foolish self-doctrines of all.


There are two reasons for this. On the one hand, because “self” carries the implication of “things belonging to self,” it claims identity with things that could not possibly belong to the self. If you think you are One with your neighbor’s tree, try cutting it down and see if it’s really yours (§21). On the other hand, if the concept of self is stretched to include the cosmos, you won’t look for the way “self” as a mental action forms around desires on a moment-to-moment basis. If you don’t examine your sense of self on this level, you won’t be able to work free of it (§22).


So there are important practical consequences for adopting the Buddhist Romantic position on these points over the Buddha’s. If you believe that there is only one religious experience, then when you have an impressive unifying experience, you will not apply the Buddha’s tests to it. If you are satisfied with a feeling of Oneness, you will not look further to see whether that feeling—like all other feelings—is fabricated or not. In this way, you risk settling for much less than second best.


* * *


• Points 6 and 7, the immanence of the religious goal and the limited freedom it can bring: The idea that the religious experience leads only to an immanent dimension, and not to a transcendent one, is drawn from the Romantic definition, under Points 2 and 3, of what a human being is: an integral, organic part of a cosmos with no transcendent dimension. As part of such a cosmos, there is no way that you could experience anything transcending the cosmos. Even in a mechanistic model of the cosmos, the same limitations prevail. When Buddhist Romanticism accepts either of these worldviews, it is forced to accept those limitations as well.


This approach is the reverse of the Buddha’s. Instead of starting with a definition of what a human being is, and then deducing from that what a human being can know, he worked the other way around: exploring first what a human being can know through experience, and then—in light of how the best possible experience was attained—drawing conclusions about how to answer the question of what a human being is. His conclusion was that holding to any definition of what a human being is would ultimately stand in the way of that experience, which is why he developed his teachings on not-self, while at the same time refusing to answer whether or not the self exists (§§15–16).


In this sense, the Buddha’s approach is somewhat like the approach that James and Jung followed at a time when the mechanistic model of the universe was ascendant: Instead of starting with the laws of the cosmos “out there” as a primary reality and trying to fit oneself, as a secondary reality, into the context of those laws, they proposed starting with consciousness as it is experienced from within as primary reality, and regarding the cosmos out there as secondary. Only then, they stated, could the problems and illnesses of consciousness be healed.


The difference in the Buddha’s case is that he went considerably further than either James or Jung in discovering what true health for the psyche could be: a dimension totally free from the constraints of space and time. From that discovery, he was able to evaluate theories of causality and the universe, and to reject any that would not allow for the experience he had attained.


This, as we have noted, is called the phenomenological approach. And the Buddha aimed his attention directly at the most pressing phenomenological problem: the problem of suffering and how to end it. My suffering is something that only I can feel. Yours is something that only you can feel. I cause my suffering through my own unskillfulness, and can put an end to it by developing skillfulness in all my actions. The same principle applies to you. In other words, the problem is felt from within, caused from within, and can be cured only from within. And as long as we claim our identity as part of an unstable web of connections, we will never be able to effect a cure.


This means that if we insist on choosing to hold to a worldview in which there is no escape from a web of interconnections, we leave ourselves subject to continued suffering without end.


As for the Buddhist Romantic arguments that an immanent view of awakening is superior to a transcendent view, these boil down to two assertions. The first is that an immanent goal is nondualistic, whereas a transcendent goal is dualistic. This argument carries force only if “dual” is inherently inferior to “nondual.” But the problem of suffering is inherently dual, both in the distinction between suffering and its end, and in the teaching that there are causes and effects. Either you suffer or you don’t. You create the causes that lead to suffering, or you follow a path of action that leads to suffering’s end. If you decide that suffering is not a problem, you are free to continue creating the causes of suffering as you like. But if you want to stop suffering, then you are committed to taking on these two dualities and seeing that here, at least, dualism opens up opportunities that nondualism closes off.


The second assertion is that a transcendent goal automatically entails indifference to the world being transcended, and that this contributes to the ecological crisis facing the Earth. The idea that there is a transcendent dimension, we are told, makes people treat this worldly dimension as worthless. Therefore we need a vision of awakening in which we all awaken together with the purpose of staying here.


This argument gains some of its force from the reduced version of the path that has come to stand for Buddhist practice in the West: going to retreat centers and closing yourself off from the outside world. But when we look at the entire path of practice as outlined by the Buddha, it’s hard to see where the path to unbinding encourages indifference to the Earth or contributes to the pollution and abuse of the environment. No one ever gained awakening by being stingy and materialistic. No one ever fracked for oil or raped the environment from a desire for unbinding. As the Buddha said, as long as one has not achieved full awakening, one incurs a debt with every meal one takes—a teaching that hardly encourages carelessness.


Most Buddhists know that they will not gain full awakening in this lifetime, which means that they face the prospect of returning to the Earth that they have shaped during this lifetime through their actions. This belief in karma and rebirth, in fact, is one of Buddhism’s most potent arguments for the stewardship of the planet. And yet Buddhist Romanticism—like Herder and the early Romantics before them—have rejected belief in karma and rebirth, and have offered only a vague generality on interconnectedness and evolution in its place. But these vague notions of responsibility toward others whom we will never see don’t have half the emotional impact of a worldview in which we will be forced to return to clean up any messes we ourselves have made.


And the path actually fosters habits designed not to leave messes. To begin with, it teaches contentment with few material things, a quality that helps to slow the exploitation of the Earth’s resources. When people are content with only what they really need, they leave a small footprint behind.


Similarly, the path entails celibacy, which is certainly not responsible for the over-population of the earth. And, unlike bodhisattvas, who are committed to returning to the feeding chain of the Earth again and again, arahants remove themselves from the chain entirely, at the same time inspiring others to do likewise, so that that many mouths and that many fish will be removed from the dwindling pool.


So it’s hard to see that holding to unbinding as a transcendent goal encourages trashing the Earth. It’s actually an act of kindness—toward oneself, toward those who follow one’s example, and all forms of life who choose to remain behind. To choose an immanent goal over unbinding—and to urge others to keep returning to the pool—is actually an irresponsible and heartless act.


* * *


• Point 8, that the goal is never reached once and for all: As the Buddha made clear, it is not the case that once awakening happens all problems in life will end. The fully awakened person still experiences pleasure and pain, and must still deal with the difficulties presented by other people. The Buddha himself had to deal for 45 years with the misbehavior of the monks and nuns in the Saṅghas he established.


Nevertheless, he also repeatedly emphasized that none of these difficulties could make inroads on his mind, and that the same held true for all those who are fully awakened (MN 137). And, unlike people who have yet to abandon becoming, once the fully awakened person passes away, there will be no more experience of the pleasures and pains of the six senses. In the meantime, their experience of unbinding consists of the total eradication of passion, aversion, and delusion (§52).


Some Buddhist Romantics, however, challenge the Buddha on this point, noting that even after his awakening, he kept encountering Māra. Because the modern mechanistic worldview has room neither for non-human spirits nor for the thoughts in one person’s mind to appear in the mind of another, the argument interprets Māra, not as an actual non-human being, but as a symbol of the defilements still in the Buddha’s subconscious that he did not recognize as such. The repeated encounters, in this view, were simply signs that the Buddha still had work to do in dealing with his own delusions all life long.


But there are two inconsistencies here. The first is that in making this assertion these Buddhist Romantics are repudiating their own Romantic interpretation of Buddhist causality. Elsewhere, they themselves have described the world as a mystery, a shimmering matrix in which there exist no discrete boundaries between individuals. In such a world, there could easily be a being like Māra whose thoughts might permeate into the Buddha’s consciousness. Why these teachers have chosen to defend the limited Romantic view of the religious goal by repudiating the Romantic worldview of a mysterious interconnected Oneness is hard to say, but the inconsistency undermines their case.


The second inconsistency comes from the mechanistic worldview such teachers adopt to make their case. In such a worldview, there is no room for consciousness as anything but a by-product of physical processes, which means that suffering, too, would be simply the result of physical processes. If it could possibly be ended in such a world, it would have to be by means of physical processes. Meditation, as a phenomenological, non-physical process, couldn’t possibly have an effect. So it would be inconsistent for a person holding such a worldview to engage in meditation practice, and even more inconsistent to teach Dhamma or meditation lessons to others.


So again, the inconsistencies involved in making this argument undermine the position of the person making it.


However this argument is made, the practical consequences of insisting that the goal can never be fully reached are similar to those under Point 5: If you accept that awakening still leaves greed, aversion, and delusion in the mind, you will tend to overestimate a meditative experience that seems impressive but still leaves seeds of these defilements in its wake. This will stand in the way of making any further progress on the path.


* * *


• Point 9, on seeing the sacred in the mundane: The ability to see all things as luminous is recognized in the Canon as a state of mental mastery—but it is still fabricated (§23). This means that it’s not a sign of a transcendent attainment.


As for the sense that all things are sacred—what we have termed the microcosmic sublime—this can lead easily to attachment. The Buddha himself pointed out that seeing all things as good can create suffering similar to the sort that comes from seeing all things as bad (MN 74). And if skillful and unskillful intentions are regarded as equally sacred, what motivation is there to abandon the unskillful ones? So the sense that all things are sacred leaves people defenseless against their own unskillful intentions and is actually an obstacle on the path.


As for the macrocosmic sublime: One of the passages quoted under Point 10 above makes the assertion that religion is mainly concerned with mystery, and expresses the preference that life and its purpose be left mysterious, and that life’s great questions remain unanswered.


This differs sharply from the Buddha’s sense of overwhelming dismay prior to his awakening. The word with which he described it, saṁvega, actually means “terror,” and fits well with Kant’s use of the word sublime. For the Buddha, this terror came from a specific view of the world—the fish in the pool—and demanded an answer: the end of suffering. To leave that answer as a mystery is to close the path to an escape.


So here again, the practical consequences of choosing one view of the sublime over another are sharp in their difference. Buddhist Romanticism wants the large questions to remain unanswered; the Dhamma, that they be resolved.


* * *


• Point 10 (a), on attaining the spiritual goal through an attitude of mindfulness, defined as an open receptivity and acceptance: The Buddha notes that the causes of suffering come in two forms: those that end when you simply watch them with equanimity, and those that end only when you exert yourself actively to get rid of them (§38). To adopt an attitude of acceptance for everything you experience allows you to end only causes of the first sort. Causes of the second sort will continue to fester, preventing true freedom.


At the same time, if all experience is simply to be accepted, and all experience is One, what does that say about the problem of evil? As we noted in our discussions of Emerson, Maslow, and Huxley, if evil is supposed to be accepted as a necessary part of the Oneness of all things, and the universe as a whole is indifferent to good and evil, there is no incentive to make the effort to avoid evil and do good. To teach such an attitude would, in the Buddha’s eyes, leave people bewildered and unprotected from their own unskillful urges (§8). There would be no basis for what he identified as a categorical truth: that unskillful behavior is to be avoided, and skillful behavior developed (AN 2:18). This means that an attitude of total acceptance is diametrically opposed to Dhamma practice.


As for mindfulness, the Buddha never defines it as an open, receptive, pre-verbal state. In fact, his standard definition for the faculty of mindfulness is the ability to remember and keep things in mind for a long time (§35). Thus, in the practice of right mindfulness, one is keeping one of four frames of reference in mind—body, feelings, mind, and mental qualities—remembering to stay with these things in and of themselves, alert to the present moment in terms of these frames of reference, at the same time remembering the instructions connected with each frame in how to be ardent in abandoning unskillful factors that arise and to develop skillful factors in their place.


Some of the Canon’s more vivid analogies for the practice of mindfulness emphasize this element of ardency, suggesting anything but an open, receptive, non-judging state: a person with his head on fire; a man walking between a beauty queen and a crowd, carrying on his head a bowl filled to the brim with oil, and a man following behind him with a raised sword, ready to cut off his head if even a drop of oil gets spilled (§§36–37).


There’s a tendency, even among serious scholars, to mine the Canon for passages presenting a more spacious, receptive picture of mindfulness. But this tendency, in addition to ignoring the basic definition of mindfulness, denies the essential unity among the factors of the path. In some cases, this denial is explicit: To make their case, some scholars actually define right mindfulness on the one hand, and right effort and right concentration on the other, as two mutually exclusive forms of practice. This suggests that the tendency to define mindfulness as an open, receptive, non-judging state comes from a source other than the Canon. It’s possible to find Asian roots for this tendency, in the schools of meditation that define mindfulness as bare awareness or mere noting. But the way the West has morphed these definitions in the direction of acceptance and affirmation has less to do with Asian traditions, and more to do with the Romantic tendency to exalt an open receptivity as the source for spiritual inspiration.


And the practical consequences are clear: To limit oneself to a practice of open acceptance leaves one defenseless against the causes of suffering that will go away only through concerted effort.


* * *


• Point 10 (b), on their being many different paths to the goal: This idea, as we noted above, came from the Pietist assumption, later adopted by the Romantics, that there is only one possible goal. Based on this assumption, both the Pietists and the Romantics believed that the only kindly way to regard paths other than one’s own was to endorse them as equally valid alternative routes to one and the same place.


However, if—as the Dhamma maintains—there are many possible goals, then the differences among the paths actually can make a difference in what is attained. So the kindly approach is not simply to endorse all paths. It’s to figure out which path leads to which goal.


The Buddha states clearly that there is only one path to unbinding (§60). Trying to find awakening in ways apart from the noble eightfold path is like trying to squeeze oil from gravel, or to get milk from a cow by twisting its horn (§59). The Canon compares the Buddha’s knowledge of the way to awakening to that of an expert gatekeeper who knows, after encircling the walls of a city, that there’s only one way into the city: the gate he guards (§57).


Even for a person on the one path to unbinding, the Buddha cites many possible experiences, such as the levels of concentration, that might be—and have been—mistaken for unbinding (DN 1). Thus he provides a series of tests for judging whether a meditative experience counts as the endpoint, as a station along the way, or as a side path leading in the wrong direction.


One of the tests for determining whether one has reached the first level of awakening is if, on reflection, one realizes that no one outside the Buddha’s teaching teaches the true, accurate, way to the goal (§56). Although individual people may have to focus on issues particular to their temperament (SN 35:204), the basic outline of the path is the same for all.


From this point of view, the Buddhist Romantic position that each person can choose his or her own path—secure in the knowledge that whatever their choice, they will get to the same goal—deprives people of the incentive to stick with the true path when it inevitably gets difficult. This, for the purposes of freedom, is a severe obstacle.


* * *


• This obstacle is especially blatant with regard to Point 11, the assertion that erotic love can form a path to awakening. The Buddha began his teaching career with the observation that the path he taught avoided two extremes: indulgence in sensual pleasures under the sway of sensuality—in other words, the passion for one’s sensual resolves—and indulgence in self-torment. Both extremes, he said, are ignoble. Both create a great deal of suffering—if you don’t believe that sex can cause suffering, spend some time in divorce court—and neither leads to the goal.


And he didn’t deprecate sensuality out of an arbitrary personal dislike for it. He recognized that the mind could attain strong concentration when focused on sensual desire, but he realized that, for the purpose of the path, that would be wrong concentration. Right concentration would require that he drop that desire (§58; §14). After all, awakening requires comprehending becoming, and a person can comprehend sensual becoming only when he or she has been able to step out of the desire around which it forms (MN 14). As the Buddha later admitted, when he first realized that right concentration required pulling away from sensuality, his mind didn’t leap up at the prospect. But he was honest enough with himself to admit that it was true. So, by focusing on the drawbacks of sensuality, he was able to get the mind into right concentration and from there attain awakening (AN 9:41).


An unwillingness to see the drawbacks of sensuality is a form of dishonesty that prevents one from examining some of the crudest forms of becoming that the mind creates. At the same time, it prevents one from imagining the desirability—or even the possibility—of a mind free from the suffering that these forms of becoming entail (MN 125). This lack of imagination places severe limitations on one’s sensitivity to stress, and one’s ability to gain a happiness totally free from stress.


* * *


• Point 12: on tolerating all religious traditions as equally valid expressions of a sense of universal Oneness. The Romantic attitude toward tolerance is directly related to the basic paradox that we have frequently noted in Romantic religion: the position that, on the one hand, no one can pass judgment on another person’s expression of Oneness; but, on the other hand, that those expressions are valid only when recognizing the Romantic view that they are imperfect expressions of Oneness, along with the corollary view that some expressions express this principle better than others. Translated into the issue of tolerance, this means that your beliefs will all be tolerated only as long as they recognize the Romantic principles of what religion is and the world in which it functions.


This straitjacket is somewhat looser than the narrow range of tolerance offered by many other religious traditions, but it’s a straitjacket nonetheless. This is especially clear from the point of view of the Dhamma, for two reasons. One, the Dhamma is not an attempt to express universal Oneness and doesn’t see a return to that Oneness as its goal. It aims instead at something beyond the universe: total unbinding. Two, it recognizes that there are right and wrong paths to unbinding. To claim that a wrong path can actually get the same result is a disservice to others—and to oneself—just as it’s perverse to teach other people to get milk from a cow by twisting its horn (§59).


These two reasons are directly related to the third and fourth noble truths: that there is an unfabricated dimension constituting the end of suffering, and that there are right and wrong paths for getting to that dimension. To force the Dhamma to abandon these two truths in order to earn Romantic tolerance is extracting too high a price. It impoverishes all those who, if the Dhamma did bow to these conditions, would be deprived of the benefits of learning these truths.


Some people fear that notions of right and wrong practices lead inevitably to strife—look at all the futile wars fought over religious beliefs—so it’s kinder to let people take whatever path they want. This is the attitude that led to Pietism in the first place, and as we have seen, this Pietist attitude has survived in Romantic religion. But some differences of opinion on religious matters are more likely to lead to strife than others. If, for instance, you believe that there is only one god, and view all other gods as evil and false, you are likely to feel threatened by the existence of other people who believe in gods other than your own. This attitude can easily lead—as it has led—to recurrent violence.


If, however, you believe in a path of action that leads to true happiness—that, say, you can get milk from a cow by pulling on its udder—you will pity other people who try to milk the cow by twisting its horn. You may feel inspired to point out their error, but if they insist on twisting the horn, you leave them alone. Nevertheless, you can still do your best to convince others aside from them that a cow is more effectively milked by pulling on its udder. And you’re right to do so. Where there’s no clear sense of right and wrong, a lot of people will needlessly go without milk.


* * *


• Points 13 through 16: These principles in the Buddhist Romantic program boil down to two: (a) that all religious texts are expressive of the author’s feeling for universal Oneness and (b) that no text carries special authority because no finite being—trapped in his or her point in time and culture—can fully comprehend or express that Oneness. Thus, all texts should be read aesthetically, for poetic inspiration, but without granting them any authority. In fact, because of the limitations of language in expressing universal Oneness, one harms one’s own experience of it by giving authority to anyone else’s expression of it.


However, from the perspective of the Dhamma, the premise on which these ideas are based is false. The Buddha’s teachings are not expressions of his feelings for universal Oneness. They are precise instructions on what to do to attain ultimate happiness. This is why his basic image for his teaching was a path: something to be followed to reach a goal.


a) Granted, the Canon contains a few passages where the Buddha and his awakened disciples speak poetically and expressively of their attainments, but those passages are rare. Far more common are the descriptive and proscriptive passages: maps to the path, in which the Buddha tells explicitly how to get to awakening; and encouragement to follow the maps, in which he tries to get people to see why awakening is worth pursuing. As he said in a famous simile, the knowledge gained in his awakening was like the leaves in the forest; the knowledge he taught, like the leaves in his hand (SN 56:31). And he chose those particular leaves because they served a purpose, helping others develop the skills needed for release.


This point is supported by the imagery and analogies employed throughout the Canon. Although some of the more poetic passages draw images from nature, they are greatly outnumbered by analogies drawn from manual skills—cooking, farming, archery, carpentry—making the point that Dhamma practice is a skill that can be understood and mastered in ways similar to more ordinary skills.


The poetic approach to the Canon overlooks the care with which the Buddha tried to make his instructions specific and clear. As he once commented (§66), there are two types of assemblies: those trained in bombast, and those trained in cross-questioning. In the former, the students are taught “literary works—the works of poets, artful in sound, artful in expression, the work of outsiders” and are not encouraged to pin down what the meaning of those beautiful words might be. In the latter—and here the Buddha was describing his own method of teaching—the students are taught the Dhamma and “when they have mastered that Dhamma, they cross-question one another about it and dissect it: ‘How is this? What is the meaning of this?’ They make open what isn’t open, make plain what isn’t plain, dispel doubt on its various doubtful points.”


He taught people in this way so that they could clearly understand what they were supposed to do. To treat such teachings as poetry encourages a hazier notion of the Dhamma, and deprives the “supposed to do” of much of its force. Passages that challenge the reader’s habits and views can more easily be dismissed—and important lessons are lost.


At the same time, treating the Buddha’s words as poetry encourages a certain looseness in quoting and translating them. Many Buddhist Romantic writers exhibit this looseness—as in the above quote citing the Buddha to the effect that precepts are not necessary for a person established in awareness, something he never said. In treating the Buddha’s words loosely, these writers harm both the Buddha, by slandering him, and the reader, by denying him or her the chance to benefit from the Buddha’s precise experience in the path and skill in pointing out how to practice it.


b) Because the Buddha was teaching a particular path of action, the Romantic reasons for refusing to grant him authority do not apply. It’s true that no one person can have the last word on universal Oneness, but it is possible for one person to have developed full expertise in a skill—and in some cases, to develop an expertise on which no one else can improve.


Seeing the Buddha’s teachings in this light enables us to understand the nature of his authority as presented in the Pāli suttas. He speaks, not with the authority of a creator, but with the authority of an expert. Only in the disciplinary rules in the Vinaya does he assume the added authority of a lawgiver. In the suttas, he calls himself a doctor; a trainer; an admirable, experienced friend who has mastered a specific skill: putting an end to suffering. He provides explicit recommendations on how to act, speak, and think to bring about that result; instructions on how to develop qualities of mind that allow you to assess your actions accurately; and questions to ask yourself in measuring your progress along the way.


As for the possible harm that might come from giving the Buddha authority in these areas, Buddhist Romantics who describe the dangers of following a particular Buddhist teaching usually deal in caricatures. For instance, one teacher warns of the dangers of wanting to follow a path that leads to a transcendent, once-and-for-all goal as follows:


“The linear path holds up an idealistic vision of the perfected human, a Buddha or saint or sage. In this vision, all greed, anger, fear, judgment, delusion, personal ego, and desire are uprooted forever, completely eliminated. What is left is an absolutely unwavering, radiant, pure human being who never experiences any difficulties, an illuminated sage who follows only the Tao or God’s will and never his or her own.”


Although this may be a possible vision of the linear path, it’s not the path taught in the Canon. The Buddha certainly passed judgment on people and taught clear criteria for what are and are not valid grounds for judgment (AN 7:64; AN 4:192; MN 110). He experienced difficulties in setting up the monastic Saṅgha. But that does not invalidate the fact that his greed, aversion, and delusion were gone.


As MN 22 states, there are dangers in grasping the Dhamma wrongly. In the context of that sutta, the Buddha is referring to people who grasp the Dhamma for the sake of argument; at present we might point out the dangers in grasping the teachings neurotically. But there are even greater dangers in misrepresenting the teachings, dragging them down to our own level rather than using them to lift ourselves up. As the Buddha said, people who claim that he said what he didn’t say, or didn’t say what he did, are slandering him (§68). In doing so, they blind themselves—and others—to the Dhamma.


* * *


• Point 17, on the sources of moral behavior. The Romantic rejection of moral precepts, like its rejection of religious authority in general, is based on a false premise: that ideas of right and wrong express only the feelings of the person who sets them forth.


The Buddha established a moral code of five precepts because he had discovered, from experience, that it gave necessary guidance in leading a harmless life: harmless both to oneself and to others (AN 4:99). And the range of this guidance doesn’t end with awakening. Even though awakened people no longer define themselves in terms of the precepts, their behavior still falls in line with them (MN 79). And, conversely, if a person claims to be awakened but his or her behavior doesn’t fall in line with the precepts, the claim can be rejected as false (AN 3:87).


Viewed from the perspective of the Buddha’s standards, the Buddhist Romantic assertion that feelings of love and compassion on the one hand, and Oneness on the other, can give a person adequate guidance to skillful behavior doesn’t hold up to experience.


An attitude of love and compassion—on its own, and uninformed about how actions work out over time—is not enough to prevent actions with harmful consequences. Good intentions are not always skillful intentions. So the precepts act as reminders of what skillful kamma actually is, and they express their message in a concise form, easy to remember when most needed, i.e., when events are urgent and confusing, and give rise to conflicting emotions or conflicting ideas about what a skillful action might be.


Similarly, an attitude of Oneness—that other people are One with you—is hard to maintain when those other people are trying to kill you and your loved ones, or steal what you need to survive. And yet it’s precisely in situations like those that you need something clear to hold onto so that you know what, in the long run, is skillful to do, and you have the strength of character to do it.


But the precepts do more than simply counsel against unskillful behavior. They are also aids in developing concentration and discernment. If you follow them carefully, you avoid actions that will lead to regret—or, from regret, to denial. A mind wounded by regret will have a hard time settling into concentration. If it has covered that regret with the scar tissue of denial, it will have a hard time looking carefully at its inner actions. Discernment won’t have a chance to arise.


Moreover, if you hold carefully to the precepts, you will find that they conflict with many of your cherished habits and notions. This gives you the opportunity to come face to face with attachments lying behind those habits and notions, which you might otherwise hide from yourself. If you tend to dismiss the precepts as simply the feelings of one person at one particular point in time—the Buddha in ancient India—which need to be modified for today, you will easily make exceptions for your notions and habits. That will deprive you of the “mirror of Dhamma” that the precepts can ideally provide.


* * *


• This principle holds true, not only for your personal notions and habits, but also for those you have picked up from your culture. If you can’t see the Dhamma as transcending culture, you won’t be willing to listen to the Dhamma when it challenges the horizons within which your culture has taught you to think and feel. Given that these horizons can be invisible to the people they surround, and yet can effectively block out any premises that don’t fall in line with them, you may not even hear the challenges the Dhamma presents.


This is the practical drawback of Point 19, on seeing the Buddha’s Dhamma simply as a product of his historical circumstances.


The whole purpose of the Dhamma is a direct challenge to this principle. The release provided by unbinding—what the Buddha called the essence or heartwood (sāra) of the Dhamma (§39)—stands outside of space and time (§§45–49). The Buddha’s discovery of this timeless perspective was what enabled him to judge which aspects of his culture were conducive to the path leading to the essence, and which ones were not. The simple fact that he claimed an experience of the transcendent doesn’t prove that it’s true, but the Romantic counterclaim—that there is no transcendent dimension—has never been proven, either. But as we have previously noted, the Buddha’s claim offers the possibility of freedom—both freedom of choice on a moment-to-moment level, and the ultimate freedom of unbinding—whereas the Romantic claim offers no possibility of genuine freedom, period. So to choose the Romantic claim over the Dhamma’s closes off the possibility of any path of practice at all.


It’s obvious that the Buddha’s language and metaphors were culturally conditioned, but it’s hard to identify any of his basic teachings as limited in that way. To say nothing of his teaching on unbinding; even his explanations of suffering and the path to its end deal in universal terms. As for the range of his knowledge, he claimed an awareness of the past that far outstrips ours (DN 29; DN 1), and he’d often cite direct knowledge of a vast expanse of past, present, and future when describing, for instance, how physical, verbal, and mental actions are to be purified (MN 61) and how the highest emptiness can be attained (MN 121). This is why even the Dhamma of the path is said to be timeless, and why the first level of awakening verifies that this is so.


At the same time, when people speak of essential Buddhist teachings that are limited by the cultural conventions of the Buddha’s time, they’re usually misinformed as to what those conventions were.


For instance, with the doctrine of kamma: Even though the Buddha used the word kamma like his contemporaries, his conception of what kamma was and how it worked differed radically from theirs (§8; MN 60; MN 101).


The same holds with the teaching on rebirth: Questions of whether rebirth actually happened, and the extent to which it was related to kamma, were hotly debated in his time (DN 2; DN 23). So it’s hard to say that, in teaching the effect of kamma on rebirth, he was simply following unthinkingly the narrow beliefs of his culture. In fact, his teachings on this issue tackled the issue of rebirth in a novel and practical way: focusing not on what is or isn’t reborn, but on how rebirth happens based on habits of the mind, and how those habits can be retrained to give freedom from continued suffering.


His teachings on kamma and rebirth give universal answers to a universal question: “What factors should I take into account to decide if a particular action is worth the effort?” We can’t be agnostic on this issue, treating it as a question not worth answering, because we answer it willy-nilly with every action we take, as we decide which potential results of the action should enter into the calculation of whether it’s worth doing, and which potential results to ignore.


What’s striking about the Western attitude toward kamma and rebirth is that so many Westerners have resisted these teachings from the start. Herder found them repellent, as did Hegel, although neither of them understood the wide range of Indian positions on these topics, or the fact that the Buddha’s position differed radically from anything else in the Indian tradition. Yet even though much new evidence on these topics has surfaced over the years, showing how the Buddha’s position was uniquely suited to the purpose of putting an end to suffering, Buddhist Romanticism remains stuck in the old Western attitude: It treats his teachings on kamma and rebirth simply as cultural holdovers that would be better dropped from the tradition because the idea of individual kamma clashes with the principle of the Oneness of all being, and the teaching on rebirth with the principle of total receptivity to the present moment. As a result, the Buddha’s actual teachings on these topics are not allowed to hold up a mirror to Western/Romantic suppositions. Nor are they given a chance to show the way around the obstacles that those suppositions place on the path.


* * *


• Instead, Buddhist Romanticism teaches that modern Buddhists are actually doing the Dhamma a favor by changing it to suit the needs and suppositions of modern culture, in line with Point 20: the duty to alter one’s religious tradition in line with the times.


Here it’s important to remember the Romantic assumption underlying this principle: that the universe is an organism with a purpose, and that its purpose is becoming more fully realized with the passage of time. Thus evolutions in society are good, and religions should evolve in order to keep up with them. This assumption receives strong reinforcement in a culture such as ours where technological progress leads people to believe that the culture as a whole is evolving far beyond anything the world has ever known.


But there is very little to support this assumption. In fact, the Pāli suttas present the opposite picture: that human life is getting worse as a sphere for Dhamma practice, and will continue to deteriorate until the Dhamma disappears entirely. And it’s easy to cite features of modern life that confirm this picture. To begin with, Dhamma practice is a skill, requiring the attitudes and mental abilities developed by manual skills—such as patience, respect, humility, and resilience—and yet we are a society whose manual skills are fast eroding away. Thus the mental virtues nurtured by manual skills have atrophied. At the same time, the social hierarchy required by skills—in which students apprentice themselves to a master—has mostly disappeared, so we’ve unlearned the attitudes needed to live in hierarchy in a healthy and productive manner.


We like to think that we’re shaping the Dhamma with our highest cultural ideals, but some of our lower ways are actually dominating the shape of Western Dhamma: The sense of neurotic entitlement produced by the culture of consumerism is a case in point, as are the hype of the mass media and the demands of the mass-market for a Dhamma that sells.


So just because Buddhism has been changed in the past doesn’t mean that those changes were good, or that they should be taken as an example or justification for new changes now. Here, again, the organic notion of change has created confusion. All too often Buddhism is presented as an organism that wisely adapts itself to its new environments. But Buddhism is not a plant or an animal. It doesn’t have a will, and it doesn’t adapt; people adapt Buddhism to their various ends. In some cases, those ends are admirable. Some novel elements—in terms of language and imagery—have helped bring people in new times and places into contact with the essence of the Dhamma. And in many cases, often overlooked in histories that focus on innovation, many attempts at adaptation have aimed, not at creating something new, but at recovering something that had been lost.


Yet because the adapters of the past were not always wise, there’s no guarantee that all adaptations are skillful. Just because other people have made changes in the Dhamma doesn’t automatically justify the changes we want to make. Think, for instance, of how some Mahāyāna traditions dropped the Vinaya’s procedures for dealing with teacher-student sexual abuse: Was this the Dhamma wisely adapting itself to their needs?


The Buddha foresaw that people would introduce what he called “a counterfeit of the true Dhamma”—and when that happened, he said, the true Dhamma would disappear (§69). In a separate passage, he compared the process to what happens when a wooden drum develops a crack, into which a peg is inserted, and then another crack, into which another peg is inserted, and so on until nothing is left of the original drum-body. All that remains is a mass of pegs, which cannot come near to producing the sound of the original drum (§71).


As noted above, some scholars have found the Pāli Canon’s warnings about the decay of the Dhamma ironic, citing what they claim to be a Buddhist principle: that resistance to change is a root cause of suffering. But the Buddha didn’t embrace change, didn’t encourage change for the sake of change, and certainly didn’t define resistance to change as the cause of suffering. Suffering is caused by identifying with change or with things that change. Many are the suttas describing the perils of “going along with the flow” in terms of a river that can carry an unsuspecting person to whirlpools, monsters, and demons (Iti 109). And a pervasive theme in the Canon is that true happiness is found only when one crosses over the river to the changelessness of the other side (Sn 5).


As for trusting the impulses of the mind to produce wise changes, this too is a notion based on the organic Romantic view of the universe: that our inner drives are all expressions of a reliably good source leading to a good end. But try a thought experiment and take the above passage—that “we must be open to a variety of responses toward social change that come from no particular ‘authority’ but are grounded in the radical creativity that comes when concepts fall away”—and imagine how it would sound in different contexts. Coming from a socially concerned Buddhist activist, it might not seem disconcerting. But from a rebel leader teaching child-soldiers in a civil-war torn country, or a greedy financier contemplating new financial instruments, it would be a cause for alarm.


The Buddha’s teachings on the mind’s active interaction with the world are in agreement with the Romantic principle that the mind has an interactive, reciprocal relationship with the universe. But he would have differed with the Romantic estimation that this activity—whether from within the mind or from the universe outside—is divinely rooted and inspired. To trust this activity unquestioningly would be, in his eyes, an act of heedlessness. In his analysis of dependent co-arising, mental fabrication—the mind’s active approach to experience—comes from ignorance (§25; SN 12:2). This ignorance has no overall purpose, and in particular does not work instinctively for the good of all. As we noted in Chapter Four, the simple fact that the mind is in an interactive relationship with its environment is no proof that both are parts of a larger, benevolent, teleological whole.


In fact, from the point of view of the Dhamma, the interactive, reciprocal nature of fabrication is the reason why causal relations are unstable, and why any happiness built on fabrication is unreliable and entails inherent suffering. The only way to end suffering is not to celebrate fabrication, but to master it strategically so as to end it; and this requires an attitude, not of trust, but of heedful vigilance (DN 16). Heedfulness must extend both to one’s attitude toward one’s intuitions and to the ways with which one interprets the Dhamma.


The choice between the Dhamma and Buddhist Romanticism ultimately comes down to which kind of freedom you want. The Dhamma offers freedom from suffering through freedom from becoming; Buddhist Romanticism—in line with the Romantic view of religion as an artwork—offers you the freedom to redesign the Dhamma in line with your preferences to produce more inclusive states of becoming. Given that the Romantic universe allows for nothing beyond becoming, it closes the door to freedom in the ultimate sense. And as we have noted, the fact that, in a Romantic universe, you have no control over your preferences, it can’t even offer freedom in the more everyday sense of freedom of choice. Although the Romantic worldview promotes the idea that expressions of preferences ultimately have no consequences, the Dhamma starts with the principle that actions have consequences now and into the future (MN 61). The difference in perspective couldn’t be more stark.


If we are serious about our engagement with the Dhamma, we have to think not only of the benefits we can gain from the Dhamma, but also of what sort of Dhamma we leave for future generations. The Buddha never demanded that people believe his teachings, but he did ask that people represent them fairly and give them a fair test. But if we insist on making changes to the Dhamma, the people who come after us won’t know what to test, or what a fair test might be. To whatever extent the true Dhamma has come down to us, has all been through the efforts of the men and women of many generations who practiced in line with it, benefited from it, and went out of their way to preserve it.


Those people were motivated to preserve the Dhamma because they had followed, not the duty to change it, but the duties with regard to the four noble truths. They comprehended suffering, abandoned its cause, realized its cessation, all by developing the path. In other words, instead of imposing duties on the Dhamma, they accepted the duties the Dhamma taught them. Having tasted the release that comes from following these duties, they fully appreciated the value of the Dhamma and wanted to keep it alive and intact for those who would come after. To disrupt their efforts in that direction, out of a desire to be creative or expressive, is an act of ingratitude toward those who went before us, and of callousness toward those who will come after.


When the Buddha described how counterfeit Dhamma would make the true Dhamma disappear, he compared the process to what happens to genuine money when counterfeit money gets circulated: As long as there is only genuine money, people don’t doubt its authenticity. They can simply put it to use. But when there is both genuine and counterfeit money, doubts will arise as to what is genuine, and so all money becomes dubious. People have to be wary of what they’re using, and have to devise more and more sophisticated tests to determine what’s genuine.


We already live in an era where counterfeit Dhamma has become common. As a result, it’s very easy to doubt that there is, or ever was, such a thing as genuine Dhamma. This means that the Buddha’s forecast has already come true. True Dhamma—as something undeniably True or Dhamma—has already disappeared. This places a burden of responsibility on everyone who wants to find an end to suffering: We have to be very careful about our reasons for choosing one version of Dhamma over another, and to test our own honesty again and again. Otherwise, if we simply trust the impulses of our hearts and of those who offer us an appealing Dhamma, we become suckers for counterfeit. And if we become counterfeiters ourselves, we’re making things that much harder for succeeding generations.


THE IRONIES OF BUDDHIST ROMANTICISM
The radical differences between Buddhist Romanticism and the Dhamma can best be summarized by restating Buddhist Romantic principles in the framework of the four noble truths: what might be called the four Romantic truths.


1) Suffering is a feeling of separation: within oneself, between oneself and other people, and between oneself and the universe at large.


2) This feeling of separation is caused by the mistaken notion that one is a separate entity with a separate identity.


3) Suffering never totally ends, but relief from suffering can be occasionally glimpsed in a feeling of Oneness that temporarily overcomes that sense of separate identity.


4) There is no one right path for glimpsing a sense of Oneness, but all effective paths consist of cultivating an attitude of enlarging one’s perspective to embrace all of life, to transcend ideas of right and wrong, and to maintain an attitude of open receptivity to all experience.


Compare these four Romantic truths with the four noble truths:


1) Suffering is clinging to—feeding on—the aggregates of form, feeling, perception, fabrication, and consciousness.


2) This clinging is caused by the craving that leads to becoming: craving for sensual passions, craving for becoming, and craving for the destruction of becoming.


3) This craving can be ended once and for all through dispassion for it.


4) This dispassion can be induced only by following the path of right view, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.


The four noble truths entail four duties—comprehending stress, abandoning its cause, realizing its cessation, and developing the path—whereas the four Romantic truths entail only one: fostering an open receptivity to universal Oneness, accepting joys and sorrows as all part of the sacredness of life.


As we saw with Schlegel and Emerson, this universal point of view carries with it an attitude of irony. In fact, a viewpoint that embraces opposites demands an attitude of irony, because every time it expresses a truth it has to acknowledge the limitations of those expressions. This attitude thus embodies a stance on the part of the author—above the truths he or she is expressing—and also a style, indicating that the truth, while heartfelt, should not be taken as fully serious. Thus a genuine Romantic would prefer to put quotation marks around the word truth in the Romantic truths—or to call them myths—to suggest the universal point of view that could embrace their opposites as well.


We often associate Romanticism with a flowery, emotional style—and traces of that style certainly can be found among Romantic writers, whether early or Buddhist—but among the various styles adopted by Romantics, irony is most faithful to the content of the Romantic worldview. In fact, irony is where Romantic content and style merge. This is particularly true for an artist who aspires to embody freedom in the process of creating a work of art, because an attitude of irony liberates the artist from two kinds of tyranny: the tyranny of traditional rules about what a work of art should be, and the tyranny of being defined by one’s own previous artistic creations.


In addition to expressing a universal perspective, the ironic style and stance also expresses the Romantic sense of the universe as organism, constantly evolving. It allows the artist to be faithful to his or her feeling of the organic forces at play within and without at a particular point in time, but without being committed to consistency over time. This is one of the reasons that, although Oneness and freedom were the two main principles that the Romantics embraced, they never managed to resolve the inconsistency between them—or to acknowledge that they had failed in trying.


Like the early Romantics, Buddhist Romantics express their appreciation of irony both in the style and content of their teachings. Irony in style is hard to demonstrate in short quotations; but irony as a conscious stance is often explicitly extolled:


“As one matures in spiritual life, one becomes more comfortable with paradox, more appreciative of life’s ambiguities, its many levels and inherent conflicts. One develops a sense of life’s irony, metaphor, and humor and a capacity to embrace the whole, with its beauty and outrageousness, in the graciousness of the heart.… When we embrace life’s opposites, we hold our own birth and death, our own joy and suffering, as inseparable. We honor the sacred in both emptiness and form.”


Applied to the Buddhist tradition, irony would mean maintaining that there are many paths to the goal, and that freedom is to be found, not by following any particular Buddhist path, but by standing above the confines of any path and exercising one’s freedom in being able to move lightly and easily among many.


In some cases, this attitude of irony is justified from within the Buddhist tradition itself by pointing to instances where the Buddha warned about attachment to views.


“[F]lexibility understands that there is not just one way of practice or one fine spiritual tradition, but there are many ways. It understands that spiritual life is not about adopting any one particular philosophy or set of beliefs or teachings, that it is not a cause for taking a stand in opposition to someone else or something else. It is an easiness of heart that understands that all of the spiritual vehicles are rafts to cross the stream to freedom. In his earliest dialogue, the Buddha cautioned against confusing the raft with the shore and against adopting any rigid opinion or view. He went on, ‘How could anything in this world bring conflict to a wise person who has not adopted any view?’… The flexibility of heart brings a humor to spiritual practice. It allows us to see that there are a hundred thousand skillful means of awakening, that there are times for formal and systematic ways and times for spur-of-the-moment and unusual and outrageous ones.”


However, in making this argument, this passage—like many others with a similar point—misrepresents what the Buddha actually said. He drew a clear line between the role of views when one is still on the path and their role after one has reached the goal. As he stated in an early poem, the goal cannot be defined in terms of views—or of learning or precepts—but it cannot be attained except through views, learning, and precepts (Sn 4:9). There may be some leeway in how a person practices in line with this fact—the Wings to Awakening, for instance, contain seven different descriptions of how the factors of the path interact—but paths of practice are clearly divided into right and wrong, because wrong paths, like an attempt to get edible oil by grinding gravel, simply don’t work.


While you’re on the path, you have to hold to it. This is part of the message of the simile of the raft. It’s not about confusing the path with the goal. The simile’s main message is about not needing to hold to the path after you have achieved the goal. But it also implies that as long as you are still at the stage of crossing the river, you need to hold firmly to the raft. Otherwise, the river will sweep you away (MN 22).


This point is underlined by the simile that accompanies the simile of the raft in MN 22: the simile of the snake. Suppose that you want something from a snake, such as venom to make an antidote. If you grasp the snake wrongly, by catching its tail, it’ll bite you. If you grasp it rightly, by pinning its neck down with a forked stick, the snake won’t be able to bite you no matter how much it writhes and coils around your arm. You’ll be able to get the venom needed for the antidote. However, if you try to play it safe by not grasping the snake at all, you won’t get the antidote you need.


Similarly, if you hold to the Dhamma simply to argue with others, you’ll harm yourself. If you hold onto it to practice it sincerely, you’ll gain the results you want. If you don’t hold onto it at all, the results simply won’t come.


As we noted above in our discussion of Point 18, it’s rare for Theravāda Buddhist Romantics explicitly to promote the idea that the universe is beyond dualities of right and wrong in moral matters. However, when they adopt an ironic attitude toward views, they ignore the fact that to assert no right or wrong in terms of views is to assert implicitly no right or wrong in terms of actions and morality. After all, views are a type of action, they lead to further actions, and those actions have consequences. As long as suffering is a problem resulting from unskillful actions, and the end of suffering is a possible goal resulting from skillful actions, there have to be right and wrong ways of viewing the problem and understanding which actions are skillful and which ones are not.


The Buddha was not an argumentative person, but even he would go out of his way to confront those who taught views that were absolutely detrimental to Dhamma practice—in particular, those who taught that action bore no results. He would also seek out and argue with those who held to opinions that inadvertently denied the power of action in the present, such as philosophers who attributed everything to a creator God, who taught that all things were without cause, or who taught that all experience was predetermined by what was done in the past (§8; MN 101). Because these views undercut any notion of an effective path of practice, the Buddha had to show clearly that they were wrong.


So the Dhamma does not embrace opposites. If it embraces anything, it embraces the observation that some practices are right for the sake of leading to the end of suffering, and other practices are wrong. As long as you’re on the path, you embrace the path. When the goal is reached, you let go of everything. But if you’re still alive and teaching others, you show them compassion by making sure that they understand what is right and wrong so that they can attain the freedom of the transcendent as well.


This point highlights a greater irony in the difference between Buddhist Romanticism and the Dhamma. By adopting a universal point of view—that of an expressive artist, trying to transcend finite dualities—Buddhist Romantics seem to be coming from a higher perspective from which they can use the historical method to criticize the Dhamma for being narrow: time-bound, culture-bound, and out-of-date. And yet, in the final analysis, they can promise only a very compromised notion of freedom: glimpses of Oneness that can never go beyond the confines of becoming.


As for the Dhamma, even though it seems to be taking a narrower point of view—that of a craftsman trying to master what is right and wrong in a craft, and passing that craft along to others—it ultimately leads to a higher goal: transcendent freedom beyond the dimensions of space and time.


The contrast between these two approaches can be appreciated most graphically by considering the story with which the author of the above passage on flexibility illustrates his message. He tells of a high school basketball coach hired to coach a group of specially handicapped children. Realizing after his first session that the children would never be able to play basketball with any recognizable rules—they had trouble even lining up and facing in the same direction—he went with the flow and threw out his coaching plans in favor of a more free-form approach. Instead of focusing on winning, he fostered an atmosphere that allowed the children to express their creativity and have a good time. The scorekeeper pushed the score button whenever he felt like it—in one game, they racked up more than a million points—the game could be interrupted by music and dance at any point, and at the end of each game everyone was rewarded with hotdogs.


The story is humorous in a gentle, heartwarming way, but the humor distracts attention from the question of whether this was the most helpful approach the coach could have taken in training the children. And the warmth distracts attention from the chilling message the story is being forced to convey: that spiritual life is not about playing well or mastering a skill, and that in the final account, winning or losing at the path doesn’t matter. All that matters is expressing yourself and enjoying yourself in the process.


If suffering weren’t a real problem, this attitude would be perfectly helpful, as it places no unnecessary demands on anyone. But suffering itself places demands on the heart, and the demands have a squeeze. If you’re sensitive to that squeeze, you want, not an artist who teaches you how to express yourself while embracing the squeeze, but a craftsman who can train you in the skills needed to put an end to that squeeze once and for all. In this context, compassion doesn’t mean throwing out the rules and awarding prizes to everyone. It means giving clear instructions as to what works and what doesn’t—treating people, not as children wanting entertainment, but as adults.


The Buddha didn’t speak as a creative artist expressing himself by inventing the Dhamma. He spoke as an expert craftsman who had discovered a path to a freedom totally uncreated and who passed that path on to many others who, in turn, have continued passing it on for millennia. The craft of the path is based on the assumption that we are free to make choices, and that our choices can make a difference. As the Buddha saw when he first contemplated his life, there is no proof that these assumptions are true—or that our actions can lead to the deathless—until you’ve put them to the test. There are no guarantees prior to at least some level of commitment. But as he also saw, the possibility that actions might make a difference meant that the only honorable way to live was to take the risk of taking on the commitment, and to devote his life to finding out how far human action can go.


There is no honor in assuming that actions don’t count and that a transcendent happiness is impossible. As long as we’re choosing a path to follow, why not make the honorable choice?


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알라딘: 나는 착각일 뿐이다 - - 과학자의 언어로 말하는 영성과 자아 샘 해리스

알라딘: 나는 착각일 뿐이다

나는 착각일 뿐이다 - 과학자의 언어로 말하는 영성과 자아   
샘 해리스 (지은이),유자화 (옮긴이)시공사2017-04-26

304쪽

책소개

뉴욕타임스 베스트셀러. 누군가가 ‘영성’을 느꼈다고 한다면, 어떤 생각이 들겠는가? 신의 축복을 받았다고 축하해줄 것인가, 그런 느낌은 그저 뇌의 착각에 불과하다고 코웃음을 칠 것인가? 영성이라는 단어를 듣는 순간 우리는 일반적으로 두 가지 반응을 보인다. 종교적 맥락에서 생각하거나, 무지와 미신의 상징으로 치부해버리는 것이다. 하지만 신경과학자이자 철학자인 저자 샘 해리스는 신작 《나는 착각일 뿐이다》에서 위의 두 반응 사이에 다른 길도 존재한다고 말한다.

영성은 합리적인 사람이 비합리적인 믿음에 맞서려는 모든 방어 전략에 커다란 빈틈으로 남아 있다. 현대 과학으로는 아직 이 빈틈을 채울 수 없고, 모두를 만족시킬 증거를 제시할 수도 없기 때문에 영성을 보는 관점들 사이의 간격이 좁혀지지 않는 것이다. 영성이 신을 만나는 경험이라고 설명하는 입장이든, 과학에 결코 포함될 수 없는 환상과 미신이라고 설명하는 입장이든 결코 반대편 입장을 이해하려 하지 않는다. 저자는 과학적으로 영성을 이해하는 중간 길을 우리에게 소개하며, 우리가 영성을 직접적으로 경험함으로써 삶을 바꿀 수 있다는 사실을 보여준다.
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목차
1장 영성
행복을 찾아서
동양과 서양의 종교
마음챙김 명상
고통의 진실
깨달음의 의미

2장 의식
의식의 출현
분리된 마음
양쪽 뇌가 하는 일
우리 마음은 이미 분리되었는가?
의식과 무의식 사이
중요한 것은 의식이다

3장 자아
무엇을 ‘나’라고 부르는가?
자아가 없는 의식
생각에 빠지다
시험대에 오른 자아
마음 이론
착각 꿰뚫어보기

4장 명상
깨달음의 두 갈래 길
목표를 여정으로 취하기
머리가 없다는 것
받아들임의 역설

5장 구루, 죽음, 약물
진정한 스승
죽음 직전의 마음
약물의 영적 이용
끝이자 진정한 시작

감사의 말
주
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책속에서
P. 13 우리는 집에 페인트칠을 하고, 다른 언어를 배우고, 더 나은 직장을 찾고 싶어 한다. 이 모든 일들이 이루어지기만 한다면 현재의 삶에서 안정을 찾고 삶을 즐길 수 있을 것이다. 하지만 그것은 대부분 거짓 희망이다. 목표를 성취하고, 건강을 유지하며, 자녀에게 옷을 입히고 밥을 먹이는 일이 중요치 않다는 의미가 아니다. 행복과 안전을 추구하느라 대부분의 시간을 보내지만 그런 추구의 본질적인 목적이 무엇인지는 잘 모르고 있다는 말이다. 우리는 모두 현재로 돌아올 길을 찾고 있다. ‘지금’ 만족할 수 있는 충분한 이유를 찾고 있는 것이다. 우리가 하고 있는 게임의 구조가 이렇다는 것을 인식한다면, 이 게임을 다른 식으로 할 수 있다. 현재 순간에 어떻게 집중하느냐가 우리가 얻는 경험의 성질을 크게 좌우하고, 따라서 삶의 질도 결정한다. _ 1장 영성  접기
P. 19 결국 우리는 거짓 영성과 거짓 과학 간에 선택을 해야 한다. 과학자와 철학자 중 몇몇은 매우 효과적인 자기성찰 방법을 개발했지만, 사실 이들 중 대다수는 그런 능력이 존재한다는 사실조차도 의심한다. 반대로 위대한 구도자들 가운데 많은 수가 과학에 무지하다. 그러나 사실 과학적 사실과 영적 지혜 간에는 연관성이 있다. 그 연관성은 대부분의 사람들이 생각하는 것보다 훨씬 직접적이다. 비록 명상을 통해 얻을 수 있는 통찰이 우주의 기원을 말해주지는 않겠지만, 인간의 마음에 관한 확고한 진리는 확인해준다. 이를테면 우리의 통상적인 자아감은 착각이고, 연민과 인내 같은 긍정적 정서는 배울 수 있는 자질이며, 우리의 사고방식이 우리가 세상을 어떻게 경험하는지에 직접적으로 영향을 준다는 사실 같은 것들이다. _ 1장 영성  접기
P. 21 우리가 ‘나’라고 부르는 느낌은 사실 착각이다. 뇌의 미로 속 깊은 곳에서 미노타우로스처럼 살아가는 자기나 자아라는 것은 없다. 또한 눈 뒤 어딘가에 올라앉아 세상을 내다보는, 우리 자신과는 별개인 어떤 존재가 몸속에 있다는 느낌은 바뀌거나 완전히 사라질 수도 있다. 그런 자기초월self-transcendence의 경험은 보통 종교적 의미로 다루어지지만, 그렇다고 해서 그 경험이 비이성적인 것은 아니다. 자기초월의 경험은 과학적 시각에서도, 철학적 시각에서도 사물이 존재하는 방식을 더 명확하게 이해했다는 뜻이다. 이 책에서 영성이라는 말은 그런 이해를 더 깊게 하고, ‘나’라는 환영幻影을 반복해서 잘라내며 나아가는 것을 의미한다. _ 1장 영성  접기
P. 22 이 책은 한 구도자의 회고록, 뇌과학 입문서, 명상 안내서 사이를 바삐 오간다. 또한 우리 대다수가 자기 내면의 중심이라고 여기는 것, 즉 우리가 ‘나’라고 부르는 자아의 느낌을 철학적으로 파헤친 결과이기도 하다. 그러나 영성에 관한 모든 전통적 접근법을 설명하면서 각각의 장단점을 저울질해보려는 것은 아니다. 그보다는 난해한 종교라는 똥 더미에서 다이아몬드를 캐내는 것이 목적이다. 실제로 그곳에는 다이아몬드가 있다. 나는 그것을 성찰하는 데 인생의 상당한 부분을 바쳤다. _ 1장 영성  접기
P. 28 우리 대부분은 보이는 것보다 훨씬 더 지혜롭다. 우리는 관계를 유지하는 법, 주어진 시간을 잘 활용하는 법, 건강하게 사는 법, 체중을 줄이는 법, 유용한 기술을 배우는 법, 존재의 여러 수수께끼를 푸는 법을 알고 있다. 그렇더라도 행복의 길은, 그 길이 곧장 뻗어 있고 열려 있더라도 따라가기 어렵다. (중략) 어떤 수준에서 지혜란 스스로의 조언에 따를 수 있는 능력에 불과하다. 그러나 마음의 본질에 대해 우리가 알아야 할 더 깊은 통찰이 있다. 이것은 안타깝게도 전적으로 종교적 맥락에서만 논의가 되어왔고, 따라서 인간의 역사를 통틀어 오류와 미신으로 점철되었다. _ 1장 영성  접기
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추천글
“샘 해리스는 우리가 진정으로 ‘깨어나도록’ 도와준다.” - 조셉 골드스타인 (『하나의 다르마, 서양 불교의 태동』 저자) 
“샘 해리스는 우리 시대의 위대한 회의론자다. 이 책 《나는 착각일 뿐이다》는 진정으로 특별하며, 일상적인 경험에 관한 당신의 가장 근본적인 믿음을 흔들어놓을 것이다. 당신의 인생을 바꿔버릴지도 모른다!” - 폴 블룸 (예일 대학교 심리학 교수, 《Just Babies》, 《공감에 맞서》, 《우리는 왜 빠져드는가?》저자) 
“샘 해리스는 신경과학자로서 우리의 자아가 왜 착각이고 뇌 활동의 산물일 뿐인지 보여준다. 나아가 그는 자아라는 착각을 버리는 것이 어떻게 우리를 깨어나게 하고 더 풍요로운 삶으로 인도하는지 직접 알려준다.” - 제리 코인 (시카고대학교 생태학 및 진화학 교수, <지울 수 없는 흔적>의 저자) 
“이 책은 가짜 과학과 가짜 영성 중 어느 쪽으로도 치우치지 않고, 어떻게 하면 우리가 더욱 깊고 풍성한 삶을 살 수 있는지 알려준다.” - 퍼블리셔스 위클리 (미국) 
“우리의 환상과 착각을 산산조각 내는 책” - 커커스 리뷰 
“탁월하고, 야망 넘치는 걸작이다! ” - 마리아 포포바 (비평가) 
“현재에 온전히 집중할 수 있는 방법을 알려준다는 사실만으로도 주목해야 할 책” - 프랭크 브루니 
“《나는 착각일 뿐이다》는 각자의 정답대로 삶을 살아가는 방법을 찾고자 하는 우리의 근본적인 본성이 왜 중요한지 알려준다.” - 트레버 쿼크 
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저자 및 역자소개
샘 해리스 (Sam Harris) (지은이) 

미국의 대표적 논객이자, 신경과학자. 리처드 도킨스, 크리스토퍼 히친스, 대니얼 데닛과 함께 종교적 도그마와 지적 설계론을 비판하고 있다. 스탠퍼드대학교에서 철학을 공부하고 UCLA에서 신경과학을 전공하여 박사 학위를 받았다. <뉴욕타임스>, <LA타임스>, <더 타임스>(영국), <보스턴 글로브>, <디 애틀랜틱>, <뉴스위크>, <신경학 연보Annals of Neurology> 등에 기고했다. 프로젝트 리즌Project Reason의 공동 창립자이자 CEO로 있으면서 과학 지식과 비종교적 가치를 사회에 전파하는 데 힘쓰고 있다. 지은 책으로 《종교의 종말》(2005년 PEN 상 논픽션 부문 수상작), 《기독교 국가에 보내는 편지》, 《거짓말》, 《신이 절대로 답할 수 없는 몇 가지》, 《자유 의지는 없다》 등이 있다. 접기
최근작 : <신 없
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유자화 (옮긴이) 

대학에서 간호학을, 대학원에서 번역학을 전공했다. 현재 초등학교 보건교사로 일하면서 프리랜서 번역가로도 일하고 있다. 그동안 옮긴 책으로는 『나는 착각일 뿐이다』, 『조안의 죄의식』, 『관계 회복의 기술』, 『의식의 수수께끼를 풀다』, 『자신감 있게 행동하기』, 『단순한 삶』, 『당신은 혼자가 아니에요』, 『욕망의 아내』, 『나쁜 생각』, 『어머니를 돌보며』등이 있다.
최근작 : … 총 26종 (모두보기)
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출판사 소개

최근작 : <강아지와 둘이서 주말여행>,<삶이 축제가 된다면>,<열병의 나날들>등 총 1,186종
대표분야 : 여행 1위 (브랜드 지수 489,776점), 음악이야기 1위 (브랜드 지수 52,161점), 과학소설(SF) 4위 (브랜드 지수 150,120점) 

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출판사 제공 책소개


* 뉴욕타임스 베스트셀러!
* 샘 해리스 TED 강연 530만 조회

리처드 도킨스를 잇는 세계적 석학, 샘 해리스 신작!
과학자의 언어로 영성과 자아를 말하다

누군가가 ‘영성’을 느꼈다고 한다면, 어떤 생각이 들겠는가? 신의 축복을 받았다고 축하해줄 것인가, 그런 느낌은 그저 뇌의 착각에 불과하다고 코웃음을 칠 것인가? 영성이라는 단어를 듣는 순간 우리는 일반적으로 두 가지 반응을 보인다. 종교적 맥락에서 생각하거나, 무지와 미신의 상징으로 치부해버리는 것이다. 하지만 신경과학자이자 철학자인 저자 샘 해리스는 신작 《나는 착각일 뿐이다》에서 위의 두 반응 사이에 다른 길도 존재한다고 말한다.
영성은 합리적인 사람이 비합리적인 믿음에 맞서려는 모든 방어 전략에 커다란 빈틈으로 남아 있다. 현대 과학으로는 아직 이 빈틈을 채울 수 없고, 모두를 만족시킬 증거를 제시할 수도 없기 때문에 영성을 보는 관점들 사이의 간격이 좁혀지지 않는 것이다. 영성이 신을 만나는 경험이라고 설명하는 입장이든, 과학에 결코 포함될 수 없는 환상과 미신이라고 설명하는 입장이든 결코 반대편 입장을 이해하려 하지 않는다. 저자는 과학적으로 영성을 이해하는 중간 길을 우리에게 소개하며, 우리가 영성을 직접적으로 경험함으로써 삶을 바꿀 수 있다는 사실을 보여준다. 저자는 영성이 그저 ‘현재의 순간에 온전히 집중하는 것’이라고 말하며, 각자의 방식으로 영성을 받아들이기만 한다면 삶이 크게 변화할 수 있다고 주장한다.

책 소 개
리처드 도킨스를 잇는 세계적 석학, 샘 해리스 신작!
종교 없이 영성에 이르는 것이 정말 가능한가?

누군가가 ‘영성’을 느꼈다고 한다면, 어떤 생각이 들겠는가? 신의 축복을 받았다고 축하해줄 것인가, 그런 느낌은 그저 뇌의 착각에 불과하다고 코웃음을 칠 것인가? 영성이라는 단어를 듣는 순간 우리는 일반적으로 두 가지 반응을 보인다. 종교적 맥락에서 생각하거나, 무지와 미신의 상징으로 치부해버리는 것이다.
하지만 신경과학자이자 철학자인 샘 해리스Sam Harris는 이 책 《나는 착각일 뿐이다》(원제: Waking Up)에서 위의 두 가지 반응 사이에 다른 길도 존재한다고 말한다. 편견도 맹신도 아닌, 지적·경험적 근거를 바탕으로 영성을 이해하는 길이다. 저자는 영성이 그저 ‘현재의 순간에 온전히 집중하는 것’이라고 말하며, 각자의 방식으로 영성을 받아들이기만 한다면 삶이 크게 변화할 수 있다고 주장한다.

‘나’라는 미궁에서 탈출하라
영성이 나를 어떻게 바꿀 수 있을지 알기 위해서는, 먼저 나를 이해해야 한다. 우리는 무엇을 보고 ‘나’라고 부르는가? 뇌 속 어느 한 지점에 작은 인간의 모습을 한 ‘나’가 존재하는가? 아니면 뉴런들이 움직이면서 ‘나’라는 모습을 만들어내는 것인가? 만일 내가 있다면 그 느낌은 어디에서 나오며, 내가 없다면 지금 이 글을 읽으며 생각하는 나는 대체 누구인가? 저자는 이러한 고민 속에서 ‘나’를 찾기 위해 분투한다. 우리는 흔히 마음이나 뇌의 깊숙한 안쪽 어딘가에 자아라는 존재가 있어, 여기서 나의 생각과 감정이 비롯된다고 믿는다. 그러나 저자는 자아가 있다면 어디에 있는지 되물으며, 한 가지 흥미로운 사례를 소개한다.
분할뇌split brain 환자는 좌뇌와 우뇌를 연결해주는 ‘뇌량’을 자르는 뇌량절제술을 받은 사람이다. 일반적으로는 뇌전증(간질)을 치료하기 위해 이런 수술이 이루어진다. 뇌의 좌우 반구는 둘 사이의 연결이 끊기고 나자, 완전히 독립적인 두 개의 뇌처럼 행동하기 시작했다. ‘달걀’이라는 단어를 우반구에 연결된 왼쪽 눈에만 보여주니 언어를 주관하는 좌반구는 이 단어를 보지 못했다고 말했다. 우반구가 통제하는 왼손에 달걀을 쥐게 하고 좌반구에게 왜 달걀을 쥐고 있느냐고 물으니, “어제 아침에 달걀을 먹어서요.”라는 둥의 거짓 대답을 지어냈다. 또한 분할뇌를 가진 사람은 왼손과 오른손으로 각기 다른 그림을 동시에 그릴 수도 있었다. 마치 두 명의 다른 사람이 존재하는 것처럼 말이다.
그렇다면 이렇게 한 사람의 뇌가 반으로 나뉘었을 때, 그 사람의 자아는 어느 반쪽에 존재할까? 좌뇌에 있다면, 우뇌에서 생각하고 행동하는 것은 누구인가? 우뇌에 있다면, 좌뇌에서 말하고 있는 것은 누구인가? 만약 다시 수술을 통해 두 반구를 연결해준다면, 어떻게 두 개의 자아를 하나의 자아로 합쳐야 할까? 서로 싸워 이기는 쪽에게 자아의 통제권을 주어야 할까? 이런 현상은 우리가 자아에 대해 가지고 있던 커다란 착각을 깨뜨린다. 자아는 어느 한 점이나 덩어리, 하나의 실체가 아니다. 그저 의식이 일으킨 환영에 불과하다.
결국 저자는 영성이 순간순간 ‘나’라는 자아의 느낌이 착각이라는 사실을 깨닫는 데 있다고 말한다. 대부분의 사람들이 영적인 삶에 관심이 없다고 말하고 대부분의 과학자가 이런 주제를 멸시하지만, 과학자들도 아직 의식의 원리나 영성의 정체를 정확히 설명하지 못한다. 우리는 모든 가능성을 열어두고, 의식의 영역을 탐색해보아야 한다.

영성에 대한 편견과 오해는 어디에서 왔는가?
저자는 자아가 없음을 깨닫고 나면, 생각과 의식으로부터 자유로워질 수 있다고 말한다. 일상생활에서 일어나는 온갖 고통을 몇 순간만이라도 멈출 수 있게 되며, 우리 자신뿐만 아니라 타인과의 반목도 줄어든다. 저자는 깨달음의 방법으로 ‘명상’을 추천한다. 명상을 하기 위해 꼭 불경을 외거나 종교에 귀의할 필요는 없다. 그저 고요함 속에서 자신의 내면을 관찰하는 것이면 충분하다. 명상에 대한 과학적 연구는 이제 겨우 시작 단계이지만, 벌써 명상의 긍정적 효과를 제시하는 연구가 많다. 명상을 통해 내 안에 있는 자아를 면밀하게 관찰해보고, 자아가 사라지는 경험을 해본다면 저자의 말을 믿지 않을 수 없을 것이다.
만약 영적 자격을 갖춘 누군가가 가이드를 해준다면 깨달음으로 더 빠르게 갈 수 있겠지만, 제대로 된 영성 지도자를 찾는 일은 쉽지 않다. 저자는 책 속에서 많은 ‘구루guru(영적 스승)’의 사례를 들고, 좋은 구루를 찾는 것이 얼마나 어려운지를 이야기한다. 영적인 문제에서는 사기꾼을 구별해내기가 어렵기 때문이다. 스포츠를 배울 때는 가르치는 사람의 능력을 즉시 가늠할 수 있지만, 자아의 환영을 인식할 때는 스승의 자질과 학생의 진보를 평가하기가 너무나 어렵다.
흔히 구루나 영적 지도자라는 말을 들으면 비합리적인 믿음과 광신도 집단 같은 것을 떠올리기 쉽다. 실제로 극단적인 영성 공동체와 사이비 종교는 카리스마 넘치는 정신병자와 사이코패스가 지배하는 경우가 많다. 게다가 영성적 발전을 이루고 구루의 인정을 받고자 하는 욕망 때문에 제자 스스로가 정서적·금전적·성적 착취의 위험에 빠질 수 있다. 무엇이 합당한 가르침이고, 무엇이 학대에 해당하는지 선을 긋기도 어렵다. 물론 아마 어떤 구루는 이런 일이 모두 삶의 기술을 가르치기 위한 것이라고 주장할지도 모른다.
어쩌면 ‘영성’이라는 말이 불러오는 오해와 편견은 그 속에 ‘초자연적 힘’이라는 의미가 숨어 있다고 생각하기 때문이 아닐까? 그러나 저자는 우리가 자아의 환영을 끊어내고 나아가기 위해 초자연적 힘을 믿을 필요는 없다고 말한다. 또한 몇몇 구루들의 병리적 행태 때문에 구루의 신뢰가 땅에 떨어지긴 했지만, 제대로 된 영적 지도자와 교류한다면 큰 배움을 얻을 수 있다고 확언한다. 명상을 수행하다 보면 진정한 자유를 느끼는 것이 정말 가능하며, 정신적 고통에서 크게 벗어날 수 있다고 말이다.

영성은 합리적인 사람이 비합리적인 믿음에 맞서려는 모든 방어 전략에 커다란 빈틈으로 남아 있다. 현대 과학으로는 아직 이 빈틈을 채울 수 없고, 모두를 만족시킬 증거를 제시할 수도 없기 때문에 영성을 보는 관점들 사이의 간격이 좁혀지지 않는 것이다. 영성이 신을 만나는 경험이라고 설명하는 입장이든, 과학에 결코 포함될 수 없는 환상과 미신이라고 설명하는 입장이든 결코 반대편 입장을 이해하려 하지 않는다. 저자는 “우리가 자기초월의 타당성을 인정하면서 이성적인 언어로 영성을 이야기할 수 있기 전까지, 우리 세계는 독단주의에 산산조각난 채로 남아 있을 것”이라고 경고한다. 하지만 영적인 삶을 종교적인 것으로만 보는 길, 그리고 영적인 삶이 전혀 없는 길 사이에는 분명 중간 길이 있다.
《나는 착각일 뿐이다》를 통해 저자 샘 해리스는 더욱 날카로워진 통찰과 깊어진 학문적 역량을 발휘하며, 과학적으로 영성을 이해하는 중간 길을 우리에게 소개한다. 또한 우리가 영성을 직접적으로 경험함으로써 삶을 바꿀 수 있다는 사실을 보여준다. 이제 편견이나 막연한 거부감, 다른 종교나 무신론을 향한 배타주의는 버리고 그저 온몸으로 지금 이 순간을 받아들여보는 것은 어떨까? 지금까지 몰랐던 또 다른 세상이 열릴지도 모르니 말이다. 접기
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공감순 
     
흠아직 다 읽지는 않았는데 의식, 자아 등에 대해 썻길래 뇌과학이랑 관련있을줄 알았는데 뇌과학이랑은 거리가 먼것 같다
명상에 대한 이야기 인데 이게 진짜인지는 둘째치고 딱히 나로써는 얻은 지식은 적음
그래도 생각해볼만한 주제이긴 하다  구매
유리메기 2018-02-22 공감 (0) 댓글 (0)
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무소의 뿔처럼 혼자서 끝까지 가라! 새창으로 보기
 리처드 도킨스와 크리스토퍼 히친스 못지 않게 유명한 무신론자 과학자가 또 한 명 있으니 그가 바로 샘 해리스다. 나는 지금까지 한국에 나온 샘 해리스의 책을 '종교의 종말' 빼고는 다 읽었는데 '나는 착각일 뿐이다'는 2014년에 나온 것으로 2012년에 나온 '자유 의지는 없다'에 바로 뒤이은 저작이다. 샘 해리스의 책을 꾸준히 읽는 것은 두 가지 지적 자극 때문이다. 하나는 익숙한 것을 아주 낯설게 바라보게 하여 그 본질을 응시하게 만든다는 것과 끊임없는 회의와 의심으로 다소 모호한 상태로 내버려 두고 있었던, 그렇지만 다 안다고 여겼던 개념들을 명확하게 다듬게 한다는 것이다. '자유 의지는 없다'는 그 대표적인 예라 할 만하다. 전작에서 '자유 의지'가 환상에 지나지 않는다고 공박했던 그가 이번엔 '자아'가 착각의 소산이라고 말한다. 그 주장과 근거가 담긴 책이 바로 '나는 착각일 뿐이다'이다. 원제는 'WAKING UP'. 한국어 제목 보다는 원제가 이 책이 말하는 것에 더 적합하다. 정말로 이 책은 '깨어남'이라는 원제 그대로 '영성'에 대한 것이기 때문이다. 영성은 얼른 정의하기가 참 어려운 단어다. 보통은 자기 존재의 참된 의미를 깨닫는 내적인 도정이라는 의미로 쓰인다. 샘 해리스의 영성도 이와 멀리 있지 않다. 그가 추구하는 것은 다름아닌 신에 대한 믿음이나 종교 없이도 그런 영성이 충분히 가능하다는 것으로 '나는 착각일 뿐이다'는 바로 그런 것을 보여주는 책이다.



 지금 이 순간에 당신이 당신인 것 같다는 유일한 증거는 당신이 당신인 것 같다는(오로지 당신에게만 명백한) 사실뿐이다.(p. 79)



 책은 모두 5장으로 구성되어 있다. 1장은 '영성'으로 그는 영성이 무엇보다 종교와 구별되어야 한다고 강조한다. 왜냐하면 종교가 없더라고 영적 경험은 얼마든지 가능하기 때문이다. 그럼에도 불구하고 사람들이 자신의 영적 경험을 종교 체험으로 간주하고 종교를 벗어난 것은 영적 체험이 아니라고 여기는 것은 그동안 자신의 모든 경험을 종교적 교리의 렌즈로 바라보는 데 너무 길들여져 있는 탓이라는 것이다. 더구나 사람들은 그러한 영적 체험을 오히려 자신들이 믿는 신앙의 절대 근거 비슷하게 여기기까지 하는데 실제 영적 경험에는 그들의 전통적 믿음을 지지하는 근거가 전혀 없으므로 그것은 커다란 오류라고 지적한다. 그러면서 덧붙인다. 우리가 '나'라고 부르는 느낌은 착각(p. 21)이라고. 뇌의 미로 깊은 곳에서 미노타우르스처럼 살아가는 자기나 자아라는 것은 없다고 말이다. 여기에 맞추어 자신이 말하는 영성이 무엇인지 정의한다. 그것은 바로 '나'라는 환영을 반복해서 잘라내며 나아가는 것이라고 말이다.









 이것은 굳이 신이나 종교의 힘을 빌리지 않고도 가능한 일이다. 사람이 도덕적으로 살기 위해 자유 의지가 필요하지 않은 것과도 같다. 과학으로 도덕이 가능하듯. 역시 영성도 가능하다. 왜냐하면 영성의 모범은 무엇보다 불교에서 찾을 수 있는데, 그것은 바로 과학자의 것과 아주 유사하기 때문이다. 즉 불교의 영성 방법은 과학자의 것과 근본적으로 공통점이 있는데 그것은 바로 경험주의다. 불교의 가르침도, 과학자의 연구도 모두 경험에 기반하고 있다는 사실이다. 그는 경험을 매우 중시한다. 바로 이것이 왜 '나'가 착각이며 환영에 지나지 않는가에 중대한 근거가 된다. 이것은 2장, '의식'에 가서 본격적으로 설명된다. 의식은 데카르트가 '나는 생각한다, 고로 존재한다'로 잘 보여줬듯이, 자아의 등뼈라고 해도 좋다. 우리가 '나'를 느끼는 것은 의식 때문이다. 그러나 이 의식이라는 것은 어떻게 출현한 것일까? 주역에서 말하는 대로 외부에 있던 영혼의 침입일까? 진화론에서 말하는 것처럼 물질의 변화일까? 샘 해리스는 그렇지 않다고 말한다.



 의식의 탄생은 조직화의 결과임이 틀림없다. 원자를 특정한 방식으로 배열하는 것이 바로 그 원자의 집합이 존재하는 경험을 불러온 것으로 보인다. 이것은 분명 우리가 성찰해보아야 할 가장 심오한 미스터리이다.(p. 75)



 그가 이토록 경험을 중시하는 것은 실체가 지금도 여전히 수수께끼에 둘러싸여 있기 때문이다. 의식의 존재를 알려주는 것은 아직도 우리의 경험밖에 없다는 것이다. 그러면 의문이 생긴다. 지금까지 의식에 대해 뇌를 통해 밝혀진 것은 뭐란 말인가? UCLA에서 신경과학으로 박사 학위를 딴 인지 신경과학자인 그는 답한다. 그것은 의식 자체를 찾은 것이 아니라 단순히 의식의 내용을 찾은 것 뿐으로 현재까지 뇌를 통한 의식의 연구는 의식 자체와 의식 내용 간의 구분을 짓지 못한 채로 이루어졌다고 말이다.(p. 85) 그리고 두뇌가 결코 '나'라는 의식의 실재가 될 수 없음을 로저 스페리가 발견한 '분할뇌'를 통해 낱낱이 밝힌다. 분할뇌 사례는 두 가지 진실을 우리에게 알려주었다. 하나는 뇌의 좌우반구가 고도의 기능적 특수화를 이루고 있다는 것 그리고 다른 하나는 아예 독립적으로 활동하는 것도 가능하다는 것. 이렇게 두뇌 자체가 정보의 인식과 행위 의도 그리고 의식 경험 모두에 있어서 분리가 가능하니, 서로 다르게 활동하는 두뇌의 부분들을 두고 하나의 주체라고 부르는 것은 아무래도 어렵다. 그렇다면 지금 우리가 나 자신을 경험하고 있는 것처럼 이 모든 별개의 의식을 포함하여 하나의 '나'라는 의식으로 만들어 주는 것은 무엇이며 어디에 있는가? 그것은 아직 알 수 없고 찾을 수 없다는 것이다. 그러므로 우리가 나의 의식이라고 말할 수 있는 것의 근거란 경험밖에 없게 된다.(그러므로 제목이 말하는 착각의 대상은 '나'라는 게 정말 있다고 생각하는, 그 실재에 대한 착각이다. 있는 건 다만 '경험'뿐이다. 이 경험주의는 주디스 버틀러의 '수행적 정체성'과도 어느 정도 이어지는 것 같다.)



 3장 '자아'는 바로 이러한 나를 나로 여기게 만드는 경험에 대해 집중 탐구한다. 의식이 경험이라면 나를 나로 만드는 경험은 무엇인가? 그것은 둘이다. 하나는 신체적 연속성의 경험 그리고 다른 하나는 정신의 연속성의 경험. 그런데 전자는 후자에 부수적이다. 정신적 연속성을 경험하기 때문에 신체적인 연속성을 경험하기 때문이다. 3장에서는 이 '경험으로써의 자아'가 왜 우리의 전부인지에 대해 논증한다. 이것을 긍정하게 되면 왜 샘 해리스가 신이나 종교 없이도 영성이 얼마든지 가능한지 또 어떻게 과학적으로도 가능한지 이해하게 된다. 쉽게 말해서 자아가 단지 경험에 지나지 않는다면 경험의 양태를 스스로 바꾸면 되는 것이다. 부정적 정서를 긍정적 정서로 말이다. 이렇게 말하면 얼른 떠오르는 게 있지 않은가? 바로 원효 대사가 말한 '일체유심조'다. 샘 해리스의 영성은 원효 대사의 것과 많이 닮았다. 그가 왜 불교적 영성 방법을 모범으로 삼는지 어느 정도 이해가 간다. 이런 식으로 4장, '명상'에서는 영성의 구체적 방법들이 자신의 실제 경험과 결부되어 설명된다. 알고 보니 샘 해리스는 이런 쪽의 경험이 아주 많았다. 깨달음을 얻기 위해 세계에 안 가 본 데가 없으며 많은 스승을 찾아다녔던 것이다. 그런 오랜 구도의 노력이 뒷받침 되어 있기에 그의 말은 단호하며 주장 역시 설득력을 가지게 되는 지도 모른다. 개인적으로 가장 인상 깊었던 부분은 마지막 장으로 '구루, 죽음, 약물'이다. 왜 그런고 하면, 여기서는 임사 체험을 다루고 있는데 그 방면에 있어 최근 아주 유명해진 책인 이븐 알렉산더의 '나는 천국을 보았다'에 대해 아주 맹렬하게 비판하고 있기 때문이다. 이 책은 미국에서 발간되었을 때, '뉴욕타임즈' 베스트 셀러 1위를 무려 52주나 했다. 그만큼 미국에 끼친 영향이 컸다. 우리나라에도 발간되었는데, 아주 많은 이들이 읽은 것으로 기억한다. 이 책이 그만한 파급력을 가졌던 것은 무엇보다 저자가 뇌를 전문으로 하는 신경외과 의사였기 때문이다. 그를 수술한 전문의마저 그의 두뇌가 완전히 정지했다고 증언했기에 저자의 임사 체험은 더욱 실제로 받아들여졌고 인기도 덩달아 높아졌다. 하지만 샘 해리스는 이 책에서 왜 그 책이 실은 아무 것도 입증하지 못하고 있다고 비판한다. 그가 제공한 증거는 잘못되었고 과학과 무관하다고 말이다. 나도 이 책을 읽었고 거기에 관련된 이야기도 들었기 때문에 혹시 진짜 이럴지도 모른다고 생각하고 놀라며 읽었던 터라 샘 해리스의 반박이 인상깊지 않을 수 없었다. 근거가 설득력이 있어 더욱 그랬다. 그가 이븐 알렉산더에 대해 논박하는 것은 그 역시 임사 체험 못지 않은 초자연적인 경험을 했기 때문이기도 하다. 그렇다고 해서 그는 초자연적인 것을 덮어놓고 믿지는 않았다. 진실인지 아닌지 확실하지 않지만 오류 가능성이 다분한 것으로 남겨두었을 뿐이다.



 여기서 이 책의 진짜 목적은 어느 정도 드러난다. 샘 해리스가 이븐 알렉산더에 반대하며 취하는 태도가 실은 영성을 통해 체화시키고자 하는 태도인 것이다. 깨달음은 내 의지를 신이나 종교에 의탁하거나 초자연적인 현상들에 기대어 얻어서는 안 되는 것이며 약물과 같은 외부적인 힘을 매개로 이루는 것도 안 되는 것이다. 오직 비판과 회의가 생생하게 활동하는 이성을 통해 나아가야 하는 길인 것이다. 지금 내게 찾아온 경험이 무엇인가 끊임없이 해석하며 의미를 만들어가는 지극히 이성적인 활동. 그것이 바로 샘 해리스가 자아의 망집을 허물고 그 무엇에도 기대지 않은 채로 오로지 혼자의 힘으로 닿고자 하는 영성의 도정이다. 이것은 리처드 도킨스가 '만들어진 신'에서 다음과 같이 말했던 것과 유사하다.



 과학자로서 나는 근본주의 종교에 적대적이다. 그것이 과학적 탐구심을 적극적으로 꺾으려 하기 때문이다. 그것은 우리에게 마음을 바꾸지 말고, 알아낼 수 있는 것들을 알려고 하지 말라고 가르친다. 그것은 과학을 전복시키고 지성을 부패시킨다.(p. 430)



 샘 해리스도 같은 것을 두려워 한다. 이성의 합리적 의심과 비판을 막는 모든 것들을, 그저 모든 것이 다 결론이 난 것처럼 달리 보고 생각하는 움직임들을 꼭꼭 자기 아래 가두는 모든 것들을. 부패된 지성이 뿜어대는 악취에 선량한 이성들이 오염되는 것을 막기 위해 그는 '자유 의지'나 '자아'처럼 현재 마치 종착역처럼 되어버린 개념들을 허무는 것이다. 그런 면에서 그의 영성을 단 한 단어로 말할 수도 있지 않을까 싶다. 바로 자유라고. 숫타니파타에 나오는 이런 자유 말이다. 나는 샘 해리스가 이 책에서 하고자 했던 말 전부가 바로 여기에 집약되어 있다고 본다.



 

소리에 놀라지 않는 사자처럼 
그물에 걸리지 않는 바람처럼 
진흙에 더럽히지 않는 연꽃처럼 
무소의 뿔처럼 혼자서 가라. 
 

 




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ICE-9 2017-05-21 공감(17) 댓글(0)
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나는 착각일 뿐이다 새창으로 보기
서양의 철학의 시작은 데카르트의 '나는 생각한다. 고로 존재하다'라는 사고에서 출발한다. 모든 것을 회의하고 의심하더라도 자기가 지금 현재 생각하고 있다는 그 사실만은 인정하지 않을 수 없으므로 내가 존재한다고 할 수 있다는 것인데, 이 책은 그 사실마저도 의심하는 내용이다. 사실 이 책의 사고가 기반하는 유물론적 증거는 기존의 뇌과학 또는 심리학에서 많이 연구되고 인용되는 내용이지만,사람들의 의식이나 영혼에 대한 사고는 깨지지 않고 있다.논리적인 사고를 한다면 이 책에서 주장하는 결론으로밖에 유도되지 않을 것 같은데, 이러한 결론에 대한 인류의 두려움 등의 이유로 계속 거부되고 있는 것 같다.


이 책의 주장이 출발하는 증거는 우반구와 좌반구를 연결하는 뇌량을 제거하는 수술의 결과이다. 좌반구과 우반구가 서로 인식하는 사실이 구분이 되면서 정보를 서로 교류할 수 없는 상태를 보면 사람의 사고는 이 사고를 기반으로 하는 하드웨어(뇌)에 철저하게 의존한다는 사실을 알 수 있다. 이처럼 사고나 의식이 철저하게 유물론적으로 하드웨에 의존한다면, 논리적으로 생각하고 철저히 따저다보면 나라는 의식 자체 (오늘의 내가 어제의 나와 같다는 연속성의 개념을 가진)도 컴퓨터의 OS와 유사하게 정보의 흐름에 불과하다고 결론낼 수 있다. 아무리 논리적으로 과학적인 사람이라도 이런 결론은 두려울 수 밖에 없다. 하지만 역설적으로 이러한 사실을 인정할 수있다면 명상이나 영성, 기도같은 모든 종교활동이 이기적인 사고나 욕심에서 출발하지 않고 철저하게 다른 사람, 인류, 자연에 철저하게 위할 수 있다는 생각이 들었다 

사람의 뇌, 심리 등에 대한 지식이 좀 더 연구된다면 이러한 사고에서 진보할 수 있겠지만, 우선은 이러한 사고가 무조건적으로 두려운 것만이 아니라 긍정적인 있을 수 있다는 생각을 할 수 있다는 의미를 가질 수 있어서 앞으로 뇌과학이나 사람의 심리에 대한 연구를 긍정적으로 볼 수 있을 것 같고, 종교에 대해서도 좀 더 이타주의적으로 생각할 수 있을 것 같다는 느낌을 가질 수 있었다.
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마키아벨리 2017-05-20 공감(6) 댓글(2)
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나는 착각일 뿐이다 새창으로 보기





우선 이 책은 어렵다. 그럼에도 이 책을 읽으면, 인간에 대해서, 뇌과학이란 무엇인지 쉽게 접근하게 된다. 인간이라는 존재가 무엇이며, 우리가 무엇을 착각하는지, 과학과 영성, 종교란 우리에게 어떤 의미인이지 접근해 나간다.






 뇌과학자 김대식 교수도 그랬다. 인간은 착각의 동물이라고, 인간이 착각 하는 건 우리가 생각하는 '나'라는 것에 대한 인지 이다. 뇌를 통해서 우리는 생존하고 나라는 존재를 인식한다. 그리고 인간의 신체 조직 중의 일부분 뇌라는 공간에는 자아나 자깋라는 개념은 없다. 인간이 쓰는 언어를 통해 만들어 놓은 개념이 인간에게 착각을 형성한 것이다. 언어가 만들어지기 전 우리에게 '나'라는 개념은 존재하지 않았다는 걸 일깨워 준다.











종교에는 믿음과 배척이 존재한다. 내가 추구하는 종교는 옳은 것이고, 다른 종교는 틀린 것이다는 믿음이 현존한다. 종교가 가진 고우의 의미는 평온함을 지향하지만, 믿음이 있음으로서 갈등이 현존하며, 인간의 욕망은 다툼과 분쟁을 불러 온다.인간의 역사 속에서 전쟁의 절반이 종교 전쟁의 특징을 가지고 있는 건 바로 여기에 있다. 







동양과 서양의 만남. 서양의 종교는 동양으로 흘러들어온다. 조선 시대 임진왜란 때도 서양의 종교는 선교사에 의해 들어왔다. 여기서 서양인들이 동양의 사상에 대해 깊이 연구하지 않았던 것처럼, 동양에서도 그런 모습을 보여줬다. 천주교를 박해하고,선교사를 추방하는 형태를 보여줬으며, 서양인들에게 동양 철학이 쉽게 다가가지 못한 것처럼, 동양에서도 서양 철학에 대한 진지한 연구는 200년이 채 되지 않는다. 









명상은 흔들리는 인간의 마음을 바로 잡기 위함이다. 여기서 인간은 명상을 통해 깨닫음을 얻는다. 자기 성찰과 자아에 대한 깊이 있는 대화, 인간은 스스로에게 질문하고 스스로에게 답을 구함으로서 깨달음의 실체에 다가선다.













의식에 대해서 책에는 많은 부분을 할애한다. 인간은 의식과 무의식에 대해 관심 가지고 있다. 프로이트의 정신분석학, 구스타프 융은 우의식에 대해 깊은 연구를 하였고, 심리학을 잉태했다. 인간은 '의식'이라는 개념을 만들었고, 동물은 '의식'이 없다고 결정내린다. 그런데 한가지 의문이 든다. 동물은 정말 무의식과 의식이 없는 걸까, 언어를 가지고 있지 않다고 해서, 인간은 의식에 대해 쉽게 단정 내리고 결정내린다. 책에는 이렇게 의식에 대해서 영적인 분야로,과학적으로 접근해 간다.

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나는 착각일 뿐이다

과학자의 언어로 말하는 영성과 자아

샘 해리스









일반적인 무신론자들은 영적, 신비적이라는 말을 유신론자들이 쓰는 말이라고 해서 거부감을 느끼기 마련이다. 도적적이나 지적으로 터무니 없는 종교적 믿음을 뜻하는 경우가 많기 때문이다. 영성이라고 하면 모두 종교, 자기기만이라고 생각한다. 그러나 대부분의 문화에서 명상, 요가, 기도처럼 의도적인 주의집중을 이용해서 세상에 대한 인식을 바꿀 수 있다는 사람들이 등장했다. 



우리는 행복하기 위해 소리, 맛, 감각, 광경, 예술, 음악 등을 음미하지만 그 쾌락은 금방 사라진다. 쾌락을 추구하고 고통을 회피하는 반복이 아닌 행복의 형태는 과연 무엇일까? 종교, 부처나 예수들이 겪었던 것을 얻어보기 위해 많은 사람들은 동굴이나 수도원에서 살기도 한다. 몇 주에서 몇 달 씩 침묵과 명상 외에 아무것도 하지 않으면 말은 커녕 책 읽고 글 쓰는 일도 하지 않고 매 순간 의식의 내용을 관찰하는데만 몰두하면 명상적 성찰을 할 수 있다고 한다. 영성에는 자기초월과 윤리적 삶이 서로 연결되어 있다고 한다. 



많은 종교중 불교는 과학자들간에 큰 관심을 받는다고 한다. 실제 불교의 가르침은 윤리적인 삶과 영적인 삶의 연결을 강조한다. 현명하게 이기적인 것과 이타적인 것은 비슷하다고 볼 수 있다. 책에서 명상을 하는 방법을 알려주고 있다. 명상은 깨어나기 위한 방법인 것이다. 우리는 걱정으로 불안해하지 않고 하늘처럼 열려있는 현재 경험의 흐름을 편안히 자각할 수 있다. 



의식의 출현은 단순히 인간의 말로는 이해할 수 없는 것일 지도 모른다. 모든 연쇄적 고리는 어디에선가 끝이 나야 한다. 의식을 물리적 용어로 설명하려는 과제는 과학의 역사에서 아직 까지 찾고 있는 중이다. 과연 나의 존재는 어디에 있는 것일까? 뇌의 한부분에 있는 것이 가연 나일까? 과학자들은 좌뇌와 우뇌는 하나일 것이라고 믿었다가 각자 다른 역할을 하고 있다는 것을 알게 된다. 그래서 뇌를 분할해 놓아도 이상이 없을 거라 생각했지만 두 개의 뇌는 이어진 것이라는 것을 알게 된다. 



분할뇌 환자에게는 대뇌피질을 가로지르는 신경계가 분리되기 때문에 각 반구가 독립성을 가지게 된다. 그렇게 보면 뇌가 분리된 사람이 단일한 주체라고 말하기 어렵다고 보여진다. 이 책에서는 다양한 명상 방법과 함께 뇌 신경학에 대해서 알 수 있다. 약물을 통해서 영성을 찾는 사람들의 이야기도 들려준다. 과연 우리가 알고 있는 영성이란 무엇이고 나는 과연 어디에 있는 것일까 생각해보게 되었다. 



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줄라이북 2017-05-20 공감(3) 댓글(0)
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착각에서 벗어나는 길은 명상이다 새창으로 보기
[서평] 나는 착각일뿐이다

이책은 신경과학자 리차드 도킨스와 함께 종교적 신앙을 부인하고 있는 무신론자 샘 해리스라는 작가의 작품이다. 그는 이 책을 통해서 종교가 없더라도 영적인 삶을 살수 있다고 말하고 있다.

1장 영성에서는 행복한 삶은 영서적인 삶에서 찾을수있다고 하면서 불교의 동양 영성에서 말하고 있는 마음수련에 집중적으로 소개하고 있다

2장 의식에서는 무의식도 중요하지만 우리에게 중요한 것은 의식이라고 말한다. 의식 자체의 본질을 조사하는 것 그리고 의도적인 훈련을 통해 의식의 내용을 바꾸는 것이 영적인 삶의 기본이라고 저자는 말한다.

3장 자아에서는 신경학자 관점에서 지속적이고 통일된 자아를 갖고 있다는 의식은 분명한 착각이라는 것이다. 우리가 통일된 주체라는 느낌은 허구라고 말하고 있다

4장 명상에서 그는 명상을 하면 정신적 신체적 건강을 얻을 수 있다고 말하고 있다. 면역 기능이 높아지고 혈압과 스트레스 호르몬 수치를 낮추며 불안,우울, 신경증적 성질을 낮추면서 행복을 증가시킨다고 한다

5장 구루, 죽음, 약물에서는 영적인 깨달음을 얻은 구루라고 해도 부정적인 사회적 악영향을 끼친경우를 말하고 죽음에 대한 지금까지의 모든 이야기는 허구라고 말한다. 약물을 무조건 금지하기보다는 좋은 약물에 대한 활용을 주장하고 있다.

그의 주장을 분명하게 엿볼수 있는 문장을 몇가지 소개하고자 한다

"우리가 변함없는 생각의 사고자이고 경험의 경험자라는 통일된 주체라는 느낌은 착각이다."

"우리는 생각의 본질을 깨닫고 순전히 우리 자신으로 존재하는 것 같은 꿈에서 깨어날 능력을 우리 내면에 갖고 있다. 이런 식으로 타인의 행복에도 보탬이 될 수 있다."

"영성은 일상적인 것에 비치는 경건함에서 출발한다. 일상적이라고 해서 결코 평범하지는 않다는 통찰과 경험으로 우리를 이끌 수 있기 때문이다."

저자는 죽음의 세계를 두려워하며 선한 삶을 살기원하는 미래지향적인 삶보다는 지금 이 순간 나의 마음을 통제하고 지금의 모습을 인정하는 것이 진정한 행복이라고 말하고 있다. 인간의 마음이 행복의 시작이기에 마음을 다스리는 명상을 강력히 주장한다.
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<과학자인 나는 왜 영성을 말하는가>의 책과 글들 새창으로 보기


 































 <과학자인 나는 왜 영성을 말하는가>는 생물학자인 루퍼트 셸드레이크 박사가 쓴 책입니다. 열린 마음을 가진 과학자입니다. 그의 전작 <과학의 망상>과 <세상을 바꿀 일곱가지 실험들>을 재밌게 봤습니다. 때문에 그의 신간을 알게되자 바로 구입해서 읽었습니다. 



 과학으로 설명되지 않는 것들이 우리 주위에 참 많습니다. 과학은 그런 것들을 무시하거나 착각이라고 덮어버립니다. 중요하지 않다고 생각하기 때문에 연구 또는 실험을 하지 않습니다. 루퍼트 셸드레이크는 그런 과학자들의 신념을 비판하고 쉽게 할 수 있는 실험들을 제시합니다. 텔레파시나 애완동물이 주인이 집에 오는 것들 미리 감지한다던가 하는 것들을 말입니다.





































 <과학자인 나는 왜 영성을 말하는가>는 무신론에 의해 축소된 종교적 의례나 순기능을 과학적인 관점에서 재조명하는 책입니다. 알랭드 보통의 <무신론자를 위한 종교>를 함께 읽어보시길 추천드립니다. <무신론자를 위한 종교>는 종교의 순기능을 철학, 인문학적 관점에서 재조명하는 책입니다. 저는 종교는 없지만 대학교 때 원불교 동아리에서 활동했었습니다. 종종 어머님을 따라서 교회에 갈 때도 있습니다. 1년에 1-2번 이지만요. 좋고 나쁨은 사람에게 있지 종교에 있다고 생각하지 않습니다. 





































 <과학자인 나는 왜 영성을 말하는가>에서는 명상, 감사, 연결, 식물, 의례, 노래하기, 음악, 순례와 성지 등을 이야기합니다. 이런 것들이 어떻게 우리에게 좋은 영향을 미치는지 어떻게 실천해볼 수 있는지 이야기 합니다.













































 위 책들은 명상에 관해 보고 싶은 책들입니다. 아래는 명상의 방법 중 하나입니다.



 1. 당신의 신념 체계에 확고히 뿌리박은 초점어, 짧은 구절, 기도문을 고른다.



 2. 편한 자세로 고요히 앉는다.



 3. 눈을 감는다.



 4. 발끝에서 시작해서 허벅지, 배, 어깨, 목과 머리 그리고 머리끝까지 점차 온몸의 근육을 이완한다.



 5. 천천히 자연스럽게 숨 쉰다. 숨을 내쉴 때마다 초점어, 소리, 구절, 기도문을 읊조린다.



 6. 수동적인 태도를 취한다. 잘하고 있는지 걱정하지 않는다. 마음속에 다른 생각이 들어오면 그냥 자신에게 '어쩔 수 엇지.' 라고 말하고, 부드럽게 다시 읊조림을 계속한다.



 7. 이렇게 10-20분 동안 계속한다.



 8. 이 과정이 끝난 후 즉시 일어서지 않는다. 1분 남짓 계속 고요히 앉아서 다른 생각이 들게 놓아둔다. 그 후 눈을 뜨고 1-2분 더 앉아 있다가 일어선다. 



 9. 이 기법을 매일 한두 번 한다. 아침식사 전과 저녁식사 전이 좋은 시간이다. -p52 





 최근 큰 규모의 연구에서 명상을 훈련 받은 사람은 그렇지 않은 사람에 비해 4.2년 동안 연간 43퍼센트 더 적은 의료비를 지출하고 응급실에 간 횟수는 절반밖에 되지 않았다고 합니다.





 감사하는 습관 또한 삶과 건강, 행복에 지대한 영항을 끼칩니다. 감사하는 사람들은 덜 우울했고, 삶에 더 만족했고, 자기수용성과 삶의 목적의식이 더 컸습니다. 그리고 더 관대했습니다. 저도 이 책을 읽고 앞으로 식사하기 전에 감사기도를 들이려 노력중입니다. 아직은 자주 까먹지만 점점 습관이 되어갑니다.



 아래는 제가 사랑하는 글입니다. 감사에 관해 좋은 글입니다. 올리버 색스는 마지막 책 <고맙습니다>에서 자신이 암으로 죽어 가고 있는 걸 알고 있을 때 이 글을 썼습니다.  



 나는 두렵지 않은 척할 수 없다. 하지만 주로 느끼는 감정은 감사함이다. 나는 사랑했고 사랑받았다. 많은 것을 받았고 그 보답으로 어떤 것을 주었다... 무엇보다 나는 이 아름다운 행성 지구에서 사는 지각 있는 존재였고, 그건 그 자체로 대단한 특권이자 모험이었다. -p101 





 

 <과학자인 나는 왜 영성을 말하는가>에서는 인간이 자연세계에 노출되는 유익함에 대해서도 이야기합니다. '삼림욕'은 스트레스 감소, 면역계 활성 증가 등의 효과가 있습니다. 몸과 마음이 건강해집니다. 우울함이 감소하고 기분이 좋아집니다. 





 

 현대인은 종교와 많이 멀어졌고 자연과도 많이 멀어졌습니다. 현대인을 병들게 하는 것은 스트레스와 자연과의 연결부족, 운동부족입니다. 이 책을 통해 몸과 마음이 건강해지는 방법들을 깨닫고 실천하는 사람들이 많아졌으면 하는 바람입니다. 저부터 잘 실천해야겠습니다. 

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알라딘: 신 없음의 과학 리처드 도킨스,크리스토퍼 히친스,샘 해리스,대니얼 데닛 (지은이),2019 The Four Horsemen: The Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution

알라딘: [전자책] 신 없음의 과학


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리처드 도킨스,크리스토퍼 히친스,샘 해리스,대니얼 데닛 (지은이),김명주,장대익 (옮긴이)김영사2019-11-07 원제 : The Four Horsemen: The Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution



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"새로운 우주가 열리던 순간"
2007년, 네 명의 사상가가 한자리에 모였다. 네 사상가는 신 없음에 대해 열띤 대화를 나누었다. 이후 이들은 대화의 내용을 발전시켜 각자의 책을 출간했고, 네 권의 책은 사회에 충격을 가하며 베스트셀러가 되었다. 리처드 도킨스의 <만들어진 신>, 대니얼 데닛의 <주문을 깨다>, 크리스토퍼 히친스의 <신은 위대하지 않다>, 샘 해리스의 <종교의 종말>이 그것이다. 마치 신화 같은 이야기다. 이 책은 신화가 시작된 바로 그 현장을 옮긴 대담집이다.

대화가 이루어진 당시만 해도 신을 부정하는 것은 금기의 영역이었다. 금기를 깨고 나온 대범한 대화에는 왠지 '나눈다'라는 표현보다는 '지른다'라는 표현이 더 어울린다. 이들이 '질러버린' 대화는 '신은 존재하는가?'라는 큰 틀 안에서 연결되는 여러 주제들을 힘있게 옮겨 다닌다. '교회가 텅 비어버리는 세상이 오길 바라는가?', '모든 종교는 해로운가', '종교는 아무런 의미도 갖지 못하는가' 등 광범위한 주제에 대한 예리한 생각들은 지적 자극을 주는 동시에, 조금씩 결이 다른 네 명의 사상을 비교하는 흥미로움까지 선사한다. 무신론이라는 새 우주를 열어젖힌 순간이 궁금한 이들을 초대한다.
- 인문 MD 김경영 (2019.11.12)
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책소개리처드 도킨스 《만들어진 신》부터 대니얼 데닛 《주문을 깨다》, 샘 해리스 《종교의 종말》, 크리스토퍼 히친스 《신은 위대하지 않다》까지, 과학과 종교계 최대 문제작들의 사상적 토대가 된 바로 그 대화! 세상에서 가장 바쁜 사상가들이 어쩌다 한자리에 모이게 되었을까? 가슴을 뜨겁게 하고, 영혼을 간질이며, 신경을 자극하는 열띤 논쟁을 마주하라! 정말로 우주를 만든 초자연적 창조자가 있는가? 《성경》《코란》이 모든 것을 아는 자의 산물이란 증거는 무엇인가? 종교와 과학은 겸손과 오만의 관점에서 어떻게 다른가? 무언가를 타당한 이유로 믿는 것과 황당한 이유로 믿는 것의 차이는 무엇인가? 전투적 무신론자 도킨스, 전략적 무신론자 데닛, 직설적 무신론자 해리스, 성역파괴 무신론자 히친스가 펼치는 지적 탐구의 장으로 여러분을 초대한다.
목차
이 책을 읽기 전에_ 무신론 혁명을 촉발한 ‘네 기사’의 등장
머리말_ 하나는 모두를 위해, 모두는 하나를 위해!


1. 종교의 오만, 과학의 겸손, 무신론의 지적·도덕적 용기
_리처드 도킨스

2. 이웃에 ‘커밍아웃’하라, 수가 많으면 강해진다
_대니얼 데닛

3. 독단은 지식의 성장을 방해하고 인류를 갈라놓는다
_샘 해리스

4. 네 기사의 토론
_리처드 도킨스, 대니얼 데닛, 샘 해리스, 크리스토퍼 히친스


감사의 말
역자 후기

책속에서
첫문장
2004년부터 2007년까지 다섯 권의 베스트셀러가 이른바 신무신론 운동의 선봉으로 유명세를―그리고 몇몇 진영에서는 악명을―떨쳤다.
P. 7~8 그런데 만일 함께 모인 무신론자들이 지구를 대표함직한 지성인들이라면 어떨까? 만일 도킨스, 데닛, 해리스, 히친스가 의기투합해서 뭉쳤다면? 정말 이런 조합이라면 유신론의 도전으로부터 무신론을 지키려는 한 편의 〈어벤져스〉 영화이리라. 전투적 무신론자 도킨스, 전략적 무신론자 데닛, 직설적 무신론자 해리스, 성역파괴 무신론자 히친스... 더보기
P. 24 네 기사가 영어를 사용하는 권역에서 어떻게 새 지평을 열었는지 상기해보는 것도 의미 있을 것이다. 그들은 세계 곳곳에 토론의 장을 열었고, 새로운 세대를 위해 인본주의와 세속주의에 힘을 실어주었으며, 신앙 치료라는 속임수부터 잔인한 순교에 이르는 종교가 지닌 최악의 측면들이 종교 자체의 본질과 분리될 수 없다는, 항상 잠재해 있었... 더보기
P. 46 연옥 항목에서 ‘증명(proofs)’이라 부르는 세부 항목은 흥미로운데, 그것이 일종의 논리를 사용한다고 표명하기 때문이다. 그 논리라는 게 어떤 식인지 보자. 만일 죽은 사람이 하늘나라로 곧장 간다면 우리가 그의 영혼을 위해 기도해도 소용이 없다. 그런데 우리는 그의 영혼을 위해 기도하지 않는가? 그러므로 그는 하늘나라로 곧장 ... 더보기
P. 98 히친스: 제가 받은 인상으로는 자기 자신을 신자, 또는 믿음이 있는 사람이라고 부르는 이들 중 대다수는 항상 그렇게 합니다. 조현병이라고 말하는 것이 아닙니다. 그렇게 말한다면 무례한 거죠. 하지만 그들은 자신들이 말하는 내용이 믿기 어려운 것임을 잘 알고 있습니다. 병원에 가거나 여행할 때, 또는 다른 일을 할 때는 신앙에 따라... 더보기
P. 110 도킨스: 학계의 신학자, 주교, 교구 사제들은 우리가 《성경》을 문자 그대로 받아들인다고, 혹은 그렇게 하는 사람들을 비난한다고 공격합니다. 그러면서 “당연히 우리는 <창세기>를 문자 그대로 믿지 않는다!”고 말하죠. 하지만 그들은 아담과 이브가 한 일에 대해 설교할 때 마치 아담과 이브가 실존했던 것처럼 말합니다. 그렇게 말해도... 더보기
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저자 및 역자소개
리처드 도킨스 (Richard Dawkins) (지은이) 
저자파일
 
최고의 작품 투표
 
신간알림 신청

1941년 케냐 나이로비 출생, 영국 옥스퍼드 대학을 졸업했다. 2008년 옥스퍼드 대학의 ‘과학의 대중적 이해를 위한 찰스 시모니 석좌교수’에서 은퇴했고, 이후에도 뉴 칼리지의 펠로로 남아 있다. 왕립학회 회원이자 왕립문학원 회원이다. 왕립문학원상(1987), 왕립학회 마이클 패러데이 상(1990), 인간과학에서의 업적에 수여하는 국제 코스모스 상(1997), 키슬러 상(2001), 셰익스피어 상(2005), 과학에 대한 저술에 수여하는 루이스 토머스 상(2006), 영국 갤럭시 도서상 올해의 작가상(2007), 데슈너 상(200... 더보기
최근작 : <뉴욕 라이브러리에서>,<신 없음의 과학>,<옥스퍼드 튜토리얼> … 총 264종 (모두보기)
크리스토퍼 히친스 (Christopher Hitchens) (지은이) 
저자파일
 
최고의 작품 투표
 
신간알림 신청
뛰어난 비평가이자 탁월한 논쟁가이며 진보적 지식인인 히친스는 1949년 영국에서 태어났다. 옥스퍼드 대학교 발리올 칼리지에서 영국을 대표하는 작가 마틴 에이미스, 줄리언 반스, 제임스 펜턴과 교류했다. 조지 오웰, 도스토옙스키 등을 탐독하며 베트남 전쟁, 인종차별, 핵무기 등에 반대해 1960~1970년대 사회운동에 참여했다. 1965년 노동당에 합류했고 러시아혁명을 번역 소개한 피터 세지윅의 영향으로 트로츠키주의와 반스탈린주의에 심취했다. 《뉴 스테이츠먼》에서 일하면서 사회 유력 인사들과 친분을 쌓았고, 그리스를 거쳐 1981년 ... 더보기
최근작 : <신 없음의 과학>,<파르테논 마블스, 조각난 문화유산>,<신 없이 어떻게 죽을 것인가> … 총 188종 (모두보기)
샘 해리스 (Sam Harris) (지은이) 
저자파일
 
최고의 작품 투표
 
신간알림 신청
미국의 대표적 논객이자, 신경과학자. 리처드 도킨스, 크리스토퍼 히친스, 대니얼 데닛과 함께 종교적 도그마와 지적 설계론을 비판하고 있다. 스탠퍼드대학교에서 철학을 공부하고 UCLA에서 신경과학을 전공하여 박사 학위를 받았다. <뉴욕타임스>, <LA타임스>, <더 타임스>(영국), <보스턴 글로브>, <디 애틀랜틱>, <뉴스위크>, <신경학 연보Annals of Neurology> 등에 기고했다. 프로젝트 리즌Project Reason의 공동 창립자이자 CE... 더보기
최근작 : <신 없음의 과학>,<나는 착각일 뿐이다>,<신이 절대로 답할 수 없는 몇 가지> … 총 62종 (모두보기)
대니얼 데닛 (Daniel C. Dennett) (지은이) 
저자파일
 
최고의 작품 투표
 
신간알림 신청
1942년 미국 보스턴에서 태어났으며, 하버드 대학 철학과를 거쳐 영국 옥스퍼드 대학에서 철학 박사 학위를 받았다. 현재 미국 터프츠 대학 철학 교수로 인지연구센터의 공동 소장직을 맡고 있다. 과학에 대해, 또한 마음의 작동에 대해 질문을 던지며 명성을 쌓았다. 데닛의 목표는 “정말이지 까다로운 문제들에 대해 확실하게, 심지어 우아하게 생각하는 법”을 가르쳐주는 것이다. 그의 대답에는 엄밀한 논증과 강력한 경험적 근거가 어우러져 있다. 게다가 재미도 가득하다. 대표작으로『주문을 깨다』『다윈의 위험한 생각』『의식의 수수께끼를 풀다』등... 더보기
최근작 : <신 없음의 과학>,<직관펌프, 생각을 열다>,<과학과 종교, 양립할 수 있는가> … 총 91종 (모두보기)
김명주 (옮긴이) 
저자파일
 
최고의 작품 투표
 
신간알림 신청
성균관대학교 생물학과, 이화여자대학교 통역번역대학원을 졸업하고 현재 전문 번역가로 활동하고 있다. 옮긴 책으로 《호모 데우스》, 《신 없음의 과학》, 《디지털 유인원》, 《인공생명의 탄생》, 《도덕의 궤적》, 《우리 몸 연대기》, 《인류세의 모험》, 《과학과 종교》, 《1만 년의 폭발》, 《다윈 평전》, 《왜 종교는 과학이 되려 하는가》, 《나는 과학이 말하는 성차별이 불편합니다》 등이 있다.
최근작 : <발턴선생 2>,<발턴선생 1>,<메디칼 스토리 2> … 총 63종 (모두보기)
장대익 (옮긴이) 
저자파일
 
최고의 작품 투표
 
신간알림 신청

한국과학기술원(KAIST)에서 기계공학을 공부했고, 서울대 과학사 및 과학철학 협동과정에서 생물철학으로 석사학위와 박사학위를 받았다. 현재 서울대 자유전공학부 교수로 재직하면서 서울대 초학제 교육AI 연구센터 센터장을 맡고 있다. 서울대 행동생태연구실에서 인간본성을 화두로 하는 ‘인간 팀’을 이끌었고, 영국 런던정경대에서 생물철학과 진화심리학을 공부했다. 일본 교토대 영장류연구소에서는 침팬지의 인지와 행동을 연구했고, 미국 터프츠대 인지연구소 연구원을 역임했다. 진화이론뿐만 아니라 기술의 진화심리와 사회성의 진화에 대해 연구해 왔다... 더보기
최근작 : <문명 다시 보기>,<사회성이 고민입니다>,<아이가 사라지는 세상> … 총 74종 (모두보기)
출판사 제공
책소개


“신에 얽매일 것인가, 과학으로 자유로워질 것인가?”

현대 무신론의 수호자 ‘네 기사’들이 펼치는
과학과 종교에 관한 위대한 지적 탐구

2007년 미국의 심장부 워싱턴D.C.에서 역사적인 대담이 열렸다. 리처드 도킨스, 대니얼 데닛, 샘 해리스, 크리스토퍼 히친스가 한자리에 모여 현대 무신론의 시동을 건 획기적인 대화를 나눈 것이다. 종교의 봉인이 풀릴 때 나타날 기사라는 뜻에서 ‘네 기사(Four Horsemen)’라 불리는 이들은, 지적 탐구가 보여줄 수 있는 최상의 모습으로 현대 무신론을 이루는 가닥들이 얼마나 다채로운지를 낱낱이 보여주었다. 《신 없음의 과학》은 그날의 대화와 이후 그들의 진화된 사고를 담은 새로운 에세이를 한데 묶은 것이다. 한국판에서는 진화학자 장대익 서울대 교수의 해제를 더했다. 현대 무신론 운동의 태동부터 ‘네 기사’라는 과학적 무신론 동맹의 형성 등 풍부한 지식적 배경으로 독자들의 이해를 돕... 더보기
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리처드 도킨스가 머리말에 남겼듯이 책도 재대로 읽지 않고 무작정 비판하는 사람이 있는것 같다.
예를 통해 조목조목 종교의 비논리적인 부분을 제대로로 설명해서 마음에 들었다.
저자의 전작인 만들어진 신은 번역이 다소 아쉬웠지만 이번 책은 번역도 매끄럽고 깔끔해서 괜찮았다.  구매
오민수 2019-11-20 공감 (6) 댓글 (0)
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무게감뿜뿜인 네 기사Four Horsemen의 수다다. 대담(2007년)과 출판(2019년) 사이 히친스의 별세(2011년)가 자리해 숙연해진다. 가벼운 아페리티프 격으로, 진수는 역시 각 저작들에 있을 것.  구매
에르고숨 2020-04-08 공감 (0) 댓글 (0)
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시원함을 원했는데 김빠진 사이다를 먹는 느낌. 신 없음의 수다 정도.  구매
탐이푸르다 2020-08-26 공감 (0) 댓글 (0)
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종교의 특권 새창으로 보기 구매
 이 책은 리처드 도킨스와 크리스토퍼 히친스, 샘 해리스, 대니얼 데닛 4명의 무신론자가 종교에 대해 논한 책이다. 무신론에 상당히 강경한 사람과 좀 유연한 사람도 있지만 기본적으로 종교에 반대한다는 점은 같다. 책은 이들을 판타스틱 4라고 하거나 어벤져스라 하기도 하는데 재밌다. 하여튼 최근 책같지만 대담자체도 2007년으로 오래되었다. 크리스토퍼 히친스가 2011년 돌아가셨으니 더 오래된 책이다. 전지구적으로 종교의 여러 폐해와 해결방안을 찾는다.

 코로나 19 바이러스 사태에서 알 수 있듯. 종교는 상당한 특권을 가지고 있다. 사회에서 가장 중요한 경제시스템과 교육시스템이 공식, 비공식적으로 마비되었음에도 종교시스템은 지속 운영된다. 자신들은 그렇게 생각하지 않을지 몰라도 이들 역시 이 나라와 사회의 소속임에도 그렇다. 이 책에서 4명의 저자들은 종교가 역사상 어느 순간 그러한 특권을 얻었다고 본다. 헌법에 종교의 자유를 새긴 것 말이다. 문제는 이들이 이걸 절대시한다는 점인데 사실 절대시되는 법이란 없다. 거의 모든 법의 국가와 사회자체 및 그 구성원들의 수호를 위한 것이고 이것에 어긋난다면 법은 존재가치를 상실하게 된다. 물론 법이 윤리적으로 옳고 그름은 좀 다른문제지만.

 재밌는 점은 중앙집권적 형태를 지닌 천주교나 불교의 경우 비교적 상당히 통제가 잘되고 국가사회에 협조적인 반면 각각 사실상 교주가 따로 있는 것이나 다름 없는 상당수 교회나 여타 종교들은 전혀 그렇지가 않다는 점이다. 이들이 좀더 자신들에게 우호적인 정권이 여당이었어도 지금처럼 행동했을지 상당히 궁금한 일이다.

  종교의 특권은 이 뿐만이 아니다. 책에서도 지적하지만 우리는 어릴적부터 아이들에게 특별한 가치를 교육하는데 상당한 망설임과 가치중립적인 태도를 취한다. 아이는 생존을 위한 진화적 특성으로 주변 어른으로부터 부여되는 가치와 학습내용을 상당기간 무비판적으로 수용하고 내면화한다는 것을 알고 있기 때문이다. 때문에 비교적 사회적으로 확실히 동의되는 우리의 전통가치나 민주주의 가치, 도덕성을 제외한다면 다른 것들은 주입이 상당히 금기시되며, 공인된 앞의 것들도 가르치는 방식에 있어서 일방적 주입을 지양하는 편이다. 하지만 종교는 그렇지 않다. 향후 민주시민으로 자라날 아이의 세계관과 가치관에 지대한 영향을 미칠 것이 분명함에도 부모에 의한 혹은 주변인에 의한 종교적 세뇌를 축복인것 처럼 허용한다.

 포교의 문제도 마찬가지다. 종교의 자유로 허락하는 것인데, 포교를 원하지 않는 상당한 다른 사람들을 괴롭히는 형태로 진행된다. 우리사회의 구성원이라면 누구나 길거리에서 수차례 붙잡혀 보았을 것이다. 그리고 남을 매정하게 뿌리치지 못하는 착한 성격의 소유자라면 의미없는 행동에 수십분의 시간을 혹은 수시간을 빼앗기는 혹독한 결과를 감당해야 한다. 모르긴 몰라도 포교하는 그 사람들도 다른 포교꾼에게 당한 적이 있을 것이다. 아니면 서로는 서로를 알아보았을까나.

 종교의 또 다른 문제는 잘못된 지식과 가치를 전파한다는 점이다. 사실 우리는 우리가 믿는 대부분의 지식의 근거를 전문가로부터 얻는다. 이전문가는 선생님이기도 하고 부모님이기도, 주변의 어른이나 언론이기도 하다. 하지만 결국 몇가진 잘못전해지기도 하지만 그 근거의 근원은 전문가들로부터 온다. 이들이 이를 우리 사회와 인간을 대표해 검증하고 증명하고 비판한다. 사실 엄청나게 철저한 검증을 받은 것들이라 할 수있다. 하지만 종교지도자로부터의 지식과 가치는 전혀 그렇지 않다. 그 근거는 대개 그들의 경전이나 그것에 대한 개인적 해석에 불과할 뿐이다. 때문에 개별 신도들과 달리 종교적 지식과 가치에 대해 입증책임이 있는 종교지도자들은 자신의 말과 행동에 보다 무게와 책임을 가져야 한다고 본다.

 다음은 종교에 내재한 절대주의다. 네 사람이 본 종교의 가장 큰 문제중 하나는 인간이 궁금해하고 우주에 만연해 있는 여러가지 들에 대한 답이 정해져 있다는 것이다. 문제는 이 답이 인간이 우주와 지구에 대해 거의 이해하지 못하고 있던 고대에 정해졌다는 점인데. 이로 인해 이 답은 현대과학문명에 걸맞지 않다. 하지만 이보다 더 문제는 답이 정해져 있다는 것자체가 질문과 도전을 금기시하고 절대적이고 영원하며 도전할 수 없는 권위를 추구한다는 것이다. 이 때문에 모든 종교에는 기본적으로 전체주의가 내재되었다고 본다. 실제 역사적으로 종교가 득세한 현실 사회의 정치권은 절대주의와 매우 유사한 형태였다. 현대의 이슬람 정권국가들이 대개 그러하며 2차대전 당시 유럽 파시즘과 가톨릭의 연합이 그렇다.

 책에서 한 가지 재밌던 점은 종교가 우리가 알지 말아야 할 것을 알지 못하게 하는 순기능도 있지 않냐고 한명에 제안했던 것이다. 실제로 현대과학기술이 이룩한 몇몇 파괴적인 그림자들이 드리운 기술에는 차라리 그길을 가지 않았더라면 어땠을가 싶은 것들이 있는 것도 사실이다. 하지만 그런 식으로 일정한 합리적 기준도 없이 여러가지의 것을 알고자 하는 욕구와 만들고자 하는 욕망을 금기한다면 그것 역시 정체된 끔찍한 정체된 사회가 아닐런지. 하여튼 다른 세명도 반대했지만 나 역시 동의하기 어려운 생각이었다.

 책은 두껍지 않고 대담이기에 네명 저자의 명성에 걸맞지 않게 비판적인 이야기나 심도 있는 이야기가 생각보다 많진 않았다. 좀 실망스러운 부분인데 차라리 네 저자 각각의 책을 보는게 낫지 않을까 싶다.  

 

   

  

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닷슈 2020-03-17 공감(35) 댓글(0)
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영원할 논쟁 -『신 없음의 과학』 새창으로 보기
한국 사람이라면 누구나 경험해 본 적 있을 것이다. 교회 분들이 거리에서 티슈나 사탕, 팝콘 등을 나눠 주며 확신에 찬 표정으로 “예수 믿으세요” 하는 것을. 그 행위의 심리를 따져 볼까. 로버트 치알디니가 『설득의 심리학』에서 소개하는 ‘상호성의 원칙’에 해당하는데, 제품 홍보인 척 공짜 샘플을 나눠주면서 자연스러운 부채의식을 심어 제품 구매를 유도하는 판촉 행위와 같다. 받을 건 받고 안 믿으면 그만이라고? 이 고도의 부채 시스템은 인류 문명의 독특한 특징이다. 종교가 이 세계에 뿌리내리는데 그런 심리 공략들은 매우 성공적이었다. 나는 호의 뒤에 숨어 전도가 목적인 그분들을 향해 “용기를 갖고 무신론을 공부해 보세요”라고 늘 말하고 싶었다. 전도는 당당할 수 있는데 무신론은 그러지 말아야 할 이유는 없다. 무조건적인 신념을 방패로 삼고 모순적인 순환논리 속에서 종교를 모든 것에 적용하는 이와 대화는 제대로 되지도 않는다.

 

 

「종교인과 말할 때 이기는 것은 어렵지 않아도 논쟁하는 것이 어려워지는 것은 대체로 그들이 이렇게 말하기 때문입니다. 그들은 항상 믿음을 시험받고 있다고 말합니다. 실제로 이런 기도가 있습니다. “저는 믿습니다. 주여, 저의 불신을 도와주소서.” 그레이엄 그린은 가톨릭교도가 되는 것의 가장 멋진 점은 깊은 신앙으로 내면의 불신에 도전하는 일이었다고 말합니다. 많은 사람이 이중장부를 작성하는 방법으로 살아갑니다.」(크리스토퍼 히친스)

 

「우리가 신에 대한 직관력이 있다는 사실 자체가 미묘한 형태의 증거라는 거죠. 그리고 이것은 일종의 ‘점화 현상’입니다. 즉, 증거 없이 시작해도 된다고 일단 말해놓고 나면 그대로 진행할 수 있다는 사실이 미묘한 형태의 증거가 되고, 그러면 추가 증거를 요구하는 것 자체가 경계해야 할 지적 능력의 타락, 또는 유혹이 됩니다. 이런 논리를 작동하면 자기기만의 영구운동기관을 얻게 됩니다.」(샘 해리스)

                                       

「일전에 학식이 높은 생물학자와 논쟁을 했어요. 그는 뛰어난 진화 해설자이지만 신을 믿는 사람이죠. 제가 말했어요. “어떻게 그럴 수 있죠? 비결이 뭡니까?” 그는 이렇게 답하더군요. “저는 당신의 합리적인 논증 전부를 받아들입니다. 하지만 그것은 신앙입니다.” 그런 다음에 매우 의미심장한 한마디를 했어요. “그것을 신앙이라고 부르는 이유가 있습니다.” 아주 단호하게 말했어요. 공격적으로 들릴 정도였죠. “그것을 신앙이라고 부르는 이유가 있습니다.” 그것은 그에게 상대를 쓰러뜨리는 결정적 한 방이었죠. 그런 말은 반박할 수가 없습니다. 신앙이니까요. 게다가 그는 그 말을 일종의 변명투가 아니라 단호하고 자랑스럽게 말했습니다.」(리처드 도킨스)

 

 

비종교인조차 무신론도 하나의 종교라고 양비론으로 치부하고 공격하는데, 종교를 비판받아서는 안 되는 성역으로 만듦으로써 우리는 세계를 더 어렵게 만들고 말았다. 곤경에 처한 우리를 각성하게 하는 ‘네 기사’가 도착한 걸 환영한다. 원래는 삼총사였는데 마지막에 합류했던 히친스가 2011년 사망해 무신론의 훌륭한 기사를 잃은 게 안타깝다.  

이 책의 원제 『네 기사Four Horsemen』는 《성경》의 〈요한묵시록〉에 등장하는 네 기사에 빗댄 말로, 기존의 무신론과 구별되는 그들을 ‘신무신론’으로 평가한 언론의 논평에서 나왔다. 2001년 911 테러 공격 이후 2004년에서 2007년 사이 나온 그들의 저서(샘 해리스 『종교의 종말』(2004)와 『기독교 국가에게 보내는 편지』(2006), 대니얼 데닛 『주문을 깨다』(2006) ,리처드 도킨스 『만들어진 신』(2006),  크리스토퍼 히친스 『신은 위대하지 않다』(2007))는 금기시되는 종교를 과학적 관점으로 비판 분석함으로써 모두 베스트셀러가 되었다. 그 열기 속에 2007년 이들이 모여 자유토론을 한 것을 담은 게 이 책이다. 이들 네 기사의 과학적 회의주의 분석들로 인해 무신론자들이 주장을 펴기 훨씬 수월해졌지만 미국에서는 여전히 소수 종교인 몰몬교보다 무신론자가 대통령이 될 확률이 낮다. 종교적 이유 때문에 진화의 사실을 믿지 않는다는 사람이 40%나 되는 한국도 별반 다르지 않다. 대선 때마다 대선 주자가 표를 얻기 위해 각 종교계를 찾아가는 게 관행인데 내겐 늘 씁쓸한 풍경이었다.

 

종교 논쟁의 핵심인 ‘신은 존재하는가’의 문제는 신자든 무신론자든 물러설 수 없는 주제이므로, 네 기사는 연결되는 차선의 문제부터 신중히 격파해나간다. “절대적이고 도전할 수 없고 영원한 권위를 추구한다는 점에서 전체주의가 모든 종교에 내재되어 있다”(히친스)는 데에 네 사람은 모두 동의한다. 이들 네 기사는 논리와 입증할 수 있는 사실에 입각해 주장을 검증하고 합리적·경험적으로 이치에 맞는 것을 수용하자고 권유한다. 도킨스는 “존재의 수수께끼에 대한 자연주의적 설명이 아무리 불가능하게 들린다 해도, 신학적 대안은 더더욱 불가능”하다고 말하며 이성의 도약을 위해 무신론적 세계관의 지적·도덕적 용기를 갖출 것을 제안한다. “과학은 우리가 어느 정도로 모르는지에 대한 가장 솔직한 담론 형태”(해리스)이다. 자신의 어려움과 구원의 버팀목으로 갖는 종교, 은유로 가득한 종교 이야기, 명백한 난센스 속에서 비합리적이고 진실하지 않은 종교적 충성을 현실의 틀로 갖는 태도야말로 정당한 이유 없는 오만이자 자만이다. 종교 전도자들과 달리 합리적 무신론자들은 “옹호하는 입장이 타당한 증거를 대야 하는 ‘입증책임’을 기쁘게 받아들이고, 결코 《성경》이나 권위 있는 선언으로 도망치지 않는다.”(데닛) “종교도 제약 산업이나 석유 산업을 다루는 것과 같은 방식으로 다루기를”(데닛) 바란다. 신의 말씀을 따랐다며 온갖 불합리한 행위를 하는 이들이 인간의 이성적 사고와 자유의지를 내세울 수 있는지도 의문이다. 그에 따른 악과 불행의 결과도 신의 뜻과 책임으로 떠넘기면서? “신이 없을 때 우리는 희망과 위안의 진정한 원천을 발견한다. 예술, 문학, 스포츠, 철학은ㅡ다른 형태의 창의성과 묵상과 더불어ㅡ즐기는 데 무지나 거짓말을 요구하지 않는다. 그리고 과학도 있다. 과학은 내적 보상 외에도, 방금 소개한 사례에서 진정한 자비를 제공할 것이다. 지카 바이러스를 물리칠 백신 또는 치료법이 마침내 발견되어 무수한 비극과 죽음을 막을 때, 신자들은 그 일에 대해 신에게 감사할까?”(해리스) 우리는 신비한 것과 초자연적인 것을 혼동하지 않는 이성의 의지를 잃지 말아야 한다.

 

「노엄 촘스키는 이 세상에는 ‘문제와 ’신비‘라는 두 종류의 질문이 존재한다고 말했습니다. 문제는 해결할 수 있는 질문이고 신비는 그렇지 않은 질문이죠. 우선 저는 그 말에 동의하지 않습니다. 하지만 그런 구분은 인정하는데, 과학에는 신비라고 할 것이 없다고 말씀드립니다. 문제, 난해한 문제가 존재할 뿐입니다. 우리가 아직 모르는 것이 존재해요. 어떤 것은 결코 알지 못할 겁니다. 하지만 인간이 근본적으로 이해할 수 없는 것은 아닙니다. 어떤 것은 근본적으로 이해할 수 없다는 개념을 미화하는 것은 과학에서는 있을 수 없는 일이라고 생각합니다.」(데닛)

 

 

믿음을 옹호하는 어떤 논증이나 반론으로 생각되는 게 있느냐는 해리스의 질문에 대한 도킨스의 답변에서 우리가 모르는 많은 것들을 신의 설계론으로 설명하게 되는 경향을 엿볼 수 있다.

 

 

「저는 우주 상수가 믿기지 않을 정도로 이상적이라는 개념이 그런 상황에 가장 흡사하다고 생각합니다. 만일 그것이 사실이라면 어떤 설명이 필요한 것처럼 보입니다. 빅터 스텐저는 그것이 사실이 아니라고 생각하지만 많은 물리학자는 사실이라고 생각합니다. 그것이 어떤 식으로든 창조적 지능을 암시한다고 생각하는 것은 물론 아닙니다. 그 창조적 지능이 어디서 왔는지 설명하는 문제가 남기 때문이죠. 우리를 탄생시키기 위해 우주 상수를 미세 조정할 수 있을 정도로 창조적이고 지적인 지능이라면, 그 자신은 훨씬 더 미세 조정되어 있어야 하고…….」(리처드 도킨스)

 

히친스는 상황이 이렇게 된 데에는 인간의 인지부조화가 일상생활을 영위하는 필수적인 시스템인 것에 기인하며, 소멸에 대한 두려움을 처리하기 위한 무의식의 작용 때문일 것이라 추측한다. 그래서 그는 “신에 대한 믿음을 인식론, 철학, 생물학 등에 관한 모든 논증의 토대로 간주해야 하지 않나” 생각한다.

몇 가지 문제에서는 종교인을 설득할 수 있지만 비판을 공평하게 사방으로 펼칠 때 무신론은 난처해진다. 비이성은 언제든 돌아서기 쉽기 때문이다. 이 네 무신론자들은 종교적인 모든 것이 사라지는 걸 바라는 파괴론자가 아니다. 신전과 신상과 신자들을 무참히 없애는 행위은 오히려 신자들끼리 자행해왔다. 도킨스는 문학과 예술을 향유하기 위해서라도 《성경》 은 필독서라고 말한다. 크리스마스 문화나 예술, 결혼이나 장례의례에서도 종교는 유의미한 역할을 해왔다. 물질적인 것, 하찮은 것, 늘 딴 데 정신이 팔린 채 하루하루를 의미 없이 보내는 인간의 삶을 지적하고 문제를 보게 만든 것이 종교의 큰 힘이었다는 데 네 기사는 동의한다. 도킨스는 종교의 사실 문제에 집중한다면, 히친스는 달라이라마는 세습 군주이고, 헬레니즘 유대교가 메시아닉 유대교에 패배한 순간이 패악의 순간이었으며, 종교는 밈과 감염의 문제라고 생각해 종교의 해악에 더 집중한다. 종교가 인류의 살육 사건에 가장 큰 요인이었던 건 역사적으로 근거가 있다. 최근까지도 가톨릭교회가 파시즘과 동맹하는 등 패착이 있었지만, 교황 제도처럼 하향식 통제가 불가능한 이슬람교는 지금 현실에서 무시할 수 없는 위협이 되고 있다. 종교의 자유가 비이성을 허용하는 자유가 아닌지 진지하게 생각해볼 문제이다. 너무나 오랫동안 경시돼온 무신론 논쟁에서 무신론자들은 “정치적으로는 지고 있고, 지적으로는 이기고 있다”(히친스). 그러나 네 사람 다 미래를 크게 낙관하고 있지는 않다. 도킨스와 해리스는 사상의 유의미한 변화로도 무신론자들은 큰 역할을 하고 있는 것이라는 긍정적 입장이라면, 히친스는 “그들은 결국 문명을 파괴하고 말 겁니다”, 데닛은 “그것은 현존하는 단 하나의 재앙”이라고 탄식하며 이 논의는 끝난다.

인간의 역사에서 신앙이 힘을 가진 이념이자 권력이 된지 꽤 오래다. 네 기사가 신무신론을 논한 때보다 지금은 더 상황이 안 좋다. 각종 미디어로 인해 더 파편화된 현실 속에서 합리적 의심과 이성적 판단은 더 힘을 모으기 어려운 상황 같다. 내가 무신론을 지지하는 것은 내 합리적 판단에서 나왔다. 누군가 종교적 믿음을 갖는다면 그도 그러했으면 좋겠다. 우리의 소통은 그러할 때 가능할 것이다.

 

「가장 강경한 노선을 걷는 도킨스는 교회가 텅 비는 것을 보고 싶어한다. 그는 웅대하고 아름답고 경이로운 우주에서 초자연적인 창조자를 믿는 것은 “좀스럽고 편협하고 시시한 일”이라고 생각한다. 신비주의 노선을 취하는 해리스는 이 세상에는 영성과 신비를 위한 영역이 존재한다고 생각한다. 신중한 노선을 취하는 데닛은 교회가 사회에서 맡을 수 있는 몇 가지 역할을 인정하지만 교회의 관행과 믿음은 받아들이지 않는다. 대단한 입담으로 카리스마를 뽐내는 히친스는 논쟁 상대로서의 종교가 사라지는 것을 원치 않으며 이 대화가 영원히 계속되기를 바란다.」

(옮긴이의 종합 요약) 

 

 

 

※

이 책의 대화는 리처드 도킨스 이성과 과학 재단에서 녹화한 영상으로 유튜브 채널을 통해서도 볼 수 있다.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7IHU28aR2E

 

 

 

 

 

 

- 접기
AgalmA 2019-11-22 공감(32) 댓글(8)
Thanks to
 
공감
     
[마이리뷰] 신 없음의 과학 새창으로 보기
과연 신은 존재하는 것일까?
과학을 무기 삼아 종교의 독선과 무지에
반기를 든 무신론자 네명이 모여 2007년
미국 워싱턴에서 나눈 대담을 엮은 책이다.

‘이기적 유전자‘와 ‘만들어진 신‘ 등의 저자
리처드 도킨스, ‘주문을 깨다‘의 저자 대니얼
데닛, ‘종교의 종말‘을 출간한 샘 해리스 등
과학자 3명과 ‘신은 위대하지 않다‘를 쓴 저널리스트로 2011년 사망한 크리스토퍼
히친스 네 명의 대담은 세계의 지성계를 뒤흔든 사건이었다.....


이들은 대담에서 2001년 9.11 테러가 미국
의 반이슬람 그리스도교 근본주의 때문에
일어났다는 데 네명 모두 공감하며 그런후
에 신, 종교, 믿음에 정면으로 의문을 제기
한다.
이를 통하여 시대의 지성들이 이야기하는
바는 뚜렷하다. 세상의 모든 현상은 무조건
적인 믿음이 아니라 논리와 이성으로 설명이 되어야 한다는 점이다. 이게 비단
종교 뿐이라?....!!
상식이 통하는 사회, 정치적인 이념도
예외는 아니다.


무조건적인 추종은 결국은 파국으로 가는
지름길이라고 감히 말하고 싶다.


물론 과학이나 상식으로 납득이 가지 않는
기이한 현상도 분명 존재하지만 그것은 어쩌면 신의 영역은 아닐까...싶다.















- 접기
우민(愚民)ngs01 2019-11-12 공감(19) 댓글(0)
Thanks to
 
공감
     
[마이리뷰] 신 없음의 과학 새창으로 보기 구매
우리는 살면서 수많은 이상한 종교에 노출된다.
가령 길 가다가 ‘예수 믿으세요‘라고 말하는 사람들부터 피켓까지 들면서 ‘예수 천국, 불신 지옥‘이라는 문구를 외치는 사람들까지. 다양한 방식(?)으로 전도를 하는 종교를 접한다. 그리고 그런 알 수 없는 종교인들의 행태에 저절로 눈살이 찌푸려지는 것은 비단 나뿐만은 아닐 것이다.
그렇다고 우리는 그런 사람들에게 ‘이러지 마세요‘라는 말을 하지 않는다. 왜냐, 그래봤자 더욱 얼토당토 않은 이야기를 하면서 화를 내기 때문이다. 결국 우리는 ‘똥이 무서워서 피하나, 더러워서 피하지‘라는 말로 위로삼아 자리를 피한다.
오늘날 종교가 사람들에게 많은 지지를 받지 못하는 이유도 바로 이러한 이유 때문이 아닐까.

이 ‘신 없음의 과학‘은 위와 같은 ‘이상한 종교‘에 대한 통칭 ‘네명의 기사‘라고 불리는 무신론자들의 통렬한 비난은 담고 있다.

여기서 주의해야 할 점은 분명 이들 중은 몇몇은 종교 자체를 거부하는 사람이 있지만 이들 전부가 ‘종교‘에 대한 무조건적인 거부를 보이지 않는다는 점이다. 대표적으로 도킨스는 종교가 역사적으로 영향을 미쳤다는 것을 알고 종교를 예의 차원에서 존중한다고 말했다. 즉, 종교는 삶의 전반에서 숭배해야 할 대상이 아니라 예의차원에서 역사적 가치를 인정하는 정도에서만 해야한다는 것이다.

이들이 비판하는 종교의 대다수는 비이성적인 종교를 뜻하며, 종교로 인해 사람들의 인생이 망가지는 것을 바라지 않는다는 입장에 가깝다.
때문에 종교를 비판했다고 뭐라고 하는 종교인들의 주장은 비이성적인 종교인 답게 책을 제대로 읽어보지 않은 사람들이다.

이 책의 또다른 특징은 지적인 담론이다.
그저 종교의 단점만을 비판하는 대화가 아니라 본인들의 전공에 맞게 양자역학이라든지 각종 과학적이고 전문적인 이야기도 한다. 이과 지식에 약한 사람은 조금 읽기 지루할 수 있으나 종교에 대한 이들의 생각을 보면 또 재미있으니 끝까지 읽어보는 것도 나쁘지 않을 것이리라 본다.

무신론까지는 아니지만 종교에 대해 어느정도 거부감이 많아진 요즘 사람들에게 추천하고픈 책이다.
당신에게는 그것이 어떤 의미가 있겠지만, 내게는 아무런 의미가 없습니다. 감사 기도는 역사가 있는 라틴어 관용 어구이고, 나는 역사를 인정할 뿐입니다.
-예의로 감사 기도를 드렸다고 화낸 랍비에게 도킨스가 한 말-

교회를 파괴하고, 유대교 예배당을 불태우고, 서로의 회교 사원을 폭파하는 것은 우리가 아니라 신자들입니다.

흔히 우리와 같은 무신론자들이 음악의 메아리, 시와 신비가 사라진 텅 빈 세계를 바라고 있는 게 아닐까 하고 두려워하는 사람들이 있습니다.
그러나 우리 중 누구도 그렇게 생각하지 않습니다.
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[마이리뷰] 신 없음의 과학 새창으로 보기

무신론자들은 경이롭고 기가 막히게 잘 해명될 수 있는 실재를 있는 그대로 받아들일 지적 용기가 있다. 무신론자로서 당신은 당신이 살아갈유일한 인생을 온전하게 살 도덕적 용기가 있다. 실재를 온전히살고 누릴 용기, 그리고 당신이 왔을 때보다 더 나은 세상을 만들고 떠나기 위해 최선을 다할 용기가 있다. P.59

신이 없을 때 우리는 희망과 위안의 진정한 원천을 발견한다. 예술, 문학, 스포츠, 철학은 다른 형태의 창의성과 묵상과더불어 즐기는 데 무지나 거짓말을 요구하지 않는다. 그리고 과학도 있다. 과학은 내적 보상 외에도, 방금 소개한 사례에서 진정한 자비를 제공할 것이다. 지카 바이러스를 물리칠 백신 또는 치료법이 마침내 발견되어 무수한 비극과 죽음을 막을 때, 신자들은 그 일에 대해 신에게 감사할까?
분명 그럴것이다. 그리하여 이러한 대화는 계속된다. P.77

도킨스 : 흥미로운 말씀이군요. 그들이 겉보기에는 확신에 차서 사도신경을 암송하는데, 그것은 의심을 극복하기 위한일종의 주문이다 이거죠. ˝저는 믿습니다. 믿습니다. 믿습니다!˝ 이렇게 말하면서요. 실제로는 믿지 않으니까. P.98

해리스 : 종교는 수많은 질문에 대한 권한을 잃었는데, 온건주의자들은 무슨 논리인지 이것이 믿음의 승리라고 주장합니다. 믿음은 스스로 계몽을 일으킨다고 주장하죠. 하지만 실은 외부로부터 계몽되었고, 과학에 침범당했어요. P.111
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Discovering Buddha Nature Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche


Discovering Buddha Nature
22,186 views•Apr 7, 2014

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
323K subscribers

In this short teaching, Mingyur Rinpoche discusses buddha nature, explaining how the innate purity of awareness can be obscured, but never changed. This teaching was originally presented as a free monthly teaching on the Tergar Learning Community: http://learning.tergar.org/course_lib...

This video includes English and Spanish subtitles.
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The Dalai Lama: "On Buddha Nature" | The Buddha | PBS

The Dalai Lama: "On Buddha Nature" | The Buddha | PBS

The Dalai Lama: "On Buddha Nature"

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9 March 2010

On Buddha Nature

His Holiness the Dalai Lama

From Buddha’s viewpoint, a human being has—through training, through practice—has what we call the highest enlightened mental state. So through practice, a human being, through a sort of purification one’s own mental state, can eventually, finally, become an enlightened one. Even Buddha himself, in order to get final enlightenment, needed hard work.

In his previous lives, Buddha is like some others [in the] Indian tradition; sometimes as a human being, sometimes as an animal, but then gradually, his practice becomes higher and higher, deeper, deeper. And then, at last, his birth as a human being as the son in one small kingdom. At that stage, he is enlightened.

Every sentient being—even insects—have Buddha nature. The seed of Buddha means consciousness, the cognitive power—the seed of enlightenment. That’s from Buddha’s viewpoint. All these destructive things can be removed from the mind, so therefore there’s no reason to believe some sentient being cannot become Buddha. So every sentient being has that seed.

Buddha in the public eye is still a human being. He acted like a human being. So sometimes he also failed to influence some people. Then sometimes he wants to express his sort of sadness like that or disappointment. One time, one king takes some action to kill many of the Shakya clan. Buddha belongs to that clan, that tribe. So that day, Buddha, under one dry tree, remained sad, and he sees his kind as the same as hundreds of other tribes killed. So he shared their sort of sadness.

He failed to perform a miracle. So Buddha says, “these things are due to individuals' karma.” Buddha cannot change their karma like that. So Buddha can teach them how to change their own karma—show their path. So unless they themselves practice—change emotion, change action—then Buddha cannot do much. Sometimes Tibetans say, “oh, the Buddha failed to protect us,” but actually according to Buddhism, it’s very clear; unless we carry some certain discipline and create a positive karma, [then] the consequences [we] have to face, have to take.

In order to develop unbiased infinite love, you first need the practice of detach[ment]. But "detach" does not mean to give up desire. Desire must be there. Without desire, how can we live our life? Without desire, how can we achieve Buddhahood? Strong desire to become Buddha; but desire to be harmful, that’s bad—but desire to self right that also the concept of ego, I, self, itself is nature, and in fact in order to develop self confidence and willpower, we need a sense of strong self. It’s very necessary in order to tackle all these biological factors of hatred, or anger, these things [for which] you need tremendous sort of will power. So the self-confidence is very, very important, but the ego which disregards other’s right—that is bad. In other words, I think egotistic attitude based on ignorance is negative. Egotistic sort of feeling based on reasons is positive.

Then, whether Buddha’s physical [body] is there or not, Buddha’s spirit is always there. Now for example, my own case. I’m a small practitioner of Buddhism, so historical Buddha now [gone] for more than 2600 years, but to me and many other practitioners Buddha is still very much alive. Maybe [we’re] wrong. Maybe superstition, I don’t know, but of course you see although I have no such experience. Some of my friends, you see, actually have seen Buddha and receive some teaching from Buddha. So Buddha’s spirit must be there.

Buddha also stated “you are your own master.” Future, everything depends on your own shoulder. Buddha’s responsibility is just to show the path, that’s all.

These are excepts from an interview conducted by David Grubin for The Buddha.

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