There are, bhikkhus, other phenomena, profound, difficult to apprehend, hard to understand, but that beget calm; joyful phenomena, not to be grasped simply by discursive thought, phenomena that only the wise man can understand. These are expounded by the Tathāgata, after he himself has known them, after he himself has seen them.
—Dīgha Nikāya 1.3
I have given some thought to writing replies to videos and articles that purport to critique Buddhism. Typically these consist of Christians and Nietzscheans making shallow arguments, or else demanding that everyone subscribe to their dogmas without much argument at all. There are many reasons I have not followed through on any of these, but primarily, we Buddhists have such a radically different view of what is to be done from Christians and Nietzscheans that it's not worth the effort. It would be as futile as a maritime explorer lecturing pleasure-cruise tourists on the proper use of ships.
However, the subject of this post concerns a new critique of Buddhism which is not only intelligent and well-considered, but also comes from what I consider to be a kindred school of thought: Platonism. The writer, Hellenic Saxon (I choose to call him Saxon for the remainder of this post), has composed this article which critiques dependent origination, the middle way, the two truths, and Buddha-nature from a Platonist perspective. As he points out in the opening, there has been no real confrontation between Platonism and any of the schools of Buddhism. If there was any such exchange during the Greco-Indian encounter in antiquity, we have no record of it, and in the modern era, Catholic polemicists seem to have totally abandoned their Platonist heritage. Today really is the beginning of a new encounter between centuries-old Buddhist schools and a burgeoning revival of pure Platonism. Not just for the novelty, but also for the intellectual nature of both schools, this should prove exciting; replying to something as cerebral as Platonic dialectic is not nearly as easy as dunking on Christian dogma. Even if both sides continue to disagree, I have high hopes that this exchange and those to come will prove both fruitful and cordial.
Having said all that, I should make this clarification before anything else: I subscribe to the Theravāda school of Buddhism. As such, the bulk of what follows will treat Saxon's criticism of dependent origination, not the uniquely Mahāyāna concepts that take up the rest of his article (I may come back to them some other time, but for now they are out of my wheelhouse, and the present post has taken long enough to produce). I will also stick to Pāli for technical terms, except where Greek and Sanskrit are appropriate.
Framing
While the opening of Saxon's article serves more to set the stage than to make an argument, I wish to comment on what I believe to be a misunderstanding.
Saxon begins with Plato's allegory of the cave. In the classical account, Plato lists two types of denizens in this cave. The first type, the foolish worldling, believes that the cave is the limit of reality, and that the fleeting shadows are all there is to living. The second type, the philosopher, recognizes the shadows as mere shadows, and seeks to exit the cave to reach the sunlit abode of the gods and heavenly forms. Saxon adds a third type to represent the Buddhists in this allegory. Like the Platonic philosophers, they understand the unsatisfying (dukkha) and impermanent (anicca) nature of the shadows (saṅkhāra), yet like the worldlings they believe that there is no unconditioned world of Being, just this dark flux of Becoming. I disagree with this description.
We should begin with the Three Characteristics. In the classical formulation, the Buddha taught that all conditioned things are unsatisfying (sabbe saṅkhārā dukkhā), all conditioned things are impermanent (sabbe saṅkhārā aniccā), and all things, both conditioned and unconditioned, are without self (sabbe dhammā anattā). To clarify some of the Pāli terminology, a dhamma (countable; not to be confused with the uncountable word for doctrine) is the simplest unit of reality. When a dhamma is conditioned, that is, if it has attributes that differentiate it with respect to other pieces of reality, it is called a saṅkhāra. The only type of dhamma that is not a saṅkhāra, that is, the only unconditioned part of reality, is nibbāna, better known by the Sanskrit name nirvāṇa, and sometimes referred to in the Pāli canon as nippapañca, or non-differentiation. Since nibbāna is unconditioned, it is blissful (sukha) instead of unsatisfying (dukkha), and it is permanent (nicca; or immortal, amatā) instead of impermanent (anicca).
All of this is to say, as I said before, that Buddhism and Platonism are kindred doctrines, even if they are not identical. Returning to the allegory of the cave, the Buddhists and Platonists agree that there is an unconditioned world outside the cave that is luminous, satisfactory, and permanent; Buddhists call it nibbāna, Platonists call it Being. It is also worth mentioning that both Buddhists and Platonists identify this unconditioned reality with the faculty of knowledge: in Platonism, this is explicitly identified with νοῦς (Intellect), and in Buddhism, liberation from the conditioned comes with the attainment of vijjā (knowledge, similar to the Hellenic idea of γνῶσις). One more remark on this matter is the fact that both Buddhism and Platonism associate the unconditioned with the gods (devas) and heavenly realms. They differ in that Plato exactly identifies the unconditioned with the abode of the gods, whereas the Buddha puts the unconditioned beyond the gods, though the gods seem to be more closely associated with the unconditioned than humans (to say nothing of animals, ghosts, titans, etc.), to such an extent that the Buddha taught contemplation of the gods (devānussati) and cultivation of godly virtue (brahmāvihāra), and that accomplished Buddhists (ariya-puggala) are destined for rebirth among the gods prior to liberation. The point is, Buddhism would have no grave objection to Plotinus' maxim:
Not to be a good man, but to become a god—this is the aim. (Enneads 1.2.7)
I apologize for what may seem an overlong response to the opening, which as I said is primarily a framing device, not strict argumentation.
The Mind and the Senses
Saxon begins his formal critique with epistemology. He gives the example of how one knows a chair when he sees one. There exists the particular chair (made from wood, arranged with so many beams in such-and-such positions, etc.) and the observer's general idea of a chair (which is how he knows whether something is a chair or not). Platonist orthodoxy has it that the observer must have the universal idea of the chair in his mind prior to seeing a material chair; it simply cannot be that the particular generates the universal. This idea must furthermore be an eternal form, which, as Saxon points out, contradicts Buddhist orthodoxy: the only thing that is eternal is nibbāna, and anything else, including "the idea of a chair", is impermanent, and is furthermore not an inherent, pre-existing part of consciousness. Saxon therefore puts forth this conundrum:
How do we apprehend the qualities of an object if the mind lacks the tools to even recognize these qualities, as the qualities in question would themselves be mental constructs and would then have to be constructed from nothing? In short: How do we build mental constructs from apprehended qualities, since those qualities themselves must be mentally constructed first?
The first issue lies in the Platonist scheme of the mind and senses, which Saxon states earlier:
It is important to note that the mind and the senses deal with different objects, the mind with the universal and the senses with the particular and it is therefore not feasible to regard the wooden chair as exactly the same object as the idea or form of chair as buddhists do.
Here, we shall refer to abhidhamma (Buddhist phenomenology), with which we may elaborate a little more on what was said above regarding dhammas and saṅkhāras. There are four kinds of dhamma: matter or form (rūpa), consciousness (citta), mental factors (cetāsika), and nibbāna. Consciousness may be divided into many schemes, but the most common one consists of six sense-doors (saḷayatāna): sight, sound, taste, touch, smell, and thought. They are called "doors" for a very good reason: they are the means by which external qualities are directly apprehended by the mind. In the cognitive series (citta vitthī), the six senses are receptors for a set of mental factors, of which there are up to fifty-two, with a minimum of seven that occur in every "mind-moment": contact (phassa), perception (saññā), feeling-tone (vedanā), volition (cetanā), one-pointed focus (ekaggata), life-faculty (jīvitindriya), and attention (manasikāra). From the moment of sensory contact, the qualities of an object are able to be directly apprehended by the consciousness.
So the Platonist model of mind as an independent faculty from the five bodily senses is incorrect. All six handle the same kinds of data (the cetāsikas), and all six convey this data directly to the consciousness, so there really is no meaningful distinction between "mental constructs" and "apprehended qualities". This is the meaning of the Dhammapada's opening verses:
All things are preceded by the mind,
surpassed by the mind, created by the mind. (1.1-2)
When one perceives the color red for the very first time, he does not need red to be pre-installed (so to speak) in his mind, because the very act of apprehending red assimilates it into the consciousness. In this way, the act of cognition is like a bit of paint (the cetāsika) splashing onto a canvas (the citta). The canvas does not need "tools" to absorb and settle the paint into place, because these capabilities are in the very nature of the canvas and the paint. Nor indeed does the canvas require a pre-existing "universal idea of paint" embedded in its nature in order to absorb and settle the paint. "All can be known directly" (Paṭisambhidāmagga 1.1).
The universal, eternal idea of a chair is thus nothing more than an abstraction from (depending on the person) a bigger or smaller set of memories of particular chairs. It only seems universal because chairs are so common that most people have sufficiently many memories of different chairs that they can all conceive of a highly abstract concept of a chair, but it cannot thus be said that "the idea of a chair" is baked into reality. That said, there actually is a sense in which it could be considered "eternal", because a concept is not a dhamma, but rather a paññatti (designation, idea, etc.). This may be determined by process of elimination:
- An idea certainly cannot be called unconditioned, so it is not nibbāna.
- An idea has neither mass nor definite shape, so it is not rūpa. (While the idea in question here designates information about form, it is not in itself a definite form.)
- An idea cannot engage in the cognitive series of contact, perception, feeling, etc., so it is not citta.
- An idea is not a piece of the aforementioned cognitive series, i.e. it is not itself the contact, the perception, the feeling, etc., so it is not a cetāsika.
Thus, an idea is not a dhamma. Since it is not a dhamma, we may agree with the Platonists that ideas are eternal (that is, not impermanent), but we would harshly disagree with them, because that means an idea is not real. I shall have more to say on this further on, but for now: this should lead nobody to discount paññattis as utterly meaningless, for the teachings themselves (the Three Characteristics, the Four Noble Truths, Kamma, etc.) are paññattis.
It may be helpful at this point to present the proper definition of "eternalism", which is the belief that
The self and the world are eternal, barren, steadfast as a mountain peak, standing firm like a pillar. And though these beings roam and wander (through the round of existence), pass away and re-arise, yet the self and the world remain the same just like eternity itself. (Dīgha Nikāya 1.3)Eternalists believe that the fundamental substance (atmā-brahman in Hindu terms) of the world is unchanging. Their belief is a claim about the nature of phenomena (dhamma), not the nature of the laws (paññatti) describing their behavior.
In summary: there is no need for pre-existing forms in the mind, because the very nature of mind allows it to acquire forms from observation. Contra Saxon, this is not equivalent to saying our mental constructs are created ex nihilo, because these mental constructs come from the contact itself; this is possible because the senses are deeply linked to the consciousness. Only when they are confused as divorced faculties does Saxon's conundrum arise, and only then could one speculate about eternal forms to close the gap. So-called "universal" forms are designations abstracted from big sets of similar experiences, and they are only "eternal" because they are not real phenomena.
Digression on the Methods of Investigation
It may seem that both the Buddhist abhidhamma and Platonist theory of forms present plausible yet mutually exclusive descriptions of reality. How should we decide which one is correct? What reason do we have to believe that the senses are of the same substance as the consciousness, or that reality is split into four types of dhamma, and so on?
This may be settled by considering the method by which the Buddha and Plato investigated reality and the mind. The Buddha did so by clear and direct observation (vipassanā), whereas Plato did so by verbal speculation (διαλεκτική). Given this, it makes sense that Buddhism provides a more correct description of reality than Platonism.
There are two problems with dialectic. First, discourse as a primary means of investigation necessarily gives rise to the so-called Problem of Universals, because it is necessary to determine the means by which discourse can proceed, which creates an insoluble recursion: discourse about discourse. I believe this is why Saxon has a number of verbal confusions in his arguments; so far, we have seen him conflate "eternal laws" as contradicting the law of impermanence, a misconception that arises from only operating on words using other words. This problem is avoided through suspension of judgment (what other Hellenic schools called ἐποχή), which the Buddha emphasizes time and again:
Speculative view is something that the Tathāgata has put away. For the Tathāgata sees... (Majjhima Nikāya 72.15)
The Socratic method can only contingently determine what "must" be, whereas the cultivation of vipassanā cuts precisely to what is.
The second problem is that dialectic is, by its nature, further removed from reality than observation is. We saw this in Saxon's assessment that the senses are one thing and the consciousness another, something, I repeat, that could only come from operating on words alone. As an analogy, consider high-level and low-level programming languages: something like Python or Java is abstract and barely resembles a computer's real operations (objects, classes, functions, etc. don't indicate anything real), whereas Assembly is "close to the metal" and corresponds pretty much exactly to what happens in the computer's circuitry. The concepts needed in high-level languages and in dialectic can be quite convincing and useful, but no serious programmer should thus think there is an eternal class int[][] in the hardware, anymore than there is an eternal Perfect Right Triangle in reality. In contrast, Assembly and Buddhism point directly to reality itself and leave little room for misunderstanding.
For these reasons, Buddhism has very little in the way of "proofs", instead preferring teachings that are
directly visible, immediate, inviting one to come and see, applicable, to be personally experienced by the wise. (Saṃyutta Nikāya 4.21, 3.53, 35.70; Aṅguttara Nikāya 3.54, 6.47, 6.48; etc.)
All of the Buddha's teachings are based on what he found after attaining perfect insight, and the literature which followed was written by those who followed his instructions and gained the same insight. Even the abhidhamma texts, as verbally dense as they are, are purely descriptive and taxonomic in nature; the scheme of six senses, seven basic cetāsikas, etc. outlined in the previous section are not suppositions about the mind but genuine findings from monks skilled in meditation and observation (or, according to the legend, the Abhidhamma-Piṭaka is a record of the Buddha's teachings to Indra and his entourage).
As an aside, it is worth mentioning that the other great Indian spiritual tradition, Hinduism, is also based on the cultivation of direct insight (though later schools, particularly Vedanta, tend to resemble Platonism in their reliance on discursive logic). One of the shared insights between Buddhism and Hinduism is the fact that the mind and five senses are fundamentally the same substance. Whereas the Buddha identifies them all with the citta, the writers of the Upaniṣads identified the mind and senses (as well as everything else in the body) as all modes of prāṇa, the vital force.
Be kind to us in your invisible form,
Which dwells in the voice, the eye, and the ear,
And pervades the mind. Abandon us not.
O prāṇa, all the world depends on you. (Praśna Upaniṣad 2.12-13)
The sages of this tradition did not merely posit this unified nature of the mind and senses through discourse, but discovered it through meditative observation (and, like the Buddhists, they did not discover any Platonic world of forms).
Dependent Origination and Infinity
Saxon next turns his focus to the Buddhist "theory of everything", usually translated as dependent origination (paṭicca-samuppāda). He criticizes this model for being an infinite regress on two counts. On the first count, paṭicca-samuppāda presents the world as infinitely vast, with no ultimate first cause, on which he notes "I have so far not seen any justification for this view". As discussed above, the Buddhist method does not rely on justification, but verification.
It certainly requires a great deal of spiritual accomplishment to directly observe that the chain of causality is infinitely large, but it is nonetheless directly and personally verifiable. This is where vipassanā's twin quality, samatha (meditative absorption), comes into play, specifically in the practice of deep meditative states called jhāna. The so-called formless jhāna comprise four of the most exalted planes of existence, of which the lower two are the plane of infinite space (ākāsānañcāyatana) and the plane of infinite consciousness (viññāṇānañcāyatana). This, too, was verified by the Hindu sages: what they call brahman, the source of reality, is often enough called "infinite consciousness". So too did the Taoists, renowned observers of nature both internal and external, confirm that ultimate reality is infinite (無極, literally "without limit").
The second part of Saxon's criticism is more handily dealt with:
Everything being a composite means everything is infinitely dividable. Everything can be divided into its parts and these parts divided themselves ad infinitum.
As explained already, there is a simplest unit of reality, called a dhamma. Nowhere in any Buddhist text would one find the teaching "all things are composite and infinitely divisible".
Dependent Origination and Physics
Saxon's second criticism of paṭicca-samuppāda is that it only tells us what there is to reality, but not why any of it is the case. He says:
What dependent origination lacks are laws that govern how causes and conditions can produce specific effects, taken on its own it lacks any explanation as to why a tree might grow from an apple seed or why heat brings water to a boil or why dependent origination is the nature of the world in the first place. With its rejection of eternalism it inherently denies these laws: ... such laws themselves would be ... part of the infinite vertical regression.
In short, Saxon claims there is no Buddhist physics, in the classical sense. In the first place, this is incorrect; the key text here is the Paṭṭhāna, the final part of the Abhidhamma-Piṭaka. The six texts leading up to the Paṭṭhāna (minus the Kathāvatthu) consist of a great many lists and matrices detailing the nature and typology of individual dhammas, after which the Paṭṭhāna itself investigates the actual causal relations between successive dhammas. If basic paṭicca-samuppāda explains reality as an infinite, unbroken chain of cause and effect, the Paṭṭhāna is what details the relations between specific causes and effects. The exact scheme of the Paṭṭhāna brute-force lists out every combination of causes and effects, which makes for even more tiresome reading than the rest of the Abhidhamma-Piṭaka (I would remark that the entire Abhidhamma-Piṭaka contradicts Saxon's claim that Buddhism is more accessible than Platonism; but then, perhaps that is why most Buddhists outside of Burma and Sri Lanka ignore it). This is why abhidhamma is sometimes called the full expression of the Buddha's omniscience; since this all-encompassing knowledge was gained by observational insight, it makes sense that its textual rendition is a massive set of lists and charts, rather than tidy theorems and axioms.
Furthermore, this argument repeats Saxon's verbal confusion that the very laws of reality are somehow subject to themselves ("part of the infinite regression"). This is likely due to the vagueness of the English thing (i.e. "all things are impermanent"), compared to the more technical Pāli terminology. As discussed earlier, concepts and designations are not real phenomena and are thus not subject to the laws of reality, so one may readily claim that reality has immutable laws without falling into eternalism. This also applies to Saxon's further elaborations on Courage and Beauty; since they are designations, not real phenomena, they are not subject to arising and fading away.
Conclusion
Despite it being a digression from Saxon's questions and criticisms, I believe the key to this whole exchange has been the difference in method. By seeking to investigate reality only by talking about it, the Platonists wind up stumbling on what seem to be simple matters. In hindsight, it seems a lot of this post involved clarifying terms (eternalism, dhammas and paññattis vs. "things", etc.) and presenting findings, some well-corroborated, against mere suppositions (the mind divorced from the senses, the impossibility of infinity, etc.).
I exhort the Platonists to spend more time on living philosophy than on playing games with words. This does not put them back at square one, for there is certainly a precedent for this in their lineage. While Aristotle elaborated quite a lot on verbal logic, he made just as much use of observational knowledge, and Plotinus is perhaps the most commonly cited Platonist in mystical circles as a paragon of meditation (Enneads 6.9 indicates that he plumbed the depths of reality much more than any of the Platonists before him). I have also noticed that this revival of Platonism has been tied to a revival of Hellenic polytheism, with a strong emphasis on personally engaging with the gods through prayer and ritual, rather than merely speculating on their nature. So it is absolutely possible for this new Platonism to shed its obsessive verbalism and flourish as a revival of the pure Olympian spirit, which seeks nothing else but freedom from the allegorical cave, encapsulated in Plotinus' maxim quoted before:
Not to be a good man, but to become a god—this is the aim. (Enneads 1.2.7)
Gods, the highest beings, those who embody purity and simplicity, have no use for speculative reasoning. The same applies all the more for the state of unbridled purity, nibbāna. It is in this same spirit, the will for the unconditioned, that the Buddha said:
‘This is suffering’—I have declared. ‘This is the origin of suffering’—I have declared. ‘This is the cessation of suffering’—I have declared. ‘This is the way leading to the cessation of suffering’—I have declared.
Why have I declared that? Because it is beneficial, it belongs to the fundamentals of the holy life, it leads to disenchantment, to dispassion, to cessation, to peace, to direct knowledge, to enlightenment, to nibbāna. That is why I have declared it. (Majjhima Nikāya 63.9-10)
