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?

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(!)