[Buddha-l] Re: Rational or mythological Buddhism and Western Buddhist lay practice

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Thu, 2005-03-24 at 10:20 +0100, Mikael Aktor wrote:

> Although early Buddhism rejected extreme asceticism, it still endorsed
> renunciation and demanded sexual abstinence of those who took it up.
> And also many later Buddhist schools kept running monastic
> institutions. Why?

Every society needs a place to keep social misfits and incompetents.
Such people used to be kept in monasteries. Now they are kept in
prisons, which, if Foucault is right, evolved out of monasteries, and in
universities, which also evolved out of monasteries.

> I don't think this is only a matter of sociology (not having children
> to care for), but because sexual abstinence as a "body technique" (in
> a Maussian sense) affects the mind in ways that are considered
> necessary for higher concentrations, although I admit, this is only a
> guess.

I must say I'm suspicious of any language that suggests that some
concentrations are higher than others. What many classical Buddhist
texts suggest is that some mental states involve a more lasting
eudaemonia than others, but there is no suggestion (as far as I know)
that these more eudaemonic states are available only to celibates. On
the contrary, Nagasena tells Milinda (the George W. Bush of his day)
that ten thousand times as many lay people become arhants as celibates
who become arhants. If those statistics are true, then what does that
suggest? I can imagine any number of hypotheses one might cook up to
account for them. But one thing seems clear from what Nagasena says
about the situation: celibacy is in no way a necessary feature of any
practice that leads to the highest goal of Buddhism.

> You're right, "religious practice" can be almost anything.

Buddhist practice is multidimensional, and I doubt that one can name any
one mode of practice that is considered essential or indispensable,
except perhaps following precepts. Many Buddhists, bot in Asia and in
the West, seem to be somewhat more gifted at rationalizing their evasion
of precepts than at following them.

> But here I'm thinking of meditation.

What is that? The term "meditation" covers at least as much territory as
"religious practice" does. The word is so broad in its denotation that
it is almost perfectly meaningless. 
 
> "Philosophy" - prototypically - is based on intellectual, discursive, 
> critical reasoning.

I am very much drawn to an observation by John C. Maraldo, who notes
that the word "philosophy" in Greek referred to a deep sense of wonder
that provoked people into questioning the pat answers offered by
mythology. A philosopher, he says, was anyone who was willing to
question the gods (or the buddhas?) themselves, perhaps because of a
conviction that asking questions is a better way of keeping mystery
alive than is giving answers. So I would say that philosophy is pretty
much indistinguishable from meditation in this sense, for I see both as
potentially effective means of being enlivened by mystery rather than
deadened by doctrinalism.

> In contrast, meditation - prototypically - stays with a preselected
> focus. It's not intellectual or discursive, but suggestive.

Surely the term "meditation" has a long history of being used with
reference to intellectual and discursive activities. Think of Descartes,
Rousseau and Husserl, all of whom wrote important works called
meditations. Intellectual, discursive thought can be every bit as
vibrantly suggestive--or as dead and dogmatic--as anything else the
human being can do with consciousness.

> In much meditation the practitioner is guided to transcend intellectual 
> reasoning in favor of sheer mindfulness or concentration.

The sort of practice you are suggesting here was never regarded as
essential by Buddhists. It was seen as something that one might do if
certain problems arose. It was an antidote to very particular diseases,
but not at all a panacea. 

> Althought the starting point may be an analytical reflection, this is
> only to lead to a meditative stand-still.

I think you have fallen victim to an uncritical acceptance of views put
forward by a handful of particularly anti-intellectual romantics, who
have tried to foist off their view of Buddhism as normative. But the
romantic view is much too simplistic and distorted to warrant serious
consideration by people adult enough to read buddha-l.

> Then, of course, there are the border line cases: Paul Williams claims
> that Madhyamaka analysis was meditative. Some see the epoché of the
> phenomenological school as meditative. I don't know if any of these
> claims are valid.

Do you know how you would go about assessing them for validity? Do you
have a criterion you can apply, other than prejudice? (I ask this as a
serious question, not as a veiled insult. When I insult, I do it quite
openly.) 

Something that I see in favor of Paul Williams's claim is that there are
quite a few Buddhists who wrote quite a lot about Buddhist theory but
who left us no clues at all as to what kinds of contemplative exercises
they did--other than the considerable amount of contemplation that goes
into planning and writing a book. So for all we know, in the absence of
any evidence to tell us otherwise, the main practice of some Buddhists
was writing books. They did that, of course, because they didn't have
access to buddha-l. So why not say that writing books, and analysing
claims made by others, was the principal meditative practice of
Nagarjuna and Candrakirti?

As for epoché an aporia, they seem to be very close to what Maraldo
calls the fundamental enterprise of philosophy. And since both Husserl's
epoché and others' aporia involve a suspension of judgment and a retreat
from naive dogmatism, they seem very much in keeping with the spirit of
the sort of Buddhism we find in some parts of the Sutta-nipaata. Indeed,
it would seem that this retreat from dogmatism and certainty was far
more fundamental to the Gotama of the Sutta-nipaata than was the
practice of the non-discursive jhaana. My reason for saying that is that
the texts suggest (to me, who read them with unassailable prejudice)
that it is much better to achieve non-dogmatism without attaining fourth
jhaana than to attain fourth jhaana without being abandoning dogmatism.
(Alas, among Western Buddhists, I know far more jhaana junkies than I
know people who have abandoned their clinging to dogmas. And this is
true both among celibates and shagophiles.)

Thank you for a stimulating conversation, Mikael. Que l'on continue, as
the Greeks are fond of saying. 

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico