some basic buddhist psychology: false enlightenments
Buddhist psychology begins with an analysis
that has some features that we Westerners will find familiar, but also some that
challenge our customary assumptions. Based on this analysis, we can understand
quite a few things that might at first seem peculiar about the Buddhist view of
things; in this post, I want to concentrate on how it can help us understand
some common misconceptions about enlightenment, and some things about how the
Buddhist view of the mind differs from the way the philosophies and religions of
the West see it.
It begins by classifying all existing things
into five "skandhas," Sanskrit for "heaps" or "aggregates." Like modern Western
science, it sees the world as an immense collection of particles that come into
and go out of existence, many times a second (not nearly as fast as quantum
events, but much faster than our ordinary awareness recognizes, so that we are
deluded into thinking that the world is a continuous
flow).
The first aggregate is "form," or the physical world. This of course includes the human body. Next comes "feelings" (the Chinese character used by Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Buddhists means "receiving"). Whatever we encounter in our experience comes with a certain feeling, which may be either positive, negative, or neutral. That is, we like the experience, want it to continue and to come back often; or we dislike it, want it to stop immediately and never return; or we don't care either way. Of course, each individual experience has its own feeling, but all feelings fall into these three categories.
The third aggregate is usually called, in English, "perceptions." However, it does not exactly match what philosophers who write in English call by that term. It refers, essentially, to our understanding of the world as a collection of discrete objects with various properties such as (for material objects), size, shape, color, hardness or softness, and so on. It must be kept in mind that the Buddhist texts speak of six senses: the five we recognize in the West, plus the mind, which perceives ideas just as the eyes perceive colors and shapes, the ears perceive sounds, and so on. Thus, the ideas in the mind are also perceived, in our everyday experience, as objects which arise and disappear. The reality, according to the Buddhist view, is that all of these perceived objects are collections of the "particles" mentioned above, which we misperceive as solid, persisting things.
Once we have the notion of a world of things perceived by the senses and the mind, we proceed to think about them, sort them into some kind of organized conceptual system, and decide how we are going to act with respect to them. This fourth aggregate is referred to by various terms in English writings on the subject, including "volitions" and "conceptual constructs." The main thing to keep in mind about this aggregate is that it includes all of the mental operations we perform with the ideas we form of the objects in the third aggregate, including the intentions to act within the world of objects. Finally, the fifth aggregate is "consciousness": a flow of awareness-events which are associated with some, but not all, of the events in the four preceding aggregates.
Coming back to the second aggregate, "feelings," let us number the categories of feelings:
1. Positive -- usually referred to as "greed" or "thirst"
2. Negative -- "aversion" or "hatred"
3. Neutral -- "indifference" or "ignorance"
In the Buddhist theory, these feelings appear to be felt by a self, which has a thirst for positive experiences, a hatred of negative ones, and no feelings about neutral experiences. It is "ignorant" of them in the sense that it does not know how to react to them. In reality, the theory says, this self does not exist, as a constant, solid thing, any more than any other thing does. It is merely a stream of events belonging to the various aggregates which (for reasons not entirely obvious) tend to fall together into an illusion of a self. The main business of this self is to maintain its (illusory) existence by accumulating as many positive experiences -- those that it perceives as supporting its existence -- as possible and warding off negative experiences -- those that appear to it as threatening its existence -- as much as possible.
In general, these feelings appear to be naturally attached to experiences. The experience of eating candy seems to have a naturally pleasant character, until, of course, we eat too much and it becomes unpleasant. The first experience a beginning smoker has with a cigarette may be very unpleasant, but smoking usually becomes quite pleasant before long. But we often try to alter the feelings we have a tendency to connect with some experiences. For instance, a smoker who wants to quit smoking might try to turn the pleasant feelings associated with the various components of the act of smoking into negative ones. Or someone who is compelled to take a job that is at first repulsive may try to make it into a pleasant activity.
With this background, we can then understand how false ideas of enlightenment arise. Since all of our experiences seem inevitably associated with one kind of feeling or another, the first idea beginning students of Buddhism generally get is that it is a program for turning one of these categories of feeling into another. For example, many traditional Buddhist texts describe sexual emotions and acts in very distasteful terms. To become enlightened, they seem to say, one must imagine the person one loves and wants to have intercourse with as an old, emaciated, disease-ridden hag. Spend time hanging out in charnel-grounds, the texts say, getting to like the appearances of rotting corpses. In other words, try to turn the strong positive feelings associated with the body and sexual relationships into equally strong negative ones.
Conversely, negative feelings associated with the dissolution of the body after death will be converted into positive ones, or at least neutral ones. In this way, it would appear, one can cultivate an "enlightened" attitude toward aging, illness, and death, as well as other forms of suffering.
While Buddhist texts advocating such practices can be found, it is doubtful, I think, that they are the most insightful parts of the Buddhist canon. They are too reminiscent of the harsh ascetic training that the Buddha subjected himself to when he first tried to understand suffering and how to liberate humanity from it, when, it is said, he became so emaciated that his stomach touched his back.
These texts concern primarily sexual drives, which the authors of the texts seem to think need to be destroyed by turning the thirst for sex into hatred of it. But an opposite notion of enlightenment is often advocated, as well: "positive thinking," or learning to see every experience, no matter how depressing it might ordinarily seem, as good. This approach is not found so often in the traditional Buddhist texts, but it seems to be quite popular among "New Age" devotees.
Still another mistaken understanding of enlightenment is that it is a conversion of all positive and negative feelings into neutral ones. Since the Second Noble Truth is that all suffering arises from thirst or greed (and the opposite, aversion), the solution appears to be to train oneself to be indifferent to every experience. That is, the goal seems to be to wipe out the first two categories of feelings and leave only the neutral one. This ideal of ataraxia or "imperturbability" was advocated by many ancient Greek philosophers and is sometimes confused with the Buddhist idea of enlightenment.
If all these are mistaken views of enlightenment, what in fact is it? This question reminds me of the famous remark of the great Zen teacher Suzuki Shunryu, who started the San Francisco Zen Center. When his students asked him what it was like "being enlightened," he would often reply, "Why do you want to know? You might not like it!" The point is that enlightenment has nothing to do with our likes and dislikes, or our indifference. Though there is really no way of describing it with complete accuracy in words, one might suggest that it is a way of handling our experiences in which we are liberated from the whole system of greed, aversion, and indifference that our illusory selves feel trapped in.
Such a goal seems impossible, of course, from the points of view of many non-Buddhist philosophies and religions. But it is what the Buddha taught as the ultimate end of suffering. More on why it is possible, and how, later.
The first aggregate is "form," or the physical world. This of course includes the human body. Next comes "feelings" (the Chinese character used by Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Buddhists means "receiving"). Whatever we encounter in our experience comes with a certain feeling, which may be either positive, negative, or neutral. That is, we like the experience, want it to continue and to come back often; or we dislike it, want it to stop immediately and never return; or we don't care either way. Of course, each individual experience has its own feeling, but all feelings fall into these three categories.
The third aggregate is usually called, in English, "perceptions." However, it does not exactly match what philosophers who write in English call by that term. It refers, essentially, to our understanding of the world as a collection of discrete objects with various properties such as (for material objects), size, shape, color, hardness or softness, and so on. It must be kept in mind that the Buddhist texts speak of six senses: the five we recognize in the West, plus the mind, which perceives ideas just as the eyes perceive colors and shapes, the ears perceive sounds, and so on. Thus, the ideas in the mind are also perceived, in our everyday experience, as objects which arise and disappear. The reality, according to the Buddhist view, is that all of these perceived objects are collections of the "particles" mentioned above, which we misperceive as solid, persisting things.
Once we have the notion of a world of things perceived by the senses and the mind, we proceed to think about them, sort them into some kind of organized conceptual system, and decide how we are going to act with respect to them. This fourth aggregate is referred to by various terms in English writings on the subject, including "volitions" and "conceptual constructs." The main thing to keep in mind about this aggregate is that it includes all of the mental operations we perform with the ideas we form of the objects in the third aggregate, including the intentions to act within the world of objects. Finally, the fifth aggregate is "consciousness": a flow of awareness-events which are associated with some, but not all, of the events in the four preceding aggregates.
Coming back to the second aggregate, "feelings," let us number the categories of feelings:
1. Positive -- usually referred to as "greed" or "thirst"
2. Negative -- "aversion" or "hatred"
3. Neutral -- "indifference" or "ignorance"
In the Buddhist theory, these feelings appear to be felt by a self, which has a thirst for positive experiences, a hatred of negative ones, and no feelings about neutral experiences. It is "ignorant" of them in the sense that it does not know how to react to them. In reality, the theory says, this self does not exist, as a constant, solid thing, any more than any other thing does. It is merely a stream of events belonging to the various aggregates which (for reasons not entirely obvious) tend to fall together into an illusion of a self. The main business of this self is to maintain its (illusory) existence by accumulating as many positive experiences -- those that it perceives as supporting its existence -- as possible and warding off negative experiences -- those that appear to it as threatening its existence -- as much as possible.
In general, these feelings appear to be naturally attached to experiences. The experience of eating candy seems to have a naturally pleasant character, until, of course, we eat too much and it becomes unpleasant. The first experience a beginning smoker has with a cigarette may be very unpleasant, but smoking usually becomes quite pleasant before long. But we often try to alter the feelings we have a tendency to connect with some experiences. For instance, a smoker who wants to quit smoking might try to turn the pleasant feelings associated with the various components of the act of smoking into negative ones. Or someone who is compelled to take a job that is at first repulsive may try to make it into a pleasant activity.
With this background, we can then understand how false ideas of enlightenment arise. Since all of our experiences seem inevitably associated with one kind of feeling or another, the first idea beginning students of Buddhism generally get is that it is a program for turning one of these categories of feeling into another. For example, many traditional Buddhist texts describe sexual emotions and acts in very distasteful terms. To become enlightened, they seem to say, one must imagine the person one loves and wants to have intercourse with as an old, emaciated, disease-ridden hag. Spend time hanging out in charnel-grounds, the texts say, getting to like the appearances of rotting corpses. In other words, try to turn the strong positive feelings associated with the body and sexual relationships into equally strong negative ones.
Conversely, negative feelings associated with the dissolution of the body after death will be converted into positive ones, or at least neutral ones. In this way, it would appear, one can cultivate an "enlightened" attitude toward aging, illness, and death, as well as other forms of suffering.
While Buddhist texts advocating such practices can be found, it is doubtful, I think, that they are the most insightful parts of the Buddhist canon. They are too reminiscent of the harsh ascetic training that the Buddha subjected himself to when he first tried to understand suffering and how to liberate humanity from it, when, it is said, he became so emaciated that his stomach touched his back.
These texts concern primarily sexual drives, which the authors of the texts seem to think need to be destroyed by turning the thirst for sex into hatred of it. But an opposite notion of enlightenment is often advocated, as well: "positive thinking," or learning to see every experience, no matter how depressing it might ordinarily seem, as good. This approach is not found so often in the traditional Buddhist texts, but it seems to be quite popular among "New Age" devotees.
Still another mistaken understanding of enlightenment is that it is a conversion of all positive and negative feelings into neutral ones. Since the Second Noble Truth is that all suffering arises from thirst or greed (and the opposite, aversion), the solution appears to be to train oneself to be indifferent to every experience. That is, the goal seems to be to wipe out the first two categories of feelings and leave only the neutral one. This ideal of ataraxia or "imperturbability" was advocated by many ancient Greek philosophers and is sometimes confused with the Buddhist idea of enlightenment.
If all these are mistaken views of enlightenment, what in fact is it? This question reminds me of the famous remark of the great Zen teacher Suzuki Shunryu, who started the San Francisco Zen Center. When his students asked him what it was like "being enlightened," he would often reply, "Why do you want to know? You might not like it!" The point is that enlightenment has nothing to do with our likes and dislikes, or our indifference. Though there is really no way of describing it with complete accuracy in words, one might suggest that it is a way of handling our experiences in which we are liberated from the whole system of greed, aversion, and indifference that our illusory selves feel trapped in.
Such a goal seems impossible, of course, from the points of view of many non-Buddhist philosophies and religions. But it is what the Buddha taught as the ultimate end of suffering. More on why it is possible, and how, later.
Posted: Wed - August 3, 2005 at 08:20 PM | |
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Published On: Dec 09, 2005 10:19 PM
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