The existential nature of Buddhist ultimates
By Winston L. King
Philosophy East and West
Volume 33, no.3
(July,
1983)
P.263-271
(C) by the University of Hawaii Press
P.263
According to the Paali Canon (Majjhima Nikaaya,
Sutta 63) Maalu^nkyaaputta, a disciple of Gotama
Buddha once complained to him that he had never in
his teaching given answers to questions concerning
the finitude or infinitude of the space-time world,
or the relation of soul to body, or the nature of
the state of the enlightened arhat after death. To
this the Buddha replied that were all such questions
to be answered before a man began his spiritual
quest, it would be like answering all the questions
a wounded man might put about the nature of the
arrow which had wounded him, of the bow that
propelled it, of the characteristics of the man who
had shot it, etc., before the man was treated. By
the time all the answers were given the man would be
dead.
The Buddha then defined his teaching as
eschewing answers to philosophical questions and
dealing only with the existential fact that "there
is birth...ageing... dying... grief, sorrow,
suffering, lamentation, and despair" and their
"suppression... here and now." These matters he does
explain, and only these, "because it is connected
with the goal, is fundamental to Brahma-faring, and
conduces to turning away from, to dispassion,
stopping, calming, superknowledge, awakening and
nibbaana."(1)
In other words, theorizing about ontological
metaphysical ultimates has absolutely no place in
the Buddhist Dharma. What remains in this "original"
or core Buddhism, is the pure existentialism of
dispassionate detachment from the space-time world
which results in nibbaana--which is elsewhere
defined simply as the absence of greed, hatred, and
delusion.
But suppose now that we advance some 1500 years
in the history of the development of Buddhist
thought. What do we find? On the semi-popular level
of the Mahaayaana tradition there have been the
eternalization, absolutization, and trinitization of
the Buddha, the creation of supernal Buddha-lands
without number, and a variety of ornate ritual
patterns. There have also been technical
philosophical developments. One theory speaks of
some seventy-five dharmas, or constituent elements,
which are strung together in causal chains by the
dynamism of dependent origination and compose all
perceptible entities, including the so-called self.
There are explanations of perception as the
non-conceptual awareness of the point-instants of
the occurrence of a fluxing physical world, or
contrastingly as only subjective apperception of
what has already ceased to be. In place of the
not-self some Buddhist thinkers propound a
storehouse consciousness (aalayavij~naana) that
contains all the karmic results from one's
immemorial past. Then there are those that maintain
that "consciousness alone" exists; others that the
universe is the mutually interpenetrative presence
of everything in everything else. And there is still
another important school of thought maintaining that
even those once hallowed Buddhist entities of cause/
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effect, sa^msaara/nirvaa.na and numbers of others
are empty of meaning and reality, that emptiness
(`suunyataa) alone remains,
What has happened to that beautifully simple
existential/experiential dharma of the Paali Canon?
Has this developed Buddhism totally forgotten the
explicit mandate of its founder? One thing should be
noted at once: that simple, original, core Buddhism
was not as simple as it literally seems to be.
Underlying its simplistic prescription for achieving
passionless detachment are many taken-for-granteds,
inherited from its parent Brahmanism.
Beginningless-endless rebirth governed by the
moralistic cause-effect of karman, an existence
whose hallmarks are impermanence, emptiness of
reality, and suffering, and the possibility of an
absolutely full and final release from all this
(mok.sa-nibbaana) are assumed without question--as
well as many other views of ontological/
metaphysical implication. Indeed the existentialist
prescription of the Four Noble Truths as the remedy
for the human predicament, which we find in the
canon, could not be presented with its scriptural
intensity and relevance lacking these
presuppositions. Yet, notwithstanding these
qualifications, it must never be forgotten that the
basic, original emphasis in early Buddhism was
existential rather than ontological/metaphysical;
the first emphasis was explicit and primary, the
second implicit and secondary.
Again it must be recalled that in the ensuing
centuries Buddhism was forced by the very factors
which impelled Maalu^nkyaaputta to ask his
questions, to make its implicit assumptions
explicit, though perhaps somewhat reluctantly. That
is, as a new and different faith and practice,
Buddhism found itself competing against many other
religious traditions in India with developing or
already well-developed philosophies which did give
answers to Maalu^nkyaaputta's questions. Correlate
with this was the universal tendency in the
historical development of a religious faith to
elaborate its original simplistic beginnings,
dependent largely upon the charisma of the
founder-figure, into a full-fledged system of
doctrine and practice. Hence Buddhism could not
possibly have escaped the destiny of philosophical
development forced upon it by its Indian heritage
and further complicated by its later career in China
and Japan.
If it be granted that such in fact was the case,
we then need to ask two questions. The first is: has
Buddhism been forced to forsake totally its classic
existentialist/experiential heritage for ontology
and metaphysics? (By "ontology" I mean questions
about being, particularly about human being--what is
man and what is he capable of becoming? By
"metaphysical" I refer to a world-view of sense of
ultimate structure and reality underlying
experience--what is the real nature of the "world?"
and what is its destiny?) And the answer to this is
a qualified no. To quote from a modern Shinshuu
Buddhist source: "Buddhist thought, including its
complex doctrinal systems, is a conceptual
superstructure built in reflection on experiential
realization."(2) Of course all religious
"experiential realization'' has always as its
context, and partly as its cause, at least an
implicit ontology and metaphysics. But it is worth
noting that a
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developed system of Buddhist thought, some fifteen
hundred years after Gotama Buddha and in a tradition
(Mahaayaana) which has strongly modified the Paali
Canon system of belief and practice, it is still
maintained that the experiential is primary and the
theoretical secondary. Examples of this could be
multiplied many times over.
The second question is this: how then are we to
regard some of the words developed Buddhism uses
about its ultimates-ultimates of some sort or other?
Are they ontological/metaphysical in fact or only
disguised forms of the existential/experiential? Or
are they both at the same time? In general it seems
to me that the case is something like this: the
basic Buddhist point of view--with perhaps the
exception of a school of thought here and there
during Buddhist history--is that there is some sort
of ultimate reality beyond our merely subjective
thoughts and sensations that occasions them: but
that in our thoughts, our terms and names for these
realities, and our philosophical systems we do not
deal with ultimate entities at their deepest levels
of reality and meaning.(3) Like the "chariot" in
Nagaasena's discourse metaphysical terms are only
"generally understood terms, designations in common
use" which are convenient for rough and ready
indication. The ultimates, whatever they are, are
more fully open to direct experience than to
conceptualization.
EXEMPLIFICATION
Two major terms have been chosen for analysis along
these lines, and several others for summary
characterization. They are anattaa, "no-soul" or
"no-self, " and `suunyataa, emptiness. When
Theravaada Buddhism asserts that man is a non-self,
is this an ontological assertion or an experiential
one? Both, I would maintain, but most surely an
existential/experiential one. That there is an
ontological intent can scarcely be denied; it is
intended to mean. in the mouths of most Theravaada
Buddhists, that there is no discoverable, genuinely
substantial or unitary personal entity such as is
usually indicated by the term "self"--though the
foundation of this statement in paali Canon texts has
been challenged in a recent volume, Self and
Non-Self in Early Buddhism, by Joaquin
Perez-Remon.(4) But it is worth noting that the
"ontology" of no-self is purely negative, a
statement of what the "self'' is not, and the
assertion that even such a "non-self" is nonexistent
as a distinct entity. Thus, the so-called self is
not a true unity but a temporary-momentary
collection of elements (skandhas or dharmas); in
fact it is not even a genuine psychological unity,
but more like a stream of fluxing and varied mental
currents. Nor is there any discernable "I" apart
from its thoughts; the "self" or individual "mind''
is its thoughts. This temporary collection of bits
and pieces falls apart upon death, with only its
main karmic thrust of energy carried on into new
being.
Though this portrait might be challenged both
psychologically and ontologically, my interest here
is in "no-self" as experiential. Though it is true
that the negative ontology is the intellectual
justification and the emotional springboard
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for the meditative process which reveals the
emptiness of self and produces the experience of
detachment, no-self as experienced in detachment is
the main concern of Theravaada meditation. The basic
thrust of many of the no-self passages is epitomized
by the comment after one extended declaration that
form, feeling, consciousness, etc. are "not my
self"; "Seeing this the well-instructed holy
disciple becomes disgusted with the skandhas.
Disgusted he becomes dispassionate; through
dispassion he is set free." And it justifies the
late Edward Conze's comment that "The formula is
manifestly intended as a guide to meditation and not
as a basis for speculation."(5)
Two aspects of anattaa as experience will be
noted. One is that anattaa can be experienced, not
just described. Indeed all vipassana meditational
techniques have as their purpose the production of a
visceral, fully existential awareness of one's own
body-mind "self" as a set of temporarily associated
factors which have no integral unity. This is
accomplished by focusing "bare attention," that is,
impartial, impersonal scrutiny, upon one's own
physical processes, emotional dynamics, and thought
developments. The result has been thus described:
As to the ultimate purpose of Satipa.t.thaana,
Mindfulness on Postures will bring an initial
awareness of the impersonal' nature of the body, and
will be conducive towards an inner alienation from
it... Looking at the postures with such detached
objectivity, the habitual identification with the
body will begin to dissolve.
And the same author later concludes:
The whole Discourse on the Foundations of
Mindfulness may be regarded as nothing else but a
comprehensive theoretical and practical instruction
for the realization of that liberating truth of
Anattaa... The guidance provided by Satipa.t.thaana,
will bring about... that immediate visualization of
it which alone imparts life-transforming and
life-transcending power.(6)
The second point about anattaa is that this
experience is also one of release, release from the
power of samsaric drives into a new and different
self-awareness. By the existential appropriation of
anattaa awareness to himself, the meditator gains a
sense of freedom from the push-pull of his own
appetites, passions, ambitions, and fixations and
from the external world's domination in general,
that is, the conquest of greed, hatred, and
delusion. The enlightened mind which results from
the complete appropriation of the truth of anattaa is
like "a rock of one solid mass... neither visible
forms, nor sounds, nor odours, nor tastes, nor
bodily impressions, neither the desired nor the
undesired, can cause such a one to waver... gained
is deliverance."(7)
It is further worth noting that nibbaana, which
is the Ultimate Goal in Theravaada Buddhism, and its
Ultimate Reality as well, whose attainment brings
rebirth into space-time existence to an end, is also
the Ultimate Experience. With respect to the fullest
possible this-life experience of nibbaana, attained
in nirodhasamaapatti (cessation of all perception
and feeling), Buddhagho.sa asks in his The Path of
Purification: "Why do they attain it?" Answering his
own question
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he replies: "Being wearied by the occurrence and
dissolution of formations [i.e. experiencing
ordinary consciousness of fluxing data by a fluxing
consciousness] they attain it thinking 'Let us dwell
in bliss here and now reaching the cessation that is
nibbaana."(8) And according to the Paali Canon his
disciples tell the Buddha that this state can be
"enjoyed for as long as we like."(9)
I suggest then that the Theravaada conception of
nibbaana is that of Ultimate Experience. The
conviction that it is of ultimate rebirth-ending
reality, though it functions powerfully as
incitement to the quest of the nibbaana experience,
is basically an inference from the experience itself
As Ultimate Reality it is spoken of vaguely and
usually negatively. Hindu yogins spoke of similar
experiences, but were equated by them to oneness
with Brahman.
Now turning to Mahaayaana: All the Buddhist
entities are to be found here in a greatly altered
state and proportion. Gotama, the enlightened
prince, has largely been replaced by the Eternal
Buddha of the Lotus Suutra. Dependent origination,
whose Theravaada role is to destroy the sense of the
unitary integrity of personal selfhood, both
physical and mental, has become the interdependent
origination and existence of each being, in organic
relatedness to every other being in the universe.
The Buddha Mind, the All-Mind of the
Vij~naanavaadins, is implied as the Ultimate Source
and Being of the universe, and the essence of the
ordinary human mind, that is, the Buddha mind in
every man. Or sometimes it is the Dharmakaaya, the
absolute essence of the Buddha, one and
indescribable, that becomes the Ultimate Reality.
Nor was it that there were no efforts in Mahaayaana
to deal with epistemological and ultimate
ontological questions. but in the end these lesser
considerations always seem to be dissolved in some
indefinable-but-experienceable Ultimacy.(10)
Perhaps the subject of our special concern,
emptiness (`suunyataa), however, is the single best
exemplar of the existentialist-experiential quality
of Buddhist ultimates which we are now examining.
And it is likewise one of the most important
contemporary designations of Buddhist ultimacy,
especially in Zen, in which emptiness has engulfed
all lesser terms in itself. We must then ask, as it
has often been asked in the past, what then is
emptiness? When Naagaarjuna demonstrated the
empty-because-relative nature of all substantive
concepts, he did not then enthrone `suunyataa in
their place. For him emptiness was a mode of
apprehension of the universe, the core of a
spiritual discipline, not an entity of any sort. He
used it, as Theravaadins tend to use anattaa, as a
universal solvent of all substantive-reality
concepts and as forming the core of a new mode of
liberated awareness and existence in the world of
time and space. But neither is emptiness a simple
denial of being. It is the essence of Theravaada
dependentorigination, or, in Mahaayaana,
interdependent origination and being, in which each
atom partakes of the reality of the total universe
and vice versa. To use an analogy:
Like primordial space it (`suunyataa) can contain
and permeate each item within it without doing
damage to that item's particularity.... It sustains
and nourishes
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whatever limited reality there may be in
particularity. So too its unlimited emptiness...
ever and ever again flows out of its own
indeterminate infinity into all limited forms
without partiality or distinction.(11)
In somewhat similar words Masao Abe has written;
True `Suunyataa, being the negation of sheer
emptiness as well as sheer fullness, is an active
and creative emptiness which, just because of being
itself empty, lets everything and everyone be and
work respectively in their particularity.(12)
One is reminded of the full-emptiness of the
Primordial Nothingness of Taoism, from which Chinese
and Japanese Zen undoubtedly appropriated much. To
use a visual image, emptiness is like the mist in a
Chinese painting which "curls through the valley
uniting the elements of the landscape"(13) without
itself being clearly specifiable or genuinely
tangible. But we are at the same time left in an
intellectual quandary. Emptiness has about it all of
the majesty, the undefinable mystery, the
distinctionless unity of some sort of Absolute
Ultimate Reality--yet we are forbidden by
Naagaarjuna and his Zen successors to give it such a
status. What then shall we do with it?
Perhaps the sentence following the passage just
quoted from Abe provides a clue. He adds to his
specification of "an active and creative emptiness"
that "It may be helpful here to mention that
`Suunyataa, just like Nirvaa.na, is not a state [he
might add "or Reality"] but is Realization." And he
further adds: "true `Suunyataa... is, the True Self.
which is beyond every form." Given the
antisubstantialist tenor of his main argument, I am
uncertain why "Realization" and "True Self" are
seemingly reified by their capitalization; but in
any case the thrust of these further comments is
clearly to existentialize and experientialize the
character of `suunyataa. That is, the experience of
existence in time and space, when carried on in the
mode of emptiness-awareness, is true, formless
selfhood. So interpreted, in common with Theravaada
anattaa, emptiness represents two elements of an
experiential nature: it is the experience of freedom
from the bonds of ordinary self and space-time
oriented personhood: and it springs out of the
meditative discipline. To this may be added a third,
specifically, though not exclusively, Mahaayaana
feature: freedom to and in an unobstructed universe.
Two examples of this will be given. The first is
from a narrative of the experience of a
thirteenth-century Chinese Zen monk, named Bukko,
when he came to Japan. Though it is described in
terms of Dharmakaaya realization, it is not
experientially different from a Mu-satori experience
described in the second example, As the account has
it, Bukko was suddenly enlightened after a long
period of intensive, but seemingly vain, meditation,
by the sound of the striking of the wooden gong in
front of the head monk's room. He rushed out into
the night and found joy in everything he saw and
felt--especially in his sense of oneness with it
all. The next day, beholding the rising of the sun,
he judged that according to the astronomy of the day
he was some two billion miles from it but "that as
soon as it comes up, its rays lose no time in
striking my face." And from this he drew the
following conclusion:
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The rays of my own eye must travel just as
instantaneously as those of the sun as it reaches
the latter; my eyes, my mind, are they not the
Dharmakaaya itself?" Thinking thus, I felt all the
bonds snapped and broken to pieces that had been
tying me for so many ages. How many numberless years
had I been sitting in the hole of ants! Today even
in every pore of my skin there lie all the
Buddhalands in the ten guarters.(14)
In the second example D. T. Suzuki thus
describes the experience of satori gained through
zazen, by the use of the koan mu:
The one who thus utters the sound, audibly or
inaudibly, is now completely identified with the
sound. It is no more an individual person who
repeats the "Mu!"; it is the "Mu!" repeating
itself... The individual vanishes from the field of
consciousness, which is now thoroughly occupied with
the "Mu!" Indeed the whole universe is nothing but
the "Mu!"... We can now say that the "Mu!" and the
"I" and the Cosmic Unconscious--the three are one
and the one is three.
To this he adds the qualification that this
experience is not yet that of full satori. One must
come back in awareness to the relative level in
which there is once more an "I" and an "other." But
after the self-emptying unitive experience of
Mu-ness this ordinary I-other consciousness is not
the same:
This so-called relative level is not really
relative. It is the borderland between the conscious
level and the unconscious.... Once this level is
touched, one's ordinary consciousness becomes
infused with the tidings of the unconscious. This is
the moment when the finite mind realizes that it is
rooted in the infinite.(15)
Certainly the meditative Mu! is not the full
equivalent of emptiness, but it obviously belongs to
the same species of essence, and might well be
called the experiential surrogate of emptiness
itself. For here too there is the same emptyfullness
that in Abe's phrasing finds emptiness as "active
and creative'' in its support of the individual
(self). is the "True Self" and its Realization.
Mu-emptiness here means the destruction and/or
transformation of ordinary self-awareness, and the
gaining of a basic non-conceptual sense of unity
with one's subconsciousness, and thereby or therein
with the Cosmic Unconscious, in Suzuki's words.
Here we may observe that this same experiential
unitive emptiness informs many another Mahaayaana
term of the more basic sort. "No-mind'' is the
experience of an instant, almost-instinctive
alertness and response to the flowing situational
currents about one, freed from the constraints of
the idee fixe or intellectual constructs. "The
Buddha Mind'' is universal-mind or
universalmindedness which has overcome the limits of
merely individual mind--positive-anattaa we might
call it. "All is Mind" is the experience of
experiencing in one's own private awareness the
infinity of the universe with no sense of mental
versus material essences incommunicably separated,
and without the confinement or obstruction of
individual-minded finitude. AAlayavij~naana is the
sense of an indefeasable internal unity of
past-present-future experience now embodied in one's
being and experience without temporal limit.
"Suchness" is the world of entities experienced
immediately in their own intrinsic quality without
the
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interposition of culturally conditioned
thought-frames and personal value-references--the
Mahaayaana form of "bare attention." The Hua-yen
doctrine of "Totality" is a mystical sense of
organic involvement in, and oneness with, the
totality of reality, of the limitless extension of
the self. In a word, all of these at least
semiontological-metaphysical, or seemingly
ontological-metaphysical terms, also and perhaps
primarily, indicate experiences of the bursting open
of confined subjective (subject-object)
consciousness of the universe, of the underlying
organic oneness of self and that universe, and of
the emptiness of those distinctions which ordinarily
set one entity apart from another.
SUMMARY
What then can be said in conclusion about emptiness
as the Buddhist Ultimate? (Anattaa will here be
treated as a sub-form of emptiness, and nirvaa.na as
its experienceable consummation.) First and most
important, I think, it is the experiential ultimate
for Buddhism. It is the experience of freedom from
all outer and inner trammels, and of organic unity
with the whole universe. Zen literature in
particular is full of expressions of such
experiences. There is freedom from, in, and with the
universe; the overcoming of all basic distinction
between self and other, even in the very
experiencing of that other. One might almost say
that the ultimate experience of emptiness in its
fullness is the Buddhist Ultimate, period.
Yet, particularly in contemporary Zen thought,
emptiness functions in fact as an Absolute or
Ultimate Reality does in Western philosophy and
religion. Why is this true? It is primarily because
of the ultimacy, i.e., inexpressible,
non-conceptual, nondiscussible quality of emptiness
as experience. That is, absoluteness as experience
imperceptibly, unconsciously, and inevitably creeps
in as the absoluteness of reality (and being?) when
"emptiness" is used in the ontological context of
the discussion of emptiness as beyond-above "Being"
or "The Absolute" or "God." And now functioning as
an Ultimate Reality, under the guise of not so
functioning, it is said to be all-supportive,
all-pervasive, and unitive of all separate
individuals, though in organic rather than monistic
manner. Emptiness becomes the Ultimate Reference and
the Ultimate Dimension of everything. In it, to use
Christian words, everything "lives, moves, and has
its being." Yet, I repeat, we are told over and
over again that emptiness is neither substantial
Absolute Being nor nihilistic nonbeing, but somehow
transcendent-immanent in "being'' and "nonbeing."
This use of Emptiness as an ultimate category,
about which everything and nothing may be said,
allows a marvellously flexible use of language as
the following quotation illustrates:
The field of emptiness is in such a sense the field
of absolute transcendence, transcendence of time and
place, of causal necessity, of the "world-connexus"
itself. But this absolute transcendence is at the
same time absolute immanence....Our actual existence
is, in its very being-in-the-world,
not-being-in-the-world; because it is
not-being-in-the-world, it is
being-in-the-world.(16)
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Here is perhaps a supreme instance of eating one's
metaphysical/ontological cake and having it too.
Yes, emptiness is the Ultimate Experience. And it is
the Ultimate Reference that displaces all other
metaphysical/ontological references. But, no! No
metaphysical claims or statements can be made about
emptiness--hence there are no attendant intellectual
structures to expound or defend, even though it is
the Ultimate Dimension of everything and undercuts
(or overtops) all other metaphysical/ontological
formulations.
In a word, emptiness performs all the functions
of a full-scale substantial Ultimacy, both
sntological and experiential, but like a mystic
ultimate which atypically in this case refuses to
attach itself to any theological-religious entity
(except somehow to the Buddha Mind) can neither be
conceived, nor attacked, nor proven, nor denied, but
only experienced by the (Buddhist) believer.
NOTES
1. Middle Length Savings (Majjhima Nikaaya),
trans. I. B. Horner, (London: Luzac, 1957) ,
2:100-101(I. 431).
2. Notes on Once-Calling and Many-Calling, Shin
Buddhist Translation Series (Kyoto: Hongwanji
International Center. 1980), p. 1.
3. This, of course, is particularly true of Zen,
which in its training discipline, at least, speaks
of spiritual transmission outside the scriptures,
coins phrases like "If you meet the Buddha, kill
him," is opposed to speculative thought in favor of
experience, etc.
4. Joaquin Perez-Remon, Self and Non-Self in
Early Buddhism, (The Hague: Mouton, 1980).
5. Edward Conze, Buddhist Thought in India
(London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1962), p. 37.
6. Nyanaponika Thera, The Heart of Buddhist
Meditation (Colombo: The Word of the Buddha
Publishing Committee, 1953), pp. 74, 85-86. Italics
mine.
7. Nyanatiloka Thera, Buddhist Dictionary, 3d
rev. ed. (Colombo: Frewin and Co., 1972), p. 106.
8. Buddhagho.sa, The Path of Purification,
trans. Nyanamoli Thera. (Colombo: A. Semage, second
edition, 1964), 23:30.
9. Middle Length Savings, P.261 (I. 209).
10. I remember my own Western frustration at a
Buddhist-Whiteheadian conference when Whitehead's
cosmology was being discussed, to have the final
ontological comparisons on the Buddhist side to be
to the Buddha Mind. Yet no suggestions of
Western-style philosophical idealism were allowed.
11. "`Suunyataa's as a Master Symbol," Winston
L. King, Numen 17, Fasc. 2., August, 1970), p. 103.
12. "Christianity and the Encounter of the World
Religions" (Kyoto: The Eastern Buddhist, Vol. 1, No.
1, New Series), p. 119.
13. The New Yorker, July 13, 1981, p. 22.
14. D. T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism (New
York: Grove Press, First Evergreen Edition, 1961),
p. 257.
15. Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, Erich
Fromm, D. T. Suzuki, Richard De Martino (New York:
Harper and Brothers, 1960), pp. 46, 47.
16. Nishitani Keiji, "Emptiness and History,"
The Eastern Buddhist 13, no. 1,(Spring 1980): 9-10.