Wisdom in Exile - Lama Jampa Thaye

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Of course, such an approach will leave intact the fundamental causes of suffering: causes which reside in the human heart itself.

      When one adds to these flaws of scientism and political ideology the danger to the human capacity for stillness, reflection and wise judgement that is signalled by the proliferation of electronic media to satisfy our immediate desires, one can easily understand why it is that our culture can appear to be spiritually bankrupt. Although it has made some advances, in many ways it has only added to the sum total of unhappiness and alienation. So, what is to be done?

      The first step is to admit that the solution to this crisis in modern culture is not to imagine that we can turn back the clock and all will be well. In other words, a voluntary return to theism (the belief in a creator god), in order to recover the lost unity of the sacred and secular, is not possible for most people. Freedom of thought has already exposed much that seems incoherent in theistic belief. In addition, a great deal of religious practice in the West has been fatally damaged. The very facts that popular devotion is increasingly moribund outside of certain redoubts, or that once-great monastic orders face continual shrinkage, only confirm that sombre analysis. Thus, with all due apologies to the great T.S. Eliot, who decided that salvation for the individual and the culture could only be found in the embrace of Christian tradition, there is little reason to look for aid there.

      It is this fact, then, that creates a space in our culture for Buddhism, a system which, unlike its spiritual rivals, can create confidence by its very accessibility to reasoning – an accessibility made possible by its sophisticated traditions of logical enquiry and philosophical analysis. It was Buddha himself who set the tone for this in his well-known dictum that his teaching was not to be accepted through blind faith. Instead he insisted that, just as a merchant first tests the weight and purity of gold before purchasing it, so one should assess the veracity of his teachings for oneself before giving assent to them.

      In the centuries after the Buddha, this emphasis upon the role of reason gave rise to an astonishingly rich body of philosophical work, which is so far little-known in the West. Perhaps the most significant of the great thinkers within the tradition were the Indian masters Dharmakirti and Nagarjuna. The former, through his work on the system of Valid Cognition, established a clear defence of Buddhist doctrines of perception, rebirth and causality, while Nagarjuna, in his Middle Way works, primarily concerned himself with elucidation of the Buddha’s teaching on ultimate truth. We will be drawing upon their work at various points in this book.

      What is more, unlike systems of mere theory, Buddhism offers a system of contemplative methods through which the essential truth to which it points can be experienced directly. Thus, within the Buddhist tradition, it is not considered sufficient merely to possess the correct theory of the world, since, unless one’s actual way of relating to that world is changed, the causes of suffering will still be emotionally operative within us. In other words, the truth about reality must be cultivated or ‘brought into being’ through ‘meditation’. Thus the role of meditation is to cultivate an attention to truth so that it may be experienced at first hand. In so doing, one is, of course, following the example of the Buddha himself, for whom the truth was liberating exactly because he knew it experientially, thus ‘awakening’ from his bewitchment by erroneous views.

      Unlike theism, which commences from an appeal to faith in the authority of revelation, Buddhism asks us to start with a dispassionate examination of our experience, actions and motivations. Of course, for such analysis to be effective, systematic attentiveness is required, which therefore requires us to practise meditation, so that we do not flounder in a mere piling up of ideas about the world rather than unmasking and liberating ourselves from our projections.

      Through such attentiveness, founded on the twin contemplative methods of ‘calm-abiding’ and ‘insight’, we will be able to scrape away the encrusted fantasies and misconstructions that characterise our present way of relating to the world. Thus, to engage in Buddhist spiritual practice is not a matter of an uncritical acceptance of particular notions about the world but of utilising the guidance left behind by the Buddha in order that we might awaken to the true nature of that world. We will have more to say about this in later chapters.

      All other philosophical opinions are characterised by Buddhism as either ‘eternalist’ or ‘annihilationist’. Although these are technical terms drawn from Buddhism, they represent a very useful way of categorising the core beliefs of all non-Buddhist thinkers. In this respect, then, ‘eternalist’ systems are those philosophies or religions which propose that there are entities which possess permanence. One form of such an opinion would be the belief in a creator god and the immortal souls created by him, as maintained in Christianity, Judaism, Islam and some forms of Hinduism. Another version would be the postulation of a permanent self that dwells within all beings, which is, at the same time, fully identical with the supreme reality itself, as is argued in the Hindu Advaita system. Obviously, however, it was ‘eternalist’ theories in a Christian form that provided the dominant intellectual assumptions of the West until recent times.

      Those opinions that one might label ‘annihilationist’ are all those theories that argue, by contrast with the ‘eternalists’, that there can be no past or future lives, because there is no reality to the mind, it being nothing more than physical processes. Thus, according to those theories, at death the body merely returns to the elements and that is the end of life. Such notions were maintained by the Lokayata school10 over two millennia ago in India and by certain schools of thought in Ancient Greece, and they are held nowadays by the proponents of philosophical materialism whose rise we have briefly surveyed.

      Buddhism, for its part, sees both of these types of systems as deviating from a correct perception of the world. Whereas the ‘eternalists’ distort the continuity and inter-connectedness that are evident in all processes in to a notion of permanence, the ‘annihilationists’ distort the change and development that are also evident in all processes in to a denial of continuity. The teachings of the Buddha offer a ‘Middle Way’ that transcends these extremes.

      In this respect, as we have mentioned above, the profound nature of Buddha’s thought is most fully understood by utilising the insights of the great thinkers such as Nagarjuna, whose Middle Way view dispensed with any belief in permanent entities, while preserving the continuity between actions and results, which continuity is, of course, merely another name for karma.

      To be specific, in the Middle Way view, all phenomena are empty of any inherent existence – selfhood, if you like – precisely because they arise through dependence, whether it be dependence upon an assembly of causes and conditions, dependence upon their own constituent parts or dependence upon merely being designated as existent by an observing mind. Thus, emptiness and dependence are the same reality seen from two different sides. The world and the beings within it are not static entities and thus there is both change and continuity interwoven as the very fabric of everything that appears.

      What all this means is that Buddhism offers a way out of the chaos that has descended upon Western thought in four particular areas.

      First, where the retreat from ideas of God and the soul has fatally undermined the rationale for moral action, since it has dissolved the notion both of a divine authority who will administer reward or punishment, as well as any entity who might receive such, Buddhism provides a sure foundation for it. In other words, while it is non-theistic, Buddhism retains a moral seriousness, since it does not need to invent imaginary static entities, whether souls or gods, to argue for the consequences of actions – consequences which often stretch beyond this very life to ripen at a later moment in the stream of being of which our present human existence is just a temporary manifestation.

      Secondly, although Christianity had offered, at least in its more contemplative forms – such as Hesychasm11 or that of the Rhineland mystics12 – a species of religious experience, but one tethered to a theism, just as Judaism had done in such systems as the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria (1534–1572),13 such systems are vulnerable to attack by reasoning, due to their essential theism. Buddhism, by contrast, offers its repertoire of contemplative practices in a non-theistic setting. It is this that renders it an approach to spiritual experience particularly suitable for our somewhat sceptical modern temper.

      Thirdly,

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