I'm writing this as an open letter to the DharmaRealm guys, but am hoping to garner some responses to this question from Buddhism fans of various stripes.
To say someone is "deep" typically means that the person thinks long and hard about philosophical problems. It's not a term that philosophers themselves tend to use about each other, as the concept seems less substantial the closer you look at it, i.e. the "deeper" you get into philosophy. Within Buddhism (and perhaps Eastern religions more generally), however, I gather that something like this concept is absolutely central to what hierarchy there is: a master is profoundly more wise and contemplates more deeply than a mere novice, much less an outsider.
So, my question is what can "depth" really mean in this context, and can it even be understood by those who have not attained such depth. To be clear, obviously if there is such an achievement, then those who don't have it don't have it, but that doesn't mean that even the meaning of the term should be cut off from the rest of us.
My context and illustration here is our talk with Owen Flanagan, an accomplished analytic philosopher who spent some time studying Buddhism and wrote a book on it. The accusation against him is that not only is he not an accomplished Buddhist (which he doesn't claim to be), but that despite spending 300-or-so pages philosophically analyzing common Buddhist themes such as suffering, impermanence, no self, emptiness, nirvana, karma, and the various Buddhist virtues like compassion and lovingkindness, he just "doesn't get it."
Here are some possibilities:
1. Depth is a matter of internalizing and applying Buddhist insights. Intellectually recognizing that everything is impermanent is much different than acting consistently on this and the many other difficult insights Buddhism has to offer. In this case, an outsider can very well explain what depth is through explication of the insights, which is not that difficult with a little research, as these have been clearly set out in many sources and talked to death for many many years.
2. Depth is a matter of having the appropriate interpretation of these insights (e.g. the Four Noble Truths). This would be a matter of scholarship and judgment; a casual reader of some portion of the literature is not going to have even the appropriate intellectual understanding of something like impermanence. A non-Buddhist like Flanagan could study the various interpretations, but lacking practice, won't have the judgment to wisely decide between them.
3. The insights referred to in #1 and #2 are themselves hierarchical, in that to even intellectually understand some of the advanced insights, you have to have already internalized some of the more basic ones. On this view, the outsider really wouldn't be able to articulate what he's missing; he literally won't understand the more advanced teachings. (The problem with this view as an outsider that I see is that it seems like that what counts as "advanced" depends on which school of Buddhism you're talking about: Is no self an insight resulting from basic, careful phenomenology, or is it something only arrived at and understood after you really internalize impermanence enough to conceive how this could apply to you personally and not just the things of your perception?)
A satisfactory answer to this question should not result in Buddhists dismissing other Buddhists of different schools as non-deep (which would seem to show that the whole notion of depth is self-serving sectarian garbage), nor should it automatically rule out gurus who would not count as academically trained in the Western sense, i.e. having read the great span of literature crossing different traditions.
I await your responses.
-Mark Linsenmayer
scott says
April 26, 2012 at 11:44 amHi Mark,
I posted a short, silly response to the link you posted to our Facebook page, but in case you (or your listeners/readers) missed it, I’ll post here, too.
We just recorded a whole slew of new episodes that will go live over the next two months. Some of the questions we take up sort of, in a round about way, address some of your questions here. Specifically, we talk about “serious” practice, which I think can be re-named “deep.” Anyway, those episodes don’t address your question specifically, so I think it warrants something more substantial.
I feel like there’s a lot here and would love to address the questions more directly, either in one of our own episodes or a separate piece. Let me think about it, and I’ll get back to you.
Thanks!
scott
dmf says
April 26, 2012 at 6:35 pmis there a lot more to it than knowing by having done/experienced and knowing about in an abstract way?
Craig Paup says
April 26, 2012 at 5:42 pmFundamentally, Buddhism is not a philosophy or a religion. It is what you guys might call soteriology. I don’t know of a Buddhist term that corresponds to “deep”, but riffing off of the concept of dependent co-origination, I would say that all Buddhist terms, Dharma, Buddha, Four Noble Truths, Paramitas, Nirvana, Karma, Emptiness, Dependent Co-origination, and so on at their “deepest” meaning, are pointing towards a truth without predicate. The truth value of a definition or explanation is dependent upon what leads, in a particular circumstance, towards liberation. Buddhist terms are given definition in relation to each other, and as experience “deepens” they are superseded through a sort of dialectic. This does not imply a hierarchy, however, as liberation could come as a breakthrough at any point. Anything that points towards liberation is Dharma, including rocks, trees, or dog shit. If someone is primed by circumstances (Karma) in a certain way, it could be dog shit. Why not?
If you already discussed Nagarjuna, you know that what I said above about “deepest, deep, deeper” is deep dog shit.
Liberation is not conceived of as an end point in Mahayana, but as the beginning of true practice. I hope this was of some help.
Mr. Flanagan has trouble going from “no self” to “compassion”. I heard nothing in the discussion about Buddha nature or Tathagata-garbha, or Mind Only. Is it perhaps too “spooky” for a naturalist?
David Buchanan says
April 27, 2012 at 3:14 pmIn this particular case the accuser says that Flanagan’s “understanding of Buddhism is superficial, and sometimes just plain wrong” and she recommends Alan Wallace instead. He “gets it” and his “views are radically different from Flanagan’s in just about every respect,” she says. I’m not sure what Barbara (the accuser) had in mind and I didn’t intentionally take her advice but a lecture given by Wallace at Oxford was the centerpiece of my most recent blog post (“More Voices on Buddhism and Science” on April 19th).
http://www.voicesfromoxford.com/B-S-Wallace.html
Wallace makes a case that William James’s approach to the study of the mind is as revolutionary as Galileo or Darwin were. Once you understand what they’re saying, Wallace explains, you see the phenomena in a whole new way, like a new gestalt or paradigm. I don’t think Wallace framed it like that just to puff up William James but to emphasize the weirdness of the Jamesian ideas he was presenting. I’d like to suggest that Buddhism is “weird” in the same way and they both tend to be misunderstood precisely because interpreters underestimate the weirdness and otherwise fail to realize they are dealing with a radically different (and highly sophisticated) worldview.
As Eugene Taylor and Robert Wozniak explain it, very few scholars have ever understood William James. James’s critics were interpreting his work through their own basic metaphysical assumptions, even though his work was an attack on those very assumptions. It has been very common for the various critiques of James to proceed from “assumptions ..that are completely foreign and, therefore, inappropriate to James’s way of thinking. James is faulted, in other words, for failing to account for that which he has explicitly set out to deny.”
I’m not sure if I’d frame the question of “getting it” in terms of superficiality or depth, but I think the problem of misunderstanding James or Buddhism has to be addressed on this level – at the level of basic metaphysical assumptions. In the case of Flanagan’s approach, I think we have to consider the possibility that “natural” is not being used in a metaphysically neutral way; it carries some pretty hefty physicalist assumptions. The analytic tradition in general (not to mention our scientific culture) has its own freight too. Taylor and Wozniak say James’s radical empiricism has been largely misunderstood since the day it published over a century. It’s like one giant “case study in misinterpretation and distortion”, and I’m convinced that basic assumptions have everything to do with it.
“The fact was, nothing in their history had prepared Western philosophers and psychologists for radical empiricism. As the reaction to his writings showed, it is exceptionally difficult to suspend our logical categories and see the immediate moment shorn of our labels of it. …Indeed, we cannot even make sense of non-western epistemologies, let alone admit that they might have something important to say to the Western outlook about ways of seeing reality that we cannot yet fathom. Yet we have in James’s radical empiricism a position that goes right to the heart of the Western viewpoint, exposing its limits. In this he resembles, not chaos and anarchy, as some of his rationalist critics might have supposed, but more the position in Western philosophy of European existentialism and phenomenology, or the metaphysics of Far Eastern psychology: the Upanishadic tat of the Hindu texts; the Theravada Buddhist image of moment consciousness as a string of pearls; the Mahayana Buddhist doctrine of co-dependent origination or Zen suchness.”
Having said that, however, James does write in untranslated English. You can also get this weirdness from Robert Pirsig or John Dewey. They are radical empiricists too, they’re both just as readable as James but they’re both tougher on theism. (Pirsig is even anti-theistic in a certain way.) These radical empiricists, I think, offer a relatively way into the weirdness of Buddhism.
dmf says
April 27, 2012 at 4:59 pmI think the “deep”in question would parallel Jame’s privileging of “intimacy”, building off of Fechner and Bergson.
“All I mean is that there must be some subjective unity in the Universe,
which has purposes commensurable with my own and which is at the
same time large enough to be, among all the powers that may be there,
the strongest. I simply refuse to accept the notion of there being no
purpose in the objective world. On the other hand I cannot represent the
existence of purpose except as based in a mind. The not-me, therefore,
so far as it contains purpose, must spring from a mind; but not necessarily
a One and Only mind. In saying “God exists” all I imply is that my
purpose is cared for by a mind so powerful as on the whole to control
the drift of the Universe. “
David Buchanan says
April 27, 2012 at 5:34 pmI believe you’re quoting James from a private letter (on a different topic) to Thomas Davidson in 1882. The essays in radical empiricism first appeared in the journals in 1904 and 1905. There was a book of psychology, his pragmatism and of course his Varieties of Religious Experience between that letter and his radical empiricism. There might be some relevance that I’m not seeing but I’m sure that this conception of an intimate Universe never crossed my mind and my remarks are only about James’s approach to studying regular, human minds.
dmf says
April 27, 2012 at 6:48 pmhis approach to studying “regular” minds is deeply connected with his broader sense of a radical empiricism and as I was suggesting the buddhistish experience of (big)Mind, from Varieties and a Pluralistic:
“[that the individual] identifies his real being with the germinal higher part
of himself; and does so in the following way. He becomes conscious that
this higher part is coterminous and continuous with a more of the same
quality which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can
keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save
himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck.”
David Buchanan says
April 27, 2012 at 7:40 pmWell, I very much doubt your assertions, dmf. (And I think you’re just changing the subject, which is annoying.) My comments were about James’s phenomenology but you are incorrectly characterizing his flirtations with pan-psychism as advocating some kind of big Mind. Since his radical empiricism was practically designed to rule out posits like Hegel’s Absolute Mind, this “deep connection” to radical empiricism seems highly implausible, to be polite about it.
I don’t want to open that debate or otherwise highjack this thread. My remarks were intended as an answer to Mark’s request. Please, take my comments as they were intended and make a good faith effort to say something that’s relevant to my point and to the topic.
dmf says
April 28, 2012 at 6:52 amthe post seems to be raising the question of what if anything is available to a buddhist practitioner who has a “deep” understanding that isn’t available to mere reflection/speculation or scientific, in my readings James was very interested in how personal experiences, intimate knowledge, could exceed (be deeper than) our words/methods of science/philo/theology and were literally the grounds of human know-how and especially morality, and that we could trust these experiences as being private/intimate and yet objective because there were greater forces at work in the universe which shared/enabled our interests.
dmf says
April 28, 2012 at 7:10 amhttp://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/jnitrous.html
speaking of which here is James on Hegel and the revealing powers of nitrous oxide experiences.
David Buchanan says
April 28, 2012 at 11:27 amYes, I’m offering radical empiricism – via Wallace – as an answer to Mark’s question about “depth” and “getting it”. I’m saying that Buddhism and radical empiricism will both seem “weird” from the usual scientific or physicalist perspective and I’m saying that they are weird in the same sorts of ways. If Wallace, Taylor and Wozniak are right – and I have lots of reasons to believe they are – James was saying something quite revolutionary about the human mind and the vast majority of commentators (over the last century) have misunderstood the radical nature of radical empiricism. More specifically, the assertion is that radical empiricism gives us access to the meaning of some very central Buddhist ideas; anti-essentialism, the relational interdependence of all “things”, the concepts of nothingness or emptiness, the doctrine of no-self and above all, as Wallace presents it, a first-person phenomenological approach to the study of the mind.
Let me offer a few words about your reading of James. While it would be fair and accurate to say that James prioritized experience over words and concepts, it would be very misleading to read this as an endorsement of subjectivism or private, personal experience. Radical empiricism is the centerpiece of James’s “radical reconstruction of philosophy”, as Charlene Seigfried puts it. It is part of his attack on what he called “vicious intellectualism”, a philosophical disease that goes all the way back to Plato. As with his Pragmatism, James is not merely taking sides with the empiricists against the rationalists but rather offering a third alternative that can mediate between these ancient rivals. Rather than begin with the assumptions of either school, his radical empiricism asks us to suppose that reality is made of one “thing” only; experience. Any ontological claim beyond that, James says, can only every be a hypothesis and such posits are worthwhile only to the extent that they can be tested and tried and otherwise put to work in experience. This would certainly be true for any claims about “greater forces at work in the universe”. Radical empiricism says that philosophers must include every kind of experience in their accounts of reality and, by the same token, philosophers ought not waste time talking about “trans-experiential” realities or entities. A world of pure experience would seal out all the metaphysical fictions that had been pouring into philosophy throughout its history. He was especially interested in ruling out the Idealist of his own time because their crypto-theology was so viciously intellectual, abstract, buttoned-up and unrealistically clean. The idea that the universe itself is rational through and through was just completely incredible to James and so the main thrust of his work is the bring philosophy back down “to the earth of things” wherein Man is the measure of all things. This is not to aggrandize our place in the universe but a statement of epistemological humility. We can only know what we know from our perspective. All the talking about eternities and essences and ultimate truths or thee objective truth – it’s all just way too grandiose, too ambitious and unrealistic. If James were making ontological claims about the greater forces at work in the universe, he’d be violating his own rules in a very big way. To make claims about the priority of one’s own subjective experience, James would have to drastically re-write (or rather un-write) one of the most important of the essays in radical empiricism: “Does Consciousness Exist”, wherein he answers in the negative. The no-self doctrine of Buddhism can be approached through James’s rejection of the substantial self, the soul, the Cartesian self. This denial of the subject would not be a very solid beginning for a subjectivist, no? This is another radical feature of radical empiricism, so that “experience” has to be understood in a very way such that the “subject” is a metaphysical posit, a secondary concept, rather than an ontological entity or primary category.
Finally, I’d also point out that the first person phenomenological approach is not offered as an alternative to the neurological, behavioral or other scientific studies from a third-person. It’s being offered as an addition, as a necessary supplement, if you will. This can be seen in the title of Wallace’s lecture; “Toward a 3-dimensional science of the mind.” James’s radical empiricism offers that third dimension.
The sympatico between James’s work and Buddhism is so strong that at least one scholar (David Scott) goes so far as to say that the Buddha himself was a pragmatist and a radical empiricist. This is my point. James offers a relatively easy way to “get” what the Buddhists are saying.
Check it out: http://www.thescotties.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/james-buddhism.pdf
dmf says
April 28, 2012 at 2:38 pmI can see that we have different readings of James and so different ways of relating him to buddhist teachings, and I’m not sure why you head into a discussion of subjectivism here so I’m going to bow out here.
David Buchanan says
April 28, 2012 at 3:45 pmYes, I noticed that too. If I had to venture a guess, I’d say you’re reading James thru some version of Rortyism. (Rorty was very dismissive toward radical empiricism.) But I had hoped that the conversation would be about Alan Wallace’s reading of James and Buddhism and/or David Scott’s reading of the same. Even as you bow out, which is fine because this is just a blog and it’s just for fun anyway, the actual substance of the matter remains untouched. I dare say it seems as though you’ve carefully resisted or stepped around the point at every juncture. It could be that you watched the video and read Scott’s paper carefully and repeatedly but they haven’t even been referenced in your remarks. I don’t get that.
dmf says
April 29, 2012 at 6:47 amthe paper seems to reduce James to functionalism (when not pointing towards a Process expansion of James which is ironic given your resistance to my bringing up Whitehead as a key figure to fleshing out James’ metaphysics) which would roughly make him Dewey and not sure how that differs greatly from what Flanagan is doing, as shouldn’t surprise you from my perspective your reply was not really an answer to the question of what “deep” might mean in buddhist practice while mine was, let a thousand flowers bloom.
ps he briefly mentions Steve Odin there who is well worth the read for anyone interested in east/west exchanges.
David Buchanan says
April 29, 2012 at 2:03 pmWhat follows is a series of quotes from David Scott’s paper, “William James and Buddhism: American Pragmatism and the Orient”, including some quotes from James himself. I have selected and presented these quotes in an effort to illustrate what Wallace is also trying to get at, namely a kind of phenomenological, first-person approach to the study of the mind. This involves not just the addition of another technique but also a broader reconceptualization of consciousness, experience and even empiricism.
I hope Scott’s assertions draw comments, critiques and questions but, for now, they are being presented without any further comment from me.
David Scott writes: “The charismatic Buddhist spokesman Dharmapa ̄la re-visited America in 1902–04 and attended a lecture of James’ at Harvard. On recognising him, James is supposed to have said to him, ‘Take my chair. You are better equipped to lecture on psychology than I’. At the end of Dharmapa ̄la’s exposition, James declared, ‘This is the psychology everybody will be studying twenty five years from now’ (quoted Fields 1992, pp. 134–5). The fact that it was the ‘psychological’ aspects of Dharmapa ̄la’s message that James focused onto rather than on abstract doctrine is no surprise. The specifics of Dharmapa ̄la’s talk is not known, but his Therava ̄da background meant a focus on states of mind and of related behaviour.”
“One broad overlap between James and Buddhism is a general sensitivity towards inner depths and wider potentialities. Writes James: ‘the further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely ‘‘understandable’’ world’.
James said: ‘I have no doubt whatsoever that most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted portion of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness’ (1908, p. 295):
“Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness . . . No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. (1902, p. 374)”
James: “Intellectualism’s edge is broken; it can only approximate to reality, and its logic is inapplicable to our inner life . . . May you and I be confluent in a higher consciousness, and confluently active there, tho we know it not? I am tiring myself and you, I know, by vainly seeking to describe by words what I say at the same time exceed either conceptualization or verbalization. As long as one remains talking, intellectualism remained in undisturbed possession of the field. The return to life can’t come about by talking. It is an act. (1909, pp. 288–9)
Scott: “Zen Buddhism matches this distrust of language and of intellectual formulations. From its meditation come a whole range of Zen dos, or ‘ways’. These applied techniques include sounds, physical jolts, humour, ridicule, ko ̄an verbal paradox, aesthetic expressions like calligraphy and the tea ceremony, martial ‘arts’ like archery and sword play. All of these techniques are intended to undermine what James calls the tyranny of ‘intellectualism’, ‘conceptualization’ and ‘verbalization’.”
“James’ ‘pure experience’ is like the Zen Buddhist sense of a natural pre-conceptualising, pre-discriminatory setting, which Zen traditionally calls one’s ‘original face’ and which Suzuki calls ‘no-mind’. The sacredness of the mundane in Zen also compares with James’ view that ‘pure experience’ is nothing ‘but another name for feeling or sensation’ (1912, p. 94).”
” ‘Theoretic knowledge which is knowledge about things, as distinguished from living contemplation or sympathetic acquaintance with them . . . If, as metaphysicians, we are more curious about the inner nature of reality or about what really makes it go, we must turn our backs upon our winged concepts altogether . . . Dive back into the flux . . . if you wish to know reality.’ These ringing words could come from many Buddhist texts but in fact are from James (1912, pp. 249, 252).”