Buddhism 101

I’m still trying to figure out what the point of blogging is, but maybe a blog can serve as a kind of historical record, tracking perspective in real time, before those recollections can be contemplated in tranquility.  I have often wished I had kept such a journal while on the track of a discovery. Although I can probably remember roughly what it felt like not to know something, it’s impossible to completely capture that exquisite state of ignorance.

In that spirit, I plan to blog my progress in a course I’m taking on Buddhism.  I hope that my sensei, the detailed blogger, will correct my misunderstandings before they do too much damage.

First I should say that the audio course is from the Teaching Company, which has been the source of much top-notch education for me over the years — I listen to the courses on my commute through Central Park. The course is taught by Malcolm David Eckel, who got his Ph.D. in comparative religion from Harvard and has written several books on Buddhism.  It’s difficult to tell exactly how much he himself is a Buddhist, but he clearly has a tremendous amount of respect for Buddhism.

In introductory lectures, Eckel discusses the Hindu background into which the Buddha (I will call him this though technically he wasn’t the Buddha until his enlightenment, or possibly his death) was born.  To the extent that Buddhism arises from and is a response to Hindu religious beliefs, the key influences are the Vedas (composed around 1500 to 500 BCE and written down beginning around 800 BCE) and the explications of the Vedas in the Upanishads, composed around 700 BCE (the Buddha, of course, was famously contemporaneous with Socrates, and like Socrates died around 400 BC).

Although no doubt the modern Buddhist might disagree, Eckel presents the Buddha’s insight as a response to the Hindu view of death (the comparisons to other religions are my own).  Apparently the early Vedas presented a view of death fairly similar to that found in The Epic of Gilgamesh (probably composed around 2300 BCE and written down around 2100 BCE)) and the early Hebrew Bible (probably composed around 1500-800 BCE and written down around beginning around 800 BCE), and probably characteristic of most known civilizations at that time. That view is that after death the soul becomes a shade and transmigrates to a Hades-like place (thus the early Greeks shared this view, though described it in more detail), which is not particularly interesting but not particularly horrible either (though not a place you’d want to go if you had a choice). A few heroes and kings maybe go to a better place where the gods live, and the gods are similar to other religions completely distinct from humans. The very late Vedas developed the notion of reincarnation (in Sanskrit, the word means “wandering”), in which the soul is reincarnated “millions” of times (according to a late Veda) and this notion is the basis of subsequent Hindu views of the afterlife, including the Upanishads. Since gods are also subject to reincarnation, the distinction between gods and humans has begun to dissolve in the Upanishads.  By the time of the  Buddha, the Hindu concept of reincarnation had developed into a decidedly pessimistic view, since it would seem that on the whole one is most likely to be reincarnated as a fairly miserable creature (the ant is commonly used as an example in the Vedas).

Thus, as Eckel conveys it, the Buddha’s big insight was that the trap of infinite reincarnation could be stopped by proper understanding of the nature of the self and reality, achieving Nirvana (Sanskrit for “extinguishing”).  The Buddha came to this understanding, and thus achieved Nirvana, and was kind enough to spend the next 40 or so years of his life conveying this understanding to his followers.

I can describe some initial concepts now.  The fundamental basis of Buddhism can apparently be understood within the context of the 4 Noble Truths: 1. All is suffering; 2. Where suffering comes from; 3. How suffering can be stopped; 4. The method leading to the cessation of suffering.

I won’t get much into this now, but to make a few preliminary comments. First, it would appear that the Buddha paves the way to the four Noble Truths with a metaphysical insight: that all is impermanent, and that the self is a delusion, and, in particular, “all is one”. My first response to this metaphysical maneuver is that it is deep and compelling.  Some of the most difficult problems in contemporary Western philosophy (the nature of identity and the nature of consciousness) can be dropped as distractions if one makes these basic metaphysical assumptions. Of course it doesn’t feel that way (one does have a sense of one’s self, of course, and if the self is a delusion, who or what is suffering that delusion?). On the other hand, from a purely scientific point of view, it certainly is true that “all is one”, and the explanatory gap in the hard problem of consciousness seems just about impossible to overcome.  A pure materialist — and aren’t we all? — would seem to be better off embracing Buddhism than trying to hold on to Cartesian dualism. More on this later.

A second point I would make is that they don’t call it the axial age for nothin’. While the Buddha was putting the kibosh on the Hindu view of the afterlife, Plato (presumably following Socrates, who claimed to be following the oracular hymns) was doing about the same to the Greek view of the afterlife.  As I indicated above, until the time of Socrates the prevalent view of the afterlife was that shades migrated to a fairly unappetizing Hades. In his meditations just before he died (in the Phaedo) he describes a view of the afterlife completely at odds with Greek (and contemporaneous Hebrew) views, and virtually identical to the one now held by Christians, Jews, and Muslims, at least those following the literal exoteric forms of their religions. The Hellenized Jewish authors of the New Testament clearly lifted their entire view of Heaven and Hell from the Hellenic strain, probably from the Phaedo, and Jews were changing their views at about the same time, probably for the same reason.  The Muslims of course took their views from the by that time well-developed dogmas of the Jews and Christians. From the modern perspective, the bracingly mechanistic and atheistic metaphysics of the Buddha is obviously more appealing, though the question of the metaphysical nature of reincarnation, which Buddhist thought was originally developed to address, does not appeal to the modern.  Nevertheless, stripped of those metaphysical assumptions, Buddhist thought does develop a bracing and fascinating set of philosophies.

In the past I have been guilty of oversimplifying Buddhism as simply an exercise in lowered expectations.  I am beginning to see much beyond that, though I still see Buddhism (which, I gather, advocates extinction [”extinguishing”? — Ed.]) on a collision course with existentialism (which, in my version at least, advocates the opposite, though Sartre might disagree). More on this later.

CVM

This entry was posted on Sunday, 22 March 2009 at 23:26 and is filed under Politics & Society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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