[Buddha-l] How Khushwant Singh does

[Richard Hayes]

On Aug 10, 2011, at 09:35 , Jamie Hubbard wrote:

> On 8/10/2011 10:47 AM, Richard Hayes wrote:
>> On Aug 9, 2011, at 21:26, "Dan Lusthaus"<prajnapti at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>> Question is: Are the Buddhist promises (and/or the promises of others) fairy
>>> tales (sublimated death wishes), or legitimate possibilities?
>> The Buddhist claims are delusions.
> Ditto that and then some.

Jamie, do you recall an exchange that took place on buddha-l back in its Louisville days between me and a fellow named David Salo? The topic was exactly this one, and Salo reported that anyone who denies the doctrine of nirvāṇa as a kind of jīvanmukti (liberation while still living) is questioning the second refuge of Buddhists. He pointed out (rightly) that Indian commentators typically understood "dharmaṃ śāraṇaṃ gacchāmi" to mean "nirvāṇaṃ śāraṇaṃ gacchām," and that if one denies nirvāṇa, then one also denies the Buddha (who was, after all, a buddha only because he had attained nirvāṇa and lived to tell the tale), and if one denies nirvāṇa, then one also denies the sangha to which Buddhist go for refuge, since the sangha-refuge comprises nothing but stream-entrants, once-returners, never-returners and arhants. And so, said Salo, if one does not accept nirvāṇa, then one cannot go for refuge to ANY of the three jewels, and one cannot be a Buddhist at all in any sense of the word. It was a no-holds-barred denunciation of me as a fraud and a pseudo-Buddhist (which, of course, only encouraged me).  

I have never believed in the possibility of jīvanmukti, mostly because I am an unrepentant evolutionist and am convinced that all of us who have bodies had lots of ancestors who were very good at surviving by the judicious use of violent methods and that we, the living, have therefore inherited genes that predispose us to do everything except follow religious precepts. As long as we are embodied, it has seemed to me, we cannot be rid of the root causes of greed and hatred; and as long as we have minds that would prefer to ignore the brute fact of our genetic heritage, we cannot be rid of delusion (which, as most wise people have rightly observed, is the essence of all religion). 

But, like the followers of the Nyāya school, I do believe that one can be liberated from the root causes of suffering as soon as consciousness ceases to exist, and as a materialist, I believe consciousness ceases to exist when the physical body decays to such a point that it can no longer support the functioning of the central nervous system (which, if one is lucky, happens a few hours AFTER the heart stops beating and not several years before). So you might say I am a universalist, since I believe that eventually EVERYONE without fail attains nirvāṇa by the time-honored method of dying. For some reason, David Salo claimed that even my universalist view of nirvāṇa does not qualify me as a Buddhist, because there would be no point in doing Buddhist practice if every living being in the universe can reach the goals of Buddhist practice without doing it. (I pointed out that there is an excellent reason to do Buddhist practice: it's fun! But even that did not satisfy Salo.)

Evam mayā śrutam: when Jack Kornfield said in a public talk that Buddhist practice can never liberate one from the root causes of suffering but can at best help one manage one's suffering to some extent, he was denounced by Dennis Lingwood (alias Sangharakshita) and declared a non-Buddhist for exactly the same reasons I was declared a non-Buddhist by David Salo. Over the years, I have seen this scenario repeated repeatedly.

Jamie, I feel I owe you a public apology. Some years ago you invited me to Smith College to be on a panel with Bhikkhu Bodhi, and I think you were hoping that the good bhikkhu and I would engage in an unseemly mud-wrestling match over this very topic for the delight of Smith College señoritas and that I would hurl all manner of ugly buddha-l abuse at the bhikkhu. Alas, I was almost civilized (or at least put on as reasonable an imitation of civility as a coyote can muster). I owe you a properly unseemly mud-wrestling match.

Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM