While Buddhist schools have many different takes on metaphysics – on what the world really is – they all acknowledge a distinction between two truths, or two levels of reality. That is: there is a conventional truth, the one familiar to us in everyday life where we can fruitfully speak of individual selves or persons and other everyday objects – and another, more ultimate (paramārtha) truth that is distinguished in some respect from the conventional, truer than the conventional. Their widely varying metaphysics mostly have to do with how we understand the ultimate truth, and I’ll talk about that more next week. I want to start this time, though, I want to note a key point that the metaphysical schools share: the importance of breaking down the conventional – or, put another way, of seeing through it.
Śāntideva’s metaphysical chapter insists on the illusory nature of conventional reality: he compares it to a dream, to the trunk of a banana tree (which is hollow, not actually a “trunk” at all but a pseudostem made out of leaf sheaths). Candrakīrti – a philosopher in the same Madhyamaka school of philosophy as Śāntideva, within a hundred years or so before him – tells us that the real meaning and (Sanskrit) root of the very word for “conventional”, saṃvṛti, is that it obscures and covers up – identifying it with the moha, delusion, that Buddhists generally view as one of our greatest problems.
And it’s that illusory nature that has ethical significance. For crucially, Śāntideva tells us, it is by recognizing the illusory nature of things that we stop being attached to them – a nonattachment that is at the heart of Śāntideva’s worldview.
So, it matters deeply to Śāntideva that the conventional is like a dream, like the trunk of a plantain tree. In order to be liberated from suffering, you have to see through everyday reality – it’s the seeing-through itself that’s the really important thing, rather than what you see through it to. Such a view strikingly bites the bullet that C.S. Lewis shoots at the conclusion of The Abolition of Man:
You cannot go on “seeing through” things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to “see through” first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To “see through” all things is the same as not to see.
For Madhyamaka Buddhists like Śāntideva at least, the point is in many ways to make the things of the world more invisible – not wholly transparent, perhaps, but transparent enough that you can see through them even when there is nothing behind them to see. For them, contra Lewis, that is the clearest seeing of all. Theravāda thinkers like Buddhaghosa don’t go that far: you can see something when you see through the everyday, the smaller reduced parts. But the two Buddhisms share the point that it is important to see through the everyday world.
In all of this, it’s instructive to compare Buddhism with Platonism – and the Abrahamic or Semitic monotheisms, like Lewis’s, that were all deeply shaped by Plato. In both Buddhism and Platonism, there is a recognition of the unsatisfying nature of the material world. In both, something beyond that world – even if that beyond is constituted solely by paradox or absence – is truly ultimate.
Monotheists disagree on how far they want to go with that Platonism: even within Christian theology, Augustine tends to agree that the unsatisfying world is something to be transcended, while Thomas Aquinas’s natural law does a lot more to affirm the world-as-it-is. Even in Augustine’s Platonism, though, the conventional still points to the ultimate; the conventional or natural world reflects the divine ultimate, partakes in it positively. There are strong elements of the conventional in the ultimate. In Buddhism the conventional just breaks down.
I tried to get at that point before by comparing Śāntideva’s view to the major Muslim theologian ibn Sīnā – ibn Sīnā having been deeply influenced by Plato via Aristotle. The commonality between ibn Sīnā and Śāntideva is in noting that the existing world that we know is incomplete, imperfect, lacking – or it at least it would be without a transcendent God to complete it. The difference between them is just that ibn Sīnā thinks there is such a God, and Śāntideva does not. So for ibn Sīnā, ultimately the existing world is not lacking because it has a God to complete it – whereas for Śāntideva it is ultimately lacking, because it does not.
This, in turn, is why I come to see a deep compatibility between Buddhism and existentialism. Both traditions are atheistic – in a much deeper, more meaningful sense than the know-nothing atheists who think they are only denying one entity. They know that there is no transcendent order reflected in everyday reality. And as far as I can tell, that denial of transcendent order works well with modern science. From Copernicus onward, science came to reveal an indifferent cosmos – which makes a great deal of sense in Buddhist terms!
Thank you, Amod.
In relation with the last paragraph: all existential philosophies start asserting the finitude and impermanence of everything in the world. In that sense, Buddhism (and most of Indian philosophies) are existential. Bu the way of managing the anguish of finitude is different in the diverse existential philosophies: non religious existential philosophers (Heidegger, Sartre) say we should be authentic and accept our finitude, that we should be faithful to the Earth (Nietsche). Christian existential philosophers (Kierkegaard, Marcel) (like Hindu Theism) seek to transcend that situation through the leap of faith in God. Jaspers is religious, but more pantheistic and somehow similar to Indian approaches. Buddhism tells us to realize that everything is unsubstantial, impermanent and insatisfactory and, as a consequence, transcend attachment and suffering. Sapiential Hinduism in general suggests realizing that our real Self is Eternal and thus transcend the relative world. I think Nishitani’s “Religion and Nothingness” is a serious and profound dialogue between Western Existential philosophy (mainly Nietzsche and Heidegger) and Mahayana Buddhism.
Best regards!
I agree. I’ve read Religion and Nothingness a couple of times and am still trying to get my head around it, but so far I think it may be one of the best statements we have of the human condition as we know it to be in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Thank you, Amod, for recalling here the dvaita traditions, which admit individual spirits or souls and thereby the problem of individualism. I took a lead from Gabriel Marcel for my masters thesis on psychology, not in the familiar way of theology, but rather personalism: his remarkable insight that the person is already transpersonal, being formed in relations.
There is much in these traditions that has been neglected through the pervasive deference to advaita, and the closely related strains of monism we grasp as idealism and physicalism or materialism. Your image of transparency, taken from the physicalist Eddington, harks back to John Leslie, professor of natural philosophy at Edinburgh in the early nineteenth century. He concluded that matter is mostly empty by taking readings with a photometer (light-meter), there following the pioneering work of Johann Lambert, who gave us the term phenomenology in correspondence with Kant. But Leslie was also a physicalist, in the paradoxical way of Scottish Realism, as now informs most of Trump’s advisers and much of his following. Leslie was won’t to reason by analysis, working back to first principles, in the way of Plato. Yet in his foundation text on mathematics, he completely bypassed the first principles of trigonometry found in Ptolemy’s Theorem. This kind of partial Augustine Platonism gave us analytical philosophy as an academic convention that sought scientific credibility by overlooking everything considered subjective.
Ptolemey s Theorem, remarkably, gives a geometrical proof of trigonometric identities, which have a logical form, something conventional wisdom does not expect from geometry! But the proof works from symmetries of measures on lines composing a four-sided figure inscribed in a circle, so capturing the metrical symmetries of the trigonometric functions. If that sounds esoteric, the formulas yielded for addition and subtraction of angles directly inform how the images from two eyes are composed in consciousness, just the kind of concern routinely overlooked as merely subjective.
Indeed, one cannot take such mundane consciousness as absolute reality, for there is a slight artifact that arises just on the plane of symmetry between the eyes, where an ambiguous stimulus of a certain kind is always seen nearer to the face. Yet that reflex serves to protect one from walking into the stimulus
objects! In such phenomena of subjectivity I don’t find simply a hollowness or lack, but rather a human nature that is both imperfect and radically under-determined, as a free agent. That ambiguity directly poses the old Pythagorean question, What is to be done? – as a problem both practical and moral.
Plato famously combined such traditional concerns with mathematics and astronomy in a lecture, tracing an argument so intricately composed that none but Aristotle could follow it to the end. Having picked my way through the historical difficulties set out above, I can now discern a more than plausible outline of that argument. Astronomy in Plato’s day faced the challeng from Meton’s determination that the lengths of the four seasons are not equal, as expected from a sum orbiting at constant speed in a perfect circle. Plato then reviewed two prominent explanations, by Anaximander in the way of Old Natural Law, where Aquinas picked up the trail; and by Democritus in the soulful ways of rhetoric, which Aquinas encountered growing up in North Africa.
Anaximander found the observed orbit of the Sun varying from day to day, at times in excess of expectation, at times deficient, yet always correcting itself by the natural law of balance, which Laplace famously set out to prove, prompting him with Napoleon to set god aside as an hypothesis he did not require. Yet within the century of such aspirations, Laplace was refuted by Poincare, who uncovered what we call chaos. Democritus, we are told by Vitruvius, wrote on scenography for the theatre, and on that context described the heavens as a pageant depicted for our instruction, as in the Mysteries. Plato then argued that the phenomena of Anaximander were due to the Earth placed with an axis at an angle to the Sun’s orbit; while the conventional perceptions of Democritus were due to our subjective aesthetic or sensory capacity; yet both are providentially designed, informing ideas of justice and beauty suited to regulating human conduct, so that both ranges of existence and experience attest a Good which is integrally One.
Just don’t confuse that with metaphysical monism!