Evolution of Consciousness?

Many, if not most, people nowadays are pretty sensitive to the various kinds of chauvinism; national, gender, religion, age and so forth. One pretty big one that goes unremarked is what might be called historical chauvinism or prejudice against the past. This goes hand in hand with what I've called The Myth of Progress, the casual assumption that things are continually getting better, and we're getter smarter, more moral and probably better looking.

I've doubted this for some time, and I'm not the only one apparently. Here's a thought-provoking essay by Jared Diamond about The Worst Mistake in Human History. (spoiler: it was the invention of agriculture.) I've often thought that the high point in human history was the Cro-Magnon period. By high point, I mean the time when people were happiest. Who wouldn't rather be out hunting wooly rhinoceros with the boys than digging in the dirt for your over-lord in Sumer?

Something I've often wondered is how different our minds are from those of our ancestors. Various writers have broached this subject, but most like Julian Jaynes with his Bi-Cameral Mind theory, begin by assuming that the present model is more correct and interpreting ancient ways of knowing in a manner that makes them equivalent to pathologies.

Some time ago I read an article by a Christian writer about angels (sorry no reference, I'm winging it here, no pun intended.) He had one quirky idea that stuck with me. He suggested that the invention of perspective in the Renaissance wasn't really an invention at all. The odd flat scenes in Medieval painting wasn't a lack of technique. It was, he said, a faithful representation of the way people actually saw things.

Then came a shift in human consciousness around the middle of the 15th century and suddenly we were seeing things in 3-D. We had entered fully into the material plane and while gaining a better perception of that realm, we lost contact with the spirit realm.

I'm not sure I buy this theory, it sounds too much like a classic Calvin and Hobbes routine. But in a broader sense, I think he's on to something. Something did change around then, and arguably not for the better. The religious hysteria that gripped Europe for two centuries was perhaps a symptom of a loss of contact with higher consciousness, and a desperate attempt to refind it. When the dust settled from the Reformation, there followed the Scientific Revolution and the increasing knowledge and mastery of the arena left to human consciousness, the realm of matter and form.

In my more optimistic moods, I think this may be a phase we as a species needed to go through. Perhaps we needed to work out a deeper relationship with matter before we could return to spirit with fresh insights; an upward turn of a spiral. In my pessimistic moods, I think it was the beginning of the great crash of our species.

In no case do I buy the view that we are wiser than our ancestors. Nothing comes without a price, and our culture's descent into materialism has cost us dearly.

Signs of Spring

Footnote to "Mind and Body"

Anonymous posted this on the "Mind and Body" thread;

check out the work of the late professor Dr. John Lorber on the student without a brain who went on to graduate with an honours B.A in Maths at the university of Cambridge.
Most of current knowledge is simply the 'party line' cross it at your peril.

You can read about this case here: Is Your Brain Really Necessary?

An excerpt;

This case is by no means as rare as it seems. In 1970, a New Yorker died at the age of 35. He had left school with no academic achievements, but had worked at manual jobs such as building janitor, and was a popular figure in his neighbourhood. Tenants of the building where he worked described him as passing the days performing his routine chores, such as tending the boiler, and reading the tabloid newspapers. When an autopsy was performed to determine the cause of his premature death he, too, was found to have practically no brain at all. Professor Lorber has identified several hundred people who have very small cerebral hemispheres but who appear to be normal intelligent individuals. Some of them he describes as having ‘no detectable brain’, yet they have scored up to 120 on IQ tests.

This comes from a web-site with a lot of fascinating and strange stuff, Alternative Science.

Mind and Body

From the comments, Doug Rogers said;

Mind is what the Universe does. All the causes and conditions come together to birth consciousness. In my understanding then, Consciousness is just a consequence of having a form to contain it. This is rather like Pinker's radio, tuned to a frequency and capable of receiving, like Brain/Body --> Mind. Really there isn't a difference between Brain/Body/Mind. We're bound by the language to make the distinction, and as such, there really isn't a distinct edge we can draw -as to self- between the fingers, the fingers on the keyboard, and the keyboard while in the act.

As far as Mind is concerned, Body is just a filter for sensation. Until a whole lot of neurons come together, there just isn't consciousness. Is there Mind before then? What exactly is reborn? Isn't this anthropomorphization a dangerous and misleading trap? How otherwise to say it? Is this some mal-understanding between English and Pali?

Is mind an effect, spontaneously generated with each sentient form? Or does Mind find form to birth into?

Let me try and clarify the Buddhist position on the mind-body problem, as I understand it (the last clause is an important caveat!)

I think the assumption made in the sentence "Until a whole lot of neurons come together, there just isn't consciousness" is unwarranted. The very first verse of the Dhammapada states that "mind is the forerunner" and it seems to me preferable to say "until mind enters the womb, there just isn't a structured network of neurons."

There isn't any strong a priori reason why one of those formulations is more logical than the other. The first is the default assumption of modern thought, but that doesn't make it either correct or logical.

The latter is the formulation that is in accord with the dependent origination, one of the cornerstones of Buddhist teaching. "Because of consciousness, there arises name-and-form." According to the dependent origination, mind does not arise out of matter (neurons), rather the reverse. If not strictly speaking matter, certainly form (organized matter) does arise out of mind. Brain is something mind does, not the reverse.

This is an odd way of thinking for most moderns, but there may be a theoretical basis in science to explain it. The biologist Rupert Sheldrake raises the serious problem of morphogenesis, i.e. when all the cells in a body have the same DNA, how do the embryonic stem cells "know" how to turn into liver cells or brain cells and organize themselves into complex organs?

This problem is profound, and is quite insoluble if you start with the ordinary materialist assumptions. With everything we know now about DNA the only mechanism we can demonstrate is coding for protein sequences. That seems to be all the DNA is capable of doing. And the problem cuts deep. Once a string of amino acids are combined into a protein string, this string must then fold itself into a workable shape. A given string can fold into a very large number of possible configurations, but only one will do the job intended. How does this bit of insensate matter "know" what is required? A purely physical explanation is impossible. And this only the lowest tier in a long hierarchy of increasingly complex maneuvres required to create an organism.

Sheldrake's explanation is something he calls "morphogenetic fields." These are pure information fields, without any physical location in space (non-local). This sounds vanishingly close to the Buddhist idea of Mind. Mind has no physical characteristics such as size, shape or location. It is everywhere (boundless) and nowhere (void). Thinking about Mind using physical concepts is to make a grotesque category error.

It's quite possible that in a hundred years time the philosophy of materialism will be just a quaint foot-note in the history of science, alongside the phlogiston theory of combustion and phrenology. It's easy to see how it arose in the first place; in the first three centuries of the modern scientific revolution (roughly starting with Newton's Principia) it has provided an enormously powerful explanatory matrix. This only started to get wobbly in the first half of the twentieth century, with quantum physics.

Nevertheless, nineteenth century habits of thought die hard and the materialist view remains strong. What is harder to understand is why it is so much taken for granted. It is really a quite unnatural way of thinking. Consider; mind is what we know directly. Matter (and the external universe) we only know second-hand, strictly speaking as an inference. Is it natural to assume that that which is immediately and surely known is derived from that which is only inferred?

Don't we ever learn?

After mad cow and chicken fever, you'd think people would be thinking twice about the wisdom of our industrial agricultural methods. But you'd be wrong.

The latest crisis is the massive die-off of honey-bees. This is becoming a serious threat to our food supplies, which depend on the bees for pollinations.

A number of possible factors are being considered; cell-phone radiation, GM crops, new pesticides, immune collapse due to stress.

Some of these may be partial explanations. I don't buy the idea of cell-phones having a major effect; we've saturated the ether with RF radiation for decades now and the picayune amount added by cell-phone towers shouldn't make that big a difference. (Pity though, it would be grand to have an excuse to ban the damned things)

GM crops seem to be a more likely causal agent; these weird genetic brews have been unleashed haphazardly on the environment and we are just beginning to see the fall-out.

But it seems that there is an over-arching systemic issue here; same one that was behind the mad-cow and crazy-chicken episodes - the greedy capitalist itch to wrack more and more out of Mother Nature.

Bee-keeping has gone industrial. The same intemperate use of chemical inputs that characterize the keeping of larger stock also goes into the bee-hives. Honey is just a side-line for modern bee-keepers, the big bucks is in trucking the bees around the countryside to perform crop pollination services, a highly unnatural life for the bees to say the least. What's more, some bright bulb thought of the idea of making pre-formed combs larger than nature's to force the bees to grow bigger.

The really telling detail is that organic bee-keepers who use natural sized combs and no chemical inputs are not experiencing bee death.

Just Plain Silly

He told them not to go to warp nine.
When you get old.
Blue screen of death, no one hears your scream.
World's most perfect map ever.
Green Lama saves America (don't ask me)

Coming Soon

Hello all, I've been away from the monastery on a teaching trip and have had spotty access to internet. That is my excuse for neglecting the blog; I should be back by the weekend and will try to get something new up then. Thanks for your patience. In the meantime, we continue to get some interesting comments from readers to check out.

Desire Continued

Barry wrote (in the comments)

What is wrong with enjoying one's food or a householder enjoying their marriage bed or any of the many beautiful and wonderful things in this human life? Surely they all belong?

This is exactly what I mean by wanting to have your cake and eat it too. Phrasing the rhetorical question in terms of right and wrong is misleading. Of course, there is nothing "wrong" with sensual enjoyment per se. That is not the issue.

The issue is one of results. The realization of the Unconditioned, nibbana, is only to be had by a disengagement with the Conditioned, samsara. All the "beautiful and wonderful things" are still marked by dukkha and anicca (misery and impermanence) and engagement in even the most refined objects of the senses lead only to rebirth in the sensual desire sphere. A moral life but one still enmeshed in sensuality can, at best, lead only to the heavenly realms.

The middle path as defined in the Dhammacakkapavattana Sutta is between the ignoble extremes of sensuality and ascetism. It doesn't mean a moderate enjoyment of sensuality, but a contented non-seeking after either pleasure or pain.

The realization of nibbana only comes from disenchantment and dispassion towards the conditioned objects of sense. You simply cannot have your cake and eat it too.

Desire (Reposted Tale of Two Similes)

Some good discussion about the nature of desire in the comments section.

Let's remember that the Buddha was very clear in his formulation; the second noble truth says that the cause of suffering is desire (dukkha, tanha). I detect a little bit of wanting to have your cake and eat it too in attempts to shift the problem away from desire to attachment or something else.

Here is an old post from October, 2005 with some salient points;

A Tale of Two Similes

I previously blogged about my trip to the Exploring the Mind conference, and mentionedespecially Mark Epstein's lecture, which I quite enjoyed although one or two points bothered me.Well, I'm currently reading his new book "Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life" and I'm finding more than a pointor two to be bothered about. (For example, that title)

But for now I'll just focus on one symptomatic point that illustrates most of my problem withthe "psychologized" form of Buddhism. Dr. Epstein quotes a well-known story from the Zen tradition.This is a great favourite of western Buddhists and shows up a lot in slightly different versions.But there is a subtly different version in the Theravada literature that is not nearly so wellknown. Read the two versions below and then I'll add a comment or two;

Zen Version, as retold by Dr. Epstein There is a famous storyfrom Japan that expresses the peculiar delight with which desire is held in the Buddhist tradition.A young woman, it is told, is walking through a field when she encounters a tiger that eyes herhungrily. She runs and the tiger pursues her. She comes to a cliff, takes hold of the root of awild vine and, in a single motion, swings herself over the precipice. Dangling there, clutching thevine, she sees the tiger sniffing the ground above her. Trembling, she looks down. It is a long wayto the bottom, and she feels momentarily dizzy. Then she , sees something else. There is anothertiger below, presumably a hungry one, who has also noticed her plight. The tigers prowl, one aboveand one below; waiting for their feast. She clings to the vine. Suddenly; two mice appear at theedge of the cliff and start to gnaw at the roots that hold her. The woman notices a wildstrawberry growing nearby on the side of the hill. She reaches with one hand to pluck thestrawberry, still clutching the vine with the other, and places the fruit in her mouth. She takesone bite. Ahhhh! How sweet it tastes. This is the end of the story. We never learn what happens or,rather, we are told exactly what we need to hear.

The story, as I understand it, is about desire. As a Buddhist teaching story,it is obviously about other things as well. It is about being in the moment and the fragility ofeveryday life and doing one thing at a time, but it also seems to be a metaphor for desire. Thewoman encounters her desire and it appears as a tiger. In psychoanalysis, the tiger would be calleda projection. Fierce, wild, devouring. A beast. just as with desire, there seem to be only twooptions: to flee or to surrender to it.

Our protagonist runs from the beast, only to encounter a second tiger. There isno escape. Cornered, she hangs on for dear life. But desire continues to torment her. It changesform, multiplies, threatens her as she struggles to avoid it. Even in the form of the mice it isdangerous. How can she escape? The solution lies in the strawberry. What does she do? She tastes itand it is good. She takes one bite, not even knowing if she will have a second one, not knowing ifthere will be a next moment at all. With complete attention, she savors the flavor of the fruit.Desire is the tiger and the mouse, but it is also the strawberry. When the young woman stopsrunning and gives up the fear of being devoured, she can finally taste it. The flavor of desire isgood.

Theravada Version; from the Avadana A man is lost in a drearydesert for a long time, being persecuted by misfortune. Then he comes to a dark and dense forest.Exhausted from the scorching sun, he is at first delighted to enter the cool shade. As he wanderson, however, thorns and jungle undergrowth cause him difficulty so that he can progress only withgreat hardship. As he struggles like this, wild animals come closer from all sides. With flarednostrils, glinting eyes and greedy jaws, they get closer and closer. Full of fear , he tries toescape , but the jungle becomes even more dense.

On this desperate escape from the desert, from the thorny forest and from thewild animals he finally comes to a half-overgrown well. In his fear he seeks refuge there. But ashe hurls himself into the well, one of his feet becomes entangled in a creeper wine, and he findshimself hanging upside down in the dark well. Although almost unconscious from fear and despair,his eyes have grown accustomed to the dark, and he sees a poisonous snake winding itself slowlytowards him, flicking its tongue in and out. Full of terror, he looks up again only to see the headof a huge elephant with two enormous tusks looking over the edge of the well.

Among the vines of the creeper in which he became stuck, wild bees swarm busilyand occasionally one of them stings him. Whenever he is stung, he flinches from the pain. At thesame time, however, droplets of honey drip from time to time onto his face. Greedily he licks themup, enjoying their sweetness, and concentrating completely on their dripping on hill.

Suddenly he notices two mice-one black and one white gnawing on the roots of thecreeper holding him. It is just a matter of time before the roots are chewed through and he fallsinto the abyss and into the snake's reach. But on the pinnacle of despair, yet another drop ofhoney drips onto his face. He sticks out his tongue to get it and for a moment forgets his hopelesssituation.

All of a sudden he notices that the wild animals have disappeared. A merciful manlooks into the well and shouts down that he will free him from his terrible peril. The man caughtin the well shouts back: "Just a moment! Wait till I've enjoyed this honey!"

The explanation of the similes;

The arid desert: the cyclic existence of beings .
The dense jungle: humanbirth.
The cool shade: childish carelessness.
The thorns: the necessity to wind oneselfthrough life .
The wild animals: manifold diseases.
The well: lust for the body.
Thecreeper: hope and expectation.
The poisonous snake: the inevitable decay of old age .
Theelephant : an expression for the power of death.
The bees: changing fate .
The honeydrops; the five sense desires, longed for, loved, thrilling, belonging to desire , charming.
The two mice: day and night, sun and moon, that gnaw away at one's life .
The merciful man:the Awakened One .

These two stories illustrate the point I previously made in this blog about the importance ofThird Noble Truth. In the first version, there is no escape from the well (no faith in Third NobleTruth or Nibbana) whereas in the second (older) version a man representing the Buddha appears tooffer an escape; transcendence.

Notice how this turns the point of the story one hundred and eighty degrees. In the version usedby Dr. Epstein, eating the strawberry becomes an almost heroic act of existential engagement withthe present moment. Given the assumptions of the story, the best thing you can do is enjoy thesweetness of the strawberry. But in the Theravada version, continuing to lick the honey becomes anact of supreme folly. There is a man offering a way out, and only a fool would hesitate to take it,no matter how sweet the honey.

As Ajahn Chah put it; if you stop and smell the roses along the way it may be dark before youfind your way home.

Right Speech and the Internet

Good news, since I reluctantly activated moderated comments, I've only had to delete one post. Bad news, that was a piece of spam for some financial scam, so the spam bots are finding their way past Blogspot's letter-code entry system.

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It was unfortunate, but all too common, the way the comments threads had started as an intelligent discussion and degenerated into a peta-realm of insults and trolls. We've all seen this kind of thing far too often on the internet. Is there something about the medium? The anonymity is a factor, no doubt, and also the casual ease of posting which means a person can upload something in a bad mood they might later regret.

But remember, Buddhists, there is karma attached to speech. Speech is a power we have of inserting dhammas directly into another being's mind-stream. The internet if anything multiplies this power, and the karmic repurcussions.

One of the formulas for right speech is the four-fold one of what speech a Tathagata would utter. A Tathagata only speaks (a) that which is true, (b) beneficial, (c) meaningful and (d) either pleasant or if unpleasant, spoken at the right time. In the context of the internet, and of this blog, I take (d) as permission to disagree but with respect and care.

Another point, and one I've addressed before, is that I occassionally get criticized for raising political questions here. Although I may sometimes slip up, I try to do so with discretion and care. Buddhism, and Buddhist ethics, ought to practical and relevant to real-life. And it seems to me that there are two very important areas of concern, war and climate-change, that could urgently use the application of Buddhist ethics. If we can't apply those ethics to the momentous issues of the day, then they are only museum relics. So, I don't intend to stop.

Time to Play Nicely Children

The comments coming into this blog have descended to a level where a reader has to wade through screenfuls of nasty insults and vague threats to find the few gems where someone has actually said something meaningful and sensible.

Barry has suggested that I do something about it. I've gone a step further than his idea of disallowing anonymous posting; I've enabled "comment moderation" so that I will now preview postings before publication.

Hopefully this will be a temporary measures until the trouble-makers mend their ways or go away and find another forum to vent their spleen. I don't really like the idea of moderated comments, which is too much like censorship.

You are still free to disagree with me or with each other; but address ideas not personalities.

Here are the new rules;

Any post will be deleted which;

1. Is an ad hominem attack or insult
2. Constitutes "hate speech"
3. Contains threatening language

If these types of posts stop coming in, I'll go back to unmoderated comments.

Just for the Hell of it

I can't help rather liking Pope Benedict. The man is a bit of an anachronism, but as I've said before, in times like these, anachronism is virtue. He has raised some more controversy by stating that hell is real, causing all kinds of consternation among the modernists, who apparently take objection to the Pope stating Catholic doctrine.

It's fashionable these days in some quarters both Christian and Buddhist to say that hell (and heaven) are just states of mind here in the human realm. This is clearly not what the Buddha taught about other realms. In the Sangarava Sutta (Majjhima 100), for instance, he was asked straight out whether or not there really are gods. His answer was definitive;

When this was said, the brahmin student Sangarava said to the Blessed One: "Master Gotama's striving was unfaltering, Master Gotama's striving was that of a true man, as it should be for an Accomplished One, a Fully Enlightened One. But how is Master Gotama, are there gods? (devas)"

"It is known by me to be the case, Bharadvaja, that there are gods."

As for hell, there is quite a long depiction of the torments in Niraya (hell) found in the Devaduta Sutta, Majjhima 130, complete with many gruesome details. It comes as a shock to many westerners interested in Buddhism that we do have our own fire-and-brimstone literature.

Of course, there are crucial differences between the Christian conception of hell and the Buddhist. Most importantly, the Buddhist hell, and the Buddhist heaven too, are not eternal. They are considered as stations of rebirth. As well, hell was not created by anyone as a place of punishment. It is a natural result of certain karmas, particularly the karma of violence and cruelty.

The rationalists are already objecting; but this isn't a real place. By raising this objection they are revealing their adherence to the naive assumption that this human realm is a real place. So is hell real? What do you mean by "real", grasshopper?

The universe we actually live in, the only one we can ever know directly, is the product of our own mind. True, we get faulty and limited signals from some mysterious "out there" in the form of light waves striking the eyes, pressure on the nerve endings, sound-waves striking the ear. But the world we actually experience is fabricated from this external data mediated through the physical apparatus of our senses and the mental apparatus of perception.

There have been schools of Buddhism that postulated that there is no real external universe. This has not been the position of the Theravada. We admit the reality of an external world, we're just not all that interested in it. Why bother about something we can only know second or third hand?

So, we could say that we dream this human world, but the dreaming is constrained by various inputs of data from an external world. The other realms are also experienced as dreams, perhaps somewhat less constrained by the incoming data. The Zen master Dogen once wrote something about how a man, a demon, a naga and a ghost all experience the same river differently. This is much stronger than the modern psychological interpretation, it does posit quite different states of being. However, there is also no reason to rule out the traditional Theravadin interpretation that heaven and hell are actual "places" existing as whole realms distinct from this plane of reality. In fact, it seems quite naive to assume that this realm is the only one.

The existence of heaven and hell make perfect sense within the system of karma and rebirth. A being is reborn according to their predominant karmas and cravings. If these are of an extreme nature, either towards goodness or evil, then the karmic-resultant will also be extreme and for instance, one who has lived by killing and torturing will be reborn into a sphere of killing and torturing.

However, it must not be forgotten that the point of Buddhism in the end is to escape from all of these insubstantial, impermanent and imperfect realms and end the cycle of karma and rebirth once and for all.

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POSTSCRIPT

Here are a few links for those who haven't raised enough hell yet

The Afterlife in Different Religions
Comparison of Christian and (Mahayana) Buddhist beliefs
Catholic Encyclopedia article on Hell
Tibetan Buddhism article on Hell (scroll down past the Google ads)
Dante's Inferno Test. Which circle of hell is right for you?
And of course, this venerable chestnut; Is Hell exothermic or endothermic?

In Defence of America

There's been some very heated discussion in the comments section. While it's good to see that the blog is generating some interest and controversy, it's time for everyone to take a deep and mindful breath. Some of the posts have crossed the line into wrong speech. I'm thinking particularly of Rod's nasty characterization of Americans.

While it's always wrong to slander a whole nationality, it's also rather nonsensical to apply such generalizations to a country as diverse as the United States of America. It's perfectly valid to be critical of American foreign policy, or the current administration, but America is more than that.

In my opinion, for what little it's worth, this presidency will surely go down in history as the worst and most destructive ever. And one of the most damaging aspects of Bush's legacy is what it's done to America's reputation around the world. Sadly, Rod's views are pretty widespread.

Something to consider; Bush was not fairly elected, either time. The first time, in 2000, Al Gore plainly got the most votes and almost certainly actually would of taken Florida if the vote count had not been stopped. In 2004, the election was shamelessly rigged with touch-screen voting. It is highly unlikely that at any time the majority of Americans actually supported Bush.

Something else to consider; most Americans are fundamentally decent and compassionate. The only way the war party has been able to sell their imperial projects has been to package them as humanitarian endeavours, "to spread freedom" and topple dictators. Even now, the most often heard excuse for prolonging the agony of the obviously failed colonization of Iraq is that an American withdrawal would lead to a "humanitarian catastrophe." If the Americans were really as mean and nasty as some would have us believe, Bush and his cronies could have just told the truth; "We're going in to steal their oil and we don't care how many of them we have to kill to do it."

Yes, there are ugly parts of America's history; the genocide of the natives and african slavery the most obvious, but the same is true of most countries. We should not forget the good things that America has given the world.

Unfortunately, when Americans of a conservative bent think of the good they've done, too often their mind goes immediately to military interventions. "America saved Europe twice." Not only does this miss the point and encourage the worst side of the collective American character, it's also historically dubious. America's importance in both world wars has been greatly exaggerated. (They were barely involved in the First, and Russia won the Second; the western front was a diversion at best.)

What America gave the world was first and foremost the concept of a free nation based on the consent of the governed and with a people holding inalienable rights. Remember the American Revolution predated the French one, and was pulled off without a reign of terror. This was quite an accomplishment, even if all they were doing was taking good old British liberties to their logical conclusion. It would be a particular tragedy if they let their constitution fail; it is on shaky grounds these days with even habeas corpus practically abandoned. (Gonzales partying like it's 1214)

As a free nation with a free and prosperous population, America has been a cultural powerhouse. Yes, I know ninety percent of American culture is crap, but as Theodore Sturgeon said about science fiction, ninety percent of everything is crap. It's the ten percent that is so impressive. America gave us Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, Ken Kesey, Walt Whitman. And American cinema, at it's best, has no comparison anywhere. And let's not forget jazz.

And don't forget that when America puts it's technological know-how into something other than killing machines, they can do astonishing things like put a man on the moon. In the sixties. With less electronics on-board than it takes to power up your Nissan.

Most Canadians have mixed feelings about our big neighbour. Best way to summarize it would be to think of a major sporting event, like an international hockey tournament. Nothing makes us happier than whipping the American team, but if the Canadians are elimated we automatically root for the Yanks. Speaking personally, I like America and Americans, I've travelled around the States a fair bit and enjoy their brash self-confident open-hearted cultural persona. (Canadian joke; what's the best thing about Americans? You never have to tell them to speak up.) Which is why I am so troubled by the way the leadership is taking the country.

America is great when it remembers it's a republic, it's horrific when it imagines it is an empire.

Dangerous Games

It's kind of amazing to me that high-stakes international politics sometimes looks like a school-yard squabble. Nobody wants to admit they made a mistake and say they're sorry.

In the current stand-off over the British sailors held in Tehran, both sides say the capture was made on their side of the international boundary. And both sides are flat out lying. The simple truth is that there is no agreed international boundary in the Gulf. See the analysis by Craig Murray, former head of the UK Foreign Office's Maritime Section, Blair Faked Map. short version, there is no way either the Brits or the Iranians can state with certainty which side of a line that doesn't exist that boat was on. Another "dodgy dossier" for Mr. Blair?

Which begs a few questions; if this area of water is disputed, why is the Royal Navy going there at all? If they wanted to avoid trouble with the situation so tense, you think they'd allow a de-facto neutral zone. (Leaving aside the bigger question, why are they in the Gulf at all?) On the other hand, why are the Iranians pushing their luck?

Part of the answer may be that the sailors were seized by radical elements of the Revolutionary Guard. The western media likes to portray Iran as a monolith headed by a dictatorial Ahmadinejad. Nothing could be further from the truth, the government there has all kinds of internal power blocs and factions and Ahmadinejad really has very little power. If the sailors had been confronted by Iranian regular navy or army the situation might have been resolved on the spot.

But there may be something else, a reason why more pragmatic elements of the Iranian leadership seem willing to push the issue. There is a piece in the Indepedent that has got a lot of attention; it reports that the Iranians are responding tit-for-tat after the Americans raided their diplomatic liason office in Arbil.

Early on the morning of 11 January, helicopter-born US forces launched a surprise raid on a long-established Iranian liaison office in the city of Arbil in Iraqi Kurdistan. They captured five relatively junior Iranian officials whom the US accuses of being intelligence agents and still holds.

In reality the US attack had a far more ambitious objective, The Independent has learned. The aim of the raid, launched without informing the Kurdish authorities, was to seize two men at the very heart of the Iranian security establishment....

The two men were in Kurdistan on an official visit during which they met the Iraqi President, Jalal Talabani, and later saw Massoud Barzani, the President of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), at his mountain headquarters overlooking Arbil.

This nasty little incident greatly antagonized the Iranians, and for good reason. Not only is this kind of thing totally in breach of diplomatic conventions and international law, it is also puts the lie to the claim that the Iraqi authorities have any say about what goes on in their own country. These officials were there on the Iraqi's invitation. And the Americans are still holding five low level Iranians seized in the raid. (The big fish got away.)

Some of the commentary from the Jingos would almost be amusing if it weren't so pathetic; check out this utterly predictable screed from the Yorkshire Post, Let's Give Iran a Bloody Nose. Terry Jones (of Monty Python fame) has done a good job of puncturing this sort of blather; Call That Humiliation?

Let's hope the children are able to put away their toys and play nicely from now on.

Did the Buddha have a sense of humour?

"A madman and an arahant both smile, but the arahant knows why while the madman doesn't."
Ajahn Chah

There was a long standing taboo in Thailand against monks being photographed smiling. Ajahn Chah was the first prominent bhikkhu who allowed his image to be recorded while looking cheerful. Certainly many of his teaching stories have a playful or humourous flavour. The same could be said of many other Thai ajahns. Similarly, the Zen tradition is full of quirky anecdotes and Vajrayana has its trickster figure in Milarepa.

But did the founder, Gotama Buddha, have a sense of humour? Some might think the idea irreverant. I would beg to differ, I don't think a healthy sense of humour, a clean enjoyment of ambiguity, paradox and the foibles of human nature, is incompatible with the highest state of liberation.

One obstacle in appreciating the Buddha's wry wit may be the stilted formal language of the suttas; recorded in Pali which was probably not a natural language but a kind of artificial prakrit, an Indic esperanto. The language itself has a structure that lends itself to formality or even gravity in expression, and the use of formulaic passages as a mnemonic device adds to this.

Translations have also been problematic in this way. The newer versions by Bhikkhu Bodhi, Maurice Walshe and some others are written in a more natural English prose, but one sometimes gets the feeling that the early translators of the Pali Text Society were trying to emulate the prose style of the King James Bible to attain the neccessary gravitas.

Nevertheless, some of the Buddha's wit does make it through the layers of transmission. This is especially true of many of his parables. From Digha 23, a parable concerning attachment to views and opinions;

Once there was a swineherd...[who] saw a heap of dry dung that had been thrown away, and he thought: 'there's a lot of dry dung someone has thrown away, that would be food for my pigs. I ought to carry it away. And he spread out his cloak, gathered up the dung, and made a bundle and put it on his head...there was a heavy shower of unseasonable rain and he became spattered with oozing, dripping dung to his finger-tips, but still carried his load of dung. Those who saw him said, 'You must be mad! You must be crazy!' [and he answered] 'You're the ones who are mad! You're the ones who are crazy! This stuff is food for my pigs!'

This spoken to one Payasi, a stubborn-minded fellow doggedly holding onto his own pile of metaphorical dung, long after the "rain" had made it worthless.

Or, what about the story found in the Kevatta Sutta (Digha 11) where a monk uses psychic powers to travel up through the successive heavens seeking the answer to a Dhamma question. Each level of gods is unable to answer him, and refers him upstairs; "Surely the gods in the next higher realm will know!" He continues until he reaches the realm of the Great Brahma who does a routine reminiscent of the Wizard of Oz;

"So the monk approached the Great Brahma and, on arrival, said, 'Friend, where do these four great elements — the earth property, the liquid property, the fire property, and the wind property — cease without remainder?'

"When this was said, the Great Brahma said to the monk, 'I, monk, am Brahma, the Great Brahma, the Conqueror, the Unconquered, the All-Seeing, All-Powerful, the Sovereign Lord, the Maker, Creator, Chief, Appointer and Ruler, Father of All That Have Been and Shall Be.'

On being asked a second and a third time, at last;

"Then the Great Brahma, taking the monk by the arm and leading him off to one side, said to him, 'These gods of the retinue of Brahma believe, "There is nothing that the Great Brahma does not know. There is nothing that the Great Brahma does not see. There is nothing of which the Great Brahma is unaware. There is nothing that the Great Brahma has not realized." That is why I did not say in their presence that I, too, don't know where the four great elements... cease without remainder. So you have acted wrongly, acted incorrectly, in bypassing the Blessed One in search of an answer to this question elsewhere. Go right back to the Blessed One and, on arrival, ask him this question. However he answers it, you should take it to heart.'

Maybe it's just me, but it seems like this passage was intended to be funny.

There are many other examples that could be cited; Moggallana's encounter with Sakka in Majjhima 37, (another one making fun of the gods), or the charlatan Patikuputta in Digha 24 who wants to challenge the Buddha but cannot get up from his seat, ("What is the matter, friend Patikuputta, is your bottom stuck to the seat or is the seat stuck to your bottom?") or so many more.

But my personal favourite, for it's quiet understated humour, is from Majjhima 12, the Greater Discourse of the Lion's Roar. The Buddha is speaking to Sariputta and recounting his early struggle for enlightment. Bear in mind, both are elderly men at this time, roughly the same age'

Now I recall having eaten a single rice grain a day. Sariputta, you may think that the rice grain was bigger at that time, yet you should not regard it so: the rice grain was then at most the same size as now.

I don't know why, it cracks me up.

Or as my teacher Kema Ananda once said, "The universe is a huge joke. If you don't find it funny, that's because you haven't reached the punch-line yet."

Historicity of the Suttas

I'm surprised that my posts about the sutta pitaka stirred up such a hornet's nest! I naively thought that the value of reading the scriptures wouldn't need defending.

I admit to not being fully conversant with all the modern scholarship; my comment about the consistency of the texts across various cultural lines is based on Warder's "Indian Buddhism" and a few other older books. As far as I can see, the point basically stands. And I am aware that the various recensions in Pali were not wholly independent of each other, but that doesn't negate the idea that they are all even more dependent on an ancient core textual tradition.

And I don't really care what Bronkhurst says, I don't find real inconsistencies in the suttas. Now, admittedly that might mean late careful editing, so doesn't in itself argue for their historicity.

Below I've posted some thoughts on history in general, but what I'd like to say here is to ask how we can be sure of anything in the past? Skepticism has it's uses but can be pushed to absurd lengths, follow the link in the post below to the New Chronologists for an example.

As I see the problem it is twofold; what value do we place on Buddhavacana (word of the Buddha) and how do we know if it is real Buddhavacana? I admit to being a bit of a fundamentalist on the first question. If there is any meaning to the concept of Buddhahood, then all is speech is "flawless in the meaning, flawless in the letter." If someone named Siddhattha Gotama really did destroy the asavas and saw absolute naked reality then it follows his words are inherently meaningful and true.

The latter question, alas, is more problematic. There are undoubtedly some late additions to the suttas. These might perhaps to some degree be discovered by linguistic analysis. What I am more uncomfortable with is any attempt to dismiss some passage based on the content. If someone decides a passage about ghosts must be an addition, isn't that based on the materialist-rationalist mind-set of the critic? To be short, how can someone who is not a Buddha judge what a Buddha might say?

As a point of practise, I think it is much more useful spiritually to err on the side of reverence for the text. This is absolute heresy to modern rationalism, but that's exactly why it's good medicine.

History is Bunk

My university training was in history, and one valuable thing I got out of four years of study was a life-long skepticism about historical writing, including the off-the-cuff contemporary history known as journalism.

History is a selective retelling of events based on very imprecise and incomplete sources. Quite a shocking amount is sheer guess-work. Historians quote each other and thereby enshrine certain memes as "facts."

One obvious bias in all the sources is that history is always written by the victors. Our concept of the Punic Wars would be quite different if the Carthaginians had won. Portrayals of the enemy are always skewed. Usually they are demonized, but occassionally they are given the status of tragic noble savages, as in Tacitus' portrayal of the Germans. This is also for political effect, Tacitus was a conservative who wanted to contrast the noble simplicity of the Germans with the hedonistic decadence of the Romans.

History is very often used and abused to serve contemporary political ends. Every time politicians want to drum up support for a war, they are sure to dredge up the hoary example of the Munich conference of 1938. If anyone took the trouble to really read up on 1938 they'd understand that it should serve as an example of the folly of international acceptance of aggression, it should be a pacifist example. (At least that's how I'd spin it)

Popular presentations of history are especially suitable vehicles for propaganda. Two recent movies (confession; I've not seen either) seem to make the case. Both are very inaccurate representations of the past, both have fairly blatant agendas relevant to contemporary issues.

Mel Gibson's Apocalypto is a statement for aggresive and expansionist Christianity (Mel belongs to a fundamentalist sect more Catholic than the pope). It misrepresents Mayan culture (denies it actually) and portrays the Spanish conquest as the coming of light into the heathen darkness. Link.

The movie about Sparta, 300, sounds like a ridiculous caricture. The political agenda of a movie about heroic good-guys fighting for "freedom" against evil swarthy Persians (no less) is too obvious in the current climate to need explaining. But if you must, go here Link. What troubles me is that contemporary Americans identify more easily with the Spartans than the Athenians.

Then there are those cases in which the interpretation of history becomes a hot political issue in it's own right. The Canadian War Museum is under fire from veteran groups for suggesting in their display on strategic bombing that German civilians were killed by Canadian air-men. Heavens, we can't let facts interfere with the myth. Link.

Finally, if you want to see just how shaky the whole edifice really is, consider the new school of maverick historical researchers, mostly Russian, who claim all history before about 1500 really is bunk. They call themselves the New Chronologists and claim, basically, that the Middle Ages never happened. According to them, about a thousand years of pure fiction got tacked in for political purposes during the Renaissance. Wild stuff, to be sure, but how do we really know?
Link

(I think the numismatic evidence refutes them, but it's fun to play with)

Sutta and Abhidhamma

Some discussion has opened up in the comments regarding my post about reading the suttas. It occurred to me that I haven't made the most imortant and salient point; the reason to read the suttas is to hear the most undiluted Dhamma directly from the most qualified source.

Who was the Buddha anyway? If you take a traditional view, as I do, he wasn't just some really smart guy. On the other hand, he wasn't a deity or incarnation of one either. He was an extremely rare historical occurence of a fully awakened human being. By his own effort, he completely purified his psyche and penetrated totally into the Unconditioned. His words are precious, because they are a manifestation into speech directly from the transcendental. In a sense, you could say he was the only fully human person in the last two and a half millenia.

To the traditional Buddhist, the Buddha's words (buddhavacana) are considered flawless. As a Tathagata, all his speech is true, connected with meaning and beneficial. This is quite different from a secular view which might hold that the Buddha taught some things because of cultural conditioning or other mundane causes of error. This is a favourite tack of those who would, for instance, edit rebirth and karma out of the teachings. If the Buddha really was a Buddha, this secular line falls apart. If he could see through the most subtle levels of samsaric delusion, he wouldn't be caught by something as relatively gross as cultural conditioning.

One problem, of course, is to know if we have the real goods. If we accept that the Buddha's Word is inherently flawless, how do we know we have the real Buddha's Word? The answer is that we don't, not completely. On the other hand, scholarship reveals the sutta pitaka of the pali canon as pretty reliable as far as we can ascertain.

We can say this because of both internal and external consistency. The bulk of the suttas agree with the contents of the Chinese agamas, which have a textual tradition going back to the second council or shortly thereafter. The various recensions of the pali, in Sinhalese, Siamese and Burmese editions agree even more. This means the original texts have not been tampered with much since the traditions diverged.

Also the degree of internal consistency of the suttas is very high, much more so than the Bible for instance. We don't find instances of the Buddha saying one thing here and another contradictory thing there.

Finally, the suttas were never subject to the same degree of political manipulation as the biblical texts.

However, we cannot have the same degree of certainty about the abhidhamma. The abhidhammas of various other early schools also survive, in whole or in part, and there is nothing like the degree of agreement as between the various recensions of the sutta material. Instead, they are completely separate. It seems likely to me that the abhidhamma arose somewhat later and served, among other things, as something like a manifesto for each school clearly defining their metaphysical positions and distinguishing themselves from the others.

Nevertheless, abhidhamma can be a rewarding and useful study. It especially complements methodical vipassana meditation, and it is no accident that these are the two branches of Dhamma developed in Burma. The only caveat is that the practioneer must remain careful not to rely on word definitions at the expense of actual phenomenal experience. One of the surest ways to block spiritual progress is to convince yourself that you've already figured it out. Just because you can name something, doesn't mean you know it, even if you can name it in Pali!

Reading Suttas

I've been leading a book study once a week on the Sutta Nipata. This is a challenging and fascinating exercise. So I'll share a few general thoughts about reading suttas and post links to some helpful resources.

Why read the suttas? There are hundreds of Buddhist books out there; good, bad and middling. Many western Buddhists have read dozens of them without cracking the scriptures. This is a shame; you want to get the straight goods, you should go directly to the source. The whole sutta pitaka has now been translated, parts of it several times. If you want to have a firm grasp of what the actual historical Buddha taught, as opposed to all the various re-castings, spins and speculations, why not check out his own words? This is especially important because so many people have put their own words into his mouth over the centuries, as discussed by my post Check Your Sources.

How to Read the Suttas. First remember that they were originally oral literature. So don't be put off by all the repetetions and numbered lists; these were aids to memorization. They definitely have a deeper resonance by being heard rather than read and some people like to read them out loud. Some of the beauty of the language is lost in translation; large portions like most of the Sutta Nipata are actually verse although the translations tend to be in a rather dry prose. Stylistically, the suttas are a very rich and diverse collection. There are straight technical sections, devotional passages, myths and stories all intermixed.

Problems of Translation. Never forget that languages are not completely isomorphic. Even the best translation is not completely true to the original, it cannot be. Even if you go to the effort of learning some Pali, you can't escape the problem entirely (although it helps.) It is however important not to become overly reliant on the bare English words which often translate Pali words inexactly. This is not sloppy translation; it is an insoluble problem because some words in Pali have no exact English equivalent. Pali has a very precise technical language for mental states and spiritual phenomena, something which English lacks. To give the most obvious example, dukkha is not the same as suffering. One of the best ways to get around this limitation, at least in part, is to acquire a working vocabulary of technical terms in Pali and refer back to them when in doubt. A very good resource here is the Buddhist Dictionary by Nyanatiloka. (Link is to an online version).

Some More on Translations. The best translations available at present are by Bhikkhu Bodhi and his teacher Nyanamoli. Maurice Walshe's edition of the Digha Nikaya is also very good. Many texts are still only available in the Pali Text Society editions dating to the early years of the last century. These works are generally very good from a purely linguistic point-of-view, but often lack the background in the actual living tradition which informs Bh. Bodhi and M. Walshe. Readers should also be aware that some of the PTS translators imposed their own ideas onto the work. A well known example is the way Mrs. Rhys-Davis and to a lesser degree I.B. Horner translated the particle atta. They wanted to "prove" that Buddha never actually taught no-self, so whenever this particle occurs, they take it as a substantive noun. A close analogy would be the use of the suffix -self in English words like myself, yourself, oneself, which does not imply a metaphysical entity. See this article, anatta6, for a discussion.

What to Read. If you are new to the suttas, or even if you're not, the best place to start would be with Bhikkhu Bodhi's In the Buddha's Words, which is a collection of suttas and sections of suttas arranged thematically and progressively together with copious explanatory notes. Another good overall collection is Nyanamoli's Life of the Buddha which arranges all the narrative sections of the suttas into a chronological sequence, together with some sections which relate the most important teachings.

When you are ready to go to the original texts in whole collections, the best place to start is usually with the Digha Nikaya, and then go on to the Majjhima. After that, you can proceed as your interest goes; deeper into the philosophy with the Samyutta for instance, or get the flavour of the myths and stories with the Dhammapada commentary or the Jatakas.

Resources and Aids. Many of the suttas are now available online at accesstoinsight.org. These are mostly in Ajahn Thanisarro's translations. These are quite good, but the novice should be aware that the Ajahn's choice of words is often not standard and this can lead to confusion (example: dukkha is translated as stress)

I've already linked to the indispensible Buddhist Dictionary, another amazing web find is the entire Dictionary of Pali Names, in the hard-cover three fat (and expensive) volumes. This is a real treasure trove of information if you like to dip into the stories behind the names.

Not online, alas, but invaluable nonetheless, is a little booklet from the Buddhist Publication Society called An Analysis of the Pali Canon by Russell Webb which provides handy indices to the various suttas.

Long Time No Blog

I just checked the blog and discovered to my embarassment that it's been almost a month since I've written anything here. And I've been deluged by requests to get back to it. (Okay, one guy asked)

Anyway, my only excuse other than sloth-and-torpor is that I've been pretty busy with other projects this last while. I'm leading a sutta study seminar on the Sutta Nipata and the preparation work is taking up a suprising amount of time. And I don't want to go in unprepared because it's a pretty sharp group! I've also just finished the first semi-finished draft of my historical novel about Ajatasattu. And I've been doing more teaching here at Arrow River; plus plowing snow, fixing generators and trying to find time to watch my breath.

So if anyone is still checking in here after that shamefully long gap, I'm not dead yet. Only one month closer.