Uncertain Minds: How the West Misunderstands Buddhism

well it's a great pleasure to be here it's a great honor in fact to be in this very August building curious footnote to the David Beckham story the Beckham's may have a four foot high Golden Buddha in their living room there's a temple in Thailand that has a golden statue of David Beckham now what that is saying about the west or the east or neither or both understanding on this understanding Buddhism I don't know but it's a reality I'd like to open with a very short story concerning a ninth century Chinese Zen monk called young men and he was once asked what is the teaching of the Buddha and his answer was an appropriate statement now I've thought a lot about that and I think it touches on something very crucial one of the things it touches on is the fact that we do need to differentiate between Buddhism remembering the Buddhism this word is a recent Western invention it was first used at the early 19th century there's no equivalent term there's no ism light in any Asian language and on the other hand what Buddhists call Buddhism which is the Dharma or the Dhamma the Dom which doesn't really translate law principle something like that teaching so when you and men is asked what is the highest teaching the Buddha he says an appropriate statement for him the Dhamma is not reducible to a dogma it's not reducible to some tree nor a doctrinal definition this is very much at the heart of the whole Zen movement it broke with the idea that somehow Buddhism could be defined fitted into neat categories philosophies metaphysics ethical systems all of that is part of Buddhism but the Dhamma which underpins it which from which it originates which is in a way it's its living force that cannot be so reductively identified I was recently reading Alistair McIntyre's book after virtue where he speaks of how a living tradition is one that is in a constant ongoing conversation with its past and I feel in my own case I'm not a Buddhist academic I have no credentials in terms of academic degrees or anything like that I'm consider myself someone who is trying to practice the Dharma in other words trying to appropriately embody some of these values and concepts and ideas and texts and meditations and so on in such a way that hopefully I might be able to make an appropriate statement in terms of the situation we find ourselves in today both personally for socially culturally if Buddhism don't like that word is going to make a living response to the world of our times it needs to be able to speak with an authentic voice not merely reciting or repeating classical teachings or beliefs or doctrines from a particular school now one of the things that probably many of you we'll have noticed even on a rather cursory notion of what Buddhism is is that it has an enormous diversity you have Zen Buddhist monks in Japan you have the Dalai Lama in Tibet you have yellow robed tranquil monks walking through Thailand Burma Sri Lanka and so on nowadays also you have Japanese groups who vigorously charge nam-myoho-renge-kyo for all kinds of purposes it's quite baffling in a way to be able to understand well what is it that holds all these different groups of people together what is the unifying principle what what is in common to these things I'm not sure there is in fact a definition that you can provide that would answer that question one of the things I think this shows is the richness of the tradition that has over its two-and-a-half thousand year history found itself in very different conditions other than that of India of the time of the Buddha in China Central Asia South Asia and in each occasion and this process is usually taken maybe two or three hundred years this process of acculturation and the Dharma in reaction and response to the needs of these specific historical places and times has come up with another form which we now call Zen Buddhism Tibetan Buddhism etc that's what I'm going to call Buddhism now I don't think I think it's quite easy to understand the doctrines and the teachings all of those particular schools and many of them I think have developed some of the earlier ideas in in very very revealing ways but I also feel that in this same process that has sometimes been a a tendency to obscure some of the things the historical Buddha said one of the differences that I think modernity brings to this the evolution of the Dharma is that inescapably we see something like Buddhism as an historically contingent phenomenon we think of Japanese Buddhism Li and we would fairly automatically say well this is what happens to the teachings of the Buddha when they went to 14th century Japan this is the the the emergent result of that encounter now what has happened this happens in all religions is that over time these institutional forms these doctrinal beliefs very easily become rather rigid become rather non-negotiable so in Buddhism too we have heretics we have the faithful all of the things that you would expect to find and say Christianity if I think of Buddhism as a living tradition however whatever I might find a value in any of these schools will I think only ever be a partial response to the question of my own life now our own lives in modernity today so in other words modernity Buddhism in modernity is confronted with an historical awareness of itself Buddhism is contingent now this shouldn't be surprising given some of the basic ideas that have always informed the Buddhists and are just named three impermanent dukkha unsatisfactory imperfect was Don Cupid as recently as called it bitter bittersweet and contingent empty not existing in and of itself in its own right and I think what we what I found very helpful is to start think of Buddhism in terms of the core ideas that the Buddha himself taught Buddhism too is impermanent Buddhism is imperfect Buddhism is contingent empty there is no essential Dharma or teaching that we're talking about something that is living like an organism in a sense that is constantly in process and influx it's constantly interacting with new environments and situations it's constantly being asked questions for which tradition may not have a ready-made answer at all so as a practice I feel that what I'm trying to do is to give voice to a sense of Buddhism of the Dharma but in a way that speaks to our condition here today and this is risky I might be getting it wrong but I feel for my own practice to be authentic if I don't do that I'm somehow copping out thank you [Music] okay well much of what I have to say won't be a repetition of what Stephen has said but in some senses I hope adding two to it let's start off with a very fundamental thing you know how the West is misunderstood Buddhism well here's a couple of quotes to give you a way that the West is not misunderstood Buddhism in 1889 somebody called Moni ammonia Williams who was a great Sanskrit scholar I mean he was a high court judge as well wrote this which book shall we cast our hearts in our last hour the book that tells us of the dead the extinct of the death giving Buddha or the book that reveals to us the living in the eternal the life-giving Christ he also says just a few paragraphs later this is the most unmitigated system of pessimism the world has ever seen yeah I think that says it all really I mean this is how the West has misunderstood Buddhism in its early times and one of the things that we must never forget and I think Stephen pointed assassin the contingency is when the when Buddhism started to be adopted and studied in the Western world they got an awful lot wrong partly because they were seeing through the worldview of Christianity now one can't fault the early translators and the early scholars because they came from Christian backgrounds there is you know there's no doubt about that but unfortunately what we've got into a system of now is repeating all of their mistakes and the mistakes are often to do and I'm not going to go into details about this because it takes me into a long kind of digression a lot of the mistakes are in translation in the actual translation of Pali and Sanskrit terms the basic lexicon of all of Buddhist terminology this leads us into a position of thinking of Buddhism as very much a religion we talk about monks we talk about monasteries we talk about enlightenment it has a wonderful word we talk about meditation there are many many other words I could refer to there's this untranslatable word that Steven referred to do ker totally untranslatable but a repeating it as suffering unfortunately of course this is what mone Williams is referring to when he talks about it they're the most unmitigated pessimism because there is suffering and then there is extinction as far as he is concerned nothing else so Buddhists aim of extinction from this early 19th century point of view you know the point of view of Moneo Williams so we keep on repeating the same problems that the early translators gave us and unfortunately and this is one of my big criticisms of a lot of popular works on Buddhism and continues to repeat this misunderstanding is we literally keep on repeating the same terms again and again and again without any attempt to rethink what's actually going on now part of my work we're on some of the work I've been only gather Stephens doing exactly the same is going back to the original texts and seeing what happens when you look at the original texts and what is there within the original texts if you look at them with the anjaan Desai by pushing or bracketing out at least the traditions that we have now this has led me into a one-stage quite recently actually in being called a Buddhist fundamentalist as I go back to the early texts and most of likely my ordinary Dharma teaching and my own practice is driven by this going back to the early texts and seeing what is going on because not only I think this is what Steven was alluding to not only has the West most understood Buddhism but in a way the further and further we get in this high historically contingent tradition away from the time of the Buddha the more and more misunderstandings creep in and so Buddhism actually this for peculiar work Buddhism also is a misunderstanding often of what the Buddha is saying in these early tanks so it's a very interesting phenomena when we start to look at these early texts well the one thing we find I think is a Buddha perhaps and I again when I admit to this might be getting it wrong we see a Buddha perhaps who's much closer to the 20th century mind and for very good reasons which I'll point out in second the second is I didn't mind the accusation of being called a Buddhist fundamentalist because interestingly in Buddhism the more you go back to the ordinary text the early tanks the further you get away from religion yeah this is what happens when you look because the Buddha this again is my own personal view of looking at these tags was not interested in founding anything anyway could be understood as a religion in many senses he is and I think Steven alluded to this his anti absolutism of any forms so for example one of the chief aspects that tends to forget forgotten in the practice of Buddhism in the West is its ethics and what we have in Buddhist ethics is a non absolutist ethics it's a non prescriptive ethics it's an ethic so it's actually very close to something MacIntyre you referred to in Stevens introduction refers to it as virtue ethics this is what we find in Buddhism which is much much closer to Aristotle and it's totally ante prescriptions so we move away from absolute isms we move into a much more catalyzer engaged aspect of life and this seems to me what the Buddha was trying to say and how we've misunderstood it if we misunderstand the Dharma as doctrine is we get into understanding it simply as a set of rules and prescriptions and belief systems now it seems to me and again I'm going to be slightly controversial about this that one of the things that's often cited by many Buddhists in the West is something which the Buddha says in the column esata and also in another text which I can never find a reference to which it's Benton's in particular site which is saying that everything should be questioned everything should be examined nothing should be taken off the authoritative be taken on belief and it seems to me what happens with that there is a lot of lip service paid to that and not a lot of actual investigation not a lot of actual inquiry into deeply deeply held belief systems and so I think what we end up with in the West more often than not is another religion particularly as as I said all of the early translations give us the picture of a religious system and this gets repeated in terms of something that looks much much more like a traditional religion with belief systems firmly in place rather than the challenging of forms of absolutism and belief which i think is far more in line with the Western world particularly in the 21st century so I think the Buddha's actual stance from looking at the early sexism anti religious stance his intensely engaged with his own culture is intensely critical of his own culture he utilizes everything within it in some way to undermine it to undermine the traditionally held belief systems that were going on at his own time it seems to me if we're in the gate if we're in the position of people on repeating religious traditions we're actually not engaged fundamentally with something the Buddhist centers out which is far more of a strategy than a set of dogmas he gives us a strategy for enquiring into every facet of life meditation there's a very interesting word which seems to be one of the things which particularly is associated with with Buddhism in the West the thing I usually surprise a lot of people with in particularly actually when I'm teaching Dharma courses is there is no such word for meditation in the lexicon of Buddhism Buddhist do not meditate they cultivate they grow things there's a wonderful hot set of horticultural metaphors that are used they're engaged and actually bringing something into being they're not engaged in something which i think is very much more within the tradition of Christianity of taking scripture contemplating it and using it as something edifying to reflect on now that might go in certain dimensions of Buddhism but it's certainly again when we start to look at the early text is not what is happening in the early texts so even the word meditation which seems to be very very much almost a prerogative of Buddhism in the sense that it seems to encompass everything so much so that Buddhism can be reduced in many occasions in the Western world to simply a system of meditation the personal practices Zen practices tantric practices so actually your Buddhism is your style of your meditation not actually the full correct engagement which traditionally again looking back at the early text is a three-fold strategy of engagement with dimensions of life such as your moral ethical basis for being in the world your study your contemplation your reflection on and your investigation deep investigation of the teachings themselves not in this dogmatic authoritarian way but something that is worth inquiring into and finally of course this system of actually beginning to cultivate in your own experience something you find worthwhile coming out of the other two strategies and so good as himself when it's reduced and I think is one of the big misunderstandings in Buddhism in the West when it's reduced simply to a set of dogmas a set of practices it loses something which is essentially there in the early tanks and so I'm quite happy to be a Buddhist fundamentalist if it means going back to those early texts and rediscovering actually something which is very very exciting and non-dogmatic [Applause] there are many many different aspects of this sorry if you can't hear me but there are many just different aspects of this which I could pick up on one of our earlier speakers was Karen Armstrong and in her book the case of God she has a very very interesting very interesting paragraphs where she talks about the etymology of dogma and doctrine and so everything that you're saying for example John about dogma and doctrine there are Christians who would say the same thing that the terms have been corrupted that we no longer understand really what doctoring really means and perhaps Giles at some point could could raise that as an issue but right now what I want to pick up on is in fact Alistair McIntyre scoped that Stephen very helpfully brought into the conversation which is a living tradition is in constant ongoing conversation with its past and I suspect many people are very very different religious persuasions philosophical persuasions indeed would absolutely agree that what both of you seem to doing is ripping up 2,000 years of that tradition to say I don't want the last 2,000 to a half thousand years I only want the Buddha so that's a curious interpretation of back entire statement well that's not quite how I would see what I'm doing frankly I am as with John particularly intrigued fascinated and moved by these early parley texts but I'm also aware that my interest in them is also framed by my training as a Tibetan Buddhist monk in dialectics and philosophy without which I wouldn't have many of the basic conceptual tools to do that kind of inquiry I think what going back to sources is helping me to do is to be able to differentiate what developments within later Buddhism somehow our r+ amplifications of those earlier principles and what aspects in Buddhism are often a slippage back into the kind of dogmatism religiosity that John mentioned so I see my engagement with these early texts as a conversation with the past but informed by my own you know rather long-standing engagement with say say Zen see I started with Zen that's not early text but I think Zen captures something about the living breath of the Dharma that other traditions don't seem to do it in do it quite so well and likewise I'm also reading these early texts with the eyes of a 21st century a post-christian in my case secular critical historically aware fashion so I don't I I see the value of going back to the early texts as a process of uncovering foundations and to that extent I might be a fundamentalist but I'm not a fundamentalist in the sense that I want to get rid of 2,000 years of history I can be happy of it because I think coming up to what you're asking Stephen as well I think it's part of an ongoing conversation the when we look at the early tax it's not in isolation it's not isolation from the history of Buddhism it's in engagement so for example you can take very important issues that you find in the British tradition such as the issue of Karma for example which some traditions have very strong opinions very strong dogmas about now looking back at the early texts helps you to engage in I think a corrective conversation with what comes later now this is not to dismiss what comes later is actually to say well sometimes when we look back at the early tags there is actually a very fundamental fruits between what has happened now there's a socio-historical reason I think Steven referred to this in his little talk there's a socio-historical reason first heart why these things have happened and why these interpretations have occurred in the way that they have in the history of Buddhism in the early tradition it was partly because of slippage back into the religious religiosity of the Buddha's time now he was a radical a lot of his followers were not as radical as he was however I don't think we can dismiss the conversation we need to engage even if we're doing work on the early tanks even trying to approach our teaching from away from that perspective we need to engage with that history of Buddhism because there going to be a lot of people sitting out there in your constituency who are actually engaged in those forms now this is another way of looking at it this is a corrective way of looking at it I don't say it's the true way that's against going into the absolutism but it offers very interesting perspectives when you start to engage in that work well you just what and then not one other thing in my studies and I'm sharing John's as well of these early texts is that by going back to these early sources we can begin to get a clearer picture of the kind of world in which the Buddha lived particularly the world of ideas of beliefs of spiritual practices and so on and we can begin to see that much of what's even in the earliest text is actually simply put an articulation of a commonly held worldview of the fifth century BC India so I would argue that for example all of the stuff about karma rebirth this is really just how people more or less generally saw the world at that time so this analysis is one in which we're also teasing apart what is just Indian thinking or for 5th century BC albeit in the buddha's mouth and what is the Buddhist saying that is actually not derivative from that understanding of the world and the person and their I think we're even able to sharpen further what it is that is so distinctive and why it is that that person's ideas have managed to be a topic for a talk this evening which is a bit remarkable really so it's not just about saying anything in the Pali Canon is the truth and forget the rest not no not at all yeah a lot of that I think the yeah I think one of the things I think Buddhism we have to notice the Buddhism is in some respects way behind developments in say christian theologist that starting from say Schleiermacher and then the other theologians through the 19th century right up to today we have a very intelligent critical response to modernity a self-critical awareness of one's own tradition buddhism basically lived until that saved the middle of the 20th century in effectively pre-modern even medieval worlds and it is suddenly become catapulted into modernity there's no transition and I think this has given rise to a huge amount of confusion it's very difficult if let's say you're a young Tibetan monk coming from India may be very learning in your tradition but with no exposure to really much of what others in the wider world would be concerned with so Buddhism in a sense has a lot of catching up to do and I own own writings from the very earliest times I've been very influenced by the work of particularly Protestant theology and I found the tools that have been used can be applied very effectively into the analysis of the sort of text that we're talking about I think up until the present moment there's been very very little purse only within Buddhist traditions of the social historical positioning of the Buddha whatsoever I mean it's almost and I used to get this years ago and looking at popular books on Buddhism almost as if Buddhism arose out of a vacuum there it was it suddenly appeared and now the Buddha was in as I said in the talk was in a total response to his society and I think that beginning to possess the Buddha in his own time I allowed the way you were talking about the Christian tradition did it with Christ I think adds to our understanding adds to what have actually come about in the centuries of the development it's a long long development a very multicultural development you know it's about in Buddhism being right at the tail really of the development of this with all these other traditions of developing in in between a lot of them have lost that sense of that social historical routing and I would just say so much so that sometimes you find the jokes which are placed in the Pali Canon being taken literally and there's a very classic example of this there's a suitor in the Pali Canon which is a suitor where the Buddha is making fun of a Hindu scripture about creation a lot of traditions will take this literally yeah that this is how creation came about it's the joke that he's making and I think unless we begin to do that social historical work on the original Canon placing it very much within his own context we lose something I think as 21st century thinking Westerners who are taking on board a tradition which is in a sense an alien import into Western culture and also simply adopting ideas which are being driven by cultures which because of their far remove often from that early beginnings of Buddhism have lost touch with the actual context because they had never actually news in the first place you okay well again it's very interesting let's try stand-up from PS now it's very interesting when you look at Buddhist ethics because Buddhist ethics appears certainly if you look at say the ethics for laypeople that appears to have something which is prescriptive yet without getting into the details every part of it and I'll just give you one I undertake a rule of training to refrain from harming living beings that's the first ethical stance of that now rather than a vow shout or thou shalt not hear you know thou shalt not in this case what we have is something which is a tool for investigating situations of harm that the individual can find themselves in now obviously implies don't kill and I see it same again so often listed just simply as don't kill as an ethical statement I think that loses something of the force of what the Buddha is trying to do and when I think about virtue ethics particularly in the Aristotelian so it's not so much a magnet McIntire sense but in the Aristotelian sense I think it's an inquiry into the good what makes us good how does that differing sense of good arise in independent situations differing situations so when I say it's non-prescriptive there is no one rule apart from I think a default option that you might take which is if you can't see your way clear to investigating this then you simply fall back onto a position of non harm I think what the Buddha is trying to get you to do in the way he states the ethical position is investigate every individual situation you find yourself in because that is going to be different even if prima facie appears to be the same so I think the ethical seeming prescriptions in Buddhism are not there what I generally fir to is kind of can openers to help you to open up your ethical life thank you I'm supposed to take a risk and say in 25 words or less what Buddhism is that of course is a very arrogant presumption on one level but what I have concluded tentatively in recent years is to identify four points that the Buddha taught that cannot be derived from the socio historical context of his time in other words that are distinctively and I think fairly non-controversial II his own ideas the first of these is the principle of contingency or conditioned arising or dependent origination one of the most authoritative accounts of the Buddha's awakening is his awakening to Pat each asana pada the processional contingent fluid unfolding interconnected nature of life second principle is the practice of what are called for ennobling truths which I prefer to see as injunctions rather than descriptions in other words to fully embrace the suffering of oneself in the world to let go of grasping and craving which so often in in a sense prevent us from that honest embrace of reality and reduce everything to my own personal desires and fears thirdly to actually try to find a space within one's own experience whereby one is no longer prompted or driven by fear attachment hatred jealousy pride and fourthly of the Four Noble Truths to embark on a way of life or as John referred to also to bring into being or a way in which your humanity can flourish in all of its aspects from the way we see things think about them speak act work apply ourselves pay attention and focus our minds the third point that I think is distinctive is the Buddhist emphasis on the cultivation of mindfulness mindful awareness regarding the specific specific experience again we often find in some later forms of Buddhism that meditation let's use this word meditation is basically introspective it's about looking into the very core of your own mind or whatever whereas the practice of mindfulness which I think is the Buddhist meditation par excellence is actually going in the opposite direction you start by paying attention to your breath to your body your feelings your mental states your responses and then literally whatever is going on in the totality of what's happening right now that's the aim of this kind of meditation it is to be fully present to what is taking place right now and the fourth point I would regard as distinctive is the Buddhist emphasis on self reliance on becoming autonomous the Buddha against a phrase you find in the early text quite a lot the person who has entered into the path has become independent of others in the Buddha's teaching and yet today so often we find this emphasis on finding a teacher becoming devoted to the teacher some house almost surrendering your autonomy in order to as in the Tibetan schools would say to receive the blessings of the larmor the Guru which to me is totally alien to the originality of what the Buddha first presented so one contingency to Four Noble Truths three mindfulness four or autonomy self around self-reliance that in a nutshell is how I'd understand it [Applause] you me it's a loaded question it's a trick question yes let's say that I aspire to live my life from a perspective that would be an imitate Co Buddha imitation of Christ imitation but I try to for me the Buddha is not just a goal that I might have arrived at at some point in some future it's a possibility that is open in all of us right now in every situation we are free either to be Buddha like in our response or to be Mara demonic like in our response yeah I think I think that's it's an interesting question I think although I agree with Stephen it's a trick question in many senses I think we think of Buddha as being a finality and it isn't it's something which is moments of awakening now the word Buddha is actually derived from the word Bodhi which means to be awakened so any moments of clarity inside awakening that you have in the sense in that moment you are a Buddha but it doesn't mean that you're fixed yeah because again it's contingent it's arising and passing away in other situations arise which perhaps don't provoke that response when you're not a Buddha so I don't think of it as a finality and I think this could be a big mistake interestingly in the poly Tech's you often find a Buddha going back and meditating well if it's a Buddha fixed and final forever I can't quite understand that yeah there's something peculiar about that I think it's because it's an ongoing process it's not something which is fixed and final it's something which I think I think Steven very eloquently put and said we're aspire to and in moments of great clarity and insight perhaps we get there [Laughter] I'll do the contingency won't even do the right view whichever one you want contingent if they remind me of the exactly was the question contingency it was about whether the total experience of interdependence etcetera also includes the consciousness in this moment yes I mean basically when talking about everything being contingent everything is contingent now consciousness is a very loaded word in Buddhism particularly in the early text and I'm thinking here of the the Pali Canon in general where for example is not one consciousness it's moments of consciousness which are occurring every second yeah I'm just using a second here as a kind of indicator it's occurring every second and now differently they're differently flavored so nothing there is no consciousness which is independent consciousness itself is a contingent arising based on the fluctuation of phenomena so there'll be consciousness associated with thought consciousness associated with our five senses and our sense perceptions and this is a view that Western philosophy came to at the end of the 19th century with Franz brentano talking about the bachelor basically the contingent nature of consciousness thing the notion that consciousness always has an object as a consciousness isn't some kind of background phenomena into which you project the phenomena of existence but is actually an independent arising which arises in every moment in our life is of a world which is also a conscious world but that consciousness is not one thing it's changing every moment it gets into great complexity and the Pali Canon it gets into the complexity of saying there is not just one form of consciousness there's 89 different forms of consciousness or 21 if you want to take into account meditative States as well you know again a different but so consciousness is implicated in the whole notion of contingency it's not something which is separate from it yeah and there's a very interesting text in the party cannon called the Subba suitor the discourse on everything and the Buddha says I will teach you everything and what is everything it's the eye and what we see the ear and what we hear the tongue and what we taste the nose and what we smell the body and what we feel the mind and what we think that's it there's nothing outside of that and all of that is contingent consciousness emerges out of the interaction between a visual object and an under and the eye organ and it's always in process and change going on to right view the the the notion of right view when you look at it in the early texts the Buddha defines it in many many many different ways there's no such thing as the right view just a couple that off the top of my head that spring to mind he sometimes says that just the understanding the Four Noble Truths is some Aditi right view at another time he says right view is not to believe in being or non being but to experience the world through a middle course it's more subtle perhaps it's touching on the idea of Shunyata emptiness it's what the verse that Nagarjuna uses is the source of his philosophy and so Mitch Aditi a so-called wrong view in fact the Tibetan is cheer it's a lot lot lock bid hour which means like like back to front view I don't like the word right that's wrong to the word summer means something which translators it goes right very good example of what John said at the very beginning we're stuck with this word right view the word summer means something like complete or whole not right which gives an inevitable moralistic tone to it and the opposite they're very translators wrong mature I would think of as sort of confused convoluted back-to-front getting it wrong in that sense so if we think of and you know he never redefines wrong view he tells you what viewing a rather than view I'd rather say vision perspective an integral perspective on life is one that would engage with these four truths and one a life that somehow avoids that confrontation with existence in that way is somehow missing the point is somehow failing to realize what a human life could be can I just just add one thing today because I think but what do I agree with Stevens translations of this word some because some marks in Pali as well can be inappropriate it's what a probe what is appropriate and I think this goes into the absolute anti absolutist stance I was talking about the Buddha having earlier on there is what's appropriate and so Mitchell is inappropriate what is inappropriate in our understanding because ditty can be understanding as well and so when we're talking about this is we're having to think is what is the appropriate understanding to have at this moment now that could be ethical it could be any number of the issues of the Buddha give you know talks about but it's it's moving it's not static it's not again not it's not a doctrine or a dogmatic about what is right and what is wrong it is it appropriate to this situation or is it inappropriate does it lead to the lessening of dukkha or does it give rise to the increase in ducking in experience you I'll pick Brian's the the there is this you know debate culture war between the New Atheists and the fundamentalist believers in one religion or another and it is totally polarized people and one of the reasons that I wrote the book I've just published confessional Buddhist atheist is to present a Buddhist approach as being hardly surprisingly a middle way between these two extremes it's felt that if you're an atheist you can't pass up possibly consider yourself to have any religious feelings at all and if you're a religious person you obviously have to believe in something like God Buddhism manages to avoid both of those it's a tradition that I think taps into the deepest ultimate questions of human life you know you know what does it mean to be a human being the Buddha only refused to answer questions that he considered to be a level of metaphysical abstraction that we could keep on asking until the cows come home and we still won't get the answers in fact it's very prescient that the questions the Buddha refused to answer are by and large not answered now is the mind and the body the same or different we call it today the mind-body problem does doesn't exist after death or not jury's still out etc now what's curious is that it's not only other religions that have been taken a great interest in some of these questions many forms of Buddhism have - I would suggest that most traditional forms of Buddhism have actually opted for an answer to most of those questions so I think you can see a very good example here of what starts out as I would consider to be a pragmatic therapeutic way of life rapidly shifts into another kind of dogmatic belief system which i think is what has happened now can I just add something to that because having again going back to the early texts is a very interesting phenomena because what you get there is the Buddha teaching nothing that isn't practical the own things is really interested in is the way people live and how that can influence them so the kinds of questions the other arcattack Westen's these unanswered questions is he's just refusing to go there he's just refusing even to enter into the grounds of debate about any of these questions simply because they don't deal with the practical issues of life and I think if we keep that in mind that that's what's going on in the very earliest art of Buddhism I agree with Stephen later on all the traditions try to answer those questions because they become philosophical you know when human being a human being seems to be very philosophical animals they seem to do it at the drop of a hat and the Buddhism is no exception it starts to develop a long historical for the Safa core tradition and with different answers coming up in each of the different tradition so there's no kind of one consensus about this in any particular tradition now what is so interesting about the buddha's early stance is he refuses to go there at all on those questions and just leaves us with the practical issues of life and i think that almost feeds were quite well into the first question because the buddha really is saying that it's the practical issues of life it's the contingency it's the Ducker the suffering we've kind of stuck with that unfortunate translation that every individual has to deal with it there is no utopia there is no utopia again I think in the later traditions that gets misunderstood Nirvana becomes like a Buddhist heaven which it isn't just an it's Ordinary sense Nirvana is a way of being it's it's actually a verbal form in in Pali and Sanskrit which indicates a way of being in this world is the Sun doesn't indicate a utopian place to which we're going to aspire or get there so nirvana is replete with dukkha what has changed is the individual's ability to deal with it that is what has changed there's no sense of absolution perhaps the way perhaps your meaning in a more Christian sense there's no way of resolving it the Buddha is trying to push people back into dealing with their life on a day-to-day unfolding basis which is a mixture as often the texts say of hope joy sadness grief you know it's a mixture of these things which come on a day-to-day basis and actually the big thing which hasn't been mentioned at all this evening so far the big thing that the Buddha really speaks about is not absolution but equanimity having equanimity with the way that life unfolds yeah neither to cling on to the good stuff that happens or to be rapidly trying to run away as quickly as possible from the bad stuff that is happening to you and I think that's what the Buddha gives us instead of absolution he gives us equanimity as a possible goal now I think there's much more nuanced thing to really understand that but I think that's kind of a basic way of trying to approach it well first of all I think we have to question what we mean by these terms pragmatism and I would use that in the sense coin by William James and others onward is really another way of considering what we mean by truth what is true for a pragmatist is what works not what somehow corresponds to a state of affairs somehow in reality somewhere now in that sense I think I'm some suci is is pragmatic when I use the word therapeutic I'm not using it in the sense psychotherapeutic although that is tends to be how we use the word today now but again in the more ancient Greek use of really just a cure a healing of the the conflicts and the strife and the bewilderment and the pain that we as human beings experience not the fact that I feel anxious because my father did something to me as a child and we have to remember that another strong parallel I find with particularly the early Buddhist texts that John's referring to again with the Greek schools of the Hellenic schools of Epicurus the Stoics even Aristotle - is the idea that philosophy r.a philosophy the love of wisdom is of no use at all if it does not cure us of something the way the word philosophies use nowadays is largely as a sort of in an academic discipline but for the Greeks and I think the Buddha - the Buddhist explicitly presented himself as a doctor he saw his teaching as a medication he saw his community as people who helped you get better and in that sense it's therapeutic but we're dealing with the therapy that is applied to the totality of our of our existence our existential angst our anxiety our alienation how do we find a way to somehow resolve or come to terms with the condition of being human and in that sense therapeutic my child abuse exception what do you think well I think there's a part I think there's a paradox here because undoubtedly I agree with Stephen here that Buddhism is therapeutic kids yeah I often make the point to students of mine that the Buddha is the first psychologist if you actually look at what's going on in the world at the same time as the Buddha even what the Greeks are doing it's completely different from what the Buddha is doing and if you look at the Indian context it's even more different what's going on there they're engaged in no big metaphysical questions actually what was asked about earlier on however to reduce Buddhism merely to a therapy in the Western sense of the word therapy I think is a big mistake that it can have therapeutic usage I think is undoubtedly the case I'm involved in this myself in Oxford in the use of what's called mindfulness based cognitive therapy which is actually the use of mindfulness which you heard Stephan talked about earlier on in roles of particularly mental health problems and in particular and in specifically in depression here so undoubtedly has its usages here now I think what tends to get missed out in all of this is again this massive component which I mentioned earlier on which is ethics this is the big area that gets missed out because I think therapists in the audience I'm sure they probably are the first thing they're appease doesn't generally tell they tell their clients to do is actually clean up their ethical act whereas the Buddha is actually saying it's a strategy which the meditation the mindfulness is one dimension event and the ethics is another extremely important dimension and in fact some early texts will say the meditation is know is of no use whatsoever if you don't actually look at the ethical basis in what you're doing of what you're doing so I don't even think it's therapy in this narrow sense we have in the Western looking at your past seeing how things came have come about kind of Freudian psychodynamic ways of looking at things that isn't there in Buddhism at all it's not there within the of therapy it's a therapy to deal with dissatisfaction across the board yeah and I think it's there's one possible translation of this tone du coeur is total sense of dissatisfaction that human beings have in this world now part of that dissatisfaction is not getting what you want yeah also getting what you want as part of this satisfaction as well and so in looking at that many many different ways we really don't have time to go into it tonight but I think the ethical component is the the bit I think that makes Buddhism different from being a mere therapy in this Western [Laughter] [Applause]

Channel: St Paul's Cathedral

Views: 234,467

Keywords: St Paul's Cathedral, st pauls cathedral, London, The Guardian, uncertain minds, agnostic, buddhism, lecture, discussion, interfaith

Id: hXYBtT4uN30

Length: 59min 13sec (3553 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 22 2011