The Buddha: closet ātmavādin? Bhattacharya's 'The Ātman-Brahman in Ancient Buddhism' Part I

It has been a while since I last blogged, partly owing to been bogged down in reams and reams of spurious, disparate 'research' and partly because I just didn't feel like I had anything to write about. I still don't feel like I have a great deal to write about, really, but I have been reading an engrossng book that has piqued my interest: Kamaleswar Bhattacharya's 'The Ātman-Brhaman in Ancient Buddhism'. I have always been taught to strike whilst the iron is hot, so to speak, so here are some preliminary thoughts. No doubt I will have more to say on this as I get further through the book and reflect on and readjust my opinions. I intend to write the next piece on Bhattacharya's thesis in view of emptiness and the implications that emptiness has on truth.

This book is notable for it's bold central thesis that the Buddha - despite millennia of Buddhist praxis, literature and tradition claiming the contrary - was a kind of ātmavādin. Contentious. This seemingly outlandish claim is centred on Bhattacharya's interpretation of a Cambodian Sanskrit inscription in light of a selection of both Pāli and early Sanskrit texts relating to both Buddhism and various branches of what we might liberally term 'Hinduism' (most centrally the teachings of the Upaniṣads and the later Advaitin stance of Śaṅkarsa) Both the Upaniṣads and the Advaita of Śaṅkara espouse the existence of a universal brahman, the totality of existence - the ''inner ruler' which resides in the Universe but is distinct from and unknown to the Universe' - from which each deluded individual is detached by wrong view, reification and ignorance. All activity derives from it, there is 'no other seer than it, no other hearer, no other thinker and no other knower'. Pretty impressive.

The idea is that the Buddha never actually denied this ātman-brahman and instead only occupied himself with denying a sort of individual ātman that is incorrectly reified by ignorant human beings. This individual ātman is argued to be analogous to the empirical 'I' or 'self' that is disputed in Buddhism. According to Bhattacharya, the Buddha recognised that incorrect construction of a permanent empirical 'I' was to mischaracterise what ātman really is, and so in describing what ātman is not (lists of personal characteristics etc., identifying the ātman with the personal ego and so on), the Buddha really intended to reveal to his followers the truth about the ātman-brahman as told in the Upaniṣads. Obviously, this would make the Buddha some variation of Vedāntin, possibly even making him the 'real' founder of Advaita-Vedānta, pre-dating Śaṅkara by as much as a millennium. There are historical reasons to doubt this thesis, but for now let's have a little look at some philosophical ones.

If, as Bhattacharya proposes, the Buddha was a closet ātmavādin, relying only on the negation of what is not ātman to apophatically point to what ātman actually is (in this case, the ātman-brahman), then the Buddha would have had to believe in at least one actual, existent thing. This is an obvious consequence of the position that every negation relies upon an actual existent thing (from which it is grounded and able to make sense as a negation). There are serious questions to be asked here about the Buddhist concept of pratītyasamutpāda (co-dependent origination), because having a grounding ultimate from which everything stems is, at least on the surface of things, at odds with traditional understandings of co-dependent origination - a doctrine that the Buddha himself is said to have espoused.

This is a recurring issue in Buddhist thought even to this day. Recently, controversies around the Semantic Interpretation of Emptiness has seen the idea of permanence face a lot of scrutiny in relation to Buddhist orthodox doctrines around momentariness and co-dependent origination. I will go out on a limb and say that the issue here bears striking similarities to underlying problems encountered in Sarvāstivādin ontology. If you are not familiar with this ancient school of Buddhism, I'll give a sort of whistle-stop guide to the problems with their doctrines. First, a quick look at their name: sarva ‘all’; asti ‘exists’; vada ‘theory’. The things that they believe ‘all exist’ are dharmas, the precise definition of which, I will get to shortly. They think that these dharmas exist across the three tenses; past, present and future – a novel position in Buddhism for one specific reason. To say that something(s) exist across three tenses would seem to necessitate some degree of permanence, and traditionally, Buddhism and permanence do not make good bedfellows.

So what exactly are dharmas? Dharmas, according to Sarvāstivādin ontology, are ultimate, irreducible, elementary ‘atoms’ that combine to constitute all psycho-physical phenomena in the experienced world. They each have a unique, intrinsic nature – svabhāva – that relies on no outside influence for its existence. It is 100% self-reliant and exists entirely of its own volition. The Sarvāstivādins identified 75 types of dharmas that allegedly account for every single type of experience that there is – thankfully, we needn’t know what these 75 things are! I also add for the sake of clarity and transparency that there is evidence to illustrate that both dharmas and svabhāva were not initially terms loaded with ontological impetus. Anybody interested in this should look up work by Collet Cox (Disputed Dharmas) and Noa Ronkin (Early Buddhist Metaphysics), who both make arguments relating to the early epistemological domains of both terms.

The point that I am trying to make by bringing dharmas into the mixer is that Bhattacharya's argument that the Buddha endorsed belief in, realisation of and salvation through a permanent ātman-brahman is in some regards analogous to the Sarvāstivādin belief that liberation could be found by seeing things as they really were, viz. by realising that all psycho-physical experiences stem from irreducible dharmas manifesting and exercising causal efficacy. The idea behind both in their respective traditions is that realisation of these 'truths' will lead to dissolution of the empirical 'I' and realisation of ultimate truth. Both posit an ultimately real substrate by which the ultimate truth can be defined (as on these models, truth is validated by its accurate description of an existent state of affairs). The problem arises very simply when we try to reconcile the total, complete interdependence of all phenomena - that is to say that no phenomena are reliant on any one thing for their existence - with a permanent, eternal ātman-brahman or what amounts to permanent, eternal dharmas.  

The stock Sarvāstivādin response to the problem is that the Buddha was only applying co-dependent origination to the conditioned realms, i.e. the realm in which we live. Dharmas do not reside here (they live in an unconditioned realm, wherever that might be), they only migrate and appear here for long enough to exercise their causal efficacy and attract another dharma of the same sort. Consequently, the Sarvāstivādins claim that despite appearing otherwise on the surface of things, dharmas are in fact sufficiently subject to co-dependent origination: all phenomena are manifested by combinations of these dharmas in this conditioned realm. How convincing we find this is a matter of opinion. Personally, I don't find it very feasible at all - fantastical notions of supranatural migration and mystical combinations of transcendent eternal atoms endowed with immutable essence is a step too far.

I suppose the argument could be made that the ātman-brahman functions in a similar way. Bhattacharya does not say this in as many words, but if we were to try and couch his attitude in Sarvāstivādin terms, the argument is all but the same. The ātman-brahman is unconditioned and dwells, if not in a different 'realm', then certainly in a different way. This means that we could feasibly see its effects - the conditioned world, engulfed in delusion and suffering - whilst not seeing the eternal cause. Again, this would arguably make its effects at least partly dependently co-arisen: they arise dependent on a multitude of factors relating to the interactions of delusion and so on. 

There is a sticking point, though. The Katha Upaniṣad states:

There is a city with eleven gates
Of which the ruler is the unborn ātman
Whose light forever shines. They go beyond
Sorrow who meditate on the ātman and
Are freed from the cycle of birth and death.
For this ātman is supreme!

The ātman is the sun shining in the sky,
The wind blowing in space, he is the fire
At the altar and in the home the guest;
He dwells in human beings, in gods, in truth,
And in the vast firmament; he is the fish
Born in water, the plant growing in the earth,
The river flowing own from the mountain
For this ātman is supreme!  

With this in mind, how far the argument about the ātman-brahman working in a similar way to dharmas could could fly is debatable, for even disregarding the Katha Upaniṣad, we still have an ultimate grounding that would appear to preclude any 'true' co-dependent origination. However, the Katha Upaniṣad is concerned with proving that there is nothing outside of the ātman-brahman: all experience is within the ātman-brahman. It follows that if the ātman-brahman is literally everything that we experience, then what we are effectively saying is that there is no cause as such, everything just is the eternal, causeless, immutable ātman-brahman. It should be pretty clear by now that the crux of all of this wrangling, be it Sarvāstivādin or Bhattacharya's own thesis, is essentialism.

Bhattacharya's thesis is that what the Buddha denied was not the ultimate ātman-brahman, but some abstracted personalised ātman. He thinks that by denying one, the Buddha necessarily tacitly affirms the other, in other words, by denying a conventional or contingent ātman, the Buddha implicitly relies upon an underlying ultimate. One way of thinking about this would be to say that in order to establish a truth at all, there must be recourse to an ultimate truth. This is not a new idea and we see it relatively frequently not just in Buddhist philosophies, but in all sorts of philosophies. In relation to this, Bhattacharya cites TVR Murti:

Negation itself is significant because there is an underlying reality - the subjecent ground. If there were no transcendent ground, how could any view be condemned as false? A view is false because it falsifies the real, makes the thing appear other than what it is in itself. Falsity implies the real that is falsified.

Nothing too controversial, theologians have been at this sort of logical wrangling for years: negating something implies that the something exists in order to be negated. In order to deny a thing, the thing must be real. It is a stance oft-cited in response to Madhyamaka philosophy, too - very recently in some papers by Giuseppe Ferraro that aim to refute the Semantic Interpretation of Emptiness put forth by Mark Siderits (as well as others - I myself have a strong research interest in this area) by arguing that without an ultimate grounds, no contingent grounds can be established.

Of course, whilst this is true some of the time (when I deny that the colour of my red guitar is blue, I do so by virtue of the fact that the guitar exists, and exists in a certain way: it is empirically red), it need not be true all of the time.

Let's say I want to describe a unicorn in negative terms because, for whatever reason, I don't believe that any positive predicates are applicable to unicorns - do we infer from this that a unicorn must exist? Well, no. What we can infer is that the idea of a unicorn is present in mind, so when I say no no no, the unicorn is not x, not y, not z, I am not affirming the actual reality of a unicorn, I am just referring to linguistic conceptions that give rise to the image.The level of 'existence' need not be ultimate, it need only be contingent upon linguistic markers that consensus agrees upon, it need only exist as an idea.

This same thing can be said of apophatic mysticism, which tries to avoid making any positive statements about God and instead tries to eff the ineffable by only denying predicates. Maimonides put it succinctly when he said that it is by this means that we see the back-side of God rather than the front-face, i.e. we see the effect, but cannot deign to speculate on the content of the nature of the cause. To couch this in more relevant terms, when the Buddha said 'this is not mine, I am not this, this is not ātman', was he winking and nudging at his disciples as if to say 'but the ātman is something else and can be realised via my method of liberation', or was he simply taking an idea of something that does not actually exist - like a unicorn - and arguing that clinging to a non-existent entity is not only pointless, but damaging?

If, like Bhattacharya and Ferraro, you believe that even an idea needs a 'real' existence in order to be negated, then obviously the argument stands that the Buddha was hinting that the ātman is other than assumed and can be discovered through diligent praxis. In this case, though, I would be intrigued to know what separates a person from a unicorn ontologically. For we can have an empirical person - we observe its agency in the world - but we would be foolish to claim that we can say the same thing about a unicorn. If both are mere ideas, then we seem to give both the same reality, and to my mind, we should be wary of doing so. Alternatively, we admit a difference. Then we are left with the task of explaining how one is more 'real' than the other: I have yet to read any scripture detailing a unicorn's quest for realisation of the brahman! It looks as though the best we can say is that all ideas are manifestations of the ātman-brahman, and as such enjoy the same ultimate grounding and thus the same reality. This would be a very odd position to take.

The upshot of this - admittedly strange - thought experiment is that a thought or mental construction need not refer to anything that exists in reality, whatever that reality may be. This is very straightforward when we apply it to empirical reality: we see humans all of the time, yet we do not see unicorns wandering our fields. It is perhaps more difficult when we apply it to the ātman-brahman because it is easy to say 'well a unicorn exists as an idea within the corpus of the supreme ātman-brahman', though I suspect that we have good reasons to doubt the veracity of this, one of which has already been outlined above. There is a clear difference in how an idea of a unicorn exists and how the empirical physicality of a person exists. When we get into the intricacies of nirguna and saguna brahman (which I do not intend to do here), these problems are compounded further.

So there are good arguments to be made against the position that the Buddha was, by denying ātman in some senses, affirming it in other senses. Of course, we don't actually know what the Buddha did or did not say, and we rely on reams of commentary and scripture recited, amended and written down over many centuries - beginning, in fact, centuries after his death! - to glean any sort of understanding at all. As is obvious, not all of these materials - if any at all - will be reliable, accurate or even remotely close what the Buddha actually said. We have next to no way of knowing what he meant.

This problem is not just narrowly applicable to the Buddha: there are plentiful examples of heretical Buddhist schools, perhaps the most famous being the Pudgalavādins. Bhattacharya cites the Pudgalavādia school as heretical not only in terms of Buddhism, but also to Vedism. This is because in terms of Buddhism, they affirm the reality of a person that is not identical and yet not distinct from the skandhas, and because in Vedic terms, they affirm the substantial reality of the person over and above the ātman -brahman. Bhattacharya agrees with orthodox Buddhism on a vital point here: the Pudgalavādins got Buddhism wrong - be it on his account, or on traditional Buddhist accounts. My question to Bhattacharya would be this - if the Pudgalavādins (as well as so many other Buddhist schools that came and went) were capable of getting it so wrong, then why is there reason to think that a single inscription in Cambodia and some rare, choice excerpts from the Pāli Canon did not fall afoul of the same mistake?

On absent friends

A few days ago, a good friend remarked that 'you don't realise how much you love someone until they're not there anymore.' It's a familiar phrase to many of us and it is one that I hear just about every time somebody close to a friend dies. It seems reasonable, really because it is reasonable. It is very, very easy to take people for granted and it appears to me that people do it throughout every stage of their life: the young child (necessarily) takes their parents for granted, always expecting that they will be there to see to their needs; an adult might take their best friend for granted, thinking that they will always be around to deal with the aftermath of a breakup, and so it goes on. We all know that taking people for granted isn't the best way to be, but it's a trap we are all guilty of falling into at one time or another.

Nevertheless, my first response upon reading that 'you don't realise how much you love someone until they're not there anymore' was twofold. First, I thought 'this is really sad, my friend is struggling with the loss of a (mutual, as it happens) friend and this is the resulting realisation that perhaps he might have appreciated this friend a little more. Something that I am sure we can all  relate to. Second, though, I thought 'that doesn't need to be true'. Over the past three months or so, I have seen the deaths of two friends and my Nan. Of all the emotions and thought processes that accompany grief - loss, anger, bewilderment, regret, sorrow and so forth - I can honestly say that this thought that I somehow hadn't appreciated my friends or my Nan in life never entered into my head. This is not because I am some emotionless droid, or because I am a benevolent all-loving hippy. It is rather down to a more simple fact: I knew how much I loved them, and so did they. Importantly, I think that this loving awareness can be cultivated, and more to the point, I think that it is an integral facet of the Buddhist path.

Seasoned scholars/students of Buddhism will be aware of mindfulness as a means by which we continually evaluate our thoughts, motivations and their manifestations in behaviour. This is the part that interests me. There is something to be said for being aware of yourself, the people around you and your interactions with them. If a result of being mindful when in the company of other people is that we respect the other person and are directly aware of/open about our own feelings toward them - and I think that it is - then it is obvious that this openness needs to start with ourselves. The first thing we should recognise is that it is ok to love people, in fact, it's better than ok. There are all sorts of love, but let's try to sum up a type recognisable in Buddhist contexts (I think it is probably the most important and fundamental means of loving that we can aspire to, in any case): a deep respect for, affection for and concern for other people and their interests.

It's not fashionable to say this out loud. I fear that we live in a society that is increasingly isolationist, if not in practice, then at the very least in rhetoric. I touched on this in an earlier post and I stand by the general thrust of my point therein. We are told to be selfish, taught to help ourselves first and worry about what's left for others later. We kowtow to governmental 'I'm all right, Jack' mentalities and enforce them in our communities with minimal protest. A love for others that drifts along the lines of a deep respect for, affection for and concern for other people and their interests is anathema to these sorts of worldviews... And that's ok. People shouldn't be shamed for holding this view, they should be celebrated. If we are mindful of this principle in our day-to-day dealings with people, it cultivates a change in our disposition. It changes our character. If you genuinely try to hold this concern close to your heart in your day-to-day encounters then eventually it becomes habitual and you do it without thinking. Why is this important? Because the change allows us to be more honest about how we feel about people; both with ourselves, and with the people in question.

In turn, this will mean that you will tell people that you love them and appreciate them. We should all do this, it's a good, worthwhile thing to say, and it injects a bit of happiness into both our lives and the life of the person we are engaging with. Be aware of the affection you have for your best mate, and bloody well tell them. Tell your Mum, your Nan, your cousins. Tell the postie that you appreciate their toil. It need not be difficult. There is a bit of a machismo thing with males and this sort of openness (not with every male, I hasten to add - but we all know this exists), it limits us because we let it. Machismo is a wasted effort, it's not important. Do not miss out on telling your friends that you love them because it's 'not what men do', or it's 'girly' or because it is whatever other silly, archaic reason a lot of lads come up with when faced with anything remotely emotional or 'nice'. 

Be aware of what your friendship means to you the next time you get a text asking you out for a drink and you can't really be bothered to pull yourself away from the X Factor. Keep in mind the love you have for a friend who is awkwardly mithering you when you're trying to watch your favourite Arnie flick. Every now and again it is important to get off your backside, realise what is important to you, act on it, let people know they are significant and that you appreciate their presence. When you do this, you have no regrets. You will realise how much you love someone, and it won't take their absence - through death or otherwise - to enlighten you. You will know, they will know, and what could possibly be better than that?

नरः सुखं धनेन न विन्दति (nor, surprisingly, through Shabba Ranks records).

नरः सुखं धनेन न विन्दति
'Man does not find happiness through wealth.'

In the time since my last post I have largely been working through a different Sanskrit textbook (Maurer 'The Sanskrit Language' ) to the one I was previously using, and I have to say, the switch has made a world of difference. When I first started out in October/December, the Coulson 'Teach Yourself Sanskrit' book terrified me. That terror did not really subside the more time I spent with the book, I think in part because Coulson assumes that his readers already speak either Latin or (ancient) Greek - an assumption which, I am reliably informed, was a step too far even at the original date of publication in the Seventies! The end result of this is a propensity to gloss over the finer details of things such as the grammatical cases on the assumption that the reader will already be familiar with them via their studies of Latin and Greek. I wasn't, and subsequently I struggled a little more than I needed to have. Add to this the tiny typeface that makes reading the Devanagari very difficult once you get past chapter 6, plus his obtuse and inaccessible writing style, and you have a dense, difficult textbook.

In any case, this does not mean that the book is not useful. The one thing that the Coulson book does do very well is the stringent grammatical detail in terms of sentential construction and a hugely helpful declension glossary and (sort-of) dictionary. It also helps that he writes out the Devanagari (for the most part) in Roman script, too; of particular use when you come across a strange conjunct consonant symbol or you have forgotten what a given Devanagari symbol stands for. The Maurer book that I have switched to has no such comfort blanket, but the simple solution for budding Sanskritists is to just use both books in conjunction! Maurer provides more of a step-by-step logical progression through the language and gives helpful shortcuts to determining things such as the subject, object, active verb and gerunds in a sentence. Obviously, this allows for a more rapid progression with reading and writing even if it scrimps on the 'understanding' part in the earlier lessons. Perhaps the single best feature of the Maurer textbook is that the exercises are not random sentences plucked willy-nilly from a plethora of Sanskrit sources (seemingly to demonstrate the author's own mastery and knowledge rather than to provide a consistent thread for the student to follow), but that they are instead whole passages from Sanskrit texts. Each sentence relates to the last and to the next, there's a story to follow, even if it is as banal as Lesson 3's tale about a King riding around in his chariot. It makes it more interesting, less of an effort and as such, much more productive.

It was in lesson 2 of the Maurer book that I came across the quote that adorns the top of this post:

नरः सुखं धनेन न विन्दति

Transliterated, it amounts to 'naraḥ sukhaṃ dhanena na vindati' (for those remotely interested). I include it because aside from it being a mainstay of my own personal philosophy (I, of course, remain eternally grateful to the AHRC for providing me with a substantial grant that allows me to sit in a university philosophy department making such grand statements!), I think it is painfully apt in relation to our recent election results which places money - some say realistically and necessarily - at the top of both the public and private agenda. The government wants to spend less, make more and fill their coffers. The government also wants us to spend more, pay more VAT and fill their coffers. They want big business to make more because we spend more, and despite the cynic in me thinking that part of this is to swell their individual wealth (how many politicians have their fingers in big business?), the pragmatic side of me says that in a capitalist system, there is a need for businesses to make money in order that they might employ us proles so that we can spend lots of money on really important things like Samsung Smart TVs, iPhones and Land Rover Evoques. In this system then, happiness seems to be inextricably bound to money, and the more of it you have, the happier you are (or should be, at the very least!).

From the Buddhist perspective, the problem here is both obvious and yet profound: we have an attachment to money. A fetish for capital. We are deluded. I don't want to be the guy that tries to teach his grannie to suck eggs (I don't know who is reading this, maybe you already know the Buddhist line on attachment to objects, maybe you don't!), but for the sake of clarity, let's break down why attachment to cash (even if this cash brings us enjoyment!) is invariably a source of profound suffering. 

Pleasant  experiences  are  only  pleasant  fleetingly;  they  are finite, short in length and do not satisfy us for any real period of time. However, these pleasurable experiences do cultivate at least one lasting result: attachment. So what can we say about cash/capital in this instance? Well, cash can provide us with opportunities to do or acquire more pleasurable things. I could buy every Shabba Ranks single in existence twice over if I only had ten million pounds in the bank! Whilst buying these records and listening to these records would make me happy for the ten to fifteen minutes or so that it takes to hear two radio edits and an extended cut (maybe a bonus track if I am lucky!), we'd be loathe to say that the records give me any lasting contentment or 'real' happiness. I doubt that I'd be sat in a monastery arguing that my life felt complete because I knew that I had in my CD rack every single Shabba single to exist. Instead, what I would find myself experiencing is a finite, fleeting, shallow sort of happiness that disappears very quickly. Nevertheless, upon buying and listening to my newly-acquired Shabba Ranks singles collection, I have cultivated attachment on a number of levels. Let's have a little look.

First, I have invested money into these physical objects. I am attached to them in virtue of perceiving them as 'mine': I worry about their being damaged, I worry about their theft, and I find myself wondering what I would do should the worst happen. A trivial sort of anxiety, but an anxiety nonetheless. Apply this same logic to your car - suddenly the anxiety seems a lot more credible, right? That's not all. Second, I am attached to how the records make me feel, both when I play them and merely in virtue of owning them. Perhaps when I can't  play them, I feel a bit down, a bit sad - let's face it, who wouldn't be a tiny bit gutted at not being able to play 'Mr Loverman' on loop for the entire day? So I feel anxiety/frustration on not being able to replicate the circumstances under which I felt content (playing the records), and when I am able to replicate the circumstances and play my Shabba CDs, I am content only for a short period of time until the cycle begins anew. 

It is very easy to see how this translates in terms of capital and being in the rat race chasing the acquisition of more capital. Additionally, we have all the anxieties illustrated above manifesting for near on every item we purchase as a result of our capital. The Buddhist solution then is not to simply get rid of capital (although that does happen should you enter the monastic life), but to get rid of attachments full stop (see my Academia.edu page for further reading on this; there is little space to thrash out every detail here). A radical solution, and one that I - being a philosophical sort - can advocate whilst (usually!) keeping a straight face. But it is hardly practical on a national level.

Obviously the entire nation is not going to become Buddhist overnight, and even if it did, we would still need an economy to function en mass. Even Buddhists need to eat, have somewhere to live and  keep themselves in clothes. Buddhists need a functional NHS. But my hope here is to show that touting the acquisition of capital and money as an inextricable facet of happiness is not only false, but it is dangerous. We risk - should we buy into this rhetoric - becoming obsessed with the acquisition of material wealth, convinced that it is the highest good to be attained. It is not. It brings a host of anxieties and it breeds callousness in the face of poverty. An 'I'm all right, Jack' mentality is precisely what the Bodhisattvas dedicate their lives to eradicating! The mahāyāna method is dedicated to the alleviation of suffering and eventual liberation all beings, not a few rich ones - not even just the poor ones! The compassionate human clearly cannot hold the acquisition of wealth as their highest good, for it corrupts and brings anxiety; attributes that necessarily curtail compassion: how can one be compassionate to all beings if one is always trying to gain more than one's neighbour? How can compassion flourish in an atmosphere of proud individualism, where 'greed is good'?

Aristotle famously argued that whilst wealth does not bring happiness in and of itself, it allows one to pursue goals that do bring happiness. Aristotle presumably mean that some wealth allows you to pursue noble goals without the worry of making yourself destitute or wondering where the next meal is coming from. How sobering then, that under a government that ostensibly supports such a sentiment, the UK is seeing a rise in destitution, a rise in food bank usage, a rise in people unable to live their lives with the dignity that every person deserves. It certainly looks to me that man on the whole really does not find happiness through wealth; only some do. And that just isn't good enough.

My first ever post (and why Dharmapāla was a snide)

I had the misfortune to be placed on a library training course last week (Effective Information Management, for those interested), evidently my negative karma is not yet fully exhausted, because I must have been a right swine in a previous life to have this day inflicted upon me. In any case, I am sure that anybody enduring a PhD will have had to face the same tedium at some point in their first year, and decidedly tedious though it was in the main, I did glean a few (potentially) useful nuggets from it (maybe).

One of those nuggets was that it might be a good idea for PhD sorts to start up a little blog so that our research interests, research papers, in-progress papers and names in general can be put out into the world with immediate effect - the plus sides to this are, I suppose, to do with open access and wide readership potential. We are all familiar with the relatively small readership of journals and the even smaller access rights that often come as part and parcel of publishing in them! So here I am, starting a blog. Admittedly, it all feels very narcissistic and it is true that generally, this puts me off doing things such as this. 'Why would anyone be interested in anything I have to say?' is the question that tumbles around my mind even now, but there are possibilities. Maybe I write something and I get another philosophy type's feedback on it. Maybe I write something that spurs a conversation that informs future research. Maybe I write something and someone even agrees - that'd be nice! Maybe I write something and it gets read by nobody at all, but is instead lost to the aether of the internet, never to be read again. Any manifestation of any of these outcomes is fine, because as I write this, I realise that just being back to writing something after six months of endless reading and battling with Sanskrit is completely bloody lovely, and that works well enough for me.

Now to the good stuff (if you're an Indian Philosophy nerd like me, at least). I've been reading some translations of Dharmapāla's work lately, in particular Tom Tilleman's excellent translations in 'Materials for the Study of Āryadeva, Dharmapāla and Candrakīrti'. This was never going to be a chore for me in part because Tom Tillemans is quite brilliant, and in part because I love all things Buddhist (apart from the guys in Burma going around murdering Muslims - what's that about?). One thing that screams out from the translation of Dharmapāla's commentary to Āryadeva's Catuḥśatikā (Four Hundred Verses) in Tillman's work is that Dharmapāla was... Well, kind of a nark! We've all taken on writers with whom we disagree, but I hazard a guess that the academic principle of refraining from ad hominem attacks ('against the man' for non-philosophy people - basically insults) has prevented us from getting too nasty (at least, I hope this is the case!).

No such problem for Dharmapāla, however:

The ancient Brahmins, in their shrewdness, secretly invented the Vedas and then said that they existed naturally, that they just came to be incanted of themselves and were not acknowledged as dependent on anything else. The Brahmins were commended as being the most worthy of veneration, while the Kṣatriyas and the rest were all [said to be] inferior; if [the latter] provided [the Brahmins] with the necessities of life, then they would obtain immeasurable merit. Fools, who lack intelligence, do not fathom [the Brahmins' various deceptions]; they wait upon [the Brahmins] with trust and respect, saying that they are a true field of merit.

It's quite clear then that Dharmapāla thinks of Brahmins as little more than charlatans out to manipulate those 'inferior' to them via a sacred system of their own manufacture. The benefits to this are, of course, obvious! It's also pretty clear that he holds a disdain for any 'fools' that do not see through the Brahmins' games - presumably this applies to any non-Buddhist! I know that merely holding such a sentiment as 'all non-Buddhists are fools' is anathema to many practising Buddhists today, never mind freely expressing it! It was put to me by a friend that 'fool' might simply mean 'deluded person' and in this instance, the tone of the passage would change significantly. This is true, it would. However, I don't think that Dharmapāla did mean 'deluded person', I think he meant precisely what he said.  Here's why.

 Even if we are generous with our attribution and say that Dharmapāla is using 'fool' to mean 'deluded person' (and any unenlightened person is deluded, even if they are Buddhist), we stumble into tricky grounds. It would seem more of a jump to say that 'lacks intelligence' amounts to 'lacks ultimate insight' (into the nature of things; the key Buddhist objective) or 'is deluded': it does look as though Dharmapāla is simply calling every Hindu stupid. Why do I think this? Because even Buddhists are deluded up until the point of enlightenment - the point of Buddhist praxis is to dispel delusion and provide insight (though there is much disagreement around exactly how this is achieved and what it must entail). If 'fool' were being used in this peculiar way, then the Buddhists who do see that the Brahmins are deceiving their adherents would be on the same intellectual level as the Hindus who do not see that they are being conned. This would presumably include Dharmapāla himself, but if not, it would almost certainly include his entire readership (monks, from master to novice) - the standout issue being that if this was the case, none of these Buddhist adherents would be able to see that the Hindus were being conned by the Brahmins either! 

Further to this, Dharmapāla continually states elsewhere in his commentary that one of the criteria for following the Buddhadharma is intelligence - it is clear that 'intelligence' here can't mean 'not being deluded', viz. 'enlightened'. If this was the case, then the Buddhist would not require intelligence to follow the Buddha's teachings, for their very possessing intelligence would already mean that they are enlightened! In light of this, it would be very strange indeed if 'lacking intelligence' was synonymous with 'being deluded'. The intelligence Dharmapāla refers to is required to understand some of the Buddha's teachings (not even all of them, illustrating that intelligence is not a final destination, but a tool for the path) and to allow the practitioner to begin to make correct determinations on their interactions with the world; it is not synonymous with enlightenment, but is rather a prerequisite to it.

So... Dharmapāla seems to have had little time for anybody that was not already following the Buddhist path - so much for universal compassion! What a nark. I leave you with a smaller excerpt. Here Dharmapāla even seems to have had it in for lepers - we are now all familiar with the cruelty of making a marginalised group the butt of a joke or derogatory comparison. I appreciate that this was not the case 100 years ago, never mind 1000 years ago, and I am aware that people were, to a degree, scared of things they did not understand (such as leprosy). Still, I am a little disappointed:

...And the Brahmin caste is not in fact worthy of veneration, nor are they a true field of merit, for they continuously engage in asking for more alms all the while that they support a wife and children, just as do greedy lepers. So the intelligent should not take refuge [in such false teachers].

Lovely(!)