Nirvana and Self

One of the most intense controversies in the Thai Buddhist scene is the debate over the nature of nirvana (or ‘nibbana’ in Pali). Basically the debate is over whether nirvana is ‘atta’ (self) or ‘anatta’ (non-self). In plain English it is whether nirvana has the characteristic of the self (namely substantively enduring and permanent) or the opposite. In Thailand the mainstream establishment Sangha has declared that nirvana is ‘anatta’. That is, they claim that nirvana does not have the characteristic of being permanent and substantive. This issue requires at least some unpacking and explanation.

The argument of the mainstream position against its opponent is that the opponent argues that nirvana is some kind of a substantive entity, a ‘place’ where those who have achieved it can enter and dwell there. In short they endure in some substantial form. However, the argument of the mainstream Sangha is that this distorts the teaching of the Buddha. The Buddha does not teach that nirvana is some kind of place like a heaven, because everything is subject to birth, enduring and decay. If nirvana is a place, then it is a thing, and hence it is subject to arising and ceasing. But that contradicts the very definition of nirvana.

Listening to these debates I am reminded of Nagarjuna and his teaching on Emptiness. Somewhere in the Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way (I don’t have happen to have the text with me) Nagarjuna says that nirvana is neither there nor not there, and it is also not the case that it is both there and not there, nor neither there and not there. This is the famous catuskoti argument (or tetralemma) which finds its original mention from the Buddha himself. The idea of the catuskoti is to wean one of the bewitchment of language. Those who are still mired in samsara are so because they believe, mistakenly, that language defines reality. Reality is whatever told them by language. Since ultimate reality is free from all conceptual fabrications, then this ultimate reality cannot be described in words. Hence nirvana is neither there nor not there, neither there and not there, neither not there nor not not-there. That is, since these four corners of the tetralemma exhaust every possibility of language use to form a proposition making a thought, understanding what nirvana really is does not involve language in this way. Rather it involves understanding *through* language that language is only fabrication.

Hence this underlies the debate between the reificationist (those who say that nirvana is substantial) and the annihilationist (those who argue that nirvana is “non-self”). It seems that both sides still are being bewitched by language. As language has this tendency to foist binary thinking (there or not-there), then this is the fundamental conceptual fabrication that the Buddha taught us to get rid of. In one way, nirvana cannot be spoken of at all, but another way nirvana can be spoken of as it is not separable from ordinary beings and ordinary objects in any way (See my earlier post on “Nirvana and Samsara”). If you don’t understand this, go from the computer and do something else for a few days and come back here again. But if you still don’t, just forget it

Filed under: meditation , Buddhism, emptiness, Nagarjuna, nibbana, Nirvana, non-self, philosophy, self, tetralemma

Word Image

I found out this website Wordle where you can input text and watch the Java program generate an image consisting of words in the text. Very nifty. Here is a portion of the image generated by the text in this very blog:

What is surprising is that the word ‘time’ gets a very large share. I did not know I wrote the word so many times. But perhaps the logic of the program works differently. Now here is the big picture (I have to compress it for this blog, but you can click on it to look at it in full size):

Filed under: Uncategorized , blog, images, text images, wordle, wordpress

Buddhism and Music

I have been listening to this beautiful YouTube video of Elizabeth Parcell’s singing of Mozart’s “Exsultate, Jubilate” and think that I should be saying something about Buddhism and music. But first let us listen to the first part of the video:

Very beautiful, isn’t it? The music does not end with this part, and I will post the second and final part toward the end of this present post. The theme of the music, of course, is Christian. If I am not mistaken, “Exsultate, Jubilate” are words that exhort people to praise Jesus, and the music ends with a rousing “Alleluia” or “Hallelujah.” (You will find this in Part 2 of the video.) Very Christian indeed.

So what does this have to do with Buddhism. I have thought for a long time, in fact since I was very young, why Buddhism does not have such beautiful music praising its founder as Christianity does with their founder. I went to a Christian school in early primary years, and they usually took me to a church where they sang hymns that contained praises to Jesus and things like that. I went with the flow, even though I was Buddhist as were most Thai students there, but I could not help thinking why there is no such beautiful music in Buddhism. All that we had was monks chanting, but monks in Thailand do not play musical instruments, nor do they sing melodies, and the chant had no harmonization at all. I was told, moreover, that music was a kind of “defilement,” something to be avoided. Music is something that leads you to become attached to sensuality and pleasure, leading you away from the true goal.

But then I began to wonder whether music is really as “defiled” as I was told. If music was really defiled, then the Mozart above would be so, but I find it very hard to bring myself to see that. In fact I remember the story behind the “Exsultate” according to which Mozart was commissioned by the Archbishop of Salzburg to write a piece of Church music for liturgical purpose, and Mozart came up with this classic masterpiece. The story had it that the Archbishop was not amused at all by this masterpiece, which he thought to be too “sensual” (well, I can see that too ).  Anyway, the point seemed to be that Mozart was a rebellious soul, and his “Exsultate” could be interpreted as a statement against the Archbishop and his conservative attitude. Perhaps art took precedence over piety. In fact I think historians of music would say that the “Exsultate” did not have any religious sentiment at all; in fact it is a piece of secular music masquerading as a religious one. In today’s secular West, the piece is performed not in a church but in a concert hall, where people applaud loudly, which they don’t do at all in church.

However, I believe that the music is very deeply spiritual and listening to it I can’t help but think of the devotion that Mozart must have felt toward God, but being the artist that he was, this was how he showed the devotion. If the singer has to sing like an opera diva praising God, then she sings that, even though it may arouse feelings that typically one does not associate with religious piety. But I think one has to look beyond that. The real significance of the music is that, precisely because of the very beautiful coloraturas and harmonization, Mozart shows that art can arouse deeply religious feeling, and one who thinks that religious music has to be dull and lifeless may have to revise what they think.

This pertains directly to Buddhism and music. My point is that it is not necessary that beautiful music such as this has to arouse attitudes or sentiments that run contrary to the goals of either Buddhism or Christianity. Of course the “Exsultate” is very sensual; that is the point. But one be sensual while being deeply religious. If you are not convinced try reflect on the meaning of the Latin lyric, but if you do not know Latin (which I don’t by the way), at least you should know “Alleluia” if you are a Christian. Let the beauty of the music come to you without any judgement (like the Archbishop did). Let is seep into you, soaking you with the sheer rhythm, melody and harmony, and blend them with the meaning of the lyrics. The two cannot be considered in separation of each other, and I think this is where the mistake of those who think this is essentially a secular music lies.

Now what if this kind of beautiful music be set to words that praise Buddha instead? What if there is a full expression of joy and delight that the Buddha comes to the world and teaches us the way out of suffering and samsara? Wouldn’t that be appropriate to “Exsultate, Jubilate” too?

I end with Part Two of Elizabeth Parcell’s singing of Mozart:

Filed under: Happiness , art, beauty, Buddhism, Christianity, Exsultate, Jubilate, life, Mozart, music, pleasure

Time is empty.

One point that attracted quite a lot of attention during the class on Nagarjuna last weekend was about time. Basically what Nagarjuna is saying is that time itself is empty. What this means is not that time itself has no content of its own, nor that time is in the Newtonian sense of being a steady flow moving ever forward, but that time itself is empty of any inherent characteristic. The flow that one imagines in conceptualizing time is nothing but our own imputation on reality. In this sense time is not different from other results of conceptual imputation, such as individual things and so on.

This points to a startling conclution that time, considered on its own, or “from its own side” as the Tibetans are wont to saying, is nothing. Ultimately speaking there is no such thing as time in reality. As individual objects have already been found to be empty of their inherent characteristics, so is time. Nagarjuna’s argument here is quite similar to that advanced by Leibniz in his characterization of time and space as being relational and dependent on things and events. For Leibniz time and space do not exist on their own, and here is one of the main differences between him and Newton. If time could be thought of as inherent existing, for example, as a “place” wherein events take place in such a way that one event can be classified as being earlier or later, then there must already be some coordinates by which these events could be so classified, for how else can we know which one is earlier or later? But if that is the case, then time itself must already have within it some means to measure the positions of the events. This, however, contradicts Newton’s own assumption that time is shorn of any marks and is nothing more than something that flows absolutely.

This also seems to be Nagarjuna’s point. Time, as does everything else that is conceptually constructed, depends for its very being on other things. Without the things that compose events, time is nothing at all, not, of course, in the Newtonian sense of time having nothing in it, but time itself is nothing. We have time because we do have things in it, and we have things in it (and space) because we already have the concept of time. Time, space and things and events are totally inseparable from one another.

If time is empty in this sense, then it does make sense ultimately to hold that there is the past, the present and the future. For all these are but relations within time. Moreover, the past, present and future derive their being from the relation to the consciousness of an individual. We feel that the time “right now” is the present because this is what we feel, this is what we are consciousness of at the moment, and of course we feel taht this “now” is forever moving. This is only a fact of our consciousness. Since all of us are moving inexorably toward that end, we have the sense of time as something ever moving onward and something that absolutely cannot be recalled or repeated. Once time is lost, it is lost forever.

However, a startling thing from the teaching of the Buddha is that that feeling that we all have is but an illusion. The relation between past, present and future holds only if there is a reference point, a point at which the present can be determined. If the present couldn’t be determined, then both the past and the future would make no sense. The present can only be determined with reference to the self, or the thinking consciousness. One feels that the present is nothing but one’s own present. But if we were to take a more general position and detach ourselves from our own individual mental continuum and our body, then the present does not have to be what we ordinarily take to be here and now, but could in fact be anywhere, that is, any time.

Perhaps this is what is meant when it is said that Buddhas and highly attained Bodhisattvas are above time. They are timeless, and once it is totally, fully absorbed in the mind of a being like you and me that time itself is empty in this sense, then it is possible that we can be timeless too.

Filed under: meditation , Bodhisattvas, Buddha, Buddhism, emptiness, Leibniz, metaphysics, Nagarjuna, Newton, philosophy, physics, space, time

Class on Nagarjuna

The class on Nagarjuna’s Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā) that I taught today and yesterday is now finished. There were seven students in the course; not much, but enough for intensive questions, answers and discussions. We worked together to understand the deep meanings behind the dense text of the Fundamental Wisdom, and I think we succeeded quite well in doing so.

The teaching was based on the text of Fundamental Wisdom that I translated into Thai. We were all exhausted in the end because we spent the whole day from 9 am to 4:30 pm both Saturday and Sunday reading almost all the chapters of the book. There are twenty-seven chapters in the Mula, so it was quite a feat covering almost all of them. We read all the verses in the chapters that we read closely, which were about twenty-five, and in the chapters that we skipped I tried to give a summary of the conclusion and the main argument.

We began by praying to Manjushri, the Bodhisattva of wisdom, to invoke his blessings so that we succeed in understanding the text. Then we began with the Dedicatory Verse, which according to the Garfield translation is as follows:

I prostrate to the Perfect Buddha
The best of teachers, who taught that
Whatever is dependently arisen is
Unceasing, unborn,
Unannihilated, not permanent,
Not coming, not going,
Without distinction, without identity,
And free from conceptual construction.

This verse kind of summarizes the main point that Nagarjuna would like to make. Things are unceasing, unborn, unannihilated, unmade, not coming, not going, and so on. Understanding this thoroughly amounts to understanding the whole text. Whatever is dependently arisen is of the nature of being ‘empty’ or śūnya in Sanskrit. As such, it is free from any kind of imputation as to its essential or substantive characteristic, either being made or born, being unborn, being permanent, being impermanent, and so on. This is an outstanding feature of the Madhyamika philosophy. It uses logic, but in the sense it apparently violates any possible laws of logic. The idea is to force us to come face to face to the real nature of things itself — the nature that is completely free from any conceptual construction and imputation.

We were all exhaused at the end of the day, but after the course was completed around 4:30 pm I think everybody came back with a better and deeper understanding of the Madhyamika teaching. What I emphasized during the course was that the distinctions between the different schools of Buddhism was not as great as some might think. For example, the two main schools of Mahayana Buddhism are the Madhyamika and the Yogācāra. The latter is known for its teaching of “Mind Only,” that is that everything that appears is ultimately speaking a projection of the mind itself. There appears to be a clear difference from that of the Madhyamika. However, when we examine closely, we find that the ultimate reality spoken of by the Madhyamika — emptiness or ordinary things themselves considered as free from any conceptual imputation — is not too different from the basic projection of the mind position of the Yogācāra. In both cases the idea is that reality as ordinarily conceived, as things with their own seemingly permanent nature and substantive identity, is not tenable. The difference seems to be only on how this basic reality itself — we might call this ‘things as they are as such’ or ’suchness’ or ‘dependent origination’ — is called.

I think this is a very promising start, and it marks another occasion where a serious attempt to understand Madhyamika philosophy is made. Another thing I said during the course was that Nagarjuna’s teaching was not in any way any addition or deviation from the Buddha’s original teaching and had nothing that the Theravadin could not accept, if understood properly.

Filed under: Buddhism , Buddhism, dependent origination, epistemology, logic, Madhyamika, Mahayana, Manjushri, Nagarjuna, philosophy, reality, teaching, Theravada, Yogacara

Ten Wholesome and Ten Unwholesome Actions

I am now translating Deshung Rinpoche’s oral commentary — The Three Levels of Spiritual Perception, which is published by Wisdom Books into Thai. The process has taken quite a long time because I am so busy with other commitments, so I can spend only a few minutes each day for the task. Nonetheless I plan to do it everyday (as far as possible) so that the completion is not too distant in the far future. This is my usual working plan — when you do a big task, try to pare it down into manageable chunks and do it one by one. Sooner or later the big task will be completed.

This is what I have been doing. The book is a long one, more than 500 pages, consisting of more than fifty chapters. I have now completed around 25 chapters. So this is almost half way, so at this rate the whole book should be finished not many months from now.

What I would like to write about here is Deshung Rnpoche’s teaching on the ten wholesome and unwholesome actions. This is a very important set of teachings by Lord Buddha which many in Thailand do not seem to pay much attention to. In Sanskrit it is kusalakarmapatha (minus the diacritical marks), or the path of wholesome action. This consists of ten items that those who practice the Dharma need to do in order to achieve the goal of Enlightenment.

For those who did not this already, here are the ten unwholesome actions (the wholesome ones are just opposites of these):

1. Killing
2. Stealing
3. Committing Sexual Misconduct
4. False Speech
5. Divisive Speech
6. Harsh Speech
7. Idle Speech
8. Covetousness or Envy
9. Ill Will
10. Wrong View

The ten unwholesome and wholesome actions are often taught in the context of karma. That is, those who vow to achieve Buddhahood in order to be able to help furry sentient beings across need to perform all the wholesome actions and avoid the unwholesome ones. This is absolutely necessary. Also, Theravadins also need to do the same, for without the wholesome karmas incurred by performing these wholesome actions, achieving nirvana is absolutely impossible.

Deshung Rinpoche taught that the results of performing the unwholesome actions are of three kinds, namely the fully ripened result, the result that is similar to its causes, and the prevailing, or dominant result. The first one is easy to understand. Doing the unwholesome actions can be a contributing cause to being reborn in one of the lower realms, i.e., as a tenant in hell, as a hungry ghost, or a non-human animal. The second type of result is quite interesting. By committing the unwholesome actions, one is likely to experience the same type of action over and over again. Suppose you steal something from somebody, a result of your action will be that the likeliness will increase that you will be in an environment that is conducive to your performing the same type of unwholesome action again, such as an environment where you will be encouraged to steal. Furthermore, you will also experience the inclination to perform the same type of action again. Suppose you stole something rather frequently in your past lives, chances are that in this life you will find yourself in a situation that makes it likely that you will steal again. This will only perpetuate the unwholesome karmic pattern, so that it will become more and more difficult for you to get out of this.

The third type of result is rather scary. By committing the unwholesome actions, you will find yourself in a situation where the physical environment itself is a cause of suffering. By committing the unwholesome acts, it is likely that you will be reborn in a desolate place where there is little food or drink, where the land is very harsh, and so on.

To underscore the importance of performing the wholesome actions and its role in achieving Liberation, Deshung Rinpoche has the following to say:

If the practice of these ten wholesome deeds is conjoined with the special Mahayana practices of bodhicitta (the bodhisattva’s vow to win enlightenment for the benefit of all beings), it will become not only a cause of higher rebirth but a cause of attaining perfect enlightenment as well. Similarly, if the practice of these virtuous deeds is conjoined with meditation on emptiness, which sees the true nature of phenomena, so that you perform such deeds with insight into the empty nature of everything, then you will accumulate transcendent merit, which becomes a cause not merely of rebirth in the higher realms but of buddhahoold itself.

This shows clearly that the ten wholesome/unwholesome deeds are very important indeed, and as such they function as a necessary stepping stone toward Nirvana and Enlightenment, as eventual Buddhahood. Deshung Rinpoche also recommends that you dedicate the merit obtained through performing the ten wholesome deeds to the enlightenment of all sentient beings. This will much expedite the journey.

Filed under: Mahayana , bodhicitta, Buddhism, Deshung Rinpoche, karma, ten unwholesome actions, ten wholesome actions, Tibetan Buddhism, virtuous deeds