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Here we present a review of a recent book about the life of the disgraced Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Sogyal Rimpoche. 

Sex and Violence in Tibetan Buddhism: The Rise and Fall of Sogyal Rimpoche

by Mary Finnigan and Rob Hogendoorn. Portland, Oregon: Jorvik Press, 2019, pback, 191pp., £15.95

review by Dhivan

The headline comes from an address by the Dalai Lama, given in Ladakh in August 2017, after eight former students of Sogyal Rimpoche wrote an open letter to their teacher, regarding his physical and sexual abuse of students as well as his indulgent lifestyle. Although accusations of abuse against him went back to 1990, this letter was the beginning of the end for a Tibetan teacher who had headed Rigpa, a large and successful international Buddhist movement. For the Dalai Lama to publicly acknowledge that Sogyal Rimpoche was disgraced was significant, in that Tibetan teachers generally do not comment on such matters. Sogyal stepped back from involvement in the movement he had founded, and died of cancer in Thailand in 2019. The future of Rigpa is now in doubt, with members of Sogyal’s inner circle, who have been found to be complicit in his abuse, apparently still involved.

This is a brief summary of the conclusion to Sogyal Rimpoche’s career. It is well known in the Buddhist world, but described in step by step detail in the second half of this new book by Mary Finnigan and Rob Hogendoorn. The first half gives an account of Sogyal Rimpoche’s origins and early life in Tibet and India, researched by Rob Hogendoorn, and the first days of Sogyal’s teaching career in the west, written by Mary Finnigan, who was at first an eager young disciple. What Finnigan and Hogendoorn wish to convey is that Sogyal Rimpoche was not a reincarnate lama (a tulku) and had never been a monk. Instead, he was merely a nephew of the Tibetan reincarnate lama, Jamyang Khyentse Chokyi Lodro (who himself comes across in the book as an unpleasantly irascible figure), with whom he travelled from Tibet to India in the early 1950s. Sogyal went to a Roman Catholic school in Kalimpong, and had little Buddhist education. How Sogyal went on to become such a successful guru appeared to be down to his charisma.

Finnigan met Sogyal Rimpoche in 1973. He was living in Cambridge, UK, aged 26, having arrived from India and she was one of a group of hippies intent on enlightenment, enchanted by the exoticism of eastern wisdom and Asian teachers. Three years later she had become disillusioned with Sogyal, and returned to the journalism she had left for Buddhism. ‘By the late 80s,’ she writes, ‘I knew beyond a scintilla of doubt that he was a charlatan’ (p.184), and she devoted her energies to revealing him as a fraud. Rob Hogendoorn is a Dutch Buddhist who teamed up with Finnigan to highlight sexual abuse by Buddhist teachers. His factual research complements Finnigan’s more subjective and personal style of investigative journalism. 

The resulting book not only provides the background story for understanding Sogyal Rimpoche’s final disgrace, but also sets out the long and sordid history of his misbehaviour for the reader to reflect upon. Sogyal’s abuses involved apparently consenting adult followers, but occurred in the midst of a system of power relations and collusion, and within a specifically Buddhist belief system. All this somehow made it possible for Sogyal Rimpoche to behave in ways that otherwise seem disgusting, manipulative and ridiculous. Finnigan writes of Sogyal passing mouthfuls of half-chewed food to his disciples as “blessings”, and how some of them purchased his used underwear for their devotions (p.135). He was recorded as explaining his physical abuse to a disciple: “The harder I hit you, the closer the connection.” He maintained a harem of young women with whom he could have sex when he wished. Finnigan and Hogendoorn usefully document how, after July 2017, certain Tibetan teachers attempted to defend Sogyal, apparently arguing that the samaya or ‘commitment’ linking disciples in Vajrayana Buddhism with their guru made abuse somehow not abuse. A reader can place this kind of denial alongside parallels in the world of sexual abuse and cover-up among Christian clergy. There is a pattern, connected with men in positions of trust.

But Finnigan’s journalistic approach sometimes makes for problems. As part of her attempt to reveal Sogyal as a charlatan, she recounts how her boyfriend at that time, John Driver, a Buddhist scholar-practitioner and expert in Tibetan, had in the 1970s witnessed Sogyal’s poor attempts to translate the teachings of Dudjom Rimpoche into English. Driver realised that Sogyal had little understanding of the Dzogchen teachings he was trying to pass on. However, in introducing the character of Driver, Finnigan includes a brief aside on how he had met Sangharakshita, founder of the FWBO (now Triratna Buddhist Order and movement) in India in the 1950s. She writes, ‘Lingwood [i.e. Sangharakshita]… had ulterior motives for [his] time in the Tibetan borderlands [i.e. in Kalimpong]. [Being] gay, [he] had heard that young monks trained as passive sex partners in Tibetan monasteries were turning up in Darjeeling and Kalimpong’ (p.57). Finnigan does not offer any evidence for her assertion that Sangharakshita was in Kalimpong to have sex with Tibetan boys. Presumably, her source of information was John Driver. Sangharakshita’s problematic sex life has been minutely scrutinised in recent years, but I am not aware of any evidence that would support Finnigan’s allegation. Sangharakshita describes his motive for being in Kalimpong as being to work for the good of Buddhism, having been asked to do so by his teacher, Ven Jagdish Kashyap. 

If Mary Finnigan can attribute base motives to Sangharakshita, without evidence, it is possible that not all the details of her exposé of Sogyal Rimpoche are entirely truthful. This diminishes the value of this book, compared, for instance, to Michael Downing’s Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center, an investigation of Roshi Richard Baker which consciously strives for a presentation that tries to make sense of what happened. Finnigan and Hogendoorn’s work on exposing Sogyal Rimpoche is essential reading for those concerned about spiritual abuse. But beyond the journalistic exposé, which is part of the drive for truth and justice, there remains a need to try to understand more deeply what is going on when people put their trust in Buddhist teachers, and that trust is returned with physical violence and sexual abuse. This understanding could help inform the development of spiritual communities in which the evident risks involved with placing trust in men in positions of power can be mitigated, and everyone’s well-being valued.

Dhivan is a member of the Triratna Buddhist Order, and editor of the Western Buddhist Review

Readers who are concerned about man-made climate change and the possibility of a Buddhist response to it may be interested in Bhikkhu Anālayo's new book, Mindfully Facing Climate Change, available in paperback or free pdf format. Many of you will already have heard of Anālayo, through his several books on satipaṭṭhāna and Buddhist meditation. He now turns his attention to how a Buddhist practitioner can mindfully turn towards the sometimes overwhelming issue of climate change. He is also offering a free online lecture series on the theme, beginning on 6 January 2020. 

I am personally intensely grateful to Anālayo for his clear and direct response to the climate emergency, avoiding apocalyptic alarmism, but facing up to the dangers fully.  

This is a guest post by Vishvapani, re-published here from an early issue of The Western Buddhist Review. 


***


The Western Canon
By Harold Bloom
Macmillan, London 1994, pp. 567

1. Introduction: contemporary criticism's questions and answers
What should be our central question in approaching literature? The celebrated American literary critic Harold Bloom proposes one: What is literature for? This question may sound obvious, but it is not one with which twentieth century criticism has been much concerned. Mostly critics have been content with asking: What is literature? British criticism has usually been literary history - explications of texts and of the relationships between them. In America formalist approaches starting with New Criticism have been concerned with analysing underlying literary structures. This made America open to the successive waves of continental critical theory which have culminated in Deconstruction, the reductio ad absurdum of formalism, which holds that literature, being incapable of referring to anything outside itself, is not for anything.

    Faced with the ascendancy of such pale-blooded approaches, Bloom has pursued a different path. What he means by his question is: What is literature for, personally and subjectively for me, an individual reader? Following Emerson, Nietzsche and Freud, he suggests that this becomes: What need does this writing fulfil in me? And, especially if the reader is also a writer, it becomes: How may I master it? Bloom describes an intense, embattled, but deeply engaged relationship between the present and the literary past, which forces any later writer to ask: How may I enter the field of poetry, when it is so dominated by Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton - the towering figures of the tradition? And: How may I find the creative space for fresh utterance? From this struggle arise the strongest literary works and their strong relationships which together we refer to as 'the canon of western literature' or 'The Western Canon’.

    In recent years, however, a new and increasingly dominant generation of academics in America (and to a lesser though growing extent in Britain), under the pressure of cultural changes and political ideology, have addressed Bloom's question and come up with a very different answer. What is literature for? they ask. Not for individual edification. A historicist approach, following Foucault, shows that literature has always served political power and that the canon has been constructed for similar ends. So let the canon be deconstructed to reveal this power structure, and let literary value be redefined to serve social goals. This almost invariably means the goals of feminism and multiculturalism. The selection of canonical texts, we are told, has expressed the interests of the dominant class to the exclusion of women, homosexuals and non-Europeans, particularly black people. Like the original Biblical canon, which is 'closed' in that it comprises only those books officially accepted as Holy Scripture, the literary canon has been closed to all but dead, white phallocentrists, and must be forced open. Bloom lumps together the various critical schools which derive from this approach (Marxist, Feminist, Deconstructive, Structuralist, Lacanian and New Historicist) as 'the School of Resentment'. The profession, he informs us, is now crowded by 'professors of hip-hop; by clones of Gallic-Germanic theory; by ideologues of gender and various sexual persuasions; by multi-culturalists unlimited'. [1] One way of opening the canon has been to bring forward numerous forgotten authors, usually women, for canonical inclusion. But this is really playing patriarchy at its own game and such nominees have tended to founder on the rocks of their implacable mediocrity. A more persuasive stance has been to reject the idea of a canon per se as ineluctably elitist. Let us see, cry the burgeoning New Historicists, that texts are the product of social energies in the cultures that produce them! (And please note that societies create while writers merely 'inscribe', the individual being a bourgeois construct and genius being a reactionary illusion). Let us open the canon to all, cry feminists and multi-culturalists, and walk as noble innocents in the wide pastures of de-centred plenitude!

    As with the broader manifestations of 'political correctness', the literary critical version has created a right-wing backlash and so the debate has polarised. For the right, canonical deconstructors are a moral threat - educated Visigoths, Philistines pulling down the pillars of their own temple. So we have seen an angry debate between left and right, between two ideas of what society should be. Both sides agree that art has a moral function in society and that values in art set values in society, but they differ in the values that they uphold. When such bandwagons are rolling, it is quite natural for those with an interest in the arts to feel an impulsion to take sides, from either love of one party or aversion to another. It takes an exceptional individual to remind us of the irrelevance of both positions to the matter of initial concern, which is engagement with the works of the canon themselves. We are fortunate indeed to have such an individual still among us in Harold Bloom, and to have him remind us in so eloquent, learned and wise a book as The Western Canon. It is an affirmation of imaginative literature against all the reductionists of left and right who try to enlist or define it for partisan ends.

    Bloom seems to me to be an exemplary guide for Buddhists who are interested in exploring Western culture. We may do this in order to seek inspiration in works closer to home than those we encounter in the Buddhist tradition; we may do it to understand ourselves more fully by understanding our cultural inheritance, or to seek points of contact with the Dharma in Western culture. In each case Bloom is an excellent guide because, while being intensely intellectual, he is also a most intuitive critic whose primary response to literature is to the spiritual force of the writer. He has not merely read virtually the whole of Western Literature, he has experienced it and brooded deeply on his experience. Harold Bloom is not a polemicist; his method is simply to open a door on his own engagement with the literary tradition. In this he is emphatically not to be confused with his namesake, the right-wing social philosopher Allan Bloom, whose Closing of the American Mind took up cudgels against academic relativism a few years ago. The Western Canon is a very different book. Current academic debates are the context from which Harold Bloom's work has arisen, but it triumphantly transcends them.

2. Harold Bloom and his approach
As Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale, Bloom has reached the top of his profession and his true stature is perhaps beginning to be recognised. He has published more than any other American critic, and so vast is his reading, so extraordinary his powers of recall, so lively and acute his intelligence, that in some ways it is surprising that he has not become a more dominant figure. But Bloom is also a highly individual critic, sometimes eccentric and often arcane; for example, he sometimes draws heavily on sources such as Kaballah and Gnosticism for his ideas. For thirty years he has been an important but unclassifiable figure standing above the academic fray. The best commentary on this aspect of Bloom's approach is that of Blake, who has Los declare that he must create his own system or else be enslaved by another man's. [2] Bloom wanted to find ways of thinking his own thoughts free from the neo-classical diction of the academy, and to find ways of thinking which made reading poetry a frankly spiritual activity. He comes closest to defining his aims as a writer and teacher in the earlier book Agon, where he describes his hero Emerson as 'an interior orator and not an instructor; a vitalizer and not a historian'. I take this to mean that Emerson was interested primarily in speaking to himself and enabling others to do the same. Consequently Bloom is more likely to appeal to poets than to academics; his best known protégéé is the equally uncategorisable Camille Paglia who herself describes him as 'a visionary rabbi'. I think that Bloom has read more deeply in Western Literature, with more love and generosity than any other living reader I know, and he seems unassailably our best critic.

    The Western Canon will make Bloom's thought accessible to a much wider audience. It centres on a series of essays on the writers whom Bloom takes to be at the heart of the Canon. Most of those that one would expect to see - Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens and Tolstoy – are there, but there are some surprises, such as Borges, Neruda and the Portugese poet Pessoa among the moderns. But there is little point in quibbling about who's in and who's out; Bloom happily admits that many others might equally have been included. The overall intention is to take a look at the central figures of our tradition with the aim of clarifying what it means for a writer to be central. Thus, The Western Canon can be read on one level as an excellent introduction to Western literature, constantly filling one with a desire to read and reread the works it discusses. But it is also far more than a 'guide to the greats': it is a master-class in imaginative engagement with literature. As such it is deeply exhilarating, though at the same time filled with a deep sadness that the capacity for such engagement is being lost. So far, so inspiring - but Bloom is not an easily assimilable master. What is at issue is not simply the effect that literature has; 'imaginative engagement' implies the encounter between a text and a personality, which in Bloom's case is a powerful and turbulent one. The Western Canon is, then, a master-class in how to read with the whole self.

3. Theoretical Background
Bloom shares with post-structuralists a refusal to make a distinction between the 'primary' texts of the canon and the 'secondary' texts of critical writing. But while this can lead others to a reductive reading of the canon which lowers it to their level, Bloom attempts to raise himself to the level of the poet. He started in the fifties and sixties as a prophetic voice speaking in reaction to what he saw as the aridity of New Criticism. In his early books, he was a Romantic critic of the Romantic poets and wrote influential work on Blake, Shelley, Yeats, and others. He saw their poetry as an attempt to give form to a 'visionary' perspective which properly eludes expression. The poetry operates through the intuitive medium of figurative language and, if the critic attempts merely to produce a prosified exegesis, he will miss the point. Worse, he will have put a normalised and rationalised image of the poem in place of the original's radical utterance whose force is to subvert the 'normal' and ‘rational'.

    Thus Bloom shared the post-structuralist scepticism regarding 'common sense' views of the meaning of texts or their interpretation according to fixed values. Bloom accompanied his Yale colleague Paul de Man in the exploration of sources such as classical rhetoric and psychoanalysis in order to articulate the underlying structures of language which generate textual meaning. For some time Bloom was spoken of as a member of the 'Yale School' of deconstruction. But whereas de Man considered that texts are imprisoned by language and can do no more than iterate the meanings which language imposes, such an approach is entirely alien to Bloom's concern with the experience of literature. In Bloom's writing, linguistic modes may structure thought but they never determine it. Similarly, while a critic may make use of an account of the mind such as Freud's in order to illuminate the texts he is reading, that account can never be more than a metaphor. The critic is then using one metaphor to illuminate another, but neither can be definitive. Even as psychoanalytic terminology became increasingly fashionable among critics under the influence of Lacan, Bloom started to draw his imagery from increasingly diverse sources such as Kabbalah, Gnosticism and from poetry itself.

    This approach contrasts abruptly with the Resenters' view that literary works are called great because they bolster the status quo, or the academic conventions and literary categories of more conventional criticism. In The Western Canon, Bloom's romanticism finds expression in his sense that great works of literature are always strange, or, in Freud's sense, uncanny. Sitting down to reread Paradise Lost, Bloom is overwhelmed by 'the terrifying strangeness of what is being presented' which seems closer to science fiction or literary fantasy than heroic epic. Bloom's Dante contrasts with the tedious classroom version 'so abstrusely learned and so amazingly pious that he can only be fully apprehended by American professors'. [3] Like Milton, Dante has the extraordinary audacity to write latter-day Holy Scripture, indeed, a work 'which prefers itself to the Bible'. For Dante, 'the poem is the truth, universal, not temporal'. Finally Dante takes the 'sublimely courageous' step of enthroning Beatrice, his own inamorata, at the pinnacle of heaven. And so continues the outrageous history of literary hubris, through Wordsworth's creation of a poetic tabla rasa, whose blankness he fills with memories of the self, through Emily Dickinson's 'reconceptualisation of everything', and down to Kafka's troubled gnosis.

    The canon is the product of the most unusual and individual minds in history, and can only be approached by other strong minds. Bloom too enters into the tradition. Perhaps the core of The Western Canon is to be found in Bloom's essays on the great essayists, Montaigne, Samuel Johnson and Freud, for all of whom the immediate subject was always an opportunity for reflections on 'general nature', in Johnson's phrase. More broadly, Bloom is fond of invoking the ghosts of eighteenth and nineteenth century critics such as Leigh Hunt, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, men of letters rather than specialists. In this century Bloom identifies himself with just a few critical peers in the highly individual voices of William Empson, G.Wilson Knight, Northrop Frye, and Kenneth Burke. The critic must be as original and powerful a thinker as the writer he is attempting to comprehend. Engagement with a strong text is always an existential affair which asks searching questions of one's capacity to respond, to think through, and to engage.

    From the perspective of a right-wing thinker such as Allan Bloom this emphasis on individual reading might sound like relativism - a denial of the absolutes of the Enlightenment project which has traditionally informed the academy - and Harold Bloom has indeed been accused of fostering 'interpretative anarchy'. [4] But the religious practitioner will understand the difference between the knowledge which arises from living a tradition and that which is merely knowing about it. It is in this sense that Bloom describes himself as an 'aesthetic critic', in the line of Pater and Wilde. He does not mean that literature should be judged in relation to an ideal, such as disembodied beauty, and still less does he advocate a sybaritic indulgence in art. But in asserting 'the autonomy of the aesthetic', Bloom does suggest that art can never be understood according to external criteria, be they ethical, political, religious or anything else. We have to meet art on the terms which art asserts, terms which are in some sense deeply human.

4. The Case of Shakespeare
All this becomes clearer if one considers the case of Shakespeare. He is at the heart of the canon and so many thousands of books have been devoted to him that even specialists find it hard to keep up with the literature relating to just one aspect of his work. But for all this writing, we seem to be no nearer a consensus on how to interpret those thirty eight plays. After all these years, critics still cannot decide whether Shakespeare was a radical republican or a reactionary royalist, a neo-platonist or a materialist, a Christian, or a sceptic. How is it that Shakespeare, who is so accessible that he is performed incessantly across the world, is so impossible to pin down? Surely this mystery at the heart of our culture is worth our full reverence.

    Bloom's answer is partly epistemological, deriving as it does from his question: what is it to know literature? But in The Western Canon he is also more specific. He starts with the observation that Shakespeare's greatest achievement is the creation of uniquely compelling characters who not only change in the course of the plays, itself an innovation, but have the capacity to change themselves through the power of their inward and reflexive consciousness. Such characters, who are 'free artists of themselves', do not appear as props to a narrative, nor as rhetorical figurations, nor as reflexes of Shakespeare, but as independent beings. We never know what Shakespeare thinks, only what the characters say. Where we may feel inclined to identify characters such as Hamlet or Prospero with Shakespeare, because they possess an authorial shaping consciousness, we often encounter the greatest ambiguity. Herein lies the generative fecundity of Shakespeare, a spiritual force which is stronger than our own ability to interpret.

Shakespeare... suggested more contexts for explaining us than we are capable of supplying for explaining his characters... (he) so opens his characters to multiple perspectives that they become analytical instruments for judging you. [5]

    Whatever standpoint we choose from which to understand the greatest Shakespearean characters, we find that, through their capacity for self-investigation, they have got there before us. Critical and theatrical attempts to construct a 'useable' Shakespeare notwithstanding, Bloom insists that 'Shakespeare invented us' through his creation of a new kind of psychological reflexiveness.

Shakespearean inward selves seem to me different to Luther's in kind and not just degree, and different indeed in kind from the entire history of consciousness up to Luther. Hamlet's self-reliance leaps over the centuries and joins itself to Nietzsche's and Emerson's then goes beyond them to their outermost limits and keeps on going beyond ours. [6]

    Bloom's approach to Shakespeare is summed up by Emerson who said: 'His mind is the horizon beyond which at present we do not see'.

5. The Anxiety of Influence
The consequence for criticism is that, because we are operating within modes of thought which Shakespeare invented, we cannot find a place to stand from which we can interpret those modes. The consequence for imaginative writers is that they must work within the Shakespearean penumbra. The modern condition is therefore one of belatedness, of coming late in history, at the end of tradition. Belatedness poses intractable questions for the writer. How does one find the creative space to make something new in the world when the halls of imagination are so densely crowded? How can one hear one's own words when the voices which rouse new generations to consciousness sound so loud and so deeply within one?

    Bloom describes the consequent perplexities of the aspiring writer as 'The Anxiety of Influence', the title of his most famous theoretical book. The primary project of his career has been to show how, perhaps consciously but certainly unconsciously, new works arise out of an ambivalent relationship with their precursors.

Great writing is always a rewriting or revisionism and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self, or that so works as to reopen old works to our fresh sufferings. [7]

    Bloom's critical method seeks out the psychic currents which connect precursors, writers and readers in order to clear fresh space in the tradition for himself, and by extension, for others. We are all belated, coming at the end of as many histories as we have the capacity to imagine, European, American, Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, or whatever we will. We must fight to make them, in some difficult sense, our own.

    The central theme of The Western Canon is the effect of the Shakespearean penumbra on all later writers. Bloom describes Milton's Satan as an attempt to come to terms with the imaginative strength of Iago and Edmund. Then again, in the face of the Lacanian tradition of Freudian readings of Shakespeare, Bloom offers a Shakespearean reading of Freud in which the elaborate structures of Freud's theory are represented as a conceptualised version of the structures of Shakespearean drama. Pace Freud, Hamlet did not have an Oedipus complex; rather, Freud had a Hamlet complex. Joyce's Ulysses is convincingly read virtually as a parable of the whole canonical process: an agon with Shakespeare.

    The canon consists of those texts which are cannot be escaped by later generations. You cannot be a creator of characters and pay no heed to Shakespeare. You may not like Shakespeare - as Tolstoy did not - and you may seek to define yourself against him, but his presence demands engagement. The canon is, then, the history of such engagements, and canonical works are those which succeed in absorbing or evading the influence of their precursors. In this way they achieve their own strength and pose a similar challenge to those who come after. Every poet of ambition, every 'thinking soul', must engage with Shakespeare, Dante and Milton - and just a few others - as well as with whichever more recent figures loom nearest and largest. To assert this, Bloom considers, is simply to attest a fact of literary history. We do not choose the canon, and Resenters cannot make it vanish; the canon chooses us.

6. The Experiential Critic
In this engagement one may find oneself. And this is as true for the critic as for the poet. On this subject Bloom has a favourite quote from Wilde's Critic as Artist.

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is the only civilised form of autobiography as it deals not with the events but with the thoughts of one's life... the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind.

Bloom is now in his sixties and the former, tangled brilliance has given way in mood and style to an autumnal eloquence. The Western Canon is haunted by death and by the shortness of time. In an appendix, Bloom lists several hundred books which are his Western Canon. Journalists have diverted themselves with the trivial game of asking 'why did he choose this book, and how could he ignore that one', and so on. But Bloom says clearly that he is not trying to impose his taste on others. His primary concern is the ordering of a life-time's reading. But Bloom engages only in mediated meditations. He contemplates mortality by reading Hamlet and reminds us, and our materialist contemporaries, that we might have occasion to do the same.

'The study of literature, however it is conducted, will not save any individual any more than it will improve society. Shakespeare will not make us better and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves. Subsequently he may teach us how to accept change, in ourselves as in others and perhaps even the final form of change. Hamlet is death's ambassador to us...'

    Bloom shares in Tolstoy's celebration of Hadji Murad as an 'escape from solipsism'; George Eliot reminds him that selfhood, for all his celebration of it, is never autonomous; Kafka teaches him grim, paradoxical patience; Montaigne and Dr Johnson are read as 'Wisdom Literature'. In his book-length studies of Yeats and Wallace Stevens, Bloom showed a capacity to engage with astonishing intensity with a poet's mind. That same intensity is to be found here in a diffused form in engagement with a host of minds and with the pattern which they together create.

    When English critics follow such an approach, they remain jovial amateurs. Bloom's Jewish intensity and American professionalism have made him its theoretician. A poem cannot be read objectively because it is not an object, and neither is the reader. It may be a metaphor for an object and a metaphor for a mental state, but it cannot be either. For Bloom, a poem is neither an autonomous text existing free of authorial intentionality, nor is it the expression of a state of being which happens to have been transferred to an artistic form. A work of art is a state of being in itself. It is not its expression, but its achievement - a form of gnosis. Poems, plays and novels are like people, whom we may not truly possess, although we may feel that they possess us. To create the figurative language of which literature is comprised is to desire to be greater; it is an expression of the writer's will to power which has designs on the reader. The reader's own desires and own struggles for identity are deeply implicated. We cannot possess a work of art; we can only meet it in an 'intimate and expensive encounter'. It is intimate because it is personal and profound – and expensive, because of the cost to selfhood of exposure to selves so much greater than one's own. And yet to read in the fullest sense is to partake of the literary gnosis:

The self in its quest to be solitary and free ultimately speaks with one aim only: to confront greatness. That confrontation scarcely masks the desire to join greatness to greatness, which is the basis for the aesthetic experience once called the sublime: the quest for the transcendence of limits. Our common fate is age, sickness, death, oblivion. Our common hope, tenuous but persistent, is for some version of survival. [8]

7. Conclusion
In his earlier theoretical work, Bloom, in rethinking our ways of understanding literature, was forced to use a language of arcane concepts and sometimes tortuous vocabulary. But in The Western Canon, he writes with a Johnsonian cadence and with the immense gravity and elegance which that implies. Bloom has never wasted time writing about things he did not value, but it is most curious that towards the end of a prolific career, he should reveal himself to be so ardent a Shakespearean. He has, after all, spent that career writing principally about post-Romantic poetry. Perhaps this is because Shakespeare has been the focus of so much feminist, deconstructionist, historicist criticism that he therefore provides the battlefield. Perhaps it is also because Shakespeare himself provides the sturdiest defence. Perhaps the reasons are more purely autobiographical, Shakespeare now providing the most adequate mirror for an ageing man. Perhaps Shakespeare offers the best mirror in which to perceive the canon, or perhaps Shakespeare's consciousness is the one with which Bloom, like the canonical writers, has to reckon, because it has played so great a role in defining his own. However this may be, there is a sense in The Western Canon, albeit an elegiac one, of completion, and of return.

    Another of Bloom's favourite quotes comes from Emerson, who says 'In the greatest writing we recognise our own forgotten thoughts. They return to us with a certain alienated majesty'. Bloom's elegy is a triumph of sorts, for in it he finds himself. Joyce's Stephen says 'We walk through ourselves meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-law, but always meet ourselves'. Joyce quotes Maeterlink, who said 'If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend'. A Buddhist thinks of Dogen, who tells us that the self is arrayed as the whole world. But Bloom condenses Stephen's apophthegm to 'I walk through myself meeting the ghost of Shakespeare, but always meeting myself'. As Bloom walks through The Western Canon, he meets ghosts and giants a-plenty, but always they turn out to be Shakespeare and always they turn out to be Bloom. How could they be anything else? So greatly does he give himself to his reading, that in his explorations Bloom reveals his own depths. He becomes like Dante, walking through the halls of memory which are simultaneously the halls of eternity, until finally his own imagination is apotheosised in beloved Beatrice at the pinnacle of Paradise. And in engaging with this Bloom's Day journey, one is continually reminded of one's own reading and one's own forgotten thoughts.

    Bloom's avowed critical aim is to achieve a form of Criticism which is also a form of Gnosis; and after a week of reading The Western Canon, I felt possessed by his cadences, so magisterial and so sad, and the landscape which he reveals had entered my dreams. There is Shakespeare, always forging ahead of us; beside him is dazzling Dante, his own greatest creation, and, all around, the finest company in the world, whose conversation means deep communion with oneself. Bloom's ambition is to enter their ranks alongside Dr Johnson, who, being the ideal reader, often seems like a cipher for Bloom himself:

(he is) everything a great critic should be: he confronts greatness directly with a total response to which he brings his complete self. [9]

Bloom strides beside them with an ancient grandeur, peering anxiously into the encroaching gloom. He walks inside the mind of Freud, which is the mind of our time, just as Freud walks inside the mind of Shakespeare, which is the mind of The Western Canon.

    I suggest that we could do infinitely worse than follow in the path of Bloom, tracing his course back from The Western Canon to his earlier works. What a magnificent irony it would be, if, following Bloom, Western Buddhists, who have looked outside their own culture for guidance, were to become the rightful inheritors of its aesthetic riches by virtue of their powers of resistance to its materialist pre-occupations and its technological distractions. Perhaps Bloom's ideas may even help us to master the traditions we have inherited and to understand the inner logic of their development. What is the Buddhist tradition if it is not a sequence of deeply interconnected creative geniuses? I do not think Bloom will betray our trust, for he is a generous teacher, an interior orator and a vitalizer in the Emersonian mould. Thinking of Bloom, as I often do, I could (perhaps sparing the hyperbole) echo Whitman's tribute to the sage of Concord:

The best part of it is, he breeds the giant that destroys itself. Who wants to be any man's mere follower? lurks behind every page. No teacher ever taught that has so provided for his pupils setting up independently - no truer evolutionist. [10]

First published in The Western Buddhist Review, 1997

***

Notes
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon, Macmillan, London 1994, p.517
Jerusalem, Chapter 1, 10, l.20
The Western Canon, p.80
The Western Canon, p.4
The Western Canon, p.64
The Western Canon, p.179
The Western Canon, p.11
The Western Canon, p.524
The Western Canon, p.185
Walt Whitman, Specimen Days, quoted by Harold Bloom in an essay on Emerson in Agon (1982, no page reference).

Read Bidding Farewell to Harold Bloom by Vishvapani

Read an interview with Harold Bloom by Vishvapani

Here we present a review of Stephen Batchelor's two most recent books on his secular interpretation of the Dharma:

Stephen Batchelor, After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age, Yale University Press, 2015

Stephen Batchelor, Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, Yale University Press, 2017

Review by Dhivan

Yale University Press were kind enough to send me review copies of Stephen Batchelor’s books when they were published. But reviewing them is difficult, as they are polemical, in favour of a particular new interpretation of Buddhism over undesirable forms of traditional Buddhism. In the end I’ve decided to comment just on the argument for secular Buddhism made in these books, independent of my response to the idea. Stephen Batchelor is something of a hero of mine: a pioneer of existentialist Buddhism,[1] and a prophet of Buddhism without belief in karma and rebirth. I enjoyed interviewing him in 2004, about his book Living With the Devil, which I still believe marks an important new interpretation of the meaning of Māra, the Buddhist version of the devil.[2] But I was not so enthusiastic about the part of his 2010 book, Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist, which attempted to rediscover the teaching of the historical Buddha. His Pāli scholarship seemed at times dubious and his arguments occasionally tendentious.[3]

Closely reading After Buddhism, his 2010 follow-up to Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist, I am once again troubled by his at times dubious Pāli scholarship. But then, in Secular Buddhism, his 2015 collection of essays, I read (p.17) how he himself admits his Pāli is not very good. He recalls (pp.17–18) his reading of the early Buddhist discourse, the Ariyapariyesanā Sutta, in which the newly-awakened Buddha is reported to have doubted the point of teaching the Dharma, for

people love their place [ālaya]: they delight and revel in their place. It is hard for people who love, delight and revel in their place to see this ground [ṭhāna]: “because-of-this” conditionality [idappaccayatā], conditioned arising [paṭicca-samuppāda].[4]

This passage becomes important for Batchelor’s own formulation of the Buddha’s awakening in terms of its being an existential shift in perspective rather than a mystical insight into the nature of reality. But Batchelor then admits (p.19) how a friendly critic had pointed out that ālaya doesn’t mean ‘place’ but ‘attachment’, and how ṭhāna doesn’t mean ‘ground’ but ‘fact’ or ‘state’.[5] Batchelor then muses about whether his translation is an example of incompetent scholarship or a creative mistake.

With this in mind, it hardly seems necessary for me to go through After Buddhism, pointing out all the Pāli mistakes. It suffices to say that Stephen Batchelor admits his Pāli is a bit rough and ready. This is not a great start for someone who wants to ‘recover the dharma that existed prior to the emergence of Buddhist orthodoxies’ (p.28). In fact, it leads to my first observation on the project in these two books of developing a ‘secular Buddhism’: that this ought not be described as a recovery of the original meaning of the Buddha’s teaching, but rather as an interpretation of the Dharma for the modern world. Following good practice from Biblical studies, one should distinguish exegesis from interpretation. To say that the Buddha’s awakening should be understood as an existential shift in perspective rather than a mystical insight is an interpretation (of the Dharma for the modern west), whereas to explain what ālaya means, and what it means for people to love their ālaya, is exegesis.[6]

His translations of ālaya and ṭhāna aside, Batchelor comes up with some lovely new interpretations of early Buddhist terms and concepts. For instance, he renders taṇhā as ‘reactivity’ (After Buddhism, p.74). An exegesis of the word taṅhā would have to say that, etymologically, it meant ‘thirst’, the Sanskrit equivalent tṛṣṇā being derived from the verbal root tṛṣ, ‘be thirsty’; though in use it means a self-centred ‘craving’ or ‘desire’. But in practice the word is used in Buddhist psychology to indicate the tendency of the mind to react with self-centred craving, which is at the root of our continued existence in saṃsāra. Hence ‘reactivity’ is a nice interpretation of the word in modern English, that gets into western concepts some of what it means as a Buddhist technical term. Likewise, his rendering of appamāda as ‘care’ (After Buddhism, p.102), instead of the usual ‘heedfulness’, manages to capture a technical term in just the right English word. 

Generally, though, I would say that Batchelor is not the best exegete of Pāli texts, partly because his Pāli is not very good, but mostly because his purpose really is to argue for a new interpretation of early Buddhism, and he confuses interpretation with exegesis. This is apparent in what has become the signature teaching of his secular Buddhism, the ‘four tasks’. These are a re-casting of the four noble truths (dukkha, ‘suffering’; samudaya, ‘arising’; nirodha, ‘cessation’; and magga, ‘path’) as four ‘tasks’ (that suffering is to be comprehended; arising is to be let go of; ceasing is to be beheld; and the path is to be cultivated) (After Buddhism p.69; Secular Buddhism, p.94). The tasks come out in fully secular form as: Embrace life, Let go of what arises, See its ceasing, Act! (After Buddhism, p.70). Batchelor derives support for his interpretation from an article by K.R. Norman;[7] but this article is an example of scholarly exegesis, which clarifies some difficult Pāli syntax by suggesting a particular account of how the discourse evolved. One might add that the ‘four tasks’ are right there in the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, the ‘Discourse on the Turning of the Wheel of the Dharma’, traditionally regarded as the first sermon.[8] The Buddha presents each of the four in terms of a ‘task’ (kicca), meaning, ‘what is to be done’. Suffering is ‘to be comprehended’ (pariññeyya), its arising is ‘to be let go of’ (pahātabba), its cessation is ‘to be beheld’ (sacchikātabba), and the path to its ceasing is ‘to be cultivated’ (bhāvitabba).[9] So the ‘four tasks’ are, to my mind, simply a way of drawing attention to how the Buddha is said to have presented the truths as tasks.  

What I find puzzling about Batchelor’s project here is his rejection (Secular Buddhism, pp.95–6) of the idea that the four truths represent the Buddha’s appropriation of a medical formula. It is in fact quite likely that the four truths represent a version of an ancient Indian medical diagnostic formula, in which dukkha, ‘unsatisfactoriness’, is the disease; the arising of dukkha is the pathogen, namely, taṇhā, ‘reactivity’; the state of health is the cessation of dukkha; and the cure is the eightfold path.[10] Certainly, the Buddha is often compared in early discourses to a skilful physician. Therefore, from the very beginning, the Dharma was presented in non-religious, this-worldly, secular terms, as a practical teaching, namely, as what are called the four noble truths. It only takes some exegesis to make this clear; interpretation is not particularly necessary.

However, Batchelor is determined to develop what (in Secular Buddhism, p.80) he calls ‘Buddhism 2.0’, a form of Buddhism that would present the Dharma not just in an updated traditional form, but in a new way that overcomes the cultural divide separating modern western practitioners from their Asian forebears. Let us grant Batchelor that such an updated Buddhism is desirable; and it is certainly part of the vision of the Triratna Buddhist movement, in which I practise, to develop such a Buddhism in this way. But why then does Batchelor so often try to develop Buddhism 2.0 through a comparison with sheer caricatures of traditional Buddhism? In this sense, the argument of After Buddhism is seriously compromised by the fallacy of false dilemma. This means arguing by presenting a choice between ‘my way’ and the Buddhist ‘highway’, and presenting the highway as a send-up of dogmatic metaphysical claims, concluding falsely that 'my way' must be right.

For instance, in After Buddhism (p.8), Batchelor characterises the Buddha’s teaching of emptiness (suññatā in Pāli) as ‘a condition in which we [he means advanced practitioners] dwell’; ‘emptiness discloses the dignity of a person who has realized what it means to be fully human’. He then contrasts this understanding of emptiness with that of the later philosophy of Mādhyamika, in which emptiness is ‘an ultimate truth that needs to be understood through logical inference’ and ‘a privileged epistemological object that, through knowing, one gains a cognitive enlightenment’. So, the Buddhist understanding of emptiness is either the Buddha’s original teaching, or the later Mādhyamika version; the latter is evidently merely a conceptual attainment, therefore we should go with the Buddha’s original teaching. But anyone who has studied anything about Mādhyamika knows that Batchelor’s account of emptiness here is a mere caricature. Indeed, Batchelor himself must know that he what he has written is mere caricature, as he has himself translated Nāgārjuna’s foundational work on Mādhyamika, the Mūlamadhyamaka Kārikā.[11] Anyone who studies this work knows that ‘Misperceiving emptiness / Injures the unintelligent / Like mishandling a snake / Or miscasting a spell.’[12]

Then again, he quotes from the Udāna, a collection of discourses in the Pāli canon, one of which he cites in translation: ‘There is, monks, an Unborn, Unbecome, Unmade, Uncompounded’ and so on. He comments: ‘This ex-cathedra declaration of a transcendent reality lying beyond the conditioned world sits uncomfortably with the suspension of judgement and suspicion of ultimacy advocated elsewhere in the same body of texts’ (p.25). But this is a tendentious exegesis of a Pāli text, for the sake of his interpretation of it as dogmatic etc., in comparison with the more sceptical texts he prefers. Later (pp.137–49) he explains how the problem is the translation (by Maurice Walshe), and that the passage can be translated in ways that have less ‘ontological gravity’. But this is a translation issue, not a problem with religious Buddhism or even with a metaphysical claims. 

Then again he tries to show up the dogmatic nature of religious Buddhism by claiming that ‘later Buddhists’ proposed a form of atomism (p.189) and that ‘Buddhist proponents of rebirth’ proposed that mind is a substance (dravya) (p.300). Atomism and substantialism are evidently supposed to make these later Buddhists sound like traitors to the sceptical, anti-metaphysical kind of Buddhism that Batchelor, quite reasonably, wants to argue is the Buddha’s original teaching. Again, this is false dilemma: the Buddhist Abhidharmikas may not have been sceptics but they used the concepts of atomism and subtance in highly specialised Buddhist ways, in relation to Indian philosophical concerns of their time. They would not have had much trouble in countering his arguments.

In Secular Buddhism (p.107), Batchelor evokes the famous parable of the raft. The Buddha describes someone who builds a raft to cross a river in their path: would it be wise to continue on their way, having crossed over, by putting the raft on their head?[13] Developing the comparison, Batchelor argues that there is no need to ask of Buddhism 2.0, ‘is it really Buddhism?’: ‘The only relevant question is “Does it float?”’. If we understand Buddhism 2.0 here simply in terms of the body of ideas that Batchelor has developed in his recent books, one would have to say that, although it has some lovely design features, and many of us wish it well on its voyage, it is unfortunately made of poor quality scholarship and is lashed up with false arguments. 

Dhivan is the editor of the Western Buddhist Review. He is a member of the Triratna Buddhist Order and lectures in philosophy and Indian religions at the University of Chester.

[1] Especially in Alone With Others (1983), Flight: An Existential Conception of Buddhism (1984), and The Faith to Doubt (1990).

[2] See Dharma Life magazine, 2004; reprinted in Challenging Times, ed. Vishvapani, Windhorse Publications, Birmingham, 2012.

[3] Reviewed in Western Buddhist Review 6, available online at https://bit.ly/320BoMZ. 

[4] First discussed in After Buddhism p.55, in ch.3 A Fourfold Task, in which he presents what has become his single most important ‘secular Buddhist’ teaching. The passage is from the Ariyapariyesā Sutta, Majjhima Nikāya 26. 

[5] I would also point out that idappaccayatā doesn’t mean ‘“because-of-this” conditionality’, but ‘the state of having this as condition’, i.e. it just means ‘conditionality’ in the peculiar Buddhist sense.

[6] In Secular Buddhism, p.81, Batchelor explains that his account of ‘Buddhism 2.0’, with its four tasks, is an interpretation; but he also admits he is easily ‘seduced’ by the idea that it is ‘what the Buddha originally taught’. 

[7] K.R. Norman (2003), ‘The Four Noble Truths’, Collected Papers II, Oxford: PTS, pp.210–23, online at https://bit.ly/2Lps3bA. 

[8] It can be found in the Saṃyutta Nikāya at 56: 11.

[9] Batchelor consistently (After Buddhism p.69, Secular Buddhism pp.94–5) gets the Pāli wrong: these four things ‘to be done’ (kicca) are in the grammatical form of gerundives, whereas he cites nominal forms.

[10] See Anālayo (2016), Mindfully Facing Disease and Death, Cambridge: Windhorse, pp.9–11.

[11] Stephen Batchelor (2000), Verses from the Center, New York: Riverhead.

[12] Verses from the Center, p.123. Batchelor’s rendering of the (Tibetan version of the) Mūlamadhyamaka Kārikā is poetic rather than philosophical.

[13] The parable is from the Alaggadūpama Sutta, Majjhima Nikāya 18.

Here we present another review – this one by Vidyapala, of a new book from Windhorse Publications by David Brazier, on the teaching of Dōgen, founder of Sōtō Zen:

David Brazier, Dark Side of the Mirror: forgetting the self in Dōgen’s Genjō Kōan, Cambridge: Windhorse Publications, 2019, 326 pp, £16 pb.

review by Vidyapāla

In this excellent and illuminating book by David Brazier, the author presents us with a new translation and commentary of Dōgen’s famously beautiful but elusive text, the Genjō Kōan, from his masterwork, the Shōbōgenzō. This is the first book that I have read by Brazier and am unfamiliar with his general outlook, but he is evidently a man well placed to interpret Dōgen’s words, having had a long and eclectic training in the Buddhist tradition. He is best known, however, for founding the Amida Trust in 1996, under the patronage of Pure Land Sensei, Gisho Saiko, and other Japanese teachers. Brazier is also a psychotherapist.

The book is divided into four sections. In the first, Brazier provides some context, giving details of Eihei Dōgen’s (1200–53) life and the social, cultural and political context in which he found himself. Brazier also illustrates the problems he encountered in translating a text so notoriously slippery as the Genjō Kōan and gives his view on the meaning of the title. The second section consists of Brazier’s translation of the text. The third section is a commentary on the text itself. Section four contains some postscripts and afterthoughts.  

From the opening context of the book, Brazier sets out some key principles that provide the basis upon which he makes his analysis of Dōgen’s various strains of thought. Firstly, Brazier places Dōgen squarely within the social, cultural and religious time in which he lived. Although Dōgen was a highly original thinker, Brazier is keen to emphasise that Dōgen was first and foremost a 13th century Buddhist monk, deeply steeped in the Mahāyāna Buddhism of his time, particularly the Lotus Sūtra, and interested in liberation not ontology. Dōgen had received his early Buddhist training in the Tendai school, where the idea that all beings were “inherently enlightened” was popular. He was vexed by the place of Buddhist practice if this was true. The Genjō Kōan was partly a response to this question. Dōgen was also a man influenced by popular Chinese styles of thought of the time, particularly those found in Confucianism and Daoism.

There has been some debate in recent years whether Buddhism can rightly be considered a religion, in the traditional sense. It is clear that Brazier answers this question in the affirmative, and sees Dōgen as an exemplar of religious Buddhism, as opposed to “secular Buddhism” or “Buddhism without beliefs”, to use Stephen Batchelor’s phrases. The idea that Dōgen was a religious Buddhist is a second key principle that underlies Brazier’s approach to the Genjō Kōan. In doing this, Brazier brings Dōgen into dialogue with his more obviously religious Buddhist contemporaries, like the Pure Land teachers Hōnen and Shinran

Before coming to this book, I had a tendency to characterise Dōgen as a sort of quintessential Zen Master: stern, aloof, with a crystalline, exacting and elitist vision for how a Buddhist life should be lived. This is not completely irrational on my part, and there is, indeed, evidence that could be brought to bear that would support that contention. It was partly because of this projection that I often lost Dōgen – the man – behind this archetype. It is often also the case that biographies of great religious figures transform, probably over millennia, into hagiographies, with all the rough edges of their original subject smoothed out, leaving us with a mere simulacra of the person. It was to my delight, therefore, that the Dōgen that emerged from the biographical pages of this book was multifaceted and humane.  And it is in revealing Dōgen’s humanity that Brazier shines most brightly. It felt in reading Brazier’s portrait of Dōgen, that the person behind his beautiful, strange and gnomic words was suddenly revealed to me: Dōgen as a living, breathing, vulnerable human being like the rest of us. A man scarred by seeing “the incense smoke rise over his mother’s coffin” (p.13); a man “broken hearted from an ill fated love affair” (p.14); a man who faced humiliation when he travelled to China to bring back Buddhist teachings and was told that he was not a monk because he’d not taken the right precepts in Japan; and a man with a tendency to be too stern with himself – prone to an asceticism that bordered on self-torture. But, what also emerged was Dōgen as a man who was able to transform his pain into the beautiful words of the Genjō Kōan: Dōgen as wounded poet! Utilising his experience as a psychotherapist, Brazier suggests that Dōgen underwent a process of sublimation, “whereby emotional energy that is tormenting the body and mind becomes re-channelled toward some constructive, loving or sublime end” (p.15).  In reading these words I was reminded of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s phrase that “we acquire the strength we have overcome.'' Brazier suggests that, in a way analogous to Siddhartha Gotama’s asceticism before he found the way to enlightenment, Dōgen’s struggles were the necessary basis on which his enlightenment experience was able to flower.  Dōgen was primed, so that when he heard his Chinese teacher Rujing’s instruction to “cast off body and mind”, he experienced a turning in the deepest seat of his consciousness.

The main part of the book is taken up with Brazier’s commentary on the Genjō Kōan itself. The style of Brazier’s commentary is conversational and he goes through the text line by line, circling back to several key themes throughout. Brazier suggests that Dōgen was doing the same in the Genjō Kōan, using a variety of different images and metaphors to illustrate a few central themes. Indeed, the Genjō Kōan is full of beautiful images and Brazier is careful not to provide any final definitive meaning of them. Rather, he brings out the multifaceted and multivalent ways they work as metaphors. Despite the conversational tone of the book, Brazier occasionally slips into a more rhetorical mode, mostly in ways that I enjoyed, although, on a few occasions, losing the nuance and subtlety of thought so prevalent throughout this book.

Brazier clearly wants to set right some misconceptions about Buddhist practice in general, and Dōgen’s Buddhist practice in particular. Indeed, he wants to set right the misconception that practicing the Dharma is about gaining anything for oneself; of becoming some kind of special person. Brazier thinks that for Dōgen, living the Dharma life is simply about doing what needs to be done, without self interest or pretention. It is about realising that we are not the centre of the universe; that we cannot make the world bend to our will. Or, as Brazier memorably puts it later in the book: “Buddhism is the abandonment of narcissism” (p.88).  For example, Brazier suggests that for Dōgen, zazen, or sitting meditation, was not a method of personal growth, of self-enhancement, of self-power. Many modern translators and commentators of Dōgen, he feels, have tended to represent him through a popular rendering of Zen in the West that is “technical, secular and reductionist” (p.42). That the aim of meditation is to obtain something for oneself: enlightenment as possession or enhancement – something to satisfy one’s body and mind. Rather, Dōgen thought zazen an act of faith – a word perhaps unpopular in modern times. If there was any stilling of the mind, it was only as a means to open up to the Dharma all around one – it was a receptive practice. In this way, he could be compared to Pure Land teachers like Shinran and Hōnen, who thought that one could not reach enlightenment through self-power, but had to rely on the grace and power of Amitabha: other-power. 

One of the more unusual, and perhaps controversial, aspects of Brazier’s translation, is his rendering the Chinese 佛 道 (fó dào) as ‘Buddha Dao’, rather than ‘Buddha Way’, as it is traditionally translated. Brazier sees the traditional translation as a mistake, and thinks by using these Chinese characters Dōgen was intending to bring together Buddhism with Daoist and Confucian thought in the Genjō Kōan. By bringing in the idea of the Dao, and its association with notions of yin and yang, Dōgen was able to draw upon the importance of all things being in their correct place, or in balance: 

When the enduring (unborn) truth appears in the midst of the ephemeral world and both play their parts, this is when Genjō happens. The right performance of yin-yang roles is the meaning of ‘Kōan’ in Dōgen’s usage. The text explains in detail what he means and how it works. So, in Genjō Kōan we have the appearance of the Buddha Dao by means of the correct relationship between its yin and yang. (p.65)

Brazier suggests that Dōgen’s position was that the “correct relationship” occurred when a person predominantly adopted a yin position: the yin being the “female, receptive principle” (p.92) that is at play, “When we are not trying to “save our skin” or satisfy our own mind particularly” (p.65). 

Adopting the yin position also means that we are able to open up to the influence of “All Buddhas” (p128). This theme is taken up much more fully later when Brazier comments on Dōgen’s famous image of the “moon in the water, which is only realized on one side when the other is dark” (p.131). Brazier comments:

I take this to be the pivotal image in the essay. It is by turning one side of ourselves – the self ­– dark (yin) that the other side becomes a mirror and thus we come to reflect the moon, which is the myriad Dharmas. (p.133)

Or, as he later puts it in more simple language, “the self becomes dark when we unselfconsciously do what is required” (p.142).

Brazier suggests a tendency in modern Buddhist teaching to think that “everything is interrelated, interdependent, even that it “interexists”” (p.88). When looked at in this way, the separation between things is minimised. Brazier thinks that this is a mistake, that there is value in seeing that the vast majority of the world is “other than self”, and that this is a sign of maturity. He then illustrates this important point by talking about the time when we realise that our parents are people in their own right:

One’s mother may have lived the most important years of her life before one was ever conceived, yet one may tend to think of her not as an independent person with special qualities of her own, but rather to always see and judge her in relation to one’s own needs and wants. To realise that the “other” truly is “other” and allow them to be so is a basis for real respect and an essential step in growing up. (p.89)

To adopt the yin position is to see our fundamental lack of mastery over things. We want certain types of experiences but not others; we want people to behave in a particular way and they behave otherwise; we believe ourselves to be deficient in wisdom and want the wisdom of the Buddha. Brazier suggests that it is natural for our spiritual quest to begin with this ambition, but in “this form of practice, based on wanting more or wanting less, there are many delusions. Dissimulation continues” (p.105). Enlightenment is not a state where we manage to evade the “affliction inherent in sentient life” (p.106). These afflictions are natural and cannot be evaded. There is, however, an artificial part of peoples’ suffering:

The artificial part is generated by their own sense of lacking what they believe the Buddha has got. (p.106)

The aim of Buddhist practice, therefore, is put ourselves in accord with the way things are, or to play one’s part in the Buddha Dao. This involves both an internal change, but also a change in how we act:

The “appearing” of the Buddha Dao is what Dōgen means by Genjō. However, that it should appear is not enough. One has to experience and act. There is a rite that celebrates the Buddha Dao and that rite is the correct ordering of daily life – right view, right thought, right speech, right action, right mindfulness, not just right satori. This right action involves self-effacement, playing one’s part, and it is called, in Dōgen’s way of writing the term, Kōan. When a person’s life accords with Kōan, Genjō occurs naturally and vice versa. (p.106)

Adopting the yin position, or “playing one’s part in the Buddha Dao”, therefore becomes a form of radical humility; of realising how deeply contingent our life has been from the moment we are born and of being grateful that we have the life we do:

When we think in a sober way about our life, we are liable to see that we receive far more than we could ever repay. (p.118) 

Brazier is clear here that he sees that the attitude one should take to one’s Dharma life is one of a “good servant”(p.120). Serving one’s teachers, as the great yogi Milarepa did, and serving the Dharma more generally is part of what it means to play one’s part in the Buddha Dao. And if one’s Dharma life is founded on humility and gratitude then we will practice the Dharma not for the sake of personal gain but in order for the 

Dharma to flourish in the world for the benefit of all beings. If she, herself, as one of those beings also benefits, this is merely incidental; too much thought about it will only get in the way. (p.120)

Brazier clearly feels that some Buddhist practitioners are just in the spiritual life for personal gain:

Many people are so deeply steeped in worldly thinking that they find it difficult to really imagine anything other than personal profit. Even people on a spiritual quest, like Dōgen on his way to China, are generally afflicted with the same disease in one way or another. Nor is Buddhism a means to advance social or economic ends, however “politically correct”. (p.120)

And later

...It is thus quite normal for modern people to think that “personal profit” is a primary reason for doing anything, especially now that most things carry a monetary value. (p.120)

I felt here that Brazier has generalised too widely. I hear this view quite frequently in my own Buddhist Order and think it makes too many assumptions about the motives of others. How can Brazier, or anyone else for that matter, really know what motivates another person to embark on a spiritual quest? I think it is probably more accurate to say that most unenlightened Buddhist practitioners have mixed motives for practicing the Dharma. There is likely to be some self interest, as well as some genuinely altruistic interest, and this will be the case all the way until a person’s mind is completely free of greed, hatred and delusion. I have the same reservations about Brazier’s worry that people are using Buddhism to advance social and economic ends. Could it not be that Buddhist practitioners are trying to practice the precepts in a fuller way that recognises the global effect of individual actions? 

Of course, as deluded beings in a complex world, we will often act in ways that are counterproductive to what we most deeply value – even identifying our deepest values is fraught with problems – but assigning motives to large groups of people simplifies things too much. If there is a growth in individualism in the modern world, even in Buddhist circles, then it is unlikely to be helped by the sectioning off of spiritual matters from those deemed economic or social. If anything, we will see a growth in individualism, not lessening, as Buddhist practice becomes a way of coping with the pressures of the world, rather than a radical re-imagining of how we might treat one another. My thoughts in this area, however, very much reflect a personal worry I have about the polarisation that can occur between those who think the secularisation of modern life a good thing and those that don’t – they are  not a criticism of Brazier’s book per se. 

The themes of adopting the yin position; playing one’s part in the Buddha Dao; and making oneself dark are all aspects of what Dōgen means in lines 13 and 14 of the Genjō Kōan when he says:

[13.] To comprehend what we call the Buddha Dao means to comprehend the self.

[14.] To comprehend the self is to forget the self. (p.70)

It is in discussing these famous lines from the Genjō Kōan that Brazier brings together various strains of his commentary. He suggests that:

When we see the self as it actually is, it loses its fascination. When it loses its fascination we forget it. It stops. (p.150)

And when it stops, our preoccupation with ourselves stops as well, and it is this that is the evidence of enlightenment, and it is this that sends “us forth in the service of the salvation of all sentient beings” (p.150).

When we forget the self, we can be fully penetrated by the Dharma – the truth – that is always around us. And this can be realised not simply as a conceptual idea but as a living experience that guides how we should live. And for Dōgen, this process of forgetting oneself would not come as the result of self development or trying to perfect the self; rather it is a process of realising that the self is not all that interesting or special: 

In practice, to comprehend the self it to realize how limited one is. It is to see one’s foolish nature, to see how one is easily lifted up or cast down, how one is vulnerable, fragile, prone to error, apt to overreact and so on, to reach a familiarity with oneself as an ordinary being. (p153)

In a world that many feel is being increasingly narcissistic, individualistic and consumerist, Dōgen’s message of humility, selflessness and gratitude feels a welcome one. In modern life we are endlessly bombarded with ways in which we can control and perfect ourselves and our lives. Brazier is right to be concerned about this, recognising how attempts to perfect and control our lives can often deepen our delusion and suffering. He is also right to point out how easy it is for Buddhist practitioners to take on these attitudes, although he perhaps, makes generalisations that are in my opinion too wide. Brazier has, however, done a rare thing with this book. He he has produced a translation and commentary that both gets to the heart of the spiritual questions that Dōgen – a 13th century Buddhist monk – was trying to address with the Genjō Kōan, and he has also produced a book that feels highly original. By   taking some risks with his translation, he is able to throw fresh light on a text that is both notoriously difficult and has been studied many times before. In doing so, he is able to bring out themes and teachings that are both highly relevant to Buddhist practitioners, but also to anyone trying to practice any spiritual tradition in the modern western world. 

Vidyapala is a member of the Triratna Buddhist Order and lives in Manchester. He works and teaches at the Manchester Buddhist Centre.

Here we present a review by Arnold Tilley of a new book by Robert Ellis, founder of the Middle Way Society:

Robert Ellis 

The Buddha’s Middle Way, London: Equinox, 2019, 320pp., £23 pb

review by Arnold Tilley

Much of the content of Ellis’s book concerns the Buddha’s Middle Way, yet seen as an instance of a purported universal Middle Way ‘which springs from the structural needs of human beings (and possibly other organisms)’ (p.281). Ellis’s formula for this universal Middle Way is expressed by a metalanguage of five sub-principles – scepticism, integration, agnosticism, provisionality, and incrementality – that are terms describing the application of our judgement in experiential situations. A constraining term, ‘absolutisation’, is also employed to target metaphysical claims that have gone wayward, i.e. are not judgements made in accord with the universal Middle Way. Although the Buddha’s Middle Way is held by Ellis to be our first major source of the universal Middle Way, in the final section of the book, he sets out alternative sources to the Buddha’s Middle Way, in philosophical, scientific and political domains.  Ellis’s book is a radical approach to our understanding of the Buddha’s Middle Way; yet, in essence, his core strategy, I believe, is to make explicit, via the five sub-principles, a universal Middle Way, of which the Buddha’s Middle Way is just one of many instantiations.  If you are a traditionalist Buddhist, you may find Ellis’s approach, at the very least, idiosyncratic and challenging; but, you might, if you are a secular-leaning, progressive Buddhist, or even a non-Buddhist, find the TARDIS-like nature of his book a suggestively expansive read.

Section 1 deals with Gautama’s early life in the palace, followed by his ‘going forth’ into the forest, which are seen as ‘oppositions in human life’ (p.32), as extremes of a life of sensual indulgence and asceticism. The journey from palace to forest can be seen as one of opening up, an expansion of one’s experiential judgement. Both palace and forest represent absolutisations, i.e. fixed delusions, or metaphysical positions. The more ‘adequate third option’ (p.33) was the Buddha’s recollection of his jhāna experience under the rose-apple tree – ‘the gateway to the recognition of the Middle Way’ (p.30). What a traditionalist Buddhist might find unsettling, however, is that Ellis regards the Buddha’s early life, awakening and ministry as an archetypal story – the Buddha as a Jungian archetype of the Self, who discovers the universal Middle Way. Ellis also questions the importance of the historical Buddha, even to the point of hypothesizing that the historical Buddha’s life is a ‘complete hoax’ (p.237), all the significance, for Ellis, apparently residing in the ‘universal insights’ contained in the Pali Canon. Such ‘free-floating’ insights, however, surely require an anchor, in a person. By contrast, far from thinking the historical Buddha a hoax, the Buddhist scholar Richard Gombrich finds the Pali texts to be the ‘coherent’ and likely ‘work of one genius’.[1]  

In the 2nd section, we are cautioned against absolutising the Buddha’s Awakening; rather, it should be seen as a ‘highly integrated and transformative experience’ (p.54). In his First Address, the Buddha equates the Middle Way with avoiding the extremes of sensual indulgence (palace) and asceticism (forest). Individual psychological, social and political integration are the fruit of following the Middle Way.

In section 3, in communicating the Middle Way, the Buddha favours metaphorical over literal language. This is linked to use of the right hemisphere of the brain, which allows more information, in an open feedback loop, to inform meaning. Concrete similes embody the five key elements (plus ‘absolutisation’) of the universal Middle Way – of lute strings (provisionality and integration), raft (scepticism and provisionality), poisoned arrow (absolutisation), the second arrow (absolutisation), the ocean (incrementality) the blind men and the elephant (agnosticism), the snake (scepticism, integration and agnostic courage), and the wet piece of wood (integration) – all of them illustrative of the Buddha’s well-integrated mind.

The Buddha’s Middle Way, in section 4, is criticised as out of date in its restricted range of absolutes to be avoided, i.e. eternalism and nihilism. Instead, Ellis emphasizes that the universal Middle Way is a ‘principle of judgement’ or a method, navigating between ‘any opposed pair of positive and negative absolutes’ (p.162). This wider application of the Middle Way steers us in the direction of universal, embodied experience, prior to the karma-rebirth world-view of the Buddha’s contemporaries.

In section 5 the Buddha’s Middle Way is equated with the Eightfold (or Threefold) Path.  Ellis argues that Buddhist tradition, instead of interpreting the Eightfold Path incrementally, absolutises it, dividing it into mundane and supramundane, lay and monastic, aspects. Rather than start with Right View, Ellis suggests Meditation as the way into the Eightfold Path, with particular emphasis on practising the brahma-vihāras, to expand the possibilities for greater integration, and increase awareness of the universality of the Middle Way and the Eightfold Path.

Interpreting the Buddha’s teachings, in section 6, Ellis argues for conditionality to be confined to our judgements, as opposed to being a theory about the universe. The three marks of existence – dukkha, anicca, and anattā – are reinterpreted as ‘prompts to provisionality’ (p.206). According to Ellis, our desires or cravings are forms of energy and are value-neutral. Karma and rebirth are seen as sources of absolutisation. The Buddha’s authority is re-cast as a Jungian archetype, symbolizing integration. Dharma, or as Ellis prefers it, the ‘Middle Way’, is defined as the ‘most helpful way of responding to conditions’ (p.226). Ellis points to the gap between monastics and lay Buddhists, whereby enlightenment is seen as the preserve of monks, and merit-making confined to lay people. Instead of faith Ellis prefers ‘confidence’ in the Middle Way, and going for refuge is more about commitment than a shelter from suffering.

Traditionally, the Dharma is seen as an objective truth or law or the teachings of the Buddha, rather than as a judgemental ‘method’, (p.52). Consistent with this, Ellis (p.1) likens the Buddha’s discovery of the Middle Way to Newton’s discovery of the Law of Gravity – i.e. both are objective discoveries. Ellis’s overall modus operandi, however, is toward the experiential and the subjective; yet, his emphasis on ‘experiential judgement’ in the Buddha’s life and teaching, seems too narrow an approach to what we understand by a religion; e.g. in Smart’s seven-dimensional scheme, the ‘experiential and emotional’ is but one dimension.[2] To be charitable to Ellis, though, it may be that he conceives of Buddhism more as a philosophical ‘way of life’, in Hadot’s sense,[3] than as a religion; hence, the stress placed on practical ‘experiential judgement’ may be justifiable.

Religions, if we are to count Buddhism as a religion, however, do value truth; one immediately thinks here of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism. But, does Ellis, in some sense, think of himself as inhabiting a post-truth world? Or, as having moved, like Stephen Batchelor, from metaphysical ‘Truths’ to pragmatic ‘Tasks’? (p.62). His redefinition of knowledge, from a Platonic ‘justified true belief’ to ‘justified general belief’ (p.46), jettisons truth, as it is found, .e.g. in a correspondence theory of truth. But, are there not irrefragable, common-sensical truths? For instance, the Stoic, Epictetus, held that to assert, at high noon, under a blazing sun in a cloudless sky, that ‘it is night time’ is perverse; the truth of ‘it is day time’ is beyond dispute. To say one merely has a general belief doesn’t seem strong enough here.[4] But, Ellis might well respond to the Stoic example by applying a Pyrrhonian scepticism to our judgements; that neither our sense-perceptions, nor our views, theories and beliefs tell us the truth or lie; so we shouldn’t rely on them, and, instead, be without views, attaining aphasia (speechlessness) and then ataraxia (freedom from disturbance).[5] But, if confronted with the actuality of Epictetus’s example, in the clear light of day, then I think, and so might the Buddha, that the sceptics would be reduced to ‘eel-wriggling’. Ellis’s dismissal of, e.g. a correspondence notion of  truth stems, I think, from his anti-realist subjectivist tendency (possibly influenced by Don Cupitt, a former tutor of Ellis). His interpretation of the Buddha’s epistemology sounds similar to a Nietzschean perspectivism, i.e. in terms of ‘integrating as many perspectives as possible’ (p.68), and, for Ellis, perhaps there are no facts, but only interpretations. It is worth noting, by contrast, however, that in an Indian context, veda means ‘knowledge’; in a Vedic context, ‘sacred knowledge’, and this influenced the Buddhist view of Dharmma, as existing ‘independently of its being cognized’,[6] i.e. objectively.

Most traditional Buddhists, I imagine, would baulk at Ellis’s understanding of the Buddha’s Awakening or Enlightenment, in terms of degrees of integration. Ellis’s section on the ‘Buddha’s Metaphors’ includes the Ocean metaphor, shelving gradually – an apt image for an incremental approach to Awakening, though Harvey adds to this gradualism that ‘insights may then come suddenly’.[7] The question of whether enlightenment occurs gradually or suddenly was debated in eighth century Tibet, and the gradualist side won. A discourse using the simile of a hen sitting on her eggs seems to back up the gradualist view; the eggs are incubated, gradually, over time by the mother hen, yet when the chicks break through the shells with the sharp tips of their claws, this might be construed as ‘sudden penetration to final knowledge’ (p.132).[8] In Rinzai Zen, it is held that kenshōs are sudden, beyond conceptual thinking, but also accepted that they can only be realized after ‘some degree of gradual practice’.[9]

Science would appear to support Ellis’s incremental approach to integrative experience. The principle that ‘nature makes no leaps’,[10] applies, too, in the spooky domain of quantum mechanics, where it was formerly held that quantum leaps were instantaneous; but, as a naturalistic endeavour science’s default position is to reject discontinuities in nature. Ellis, likewise, does not accept ‘sudden’, instantaneous accounts of enlightenment, which he would regard as absolutisations of the integrative psychic process. But, as he later refers to the possibility of unknown parts of the universe as being potentially outside the supposed universality of the domain of conditionality – we only have ‘our limited embodied standpoint’ (p.142) – so too, here, we might also conceive of other possible worlds ­– perhaps a planet populated by Rinzai ‘suddeners’ – where nature does make leaps, and sudden ‘discontinuities’ do occur.

Turning now to the Buddha’s Middle Way, understood as the avoidance of hedonism and asceticism, Ellis writes that ‘there is nothing here that limits the Middle Way to the avoidance of only these particular two poles’ (p.148). But, here, at the very source for our understanding of the Buddha’s Middle Way, the Buddha’s First Address, Ellis deviates from, and in my view misunderstands, the true Universal Middle Way of the Buddha; Ellis’s Universal Middle Way complicates and obscures the Buddha’s simple expression of the Middle Way with the unnecessary multiplication of these two poles and the addition of his five sub-principles. If we apply Ockham’s Razor then the Buddha’s visionary First Address[11] should be limited to its functioning simply as his foundational roadmap, as setting out the Middle Way between hedonism and asceticism, here outlined in broad brushstrokes – rather like the central white lines on a road. Along with the other pair of extremes, eternalism and nihilism – like cautionary double yellow lines, at both sides of the road – they represent fundamental parameters which orient the universal human condition, guiding our life and speculative afterlife existential choices within a normative, meditative and philosophical framework, i.e. the Eightfold Path and Conditionality. For the Buddha – a safe and proficient driver – observing the Middle Way between these parameters led to ‘direct knowledge’ (p.148).  

I have already referred to the correspondence theory of truth (the other two main theories of truth are the coherence theory and the pragmatic theory). However, more pertinent to the Buddha’s ‘intimate’ ‘direct knowledge’ is the ‘assimilation theory of truth’ – objective, but not public – described by Thomas Kasulis, in his book Intimacy or Integrity.[12]  Basically, the assimilation theory concerns expert knowledge, i.e. ‘only a master can certify the skill or insight of a disciple and only an established master can certify a new master’ (p.79). This relates to stream-entry. It is said that, during his First Address, the Buddha recognized and affirmed Kondañña’s experiential insight into the Four Noble Truths – such insight is described as gaining the stainless Dharma-eye. Ellis, however, questions whether we can make sense of the idea of a stream-entrant (p.240).

For Ellis, ‘direct knowledge’ – if it is meant as ‘knowledge and vision of things as they really are’, (i.e. insightful knowledge), as expressed in one of the positive links of the Spiral Path – is ‘dubious metaphysics’ (p.198). But, in his First Address, I don’t think that the Buddha was theorizing about the universe (p.196) in metaphysical terms; he just sketches a Middle Way route, applicable to all road users; a general direction to be taken, within boundaries. Perhaps, practising the Middle Way, within, and limited to, the fundamental two pairs of parameters, is more akin to a skilful know-how, like driving a car, than an ‘absolutised’ propositional know-that; although, knowing the safest way to drive from A to B does involve knowledge-that, e.g. knowing the Highway Code.

In the Simile of The Raft – simply and potently interpreted as the inevitability of severing one’s external adherence to the Eightfold Path, on attaining nirvāṇa (or a sufficiently well-integrated mind (Ellis)) – Ellis again complicates matters by measuring the simile by, and reducing it to, his principle of provisionality, i.e. that considering ‘alternative options’ (p.102) to discarding the raft should be entertained; and, so, the truth and power of the simile is weakened in irrelevant fabrication and over-literalisation, e.g. one might keep the raft ‘just in case there is another river’ to cross (p.103). This connects with our previous discussion about the nature – sudden or gradual – of enlightenment. If there is a totally well-integrated mind, then a proliferation of alternative possibilities is needless; that is, if sudden enlightenment is a distinct possibility. Acting without the need for explicit reminders of, or reliance on, the Teachings, or having internalized the Teachings to the point of their becoming spontaneous to our way of being, are comparable to a road without markings, and driving Codeless. Does the way of the Buddha, here, begin to resemble, in externals at least, the antinomian Way of Daoism?

I think Ellis is right to point out that conditionality, as expressed in ‘traditional formulae’ (p.199), e.g. the twelve nidānas (reactive mind), or the Spiral Path (creative mind), can become ‘rigidified’ (p.197) or, perhaps, merely learned by rote;[13] but I disagree with him that the graphic depiction of the twelve nidānas, in the Tibetan Wheel of Life, is no longer in the most ‘helpful form’ (p.198) to communicate universal insight. It is arguably, to some people, a valuable and useful teaching aid, and mnemonic device, in concrete, pictorial, non-intellectual, aesthetic form, that would readily appeal to those who have a predominantly visual learning style (which is perhaps why YouTube has an animated version), and who may be illiterate; to such people it may represent an artistic illustration of the universal in the particular.

Ellis, at times, can tend towards a reductionist position. For example, when he is discussing ‘desire’, he concludes that there is only one sort of desire and this is equated with ‘energy flowing through our brain and nervous system’ (p.210). This physicalist understanding of desire can be contrasted with a more nuanced Epicurean philosophical distinction between three sorts of desire, namely; natural and necessary, natural but not necessary, and vain and empty.[14]

Also, when Ellis adopts Ian McGilchrist’s ‘brain lateralisation’ approach, he appears to slide, sometimes in the space of a single sentence, between a folk psychological use of language and physiologically-based expressions (e.g. pp.131, 137, 173, 188, 209, 214, 262). For example, Ellis writes: ‘That means that it is the left hemisphere that is the source of our impatience ...’ (p.266). But, obviously, all sorts of reasons and causes may be the ‘source of our impatience’ that are not directly sourceable to the left hemisphere of the brain; I may, for instance, become impatient because of an external factor, such as my train being late.

Ellis’s formulaic metalanguage (by contrast, the Buddha, I imagine, spoke a fluent metta-language!) – the five sub-principles, plus ‘absolutisation’ – is comprised of nouns, abstract nouns, and smacks of a confected metaphysics. When compared to the rich, everyday concrete imagery of the Buddha’s simple metaphors, it seems more like an x-ray image, an attempt to capture perhaps, a supposed hidden essence, the bones, of Ellis’s universal Middle Way, beneath the flesh and blood of the Buddha’s Middle Way. Moreover, structurally or formally, as it occurs throughout the book, I would liken Ellis’s purported universal Middle Way to Plato’s Forms, and the Buddha’s (and alternative sources of the) Middle Way, to imperfect copies in the sensory world; or, perhaps better, compare Ellis’s universal Middle Way and its relation to the alternative sources, including the Buddha’s Middle Way, to the Hindu religion, which is sometimes described as a ‘polymorphic monotheism’ (one God, many forms). No doubt, Ellis would reject the metaphysically realist, Platonic/Divine connotations, here; but, I merely indicate a possible structural congruence.  

It may be, however, that the discoverer and pioneer of the Middle Way, the truly Universal Middle Way – the Buddha – is without peer, and that all the subsequent commentaries and various writings, including Ellis’s book, on the Buddha’s Middle Way, since Siddhartha Gautama’s time are, to paraphrase Whitehead on Plato, merely a ‘series of footnotes’ to the Buddha.[15]

Arnold Tilley lives and works on the Fylde Coast of the UK. When not playing table tennis, he studies philosophy with the Open University.

[1] Gombrich, R.F. (2006),  Theravada Buddhism, Oxford: Routledge, p.21 (see also Dhivan Thomas Jones,  ‘Did the Buddha Exist?  Contemporary scholarly debate about the historical Buddha’, www.dhivan.net, 14 July 2019).

[2] Keown, D. (2000), Buddhism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: OUP, p.4ff.

[3] Hadot, P. (1995), Philosophy as a Way of Life, Oxford: Blackwell.

[4] Sellars, J. (2014), Stoicism, Oxford: Routledge, pp.69–70.

[5] Beckwith, C. (2015),  Greek Buddha: Pyrrho’s Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia,  Princeton University Press, p.23.

[6] Gombrich, R.F. op.cit. p.33.

[7] Harvey, P. (2013),  An Introduction to Buddhism (2nd ed.), Cambridge University Press, p.49.

[8] from ‘Development’: Aṅguttara-nikāya 7: 71: trans. Bhikkhu Bodhi (2012), Numerical Discourses of the Buddha, Boston: Wisdom.

[9] Harvey, P., op.cit. p.371.

[10] see Ball, P., ‘Quantum Leaps, Long Assumed to be Instantaneous, Take Time’, https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-leaps-long-assumed-to-be-instantaneous-take-time-20190605/, 5 June 2019.

[11] The quotation from Ellis, above, refers to a passage from the Saṃyutta-nikāya, 42: 12, in trans. Bhikkhu Bodhi (2000), Connected Discourses of the Buddha, Boston: Wisdom, p.1350, which records a conversation between the Buddha and Rasiya, the headman. It reiterates the Buddha’s First Address, almost verbatim, with just an additional reference to the Eightfold Path.

[12] Kasulis, T.P. (2002), Intimacy or Integrity: Philosophy and Cultural Difference, University of Hawai’i Press.

[13] See the Upanisā Sutta, Saṃyutta-nikāya, trans. Bhikkhu Bodhi (2000), Connected Discourses of the Buddha, Boston: Wisdom, (in this short discourse, the apparently rigid categories of the Spiral Path are dissolved, and unfold in flowing, watery imagery, i.e. from rain to gullies to ponds to lakes to streams to rivers to the great ocean – a journey, perhaps, from faith to tranquillity).

[14] O’Keefe, T. (2014), Epicureanism, Oxon: Routledge, p.124.

[15] Alfred North Whitehead wrote in his Process and Reality (1979), Free Press, p.39: ‘The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.’

Some information on two scholarly and philosophical events coming up in our Triratna Buddhist community:

Triratna Scholars Network study retreat Sunday 15 Dec–Thursday 19 Dec 2019 at Adhisthana (ending after lunch on the Thursday), led by Sāgaramati, Dhīvan and Śraddhāpa. Please book through the Adhisthana website, or contact Dhivan (thomas@dhivan.net) with questions. Open to Order members and mitras. The theme will be:
Early Perfection of Wisdom. The Aṭṭhakavagga or Chapter of the Eights, from the Sutta Nipāta of the Pāli canon, presents an early version of the Buddha’s teaching, which emphases the abandoning views and opinions, and dwelling in an open state of non-attachment, a version of the Dharma that has much in common with the Perfection of Wisdom (Prajñāpāramitā) literature of later Mahāyāna Buddhism. This study retreat, organised by the Triratna Scholars Network, will explore the Pāli text and context of the Aṭṭhakavagga, and the Sanskrit text of the Ratnaguṇasaṃcayagāthā or Collection of Verses on Precious Qualities, an early Perfection of Wisdom text. As well as the study of texts, there will be discussion of scepticism in Greek and Indian philosophy, and daily meditation on the themes of the retreat. This event is open to Order members and mitras, and is aimed at those with an interest in the study of Buddhist texts and languages.

Philosophy Symposium 24 Jan–Monday 27 Jan 2020 at Adhisthana, led by Sīlavādin, Dhivan and Matt Drage. Please book through the Adhisthana website, or contact Dhivan (thomas@dhivan.net), or Sīlavādin (meynardvasen@gmail.com), or Matt Drage (mndrage@gmail.com) with questions. Open to Order members and mitras. The theme will be:

Exploring Buddhist Modernism: How modern western ideas shape western Buddhism. What cultural and historical forces have made Western Buddhism possible? How have modern revolutions in philosophy and psychology, such as Kant’s claim that our world is mind-dependent, and William James' focus on the "experience" of the individual, shaped the way we understand the Buddha's teachings? How does the naturalistic worldview of modern science influence how we interpret the doctrines of 'dependent arising' and rebirth?  How does romanticism – with its blending of the imagination, the arts, individualism and Christian spirituality – inform the way we have come to understand the Buddhist path? 

In this symposium we want to explore how we cannot help looking at the Dharma in terms of these paradigms, although we might not be aware of doing so (or especially if we are not aware). We also want to explore how these paradigms have played a role in Sangharakshita's thinking and teaching. 

(Posted on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies:)

This summer, Prof. Gombrich will run another Advanced Pali reading course in Oxford in August. The dates for this course are as follows: arrive Wednesday evening, 14th August, depart Friday morning 23rd August. There will be no class on Sunday 18th August. This course will be unlike the introductory course.  It will mainly consist of reading texts together in class.  This year that will include poetry and commentaries; some texts will be distributed in advance.

As in previous years, students on the course will be housed in Clive Booth Student Village, which is owned by Oxford Brookes University.  Accommodation costs for the entire course amount to £270.  The accommodation block is about 10 mins walk from the lecture room that we shall be using.  (Due to development works this year, the stay will be in upgraded ensuite accommodation.  Since the costs are substantially higher than normal, the OCBS has decided to subsidise this increase to maintain affordability for as many students as possible). The cost of the course, excluding the accommodation, will be £360 (covering lecture room hire, teaching costs, and expenses). 

Vajratara reviews a first-class new book on early Buddhist doctrine:

Early Buddhist Teachings

by Y. Karunadasa

Boston: Wisdom Publications 2018, 240pp, hb £22.50, pb £11, ebook

review by Vajratara

In a book market saturated with books about Buddhism, one may not immediately choose a book about early Buddhist teachings written by a Pali and Buddhist studies Scholar. However, though Early Buddhist Teachings goes over some of the same ground as other books about basic Buddhism, it offers a fresh and comprehensive overview that leaves us with a deeper understanding. Professor Karunadasa explains a wide range of Pali terms and teachings, bringing them together in such a way as to enable the reader to understand not only their definition, but also their relation to each other.  

He builds up his explanation by giving an outline of Buddhism as a dynamic-process philosophy. Subject and object are not fixed entities, but describe an ever changing process. Buddhism is essentially pragmatic. In the ever changing process of experience, whatever helps one to eliminate passion, aversion and delusion and develop generosity, loving kindness and wisdom are the Dhamma. Karunadasa is keen to rebuff any ideas that Buddhism involves ‘esotericism’ or ‘mysticism’. As he understands it, ‘mysticism’ involves attributing a ‘higher metaphysical reality’ outside of our direct experience or in positing the goal of Buddhism as a ‘mystical absorption with an absolute’. The Buddha, he says, described the nature of ‘the world’, the world being the world that we experience through our six senses (including mind): ‘It is only world of sensory experience that Buddhism recognises, the world that we experience through our six sense faculties.’

The nature of this world is described as the middle way, as 'dependent arising’, rejecting the extremes of nihilism and eternalism. This is the foundation of Karunadasa’s exploration of the early Buddhist teachings. From that foundation he explains how the notion of self identity is formed in the cognitive process, and how the mind, and consciousness, construct our reality. This is where Karunadasa’s summary is at its most comprehensive and penetrating. He explores both the conscious, reflective and pre-reflective level of the creation of self-identity in a way that reveals the dynamic depth of our perceptions of who we are. He explores the nature of the relationship between mind and body and between consciousness and the other mental faculties. The continuum of mental phenomena that is the mind in action is explained in every stage and every level. What emerges is an understanding of the mind in early Buddhist teachings that is complex and subtle. It is invaluable for students of the later Buddhist teachings on self identity, mind and consciousness to understand the basis of the later teachings in light of the early Buddhist texts. Each term used – viññāna, manas, citta, cetāsika, vedanā, saññā, etc. – is precise and multi-layered. Karunadasa gives a clear explanation which enables the reader to understand what the Buddha did, and did not, mean when he used each term. 

The latter part of Early Buddhist Teachings is taken up with the practical implications of the understanding of mind and the cognitive process. He discusses the nature of unsatisfactoriness, suffering or dukkha, and how to lead an ethical life that leads us beyond suffering, to mundane happiness and to the highest happiness of all, Enlightenment or Nibbāna. Moral ‘evil’ and moral good is based in the mind, and again Karunadasa explains the deep-seated psychological tendencies that we are all subject to, and how they manifest in ‘the mind’s turbulence’ and are expressed in action. Nibbāna too is explained in various ways, clearing up any misunderstandings, and exploring the more complex dimensions of Nibbāna, such as Nibbāna being ‘free from action’ (kamma). This leads into a discussion of the mystery of what happens when a Buddha dies, along with the other ‘unanswered’ questions. Karunadasa finishes the book looking at the Buddhist attitude to the idea of ‘God’. The appendix discusses the Buddhist rejection of religious fundamentalism. This seems of particular interest given recent religious tensions and inter-religious violence in Sri Lanka, Karunadasa’s native country.

Early Buddhist Teachings gives both breadth and depth in understanding the early teachings. Karunadasa combines both scholarship and accessibility, making it a good overview for those students wishing to deepen their knowledge of Buddhism and understand the early Buddhist foundations of later Buddhist teachings. It would also appeal to those who would like an introduction to the teachings found in the Pali Canon. For those training for ordination in the Triratna Buddhist Order, it offers a very good companion to The Survey of Buddhism by Sangharakshita, whom he quotes. It is an academic book, and thus gives a reliable grounding in the early teachings. The implications of those teachings in modern life are left for us to reflect on in our own way. Karunadasa gives us the tools to do so. 

Vajratara has been a member of the Triratna Buddhist Order since 2004.  She lives and works at Tiratanaloka retreat centre in Wales where she helps train women for ordination.

Another review – this time by myself (Dhīvan) on an excellent new history of Buddhist philosophy in India:

The Golden Age of Indian Buddhist Philosophy

by Jan Westerhoff

Oxford University Press, 2018, 326pp £30 hb

 review by Dhīvan

In a customary gesture in books like this one, [1] Jan Westerhoff asks in his introduction what the purpose might be in his writing another history of Buddhist philosophy, given that those already available were written by such eminent scholars. In this case, the eminent scholars are Volker Zotz (writing in German), Emmanuel Guillon (in French) and Edward Conze (in English); hence the nearest rival to Westerhoff’s new book is Three Phases of Buddhist Thought in India by Conze, published in 1962. In the Preface to Conze’s work, that particular eminent scholar laments the ‘hideous and brutish noises emanating from machines’ (p.7) that deepen the spiritual darkness of our times; he wonders about the point of a history of Buddhist philosophy in the ‘age of the moron’ (p.9); and moans that ‘no Oxford or Cambridge professor would demean himself by paying the slightest attention to his colleagues of ancient India’ (p.9). 

 How very miserably last-century that seems now. Times must have changed, since Jan Westerhoff is the Professor of Buddhist Philosophy at Oxford. This is not to say that lots of people are now paying attention to Buddhist philosophy; but Westerhoff’s academic post is a an important sign of the increasing interest in, and integration of, Buddhist (and Indian) philosophy into a more multi-cultural approach to philosophy in contemporary academia and beyond. [2] And his new book, The Golden Age of Indian Buddhist Philosophy, is a significant contribution to that interest and integration. In short, his book is simply the best high-level introduction to Buddhist philosophy now available, by a yojana. [3]

Jan Westerhoff likes to dress in a three-piece suit, sporting a handkerchief in his jacket pocket, and a middle parting in his hair. This academic style rather separates him from older Buddhist studies professors, who tend to be the product of the 1960s counter-culture, or the more recent Buddhist studies types, who are still a bit fringe. So what led him to Buddhist philosophy? His background is in mathematical philosophy, but he did a second doctorate on Nāgārjuna, [4] and it is evidently the philosophical rigour of Nāgārjuna’s philosophy and Madhyamaka that has attracted him. [5] All this might have led to a forbiddingly intellectual history of Buddhist philosophy, but The Golden Age turns out to be very readable (if not exactly beginners-level) in the sense of focussing on essentials, without attempting to go into too many details.

Westerhoff’s Introduction sets out his method, which is to treat Buddhist philosophy as a ‘game’. This sounds odd, since Buddhism as such is not a ‘game’ but the teaching of the way to awakening; but it begins to make sense as one considers that intellectual activity is not in itself the way to awakening, which is beyond words, but is rather connected with the clarification and correction of assumptions and views which are relevant to the life of training towards awakening. The various arguments between philosophers does in fact resemble a game – a serious, hard-fought kind of game, though not much like football. And, in fact, the actual history of Buddhist philosophy in India has very distinct ‘sides’ (Abhidharmikas, Mādhyamikas, Yogācārins), individual philosophers tending to identify with one of the schools. Westerhoff goes on to describe the factors involved in this game. As well as (a) arguments and (b) sacred texts there is (c) meditative practice. That is, Buddhist philosophy is not justan intellectual activity, but it also involves the conceptual exploration of what Westerhoff nicely calls the ‘meditative phenomenology’ (p.8) of Buddhist practice, whereby certain frameworks of thought give rise to particular meditative experiences. This in turn leads to the re-interpretation of sacred texts and the valuing of certain arguments. So this game is not much like chess either. 

Now Westerhoff can discuss the material that the philosophical game works with. It consists of (a) teachings of the Buddha (both the original teachings and the later Mahāyāna ones), (b) debates in the intellectual culture of India, (c) commentaries on the teachings and debates, and (d) doxographies, or accounts of the various views held by various schools. From this it becomes evident that Buddhist philosophy presented itself in a very different way to western philosophy; not much in terms of independent works by individual philosophers, but taking the appearance of interpretations of Buddhist teachings within a debate framework. The dependence of Buddhist philosophy on the acceptance of Buddhist teachings leads to a situation in which philosophical activity appears to take for granted beliefs (for instance, in yogic powers, or in Padmasambhava’s mythic attributes) that are far from ‘rational’ in the western sense. At this point Westerhoff invokes a methodological principle that is both refreshing and radical. Rather than either dropping the naturalistic assumptions of western thought, or dropping the specific Buddhist commitments of the thinkers he is writing about, he proposes a charitable acceptance of those Buddhist commitments and a ‘bracketing’ of our naturalistic assumptions ‘in order to see how far we can go in our analysis without appealing to them’ (p.32). The result of this kind of immersive philosophical method turns out to be one of visiting a strange, unfamiliar intellectual landscape in such a way that one gradually starts to feel at home.

In Chapter 1, Westerhoff explores Abhidharma as philosophy. It soon becomes evident that his approach is quite discursive and narrative, outlining the historical development of the philosophical schools, describing their texts and interests, characterising their particular approach and how a modern reader might appreciate it. The philosophical content of the chapter on Abhidharma consists in sketching its ontology of dharmas in relation to Buddhist teachings, and in contrasting differences between Abhidharma schools. Westerhoff pays special attention to the dominant Sarvāstivādins, presenting their arguments for the peculiar view that past and future dharmas really exist. His principle of charity becomes very evident here, since Sarvāstivādin views are far from attractive, least of all to a Madhyamaka. His section on the Pudgalavādins is likewise sympathetic, stressing the continuity of the view of the real existence of the person with later views of Buddha-nature, while leaving it open whether these views are compatible with Buddhist teachings.

As might be expected from an expert on Nāgārjuna, Chapter 2 on Madhyamaka is crystal clear, though its emphases are surprising. Westerhoff invites readers to bracket their naturalistic assumptions about the life-span of Nāgārjuna, to get at the significance of believing he lived for 600 years and had magic powers: this belief may have been a way to make sense of claims made about different people called Nāgārjuna. Moreover, the story that Nāgārjuna was entrusted with the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtras by the nāgas starts to make sense once we appreciate how Nāgārjuna, in his main work (the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā), presented arguments to support what Westerhoff calls the ‘doctrine of illusionism’ of the Perfection of Wisdom literature. Rather than trying to determine a version of Nāgārjuna’s philosophy that would be acceptable to humanistic assumptions, Westerhoff rather emphasises the difficulties of understanding Nāgārjuna, and the large questions that remain for understanding his apparent toleration of contradiction. Westerhoff’s Nāgārjuna is an interpreter of prajñāpāramitā through the hermeneutic of the two truths. He goes on to describe the ideas of commentators on Madhyamaka, such as Buddhapālita, Bhāviveka and Candrakīrti; it came as something of a shock to me to discover how little space the brilliant Candrakīrti gets in a history of Buddhist philosophy, so rich is the tradition. In this chapter, Westerhoff also continues a theme from Chapter 1, of setting Buddhist philosophy into a broader setting of Indian philosophical debate, in this case how the Mādhyamikas were concerned to argue against the realist philosophy of Nyāya. This approach emphases Westerhoff’s unwillingness to try to naturalise Buddhist philosophy into western philosophical narratives, but rather to expand the reader’s horizons.

Chapter 3 concerns Yogācāra, which Westerhoff prefers to try to harmonise with Madhyamaka rather than portraying the schools as rivals. Westerhoff discusses key Yogācāra concepts (the three natures, the ālaya-vijñāna or foundational consciousness, mind-only, and so on) at length, and there is another surprising emphasis here. He notes how contemporary western accounts of Yogācāra tend to argue against an idealist interpretation of mind-only, by emphasising epistemology rather than ontology: that ‘mind-only’ refers to the thesis that we can only know the world in terms of our representations of it, representations that (the Yogācārins argue) depend on the mind; this is not the same as claiming that the world does not exist. His point is that idealism is totally out of fashion in western philosophy, but that is not a good argument for interpreting Yogācāra as non-idealist. Westerhoff’s own contribution is to argue that, according to the Yogācārins, ‘the true nature of reality can only be known through meditation’ (p.178), so that the Yogācāra arguments for representation-only are more like denials of the discursive assumptions of ordinary people. 

In Chapter 4 Westerhoff moves on to the later logico-epistemological thought of Diṅnāga and Dharmakīrti. These thinkers had in fact already appeared in section 2 of Chapter 3, which seemed rather out of place in what was not the best-organised chapter of the book. [6] But in the present chapter, their thought is presented with a clarity that soon reveals their work to be the nearest that Buddhist philosophy gets to some of the enduring concerns of western philosophical thought about knowledge and language. Diṅnāga argues that knowledge through perception consists not in the recognition of some real thing ‘out there’ in the world, but in the conceptual construction of representations from the information that appears to the senses. This is a kind of phenomenalism, and Westerhoff’s contrast of Diṅnāga’s and Dharmakīrti’s philosophical view with the view of the Mīmāṃsā school, that language involves a correspondence of words to things, is a helpful way into the issues, as they were seen by Indian philosophers of the time.

In some Concluding Remarks, Westerhoff returns to a theme implicit through his whole presentation: that of the relationship of philosophical thinking to the meditative methods of Buddhist practice. He invokes the name of Pierre Hadot, whose work on philosophy as a way of life, in the context of ancient Greece and Rome, emphasises how philosophical discourse was in service to the practice of spiritual exercises and debate, for the sake of achieving the goal or aim of life as conceived in a particular school. [7] From this point of view, it is important not to approach Buddhist philosophy with the assumption from contemporary western philosophy that it is an ‘exercise of reason, for its own sake’ (p.283). The meditative dimension of Buddhist philosophy makes such an approach unlikely to do justice to what is essential. Rather, Westerhoff recommends ‘doing philosophywith ancient texts’ (p.284), which means bracketing naturalistic assumptions, putting oneself into the midst of the particular problems that Buddhist philosophers were concerned with, and appreciating the methods – meditative as well as argumentative – that they employed to solve them. Sādhu, Jan Westerhoff!

Dharmacārin Dhīvan is the editor of Western Buddhist Review. He is a member of the Triratna Buddhist Order, and author of This Being, That Becomes: the Buddha’s Teaching on Conditionality.

[1] The book reviewed here is part of an ongoing OUP series: ‘The Oxford History of Philosophy is an open-ended series of books which will weave together to form a new history of philosophy’ (OUP website).

[2] On which, see especially Jay Garfield, Engaging Buddhism: Why it Matters to Philosophy, OUP, 2015; and Peter Adamson’s and Jonardon Ganeri’s now-concluded 62-part podcast ‘Philosophy in India’.

[3]1 yojana= about 7km.

[4] Which eventually became Nāgārjuna's Madhyamaka. A Philosophical Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2009.

[5] Recent works include The Dispeller of Disputes: Nāgārjuna's Vigrahavyāvartanī, Oxford University Press, 2010, and Crushing the Categories: Vaidalyaprakaraṇa by Nāgārjuna, Wisdom Publications, 2018.

[6] Not only is Chapter 3 somewhat disorganised, but the book as whole contains many typos and errors; the final copy seems not to have been proofed. This is odd, considering the beautiful production of the text, complete with marginal text box summaries, à la King James Bible.

[7] See Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, Blackwell: Oxford, 1995; and especially What is Ancient Philosophy? Harvard University Press, 2004. See also my blog post.

We present a review by Nāgapriya of Anālayo's recent study of the Buddhist teaching of rebirth and what evidence there might be for the truth of it:

Rebirth in Early Buddhism and Current Research

by Bhikkhu Analayo

Wisdom Publications, Somerville MA, 279pp. hb. £22.50

review by Nāgapriya

Bhikkhu Anālayo has garnered a distinguished reputation as an authoritative scholar of the Pali Canon and early Buddhism. His mastery not only of Pāli sources but also of parallels in Chinese translation has enabled him to produce a growing corpus of erudite books and articles which are, at the same time, anchored in his spiritual practice as a Theravāda monk. His basic approach is to select a key theme and explore what the Pali Canon and related texts have to say about it, supplemented by his own critical apparatus.

In the present work, Anālayo brings his formidable talents to bear on the vexed topic of rebirth. While he begins with Pāli sources, he then goes on to look at scientific investigation into rebirth, besides documenting in considerable detail the case study of a Sri Lankan boy who was able to recite Pali texts seemingly from memory without ever having been taught them. 

Anālayo makes it clear in his introduction that he does not aim to campaign for the acceptance of the doctrine of rebirth and that, moreover, his own practice does not rest on its acceptance. He also notes that not all of the sections are likely to be of equal interest. It is worth pointing out too that the book includes a lengthy appendix, around 70 pages, which consists in a transcription of the texts that the Sri Lankan boy recited. This material relates only in a tangential way to the central topic and could easily have been omitted without significant impact on the central topic.

In Part 1 of the book, which is relatively short (around 30 pages), Anālayo reviews the early Buddhist doctrine of rebirth. In this section, rebirth is contextualized within the general principle of conditionality, and the traditional view that meditative training may permit the capacity to remember past lives is explored. He concludes that 'rebirth is an integral and essential component of early Buddhist thought' (p.35) and that its flat rejection would seem to contradict notions of right view. What precisely rebirth may mean is not treated in detail here and there is no exploration of different rebirth models or options.

In Part 2, Anālayo explores how Buddhists throughout history have defended and argued for the notion of rebirth. He squarely rejects modern attempts to claim that the Buddha didn’t really teach rebirth and underlines its orthodoxy. He also touches on the difficulty encountered in the Chinese reception of karma and rebirth, pointing out that it was more common for people to think in terms of receiving retribution for the deeds of their ancestors. While Anālayo does not explore this option, such beliefs invite reflection as to whether rebirth should be understood only as an individual transmission or whether we may in fact inherit the karmic traces of multiple individuals and bequeath our own karmic legacy to multiple others.

In Part 3, Anālayo summarizes a range of empirical evidence that would appear to offer support for the idea of rebirth. In doing so, he looks at near-death experiences, past-life regression, children’s memories of past lives, and xenoglossy. Xenoglossy refers to the ability to utilise a language which it would seem a person could not have learnt in their present life. After considering these topics, Anālayo concludes that;

the body of data that has emerged so far changes the status of the idea that rebirth can occur from a religious creed into a reasonable belief supported supported by a body of evidence (p.116).

But this evidence also raises many questions. Why do so few people have past life memories? Does the evidence necessarily indicate an individualized process of rebirth? Is it possible that rebirth is the exception rather than the rule? None of these more philosophical questions are examined. In reflecting on the evidence of apparent memories of past lives, Anālayo concludes that ‘at least some of these cases do reflect genuine memories of the past’ (p.117). This is of course a long way from showing that they represent evidence for rebirth as generally understood in the Buddhist tradition. 

Part 4 presents an extensive study of a striking case of apparent xenoglossy, which relates to a Sri Lankan man named Dhammaruwan who, as a boy, had the capacity to recite a series of Pāli Buddhist texts from memory without ever having learnt them. He later lost this ability but recordings were made of his chanting which Anālayo analyses in relation to the extant written equivalents while forensically identifying discrepancies. At the very least, such phenomena point towards remarkable capacities within consciousness and may even be suggestive of past life memories. The past life in this case appears to relate to the fifth century CE and so raises additional questions about continuity of consciousness and memory, as well as whether rebirth might be a relatively rare event or whether rebirth happens soon after death or whether in fact centuries could pass between rebirths. It is perfectly possible that Dhammaruwan had had intervening lives but then why would he remember a life from some 1600 years earlier? We don’t know. 

In his endorsement on the dust jacket, B. Alan Wallace claims:

This book points to the principle of conservation of consciousness, analogous to the conservation of mass-energy, as one of the fundamental truths of the natural world.

The book certainly doesn’t do that. It does, however, underline how rebirth has formed an integral part of Buddhist teaching and offers some evidence for those in need of it which indicates that rebirth in some form or other is a credible belief. It also leaves many questions untouched which relate to the nature of personal identity, continuity, and karmic legacy. 

Anālayo concludes by proposing that ‘what remains of central importance is to learn to face mortality, one’s own and that of others, rather than turn a blind eye to it’ (p.165). This requires us to practise mindfulness of death. This is an important and pragmatic reminder. All of us will die, whether or not we believe in rebirth, and this fact invites us to consider what our legacy will be. 

Nāgapriya lives in Mexico where is director at Centro Budista de Cuernavaca. His latest book is The Buddhist Way (New Holland). He is also author of Exploring Karma and Rebirth (Windhorse Publications, 2004).

About an event coming up at Adhiṣṭhāna that should be of interest to readers of the Western Buddhist Review:

'From here to the beyond…': Studying the ‘Spiral Path’ in Early Buddhist Discourses

Led by Dhīvan and Sāgaramati

9–16 Dec 2018

This study retreat marks the first led by the newly-initiated Triratna Scholars’ Network and will offer an opportunity to go behind the scenes, as it were, of Sangharakshita’s presentation of the Dharma, to look at the sources and texts connected with the ’Spiral Path’. We will examine closely the sources of this teaching in early Buddhist discourses and beyond, in relation the core teaching of dependent-arising. The path factors, from faith through concentration to liberation, offer a map of for spiritual growth and development through a vision of natural unfolding. But how does this map of experience relate to other accounts, such as the cessation of conditions, or the development of the seven awakening factors? The retreat will offer the opportunity to answer such questions through the study of various early Buddhist texts in translation. We will enter the world of textual scholarship in Pāli and other languages, in which the Dharma comes alive in its historical context. And, most importantly, we will connect this scholarly exploration of the path factors with meditation and reflection on the Dharma.

This event will be suitable for Order members and mitras who would like to engage in text-based study of the Dharma. It will be of particular interest to those considering learning Pāli or Sanskrit, or thinking of engaging in the scholarly study of the Dharma. It will be a great way to network with scholars and the scholarly-minded in Triratna. For more details and to book see the Adhiṣṭhāna website. And please pass on this information to anyone you think might be interested.

We present here a review by Dhīvan and Kulamitra of an important new book for the study of early Buddhist literature and history:

Richard Salomon

The Buddhist Literature of Ancient Gandhāra: An Introduction with Selected Translations

Wisdom Publications, Somerville, MA, 2018, pb $29.95

review by Dhīvan, with a contribution by Kulamitra

In 1994, a clay pot containing ancient birch-bark scrolls appeared on the antiquities market in Pakistan, and was acquired by the British Library. Richard Salomon was one of the first scholars to inspect these fragile scrolls, and to discover that they were written in the Gāndhārī language, in kharoṣṭhī script, and were the oldest Buddhist manuscripts ever found. Since 1994, more collections of Gāndhārī manuscripts have been acquired, and an international team of scholars, with Salomon among them, has dedicated itself to studying them. Having in 1999 written the first guide to the new discoveries [1] – with photos and illustrations that make it still a valuable work – Richard Salomon has now written a non-specialist guide to the highlights of what has been discovered about the Buddhist literature of ancient Gandhāra, including an anthology of translations of the wide range of sūtras and stories that have been worked on so far. This is completely compelling reading for anyone with an interest in early Buddhist literature or Buddhist history. Not only does Salomon write with a wonderful clarity and precision, that allows us to enter into a very specialist world of scholarly study, but the newly discovered Gāndhārī literature opens up whole new perspectives that were simply unavailable before.

Although I had read Salomon’s earlier introduction, as well as some of the specialist volumes published by the University of Washington, [2] and even attended a fascinating seminar on a particular Gāndhārī scroll with Dr Mark Allon at SOAS in London, I found the experience of reading this comprehensive new introduction quite exhilarating. The first three chapters present an overview of the history of Buddhism in the Gandhāra region and some context for understanding the significance of the Gāndhārī literature that has begun to come into view. Ancient Gandhāra comes into the historical record with coins and inscriptions from the period when it was under the rule of Greek and Indo-Greek kings; the paracanonical text The Questions of King Milinda contains fictional philosophical dialogues of the Bhikkhu Nāgasena with the Indo-Greek King Menander. [3] The heyday of Gandhāran Buddhism, however, was the first centuries of the common era. The Kushans, originally from Central Asia, ruled their empire from there; many Buddhists will be familiar with the Hellenic-influenced style of Gandhāran Buddhist sculptures from the Kushan period. Scholars already knew about Buddhist literature from the area, since the discovery of a Gāndhārī version of the Dhammapada in the late 19th c. [4] So although the revelation in 1994 and since of many more scrolls and fragments was not a complete surprise, the implications are nevertheless profound.

This was proof that there had existed Buddhist canons in local languages, such as Gāndhārī, comprising similar, but by no means identical, texts to those preserved in Pāli and Sanskrit and translated into Chinese and Tibetan. The implications for the study of early Buddhism are profound. There are still those who believe that the Pāli canon is in some sense the authentic record of the teaching of the Buddha, even that the Buddha spoke Pāli. This view is now comprehensively refuted, at least as far as sensible scholarship goes. The Pāli canon is the one surviving version of the canon in its original Indian language; but evidently there were others. Since, on the basis of comparative study, there are many small differences between versions, the conclusion must be that the Pāli canon is not ‘the’ authentic record of the teaching of the Buddha, but simply the version of it preserved in Pāli by the Theravāda tradition. 

Salomon goes even further than this. In his conclusion, he makes a comparison between the emerging picture of relationships between the various Buddhist literatures and texts with the discovery made by scholars of human paleontology, that there is not in fact some linear chain of hominid predecessors to modern Homo sapiens, but rather a “tangled bush” of ancestry. Likewise, the early Buddhist texts we now have can rarely be traced through a process of transmission to a single ancestor – representing, perhaps, a record of the original teaching of the Buddha – but rather what we have is a “tangled bush” of transmission lineages and textual traditions, among which none can claim to be the authentic one. In this way, Salomon follows contemporary scholarship in suggesting we speak of “Buddhisms” rather than a single tradition whose various branches can be traced back to its founder. That said, these various Buddhisms are not in fact all that different from each other, and in practice the variations among different texts and traditions generally speaking add to the richness of the tradition considered as a whole, although the fantasy of discovering ‘the Buddha’s original teaching’ now looks impossible rather than simply very difficult to achieve.

Kulamitra adds:

The implications of the research by Salomon and others on the Gāndhārī manuscripts tells us a lot about the process of remembering, editing and finally writing down the Buddha’s sayings. Not only were there various Buddhist regional traditions, each with their own versions of the Buddhist canon, but the way in which they varied allows us to glimpse the process by which the canons were put together. The Buddhist canons include similar material; for instance the Pāli Dhammapada is related to a Gāndhārī version, and there is a Sanskrit version, called Udānavarga, attributed to the Sarvāstivādin school. Other material too, like the Rhinoceros verses discussed by Dhīvan below, seem to have circulated as individual suttas within their different regional schools before being organised into collections in their particular canon. So the individual suttas predate the formation of canons or the collections, such as the ‘Long’ or ‘Middle’ length sayings, into which they were divided. What is more, the different Dhammapadas (and some other suttas in verse) had different numbers of verses, some of them overlapping, between them incorporating more sayings of the Buddha than are preserved in any of the individual Dhammapada collections.Even where verses are substantially the same in different recensions they are put together in different chapters in similar collections. This suggests that the verses were being drawn from a common pool of verses of a Dhammapada type that were in circulation in the oral memories of the Buddhist monks even before the individual suttas formed. Further more, it is clear from the variations of similar verses in the same sutta pool that the verses could be rearranged, with the start of one joined to the end of another, like children’s magnets that can be used to build a structure, then dismantled to form a new one. It is as if they emerged from a disorganised set of proto-verses that could take form in varied ways according to the editorial inclinations of their reciters. In this way, a core of ancient, authentic material was preserved without any one school, or canon, or even any one sutta having a claim to more authenticity than another. We seem to glimpse a spontaneous literary pratītyasamutpāda or dependent arising in this formation of the Buddhist canons, coming into much better focus through the study of the literature from Gandhāra.

Back to Dhīvan:

Another exciting discovery that the study of Gāndhārī texts has made is evidence in support for what has come to be called “the Gāndhārī hypothesis”. This is the hypothesis that the originals for many of the early Buddhist texts translated into Chinese in the first centures of the common era were not in the Pāli or Sanskrit languages, but rather in Gāndhārī. The evidence is linguistic but in some cases compelling. This turns out not to be entirely a surprise, however, since the Gandhāra region is on the Silk Route, the route by which Indian Buddhist spread to China. This in turn brings to mind to existence of whole canons of Buddhist literature in languages now lost to us, and the plurality and diversity of Indian Buddhism in its early days.

However, after the exhilarating opening chapters, so rich in scope and implications, when one comes to the anthology of translations of the newly-discovered Gāndhārī literature, one might feel some disappointment and even frustration. The old scrolls, written on crumbling old birch-bark, yield mere parts of texts, all incomplete, some mere fragments, and much of it hard to decipher. Additionally, although Gāndhārī is a middle-Indo-Aryan dialect (a Prakrit), a cousin of Pāli, a niece of Sanskrit, the scholars working on the Gāndhārī manuscripts have hardly anything else to go on as they try to read the texts they have. There are idioms, spellings and grammatical features that are otherwise unknown. Hence the the twelve chapters containing illustrative translations of the best-preserved or most interesting texts are frustratingly partial. So much of what we would need in order to compare these texts with Pāli or other versions is missing. The translations that Salomon presents are like a random selection, picked out of the lottery of time and chance, many of which have to be padded out with translations from parallels preserved in other languages so that they can even be made to make sense.

Further reading, however, transmutes this sense of frustration into a quiet sense of the revolutionary importance of these old texts for our understanding of early Buddhism. The range of texts that Salomon translates is significant in this regard. There are early poetic texts, such as stanzas from the Dhammapada, and texts with parallels among the mainstream Buddhist sūtras. But there are also stories of the Buddha’s disciples and their karmic backgrounds that seem peculiar to the Gāndhārī tradition, suggesting how Buddhism varied across regions even in its homeland of the Indian subcontinent. There are also fragments of ancient commentary and Abhidharma, which shed fascinating light on the varying traditions of how Buddhists thought about their own texts and traditions. And then, as a kind of fabulous encore, there are extracts from an early Perfection of Wisdom sūtra, giving us a valuable window into the early history of Mahāyāna.

A highlight of the volume for me was chapter 3, entitled ‘The Rhinoceros Sūtra’. I had already studied Salomon’s specialist volume on this early Buddhist poetry, each stanza of which concludes with the line, “one should roam alone like the rhinoceros”. [5 ]The Gāndhārī version of the Rhinoceros verses present many of the same stanzas as the Pāli version, but in a different order. Their existence in Gāndhārī, as well as in Pāli and Sanskrit (in the Mahāvastu) suggests just how popular the verses were among the early Buddhists, perhaps being included in a curriculum for new monastics, hence much-copied and among the best preserved of early texts. Salomon includes a lot of prefatory material to his translation which is easily the best introduction to the Rhinoceros Sūtra available, exploring the concept of solitude in early Buddhism, and the peculiar attribution of these verses to the paccekabuddhas – the ‘solitary Buddhas’ who lived before ‘our’ Buddha arrived. For me at least the book is worth its cover price for this introduction alone.

I was not completely satisfied with Salomon’s scholarship, however. In his chapter on some verses from a Gāndhārī version of the Dhammapada, he includes a translation of a stanza with a parallel preserved in Pāli:

[A monk] who removes anger as soon as it arises, as one removes [snake venom with herbs as it spreads through the body, leaves behind] this world and the next [as] a snake leaves behind its old worn-out skin. [6]

The phrase “this world and the next” in fact recurs in a series of stanzas here which, following their name in Pāli, we can call the uraga (‘serpent’) verses. In a note he comments:

The exact sense of the phrase translated as “this world and the next” (orapara= Skt orapāram) is a problem that has been extensively but inconclusively discussed by traditional and modern scholars. 

I myself have contributed to this discussion but, far from leaving the translation inconclusive, I have come up with a suggestion for an understanding and translation that, although not proven, goes a long way to making sense of not only the phrase orapāra but also some other long-standing issues of understanding and translation of the uraga stanzas. [7] Actually, orapāra does not exactly mean “this world and the next”. Rather, it means “this shore and the far shore”, and the idea that this is a reference to “this world and the next” is an interpretation among several possible interpretations, in a metaphorical context typical of a poetic text. Indeed, the most obvious interpretation of “this shore and the far shore”, or so I argue, is as a reference to a discourse which by some happy coincidences is not only preserved in Gāndhārī, but is translated in Salomon’s new volume, in ch.2, as ‘The Parable of the Log’. [8] In this discourse, the Buddha, while looking at a log floating down the river Ganges, entreats his monks not to get stuck on the near shore or the far shore, the near shore representing the six senses and the far shore the sense-objects, but instead to keep going to reach the ocean, which represents nirvāna. [9] This is not the place to go further into how to fully understand either ‘the Parable of the Log’ or the uraga verses and their parallels in the Gāndhārī Dhammapada, but I was pleased to find that Bhikkhu Bodhi has taken up some of my suggestions in his recent translation of the Suttanipāta. [10] I do not of course suppose that Richard Salomon should necessarily agree with my arguments or conclusions, but my point is more that he seems not to know about them. This in turn suggests that his translations more generally may not always reflect all the scholarship available on the various texts he translates.

I should hope that most readers of this review will, quite rightly, take my very particular criticisms to be those of a disgruntled specialist. They should likewise conclude that, if such a tiny criticism is all that this reviewer can come up with, Salomon’s translations sound good enough. Indeed, generally speaking his translations combine accuracy with a wonderful readibility. Richard Salomon is that rare creature, a scholar who writes beautifully. 

This new volume represents more than an account of first impressions of the literature of Gandhāra. It is more like a deeply considered summary of what has been discovered in the first twenty years of its study. But there is more yet to be studied, and there is the likelihood of yet more ancient birch-bark manuscripts turning up, hopefully not just on the antiquities market in Pakistan, but in their archaeological context. So there is every chance that this book will be followed by more. Let us hope Richard Salomon writes them. These are rich times indeed for the study of early Buddhism.

Dharmacārin Dhīvan is the editor of Western Buddhist Review. He is a member of the Triratna Buddhist Order, and author of This Being, That Becomes: the Buddha’s Teaching on Conditionality.

Dharmacārin Kulamitra is a member of the Triratna Buddhist Order and President of the North London Buddhist Centre. He is currently doing a PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies.

[1] Richard Salomon, Ancient Buddhist Scrolls from Gandhāra: The British Library Kharoṣṭhī fragments, The British Library, London, 1999.

[2] Six volumes so far; see https://asian.washington.edu/early-buddhist-manuscripts-project for details. 

[3] The Milindapañhā now exists only in Pāli, but is thought to have been translated from a north Indian original.

[4] Edited by John Brough as The Gāndhārī Dhammapada, SOAS, London, 1962; his discussion of the text and of the Dhammapada generally are legendary for their thoroughness and caustic wit, but he does not deign to translate. Valerie Roebuck’s translation of The Dhammapada (Penguin, London, 2010) contains some selected translations of those stanzas in the Gāndhārī Dhammapada that are not in the Pāli version.

[5] This is my translation from the Pāli; Salomon translates the parallel Gāndhārī phrase as “wander alone like the rhinoceros”. Some of Salomon’s thinking ended up in an article I wrote on translating this line, which Bhikkhu Bodhi translates “one should live alone like a rhinoceros horn” (Bodhi, trans., The Suttanipāta, Wisdom, Somerville MA, 2017, p.182f.). See Dhivan Thomas Jones (2014), ‘Like the Rhinoceros, or Like Its Horn? The Problem of Khaggavisāṇa Revisited’, Buddhist Studies Review, 31.2, pp.165–78.

[6] Salomon p.196. While this stanza is included in the Gāndhārī Dhammapada, its Pāli parallel is found in the Pāli Suttanipāta v.1, with another in the Sanskrit Udānavarga (another traditional name for the kind of anthology we know as the Dhammapada). The square brackets here enclose words supplied from the Pāli version, missing in the fragmented Gāndhārī text, a typical example of how much has been lost from the birch-bark scrolls.

[7] Dhivan Thomas Jones (2016), ‘“That bhikkhu lets go both the near and far shores”: meaning and metaphor in the refrain from the uraga verses’, Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, 11, pp.71–107.

[8] This discourse is preserved in Pāli in Saṃyutta Nikāya 35:241, trans. Bodhi, Connected Discourses of the Buddha, Wisdom, Boston, 2000, p.1241f. 

[9] A quite delightful discovery in Salomon’s translation is that the Gāndhārī version includes a supplement concerning a frog-bodhisattva (pp.155–6).

[10] See Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans., The Suttanipāta, Wisdom, Somerville MA, 2017, p.1364 n.288 and p.1367 n.308.

We’re delighted to present a review by Akasapriya of an important new book of philosophical reflection on the effects of contemporary social media:

James Williams, Stand Out of our Light

Cambridge University Press, 2018, pb £13, or available as a free ebook

Readers of Vaddhaka’s book The Buddha on Wall Street (reviewed here) may recall that he dedicated a chapter to the attention economy. The term refers to the various ways in which internet-based companies make money, often indirectly, from the users of their services. Stand Out of Our Light is a book-length examination of the same topic by James Williams, a former Google employee turned philosopher at Oxford. 

As awareness grows of the economics of the web, so too does awareness of how it affects users. If an online service is free to use, as Gmail and Facebook are, then the price of using it may be hidden. That price is often attention and personal information, summed up in the popular phrase ‘you are the product’. Although news headlines tend to focus on Facebook, partly because of its scale, the attention economy is not restricted to social media. Any online service that depends upon advertising is part of the attention economy, whether a search engine or a newspaper website. 

The development of the internet has resulted in an abundance of easily accessible information, and this abundance presents challenges. The more information there is, the more important good search becomes: hence the rise of Google. Choosing what to look at also presents problems. Williams quotes Herbert Simon:

when information becomes abundant, attention becomes the scarce resource.

Attention is notionally under our control, but choosing what we attend to can require willpower. When there is widespread competition for our attention and that competition is highly sophisticated, then individual willpower may not be enough.

The rapid pace of innovation means that significant amounts of time and energy may be needed just to keep up with new developments. Online products often change their features and interfaces, as users of Gmail and Facebook will have noticed, and the user has little or no choice in the matter. The online environment is thoroughly designed and much of that design is persuasive, built to serve the purposes of the designer first and the user second. This is especially the case with advertising, persuasive design par excellence.

Advertising is the default business model for most digital services that do not charge for their use. And advertising can be embedded in every aspect of the user’s experience, whether in between news articles or as links embedded in YouTube videos. The effectiveness of adverts depends on getting attention, which can lead to clicks and ultimately purchases. With so many adverts, there is considerable competition between those adverts for your attention. And whereas advertising was once relatively passive – a billboard or a magazine advert, whose effects could largely be measured only in increased sales – the effectiveness of adverts can now be measured at the level of the individual user.

Williams doesn’t think too highly of this. In tracing the brief history of these developments, he writes:

This is how the twenty-first century began: with sophisticated persuasion allying with sophisticated technology to advance the pettiest possible goals in our lives. It began with the AI behind the system that beat the world champion at the board game Go recommending videos to keep me watching YouTube longer.

YouTube’s ‘next up’ feature is just one method of competition for your attention. Another part of the design strategy is variable reward. Facebook’s news feed changes each time you visit, with the prospect of another update always there, but even checking for email is an example of variable reward: you don’t how many new messages you have until you look. Design often persuades you to stay within the system, and to return once you’ve left. In many ways the strategies are similar to those employed by casinos.

Persuasive design is not necessarily bad, and it can be used to ‘nudge’ people to healthier behaviours. But the predominant use of design that Williams explores is to grab our attention and sell advertising. These developments are very new, and we are constantly catching up with the demands they make upon us. Just as laws are sometimes inadequate to keep up with digital developments, Williams argues that our language needs to evolve too. The new and extensive demands on our attention prompt him to find better ways of talking about attention.

Rather than asking what attention is, Williams asks how we might be paying when we pay attention. He turns to John Stuart Mill’s discussion of freedom to suggest that attention can be seen much more broadly than the moment-to-moment decisions about what to look at. Attention can be as much about our plan for our whole lives as a decision to click on an online advert or not. At this point of the book some Buddhists might think that Williams is trying to reinvent the wheel. Whether talking in terms of smṛti, samprajanya or apramāda, or the more fine-grained analysis of processes of attention in the scheme of fifty-one mental events described in Sangharakshita’s Know Your Mind, Buddhism has a rich language of attention. Williams’s approach throughout the book draws upon the western philosophical tradition, but he goes further and invents a threefold analogy of light to describe our faculties of attention. The “Spotlight” is our immediate capacity for navigating awareness and action toward tasks. It enables us to do what we want to do. The “Starlight” describes our broader capacities for navigating life “by the stars” of our higher goals and values. This enables us to be who we want to be. And by “Daylight” Williams implies our fundamental capacities – such as reflection, self-awareness, reason, and intelligence – that enable us to define our goals and values to begin with. It enables us to “want what we want to want”. There are clear overlaps between faculties described in the Buddhist tradition and Williams’s terms.

Williams’s goal in the book is to go deeper in his analysis than similar accounts have done. He questions the usefulness of a model of addiction, or indeed any medical models, because it’s not the only way that technology can be problematic. Instead, as suggested in his model of types of light, he sees the problems as much larger, potentially affecting our overall moral direction. 

Competition in the attention economy is not just between various services vying for the individual’s attention, but also pits individuals against one another. Systems of ‘likes’ can encourage people to compete with each other and also with their past selves, seeking attention from others in ever more dramatic ways. In 2017 a man filmed a stunt in which he asked his wife to shoot a gun at a thick book he held in front of his chest. The book was not thick enough to stop the bullet, which killed him. The video had been intended for YouTube in a bid to increase the number of subscribers to the couple’s channel, and Williams describes several such tragic incidents. Reflecting on his own relationship to online activity, he came to realise that his behaviour was being shaped away from his deeper values towards somewhere that was not to his benefit. Instead, he highlights the necessity of reflection and leisure for remaining in touch with our deeper values. But it needs to be true leisure, away from the apparently innocent scrolling through a news feed.

In the end, the attention economy is structured to encourage behaviour quite opposed to reflective leisure. At one extreme, this can take the form of mob rule and public shaming, an unfortunate aspect of behaviour seen on the social media platform Twitter, and can even play a role in genocide. The UN’s Special Rapporteur has said that Facebook played a significant role in helping to incite violence towards the Rohingya in Myanmar. The platform has unfortunately been used by nationalist Buddhists to propagate hate speech towards the Muslim minority, many of whom have had to flee the country. These are tragic and unintended effects of the attention economy, but its larger project is unquestionably the manipulation of the will, often in a way that does not serve humanity well.

The book is mainly devoted to describing the problem rather than suggesting solutions. Williams rejects the idea of a balanced account because he sees the technologies as fiercely adversarial by design. The challenges are new in kind, and clarity about their effects is impossible because technology keeps changing. However Williams does believe that technology can improve the world, and points to the potential of the internet to spread awe and wonder, as well as more divisive emotions. Despite focussing on problems, he also wishes to avoid the risks of overt moralism. Metaphors of consumption – such as addiction – can be signs that this is happening, as much as their converse, such as the idea of a digital detox. Individuals might find taking a break from online activity quite helpful, but in the end Williams questions whether adaptation can be enough as the competition for our attention is too great.

In passing, Williams dismisses mindfulness as irrelevant to these issues. Although it is implied that he would see mindfulness practices as an insufficient antidote to the problems he describes, Williams has more philosophical reasons for rejecting it. He sees as futile the application of Eastern religious terms to a problem which that is attacking the basis of Western democracy, itself founded on very different philosophical foundations. This is a sweeping judgment, but might point to one of the potential shortcomings of the secular mindfulness movement: its lack of an overtly ethical dimension.

When it comes to attributing the problems, Williams seems rather too quick to say that no one is to blame. Notwithstanding his arguments that a complex technological culture has arisen that goes beyond the decisions of any individual, it’s tempting to think that loyalty to his past at Google may be influencing him. Systems are designed by individuals and every design decision in services such as Facebook will require many hours of work to program and test. Those designs will be motivated by business goals, set by human beings, all of whom have made decisions about how those goals should be implemented. The wider effects of those decisions may be unintended, but that does not mean that some individual responsibility cannot be sought. Mark Zuckerberg for one has become extremely rich as a result of overseeing Facebook’s model and methods of selling advertising. 

This assessment also sets up an apparent contradiction with one of the solutions proposed. Williams introduces the idea of a kind of Hippocratic oath of designers, a code of conduct for design to work in humanity’s best interests. This seems a worthy aim. But if no one designer can be held responsible for the faults of the attention economy, and a widespread culture has grown up with a particular ethos, how likely is it that some designers adopting a code of conduct would be able to turn the tide? 

Williams’s larger theme is the threat to democracy that the attention economy presents. When online services steer individuals towards less wholesome directions, the quality of public debate and even democracy itself can be undermined. Williams was writing before recent revelations about the use of Facebook’s data and advertising in attempts to influence the outcome of Britain’s EU referendum, but that event only underlines how relevant this book is. Democracy is partly about the freedom to make choices about how we govern ourselves, but there is another kind of freedom at stake. Ultimately, our capacity for attention can be equated with our bigger freedom to make ethical choices – and with the ability to set the direction of our whole lives. Stand Out of our Light is a valuable contribution to our understanding of how and why our ability to pay attention is threatened as never before.

Akasapriya is a historian of art and museums living in London, who also makes paintings and designs websites.

We present here a review of a new book exploring common ground between Buddhism and the philosophical tradition of Stoicism:

More Than Happiness: Buddhist and Stoic Wisdom for a Sceptical Age

by Antonia Macaro

Icon Books, London, 2018. £12.99 hb

review by Dhīvan

I met the author of More Than Happiness, Antonia Macaro, at a mindfulness retreat in 2016 led by Ven Anālayo,[i] and then again in November 2017 at a Bodhi College weekend on ‘Philosophy as a Way of Life’. An encouragingly large number of us listened to Stephen Batchelor and John Peacock talk on philosophy and Buddhism, before ourselves engaging in informed, lively discussion on the theme of the relationship between philosophy and Buddhism as ‘ways of life’. The kind of ‘philosophy’ we are talking about here is not the kind of analytic enterprise taught in modern universities, which is concerned mainly with abstract philosophical problems and arguments. Rather, it is philosophy (‘love of wisdom’) as the actual thinking and living and striving towards the best kind of life for human beings. This sense of ‘philosophy’ was brought to widespread attention by the scholar Pierre Hadot in his pioneering book Philosophy as a Way of Life.[ii] Macaro’s book is a very down to earth and practical introduction to Buddhism and Stoicism as two specific philosophical traditions of thought and practice, bringing into view their common features and concerns, and highlighting the value of a philosophical life.

We could regard More Than Happiness as a contribution to what appears to be an emergent cultural engagement with what we might call ‘secular wisdom’. Western culture has become so post-Christian that there is a big hole where religion used to be; and meanwhile human beings have as great a need as ever, in the midst of scientific and secular culture, for ideas that might guide their lives. The steady growth of Buddhism in the west is one response, but another is a smaller-scale but significant resurgence of Stoicism. This philosophical tradition goes back to 4th c. BCE Greece. A philosopher named Zeno founded the Stoic school, named after the stoa poikile or ‘painted porch’, where they first met in the middle of Athens. The Stoicism that is resurgent today, however, is based on that of the Romans, especially of Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, whose works have survived in a more complete form. When, in modern English, we say someone is ‘stoic’ or ‘stoical’, we mean that they endure pain and hardship without complaining. Such an attitude is not untrue to the what Stoics actually valued (while the word ‘epicurean’ is merely a caricature of the Epicurean school of philosophy), but there is also a complex ethical and metaphysical world-view behind Stoicism, of which a level-headed resilience is a useful outcome.

As a summary and comparison of two practical traditions of thought, Macaro’s book is excellent. It is very clearly written, without technical detail but never vague or unclear. Chapter 1 is a scene-setting, in which she gives an overview of Buddhism and Stoicism and explains her approach. I am not a scholar of Stoicism, but judging from her presentation of Buddhism, which I know more about, she has an exact and accurate sense of what recent scholarship reveals about the earliest phase of the traditions. She addresses the knotty problem of the degree to which traditions like Buddhism and Stoicism are religions. In their historical forms, both involve what we would call religious claims; but, for the sake of this book, she extracts useful teachings from each that are compatible with a secular or naturalistic worldview. She presents with an admirable economy the way both traditions have developed philosophical methods and frameworks for their account of the human condition and how to flourish in it. 

In Chapter 2, she sets out the starting problem for any philosophy of life: the existential problem we face, called dukkha by the Buddhists, simply mortality for the Stoics. Buddhists and Stoics agreed that false conceptions about the sources of happiness and a misleading tendency to seek satisfaction in the wrong places leads to suffering, and that an attitude of renunciation is the beginning of a spiritual life. In Chapter 3 she explores the shared idea of philosophy as healing, and spiritual practice as therapy. While the Buddhists proposed a deep transformative insight of our wrong views and emotions to be the basis of health, the Stoics proposed an examination of our faulty beliefs, which are the basis of emotions and decisions. In Chapters 4 and 5, she presents the goals of each tradition: the ideal of nirvāna for the Buddhists, and the particular kind of eudaimonia, ‘happiness’ or ‘flourishing’ cultivated by the Stoics, specifically, ataraxia or ‘tranquillity’, a state of emotional calm brought about by completely reclaiming responsibility for one’s own thoughts and beliefs. 

In Chapter 6, Macaro turns to the theme which lends her book its title: how the goals of these traditions is ‘more than happiness’. Both traditions stress discipline and tranquility, but also ethics, meaning that the ideal for each is a way of living in relation to what is good. Chapter 7 turns to what each tradition proposes as the kind of appropriate view for the living out of their respective ideals. Macaro does not entirely accept the value of renunciation, as taught by both traditions, emphasising rather the ‘seeing clearly’ that allows us to see things in a correct perspective. In Chapter 8, she discusses the human ideals presented by each tradition: that of the ‘sage’ for the Stoics, and the ‘Buddha’ for the Buddhists. She notes the perfectionism of both traditions, and the difficulty of their ideals, but also how adherents can move incrementally towards emulating these impossibly far-off figures of the Buddha and the sage. Then in Chapter 9, Macaro turns to the kind of practices and spiritual exercises through which Buddhists and Stoics develop and grow. Both traditions involve training, through such disciplines as mindfulness. Chapter 10 summarises ‘10 meditations inspired by Buddhist and Stoic insights’ that we could take into our lives. Here we see what is really meant by ‘philosophies of life’: pithy themes for reflection, such as the advice to ‘consider the bigger picture’. Such themes are easily memorised, but are also tied into well-argued systems of thought, so that we can use them in day to day life, and also develop our understanding of what they entail through study and reflection.

I’ve summarised all this to give a sense of what the book covers. For someone new to the idea of philosophy as a way of life, More Than Happiness is a clear, accessible and accurate guide to both Stoicism and Buddhism. It doesn’t aim to raise too many questions, but rather to gather from both traditions what seems most useful for the contempory spiritual seeker. I would like now, however, to step back from the what the book says, to what it assumes and doesn’t say. In this way I hope to place the book in a bigger context.

The Buddhism that Macaro has chosen to discuss is, as she describes in Chapter 1, what is now called ‘early Buddhism’, which is the kind of Buddhism that is evident in the discourses of the Pāli canon. However, this kind of Buddhism is also something of an abstraction,  because it is a reconstruction by modern scholars and teachers of a way of thought preserved in early Buddhist literature. Since it exists as a reconstruction in the minds of modern western readers, it is a form of Buddhism that is especially attractive to those wishing to develop a secular form of Buddhist spirituality. But one might wish to contrast this construct called ‘early Buddhism’ with some actual Buddhist traditions, such as modern Theravāda, which revolves around the living tradition of monastic practice; or Tibetan Buddhism, with its extraordinary devotionalism and its philosophical debating culture; or with a modern Buddhist movement like Triratna, with its distinctive emphases on friendship and the arts. This contrast reveals how the ‘early Buddhism’ that Macaro assumes to be Buddhism in her book is a somewhat thinned-out and de-actualised version of the various existing traditions of Buddhism. 

This, however, may be a little unfair. Perhaps the version of Buddhism that Macaro evokes is nowadays quite alive in the contemporary flourishing of insight meditation retreat centres, such as Gaia House, which are not tied to particular lineages of Buddhist practice, being more eclectic as well as oriented quite specifically to modern secular culture. But, even granting that ‘early Buddhism’ is alive and well in the form of insight meditation teachings, Macaro’s version of it stops short of exploring the crucial role of community or sangha for spiritual life. The versions both of early Buddhism and of Stoicism described in her book assume a reader interested in a sort of personal and private spiritual life, consonant with the privatization of religion in contemporary secular culture. It might be, however, that this misses out on how participation in spiritual community is the condition for personal transformation. When Buddhists ‘go for refuge’ to the Sangha, they acknowledge the role of the spiritual community in their Dharma lives. From what one can gather, the tradition of Stoicism was more of a personal and private philosophical orientation, but then again (especially in its Roman phase) the Stoic outlook was often most popular among those involved in public life, immersed in the social and political, such as the Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius.

By drawing attention to the assumptions the author makes in her presentation of Buddhism and Stoicism, I do not particularly mean to criticise her aim or method, which is perhaps to address the contemporary reader in the comfort (or discomfort) of their secular homes. But I would like to prompt anyone who reads Antonia Macaro’s book on towards a deeper considerations of how either Buddhism or Stoicism might be successful philosophical ways of life – actually effective in ending dukkha or healing the soul. In this respect there is another factor, both for Stoicism and Buddhism, that Macaro does not discuss, which is that of commitment. It would not be unfair to say that More Than Happiness presents Buddhism and Stoicism as potentially useful traditions of thought and practice, from which a contemporary person might try to benefit.

Jules Evans, author of Philosophy For Life, an exploration of Greek and Roman philosophies as practical guides to life, distinguishes between two models of contemporary philosophical engagement. In the ‘liberal’ model, authors and teachers present ancient philosophies in their strengths and differences, to be considered and reflected upon.[iii] In this respect, Macaro’s approach represents a liberal model of philosophy as a way of life. But there is also the ‘committed’ model. In this model of philosophy, one may be attracted to some school, and then make a commitment to practice that philosophy (perhaps within its community of practitioners), and it is the existential choice and commitment that is the condition for the transformation and healing that the philosophical life promises.[iv] The role of commitment is central too to Buddhism. Having heard the Dharma one may commit oneself to practice it, and this emotional commitment becomes (along with participation in spiritual community) a condition for success. One commits to practice the precepts, and perhaps to a daily meditation practice. Commitment is important in Stoicism too. I will end by mentioning two recent books, part of the resurgent ‘neo-Stoic’ movement: A Guide to the Good Life by William B. Irvine and How to be a Stoic by Massimo Pigliucci.[v] These books represent less the ‘liberal’ model of philosophy, and more the ‘commited’ model: they are each by authors who have made the existential choice to live by Stoicism. In this respect, they communicate the philosophy of Stoicism in a living way.

Dharmacārin Dhīvan is the editor of Western Buddhist Review. He is a member of the Triratna Buddhist Order, and author of This Being, That Becomes: the Buddha’s Teaching on Conditionality.

[i] Anālayo is a Buddhist monk and scholar many of whose books are published by Windhorse Publications. Ālokadhāra reviewed Perspectives on Satipaṭṭhāna (2013) () for Western Buddhist Review, and Sarah Clelland reviewed Emptiness and Compassion (2015).

[ii] Dhīvan reviewed Hadot’s subsequent book Ancient Philosophy, and a related exploration of Hellenistic philosophical schools by John E. Cooper, on his blog.

[iii] Jules Evans, Philosophy For Life And Other Dangerous Situations, Rider, London, 2012, p.191.

[iv] Hadot explores the various existential choices involved in the different Hellenistic schools of philosophy: see Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? trans. Michael Chase. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002, ch.7.

[v] William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life, Oxford University Press, 2009; Massimo Pigliucci, How to be a Stoic: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Living, Rider, London, 2017. Pigliucci also blogs on ‘How to be a Stoic’. 

Here is a review by Ben Atmer of Vajragupta's new book from Windhorse Publications:

Vajragupta, Wild Awake: Alone, Offline & Aware in Nature

Windhorse, Cambridge, 2018, £10 pb

review by Ben Atmer

Vajragupta, a member of the Triratna Buddhist Order and writer, has had published a new book based on his long and deep immersion in the practice of solitary retreat. He attempts, for the most part remarkably successfully, to convey his sense of intimacy with the natural world, and tries to suggest just what it is about solitary retreat which is so valuable and rewarding, and why we, as Buddhists, might consider following in his footsteps. It is to be hoped that through books like this, the practice of thinking about and being with nature will once more come to occupy the same important place in the spiritual life as poetry and music and the other arts, making explicit the profound connections between religious practice and other forms of contemplative experience. 

A strong tradition of nature writing, distinct from but not completely unrelated to travelogue or memoir, has been developing in the English speaking world in the last few decades, and in this review I would like to reflect on how Vajragupta’s book, as a literary work, could be placed in this tradition. This recent tradition of nature writing can be seen as a reflection of more distant precedents, particularly in the American tradition – the works of Thoreau or John Muir, both rooted in a kind of proto-environmentalism, being obvious exemplars. In the European tradition too, the Enlightenment fascination with the ‘sublime’ generated a renewed interest in the natural world, in both visual and literary arts, which have had echoes into the 20th and 21st centuries, with poets such as Edward Thomas, and writers such as W.G. Sebald, being pre-eminent examples of a certain kind of muscular and complex appreciation of nature. 

In the last few years, perhaps the most prominent of writers in this tradition in English has been Robert Macfarlane,[1] following directly the precedents set by naturalists such as Roger Deakin and J.A. Baker, and heavily influenced by a previous generation of writers including, most significantly, Nan Shepherd, whose work The Living Mountain Macfarlane acknowledges as seminal. His focus has been on the phenomenology of landscape and nature, and the intimacy and sense of particularity which certain spaces might evoke in the observer. This is far removed from the grand narratives of some previous travel writing, and Macfarlane’s tradition is a gentler, more mindful immersion in small landscapes, accompanied by an acute sense of literary context and of the cultural and historical relativity of our gaze. 

Vajragupta’s book is situated at the intersection between personal memoir, spiritual guide-book and natural history, in the sense we have just been discussing. In its essentials it is a description of a number of solitary retreats the author has taken, over a period of many years, in the British (and in one case Spanish) countryside. What is immediately apparent from his writing is his deep affinity with the natural world, and the richness of his descriptions of landscape and nature are obviously the fruit of long contemplation. For example, here he describes the behaviour of waves on Chesil Beach in Dorset:

The beach near where I was staying is formed of a series of steps, or steep banks, where the shingle suddenly drops away for a metre or two. I observed how the shape of the shore worked with the waves. Sometimes a wave would thump up against the vertical face of a step, throwing shingle into the air. Other times the wave would come over the ledge, and then there would be a huge hissing, sucking and sizzling as sea water drew back through the gaps between the stones. Since the shingle was so fine and small, the gaps were numerous and intricate, and this created an especially loud hiss.

Or he observes and describes the appearance of a swallow which has landed on his window ledge:

It was tiny and delicate looking, just a couple of ounces of throbbing life. On top it was night-blue, nearly black. The feathers were fine, downy, almost like mole fur. Underneath it was off-white, looking rather scuffed and smudged. There was a chestnut-orange blur on its throat. The wings were huge relative to the rest of it, two dark crescents curving past the side of its body, pressing down into the concrete ledge. It quivered with quick, short breaths, and looked much smaller, more flimsy, on the window ledge, than a swallow looks in the air.    

Descriptions such as these are the great joys of this book, and Vajragupta’s lovingly attentive gaze shines out from almost every page. To this extent he conforms closely to, and compares well with the deep vein of nature writing we have been discussing. He is at his most compelling when he is minutely observing the nature around him, his observations obviously the consequence of a profound and gentle receptivity. He exudes a sense of narrative honesty, and this extends to the more difficult times, the boredom or frustration which is an inevitable part of solitary retreat. As he puts it:

Sometimes I encountered loneliness, sometimes I felt happy. One minute I would be craving, the next moment I found contentment. Fidgety, restless boredom, then a surprising stillness, sadness, then joy.

Where, perhaps surprisingly, his book differs from the best writers in this genre is in its lack of a sense of structural unity or purpose. For example, J.A. Baker focusses on a particular time and place (Essex, 1960s), and a particular preoccupation, his famous peregrine falcons, whose life-cycles and location are lovingly evoked; similarly, Nan Shepherd is bewitched by the Cairngorms of Eastern Scotland, which provide a backdrop for her life’s immersion in nature. Vajragupta’s work lacks this satisfying sense of purpose, despite the ostensibly unifying theme of ‘retreat’, and sometimes I felt his work was a collection of beautifully described, but nonetheless somehow incomplete vignettes.

One aspect of Wild Awake which is a candidate for unifying the whole, and which is characteristic of another kind of nature writing, is that of memoir, or the account of a personal journey, physical and, in this case, perhaps, spiritual. There are many precedents to this kind of writing too, and indeed it might be argued that an element of the personal is inevitable in such a work. Whereas Nan Shepherd tries to write in a largely impersonal tone, so that her works become like descriptive poems in prose, paeans to the landscape she loves, other writers, less preoccupied with the accurate depiction of landscape, have focussed on personal experience, in which, through the particularity of their prose, the landscape is itself, as it were, created by the observer’s gaze. In such cases the writer’s emotional journey is often reflected in a form of expression which gives life directly to the emotion, rather than simply telling the reader that it was present. Writers such as Jack Kerouac immerse the reader in their experience of solitude, in all its joy and boredom and beauty, its ecstasy and its banality. Kerouac writes, in thinly disguised fiction, of his time on Desolation Peak in the Washington Cascades, with a characteristic stream-of-consciousness poetry:

I wake up and I’m on Desolation Peak and the fires are motionless in the blue morning – Two butterflies comport – My clock ticks the slow day – While I slept and travelled in dreams all night, the mountains didn’t move at all and I doubt they dreamed.

Other writers also take a personal, confessional approach to their writings about nature, even if they omit Kerouac’s extremities of affect. Edward Thomas, famous mostly for his poetry, but also the author of beautiful prose collections such as The Heart of England, and John Muir, one of the inspirations for the national parks movement in the United States, and the author of My First Summer in the Sierra, Travels in Alaska and other prose works, give biographical accounts of nature, but in a manner more focussed and immersive, less episodic, than that of Vajragupta, situating the reader, and reassuring him, with their profound acquaintance with a particular place, rather than using a landscape essentially as a backdrop to their personal struggle.

Another way in which this biographical style has been incorporated into travel writing is in the manner of W.G. Sebald, especially in The Rings of Saturn, in which explorations of the stark landscapes of East Anglia are described in passages of unexpected beauty and incorporated into inimitable works of historical and philosophical story-telling and allusiveness. His works are presented in the manner of confessional accounts, leaving an indelible, eerie sense of times and spaces intersecting and co-existing, in which veracity is itself moulded and weathered, but which nonetheless point, somehow, to a wider and deeper kind of truth. 

The problem, to my mind, with Vajragupta’s biographical approach, and which the above writers have, in their own way, managed to avoid, is not, then, with the power of his descriptions of nature, or indeed with the presence of the personal (he speaks most movingly of his memory of his deceased father, for example), but rather with his lack of full commitment to either the personal or the objective. Of course, the personal quest, the vividly expressed, immediate phenomenal experience, which occupies a prominent place in many such narratives (Sebald and Kerouac included) is also in a sense what Vajragupta is trying to escape from, and it must be remembered that this is, at heart, a book about Buddhist experience. Vajragupta tries to make this explicit, albeit towards the end of his account:

In nature… I lose myself in my surroundings. I can become so absorbed that I forget the old world; the ambitions and ego projects, and the roles and self-identities bound up with them, fade and fall like autumn leaves shaken from a tree. The defensive barrier of “self” lowers, and then, there, is the world.

This is, of course, a valid and perceptive point in a work whose purpose is perhaps, at heart, to describe a process of self-transcendence through solitary contemplation. The problem is that Vajragupta’s account is strongly pervaded by the personal, filled with descriptions of how nature affects him, and so he ends up never truly ‘getting out of the way’ of his narrative, but neither does he, like Kerouac, plunge whole-heartedly into the personal. There is, ultimately, little sense of the nature of spiritual practice – in other words there is little indication of what makes solitary retreat such a uniquely special experience, and sometimes the work can read like a much more conventional piece of travel writing. For hundreds, perhaps for thousands of years, retreat in this sense has been the source of great inspiration and revelation for spiritual seekers, and it would have been instructive to hear more of this from Vajragupta, in particular to hear more of his personal experience of the transcendent sensations of which we have been speaking, which used to be known as the sublime.

If it is, perhaps, too much to expect of Vajragupta that he has achieved a degree of spiritual revelation comparable to the Desert Fathers or the Indian ascetics, it is perhaps not so unreasonable to expect at least an echo of the transcendent, which is at the very heart of solitude. Again, listen to the luminous voice of Kerouac, still on his lonely mountaintop, obsessed by the sheer ecstasy and awe of his position:

I used to sit, or lie down, on Desolation Peak… [and] every time I thought of the void I’d be looking at Mt Hozomeen… stark naked rock, pinnacles and thousand feet high protruding from hunchmuscles another thousand feet high protruding from immense timbered shoulders…the very top tittermost peak abominables of Hozomeen made of black rock and only when storms blow I don’t see them and all they do is return tooth for tooth to storm an imperturbable surl for cloudburst mist…

One can feel the exhilaration of the high mountains, the poetry of the sublime, in this description, however overblown it may feel to modern sensibilities, and it is this which I miss most in Vajragupta’s ever-measured tones. It is this sense of exhilaration which has always seemed to me the key to the solitary retreat in the wilderness, and my own experiences of the sublime, the sight of the great pyramid of the Weisshorn towering above the Matter valley, the play of light on the moors, have, at their most transformative, seemed closest to Kerouac’s cry of joy and terror. In normal life, perhaps, the closest one can come to such a sense of being shocked out of oneself by beauty, is in the experience of great art, and it is no accident that the most successful communicators of great, solitary experience, have often been great artists. ‘Oh the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall, frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed’: I think most people who have a sensitivity to natural wonder have probably experienced something of Hopkins’ sense, perhaps akin to the sense of exhilaration or terror which can sometimes accompany meditation, but which is also linked, I sense, to insight, to a deeper understanding of our place in the cosmos, and which is perhaps at the heart of our solitary communion with forces larger than ourselves.

This isn’t to say that there is no value in quiet contemplation, in new shoots of personality ‘struggling, growing and longing for sunlight’, but rather that this kind of slow dawning of consciousness is not necessarily the most persuasive advocacy for solitary retreat. Nonetheless it is in the most intimate chapter of his book, ‘Green Fire’, from which these words are quoted, that Vajragupta comes closest to a sense of the sublime. He speaks of the wonder that is Spring:

...a green fire that never stops burning, consuming all that goes before it, but then brilliantly growing with new light.

...this gift of spring was so generous, so abundant that my heart flowed full of gratitude, it brimmed with wonder, even a sense of reverence.

I found myself wishing that we might have heard more of this side of his experience, this kind of affective insight, which is accompanied by a shimmering prose which seems to mirror the sentiments he describes. 

The other side of the sublime, of course, alluded to already above, is the sensation of terror. As the philosopher Schopenhauer vividly describes:

When we are abroad in the storm of tempestuous seas; mountainous waves rise and fall, are dashed violently against steep cliffs, and shoot their spray high into the air… then… simultaneously, he [the beholder] feels himself as individual, as the feeble phenomenon of will, which the slightest touch of these forces can annihilate… and he also feels himself as the eternal, serene subject of knowing…

This aspect of the sublime, which becomes immeasurably more powerful when experienced in solitude, is represented for Vajragupta by his experiences at a retreat centre in Spain. He describes a walk up onto a high ridge, and his dawning sensation of fear as the rocky spine narrows and crumbles, and his awareness of the precariousness of his position:

What had begun as a feeling of caution suddenly escalated. Starting low in the lurching stomach, clawing its way up into the thudding heart, creeping all over my shuddering body, triggering my thinking mind into overdrive: panic, panic, panic, panic. I watched thoughts invading my being like alien intruders…

Again, there is a curious detachment in this account of his experience, which the very best writing of its kind would immerse you in. Even Nan Shepherd, normally so austere and elegant, is occasionally roused to a kind of rhetorical fury, though note the lack of personal intrusion into the narrative:

I watched, from the shoulder of Morrone, the Cairngorm mass eddy and sink and rise (as it seemed) like a tossed wreck on a yellow sea. Sky and the wrack of precipice and overhang were confounded together. Now a spar, now a mast, just recognisable as buttress or cornice, tossed for a moment in the boiling sea of cloud. Then the sea closed on it, to open again with another glimpse of mounting spars- a shape drove its way for a moment through the smother, and was drawn under by the vicious swirl. Ashen and yellow, the sky kicked convulsively.

       

It is this intensity of engagement, whether personalised, as in the torments of Jack Kerouac, or metaphorical and objectified, as in Shepherd, that I would have liked to witness more of in Vajragupta’s account. In comparison I found his descriptions rather constrained, particularly as I sensed, and occasionally glimpsed in his prose, an intimate connection with and feeling for the landscapes and, in particular the fauna, of the places he came to know so well.   

I thoroughly enjoyed Vajragupta’s powerful new book, close as it is to my own heart. His relationship with the natural world, closely observed and beautifully described, is the product of long, patient absorption, and his narrative clarity is reflective of a deep mindfulness and wise practice. My only wish would have been to have seen something more of the energy of transformation, by means of a more immediate immersion in his experience – what it is, precisely, about nature, about ‘wilderness’, in its broadest sense, which has such a powerful effect, which, experienced in the intensity of solitude, exerts such a spell, pulling one out of oneself, quieting the clamour of the everyday. It is this, I think, which lies at the heart of the solitary retreat – the quieting of self in the moment, the ideal of immersion which is characteristic of the greatest achievements of art and spiritual practice, but which also lies at the core of what was once known as the sublime. It is perhaps the great works of nature writing which have brought us closest to comprehending this, and which ultimately motivate us to seek such experiences for ourselves. 

Ben Atmer is a Mitra living in Bristol, who is irresistibly drawn to wild places and to the arts, and who tries to combine these in his love of landscape photography. Samples of his work can be seen at www.benatmer.com.   

​Please consider buying Wild Awake direct from Windhorse Publications.

[1] Ed’s note: Robert Macfarlane was interviewed by Ratnagarbha in Urthona: Journal of Buddhism and the Arts, issue 28. 

We present another review by Vidyavajra, this one of Brad Warner's second book re-interpreting the great Zen Master Dōgen for the present day:

Brad Warner, It Came From Beyond Zen! More Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan’s Greatest Zen Master, New World Library, 2017 (£15 pback)

review by Vidyavajra

As I start a review of another book by Brad Warner, I am conscious that, should I be so inclined, I could just rehash my previous review of Don’t Be A Jerk. Comment on the pulp sci-fi book cover, tick, remark on the ‘dude persona’ ill suited to the material, tick, wonder if at fifty-three it’s time the guy grew up, tick, and so it would go on, tick, tick, tickety, tick. But that would be an untrue representation of this book, and would not be taking Brad Warner’s work seriously, which it does deserve. So, I will try not to repeat myself, too much, tick.

I’ve met folk who hold quite scathing views of Warner and his books. They’ll happily rail against his populism, accuse him of dumbing down the dharma, take one look at his book covers and judge him wanting. Holding dismissive views on anyone, especially if you haven’t read a word they’ve written is not entirely fair, and does whiff a bit of ‘dharma snobbery’. I know, I hold up my hands, I confess, I used to be one of them. Very definitely ‘used to be’.

Having now read two of his books on the Shōbōgenzō, I’ve really warmed to the man and the uniqueness of his style. He doesn’t try to big himself up; if anything he’s self deprecating to a fault, playing down his evident intelligence. He’s smart and clear-headed, and knows why he writes his books in the way he does, attempting to communicate Dōgen’s version of the Dharma to ‘a different audience’. He knows his readers may not be that academic, intellectually erudite or perhaps even Buddhist, but nonetheless he has this wonderful stuff he wants to show them. He is an enthusiast who has actually become rather good at what he does, bringing Dōgen up to date with a great deal of skill and sensitivity in order to make it intelligible to ordinary people. When his approach works his explanations and clarifications are quite insightful and thought-provoking. They’d give anyone an improved chance of understanding where the hell Dōgen is coming from.

These recent commentarial books on Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō by Warner are by anyone’s standards a heroic undertaking. The texts are often densely esoteric in meaning and the use of language is eccentric. Nevertheless, Warner attempts to understand and to paraphrase paragraphs that even learned translators have thrown up their hands at, and declared they haven’t the foggiest. He’ll have a stab at coming up with a way of looking at it. He executes it all in a straightforward matter-of-fact way, but with the reverence, insight and articulacy you’d expect from someone whose love for his subject matter borders on the deeply devoted.

He’s composing a paraphrase of Dōgen, not a translation. He makes copious references to other translators to help tease out the subtext in a tricky sentence, or goes back to the original Japanese to check if those translators, or himself, are correct in their interpretation. He generally steers clear of specialist language or terms that may unnecessarily exclude, mystify or alienate. He attempts to explain inexplicable things using everyday language, speech patterns, modern cultural references and idioms. He does all this without dumbing down Dōgen’s meaning or simplifying profundity until it becomes something shallow. I believe this type of effort is worthy of great praise, something that may in Warner’s case be a little overdue.

He does, however, like his little bits of fun, and I imagine not everyone will appreciate this feature of his writing. In his previous book, Don’t Be A Jerk, some of the updated cultural references seemed a bit heavy handed, his jokes over-indulged. However, in It Came From Beyond Zen he rarely puts a foot wrong, his updating just feels more considered and appropriate. He can provide plausible explanations to back up the most outrageous choice of a replacement term. You have to admire his sheer gall sometimes.

He’s been writing books in this style for several years, so he inhabits it and is fluent within it. Yes, Warner does put in those jokes and playful silliness, but one shouldn’t assume that this means he’s not serious about what he’s doing.  I found I indulged his ‘humourous whims’ more readily this second time around. For it is a truth, perhaps not widely known, that wit, wordplay and a mischievous wink are a major part of Dōgen’s style. He was a bit of a ‘pun master’ not adverse to gleefully leading you up the garden path just for a laugh. Well, perhaps not just for a laugh, as he usually had a point to make at the same time, though sometimes you’d have to be Japanese to appreciate the joke.

It Came From Beyond Zen contains chapters from the Shōbōgenzō that I’m personally quite fond of, in all their bonkers brilliance. He begins the book with ‘Inmo’ which could be translated as ‘this’, ‘thus’,  ‘such’, ‘what’ and ‘it’, all of which are used by translators to refer to things unnameable, beyond being understood, essentially ineffable. The use of ‘it’ as the title of a chapter and in the title of the book, It Came From Beyond Zen, makes apparent one of Warner’s little puns. The text of ‘Inmo’ and of Mu-chu Setsu-mu (‘Explaining a Dream within a Dream’) are not light reading, no matter how simplified the paraphrase is. Here is an extract from Warner’s paraphrase of ‘Inmo’, so you get a feeling for Dōgen’s writing style:

You might ask, How do I know I’m a person who is It? You know you’re a person who is It because you want to understand what It is and align yourself with It. You have the face and the eyes of an It person, so you don’t have to worry about the ever-present It. Heck, even worry itself is part of the great, unknowable It that is the universe and is you. So, It is beyond worry!

Dōgen quickly shifts ground from the profound to the playful, as if he’s taking a line of imaginative enquiry for a walk, though even he knows not where. Meanings can be flipped within a sentence, state contradictory viewpoints, turn the commonplace into a paradox and just generally confound expectations. These eccentricities can take some time to tune in to, but it can be worth the wait. They make for an imaginative and insightful journey.

Warner diverts his focus from the Shōbōgenzō on only two occasions: first, when he examines ‘The Instructions to the Tenzo’; second, in a chapter headed ‘Compassion and Zen Buddhist Ethics’, where he aims to correct the widely held misconception that Zen practice has no ethical content. Taken together with the chapter on Shishobo (‘Four Good Ways to Treat People Right’) included in this book, in which Dōgen uses the four saṃgrahavastus to lay out an ethical practice applicable to both a monk or lay practitioner, I think he does conclusively knock that misconception on the head.

He also bravely tackles the vexed concern about World War Two, and the alleged collaboration of Zen leaders with the Japanese regime. In his opinion, it’s been exaggerated, and was not as widespread as has been portrayed. Also, the aforementioned collaborators are unable to defend themselves, so we cannot bear witness to the broader perspective. Warner’s viewpoint is that sixty years later it’s easy to stand looking down from the top of our high ethical principles and find these men wanting. We were not there, and don’t know what the pressures of that time were like. If we found our country developed ambitions to create an empire, and turned itself into a military cult, how would we respond? It’s hard not to theorise from a position of principle, rather than actuality, which undoubtedly would be a whole lot more ethically messy. However, though Warner has a point and makes it well, I remain reluctant to put all the guns of opprobrium away completely.

It obvious to me that the Shōbōgenzō is a difficult text for the casual enquirer unfamiliar with the Dharma, or for entry-level Buddhists to read and truly benefit from. It would, even with Warner’s generally excellent paraphrase, be easy for someone inexperienced in decoding Dōgen to misinterpret. This could include taking literally what was intended as a metaphor, or was a parody of a deluded viewpoint, or taking as a true representation one of Dōgen’s flights of fancy.  I don’t think its unreasonable to ask who exactly is the ‘different audience’ that Warner is trying to get hooked on Dōgen?

Warner as a writer must be the eternal optimist, because of his aim to make the Shōbōgenzō accessible to a wider readership. He has chosen to cut out what he sees as unnecessary poeticisms or references that would only be relevant if you were Japanese and living in the 13th century. These are the sort of sacrifices you may have to make if you are going to streamline Dōgen. But what he’s produced is as honest an updated version of Dōgen as can be; it is very definitely not a travesty. When Warner says in the book’s conclusion:

I think my take on Dōgen is actually fairly orthodox in spite of the jokes and the Godzilla references. That stuff is just window dressing.

– he’s not bullshitting; that is precisely what he is doing, and by doing so he reveals the lengths he’s prepared to go to connect a new readership with Dōgen and the Shōbōgenzō.

Vidyavajra lives in Upper Sheringham in North Norfolk and daily explores the contrasts and conflicts between being both an artist/craftsman and a cleaner.

We are pleased to present a review of a new book from Windhorse Publications on the therapeutic use of mettā or kindness by Paramabandhu and Jed Shamel – reviewed by Paul Wielgus, himself a mindfulness teacher.

Mindful Emotion: A Short Course in Kindness by Paramabandhu Groves and Jed Shamel, Windhorse Publications, Cambridge, 2017.

review by Paul Wielgus

The first thing that struck me about Mindful Emotion – the book as well as the support on the accompanying website – was its simplicity and sheer accessibility. The book is well-structured and simple to understand. It is also simple to tactically apply the methods it describes, and the website likewise has a simple layout that does not scare you off. In fact, the website complements the flow and the content of the book. Even the short introduction film, which at first looks like it might be a bit cheesy, works well.

As the creators claim, this is a course that draws on techniques from positive psychology and ‘third wave’ therapies (for example, compassion-focused therapy), as well as taking inspiration from the Buddhist tradition; but Kindness Behaviour Training (KBT) is also a course that anyone can understand, participate in and gain benefit from. Indeed, it seems to be a course for Everyman (or woman), a course that takes practices like mettā-bhāvanā together with mental attitude like kindness, acceptance and forgiveness, and adapts both to deal with the modern epidemics of depression, addiction, and stress.

This is less a case of ‘move over mindfulness, here comes kindfulness’, and more a recognition that a mindful response to those modern epidemics involves teaming up the essence of mettā-bhāvanā with mindfulness of breathing in order to to help do battle. It is high time that mettā-bhāvanā shared the responsibility for driving with mindfulness of breathing, rather than always being a passenger on the journey to awakening (or even in pursuit of the easing of everyday suffering). As the website’s introductory video tells us, we need to respond with our hearts as well as our heads.

In order to review this book I would like to refer you to the story of my own engagement with mindfulness. When the book plopped onto the hall carpet and then the course pinged in my inbox, it seemed to be a time in my life when I was very much ready for engaging in KBT. Twenty-three years before, in 1994, I had reached the age of 40 and was in the throws of a classic mid-life crisis. Karmic winds ( something which I had no comprehension of whatsoever back then) had blown me into the Buddhafield meditation tent at the Glastonbury Festival, where, on a sunny Thursday in June, I sat down and was instructed by a long-haired Western Buddhist Order member, named Sanghaloka, in the mindfulness of breathing.

From that moment my life changed. The immediate impact was a dramatic waking up to the suppressed introvert side of my nature, and the immediate and subsequent discovery of the possibility of an inner peace that had been previously been sadly lacking in  my life. In subsequent months and years the mindfulness of breathing started to appear as a part of my corporate work in change and innovation. Eventually I found a Buddhist path, in the Tibetan tradition, and proceeded to study and practice for the next 15 years gaining a deeper general understanding and experience of the Dharma.[1]

However, after my morning awakening at the festival in 1994 my afternoon experience was somewhat different. I returned dreamy-eyed to the Buddhafield tent and experienced some gentle Qi Gong followed by an introduction to mettā-bhāvanā, delivered by another amazing FWBO order member, Karunāvīra. Whilst this was also satisfying, it did not have the impact of mindfulness of breathing, a response which began what many others seem to have experienced, which is the start of a preference for mindfulness of breathing over mettā-bhāvanā.

What has this to do with Mindful Emotion? Well, reading the book all these years later filled me with a feeling of encouragement that here was an approach that might perhaps correct a perceived imbalance in me between mindfulness of breathing and mettā-bhāvanā, a correction arriving synchrononistically for my personal as well as for my working life. This sense of importance was connected to a relatively recent teacher training experience  in MBSR (mindfulness-based stress reduction), itself a powerful experience, and the KBT course now gave me a strong feeling that the balance between the two meditation practices might to some degree be redressed.

My journey since that Glastonbury Festival in 1994 had led me to get involved in ‘The Mindfulness Revolution’ and, having attended a Mindfulness in Society Conference with John Kabat-Zinn in 2010, I had actively started to bring mindfulness into my work, including training in MBSR, and also completing mindfulness training with Global Corporate Mindfulness organisation, Potential Project. The influence of mindfulness of breathing in these trainings is profound, and as the mindfulness movement has evolved the recognition of the additional necessity for kindness and compassion training has enriched the overall package, particularly in the context of leadership training.

In summary, the arrival of Mindful Emotion in my post seemed to come at a very appropriate and relevant time both for my own practice as well as the the training I do in the workplace. So how does it fare? Overall the book is simple and elegant and succeeds in integrating mettā-bhāvanā with the mindfulness of breathing. It builds a foundation of mettā using the core structure of mettā-bhāvanā to create a system that leads the reader/participant along a journey to gain a deeper experience of the nature and function of kindness, and a methodology to cultivate it. The concept of ‘cultivation’ (bhāvanā) is central to the structure of the course, and the use of a gardening metaphor serves it very well. In the section on ‘fruition’ the authors remind us of an ancient Chinese proverb:

If you want to be happy for an hour get drunk, for a day get married, if you want to be happy for life, plant a garden.

The book offers ways to work on the ground of our mind, sowing the seeds of kindness. We are reminded that it is a lifetime’s work, though this is work that is very rewarding.

So the eight week course it introduces is just the beginning, albeit an impactful one, to this lifetime of work. Each chapter has a gardening theme, for example ‘preparing the earth’ with a foundation of mindfulness; dealing with the weeds (that is, with difficulties) by turning towards them; sowing the seeds of kindness and waiting for the first shoots. Also like gardening, there is much repetition and going over the same ground in the book. For example the core meditation in each section is based on the self, friend, neutral and difficult person structure of mettā-bhāvanā, which when encountered in the course of reading the book is repetitious and may for some readers become little tedious, but obviously performs an important function in practice, particularly in the essential construction of new neural pathways, when experienced within the framework of a weekly course.

The book takes the reader along a pathway that starts with the foundational breath and body practices, and guides them through a range of increasingly subtle mental states such as acceptance, gratitude, generosity, contentment and ultimately the delicate mind of forgiveness. As well as specifically focussing on the cultivation of kindness itself, all of these also constitute individual components for the development of kindness as well. Appreciative enquiry and positive psychology form an integral part of the programme which is also supplemented with research and science-based facts and stories. The format also provides the reader/practitioner with a simple study format to monitor progress week by week.

The course is satisfying in its overall structure and its system of evolution. I found two sections in particular very appealing. First, the chapter on ‘organic imagination’ extends the appreciative approach to include the use of the creative imagination to further cultivate kindness. It does this by extending the friend, neutral, difficult person process into a remembered or imagined place of beauty, and developing an attitude of contentment as a vehicle for kindness in the process. This session also addresses the enemies of rumination and worry head-on and encourages the reformulation of positive neural pathways, particularly through the appreciation of beauty through simplicity as the antidote. This works by gently bringing the mind back into the present moment to savour the beauty around us, and to halt the natural inclinations of our wandering mind.

Secondly, the adaption of the ‘breathing space’ process (which is central to MBSR training) and its transformation into the ‘kindness space’ is a stroke of genius. As my own practice and teaching of MBSR has evolved, I have become to realise the profundity of the ‘breathing space’ both within the training itself and as a cornerstone for the practitioner in helping to maintain their practice beyond the course. In KBT there is a very simple adaption of this MBSR breathing space. In its new form as the ‘Kindness Breathing Space’, I believe it can itself become a cornerstone of this particular program as it develops and evolves. Furthermore, it has inspired me to consider wider applications of this approach. Why not consider some of the other mental attitudes and create, for example, an ‘appreciation breathing space’, a ‘gratitude breathing space’, a ‘generosity breathing space’, even a ‘forgiveness breathing space’?

All in all, Mindful Emotion is a comprehensive and systematic approach to cultivating kindness. It is an elegant complement to MBSR with its core practice of mindfulness of breathing. Proof of its full value may only really be through actual immersion and participation in the programme, but the book does also provide encouraging stories and quotations from people who have already participated. My own feeling is that the core benefit of the course would be as a welcome refresher aimed at people who have already participated in an MBSR programme. This is a very real need in the world to help build on the undoubted impact that MBSR can have, and to provide a strong platform to meet people’s need for an additional structured programme to continue and evolve their practice. Kindness Behaviour Training does seem to offer a first class, robust opportunity to do this.

I also think it can also work as a ‘stand-alone’ course, but this would not necessarily impact people as profoundly as MBSR, particularly when that programme is delivered by experienced teachers who are able to harness its true holistic power. Still in a world desperate for means and methods to encourage and cultivate kindness and compassion KBT offers a powerful beacon of hope, and Mindful Emotion is a book that competently and inspiringly allows that beacon to shine.

In conclusion, Mindful Emotion is a book that details a system which has the power of mettā at its heart, and a methodology that has the potential to bring that power to people in the world of work, to business leaders, to people in education and health services; in fact, to everyone, to Everyman and to Everywoman.

Paul Wielgus (dragonfly-coachingforlife.co.uk) teaches mindfulness in his local community in Somerset as well as being a Mindfulness coach/facilitator  and trainer for leaders and organisations in the UK and beyond.

You can purchase Mindful Emotion direct from Windhorse Publications – this means more of the purchase price goes to the publisher.

[1] I have retold the story of my 1994 experience of the impact of mindfulness of breathing many times, even featuring it in a TED-style talk in 2014 available at  https://youtu.be/VGOlpOF_B24.

Gil Fronsdal, The Buddha Before Buddhism: Wisdom from the Early Teachings, Shambhala, Boulder, 2016, paperback £15, 180 pages.

reviewed by Dhivan Thomas Jones

Gil Fronsdal’s new book is a translation of and commentary on ‘The Chapter of the Eights’ (Aṭṭhakavagga), the fourth chapter of the Sutta-nipāta, itself a miscellaneous collection of Pāli Buddhist verses (including such classics as the Karaṇīya-metta sutta and the Ratana sutta). I was excited when I heard about this new translation, because The Chapter of the Eights is a fascinating work, presenting the Dharma in a form that seems to take the reader back to an unfamiliar world of ancient Indian asceticism. In this world of heated argument about beliefs and practices between professional renunciates and spiritual wanderers, the Buddha’s teaching is presented as something beyond belief, beyond views and opinions, as a lived insight that combines a lifestyle of simplicity and moderation with an attitude of careful investigation and letting go. The non-dogmatic and practical approach of The Chapter of the Eights reads like the living words of the Buddha in his teaching heyday, in contrast to the lists and repetitions of the prose nikāyas, which can often appear formulaic. This has led to speculation about the Eights poems – that perhaps they are older than the prose discourses; that perhaps they represent an early and unsystematised version of the Buddha’s teachings; that perhaps they represent ‘the Buddha before Buddhism’, as the title of Fronsdal’s book proposes.

There is good news and bad news about Fronsdal’s new translation. The good news is that he has written some useful introductions to and commentaries on the sixteen poems that make up The Book of Eights, making these old Buddhist verses more easily accessible than they have been before in English. The bad news is, unfortunately, quite bad. It is that the translations themselves generally lack precision, and are occasionally wrong. Fronsdal does not seem to know Pāli particularly well. In my view, the book can hardly be recommended as a translation, though if it encouraged readers to investigate further it could be said to have some value. In what follows I will firstly discuss the importance of The Book of Eights, and how Fronsdal presents it, before indicating some of the problems with his translation.

Fronsdal’s preface begins: ‘This book is a translation of a collection of ancient Buddhist poems often considered to be among the Buddha’s first teachings.’ It might seem that Fronsdal is here starting to elaborate the claim made by the book’s title, ‘The Buddha Before Buddhism’. The claim is that the Aṭṭhakavagga contains some of the oldest records of the Buddha’s teaching, perhaps dating from a period early in his teaching career, before the more systematic teachings with which we are familiar. However, despite this opening sentence, Fronsdal does not particularly push this claim; and indeed in his Afterword he presents an accurate summary of the uncertainties around making any definite claim for the date or original purpose of the chapter. In this regard, I had the sense that the title, ‘The Buddha Before Buddhism’, was possibly chosen by the publisher to act as a magnet for those drawn to the idea of ‘the Buddha’s original teaching’. Alas, the whole idea of getting back to ‘the Buddha’s own words’ looks, from the scholarly point of view, increasingly like an impossible dream. Fronsdal doesn’t actually dispute this. But before I present his view of The Chapter of the Eights, I will summarise what might positively be said about the text’s historical importance.

The Sutta-nipāta as a collection was probably assembled rather later than the discourses in the four main nikāyas or collections. It is arranged in five chapters, the fourth being The Book of Eights (Aṭṭhakavagga) and the fifth The Way to the Beyond (Pārāyanavagga). The reason for supposing that these two chapters contain relatively old materials is twofold. Firstly, they are both commented upon in another canonical work called the Niddesa (‘Explanation’). This early commentarial text also comments upon the Rhinoceros Discourse (Khaggavisāṇa sutta), in the first chapter of the Sutta-nipāta. The Niddesa cannot be precisely dated but the fact that it exists shows that the texts it comments upon were valued in a special way from an early point in Buddhist history. Secondly, The Chapter of the Eights is itself mentioned in the prose nikāyas. In the Saṃyutta-nikāya, 22:3, the householder Hāliddakāni asks the Venerable Mahākaccāna to explain to him the meaning of a stanza from the Māgandiya in The Chapter of the Eights (Sn 844). Moreover, in the Udāna 5:6, the Venerable Soṇa is said to recite at the Buddha’s request the whole of the The Chapter of the Eights, and the Buddha compliments Soṇa on his recitation. These two stories seem to imply that The Chapter of the Eights were in existence prior to the composition of the prose nikāyas, in the time of the Buddha himself. (The Way to the Beyond and some other stanzas similarly appear to have been in existence during the Buddha’s lifetime). We should also say, in support of the idea that The Chapter of the Eights is old, that its language is archaic (which is presumably why the early Buddhists composed a commentary on it).

However, it must be emphasised that The Chapter of the Eights is relatively old, compared to other early Buddhist texts. This does not allow us to date it. Because the early Buddhist scriptures were composed and transmitted orally for hundreds of years, there is a kind of ‘event horizon’ which we cannot get behind. This horizon is about two hundred years after the Buddha’s death. The fact the early Buddhist scriptures describe The Chapter of the Eights as already in existence at the time of the Buddha in fact shows that the Buddhists of two hundred years after the Buddha’s death believed that The Chapter of the Eights was an old record of the Buddha’s teaching. But we cannot be any more certain than that about the matter. This has not stopped scholars speculating about it. The late Tilmann Vetter thought that the Eights were originally composed among non-Buddhist ascetics and then later included in the Buddhist canon.[i] Other scholars have speculated that the Eights describe an early form of Buddhism, that existed prior to organised monasticism and Buddhist doctrine.[ii] However, K.R. Norman, whose translation of the Sutta-nipāta is the most scholarly though it is very literal,[iii] has discussed the Aṭṭhakavagga in relation to early Buddhism, and concluded very convincingly that it is a mistake to suppose that the contents of The Chapter of Eights can somehow be taken to represent ‘Buddhism’ of any period. The Eights should be taken as more of a snap shot of one approach to the Dharma.[iv] While we can identify the particular characteristics of this approach, it is not possible to know what other discourses and teaching were in general circulation when the The Chapter of the Eights was composed. It is likely that The Way to the Beyond was in circulation at that time, which presents the Dharma in rather different terms, so it is likely that The Chapter of the Eights was always one approach among several, in which case it does not necessarily represent ‘the Buddha before Buddhism’.

Despite his book being titled ‘The Buddha Before Buddhism’, Fronsdal’s introduction and commentaries concentrates on the original content of The Book of Eights rather than on speculative questions about where the Chapter stands in relation to the Buddhism of the prose nikāyas. He identifies four distinct themes of the Chapter: (i) letting go of views; (ii) sensual craving; (iii) the description of the sage; and (iv) training. However, it must be said that the most strikingly original theme in the Chapter is the first theme, letting go of views. This theme is visible in the four discourses (2–5), each of which contains eight (aṭṭhaka) stanzas, that probably give the Chapter of the Eights its name (Aṭṭhakavagga). One can get a flavour of the argument from v.787:

One who is attached argues over doctrines –

         How and with what does one argue with someone unattached?

         Embracing nothing, rejecting nothing,

         Right here, a person has shaken off every view.[v]

Other discourses in the Chapter make the same point: that a religious practitioner seeking peace should let go of views, should not get involved in religious arguments, should practise a sceptical abstention from debate, and by contrast learn to seek peace through a different method, by understanding the relationship of views and emotional attachments, so as to abandon the former by letting go of the latter through insight.

As Fronsdal explains in his introduction, this message is not unique to The Chapter of the Eights, but is the subject of the Honeyball Discourse (Madhipiṇḍika sutta) in the Majjhima-nikāya, which explains how disagreement and debate is a result of conceptual proliferation (papañca), which itself arises from feeling, perception and thinking. Many other discourses, it might be said, present the same message from different angles, most obviously The Discourse on Brahma’s Net (Brahmajāla sutta) in the Dīgha-nikāya, which explains the arising of sixty-two kinds of wrong view on the basis of feeling and contact. The other themes of The Chapter of the Eights which Fronsdal identifies can likewise be found discussed in other discourses. Nevertheless, it remains the case that the Eights is vividly focussed on the fruitlessness of religious debate. In the eighth poem, the Discourse to Pasūra (Pasūra sutta), the speaker of the discourse (presumed to be the Buddha) addresses Pasūra:

            Wishing for an opponent, you roar

                      Like a hero nourished on royal food.

                      Run off, O Hero, to where the fight is;

                      As before, there is no fight here.[vi]

Pasūra seems to be an avid debater, and implied by the poem is a context of lively debate between ascetics (samaṇas), on topics of religious and spiritual importance. The Buddha simply refuses to participate:

            Pasūra, what opponent would you get

                      From those who live without opponents

                      Who don’t counter views with views,

                      Who don’t grasp anything here as ultimate?[vii]

From these extracts, I hope to have given a taste both of the main theme of The Chapter of the Eights, and the accessible style of Fronsdal’s translation. Likewise, Fronsdal’s introductory comments to each of the sixteen poems open up the unfamiliar concerns and presuppositions of the ancient verses for contemporary readers. In this sense, Fronsdal’s book is not aimed at scholars, and indeed does no more than hint at the scholarly discussions on various topics. For instance, the eleventh poem, The Discourse on Quarrels and Disputes (Kalahavivāda sutta), is of great interest (at least to some of us), since it presents many of the nidānas or causal links familiar from the twelve nidānas of paṭicca-samuppāda or dependent arising – but without any apparent awareness of that highly structured formula. It would seem that this poem represents an early presentation of themes that only later became the twelve links of dependent arising.[viii] Fronsdal’s introduction to the eleventh poem instead speculates on the relation of the discourse to the Bṛhadāranyaka Upaniṣad, which is not an impossible hypothesis though it would need more discussion to look like more than guesswork.

Turning now to the translation issues I highlighted earlier, one could perhaps simply enjoy Fronsdal’s accessible new translation, as a way to explore a particularly interesting example of early Buddhist literature. However, any reader wishing to explore the meaning of the stanzas in detail should be aware of the many mistakes in Fronsdal’s rendering. Let me start with two general issues. First, Fronsdal translates nibbāna as ‘release’,[ix] nibbāti as ‘frees’[x] and nibbuti as ‘release’.[xi] These three words are etymologically and conceptually related; nibbāti means ‘goes out’ (of a flame) and is used metaphorically in early Indian religious thought in relation to the ending of the process of being reborn in saṃsāra. Likewise, nibbāna means ‘going out’, ‘quenching’ and is a metaphor for the summum bonum of the spiritual life and the end of rebirth; likewise nibbuti is regarded as cognate with nibbāna while also connoting ‘happiness’, ‘being at ease’.[xii] So why does Fronsdal write blandly “release is a translation of nibbuti”?[xiii] It just isn’t. ‘Release’ would be a translation of vimutti, which is a different concept. I would guess that Fronsdal wanted to maintain a this-worldly and psychological kind of tone in his translation.

The other general issues is Fronsdal’s translation of bhavābhava as ‘becoming and not-becoming’.[xiv] He does not in fact explain what he thinks he means by ‘becoming and not-becoming’, but it occurs in such contexts as:

          This wise one doesn’t associate with

          Becoming or not-becoming.[xv]

The Pāli here is bhavābhāya na sameti dhīro: ‘the wise person does not go to bhavābhava’. The word bhava means ‘existence’ or ‘becoming’, or ‘state of existence’, such as one of the six ‘realms’ of the wheel of life – existence as a god, animal, human, and so on. As K.R. Norman points out, the Pāli commentary explains bhavābhava as bhava-bhava ‘one or other state of existence’, saying, ‘in bhavābhava means in states of existence in the sensory realm and so on, or in bhavābhava means in one or other state of existence, in ever-renewed states of existence’.[xvi] That is to say, bhavābhava means ‘existence after existence’ or ‘various states of existence’. It does not mean ‘becoming or not-becoming’. Indeed, as the example above shows, the translation ‘becoming or not-becoming’ does not even make sense, whereas it makes perfectly good sense (in the ancient Indian context of belief in rebirth) to say, ‘the wise person does not go to various states of existence’, meaning that the wise person does not undergo rebirth into a god realm or back into the human realm and so on. Again, one might guess that Fronsdal wanted to avoid references to the rebirth cosmology of early Buddhism.

As well as these two general issues with Fronsdal’s translations, there are many specific points. In the context of this review, let me just take one, to make my point. Fronsdal translates the first two lines of v.898 as follows:

            Those who say virtue is ultimate

                      Dedicate themselves to purity and religious observance.

The context is the statement of an opponent’s point of view – the view that it is the strict observance of a moral code that makes for spiritual purity. The Pāli here is sīluttamā saññamenāhu suddhiṃ / vataṃ samādayā upaṭṭhitāse – ‘Those holding virtue as the ultimate say that purity is through restraint. / Undertaking a vow they are dedicated.’ But Fronsdal writes in a note: ‘The meaning of this sentence is obscure. To translate this line most scholars look to the canonical commentary on this verse found in the Niddesa and borrow the idea that purity comes from self-restraint. I have tried to understand the sentence on its own terms, without the commentary. No English translation that I know of, including mine, translates saññā (‘concept’, ‘perception’) in the opening phrase sīluttamā saññamenāhu suddhiṃ.’[xvii]

This note shows, however, that Fronsdal does not understand the Pāli and misrepresents previous translators. The word saññamena has nothing to do with saññā but is the instrumental singular of saññama, from the verb saṃ-yam, ‘restrain’.[xviii] Hence, ‘Those holding virtue as the ultimate (sīluttamā) say (āhu) that purity (suddhiṃ) is through restraint (saññamena)’. This is not at all obscure, and shows that in this case previous translators did not borrow the the idea of ‘restraint’ from the commentary.[xix] I have found another fifteen specific examples of mistakes in Fronsdal’s translation, simply based on not understanding the Pāli.[xx] What to say? In his Acknowledgements on p.ix he thanks various people such as Thanissaro Bhikkhu for checking his translation. Not very thoroughly, one might think. Fortunately, Bhikkhu Bodhi’s translation of the Sutta-nipāta and its commentary will be published very soon.

Dhivan is the editor of Western Buddhist Review

[i] Tilmann Vetter, ‘Mysticism in the Aṭṭhakavagga’, in The Ideas and Meditative Practices of Early Buddhism, Brill: Leiden, 1988.

[ii] For instance, Hajime Nakamura, Indian Buddhism: a survey with bibliographical notes, KUFS Publication: Tokyo, 1980.

[iii] K.R. Norman, The Group of Discourses (2nd ed.), Pali Text Society: Oxford, 2001.

[iv] K.R. Norman, ‘The Aṭṭhakavagga and Early Buddhism’, in Jainism and Early Buddhism: Essays in Honour of Padmanabh S. Jaini, ed. Olle Qvarnström, Asian Humanities Press: Fremont, 2003.

[v] Fronsdal p.51, the last stanza from ‘The Eightfold Discourse on the Corrupt’ (Duṭṭhaṭṭhakasutta).

[vi] Fronsdal p.73, Sn 831.

[vii] Fronsdal p.73, Sn 832.

[viii] See, for instance, Hajime Nakamura, ‘The Theory of “Dependent Origination” in its Incipient Stage’, in Buddhist Studies in Honour of Walpola Rahula ed. S Balasooriya et al., Gordon Fraser: London, 1980, pp.165–72.

[ix] In v.940, 942, although in v.822 he has ‘nirvana’, without explanation.

[x] In v.915.

[xi] In vv.917, 933.

[xii] All this can be easily checked in either PED or in Margaret Cone’s Dictionary of Pāli vol.II.

[xiii] Ch.14 n.3 p.171.

[xiv] In vv.776, 786, 801, 877, 901.

[xv] Final two lines of v.877.

[xvi] Norman 2001, p.328, n.776, quoting the commentary Paramatthajotikā II p.517: bhavābhavesū ti kāmabhavādisu, atha vā bhavābhavesu ti bhava-bhavesu, punappunabhavesū ti.

[xvii] This is n.4 on p.170.

[xviii] This is perfectly obvious from the Mahāniddesa p.309 and from Pj II p.558, both of which gloss saññamena as saṃyamamattena, ‘through mere restraint’.

[xix] Hence Norman p.118 translates: ‘Those who consider virtuous conduct to be the highest thing say that purity is by means of self-restraint’.

[xx] Contact me for a full list of mistakes and issues.