Asian Philosophy: Buddhism in Tibet, China & Japan

Buddhism in Tibet

Tibetan culture was transformed by Buddhism, which arrived from India, Afghanistan and China shortly after 600 CE. Mahayana Buddhism became not only Tibet’s official religion but its social structure, art and architecture as well. The Tibetan written characters were created to translate Buddhist texts into the Tibetan language. Many Mahayana texts, including Nagarjuna’s, survived in Tibet as Islam took over India. Tibetans claim that Buddhism arrived centuries earlier, when the Buddha himself and other Buddhas came to Tibet to teach. One amusing story has Buddha asking about Tibet before journeying there, and he is told that the Tibetans are the nicest people ever. Buddha worries that if the Tibetans are so extraordinarily nice, he will lose his finely honed ability to deal with jerks, so he takes along a terrible tea servant who constantly mocks the Buddha and plays tricks on him.

Buddhism developed into many competing schools of thought in Tibet as it had in India and did in China, Japan and throughout Asia. Tibetan Buddhism is known for its elaborate rituals, tantric practices, meditation exercises, and systems of symbols, deities and demons. Tibetans believe that many demons were converted to Buddhism by great teachers, and so much artwork features demons who are protectors of Buddhism, its teachings and the community. Gazing at these demons, and similarly at skull bowls of blood, decapitated heads and other horrifying images is thought to purify the self of obstructions and identify with the lowest and most horrifying levels of the self and mind.

Soon after Tibetan Buddhism was established, there was an influx of Chinese Chan (Zen, in the Japanese, which we will briefly cover today and move to koans exclusively in two weeks). Controversy arose between those who supported the elaborate Buddhist practices and those, including many nobles, who supported the simplicity of Zen, which taught that enlightenment could be achieved suddenly and without elaborate ceremonies and practices. Zen Buddhists do traditionally believe in deities and practice ceremonies, but meditation and enlightenment became the primary and simple focus. Interestingly, here in the Bay Area and in America the Beatniks loved Zen and its stark black and white imagery, while Hippies, many who did embrace Zen, were drawn to the colorful and elaborately beautiful art and practices of Tibetan Buddhism and Indian Hinduism. Legend has it that after a debate judged by the Tibetan King in 979 CE between both sides, the Chinese and their school was expelled and the King officially pronounced the Indian Nagarjuna to be affixed as patriarch of Tibetan Buddhism in opposition to Bodhidharma, the patriarch of Chan/Zen.

Between 1200 and 1500, many schools of Tibetan Buddhism arose in debate with each other over the vast store of Indian texts which survived only in Tibet. Education in Tibetan Buddhism largely consists of the memorization of texts and debate with others about various understandings of the texts and their teachings. Good debaters would achieve fame and following, much like athletes and celebrities today. Many debates revolved around the controversial concepts of emptiness and buddha-nature. As untranslated texts were being translated, schools based on the new texts (Gsar-ma) entered into debate with older schools based on the earlier translated and established texts (Rnin-ma).

According to modern scholarship, some of both the old and the new texts were never original Indian texts at all, but were written in Tibet and “discovered” by various figures at various times. Similar “discoveries” occurred in China and Japan with the development of Buddhism there. New schools would arise, and a member would “discover” a text hidden in a log or a cave that just happened to support their doctrines and argue against the doctrines of competing schools. Tibetans view Buddhism as evolving in India into the final form of Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka school, and then each Tibetan school views this tradition as evolving in Tibet into their own position. This is very similar to Chan/Zen, each school viewing itself as the final evolution. As mentioned, this ‘final form’ takes drastically different forms in various places.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead has attracted a following in Europe and America, first among scholars such as the Theosophists and the psychoanalyst Karl Jung, who noted the similarities with the Egyptian Book of the Dead in his search for the primordial archetypes of the common human psyche, and later with Timothy Leary and hippies who viewed psychedelic experiences as a death and rebirth. The text is to be read to the dying and then to the corpse in the days after death to help it be released from rebirth and achieve nirvana. Again and again, the text implores the dead to embrace the clear light from above which appears bright and frightening to the ignorant, who prefer the dull light from below. Embracing the clear light, which they are now ‘set face to face’ with, results in liberation, while running into the softer dim light means being reborn in the world of suffering and desire.

In a series of talks in 2010, the Dalai Lama spoke to an audience on the need for compassion and discipline across religious and secular lines, and then taught from Nagarjuna’s central texts. We have already discussed Nagarjuna, and his importance for Tibetan Buddhism as well as Mahayana Buddhism across North East Asia. He says that the golden age of ancient Indian should be a model of how many religions and philosophies can coexist together. He says that he believes that only Buddhism truly believes in anatman, the absence of a permanent self, but he will ask Jain leaders about this at a Jain ceremony and series of dialogues he is going to attend in a month. He also mentions that some Jains attend these conferences completely naked, and giggles for awhile about it. He also mentions that religions such as Christianity and Islam which believe in heaven do believe in a permanent self, but neither he nor they know what this is for sure.

Teaching from the Nagarjuna texts, he says that the true self has no self particular to itself at all, and that through study, critical reflection, and meditation, as we saw last time, one can come to a greater and greater realization of this deepest level of reality. He follows Nagarjuna who criticizes the Yogachara or Mind Only school for maintaining a duality between mental conceptions and mind, saying that form is emptiness, and emptiness is form. Rather than ridding the mind of mental conceptions, we become not only the mental conceptions but the conceptions they oppose to realize mind. Realizing interdependence means maintaining distinctions while simultaneously overcoming them. This is the true cleansing of realization. Just as Buddha criticized Jains for trying to get rid of the self as a conception, Nagarjuna is criticizing the Yogachara for trying to get rid of conception, including the self. Negation of concepts is not their annihilation, but accepting the things that they negate. Overcoming the self is not annihilation of the self, but acceptance of the other as the self through compassion.

On a final political note, Tibet is currently occupied and claimed by China. While the Tibetan nobility did not treat the common people very well, a major factor that allowed the Communists to invade and take over, the Tibetans begged the Americans to help them and arm them against China, but American CIA agents evaluated the situation and did not see much value in protecting the vast Tibetan dessert lands, allowing Tibet to fall to China. Two years later, the world’s largest deposit of uranium was discovered in the Tibetan and Khazakstani mountains, putting this in Soviet Russian and Communist Chinese control. If those deposits had been discovered two years earlier, it is likely that America would have protected the Tibetans and Tibet would be free today.


Buddhism in China & Japan

We will cover the Period of the Hundred Schools (600-200 BCE) and the Han unification of China (220 BCE - 200 CE) at the beginning of the second half of the class before we cover Confucianism, Moism, and Daoism. The short story, to introduce Buddhism in China, is that many schools of thought flourished in the warring period before the Han unification of China, and that with the arrival of the Han dynasty came royal patronage and support for Confucianism and Daoism. In the latter half of the Han dynasty, between 65 and 200 CE, the third most prominent school of Chinese thought, Buddhism, began to spread and settle in China, arriving from India and central Asia.

The Han was a prosperous time, when there was much new money and much interest in philosophy and study and patronizing the arts and temples. The old moneyed families, the new money families coming up, and the scholars were now competing and collaborating voices. By the later half of the Han, there were 30,000 students at the government funded state university, where primarily Confucianism and other classic texts were studied.

Unfortunately, Confucianism had become a new orthodoxy, and skeptical calls for revisions as well as the weakening of Han power had many scholars looking to Daoism, particularly the two main texts of the Dao De Jing and the Zhuang Zi we will study, as well as other systems such as the paradoxical Logicians and authoritarian Legalists for new solutions and understandings to old problems just as Buddhism was coming over the border. The peasants, who were increasingly desperate, turned to Daoist religious communities of worship in large numbers and rebellions were common. The largest were the Yellow Turban rebellions of 184 and 189 CE which sought land and food distribution for the people. The Han triumphed and put down the rebellions, but infighting soon pulled the Han apart again once it was no longer unified against the Yellow Turbans. This power vacuum allowed Buddhism to take hold and thrive.

Daoism offered the strongest alternative for both the elite scholars and the common devotional communities. They centered on the ideals of a return to nature and the natural, the freedom of the community and individual from abuse of authority, and the absolute as mystical One. Buddhism increasingly offered an alternative also in line with these ideals. Some early Daoist tales sound much like later Buddhist koan stories. Liu Ling, a Daoist master, was often drunk and sometimes lay around completely naked, and when several men entered his house and saw him in this state, he replied, “Heaven and earth are my dwelling, and my house is my pants...What are you all doing in my pants?”. As uplifting as these stories were, the Daoists offered little structure for reordering society, some retreating into nature, others ignoring local tyrants or turning to religious devotion and ecstasy.

Buddhism was at first regarded as a strange foreign form of Daoism. The two fought and supported each other alternatively for centuries afterward. In spite of their profound similarities, centrally skepticism of human understandings and transcendence of attachment in the unification of all, Indian and Chinese language and culture had profound differences as well. Chinese language uses short terms, while Indian language strings incredibly long and complicated terms together. Similarly, Chinese philosophy values brevity and expresses itself in simple, concrete metaphors, while Indian philosophy values comprehensiveness and expresses itself in complex and abstract analysis. A comparison of Daoist and Buddhist texts shows this immediately. Compare the metaphor of the well frog in the Zhuang Zi with the middle length discourses of the Buddha on the categories of existence and how each is inherently empty. Consider that Buddhists would refer to ‘perfection’, while Daoists would refer to a thing being ‘round’, Buddhists would refer to ‘one’s true nature’, while Daoists would refer to ‘one’s original face’, and Buddhists would refer to ‘essence’, while Daoists would refer to ‘the pupil of the eye’. This was the same situation when Buddhism arrived in Japan around 550 CE, Daoism and Confucianism having arrived long before. The Japanese understood Buddhism in a Daoist natural world context.

Socially Chinese and Indian cultures were also at odds. Chinese society was familial, seeking value in the worldly prosperity of the family. Indian Buddhism valued the otherworldly, and advocated leaving the home in pursuit of enlightenment in the monastery. While Daoism did have its wandering and wilderness dwelling sages, this would be a sticking point for Buddhism for many centuries. Many competing Confucians and Daoists would routinely call for an expelling of the foreign culture that asked the young to abandon their families for the monastery. To overcome this, Buddhists, like Daoists, offered local communities support in education, medicine, and relief in times of crisis. Gradually, Daoism and Buddhism were interrelated, with the Buddhist Dharma (teaching) equated with the Dao (way), and Buddhist nirvana (liberation) equated with the Daoist wu-wei (non-action). These were crude equations, which were enriched over centuries of translation and scholarship.

Buddhist sutras continued to arrive from India, carried by both Indian and Chinese Buddhist monks on pilgrimages to spread the dharma. In architecture, the Indian stupa became the Chinese pagoda, one of the most common and recognizable forms of Chinese architecture. Chinese artists began portraying the Buddha and boddhisattvas in Chinese form. The Mahayana Completion of Wisdom sutras (Prajnaparamita sutras) were introduced, becoming the central texts of the most popular forms of Buddhism today, Chinese and Japanese Pure Land Buddhism, which focus on devotional chanting to bodhsattvas for good fortune and protection.

While Pure Land traditions were popular among common people and traditional noble families, the Chan (Chinese) or Zen (Japanese) tradition became popular among scholars and nobles who pursued philosophy, literature and the arts. The Pure Land tradition feeds off the faith practices of the Tiantai school, and the Chan/Zen feeds off the wisdom tradition of the Huayan school. Both teach the oneness of all things, but the Tiantai would say there are demons in the heavens and buddhas in the hells, while the Huayan say that One is All and All is One. Next week, we will exclusively study the Chan/Zen literature and the koan stories, some of my favorite philosophy texts. The history of Buddhism in Korea and Japan is also dominated by the duality of the Pure Land devotional traditions and the Chan/Zen meditation and koan practice.

In Japan, Amida (from the Indian Amitabha) worship reached a radical and popular form that bears interesting resemblances to Protestant Christianity. Shinran (1173-1262) founded one of the most popular forms of Japanese Buddhism, Jodoshinshu, which taught that other than the most dedicated sages human beings are too sinful to gain enlightenment, so the best way for all people to gain entrance to higher existence, in accord with the Mahayana tradition, was to rely entirely on the grace and power of Amida who could bring both the good and the bad to heavenly realms or pure lands. It is only in turning away from self accomplishment and entirely towards the salvation of all by grace that the most people could be saved from hell worlds. Shinran decided that no vow of celibacy would make much difference, and so he married and taught his priests to marry, for which he was persecuted for the rest of his life.

As texts arrived and were translated, the Chinese noticed that the Theravada and Mahayana had two different ideas of how one achieves enlightenment already mentioned. The Theravada teach that progress is gradual, much like the Confucians do, and that it is only study within the institution that brings slow and steady progress. The Mahayana teach that buddha-nature is already within, and that sudden breakthroughs and transcendent states are achievable by anyone, much like the Daoists do, and that this can occur either inside or outside of the institution. This dual understanding became complimentary but also developed into a conflict, the central conflict of the two schools of Chan/Zen and later a conflict within Neo-Daoism and Neo-Confucianism which had both subsumed much of Buddhism in later centuries.

All of this resulted in a vast expansion of Buddhism, among common devotional worshipers who sought refuge in new divinities, practices and communities, among scholars who found new philosophical concepts and texts to study and re-read, and among the wealthy who gave immense amounts for new temples, monasteries and monuments with new designs and appeal to secure their own fortune not only with the deities but with the populace. Daoist priests and Buddhist priests alike served communities and noble families, providing relief for the suffering of both the poor through charity and the rich through consolation. Buddhist organizations funded hospitals, low cost hostels for travelers, bridges, and trees planted beside popular roads.

Unfortunately, this allowed many Buddhist monasteries to become extraordinarily wealthy, which attracted unwanted attention from competing systems and rulers who were wary of rivals. It was not lost on the ruling powers that Buddhism, like Daoism, served as a popular center of power that could, and sometimes did, result in rebellion. Mahayana Buddhism in particular had teachings that could be interpreted as supporting rebellion, especially by those in the suffering countryside. In the last age, when the buddha Maitreya was expected foretold by signs, no government was legitimate and the world was soon to be reformed and reborn. Many rebellions used the color white, the color associated with Maitreya, as a symbol for their movements.

In some periods, Buddhism or Daoism was persecuted depending on patronage, while in other periods each received vast contributions and thrived. This is entirely similar to Catholic monasteries in Europe, who not only fought amongst themselves (Franciscans, Dominicans, and Jesuits) after becoming wealthy civic centers of education, medicine and technology, but had to survive persecution of rulers who wanted their wealth as well. In later dynasties, after Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism were the three established schools of Chinese thought and were interwoven in official rituals and popular culture, rulers worked hard to work with Buddhist leadership, who had considerable sway over much of the population, while also making sure that they did not acquire too much unchecked power.

Around 1100 CE, Neo-Confucianism attempted to revive Confucianism to return it to its central place in society. While Zhu Xi, the greatest teacher of Neo-Confucianism, called Buddhism the enemy, he could not help but reincorporate Buddhist teachings such as the metaphors of the sun behind the clouds and the pearl at the bottom of the muddy pond, each implying that through study, as well as meditation, the inner truth and nature can be realized. While originally the term ‘li’ meant human order and tradition, in Neo-Confucianism Li became cosmic order, more like the Dharma of Buddhism and Dao of Daoism after being intertwined with Buddhism over centuries. While Confucius taught that one should benefit one’s own family as well as human kind, Neo-Confucians taught that one should benefit all conscious beings like Mahayana boddhisattvas. Wang Yang Ming (1472-1529 CE), one of the greatest Neo-Confucians who we will study, was called a Buddhist in disguise by his opponents for teaching Buddhist metaphors that were part of popular culture and sudden achievement of new understanding. Neo-Confucianism supported state funded hospitals, orphanages, homes for the elderly, and public cemeteries.

In the last two centuries, as China encountered Europeans, there were new favorable and unfavorable interpretations of Buddhism used to understand China’s relationship with the new foreigners. Some attempted to show that there was nothing new in European thought that could not be found in Buddhism, such as rationalism, humanism, democracy, dialectic, evolution, and later communism and existentialism. Others argued that Indian Buddhism and its transcendent visions had held China back such that it had not modernized as fast as Europe. Later, Chinese communists such as Mao would both condemn Buddhism as superstition of a past age as well as celebrate it as a common bond with Asia that transcended nationalism and demonstrated that Asia and the world could one day share a common culture.

One final modern figure to mention is Nishida Kitaro (1870-1966), a Japanese philosopher and Zen practitioner who founded an entire school of philosophy in Japan by comparing Zen and the Buddhist tradition to German philosophy, particularly the existentialism of Nietzsche and Heidegger. In his book The Self Overcoming of Nihilism, he argues that German and French existentialists have a preoccupation with the emptiness of existence as a negative, meaningless and frightening thing, and that Buddhism and Zen have gone beyond this to affirm the positive abundance and richness of the emptiness and void.

Logic: Greek Skepticism

HERACLITUS

According to one source, Heraclitus was a king who abandoned the title to become a philosopher. This has been identified as a close resemblance to the story of the Buddha in India, and some scholars have argued that Heraclitus was in fact the Buddha from India while others have argued that the Buddha was in fact Heraclitus from Greece. Both thinkers were mythologized as a king who left powerful king position and became a sage, putting the mental and spiritual above the corporeal and material. Both believe in the enlightening sun rising above the watery chaos of human perception and desire, but it is far more likely that the two were not the same individual and simply share the cosmology common to the cultures of the ancient world. Plato, who we will study next, shares this as well.

We do not know much at all about Heraclitus’ life, but he likely lived about 540 BCE. It is said in some sources that he was a king who gave up his throne to his brother to be a sage, but this is impossible to confirm and as mentioned quite allegorical which is always suspicious. He is said by other sources to have been a doctor, and many of his fragments do speak about the workings of physiology within the larger frame of physics as a thinker who is immersed in ancient cosmology would. A fragment reads:

Moisture makes the soul succumb to joy. Dry, the soul grows wise and good.

Heraclitus believed that the soul, mind and self becomes soggy and intoxicated when one indulges in desire and pleasure (drinking and sex are moist by nature), and likewise when one studies with the fire of the mind and abstains from pleasure the soul dries out. While this could come from a physician, some fragments seem critical of physicians and the practice of medicine just as others are critical of philosophers, spiritual groups and politics. A fragment reads:

The cosmos works by harmony of tensions, like the lyre and bow. Therefore, good and ill are one. Good and ill to the physician must be one, since he derives his fee from torturing the sick.

Heraclitus did write a book which he entrusted to the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, though we only have the very beginning today. There was a popular book of Heraclitus’ philosophy in ancient Greece, but this may or may not have been the original text. While we do not have any of his writings today, he is mentioned often by other writers, philosophers and historians who quote him and his work, and these pieces are put together as the fragments of Heraclitus which we read as a single text.

Heraclitus is a very skeptical thinker. He is sometimes portrayed as sad or depressed, called the ‘weeping philosopher’ by some and looking very down in Raphael’s painting, The School of Athens. He may, however, have been quite happy and misconstrued as sad by others, particularly Platonists who are opposed to his idea of formless fire and were supported in the Christian tradition. Raphael, who painted in the period of the Neoplatonic Renaissance, would have seen Heraclitus in this light. Heraclitus is angry at the politics of his city state Miletus. Like the Athenians killed Socrates for questioning too much and so “inciting the youth to riot”, Miletus exiled Hermadoros (whose name means ‘lover of Hermes’, Hermes being a god of wisdom and knowledge who was identified with Thoth, the Egyptian god of knowledge) because was ‘worthier than average’, presumably doing philosophy and cosmology. Heraclitus responded:

As for the Ephesians, I would have them, youths, elders, and all those between, go hang themselves, leaving the city in the abler hands of children.

Just like the ancient Sumerian lamenter, Confucius, and many other great thinkers, Heraclitus did not like the politics of his day and was critical of traditions of thought in general. Heraclitus was not, however, sad or angry as much as he was a skeptic. Many of his fragments appear playful jokes. Despising the beliefs, traditions and politics of the day does not make one a sad or angry person relative to others. Rather, it turns criticism of the other into criticism of the self and one’s own civilization. Heraclitus was convinced that wisdom and inquiring within show us that all is one big cosmic fire, and things that unify the community and the individual bring wholeness and true happiness. However, he believed that humans are often foolish and let their minds divide themselves from the whole and from each other such that their understandings are disjointed and ignorant.

This is very typical thinking of skeptics the world over. A dogmatist would say that there are specific truths that are certain and must be separated from the uncertain, specific goods that must be separated from the evil. A skeptic would say, like Heraclitus and the Daoists from China, that the truth and the good is the whole and the great One, and the tendency of the mind to divide the good and the true from the rest is the opposite of true understanding and wisdom.

Heraclitus was not a fan of experts and specialists, and he ridiculed the cultural leaders of his time. He says that the common people are completely asleep, but far more dangerous are the experts who have a small piece of the puzzle and say that they know the entire truth. He calls the poets (Hesiod and Homer) and the Pythagoreans frauds, and says that there are no permanent truths or laws other than the constant formation of watery chaos by the sun and cosmic fire. Notice that this does not question the set up of the cosmos as we have studied it everywhere (and what the Persians gave to the Eastern Greek city states). Many often ask, “Why, then, should I listen to Heraclitus, since he is simply an expert?”. Heraclitus replies as most skeptics do: don’t take my word for it, but look into the world and within yourself and you will find that it is true. The beginning of his book, which we still have, reads:

The word proves those first hearing it as numb to understanding as the ones who have not heard, yet all things follow from the word. Some, blundering with what I set before you, try in vain with empty talk to separate the essences of things and say how each thing truly is, and all the rest make no attempt. They no more see how they behave broad waking than remember clearly what they did asleep.

For wisdom, listen not to me but to the word and know that all is one. Those unmindful when they hear, for all they make of their intelligence, may be regarded as the walking dead. People dull their wits with gibberish, and cannot use their ears and eyes. Many fail to grasp what they have seen, and cannot judge what they have learned, although they tell themselves they know. Yet they lack the skill to listen or to speak. Whoever cannot seek the unforeseen sees nothing, for the known way is an impasse. Things keep their secrets.

Now that we can travel anywhere, we need no longer take the poets and myth-makers for sure witnesses over disputed facts…If learning were a path of wisdom, those most learned about myth would not believe, with Hesiod, that Pallas in her wisdom gloats over the noise of battle. Pythagoras may well have been the deepest in his learning of all men, and still he claimed to recollect details of former lives, being in one a cucumber and one time a sardine.

Of all the words yet spoken, none comes quite as far as wisdom, which is the action of the mind beyond all things that may be said. Wisdom is the oneness of mind that guides and permeates all things.

Many who have learned from Hesiod the countless names of gods and monsters never understand that night and day are one.

Time is a game played beautifully by children. Applicants for wisdom do what I have done: inquire within.

Since mindfulness, of all things, is the ground of being, to speak one’s true mind and to keep things known in common, serves all being, just as laws made clear uphold the city, yet with greater strength. Of all pronouncements of the law the one source is the word whereby we choose what helps true mindfulness prevail. Although we need the word to keep things known in common, people still treat specialists as if their nonsense were a form of wisdom. Fools seek counsel from the ones they doubt. People need not act and speak as if they were asleep. The waking have one world in common. Sleepers meanwhile turn aside, each into a darkness of his own.

Homer I deem worthy, in a trial by combat, of a good cudgeling…They raise their voices at stone idols as a man might argue with his doorpost. They have understood so little of the gods.

This is a psychological skepticism that is criticizing the human ability to know particular things as permanent that are able to be separated from the One and All (the cosmic fire). Only the All is permanent. All the other things are wandering temporal forms. The many beings arise from the energy of Being, and then they fall back into the fire and disappear. Heraclitus believes that the divisions made by the mind are mortal, not eternal, like the human body. Our knowledge and laws are impermanent like mounds of dirt. Heraclitus says many things to humble us, including pointing out our similarity to apes to put our achievements in perspective:

The language of a grown man, to the cosmic powers, sounds like baby-talk to men. To a god the wisdom of the wisest man sounds apish. Beauty in a human face looks apish too. In everything we have attained the excellence of apes. The ape apes find most beautiful looks apish to non-apes.

Heraclitus’ most famous idea is a memorable image: you can never step in the same river twice. Just as a river is always flowing and changing, so is reality always flowing and changing, such that nothing stays exactly the same for any two moments. You step in a river, then step out, then step back in the same river, but it is no longer ‘the same river’. Paradoxically, changing constantly in the way that things do is the stability and being of things. Rivers flow, fire burns, life thrives, always in motion to be stable in what it is. He says, “Goat cheese congeals in wine if not well stirred”. It is an example of a motion keeping a mixture what it is. When the motion stops, the elements disintegrate. In the same way that stability is motion, opposites work together:

From the strain of binding opposites comes harmony. The harmony past knowing sounds more deeply than the known…The sea is both pure and tainted, healthy and good haven to the fish, to humans undrinkable and deadly. Poultry bathe in dust and ashes, swine in filth…Two made one are never one. Arguing the same we disagree. Singing together we compete…Without injustices, the name of justice would mean what?..The way up is the way back. The beginning is the end.


PYRRHO AND SEXTUS EMPIRICUS

Sextus is a mystery. He is supposed to have lived towards 200 CE, 700 years after Heraclitus.
He is thought by scholars to have been from Alexandria Egypt. He might be Libyan, thus African, but it has been assumed that he was Greek living in Egypt or Rome. It is thought that he is a doctor because he mentions medical cases to show how sometimes things are good but then surprisingly bad in other cases or vice versa, but there is nothing that proves this.

Sextus is the first Pyrrhoian Skeptic, quite similar to the Jains and Buddhists of India. Agnosticism of all judgment and plurality of perspective and truth are staples for both. When Alexander fought his way to the border of India, to try to conquer the rich and fertile area, he brought the philosopher Pyrrho with him around 300 BCE. Pyrrho met with some ‘gymnosophists’ in the historian’s texts, and scholars argue whether these were Buddhists, Jains or if either existed yet at the time. Pyrrho witnessed the yoga and extreme penances of the sages, had discussions, then came home and refused to write anything or live in society. People would come to visit him on the edges of town, where he would argue that everything is true and not true, that every perspective is true but also false. His thinking sprouted a school in Alexandria Egypt, a great center of Greek, early Christian and later Muslim thought. We know of this exclusively through the writings of Sextus.

For example, Sextus calls upon the ‘where there is smoke, there is fire’ example used by Gautama and Aristotle, and then brings up many cases where one would be mistaken to draw the inference. The point is not that it can’t be drawn, but it can never be certain in a particular situation.

The Issue: IS has a temporary and eternal meaning, back and forth, like IS has a whole-part back and forth meaning. (Clinton, Rumsfeld vs. dealing with the real issue)

Intro Philosophy: Socrates & Plato

Socrates (470-400 BCE) is a very famous yet controversial and obscure figure. Like many great thinkers of the ancient world, he did not write his own thoughts down but taught others and it was Plato (430-350 BCE) and another philosopher and historian named Xenophon who wrote about Socrates and his teachings after his death. The third source of ancient Athenian literature that speaks about Socrates is Aristophanes who wrote plays mocking Socrates and portraying him as an idealistic fool. It was believed and still is by many that Plato and Xenophon were Socrates’ students, but new scholarship has shown that this may well not have been the case. Plato was a playwright who wrote several unpopular plays before writing the dialogues between Socrates and his students that became celebrated as some of the first and central works of ancient Greek philosophy. While Plato never appears in his plays himself, he does put his own family members in roles. He has characters mention him as a young devoted follower of Socrates, but in one place it is said that Plato was sick which explains why he could not be with Socrates before his court ordered death by drinking hemlock.

As already mentioned last week before covering Heraclitus, it is often said that Plato’s dialogues such as the Republic are some of the first works of philosophy and ‘Western’ European thought, but really Plato and his student Aristotle were revered by Muslims and Christians alike and their texts survive because they were important to the Abrahamic religions, not because they started a new way of European thinking. Modern European philosophy is quite diverse in its opinions, and Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the three celebrated Athenian thinkers, did not identify with Northern Europeans and did not believe that they were the first to be concerned with wisdom and the world. Before the rediscovery of the “presocratics” (like Thales and Heraclitus) they were even considered to be the birth of philosophy in ancient Greece by many, even though this proved also to be untrue.

It is generally accepted by scholars today that Plato’s early dialogues are one of the best sources for understanding Socrates and his ideas, but in Plato’s later dialogues Socrates is a mouthpiece for Plato’s own ideas. We will consider Socrates and his thought first, then turn to two of Plato’s most important later dialogues, the Republic and the Timaeus, to study Plato’s thought. Socrates and Plato were both influenced by Heraclitus (our subject last week), and while Socrates seemed to have been quite similar to Heraclitus, Plato’s thought changed and he began putting quite different views into Socrates’ mouth.

Consider two polar opposite views one can have of reality and the world. In the first view, everything changes constantly and all permanence is an illusion. In the second opposite view, everything remains the same and change is the illusion. Both of these views, in fact, can be found in Indian thought, particularly in Buddhism. As we saw last week, Heraclitus was a famous champion of the first view. He argued that only Being, the One and All, the cosmic fire or energy, is eternal and all other beings are temporary in spite of what our judgments tell us. Another presocratic thinker named Parmenides (who lived sometime before 500 BCE) argued for the second and opposite view. He argued that there is one unchanging reality that is eternal and all change and temporary beings are the illusion in spite of what our judgments tell us. This would mean, similar to some scientific theories today, that there is only one moment of time and it is our position and perspective within that moment that changes.

Socrates and Plato were both influenced by Heraclitus, but in his later dialogues Plato has Socrates argue for views that sound much more like Parmenides. Originally, Socrates questioned everyone to show that we know very little and it is the job of the philosopher to show this to people. He would argue with others, including famous thinkers and sages, who believed that they possessed certain truth and point out the contradictions in their reasoning. This is much like Heraclitus telling us to beware of experts and being seduced into thinking that one school of thought or perspective is simply correct but instead continue to investigate the self and world as both have no limit to their depth or the things we can learn. It is also very similar to Pyrrho and his skeptical school of thought, as well as Buddhist logic and debate, particularly Nagarjuna, one of the most famous Buddhist teachers and the central Buddhist logician.

While according to Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes Socrates did not put forward views of his own but rather attacked others to show that human beliefs are imperfect and incomplete, in Plato’s later dialogues Socrates argues that there is one unchanging reality above the temporary perceivable world and it is the job of the philosopher to seek and understand this eternal reality. Plato uses Socrates to teach his own increasingly Parmenidean view that there are unchanging and eternal forms of things in the heavens and only the educated and the persistent come to see and understand these forms.


Socrates and his Method of Questioning

We know very little about Socrates’ early life other than the details supplied in Plato’s works. He mentions several influences, including two women. He says that the witch/shaman Diotima taught him about love and how it is central to life and the cosmos. Like Buddha we studied last week and Confucius we will study next week, Socrates identified love with wisdom and objectivity. There is an interesting dynamic in human thought about whether learning and acquiring knowledge make one passionate or dispassionate, whether science for example fills our hearts with awe or stills them. The word ‘philosophy’ is often translated ‘love of wisdom’, but in fact ‘wisdom love’ could refer either to the loving of wisdom or wisdom that is also love.

Socrates also gives credit to Aspasia, the mistress of the general Pericles, who he says taught him rhetoric. If true, this shows that Socrates was not a common person but just like almost everyone in Plato’s dialogues an aristocrat who knew politicians and the wealthy. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle lived at a time when the glory days of Athens were in decline. Eventually, Alexander (Aristotle’s student) would conquer the city and the surrounding city-states. Socrates was a critic of Athenian society, called “the horsefly” because he believed in stinging Athens into action, and he was eventually condemned to commit suicide for corrupting the youth of the city after there was a riot.

Socrates’ career as a philosopher began when his friend Chaerephon went to the oracle of Delphi to ask if anyone was wiser than his friend Socrates. Socrates, with characteristic modesty, protests that this was a very crass question to ask of the great oracle. Notice that Socrates does believe in the oracle and in the gods. His last wish, the last thing he said before he died, was that a rooster should be sacrificed to Asclepius, the ancient Greek god of healing and mystical insight who is associated with Thoth the Egyptian god of knowledge and insight. Socrates loved irony, and it seems that he viewed his death as being cured of life and its limitations.

Religious people, including Christians and Muslims for centuries, often view Socrates, Plato and Aristotle as making way for solar monotheism already popular in Egypt and Persia in their time and seeing the gods as many human shaped anthropomorphisms of what is rather one and without and above human form. Non-religious people often view the three Athenians as moving away from religion and toward atheism and questioning traditional understandings. Interestingly, traditional polytheists in Athens in their time said the same thing and called them atheists as well, along with other increasingly monotheistic thinkers such as Heraclitus who are likely being influenced by the latest developments of Egyptian and Persian thought. It seems that if you want thinking to evolve towards your own thought, you could view it either way.

The oracle replied to Chaerephon that no one was wiser than Socrates. Upon hearing this, Socrates says, with either genuine or false modesty, he was very troubled by this because he did not believe that he was very wise at all and this would mean that humanity is quite ignorant overall. He decided that he needed to determine if what the oracle said was in fact true, and so he began to wander and debate others, seeking someone wiser than himself.

Socrates felt that he knew nothing, but as he questioned the experts of Athens he came upon a horrible discovery and paradox. The experts believed themselves to be wise and possess great knowledge, but when questioned it turned out they knew very little. Socrates knew that he himself knew nothing. Therefore, Socrates says he discovered that he was wiser than the experts because he knew that he knew nothing, while the experts knew nothing but thought that they knew a great deal. Humble and modest Socrates was aware that mortal humans know nothing, but the politicians, artists and warriors were unaware of this great equality they shared with Socrates. The ignorance of Socrates was thus the greatest wisdom in all of Athens. It is certainly true that the more one knows, the more one knows there is an endless amount to know and that we are all quite equal in knowing very little even when we know a great deal. There is another paradox here: the more one surpasses others in wisdom, becoming different, one identifies with them more, seeing the similarity.

Notice the similarity between Socrates and Heraclitus, who argued that the experts believe themselves to know a great deal but do not understand that their knowledge and perspectives are mortal and we are all mere apes to the gods. Socrates argued, like Heraclitus, that the greatest wisdom is found in questioning oneself and others. Remember that great city-states and empires had risen and fallen along with increasingly specialized experts. Philosophy questions experts and the basis of our knowledge, which humans find useful particularly in times of crisis when hard questions must be asked.

Socrates argued that one should accept one’s own ignorance and the guidance of the world through intuition. He believed that he had a spirit, a ‘daemon’ in the Greek, a word which became “demon” as Christianity replaced the polytheism and spirits with monotheism and angels. This spirit was much like what we would call a conscience, a word which means “co-seeing” or seeing along with, an intuition that one should or should not do a particular thing, something Christians identified with angels sitting on shoulders just as ancient Greeks did with spirits.

Socrates says that his daemon told him to stay out of politics. Good advice, seeing as how his death was quite political. Not only did politics get Socrates killed in spite of this, but Plato has Socrates get increasingly political in his later dialogues, particularly in the Republic where Socrates debates the best form of the city. This is another piece of eminence that Plato may not have known Socrates and is using him as a mouthpiece for his own ideas. Socrates also praised the divinity of poetry, mysticism, love and getting drunk with friends as he does at the Symposium, a dialogue about a drinking party that turns into a philosophical discussion about the nature of love.


Plato & his Dialogues

Plato was long assumed to be a student of Socrates simply because Plato writes as much in many of his dialogues and he is the best source on him, though if he turns him into a mere mouthpiece for very different ideas in the later dialogues he may also be the worst. As Socrates is about to die, Plato has Socrates ask where the young Plato is, to which another student replies that Plato was sick and thus could not be there at the time. Scholars now are critical of this, and think that Plato had a habit of writing himself and his family into Socrates’ circle in his dialogues. Because they are our best sources on Socrates, it is difficult to tell whether or not Plato’s older cousin Critias or Plato himself were actual students of Socrates or whether they were simply influenced by this figure who became quite famous following his trial and death.

Plato’s actual name was Aristocles, but according to the story his wrestling instructor named him Platon or ‘Broad’ because he had a wide figure and wrestling stance. This may be merely a story, because Plato was known to have a wide and thus ‘broad’ breadth of knowledge covering all subjects of ancient thought and might have acquired the nick name in this way. Plato’s father died when he was young, and his step-father became the Athenian ambassador to the Persian royal court. Remember that Persia was a great source of ancient world cosmology at the time, and Zoroastrianism, Persia’s solar monotheism, would be a major influence on the Abrahamic religions just as Plato himself would.

Long after his attempts to become an established playwright, after his dialogues about Socrates had gathered some fame, Plato founded his Academy in 385 BCE, an open area near a sacred tree grove where he, his students and other lecturers would teach and debate matters of philosophy and cosmology. Academy in fact means ‘porch’ or ‘step’, an open area in front of a building, a fact it took scholars long to understand for they believed that the Academy must have been a building itself. Scholars made a similar error looking for the famed Library of Alexandria (an Egyptian center of ancient world cosmology, Platonism and Christianity), when in fact the library was a shelf that ran along a hall that connected two buildings, just as one would say a collection of books is a personal library. Plato writes in the Timaeus, his book on the cosmology of the world, that ancient Egypt was the birthplace of philosophy and science, which again he would have understood to be the same thing acquired through knowledge of the self and the cosmos.

To examine Plato’s thought in its later and mature form we will look at his two most influential dialogues which both come from his later period and are certainly to be read together. It is sad that the dialogue of the Timaeus is supposed to happen on the day after the dialogue of the Republic, and the Republic covers the proper order of the self and city while the Timaeus covers the cosmos and how it also works in the same way that the self and city should if ordered properly and justly, but it is difficult to find the Timaeus in print while every Intro Philosophy course covers the Republic. I made sure to give you both texts in your reader. It is much easier to believe that Plato and Aristotle invented secular scientific reasoning when you do not read the cosmology of the Timaeus. For Muslims and Christians, the Timaeus was understandably Plato’s most important work and Aristotle would be making modifications to this picture, that the world is a living being and vegetation is the body hair of the world. On campuses today, however, students read sections of the Republic that speak of the self and city and are often told that this is the birth of speaking abstractly about subject matters this way. Plato and Aristotle had much greater reverence for Egypt and Persia to believe such a thing.

In these two late dialogues, believed to have been written about 360 BCE, Socrates was no longer sharing much of the conversation with other debaters, but dominates the texts with monologues that are now Plato’s own Parmenides-like views of the unchanging form that is the hidden source of the temporary. Plato believed that Heraclitus was right about the world below, but Parmenides was right about the eternal world above, the unchanging model, form, order and cause of the ever-changing world below. Plato has Socrates argue that those who think they know the world below have mere opinions, but the one who knows the world above, the true eternal pattern of reality, has true knowledge. In this way, wisdom for Plato was not simply knowing that one knows little to nothing, but rather is acquired through the gathering of knowledge of the world and its patterns. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates debates with others on justice and the Good. Socrates debunks several common views, then constructs an ideal model of the city. The well ordered city is compared to the well ordered soul, three faculties that must be kept in their places. Thus, the Good is the proper order of the elements perfectly in accord with ancient cosmology. Just as the individual is a microcosm to the city, the city is a microcosm to the cosmos, and again the elements must be separated and put in their places with the highest element on top and the lowest beneath. The cosmos is ordered in its unfolding, producing the ideal order of the soul and the city.


The Republic

Socrates talks to several “interlocutors” and argues against their concepts of justice. This is Socrates acting like the original Socrates. Polemarchus argues that justice is paying debts, helping friends and harming enemies. Socrates argues that in some situations, helping friends and harming enemies are wrong. Thrasymachus argues that justice is ‘the good of the stronger’. Glaucon similarly argues that without threat of punishment, no one would do good. Socrates argues that the strong will corrupt themselves if they only act for their own interests and not for the good of the whole. Remember the politics of the time, and that many tyrants and forms of rule came and fell, had some success but also great failure. This is the substance of Book 1.

Starting with Book 2, Socrates now turns into Plato. He says to those who remain and do not leave upset that he did not feel he had convincingly refuted these other views, and that perhaps they should continue to debate to figure out what justice actually is. This is the turn from Socratic questioning to Platonic forms and separate structures that should have ideal forms. Unfortunately, everyone who is critical of Socrates has left the party, and the two who stay are mindless yes men who agree enthusiastically to everything Socrates says and praises it as the most certain and good wisdom they have ever heard.

Plato, as Socrates, argues for an eternal form of the Good over the world of many temporary beings and desires. Socrates is challenged to give a positive account of justice, not just defeat opponents as Thrasymachus accuses him of doing before leaving similar to Hindu debaters accusing Jains and Buddhists of tearing down other positions rather than arguing for a consistent truth. Socrates argues that first they must construct the ideal or just city, and this will show how the ideal or just individual should be. Essentially, the just city is a threefold caste system, identical in many ways to the Hindu caste system of India. There are many similarities between metaphors and teachings of the Republic and Indian thought. While originally I believed that this was due to an Indian influence on ancient Greece, it is likelier that the cosmology and thought of Egypt and Persia, the interconnectedness of ancient cultures and the similarity of ancient cosmology are responsible.

This threefold division corresponds to the physical human being and the cosmic being. The head is fire as an element, reason, thought and consciousness in the individual, and the ruling philosopher kings in the city. The heart or chest is air as an element, spirit, breath and courage in the individual, and the police or guardians in the city. The hands and stomach is earth as an element, desire, craving and thirst in the individual, and workers, farmers and craftspeople in the city. The individual, city and cosmos form a continuum, a set of Russian dolls. Notice that authority and the good come from above, evil and chaos to be ordered from below.

Plato and Aristotle were not fans of democracy. Not only were they aristocrats and connected to royal courts like the educated often were in ancient Athens, Socrates was condemned to death by the Athenian assembly thinking and questioning too much. Unlike how it is often taught today with sections of the Republic, Plato and Aristotle thought much higher of the royal dynasties of Egypt and Persia than they did of the brief period of Athenian democracy. Like other educated Athenians, they revered King Darius of Persia, particularly because he gave Athenian nobles much freedom and rights.

All is sacrificed for the common good. There is to be no private property or partners or children, for any of the three classes. Socrates argues that the ruler who grabs for themselves will not be happy, filled with “horrid pains and pangs”, and will physically and mentally fall apart. This tyrant will never “taste true freedom or friendship”. Because this is not the order of the cosmos, it will not stick and will fall apart just like many tyrants have recently in ancient Athens. Similarly, if everyone shares everything in common, there will be greater justice and less selfishness.

The Soviet Union and America funded scholarship during the cold war that argued each was more like Athens than the other. The Soviet Union pointed out that they were much more like the Republic than America, a democracy fueled by individual consumption and private property. America pointed out that Aristotle was critical of Plato and argued there should be a balance of public and private property and Plato’s ideal city was impossible in the real world, while using the language of ‘West’ and ‘East’ to separate Russia from the ‘true’ Western tradition. I myself would like more of a balance today between the public and private, but to many this is very socialist and thus un-Western, like Soviet Russia.

Socrates argues that each person is best suited to one thing, and should be assigned this one job. If people do more than one job, they will not be able to do this one job as best as they can. He argues that we will lie to the people, tell them the ‘noble lie’ of a Phoenician story, that people were born from the earth and there are three races of people because the metals of gold, silver and bronze flow in their veins. While people will raise all children in common, they will be tested from early ages to see whether they can be athletic and educated. Those who cannot be athletic will be workers. Those who can be athletic but can’t study will be police. Those who are both athletic and educated are the philosophers, educators and rulers.

Why tell the lie, if we are striving for ideal good and justice? Because the common will not understand and grab for themselves, very much Plato’s opinion of the brief period of Athenian democracy when the rich each grabbed for themselves in the absence of a powerful and just king. Plato’s cave, which we will discuss, reinforces this point. If you tell the truth to everyone, they will not believe you and try to destroy you as they did Socrates.

Socrates argues and the interlocutors naively agree without much of a fight that if they separate out the police and train them as best as can be, and then take the philosophers out of the police and educate them as best as can be, no injustice will be possible. There is the simple belief that the order itself will generate justice throughout the whole. The police and philosophers will thus never be greedy or unjust to the people below. Plato elsewhere argues that this is how the Egyptians in Thebes did it, by elevating priests as a class. He also says to imitate Sparta as well separating out the warriors.

In the same way, if you put your desires and appetites in check with your feelings, and your feelings in check with your reason, you will be a well ordered soul or individual. The appetites crave, the spirit is passionate, and the mind is reasonable. These are their jobs, the single thing they do the best, their purpose. Socrates argues that sometimes we are very thirsty, but if we know the drink is poisoned our reason puts our desire in check. Other times we may want honor but realize that it is not the smart thing to do, putting our spirit and emotions in check by our reason. This is interesting, for in the Apology Socrates argues not only that he should not be condemned to death but given free food and drink for life because he is helping Athens out, but then when this angers the assembly (as one could have reasoned), Socrates argues with his students that he must drink the poison and not escape by bribing the guards because it is the right thing to follow the law even when the law is unjust.

Plato also suggests banning all art (music, poetry and theatre) that is counterproductive, which pretty much means everything that isn’t impressing the highest good and order. The youth are to be taught that they must improve themselves for the good of the state, and that the gods never to injustice or desire. Remember that Heraclitus also thought it foolish to believe that the gods had the same problems and flaws as humans.

The Allegory of the Cave

After being questioned about lying for the purpose of the good and justice, Socrates says that this is best explained with an analogy. He describes the masses and the assent of the philosopher beyond opinion of the earthly realm to knowledge of the heavenly and eternal realm, showing why the philosopher alone should have authority. It also illustrates Plato’s placing of Parmenides above Heraclitus, the eternal and heavenly above the mortal and earthly.

Imagine that everyone is chained in a dark cave, watching shadows of puppets carried before a fire at the mouth of the cave. The people think that the shadows are reality, the real things. The one who escapes, breaking the bondage of appetites and earthly things much like Jainism and Buddhism teach, first sees that the shadows are shadows of puppets, and sees the fire that casts the shadows. This draws the seeker to the mouth of the cave. Coming out of the cave and past the small fire, the seeker is at first blinded by the sunlight, but then sees real things outside of the cave and realizes that the puppets were just poor copies of the real things casting shadows that were shaped like real things. The seeker now has knowledge and wisdom, not mere earthly opinion and belief.


The Timaeus

The Timaeus, the work of Plato which he as well as Christians and Muslims believed to the most important, is not in spell check when typed today. Aristotle refers to it more than any other text of Plato’s, and it was the most important book for philosophers and scientists of the Italian Renaissance, one of the only works of Plato that Christian Europeans kept until they got other works of Plato and Aristotle from Muslims. It is, again, sad that we have largely forgotten it while remembering to praise the ancient Greeks and Renaissance Italians for being the great sources of European culture and study. It is very clear after reading the text why both religious and non-religious people ignore the text, because both have forgotten what used to be central religious and scientific beliefs in the European tradition.

Socrates the day after the party where the ideal Republic is discussed says that he would like to talk more about the ideal state and how it corresponds to the cosmos. Then, Critas tells the story of Solon going to Egypt and that the Egyptians told him of the story of Atlantis. This is, indeed, where the story of Atlantis comes from and it is not found earlier in Egypt as Critas says. The Egyptian Priest tells Solon that the Athenians do not remember because they have just become educated and civilized, but the Egyptians know from their history records that thousands of years ago the Athenians stopped the people of Atlantis, who were threatening to take over the world. We now know that Egypt was not as many thousands of years old as Plato believed, but this does show Plato believed that they were civilized long before Athens. The story, which is now believed to have been an invention by Plato or a story told to him that he believed, is very similar to the Battle of Marathon, and the Athenians and Spartans repelling the Persians.

Timaeus now speaks of the creation of the cosmos out of the One, showing the order already described of the elements and how the individual human was created as a microcosm of the macrocosm. This implies that you put your faculties of desire, spirit and reason in their proper order to be good and healthy, which is the order of the cosmos. The One sprouts the eternal order or model of things, which includes all eternal models or archetypes of things, and the demiurge, the sky father being that is the small fire at the mouth of the cave, then produces copies of the models in the ever changing world of earth below. The whole is a living creature, with the heavens as soul and the all as reason. Timaeus, as Plato, says that human beings are a plant with their roots in the heavens. The demiurge fashions reason in soul, and soul in body in individuals. The demiurge then moves everything in a circle, bringing about the life and death in circles of earth beings from planetary orbits and starlight.

This is all done by sameness and difference. Sameness has the higher and encompassing role, difference being proportional downward. The four elements have certain shapes, which are then glued together by the fifth element, quintessence or ether. This is the cosmology of Christianity and Europe well through the middle ages, up to Newton and Leibniz, who read Islamic scholar’s commentaries on the Timaeus. The Medieval Christians had to retranslate Plato, with central interest in the cosmology of the Timaeus, from Arabic into Latin.

Asian Philosophy: Buddhism in India

This lecture covers Buddhism in India, including the major two traditions of Buddhism that originated in India, the Theravada and the Mahayana. Next time, we will cover Mahayana Buddhism in Tibet, China, Korea and Japan.

The Life of the Buddha

According to the tradition and legend, Buddha, the awakened or conscious one, was the son of a king who ruled the Gotama region of Northern India, the same region and living at the same time as Gotama, founder of the Nyaya school of Logic and Debate. When the Buddha was born, the king’s wise advisor told him that his son would be either a great king or a great holy man. The king did not want his son to be a holy man, but rather the next king, so to control his son he hid his son away in his palace and gave him all the luxuries in the world, hiding death, disease and pain from him, surrounding him with dancing girls and servants and only healthy, happy, obedient people. At 29, the Buddha had become bored of this, and snuck out to see the city, taking along his trusted servant. In succession, the Buddha saw the Four Sights (an old man, a sick man, a dead man, and a holy man). When he saw the first three, his servant each time told him that old age, disease and death are unfortunately inevitable for everyone, but when he got to the fourth, the holy man (likely a Jain or proto-Jain), his servant told him that the sage was working on the first three.

The Buddha was immediately envious of something more wonderful than he had ever possessed in the palace, and so he escaped into the jungle where he found sages practicing austerities. The Buddha did these proto-Jain austere practices in the jungle for six years, but he found that this brought no great enlightenment and in fact brought him self-hatred. Buddhism is famous for long periods of meditation, and this is quite like Jain austerities of standing in postures, fasting and concentration exercises, but Buddhism teaches that it is through balance and not extremes that one will be liberated. The Buddha found Jain asceticism to be promoting of self hatred which is still attachment and duality. In other words, the Buddha found Jainism to be ekantavada, one sided, and not in accord with the Jain principle of anekantavada, non-one-sidedness.

The Buddha left the jungle disappointed. He decided to sit beneath a large tree, known as the Boddhi Tree (which one can go see in India today, a tree supposed to have been grown from the original in the original spot), and he vowed not to rise until he found complete and total truth or he would give up his life. After 49 days, at the age of 35, he realized complete enlightenment, the goal of moksha and nirvana that the Hindus and Jains also revere. This is defined in the tradition as the total extinction of greed (raga), hate (dosa), and delusion (moha), obtainable in this life by any being through the overcoming duality and desire. Just as Jains call their sages Tirthankaras, one who fords the stream to get to stability on the other side, the Buddha is often called the Tathagatha, the ‘Thus Come One’ or the ‘having arrived guy’. While Hinduism and Buddhism competed against each other, they also incorporated each other: Hinduism recognizes the Buddha as an incarnation of Vishnu, while some Buddhist texts speak of the Buddha going to high heaven realms and teaching the Hindu gods, who rejoice upon being enlightened more than they apparently already were.

On a related note, Buddha is never depicted as fat in spite of how many Europeans and Americans who believe that he often is. Gautama Siddhartha, the original Buddha, is always depicted in India, Tibet, China, Japan and South East Asia as tall and slender, particularly because when he was enlightened under the Boddhi Tree he had been practicing Jain-like austerities and fasting for some time.

The happy laughing and fat Buddha is Budai (in Chinese, Hotei in Japanese) the laughing Chan/Zen monk and good luck saint/bodhisattva who supposedly lived around 900 CE. His name means ‘cloth sack’, and he is often depicted holding a sack, and orange, or a ball of butter up in the air. It is said that he loves playing with children and giving them gifts and candy from his bag, just like the sort of people I was warned about by Nancy Reagan as a child in the eighties. He appears in one Zen koan story, the sort we will concentrate on two weeks from now. It is said that a monk approached him as he was distributing candy, and asked, “What is the meaning of Zen?”, a common koan question, and Budai dropped his bag to the ground. The monk then asked, “How does one realize this?”, and Budai picks up his bag and wanders off.

Budai is extremely popular in Chinese culture, and it is believed that he brings good luck and fortune to lay people and shop owners. Rubbing his belly is supposed to bring good luck, which is why the gold paint or red die on the belly of Budai statues in restaurants is often word away. People saw Ho Dai in the Chinatowns of Europe and America, and assumed this Buddhist monk to be the Buddha himself. Yes, but only in the way that all of us are the original Buddha, Budai and the entire cosmos.

The Core Philosophical Teachings of Buddhism

The Four Noble Truths (or Four Truths of Nobles, or Four Ennobling Truths)

1) Existence is suffering.
2) The cause of suffering is desire.
3) There is liberation from suffering
4) The liberation is the Dharma, the Buddha’s Teaching, or the Eightfold Path

While these are supposed to be the realization of the Buddha under the Boddhi Tree, it seems strange to say that the Buddha suddenly realized that liberation is his teaching. Sometimes it is said that the fourth is following Buddha’s teaching, but often it is said that it is following the Eightfold Path.

The Eightfold Path is similar to the Three Jewels of Jainism, which are right body, right speech and right mind. Notice that the three correspond cosmologically to earth/desire, air/breath, and fire/thought. The Buddha added more to the list to make eight: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.

The Five Abilities

The five abilities or faculties that are to be developed through study and practice are dedication, strength, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom. The final ability, wisdom, is the most prized. Just as the lion is king of the animals, wisdom is king of the virtues and identified with the lion. It is also symbolized by the sword or the ‘sword of wisdom’. Some bodhisattvas such as Manjusri, bodhisattva or saint/buddha of wisdom, is often pictured holding the sword upright or above the head ready to cut off attachments and destroy the obstacles of ignorance, often personified as demons.

The Doctrine of the Middle Way

In all things, as the mind splits things into opposites and prefers one while rejecting the other, one should always practice moderation between the extremes. As a criticism of Jainism, this means that one should balance pain and pleasure, being attached to neither, rather than chase pain and difficulty to liberate the self. The Buddha found Jain practice to be immoderate: too much de-emphasis of self is attachment to self hate, not detachment from particular things (as self-hate is particular and bound up with particular things just as much as self-love or pride is). One must love and hate the self, bringing the two together, to find detachment from many and complete identity in the One, the All.

Doctrine of Impermanence

The Buddha taught that all things are impermanent. Thus, everything is constantly evolving, never the same twice. Only the great All is eternal, the One to which we all belong, but as soon as you say this it becomes a conception, a particular being separated from other particular beings, and then is simply another temporary and limited being in your mind. Just like Jains, Buddhists believe that because of suffering there is attachment and bondage to particular things, to ‘this versus that’, such that we come to have one-sided views of ourselves, of particular things, and of the cosmos as a whole. The Buddhists, like the Jains, believe that one does not have a permanent self, and this constant transformation is a central cause of the fear and clinging of the mind to particular things outside of the self in order to seek stability. However, because the things are not themselves permanent, the mind must jump from one thing to another, seeking ideal stability in each thing and then leaping to the next with the same hope, endlessly without rest unless wisdom is developed.

The Buddhists use the metaphor of the monkey mind, of a monkey leaping from branch to branch in a frenzy. The liberation from desire is simultaneously the liberation of ignorance, a finding stability in the whole tree rather than seeking stability in any particular branch. One can desire or thirst for an end to particular things or everything as well, but this is does not bring satisfaction either. In another related monkey metaphor, one similar to the enchantingly racist Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby story from Tales of Uncle Remus (which is nice in retelling African wisdom tales in the context of the American South, but plenty racist in their presentation by today’s standards), a hunter sets a trap for a monkey with pitch. The monkey takes the bait and gets his hand stuck. To get his hand out, he uses his other hand, then legs, then tail, getting more and more stuck in the trap as he tries to escape. It is similar to the Chinese finger trap puzzle, where getting free means doing the opposite of trying to pull away.

Codependent Arising (Pratityasamutpada)

Another major teaching of Buddhism is the codependent arising of all things, also known as dependent origination and conditioned genesis. All things are themselves in so far as they are interconnected to every other thing. Opposites, such as heat and cold or self and other, do not anchor themselves or give things their meaning, but rather all things exist dependent on other things. Not only do opposites arise codependent with each other (without good there can be no bad, and without cold there can be no heat) but each particular thing is a bundle or pile (skanda) of many things. The self is a pile of many things, as is the meaning of a thing, the memory of a thing, or the cause of a thing.

Emptiness (Shunyata)

Buddha taught that all things are empty (shunya) of self or self-existence. While this seems depressing or frightening to many, it should be understood more as openness, as not being closed off in the self as it first appears but being connected to and dependent on everything else. Just like when studying Nietzsche or any decently skeptical thought, what first appears to be nihilism, belief in nothing, should rather be understood as belief in everything as a whole, as a rich abundance that means far too much to mean any specific thing in particular. A set of talks by the Dalai Lama recently released is called Compassion in Emptiness. He speaks about Nagarjuna, who we will study as well, and connects emptiness, openness, and compassion as the goal of Buddhist teaching and practice. Being empty of self is not just lacking self-determination, but lacking selfishness and possessiveness. An absence of selfishness or division of things does not mean one has nothing. Rather one is not attached to the things one finds one has. In an early text, the Buddha says that abiding in emptiness is abiding in fullness.

Mudras of the Buddha

We have already discussed mudras, hand positions such as the seed or essence mudra pinching of thumb and index finger together which is found in the Hindu Upanishads as well as early images and statues of the Buddha teaching that all is one without division and the essence of what deludes us and prevents us from realizing it is desire and attachment to particular things. There are many mudras associated with the Buddha and his teachings, but there are two central mudras that form a paradoxical pair. Buddha is often shown with his palm face down towards the earth, cutting off all desire and delusion, blocking the lower and detaching from the inferior. Buddha is also often shown with his fingertips touching the earth, connecting with the lowest and purifying the inferior. This is similar to dogmatic understanding which separates the true and good from the false and bad, and skeptical reason which seeks the union of the divided and oppositions into an integrated whole. In so far as delusion is division, one should eliminate it. In so far as division is delusion, one should integrate with it to get beyond it.

Meditation Practice

While I am not, in any way, an instructor in meditation, I have periodically practiced it based on the instructions of modern teachers and there are a few points to share with the average person who wishes to put a simplified and informal version into practice. You can practice in the traditional lotus position or ‘sitting Indian style’ as it is sometimes called, but you can also sit straight in a chair, stand straight, stand in yoga postures, walk, or even jog according to post-eighties trendy teachers. You can close your eyes (I would not while jogging), keep your eyes open, or, as many Zen teachers instruct, keep your eyes half open, half closed. In the Zen tradition, there was debate about this similar to the opposing mudras just discussed. With the eyes closed, it is easier (while not that easy) to concentrate but harder to integrate with everyday life. One of my favorite short Buddhist stories tells of a monk who goes up to an isolated mountain top and becomes greatly enlightened, but then when he goes back down into the marketplace someone bumps into him and he is greatly angered. With the eyes half open, it is easier to concentrate while integrated with experience of the world. For human beings, visual experience is the most vivid and most processed in the brain.

While meditation is about clearing and calming the mind, it is very difficult if not impossible to empty the mind. No matter how hard one tries, particularly if one is trying hard, things continue to pop into the head and take your mind away with them. Jack Kornfield, an American meditation instructor and author, says we should watch as things rise continuously in the mind and let them fall away without following them, what he and his teachers in India call, “gazing at the waterfall”. Other teachers, including those of early traditions, speak of holding compassion or particular images in mind.

Regardless of whether one concentrates on nothing, something in particular or whatever arises naturally, all instruct that one should also concentrate on the breath. There are complex formulas for in and out counts for breath, as well as quick or slow inhalation versus exhalation, but the simplest is slowly breathing in with a count of four or five seconds followed by breathing out with the same count at the same speed. You can count forward for both or count from one to five on inhaling and from five to one on exhaling. At first it is awkward to switch from inhaling to exhaling and exhaling to inhaling while concentrating, but with practice and patience the sharp transition becomes smooth and rounded. There have been numerous psychological and neurological studies that suggest regularly meditating in this or a similar way has mental and physical health benefits, particularly due to reduction of stress.


Schools of Buddhist Thought in India

The two largest groups of Buddhism are the Theravada and the Mahayana. ‘Theravada’ means ‘The Way of the Elders’, the continuation of the initial orthodoxy from the time of the Buddha. ‘Mahayana’, which means ‘Greater Vehicle’, was a reformation in India in the first century CE that became the larger of the two schools, though there are still over 100 million practicing Theravadins. The Mahayana call Theravada ‘Hinayana’, the ‘Lesser Vehicle’, though of course the Theravada never use this term to refer to themselves.

Today both can be found all over the world including Europe and America, but primarily Theravada is the official religion of several countries in South East Asia including Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos, and Mahayana is found in many countries of East Asia including China, Mongolia, Korea, Vietnam and Japan. Sometimes Tibetan Buddhism is considered part of Mahayana, but sometimes it is considered the third large school of Buddhism, Vajrayana, the ‘Diamond Vehicle’. As with the terms ‘Mahayana’ and ‘Hinayana’, it is often only the Tibetans refer to themselves this way.


The Theravada Tradition

First we consider the original early tradition, the Theravada, which formed as a religion at the same time as Jainism and Hinduism were gathering and codifying their own religious traditions. This was centered in the sangha, the community or monasteries. To become or convert to Buddhism, traditionally one takes the three vows: “I take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma (the Buddha’s teaching) and the Sangha (the Buddhist community or tradition of the faithful). Sometimes monasteries were founded in remote locations to promote meditation and withdrawal from the bustle of life, but often they served as religious, educational and medical sites for local communities the same way that Christian monasteries did in the Middle East and Europe. Both were centers for learning to write and copying texts, first by hand and then printed after block printing was invented in China. The first block printed text

There are three ways one can be involved in the sangha, though the third is only vaguely involved. First, one could be a common lay person who is educated by monks or self-educated in Buddhist teachings, meditation and devotional worship. Buddhist monks of the Theravada tradition wander from house to house, collecting alms and food to eat. Monks often have only two possessions, a robe and a begging bowl. To the horror of many Jains, Buddhists will eat donations of meat, rare in most households of India not only because of diet but because it is expensive. When challenged on this by Jains, the Buddha replies that it is perfectly alright to eat meat if it has not been killed particularly for the monk to eat. This is similar to eating fruit after it has already fallen from the tree, but the Jains of course were not satisfied with this answer. Much later, an emperor of China asked the Indian Buddhists for texts that prescribed vegetarianism, and when they said there was no text that made the diet a requirement, the emperor had one written up and made law for Buddhist monks of China because Daoism had already convinced Chinese culture that vegetarianism is required of great sages.

The second way one can become involved with the sangha is to quit being a lay person and join the monastery as a monk or a nun. In one early text, Buddha uses a parable identical to one used by Jesus, the parable of sowing seeds on good and bad soil, explaining that while teachings should be shared with everyone, those monks and nuns who have committed their lives to monastic living are rich with potential to use the teachings the most. While this did give women as well as low caste and poor individuals the opportunity to seek a better life outside of their circumstances and become educated, it is also true that nuns were still considered subordinate to monks. Monks could instruct nuns, but nuns could not instruct monks. The same was true of Christian monasteries in Europe, which is why nuns often teach children in schools but not adult men. In one text, Buddha prescribes this sexist social order but when asked by Prajapati, the legendary founding Buddhist nun, how nuns should train and practice compared to monks, Buddha replies ‘as monks do’ twice, explicitly mentioning no difference.

The third way one can be involved, though not very involved, with the sangha is to become an arhat. Remember that Jainism and Buddhism developed from individuals who were not yet bound in communities and monastic orders but were rather practicing meditation and austerities individually in the jungle. Both Jainism and Buddhism recognize that some individuals who practice on their own are indeed sages who achieve greatness, though typically the traditions advocate joining the traditions and the community within the walls. One can go off on one’s own, but it is often better to seek instruction and discipline within the community. In early texts, the title arhat means little more than a buddha, but in the later tradition the term increasingly refers to individuals on their own or only marginally involved with the monastic community.

In one early text, an evil monk tries to take over the community and when the Buddha sends him away he returns and argues with Buddha in front of the sangha about how staying near the outside community and seeking alms and food will necessarily involve monks in evil so monks should dwell in the forest apart from lay people. Buddha replies that one can go into the forest if one wants, or dwell in the community if one wants, and enlightenment can be gained either way. The evil monk uses this as a devise to cause a schism in the sangha, a story that explains to early Buddhists both how Buddha accepts arhats as well as how early on there were competing Buddhist schools with various dogmas and interpretations. Just before this final trick that worked, the monk had tried to kill Buddha by releasing a crazed elephant on the path where Buddha was walking, but he sooths the elephant with his unsurpassed compassion mind and strokes its pacified forehead, and the elephant cleans the dust off Buddha’s feet with his trunk, anoints his own head with the dust and wanders off, no longer a crazed but now an enlightened elephant.


The Mahayana Tradition

One of the major differences between the Theravada and Mahayana traditions is that the Theravadins believe that one can possibly become enlightened on one’s own or outside the monastery, but typically it is monks who gain enlightenment and liberation. This meant that lay people as well as nuns were taught that they should work hard to reposition themselves such that they could be born a monk and achieve nirvana in the next rebirth or one soon to come. The Mahayana tradition grew in reaction against this rigid formula. Increasingly, stories and texts were circulated telling of lay people, including old women and young children, becoming enlightened without needing monastic training. In one story, a snake/dragon (naga) princess becomes enlightened upon hearing Buddha’s teachings, but when she goes to have her enlightenment confirmed, the monks do not believe her because she is a woman and argue that it is not possible. To refute them, she transforms into a male in front of their eyes and shoots off to a high heaven realm. Notice that one could read this story in the community as a progressive or a conservative, as if it doesn’t matter or as if you still have to transform into a man first before total liberation. When we read Zen koan stories in two weeks, there are many in which a mountain dwelling sage, or an old woman, or a girl with pigtails shows up a Zen master, who must acknowledge they are beaten by the understanding of an outsider.

Buddha Nature (Buddha Dhatu)

The Mahayana began teaching that, just as all particular beings are in fact one being, all conscious beings have Buddha nature and so it helps to be a monk but anyone can achieve great enlightenment no matter who they are. Just as Jainism and Buddhism had appealed to individuals of all castes by putting enlightenment above caste duties, Mahayana Buddhism flourished and considerably outgrew the Theravada in numbers. The Theravada tradition survived as the official religion of Sri Lanka, the island south of India, and was spread along Indian shipping trade routes of Southeast Asia along with the Ramayana and much Hindu culture. The Mahayana thrived in central India and so it was the Mahayana tradition that spread through East Asia, through Tibet and China and then Korea and Japan.

Bodhisattvas

The final major difference between the Theravada and Mahayana traditions, one of great importance for devotional worship, is the reverence of great saints or bodhisattvas. These are often also understood to be buddhas in their own right. Just as Mahayana increasingly involved lay people, devotional worship came to incorporate the honoring of great saints that could bestow particular blessings or help individuals achieve states of realization. The bodhisattvas are understood to be great individuals who could have been fully released but decided to stay involved in the world for the sake of enlightening and liberating all conscious beings.

Buddhist devotional worshipers pray, chant and give offerings such as burning incense to implore the help of their power. The most important and popular bodhisattva is Avalokitesvara, known as Guan Yin in China, the bodhisattva of compassion. She plays a similar role to the Virgin Mary in Catholicism, a being one can implore for kindness and mercy. Another central bodhisattva is Maitreya, the Buddha who will come at the end of this kalpa or cycle of the cosmos to signal the end of this world and its rebirth. Maitreya is the Buddha to come, the one who will be as great as the Buddha who came at the high noon of this kalpa to teach the true way of things. Another popular bodhisattva is Manjusri, the bodhisattva of wisdom who is often pictured holding the sword of wisdom above his head, ready to cut off attachments and the ignorance attached.

The Perfection of Wisdom (Prajnaparamita) Sutras

The earliest and most popular Mahayana sutra texts are called ‘perfection of wisdom’ sutras. They are short compared to much of the Buddhist texts, and are chanted in devotional worship to Buddha and the bodhisattvas. The two most central are the Diamond Sutra or Diamond Cutter (Vajracchedika) Sutra and the Heart (Hrdaya) Sutra, which I gave you in your readings. Notice that vajra, ‘diamond’, is taken up by the Tibetans to specifically refer to their tradition as Vajrayana or ‘Diamond Vehicle’.

These texts repeat the message that the perfection of wisdom is emptiness and compassion, not for one’s own sake exclusively but for all conscious beings. This is the vow of the bodhisattva, but it is also the aim of the lowest practitioner. Wisdom is, as the Buddha taught according to much earlier Theravada texts, the highest virtue, seeing beyond selfishness and identity such that one cares for the liberation of all beings. In the introduction of a book on the comparison of Psychoanalysis with Zen (a Mahayana school) called The Couch and the Tree, the author recalls a conversation as a therapist with a Zen monk, who says, “My religion can save rocks and trees…Can your religion do that?”.

As the Mahayana draw the focus away from salvation in the monastery to salvation of the community as a whole, the Buddha and bodhisattvas are presented as superior to arhats because they teach others rather than isolate themselves, concerned with their own achievement. Rather than abstain from the world and suffering, the goal is to overcome the world, suffering and attachment by becoming them and thereby surpassing them. As Zen master Joshu says in one koan story we will read, “Buddha is compulsive passions, and compulsive passions are Buddha”. Similar to how the Buddha tried austerities but found it to be an attachment to self loathing in the attempt to get rid of attachment, by seeing one’s own goal of liberation as itself delusion you gain self liberation by giving up on self liberation and helping others.

In the Diamond Sutra, after Buddha goes to collect food and alms in a large city, he is asked about the bodhisattva path at an assembly of monks. He replies that all beings are to be liberated and enlightened, and the merit or good karma generated from this is as invaluable as the sky is immeasurable (which is also, we are told, thus no particular merit at all, which will be important for Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen). The Buddha can see with his ‘buddha eye’, the third eye that opens in the center of the forehead as in Hinduism symbolizing union of the duality of two eyes, that there have been countless buddhas so far and this is the root of countless buddhas in the future. He questions Subhuti, a bodhisattva himself, and Subhuti answers correctly, demonstrating his right understanding, exactly as Chan/Zen monks will do in koan stories we will examine soon. Many of his answers consist of saying that there is a teaching, but there isn’t, there is a galaxy, but there isn’t, there are the thirty two marks that traditionally identify the Buddha, and there aren’t, and many other things that do and do not exist as they are. We will see with Nagarjuna and the Madhyamakas that this becomes foundational for Buddhist logic. Buddha says that the universe is like a Ganges river for every grain of sand in the Ganges river, endlessly complex, yet there is one mind that can be known that contains all of it. In the final lines, he says that even if a bodhisattva were to give innumerable galaxies of precious gems to him as a gift, this would not have the immeasurable merit that a humble woman or man would achieve by sharing the teaching with others.

In the Heart Sutra, the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara, filled with compassion, teaches that all things are empty, including the emptiness and negation of things. How do you like them non-apples?


Buddhist Logic

The Buddhists, who enjoyed debate on the nature of reality, took Gautama’s teachings on logic and in dialogue and debate with Jains developed skeptical arguments against Nyaya atomic truth. Until recently, it was believed that Buddhists took these developments from the Jains who developed them earlier, but today it is understood that Buddhism was forming and developing its doctrines at the same time as Jainism was, so it is not clear whether the Buddhists got the skeptical arguments from Jains or if both Jains and Buddhists get them from earlier Jain-like thinkers who were meditating and practicing disciplines in the Jungle as the Jains do. Like Jains, Buddhists argued that a thing can be in some part but not others, in some place but not everywhere (universal) and at some time but not all times (eternal).

Things are not grounded in singular essences or elements, but in the network of elements and particular things as a whole complex. The Buddhists, like the Vaisheshika and Nyaya, believe that things have causes, however they do not have singular causes but rather instrumental, dominant, significant or efficient causes that catch our focus such that the infinite network of causes is obscured. It is true that particular things cause other particular things, but not in a simple exclusive ‘A to B’ relationship. One can understand and recognize A to B causation while also maintaining awareness of the perpetual complexity of context.

According to the Buddhist tradition of logic, there are three kinds of inference, two positive and one negative. The positive types of inference are identity (If there is fire then there is flame) and perception of effect (if there is smoke then there is fire). The negative type of inference is non-perception (There is no fire if we see no fire). Buddhist logicians, like Jains, often use the same examples the Vaisheshika and Nyaya use, such as ‘If there is smoke on the hill, then there is fire on the hill’ to analyze types of inference and discussing whether or not a particular inference is valid.

Buddhists believe that reason, wisdom and enlightenment can be achieved through study, reflection and meditation. Study is taking knowledge in, reflection is critical reasoning about the knowledge one has taken in, and meditation is practicing stillness and calm. While most Indian schools of thought teach that study and reflection are paths to enlightenment and greater perspective, Buddhists emphasize the necessity of practicing meditation over long periods of time.


Nagarjuna

Nagarjuna (150-250 CE) is the central and most famous logician of Buddhism and, from a non-eurocentric view, one of the greatest logicians in all of human history. He was likely the abbot of a Mahayana monastery where he wrote textbooks for monks on logic, meditation and compassion for all beings. He is considered the founder of the Madhyamaka school of Mahayana Buddhism. Nagarjuna’s work was important for many Chinese and Japanese schools of Buddhism. Tibetan Buddhists, who wrote many commentaries on his work. The Dalai Lama today teaches Nagarjuna to large audiences.

The Madhyamaka or ‘Middling’ school develops in response to other competing Buddhist schools of the time by attempting to get back to the fundamental concept of the middle way, the non-one-endedness that the Buddha found but not enough of in Jain practice. To show that all things are interdependent, Nagarjuna and the Madhyamaka school argues that all things, in so far as they can mean and thus be particular things for us, are mental constructs that can always be opposed by their opposites. In this way, Nagarjuna’s four things or modes are very similar to the Jain dogma of seven perspectives that are simultaneously true of each and every thing.

Nagarjuna attacks positions of other schools and debaters by showing contradictions that undo their position and conception. If a position contradicts itself, it is not self sufficient but dependent on its opposite within its very self. For example, if the ultimate truth is that there is no predominant ultimate truth, the ultimate truth is simultaneously its opposite. To rephrase, if the meaning of life is that we can find all sorts of meaning in life, then the singular meaning of life is, at least to a decent degree, that there is no singular meaning of life. This does not make life devoid of truth or meaning, but rather shows how fruitful truth and meaning can be. As another example, if benefiting the self requires benefiting others, then true self-interest and self-investment is interest and investment in others.

Against Nagarjuna and the Madhyamaka school arose the Yogachara school who argued that the Madhyamakas were nihilists who did not understand the Buddha’s teachings about the essence of all things. If everything is a mental construct, they argued, then what are mental constructs ultimately made out of? They argued that there is mind, which is what mental constructs are made out of, and so their school is known as the ‘Mind Only’ school. One could say this is simply rephrasing the Madhyamaka position that all things are mental constructs, but the Yogachara are arguing that all is Mind, one thing, and this itself is not a mental construct. When mental constructs are cleared away, there is revealed the mind that is in all things. Of course, many would call this nihilism as well.

Many of Nagarjuna’s works attack the Nyaya school as well as competing schools such as the Yogacharans. Like the Jains, Nagarjuna believed that the Nyaya were right about their views but they did not understand that viewpoints and descriptions can complement each other as opposites. While Buddhists believe in classifying types of things in the world and mind, and teach these lists of categories as catechism, they believe in seeing things as temporary, dependent on other things, and lacking self-stability and self-determination. Like the Nyaya and other Buddhist debaters, Nagarjuna typically argues for a proposition supported by both reason and analogy while pointing out fallacies in the argument of his opponents.

In one debate, his opponent argues that if Nagarjuna believes everything is empty, then his words and argument must be empty. Nagarjuna replies that his words are, like all things, relatively empty, but this does not mean they are not relatively true and meaningful at the same time. Nagarjuna’s opponent argues that if Nagarjuna believes that everything can be negated, then so can his argument. Nagarjuna replies that he can negate his own argument, but he can also put it forward at the same time. What will these words I use now mean in five years or 3000 years? If we do not know this makes them quite meaningless to us sitting here today as far as we know, but does this make them quite meaningless here and now?

Buddhists believe in teaching particular things, but acknowledge that sometimes we need to hear a particular truth and be lead in a particular way, and other times we need its opposite. Just like Jains believe, a teacher who knows there are many sides to truth is wiser at teaching particular things as true. If a truth is quite true, this is dependent upon and interactive with the opposite truth being quite false but still in some ways true. Nagarjuna taught that all Buddhist concepts are only valid for actual practice and not abstractly in theory, much like American pragmatism and John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism. Like Wittgenstein in his later thought, Nagarjuna taught that things do not have singular essences, but arise out of the complex whole. He argued this against other Buddhist schools of his time who taught that the essence of the self is non-existence as opposed to existence, that time is the essence of things, anger is the essence of duality, that compassion is the essence of practice, and matter is the essence of form.

Nagarjuna is a firm supporter of pratityasamutpada and Jain anekantavada, non-one-endedness. This is displayed well in his Catuskoti (also called the Tetralemma, both meaning, ‘The Four Things’) show us another modal understanding of viewpoint and description that complements the Jain seven view understanding already discussed. This is best symbolized as a cross or an X that cuts a space into four quadrants of is, is not , is and is not, and neither is nor is not. This last case may be hard to understand at first, but if consider that the absolutist principle and strategy called the ‘principle of non-contradiction’ denies that something can be and not be at the same time. Another different example is that the image of a fire on a television is not hot like a fire, but neither is it cold because it is not hot. Rather, the image of a fire is neither hot nor cold in itself unless one has left the television on for far too long. Another example of this type is an actor playing a villain is not bad because he does evil, but neither is he good because he is not evil as he appears. The actor may be acting well or poorly regardless of what the role requires.

As a final example of the Catuskoti, one that fits well with the previous examples of Nagarjuna’s thought, consider that being, reality, is, is not, is and is not, and neither is nor is not. If there are presences and absences, then being is (as plenty of things), being is not (as plenty of spaces), and so being both is and is not (together) and being neither is nor is not (exclusively, as it is both).