Olive Press Main Page
A Survey of Buddhist Thought
© Alfred Scheepers
No unauthorized multiplication allowed
A Survey of Buddhist Thought, pages 17-22
Introduction
What impells a man to undertake the study of history, and in particular, that of
the history of ideas?
When I was beginning as a student in philosophy, there were two questions
I thought that ought to be answered, one concerning the principle which forms
the foundation of our life and the world or universe that it inhabits, the other
concerning its destiny. Our established religions have had something to say,
especially about the latter. But even if it be true what one or other religion
preaches, the fact remains that as long as we merely believe in some religious
doctrine, we can by that very fact never know whether it is true. And it is just
that what we want. Thus religion, instead of providing us with answers to our
fundamental questions, rather stimulates us to search for them. Otherwise we
would never get to know what we really believe, since all religion cannot escape
being interpreted within the context of a worldview that lacks the knowledge that
may appease our restlessness. So we are caught in a vicious circle.
Modern man has thought that science should fill the gap left open by
religion. Objective knowledge might provide for the sound interpretation of our
religious believes. But, alas, there has been no scientific knowledge in the past
that is not modified by our present insights, and we may hardly expect that our
present insights will not be changed by future investigation. Moreover, science is
not a unity, the humanities and the physical sciences do not seem to stand on a
common ground, and their respective viewpoints of freedom and determinism
appear to be diametrically opposed. If such is the case we might almost give up
hope to find in scientific development, as it is, the ultimate answer to our
questions. Even the methods of both groups of scientific culture have little in
common; the one wants to understand, the other to explain.
As life is one, and cannot at one and the same time partake of two
conflicting universes, it became my conviction that a third way of interpreting
existence should be possible. Instead of the prevailing scientific model, shaped by
geometry and not being able to include the facts of human life, I thought, there
should be searched for a model based on a principle that can account for both,
mental and physical phenomena. I have not been the first in search for this
principle. The gigantic work of Russell and Whitehead, undertaken in their
Principia Mathematica, to reduce mathematics to logical principles, was
prompted by the same need. After partial failure of the endeavour, Russell
relapsed into physicalism, but Whitehead continued in another way. He tried to
find a common denominator of all phenomena, physical, biological and human.
To that end he postulated feeling as the inner essence of whatever can be
presented by outward appearance. In doing so, physical phenomena became
- principally at least - accessible to the hermeneutics of understanding.
History showed that Whitehead's leap into metaphysics, and Russell's
relapse into the mechanistic worldview, came out of unjustified discouragement.
Although the development of quantum-physics issued in ideas which do not
suggest Whitehead to be a complete fool, this branch of science did not force the
desired breakthrough. It led to the discovery of many new facts, but at the same
time it revealed fundamental contradictions within physical science itself,
especially regarding the basic characteristics of its object. Here no unified
interpretation of existence could be established.
In recent times, although scientists are frantically trying to make us believe
the contrary, physical science has come to an impasse. Not being able to decide
questions as to the fundamental characteristics of matter and the origin of the
universe, leading physicists start re-stating the old philosophical problems, e.g.
the question of time, hardly aware of the fact that they have left the domain of
empirical research and have entered the field of the a priori.
The truly dynamic development was to emerge in the field of logic,
resulting in cybernetics or computer science. Finally here was given a model that
could simulate the workings of intelligence without deviating from the laws of
physics. Slowly more and more people get convinced that, maybe, after all, the
impossible - for being a contradiction in terms, viz. an intelligent machine - is
possible.
Now then, let intelligence and mechanics, understanding and explanation,
coincide, what may then be the underlying principle of this unity? This principle
was formulated already centuries ago by a man who kept fascinating me with his
thought since I heard of him. He was the one who paved the way for modern
symbolic logic, and for the computing machine, even for Whitehead's conception
of being as essentially perceptive. His name was Leibniz, and he coined the idea
behind it all: the principle of sufficient reason.
Whence did this principle come? Genius? The hint to search for it in
Buddhism I got from Whitehead. It took a long time of severe mental trouble
before circumstances made me take up that advice. But finally in Buddhism I
rediscovered Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason, now called the principle of
dependent origination (pratitya-samutpada). I am still not sure whether the
appearance of this principle in such different cultures and times is a coincidence.
After all, Leibniz lived after the Portuguese and Dutch seafarers had found their
way to the East. The painter Rembrandt had already copied Indian miniatures,
and Leibniz knew enough of China to admire its culture and thought. I am in the
dark as to the exact nature and extent of his knowledge, but it does not seem
impossible that somehow he picked up from it the principle of sufficient reason.
In short, the statement of the principle by Leibniz may itself be conditioned by it.
In recent years I have been studying the history of Buddhist thought. And I
discovered how much my approach differs from that of the philologists who
dominate this field of study for obvious linguistical reasons. While they are
content establishing the meaning of words and to base on it an account of the
ideas held in those days, this cannot offer me any satisfaction. The philologist
often takes for granted the patent progress of science and technology that
characterizes the Western world, and his interest in the other culture has
something of romance, even of escapism. It also has something of the collector's
mentality; one wants to collect the oddities of the human mind to put them into
the museum of the modern age. In this endeavour philological correctness is the
highest virtue. If our translations do not make sense, so much the better. As long
as they are based on established usage of the meaning of words, this only proves
the advance of our logical thought in comparison to that of other cultures. And
that confirmation of our own ego pleases us to the highest degree. How can you
expect logical consistency in the realm of ignorance? Personally I find little
satisfaction in this approach, bothered as I am by the inconsistencies of the
intellectual frame of our own time and culture and desperately searching a
medicine for the collective schizofrenia that upsets our whole intellectual life. I
stick to the principle that things would not have been said if the people who said
them, would not have had the feeling of expressing a consistency of meaning. It
seems more probable that philosophers deviate from the daily usage of words in
expressing the intricacies of the mind, than that they are talking nonsense. We
should before all pose the question:' What reality did they want to elucidate?'
Here we find more profit in Wittgenstein's idea, that the meaning of words is
derived from their usage, than in the postulate that words are used in accordance
with an established meaning.
For all this, in interpreting the history of Buddhism, I do not content myself
with just rendering so-called objective descriptions, no matter how awkward, but
I try to find a standpoint from which the data seem to fit together into a coherent
whole, even to the point of stretching the `established' meaning of terms. But
then, the history of Buddhism becomes more lucid than ever. We see that there
never have been major differences of opinion, and that the basic ideas of early
Buddhism have developed throughout history until the present time without ever
having been abandoned. They have been elaborated, refined, slightly modified,
and, above all, clothed in ever different terminology. But they always retained
the same inner logic, that of the principle of sufficient reason, a principle that is
now causing a major scientific revolution.
Destiny.
As regards the second question, that concerning the destiny of life, one can only
approach it personally. I was young in the seventies of the 20th century.
Whoever experienced these years in the sensitive age knows there was something
in the air. Young people attacked the prevailing, established, and often
hypocritical morals and rejected a life of 'progress,' industrialization, and
accumulation of wealth. They - for a part at least - returned to the simple values
of love and peace, a life close to nature, and they searched in non-Western
cultures for ideas and techniques that might realize this ideal. But on the whole
there was a strong accent on experience at the expense of knowledge.
Abandoning tradition and possession one tried to regain oneself after having been
banished by one's parents in an alien world which seemed to offer nothing
human.
The new movement was mainly expressed in a music characterized by a
fresh, sometimes naïve non-conformism. Listening to it, remote and slumbering
recesses of the soul were brought to life and opened up a world, free, new,
colourful, nourishing, never heard of before, but yet more intimate than anything
until then familiar. One could - even without irony - believe in happy and
`beautiful people,' as Melanie (Safka) sung.
After those years I never have been able to see anything worthwhile in
gaining a position in the world, procuring a good income, buying a house, or
planning a family. My parents had a caravan on an island bordering the North
Sea. I often stayed there from early spring and walked through the unpolluted
stillness of the dunes. As summer approached, I saw the cars of the tourists
occupying the hitherto deserted roads, damaging the whole scene with their noisy
ugliness. Then it became clear to me that what we call progress is really
destruction. Since then I go along searching to recover early spring, or the
untrodden morning dew, or the beach from which the traces of human
carelessness have been recently washed away by the flood or by heavy rains.
Back to the beginning before all complexity! What do I search for in the
ungrazed meadow, or in the forgotten roadside studded with flowers in the
moment in which it seems forgotten by everyone, forgotten to be spoiled? It is
perhaps what I have come to call the moment of absolute birth, the birth that is
not a development of something else, but that lies at the root of all growth, the
mystery that lies between the mute silence of eternity and the peace of life's
elixer, not yet fermented, but in which the yeast is on the verge of becoming
active. Here we have the inconceivable, yet it is unavoidably there. In it we find
the calm preceding every free and creative act that is able to change our life from
the root. Only standing in this calm we can decipher the meaning of life, which
is always our life.
I think, that to stand in this calm, never more deviating from it, has been
the sole aim of the Buddhist path, nothing more and nothing less. From this calm
one acts without any coercion, one understands without any distortion, one feels
without any depression. One is clearly conscious of the beauty around, as things
are when one is not shaped or conditioned, when one is not part of, and not
incorporated in anything. We should not call it 'autonomy.' For in that there is
still a will commanding and coercing a human frame. In that there is not the
unharmed freedom of this spontaneity. If we are not like this, if we do not stand
in that calm, and act in the love that wells from it, cognize in the wisdom
surrounding it, feel the joy of conciliation, atonement, of home-coming, that
accompanies it, then we are maimed in our humanness, the son of man - with
empty hands, without pretention, without claims, with nothing to call his own,
because he does not have, but lives, is all this - is not yet there. For the more
one has, the more one maintains, the more one is imprisoned, the more
constricted, the less one is - that is, is free.
Thus destiny is a beginning, but a beginning starting from an ever different
whole, from a perpetually changing context.
From origin to destiny.
If you have lost your way in the forest and cannot find your way home, you may
start crying until somebody finds you. If you're lucky some helpful guide takes
care of you, if you're not, you keep on crying, or some robber comes to take
your money and maybe also your life. If you want to depend on yourself, there
are some rules to cope with the situation. Descartes advised to advance always
straight ahead, then sooner or later you emerge out of the wood. From there it is
easy to proceed further safely. But there are other methods: one can climb a hill
or a tree for orientation, or look upon the sky, the sun, moon, and stars, to
choose a safe direction; the type of vegetation may reveal your position, or, if the
soil is soft, you may return on your own footprints. In any way, don't panic, and
don't start running hither and thither or in circles: you will exhaust yourself and
diminish your chance of rescue.
The rules for coming where you want if you don't know the way have been
called laws. The most important of them can be used in any situation. For the
lost soul there have been made some rules of conduct, also called morals, which
in all main religions of the world have been formulated more or less the same: do
not kill, do not lie, do not steal, and, mind your appetites! For those who do not
want to leave anything to chance, different religions have prescribed more
refined rules, which, if practised conscientiously, bring you straight away home.
In Judaïsm and Christianity such a rule is e.g. to have unremitting faith in the
Lord, in Buddhism the proper practise of meditation is prescribed.
Rules are to be followed if you don't know the way, but not necessarily if
you know what you do and why so. This explains the paradox that the same God
of the Jews who forbids the killing of men, is enraged against the one who has
left someone alive. For they who are not lost travellers on the road, but are
fulfilling a divine plan, do not live under the guiding rules but under direct
command. Similarly, the Yogacaras of Buddhism thought it was permissible to
kill one man-slaughtering tyrant to save many lives. As already Machiavelli
remarked: being too absolute in goodness may cause more damage than the
amount of wickedness required in curbing evil. But caution! This insight has too
often been used as an easy excuse for violence. Generally speaking, the one who
lives out of spontaneity, love, and wisdom, does not need fixed guiding rules,
but this does not mean that he usually transgresses them. He only does so in
extremities, if in any other way he would betray himself, if by not transgressing
he would lose his freedom and his stand in the primordial calm.
Thus we have enumerated the few principles of Buddhism: nature of reality,
destiny, and the right path. We shall now see how the Buddhist mind coped with
these throughout its history.
Previous Chapter Top Next Chapter