Is philosophy an involution of Buddhism (and other religions)?

This is more or less the thesis advanced by Jayarava in his longest comment on this post.

The idea is that the (Buddhist) religion is primarily experiential and that philosophy is a later reification which misses the main point at stake and moves the emphasis away from what really counts. Moreover, in the case of Buddhism (but I am inclined to think that no other theology would survive Jayarava’s analysis) the result is full of inner contradictions and does not stand a critical inquire.

Thus, why engaging in philosophical thought, if you care for a given religion? Why entering a field in which you will loose anyway, since sooner or later a new development in, say, physics or neurosciences will show that you are at least partly wrong?

A possible answer would be to claim that natural sciences and theology do not speak about the same things (a claim Jayarava appears to refute). Moreover, one might claim that human beings naturally try to understand (as in Aristotle). But are there positive reasons for engaging in philosophy if one comes from a religious standpoint? Let us consider Giordano Bruno’s paradoxical words on this topic (as you will all know, Giordano Bruno was a Catholic priest and philosopher who was burnt on 17.2.1600 because of his heretic ideas —this sonet praises the ignorance of those who do not question anything, as if this were a moral virtue):

IN LODE DELL’ASINO:

Oh sant’asinità, sant’ignoranza,
Santa stoltizia, e pia divozione,
Qual sola puoi far l’anime si buone,
Ch’uman ingegno e studio non l’avanza!

Non gionge faticosa vigilanza
D’arte, qualunque sia, o invenzione,
Né di sofossi contemplazione
Al ciel, dove t’edifichi la stanza.

Che vi val, curiosi, lo studiare,
Voler saper quel che fa la natura,
Se gli astri son pur terra, fuoco e mare?

La santa asinità di ciò non cura,
Ma con man gionte e ’n ginocchion vuol stare
Aspettando da Dio la sua ventura.

Nessuna cosa dura,
Eccetto il frutto dell’eterna requie,
La qual ne done Dio dopo l’esequie!

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21 thoughts on “Is philosophy an involution of Buddhism (and other religions)?

  1. Aren’t all religions of their nature successive to mythology and multiple gods. Eventually one god is regarded as supreme. In the Vedic system this multiplicity exists alongside the more evolved forms. Buddhism arose out of the Vedic matrix and shares some of this multiplicity but with a refined even programmatic clarity. As to whether the onset of philosophy brings conflict with religious values I would say that it may do. The childish form that we are reared with is challenged and must accommodate the rational questioning. It can do that in three ways;, either by losing one’s faith or by becoming arid and rationalistic or by moving into a new mind which combines the logical, emotional and mystical elements of the personality. It is this final stage where paradoxes are resolved in a divinised humanity.

    • Thanks, Michael. This is, as you might know, also Hermann Hesse’s view of the succession of three ages within one’s psyche (childish, rational, religious). He explains that people who tend to arrive early to the second one will have more troubles in reaching the third. I would add that some people just remain in the first one, though, believing in superstitions rather than religions.

    • Michael.

      It’s not true that Buddhism “arose out of the Vedic matrix”. Brahmins were certainly present in the eastern half of the Ganges Valley by the time of the second urbanisation but, as the Buddhists texts seem to show they were not dominant. The Śatapathabrāhmaṇa describes the land east of the Aryavrata (i.e. east of the confluence of the Yamuna and Ganges) as not suitable for a Brahmin to live in. This changed only slowly.

      In fact archaeological evidence shows that there where at least two distinct cultures in the Ganges Valley: Brāhmaṇa and Śrāmaṇa. This thesis has been explored by a number of authors, but I find the version in Geoffrey Samuel The Origin of Yoga and Tantra to be the most accessible. See also Johannes Bronkhorst Greater Magadha, though in my opinion Bronkhorst strains credibility by inverting the timeline. Brāhmanism did not become dominant in that part of the world until after Aoksa died.

      Buddhism arose out of a Śrāmaṇi matrix, in which there were also some Brahmins who plays relatively minor roles. This is not to say that Buddhism was not influenced by contact with Brahmins to some extent. Buddhism, as will all Indian religions, was influenced by the many cultures of that region. And in my view Brahmanism came to exert a greater influence as time went on.

      We really need to lay to rest this anachronistic idea that Buddhism arose from a Vedic culture. It did not.

        • OK. I think you have just stepped aside and let my argument go past you without engaging. I made some substantive points that you have completely ignored. There are whole books on this subject that you don’t seem to have read and don’t seem to be interested in reading. So when I look at your reply, I’m already thinking, this person doesn’t care what I say and is not interested in evaluating the arguments or the evidence I offer, he’s just asserting an opinion that I cannot alter. Not a great start and probably means that this exchange will not be very satisfying for either of us.

          But in answer to your objection, the short answer is that no one knows.

          Although some of these ideas are found in Vedic texts that are assumed by many to pre-date Buddhism (something we cannot prove), there is still no solid evidence for transfer of knowledge one way or the other. In other words we have some minimal evidence suggesting a correlation, but none whatever for causation.

          Johannes Bronkhorst – the heavy hitting Dutch philologist -says that these very ideas came from the Śrāmaṇa milieu and were introduced into the Vedic world from there, via the cultural sphere of Greater Magadha (which I call Greater Kosala). I’m not sure he has converted many people to his view, though his book Greater Magadha certainly made a huge splash when it landed. On the other hand none of these ideas, with the possible exception of reincarnation are found in the Vedas, so to what extent are they Vedic ideas in the first place?

          There’s some suggestion that Buddhists might have been responding to Upaniṣadic doctrines of ātman in the anāttan doctrine (as K R Norman, Richard Gombrich and others have pointed out), but there is also plenty of doubt about this. Āttan as used in Pāli hardly bears any relationship to the ātman of Bṛhadāranyaka for example. Also note that no Brahmin in the Pāḷi texts ever uses the word “āttan” in any declension or espouses a theory even related to ātman. This is my own, unpublished, discovery. But it does rather undermine the idea that Buddhists where responding to a specifically Vedic theory of ātman (which was in any case an innovation in the Upaniṣads).

          Many commentators take the view that karma and liberation are introduced to Yajñavalkya in BU by a kṣatriya so must have been alien to the Vedic world. This is a little trivial, but the role of the king as teacher of Yajñavalkya, the Vedic Priest par excellence, is certainly curious.

          On reincarnation in the Ṛgveda see my essay Rebirth in the Ṛgveda from Feb 2015.

          I have joined the speculation on this subject to some extent in a JOCBS article.

          Attwood, Jayarava. (2012). Possible Iranian Origins for Sākyas and Aspects of Buddhism. Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, 3, 47-69. Online: http://www.ocbs.org/ojs/index.php/jocbs/article/view/26

          Again my theory has not m/any converts. Perhaps you could read my article and tell me what you think?

          But still, we don’t know. And we don’t know because the existing evidence cannot support a valid conclusion. So it’s important to not draw conclusions until more evidence comes to light. But we probably never will obtain such evidence.

  2. Hi Elisa,

    Thanks for engaging with my ideas in this way. I’m not a philosopher. I’m more of an historian of ideas. But I suppose one might say that philosophy is an attempt to make sense of one’s world. The “world” that most interested the early Buddhists was the one they found themselves in when they withdrew completely from sense experience in meditation. Which set a somewhat different agenda than we find in European philosophy.

    One problem was that Buddhists generalised from such experiences in a way that was not justifiable. Mind you most ancient philosophers made a similar mistake. A quick look at the long lists of logical fallacies and cognitive biases on Wikipedia shows us why. Individuals are bad at reasoning tasks – this is the conclusion of Mercier and Sperber in their article “Why Do Humans Reason. Arguments for an Argumentative Theory.” [ref and my discussion of it here.] The collective endeavour of science in which many people compare notes on what they observe, looking for reproducibility, changed how we thought about the world. It allowed us to begin correcting for biases and fallacies. But this trend is absent from the ancient world. At least it is absent from the literature that I study.

    Another problem was the sheer scale of syncretism of early Buddhism. Ideas from Jainism, Brahmanism, and Zoroastrianism jostle with animism and shamanism in those early texts. Who can make sense of that mess? The answer is *no one*. All attempts to unify Buddhist end up arbitrarily excluding certain elements from the picture. If one does not filter, the result is too confusing.

    That Buddhists got things wrong is not a radical thesis, even in religious terms. Throughout our own [i.e. Buddhist] literature there are examples of Buddhists criticising other Buddhists for their beliefs. What I am doing is repeating some of those arguments, without necessarily accepting any one solution. Sometimes I get there independently, but inevitably I find a precedent. Some of the key texts for these criticisms are Kathavatthu, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, and Abhidharmakośabhāṣya. For example Nāgārjuna says

    tiṣṭhaty ā pākakālāc cet karma tan nityatām iyāt |
    niruddhaṃ cen niruddhaṃ sat kiṃ phalaṃ janayiṣyati || MMK 17.6 ||

    This is a genuine and very significant problem that produced a number of solutions, particularly: sarvāstivāda, pudgalavāda, kṣaṇavāda, and Nāgārjuna’s own solution. Two sects of Buddhism were named for their solution to this problem! Only the last two survived. Kṣaṇavāda survived in two different versions: Theravāda and Yogācāra. But the surviving philosophy did not win the argument as such, it’s just that their opponents died out due to changes in the environment. I don’t make this stuff up, I repeat historical arguments. It’s just that we are used to thinking of Buddhist arguments as settled because monks and academics share the same preoccupations with maintaining the status quo.

    However, just because ancient Buddhists got things wrong, and modern Buddhists still do, doesn’t mean we should stop thinking about our world. If the religious exercises of Buddhism produce experiences that do not fit into other models of the world, then we must think of a worldview in which they do fit. Living German philosopher, Thomas Metzinger, has a similar attitude to his own out-of-body experiences. He has said that any philosophy which does not account for out-of-body experiences is simply not interesting. I agree. Western philosophy is not really very interesting yet, because no westerners have really engaged with the altered states produced by Buddhist exercises, particular the removal of the first-person perspective on experience that some Buddhists still attain. Actually the number of people attaining this seems to be on the rise.

    Religious philosophy is problematic. It is usually aimed solely at proving religious axioms. This is contrary to the spirit of secular philosophy, which seeks rather to derive axioms that have explanatory power. One fits the data to the explanation, the other fits the explanation to the data. Only the latter will produce useful knowledge. So religious philosophy is often uninteresting to anyone who does not accept the axioms of a religion. I have no interest whatever in Christian, Islamic, or Hindu philosophy for instance. Nor am I very interested in most Buddhist philosophy since I can see that the axioms are flawed. Our knowledge of physics makes it certain that there is no afterlife for example. So arguments about the nature of the afterlife are of no interest to me because they are based on a fallacy.

    The history of these ideas has a certain amount of value as history, but they have almost no relevance to the present. Unfortunately many Buddhists think otherwise and cling to an essentially Iron Age worldview. My aim is to disrupt this worldview mainly using history, but also a bit of science. I find that History provides by far the most devastating arguments against contemporary Buddhist beliefs because the arguments are on terms that Buddhists will accept. They tend to reject scientific arguments out of hand as “Materialism”.

    That quote by Nāgārjuna is an excellent example. According to our supposedly most important doctrine you cannot have an effect that outlives its conditions (Pāḷi: “imassā nirodhā idaṃ nirujjhati“). And yet karma has this feature as an absolute requirement. Pratītyasamutpāda is thus incompatible with karma. And when it comes down to it, Buddhists always chose to modify pratītyasamutpāda in order to preserve karma. This means that most of what I was taught about Buddhism by my teachers was wrong. I was deeply shocked to discover this.

    Many Buddhists still seem incapable of contemplating it. For example, my attempts to interest Buddhist Philosopher Amod Lele in this problem have resulted in scornful dismissal. He thinks I’m a crank, as so many others do. And yet it’s not some weird thing I made up, it’s right there in Nāgārjuna! I’m just quoting. And yet he won’t see it. Almost no one I know will even look at it. But there it is. Personally I can’t unsee it. It has changed my whole relationship to the Buddhist world and my own teachers irrevocably. The idea that this kind of problem even exists is incredibly disruptive and most mainstream Buddhists have identities and careers bound up with the received (filtered and homogenised) tradition.

    The experiences that make Buddhism interesting: dhyāna, śūnyatāvihāra, nirodha, vimokṣa etc have yet to receive much attention outside of Buddhism and thus have yet to be considered objectively by people who are not committed to the axioms of the religion. So not much valuable philosophy exists on the subject. There’s a lot of focus on morality, since that is what interests Western Philosophers these days. But little of any real interest.

    Sadly I don’t read Italian. Can you translate or summarise the sentiment of the poem?

    All the best
    Jayarava

    • Dear Jayarava,

      many thanks for the detailed answer and apologies for replying just now. As usual, we tend to disagree on our basic epistemic attitude. I would call you a positivist (whereas you probably just describe yourself as “rational”). In other words, I am not sure there is *a* solution which will solve the problem whereas all others are “wrong”. I rather tend to think that ancient Buddhist thinkers, like most of us, were trapped in a complicated world and tried their best to make sense of it (while, at the same time, having to deal with peer pressure and the like). The results of these endeavours are always fascinating, I think.

      As for the points you raise:

      —He has said that any philosophy which does not account for out-of-body experiences is simply not interesting. I agree. Western philosophy is not really very interesting yet, because no westerners have really engaged with the altered states produced by Buddhist exercises, particular the removal of the first-person perspective on experience that some Buddhists still attain. Actually the number of people attaining this seems to be on the rise.

      Many people have many contradicting experiences and I am not sure I want to account for all of them. I am very much inclined to think, for instance, that many alleged “visions” are self-delusions. Could not a convinced Buddhist experience something only because s/he knows s/he should experience it? (Don’t we likewise recognise “Mary’s” or “Christ’s face” in a given rock, just because we instinctively want to make sense of what looks casual?)

      —Religious philosophy is problematic. It is usually aimed solely at proving religious axioms. This is contrary to the spirit of secular philosophy, which seeks rather to derive axioms that have explanatory power. One fits the data to the explanation, the other fits the explanation to the data. Only the latter will produce useful knowledge. So religious philosophy is often uninteresting to anyone who does not accept the axioms of a religion. I have no interest whatever in Christian, Islamic, or Hindu philosophy for instance. Nor am I very interested in most Buddhist philosophy since I can see that the axioms are flawed. Our knowledge of physics makes it certain that there is no afterlife for example. So arguments about the nature of the afterlife are of no interest to me because they are based on a fallacy.

      See my points above. I find apologetics fascinating and I am not sure “pure” philosophy (or “pure” science) really exists.

      —The history of these ideas has a certain amount of value as history, but they have almost no relevance to the present. Unfortunately many Buddhists think otherwise and cling to an essentially Iron Age worldview. My aim is to disrupt this worldview mainly using history, but also a bit of science. I find that History provides by far the most devastating arguments against contemporary Buddhist beliefs because the arguments are on terms that Buddhists will accept. They tend to reject scientific arguments out of hand as “Materialism”.

      This is surely very interesting. I wish more contemporary “Hindus” would do that against upholders of a pristine “Hindu” unity, purity, etc. (The same applies to contemporary Christian upholders of the intrinsic value of things which were not of primary importance in early Christian texts, etc. etc.).

      —That quote by Nāgārjuna is an excellent example. According to our supposedly most important doctrine you cannot have an effect that outlives its conditions (Pāḷi: “imassā nirodhā idaṃ nirujjhati“). And yet karma has this feature as an absolute requirement. Pratītyasamutpāda is thus incompatible with karma. And when it comes down to it, Buddhists always chose to modify pratītyasamutpāda in order to preserve karma. This means that most of what I was taught about Buddhism by my teachers was wrong. I was deeply shocked to discover this.

      Well, as you know, there are several ways to try to solve this riddle. Mīmāṃsā authors speak of an apūrva potency bridging the gap between sacrifice and result. My general comment would be: I am not done with ancient thinkers unless I have tried hard to make sense of what they say in any possible way. Yes, I am being charitable. At times, I also think you are charitable towards contemporary natural scientific results, though.

      —Sadly I don’t read Italian. Can you translate or summarise the sentiment of the poem?

      You surely know about Giordano Bruno’s tragic death and you might know that he was fully aware of what he was risking by asking the Catholic Church to think more deeply about its own assumptions. The sonnet is an (antiphrastic) eulogy of stupidity and obedience to dogma. Why studying, why trying to understand —he asks— when we should rather just beg for God’s mercy? The poem ends with: “Nothing lasts / apart from the fruit of eternal rest, / which God will grant you after your funerals!”

      • A positivist? That’s harsh. If you have so catastrophically misunderstood my intention then I really am failing to communicate effectively and ought to just stop.

    • Great discussion, everyone.

      As too often is the case, I find myself short on time and long on points I’d love to comment on. I’ll try to be brief. My comments on the original post (x-posted at Indian Philosophy) are here: http://indianphilosophyblog.org/2016/03/04/is-philosophy-an-involution-of-buddhism-and-other-religions/#comments

      As is (also) too often the case in academic conversations, the argument here seems to revolve around definitions.

      Jayarava, you suggest that “philosophy is an attempt to make sense of one’s world.” Whereas Buddhists withdrew from the “world.” That’s a fair assessment for *some* Western Philosophy, but not all. Plenty of rigorous philosophical thought, from Pythagoras to Kant and onward, involved seeking something deeper than/beyond/outside (choose your metaphor) the “world.”

      It seems that in the next paragraph you bring Buddhism and ancient (Western?) philosophers back into parallel, if only to say they made unjustifiable generalizations.

      When you write “The collective endeavour of science in which many people compare notes on what they observe, looking for reproducibility, changed how we thought about the world. It allowed us to begin correcting for biases and fallacies. But this trend is absent from the ancient world. At least it is absent from the literature that I study.”

      You are taking a particular stance on what science is as well – claiming that it (as a trend) “is absent from the ancient world.” It’s been a while since I studied Philosophy of Science, but this does sound a lot like the Positivist view promulgated by the Vienna Circle around the early 20th century (as I think Elisa was suggesting as well). This is one of many understandings of what science is. I’m not saying it’s wrong, but it’s helpful to note.

      I’m also curious about this claim that “monks and academics share the same preoccupations with maintaining the status quo.” You certainly don’t mean to include all of the monks and academics who have notably *challenged* the status quo in that statement, do you? Perhaps you mean *most* monks and academics? Or simply most people? I’m just not sure what that would mean otherwise.

      Lastly, only because I have to run, “Our knowledge of physics makes it certain that there is no afterlife for example.” Here I think most philosophers would be more cautious, or at least say more about their particular reasoning on the subject – or theory, be it eliminative materialism, etc. Again, I’d have to dig back through my Philosophy of Science notes and readings, but much of what we think of today as Physical Science grew out of theological debates of the middle ages, theological explorations by Muslims, arguments between clerics, etc. Questions about the nature of God and the nature of the Universe are historically extremely close, and yes, a number of contemporary Western philosophers still mingle in their interplay as well as questions about “a good life.”

      • Thank you, Justin. Am I right summarising if I say that your last paragraph aims to say that “science” is not a neutral category, whose results can thus be seen as objective parameters (e.g., proving that there is no afterlife)?

        • Why not read the essay I wrote? Or Sean Caroll’s essay? Or his recent book? Then tell me what is wrong with the logic. I’d be fascinated. I really would.

          • Dear Jayarava,
            after having read your essay (although not Caroll’s essays and books) I can add to Justin’s my appreciation of your clarity and rigour. What I think is not satisfying in the essay is the following: 1. You seem to me to attack a straw-man kind of afterlife, one which might have attracted some naïve people but which I am not sure was ever the orthodox solution found by one or the other theologian or philosopher. It is the sort of paradise of comics and movies, in which we find our relatives welcoming us and we are identical to ourselves as we are now, but perhaps healthier, forever young and so on. I agree with you that Caroll’s arguments seem to be cogent in disproving it. I am not sure, however, about who should really be concerned by the loss of a childish paradise. Thus, I wonder (but here my bias in favour of charitative reading re-emerges*) whether we should not be looking somewhere else if we want to understand mystical statements about such an afterlife. Luther or Nāgārjuna seem to point to the fact that heaven is a state of mind, not a place in which our “soul” will go at a certain point of time. Thus, the problem amounts to defining time and space. If they are the unavoidable precincts of each experience, then such a state of mind would also be limited, and drastically so. Still, limits of time are relative and not absolute constraints, if I am not wrong.
            2. A theist will always be able to say that an omnipotent god can restore life in its entirety, including bodies (you will remember that life is embodied in Judaism and perhaps also in (pre-Paul?) Christianity, so that dualism does not seem to be a good way to describe it). Again, I am sure many Christians will be dualists, but attacking popular beliefs is a different thing than proving that the sophisticated version they derive from has been proven wrong.
            3. Did you read John Taber’s essay on Dharmakīrti against Physicalism? Would be glad to read your views on it.

            Thanks again!

            *please note that charitative readings are not the same as confirmation biases, since I try to make sense also of worldview I do not share.

      • Hi Justin

        One should never try to define philosophy, no matter how generally, because no philosopher will ever agree with you. And it will all come down to semantics, or “definitions”. Which is all a bit fucking tedious.

        Yes, I think Buddhist philosophers over time drifted into the same kinds of irrelevant questions that Western philosophers, on the whole, pursue. Do you not think this? Do you think, for example, that the ontological speculations of the Ābhidharamikas were wholly in line with the early Buddhist project or are in some way not ontological speculations at all?

        My argument about science and the afterlife foolishly rests on the premise that someone might have either read Sean Carroll’s original argument or have read my attempt to paraphrase it, i.e. my essay There is No Afterlife, Sorry. I have said a great deal more about this view and why I find it plausible. But even my 5000 word essay on the subject is all too brief and relies on taking other arguments made in other essays as given. One cannot necessarily reproduce what are effectively book-length arguments in the comments section of a blog. You certainly don’t.

        Mind you I should not assume that academics, even the ones who know me, have any interest in reading my essays – a stupid mistake. That I might be stating conclusions explored at greater length elsewhere seems obvious enough to me, since I have written those hundreds of essays and that handful of articles, but to assume that other people might make the same link was overly ambitious. Of course you would assume that I’m talking out my arse and making statements without ever having thought about them. That’s just what fucking amateurs like me do I suppose.

        But if you have a counter argument to the the notion that we understand the physics at the mass, energy, and length scales relevant to human life well enough to exclude other forces or types of matter from the picture, then by all means tell us about it. I’m personally very keen to learn about the new physics that you propose in order to account for the afterlife. I’m sure the scientific community will be fascinated to hear that they’ve been wrong about matter and energy all this time. Hopefully we will be able to get the billions of dollars in funding needed to test your predictions. I’m sure we can get Sean Carroll interested. Exciting times.

        I certainly make a distinction between the knowledge seeking I see in the early Buddhist texts (and in Vedic literature to the extent I know it) and the scientific revolution which began in the 17th century. Don’t you? It is not only positivists who do this. Is it? Or do philosophers generally ignore the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution and all that minor historical stuff? Silly old me, thinking that things had changed. The world is probably really flat after all I suppose? Figures. I’m not a philosopher, you see, so always making beginners mistakes.

        Rather ironically, given the accusation, I make such a distinction on the basis of Karl Popper’s definition that scientific knowledge progresses through conjecture and refutation. According to Popper science is largely the effort to refute hypotheses and finding theories to account for the observations. Buddhism is largely about finding arguments to support doctrine and finding ways to exclude counter-factual evidence from consideration. I do cop a lot of shit for trying to refute Buddhist theories, which doesn’t seem to deter me unfortunately. Someone has to do it. Academics don’t seem to be interested.

        On the other hand many modern philosophers of science point out that Popper’s definition of science was too narrow. A good example is the prediction of the Standard Model that a boson must exist in the ca. 120-140 GeV range that would be a carrier of the force of gravity. What CERN did in the LHC was test this hypothesis by searching *for* a particle in that energy range and they found one. Similarly for the LIGO detector which “saw” gravity waves earlier this year. This kind of testing of the predictive power of a theory is also important. We need to know if a theory makes accurate predictions, and how accurate and precise those predictions are (all measurements have accuracy, precision, and error). This is why the theory of General Relativity is considered so robust. It makes a number of testable predictions that have shown to be accurate and precise within the limits of error, time and time again. Gravity waves were, I think, the last outstanding major untested prediction of General Relativity – and they were discovered at unimaginable levels of precision (1/10,1000 of the radius of a proton!). Also most people seem to underplay that it is also a direct observation of a blackhole, another prediction of Relativity, but I digress.

        To deny that General Relativity (or other aspects of the current Standard model) is a theory that makes accurate and precise predictions because “science is not a neutral category” is far too weird for me to deal with. I leave that to the professionals. But do watch out crossing the road on the way home, because whether you believe in it or not, getting run over is a bitch.

        My specific knowledge of the ancient world is largely confined to TV documentaries and a detailed and persistent daily examination of the early Buddhist texts in Pāḷi over some 10 years, plus some Chinese and Sanskrit texts, as well as reading more or less all of the relevant secondary literature. Lately I’m extending into the pre-tantric Prajñāpāramitā texts, and I’ve dabbled in Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośabhāṣya where it concerns the Buddhist afterlife. I see nothing like a scientific theory in this literature. I see no commitment to conjecture and refutation. Buddhist texts are all about confirming Buddhist beliefs in the most chauvinistic way. One could sum it all up as “Buddhism is true, because it is true”. The various afterlife theories in particular are all about interpretations of scripture, and speculating about supernatural forces or entities. To the extent I’m aware of other ancient Indian afterlife theories they seem no better.

        I have been collecting resources on Buddhist karma and rebirth for years now. I have found exactly two articles which critique karma as a theory. One by Richard P. Hayes, the only person I know of to ever have challenged the view that Nāgārjuna was a brilliant philosopher and thus a weirdo after my own heart; and the other by Paul J. Griffiths, before he lost interest in Buddhism and started exploring other avenues. All the other articles I have are concerned with spelling out or clarifying particular views with no critical evaluation at all. A few concern the intra-sectarian arguments. But these arguments are along the lines of “the antarābhava is not mentioned in scripture, so it cannot exist”.

        Buddhist Studies as a discipline seems to be all about describing Buddhism more and more accurately. The recent changes that have come are concerned with this kind of project. These are certainly welcome changes, but that’s not what I am talking about.

        A growing body of Buddhists who are sceptical of the tradition on rational grounds have no scholarly underpinning. To my knowledge there are no scholars exploring the doctrinal or theological implications of this move away from religious tradition towards rationalism – not even from the mindfulness crowd. Myself and David Chapman, Glenn Wallis and his cronies, and one or two other bloggers are trying to wrestle with this in our own ways, with DC being the most broadly successful I think. Do we count Žižek? I suppose we must, though I cannot imagine any Buddhist Studies journal publishing his work. That’s what I mean when I lump Buddhist monks and academics together.

        Buddhist Studies does not extend to rational critiques of Buddhism. Or does it? I’m happy to get any helpful references at this point. Maybe some other field got dibs on the critiquing part of scholarship and there’s a demarcation dispute?

        • Hi Jayarava,

          You asked: “Do you think, for example, that the ontological speculations of the Ābhidharamikas were wholly in line with the early Buddhist project or are in some way not ontological speculations at all?”

          That’s a great question. I don’t know for certain, but I think the term “extension” is safe; as those lists and categorizations could be seen as early Buddhist lists and categories based, perhaps, in further meditative practice and philosophical competition from non-Buddhist thinkers.

          Returning to science and the afterlife, what if I told you that modern science gives us very good reasons to believe (but not a proof, *never a proof*) that there is no such thing as an afterlife?

          Notice the difference between this and your statement, “Our knowledge of physics makes it certain that there is no afterlife for example.”

          Sorry to be the nit-picky philosopher, but this is an important distinction.

        • P.S. Please don’t take my critique/questions personally. In general I quite enjoy your work and admire your tenacity. At times, of course, I’m going to disagree (I do that with everyone though, just ask Amod).

          P.P.S. One last point of disagreement I’ll mention is in regard to Buddhist Studies not extending rational critiques to Buddhism. Paul Griffiths, who you mention, has a couple great books; in 2005 the Journal of Buddhist Ethics did a mini-conference on “Naturalizing Karma,” which dealt with some of these issues. Brian Victoria has strongly criticized Japanese Zen militarism (and been critiqued in turn for his perhaps overzealous use of some evidence), Richard Gombrich has wonderful critiques of the early tradition/Theravadin orthodoxy as misunderstanding the Buddha, Bhikkhu Bodhi has in turn criticized Gombrich, Donald Lopez has criticized our reception of Tibetan Buddhism, Bernard Faure has furthered that to a full range of receptions/misrepresentations of Buddhism, Paul Williams extensively criticized Shantideva, Christopher Ives has critiqued the “green” credentials of Buddhism – as has Damien Keown, Rita Gross has criticized Buddhist Patriarchy, and on and on…

  3. Firstly I think there is a problem classifying Buddhism as a religion, specifically in the way that the discourse on “world religions” has been widely discredited as a useful analytical framework.

    “The idea of “world religions” expresses a vague commitment to multiculturalism. Not merely a descriptive concept, “world religions” is actually a particular ethos, a pluralist ideology, a logic of classification, and a form of knowledge that has shaped the study of religion and infiltrated ordinary language. (Tomoko Masuzawa)”

    Secondly, I have yet to find a convincing piece of work that offers anything noteworthy when it is compared with other religions since the entire framework of inferences collapses under this unfortunate classification system of “World Religions”.

    So, next we have efforts that suggest Buddhism might be an enterprise fitting (“Western”) philosophical treatment, but from everything I have read, this type of commentary also seems far too contrived since I suspect it fails to engage critically with the practice, on it’s own terms.

    I am personally, entirely pessimistic about the possibility of either historical or scientific treatments to generate anything significant either, other than as a means to unleash the sort of tiresome demons that add nothing substantive, whilst sounding important nonetheless.

    Whether or not philosophical thought is an “engagement” or a “detatchment” may be more fruitful when comparing mathematics to say, abhidhamma? – but I am not sure the modifier “philosophical” to the concept of “thought” achieves as much as it seems.

    The reasons why we might care for a given religion I think are different for the reasons why we might care to believe anything at all, including the category of information we call “facts” – historical or scientific and so on?

    To my mind, historical and scientific facts have one advantage only over fiction, and that is when they are combined with a well considered and well-proven theory they offer unsurpassed opportunities to offer accurate predictions – so they are useful but also self-perpetuate ideas of human-centred ideas of progress that may themselves be part of a much larger fiction?

    Not to mention facts are, as we know – often depressing and anxiety inducing – to the point of debilitation.

    There can be little doubt that the fact that we are spinning around a super-massive ball of radioactive gas at 16,000 miles an hour or whatever it is is not only enchanting and and awesome – it is considerably disquieting when compared to the idea that the sky moves serenely around outside what could be a more solipsistic (and in my view – wrong headed) appreciations, no?

    Fiction, on the other hand (in the sense of unjustified or false beliefs) offers us a different basket of goods, and as long as we are aware of why we care to believe in something, rather than whether we are “right” to believe it there seems to be little scope for serious escalation in harm?

    In fact, there might even be some benefit from imperfect cognitions?

    “cognitions [may] contribute to knowledge and self-knowledge without meeting the standards of truth and accuracy…”
    http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/generic/perfect/about/index.aspx

    The status and character (properties) of belief in general are tricky, but we could explore why we believe something in particular – standards/ rules and principles of inference are particularly interesting I think – and this is where the Buddhist project does not appear to be divergent from any other philosophical tradition?

    It’s also not certain to me that believing is a competition as to who has the best beliefs. Knowing we are 93 million miles away from the sun hardly “wins” against the fable of Icarus? (Unless of course we are planning some kind of space mission?)

    If we are a primary school teacher perhaps both kinds of information would be equally well received?

    In this sense, it’s not so much about displacing unstable truths with more stable ones, but simply to recognize archaeology, mathematics and natural sciences offer an indispensible basket of benefits, and theology does too and even though they may speak about the same things at times our incurable fondness for ignorance is matched only by our incurable fondness for facts and it’s the mutual and combined disruptive capabilities of BOTH categories of truth I personally find the most interesting, not escalating my commitment to either one.

    I am sure this is what the Buddhist project is all about – it’s pedagogy plain and simple – and so it’s just as much about cognitive “suspension” rather than “tension” for me.

    • So, Mat, you basically think that Buddhist philosophy is not about accounting for the world, but rather about devising a good set of beliefs for living as happily as possible, right? I guess many Buddhists would reply with Paul’s statement that only the truth can save you. See also Birgit Kellner’s repeating Claus Oetke’s claim that Buddhist metaphysics is “revisionary”, not “descriptive”, in this article, p.2. Perhaps this harmonises with your view?

      • Elisa,

        I am in favour of Birgit’s approach, yes. I will read it over again because the locution is a little cumbersome for my taste in places – but I think she is on to something. I’m not sure I meant to suggest that Buddhism is “devising a good set of beliefs for living as happily as possible” rather than “accounting for the world”.

        All I wish to suggest is that I “have a feeling” that “Buddhist Philosophers” (if that category of individuals is at all justifiable, – it probably isn’t) understand the cognitive benefit of understanding the relativity of “truth” claims better than most. So much so, that I would suggest the “Two Truths” debate perhaps could only exist with a Buddhist intellectual framework? So, in answer to the idea that “only the truth will save us”, I would answer something like – “uh – huh – right – and I suppose you are asking me to accept YOUR truth rather than mine?” The Buddhist project is possibly more descriptive than we might think, in the sense that it tend to evade definitive claims and (generally) is ontologically ultra-conservative (cautious). For me this is what defines a Buddhist approach and caused the most frustration and intellectual embarrassment for people who prefer a more positivist, empiricist, idealist… literature. My sense is that the most inspiring Buddhist teachers are critically aware of the diminishing ontological status of shared truth claims, exemplified time and time again in the tone and structure of the debates themselves as they are presented to us. Failure to recognise this I think at a very early stage in research I think results in a harrowing misreading of the Buddhist intellectual enterprise, and this is evident in the way individuals approach the work, they miss this feature and then spend an entire career “bootstrapping” themselves into the community of interest with whatever philosophy they do fell most comfortable with, rather than dealing with the literature on it’s own terms. I am sure you must encounter this often as you do your work?

  4. Jayarava:
    Thanks for your comprehensive reply.

    Yes I think that you have made several valid points in an area which may be fraught by priority disputes and autochthonism. My thinking was led by the assumption that the Brhad.Up. predated the Buddha and as those topics which I mentioned are in there this was part of the philosophical background. ‘Vedic matrix’ is a loose hedging sort of locution, the origins of elements in it may be other than ‘Ayran’, ‘Indo-European’, Harappan, sramani etc, etc.