She’s the former nun who is now a prolific author (over 80 works are listed on amazon.com’s site).
Does anybody here read her books?
I’ve listened to a couple of interviews with Karen Armstrong. She’s very cool, IMO.
Best wishes,
Jerry
I have her book on Islam, which I’m going to read.
She was part of the Jesus Project, which we discussed
at some length awhile ago, and I’m a bit suspicious
of her. My concern is that she will tend to be too
sympathetic to the religions she writes about to really
do them justice, and that she may alter them to
make them more plausible to people with her
theological views.
However I don’t
have any real ground for this, not having
read her books–the one on the Buddha would
help.
Here’s an interview with Armstrong about the life of Buddha:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1118892
Fresh Air from WHYY, February 21, 2001 · Religion scholar Karen Armstrong. The best-selling author of The History of God, and The Battle for God, has a new book about the life of Buddha. From North India, Sidhatta Gotama, renounced normal life, leaving his wife and child to live alone and attain enlightenment. He found it through his own experiences, did not rely on a supernatural God, and fought against the cult of personality that would turn him into a leader. Instead the Buddha taught his disciples to discover the truth within themselves. His teachings flourished in India for 1500 years and then spread to Tibet, Central Asia, China, Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia. Armstrong’s book Buddha is published by Penguin Lives.
Jim, if you are able to listen to the interview, I would very much like to hear your comments.
Best wishes,
Jerry
Thanks for the link. I’ve listened to the interview. KA is fiercely intelligent, plainly, and her account of the Buddha and his teaching is good. I have some differences with her, but I don’t wish to make too much of them in that, first, she may be right and I not, and, second,
my views are the result of my own ruminations and so may reflect ‘the Buddhism that I would
like Buddhism to be.’
She emphasizes a political and economic problem in the time of the Buddha, to which he was reacting and which was a good part of the cause of the suffering to which he responded. There was an economic revolution going on, she says, new kingdoms and cities, a new ruthlessness; this was the occasion of Buddhism’s emergence. We are talking about the seventh century BC.
This is the first I’ve heard of any of this, either the economics or that Buddhism is a response to it, and I’m doubtful about it. Not that there weren’t wars and so on, which are spoken of in the suttas, but I didn’t know this was new or that the suffering Buddhism addressed was the result of a ‘new ruthlessness.’ Nor do I find support in suttas.
My own view is this–people in the area had, for about two hundred years, become persuaded of three realities: caste, karma, and rebirth. The caste system was imposed by the Aryan invaders when they arrived from Persia, and it was an ordering of society into groups categorized by the purity of the group’s work–the Brahmins or priests had the purest work, and so were the highest caste. Next came the kshatriyas, or warriors/administrators, the Buddha’s caste, in fact, which was in considerable rivalry with Brahmins. Most religious revolutions in India came from the warrior caste. Then artisans and laborers and, finally, untouchables whose work was too filthy to deserve a place in the caste system. Caste obligations were very onerous for most people.
Karma (Kamma in Pali) means action, and came to mean the fruit or result of intentional action. You reap what you sow. Good deeds create good karma and bad deeds bad karma, but all karma is bad because it must come back on you and so it will drive you into a new life, into rebirth. There was a great sense of the suffering of human life, of old age, sickness and death. If, on my death bed, I leave my belongings to the poor, this will cause another rebirth, hence sickness, old age, and death.
So people were faced with a sort of triple problem: karma, which would drive one into a rebirth (and death) in a caste, repeatedly, forever.
Buddhism was a response to this problem–it breaks the causal chain of suffering by teaching us to act without creating karma. Karma is the result of action that flows from the delusion that I act–when I realize that nature acts, that there is no self or subject in the mind/body process, acts but no agent, thoughts but no thinker, I act without creating karma. Hence my old karma will spend itself, as it must, but then I will not be reborn; for an enlightened individual creates no new karma. So Buddhism promised escape from the wheel of life and death.
More directly, the Buddha attacked the caste system by maintaining that anybody who became a Buddhist lost his/her caste. Just as all rivers become one in the sea, all castes become one in Buddhism, he taught. This had a great deal to do with Buddhism’s success. Note that he is now undercutting the Brahmins, who depend on the caste system; his strong opposition to animal sacrifice undercut the Brahmin’s bread and butter, which was performing animal sacrifices. The rivalry between warrior and priest castes may have been an element in his teachings.
Well, these are the theological and social difficulties to which I see Buddhism responding, not the ones Armstrong mentions.
In talking about the Buddha’s death–he died in a remote village, a pretty poverty stricken place. Why was he in the jungle? Terry G ask? Armstrong suggests that the Buddha was retreating or recoiling from the aggression of society. I’m doubtful about this. He was all of his life a monk, he would go about with his people, enter a village with his begging bowl–according to the monastic rules he couldn’t eat after midday and had to beg for food, so he would come into our village, we would feed him and his retinue, then he would sit beneath a tree and teach us. That’s what the Buddha did, you see, so he was in this place because this is what he did. He certainly spent a good deal of time in rich surroundings too, teaching to wealthy people and powerful people, but he went everywhere and taught everybody and India was largely ‘jungle,’ that is, forests and villages. He would have no reason to avoid poor villages and he happened to be in one when he died.
Again Armstrong says that the Buddha, when he left his wife and children, went into cities, which is where the new ruthlessness was taking place, the new economics, and so on. On the accounts I read he went into the forest, which is the place where people generally went who left society. His charioteer drove him to the border of the forest, he traded his clothes with a beggar for the beggar’s rags, cut off his hair, and went into the forest. There were people in the forest, but I thought that’s pretty much where he went; never heard about his going to the cities instead.
She equates Nibbana (pali) (Nirvana sanskrit) with ‘what monotheists call the presence of God.’ Maybe so, but most Buddhists, at least in the Buddha’s tradition (the Theravada) would object to this strenuously. She speaks of it as undefinable, but he does seem to say something more about it, anyhow. The cause of suffering is tanha, thirst, craving (for sense pleasure, for existence,
and for non-nonexistence). Nibbana is the complete cessation of suffering, which is very close to the complete cessation of tanha, the cause of suffering; so Nibbana is likened to a candle guttering out–as desire, thirst finally end. Nibbana is also called the Deathless and the Unconditioned, because it doesn’t arise or pass away and it isn’t created by causes–in this way it is unlike conditioned things, that is, things that arise on account of causes, like these bodies, these mental states, and so on.
I think the Buddha thought the world consists of empty phenomena rolling on, nothing solid,
everything transient, within a great empty space. Where we think there is something substantial, for instance a soul within, there’s nothing. But that nothing, that spaciousness is our refuge from suffering. We learn how to reside in it. So where I thought I was, I find finally that there is nothing, but that nothing is the Unconditioned, the Deathless, Nibbana. It isn’t God or Self, it’s just empty, very spacious, and so there is room in it for everything, pain and joy, life and death, room for everything…
Still she is right to point out that the Buddha does talk about Nibbana in quasi-mystical terms.
However I don’t see him as a terribly mystical fellow, not that she does, either. But on my take, he’s a bit more of a philosopher–no surprise, of course!
She says that he still suffered after his enlightenment, but he could live at peace with suffering. This is probably a matter of words–certainly he was capable of physical pain, but I think he thought that suffering was a matter of aversion to pain. The cause of suffering is craving and aversion, which end with enlightenment, and so there are agreeable and disagreeable states, pleasant and unpleasant states, but no suffering.
In the interest of boring hell out of everybody, I post here
the last pages of an article I recently published concerning
the buddhist doctrine of anatta, or no self. The chief question is
whether morality can survive if there are no persons, no
subjects, but only the experiential stream. Some concepts:
Eliminativism, here, means that there are no persons, none
of us exist.
Utilitarianism, we will say, is the view that an act is right
just in case it maximizes the quantity of pleasant mental
states in the universe over the long term.
This is a leading normative theory. Basically right acts have
pleasant consequences; wrong acts less pleasant consequences
(or painful consequences). That’s the difference between
right and wrong.
One objection to utilitarianism is that it ignores issues of
justice and moral rights. If I could save five lives at the
cost of one by murdering somebody and donating her
organs, thereby maximizing the quantity of pleasant mental
states, many would say it’s still wrong because the
murdered person is treated unjustly.
Deontological ethics is the morality of rights and justice;
deontologists believe that sometimes the act that has
the best results is wrong.
Ok, here we go. Again, the chief question here is whether morality
can survive if there are no persons, no subjects of experience,
but only the experiential stream:
Of course Eliminativism still flies in the face of the most fundamental datum of common sense. We exist. But common sense is often a casualty of science, while Eliminativism, if I’m right, has behind it the whole force of Naturalism. Why, then, do we all believe that we exist? The answer given by Eliminativists is that the sense of self is a delusion borne of human psychology. The delusion can be overcome, at least briefly, by attending to the mind-body process, which interrupts the slurring together of successive mental states to which David Hume credited the idea of self. Attention can also dissolve the powerful attachment to mind and body, and the resulting craving for permanence, of which the sense of self is an artifact–as the Buddha taught. To spend a long while attending to the mind-body process is to be struck pretty forcefully with the insight that no one is in it. There is a sense of awakening from a dream. A consequence of Hume’s view is that mindfulness meditation will produce just this insight. As the ‘delusion of self’ is dissolved by practices that undercut what, according to plausible psychological explanations, are its cause, the appeal to common sense is inconclusive, too.
VI
Why, then, is it so hard to accept the consequences of an impersonal universe? There is, of course, the bafflement of our self-concern. In short, what becomes of me? Of course, given what will happen to the ‘self-cherishing I’ pretty soon anyway, the idea that it never existed has its consolations. As human life is largely a bafflement of our self-concern, these increase the more the idea is accepted. We’re now fishing in the right waters, at any rate. What makes Eliminativism really hard to swallow is that morality is destroyed. Right and wrong cannot exist in an utterly impersonal universe. Who was harmed by the Holocaust, after all? None of it happened to anybody! It would be crazy to accept such consequences, surely.
An immediate response is that Utilitarianism survives, for it quantifies only over mental states, not subjects. An insight of classical Utilitarianism is that pleasant mental states are intrinsically better than painful ones–not better for anybody, just better simpliciter. An act is right if it makes the world a happier place. If ‘acts exist, but the person who acts does not,’ there are right acts and wrong acts. Also there are good and bad intentions, for nothing in Eliminativism precludes actions motivated by a desire for a better world. But now the difference between right and wrong seems more aesthetic than moral; morality loses its urgency. This isn’t necessarily such a bad thing, however. A more serious difficulty is that justice doesn’t supervene on utility. There are fundamental human rights, contracts and obligations, special duties to our families and countrymen, which we violate if we always do what’s most useful. Rights bearers are required, people wronged by promises broken, persisting subjects whom death would deprive of a future. How can deontological ethics survive the loss of subjects?
Perhaps Buddhism contains an answer. The Buddha knew that the universe is impersonal through and through; he wasn’t deluded at all. Yet he attacked the caste system because he recognized its injustice. How was he able to do this? The delusion of self is an artifact of craving, attachment, and inattention; it dissolves as they do. In their place a powerful compassion arises–at least for those ‘well established in virtue.’ Suppose my paranoid friend believes himself to be the object of a conspiracy. If I’m compassionate I will enter into that delusion, until it becomes sufficiently real that he knows that I know what it’s like for him. A natural activity of compassion is to enter into the delusion that causes pain; it takes up the point of view of delusion, investing its intentional object with a vivacity that makes it emotionally real. As that object’s emotional reality flows from the activity of compassion, not from the perception or cognition that the object is real, it is consistent with recognizing the delusion as delusion. Compassion can create its own object.
An awakening Buddha finds herself surrounded by transient minds and bodies possessed of the delusion that they contain persons, which involves a cycle of pleasure and pain. Compassion enters into the delusion, investing it with emotional reality, thereby creating persons whom compassion loves. The Buddha spent most of his life bringing to people he knew didn’t exist the liberating news that they never were. He did this from compassion for them. Compassion enabled him to recognize the caste system’s unfairness to people he knew didn’t exist.
According to Buddhism, wisdom and compassion support each other ‘like two hands that wash one another.’ The realization that my brother is a bag of bones finds its complete expression in compassion for my brother. Conversely, to care for somebody all the way down to her metaphysical ground is to recognize her emptiness. From the perspective of compassion, the world is full of suffering beings crying out for protection and for justice. From the perspective of wisdom, while the natural order contains terrific pain, no one suffers it. Without compassion, wisdom would be other-worldly, less than wise. Without wisdom the compassionate heart would be broken. From the perspective of compassion, knowing the universe is impersonal is a reason to be kindly and fair. A Buddhist saying goes: “Ultimately there is neither right nor wrong, but right is right and wrong is wrong.”
Kant believed that morality must be founded on respect for persons. I suggest that morality is better founded on compassion. The sentiment of respect overly narrows the moral community–it excludes infants, fetuses, and non-human animals. Compassion populates the universe with moral objects. In Mahayana Buddhism, the Bodhisattva vows to be reborn for the sake of all sentient beings–‘yea, until the last blade of grass is liberated!’ Of the two sentiments, compassion is less fragile ontologically: it motivates a satisfying morality even in an impersonal universe like ours.
Thanks for posting that, Jim.
I would approach the “Do I exist?” question a little differently, but I believe the practical result would be the same. (My answer would be more like the saying you’ve quoted about right and wrong: “I neither exist nor do I not exist, and I both exist and do not exist.”)
I especially appreciate what you say about compassion. I would say that what remains of the ego sense in an enlightened soul becomes mostly occupied with the sense that “I am no different and not separate from any other soul, and whatever happens to any soul is perceived very much as if it had happened/were happening to me.”
To an enlightened soul, it is clear that this is only possible through the illusion that I or anything else exist, but the illusion is something, and it is not completely without reality. It is an illusion, which has its own existence, even though it is only the existence of an illusion. But there it is.
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Best wishes,
Jerry
Yes, makes sense.
Like I said, I think we’re talking about the same thing at an operational level. Just putting the emphasis a little more here or there, but pretty much all the same components and the same overall result.
Best wishes,
Jerry
Jim Stone wrote:
“An awakening Buddha finds herself surrounded by transient minds and bodies possessed of the delusion that they contain persons, which involves a cycle of pleasure and pain. Compassion enters into the delusion, investing it with emotional reality, thereby creating persons whom compassion loves. The Buddha spent most of his life bringing to people he knew didn’t exist the liberating news that they never were. He did this from compassion for them. Compassion enabled him to recognize the caste system’s unfairness to people he knew didn’t exist.”
Thanks Jim, your erudition always impresses me. My quibble with the above is that, at best, it provides a very thin gruel for me personally. Spending the remainder of my life in a kind of sad, compassionate contemplation of the trials of persons that I know do not exist, is not a very satisfying prospect. Loving these non-existent persons through my compassion and doing “right” by them out of compassion is equally unsatisfying because the underlying premise is that they never existed in the first place.
I am not deluded that the “I” that is me is of much significance. But, I remain hopeful that it is at least a little bit more than a self delusion in a wholly impersonal universe.
I’m not picking a fight with the Buddha. Just expressing my personal view that his philosophy (while it may be entirely correct) is just too sad and empty for me.
How do I avoid the temptation? 
I’m sorry, Jim, I don’t agree with any of your interpretations or examples or arguments. I don’t know all the philosophical jargon (can’t be bothered).
Instead of eliminativism, think “acceptance”. There is desire, there is greed, there is self-centered desire for self-preservation. One cannot eliminate these things in ones’ self. They are a natural part of ourselves. We cannot eliminate these aspects of ourselves.
However, we can recognize these aspects of ourselves as simply that: elements or aspects. We do not have to act on these, but we should recognize them, accept that they are there, grant them their due value, and move on.
This, I believe, is closer to what Buddhism has at its core; not to necessarily follow our many different impulses, but step back (internally) and get the big picture. Most of our selfish wants look pretty silly when viewed from a POV where we look at ourselves within the larger context. Compassion comes from viewing ourselves and others together within this larger framework. Ethics and Morality are imposed. Compassion happens as a natural process within the larger world view.
Stay tuned. Blessings at 6:00. 
djm
This is exceedingly reasonable. I think that few people
understand Buddhism who never find it objectionable.
Not a nice religion. Jerry’s take on these things is
‘softer’ but the Buddha is talking about death in life,
IMO. It isn’t sad, it’s free, but there is nothing left
in it for me. The ‘self-cherishing I’ gets dissolved by
practice, craving, aversion get dissolved by practice,
and there is kindness, serenity, and good cheer; not wanting anything
feels like having everything you’ve ever wanted.
But you are gone, the personality is largely gone,
you can absorb into it sometimes if it’s to a good
purpose, but mostly you dwell in emptiness.
Anybody who doesn’t wonder if this could possibly be
worth the cost probably hasn’t grasped what it’s about.
You know, one of the early practices was for the monk
to go to the charnel ground and watch the bodies rot,
saying: ‘This will happen to this body too.’ It’s sort of
like the process of letting go that people do when
they are dying, but you do it now.
The Buddha said it was for people who had had enough
of suffering–those who haven’t had enough of suffering
probably shouldn’t apply. Also it is in a way very noble,
because one comes to terms with the fundamentals of
existence, especially transience, that nothing can
be grasped, not the body, not the mind, and seeing
this again and again one let’s go and is free.
But the self is the delusion, the self is the dream that there are
things one keeps–to wake up is to die. To be awake is to
become something impersonal and very kind. Life goes on,
but no one lives it.
Just learned that my father in law is dying, probably,
and for the last two days my wife and I have been
awake. A wonderful, terrifying freedom. I’m trying
hard to reconstruct the dream.
Somebody once asked Suzuki Roshi what he did
in his spare time, and he laughed and laughed.
I find that elitist and exclusionary. Why can’t they accept me for what I am? Maybe I don’t WANT to apply then. Hmmph!
OK, OK, you can apply.
Jim Stone wrote:
The Buddha said it was for people who had had enough
of suffering–those who haven’t had enough of suffering
probably shouldn’t apply. Also it is in a way very noble,
because one comes to terms with the fundamentals of
existence, especially transience, that nothing can
be grasped, not the body, not the mind, and seeing
this again and again one let’s go and is free.
But the self is the delusion, the self is the dream that there are
things one keeps–to wake up is to die. To be awake is to
become something impersonal and very kind. Life goes on,
but no one lives it.
Perhaps that is the fundamental truth of it. I look around and see plenty of suffering and to paraphrase, “life can certainly be hard, short and brutish”. Yet, there are all those other things that make me smile. I guess the Buddha and I must part company because I’m just not ready to let go of the suffering because it also means letting go of the joy. I, like many others I’m sure, have been looking for “the” answers for most of my life. I will continue shopping.
Just learned that my father in law is dying, probably,
and for the last two days my wife and I have been
awake. A wonderful, terrifying freedom. I’m trying
hard to reconstruct the dream.
You and your wife have my deepest sympathy. I lost my mother just three weeks ago. I also feel a wonderful, terrifying freedom in her release from misery and pain.
This is called egoism. It is the basis of all religion.
Sorry for your loss,
djm
Consider the word “Brahman” to mean that which absorbs everything into itself. There’s a difference of opinion between Buddhism and Hinduism as to whether the void is inherently empty or inherently substantial. However, either interpretation will work here:
From fear of Brahman the sun shines.
From fear of Brahman the wind blows.
From fear of Brahman the fire burns.
From fear of Brahman the rain falls.
I interpret this to mean that we continue to scurry around doing what we do and being what we are out of fear that we will cease to exist if we give in to the unboundedness that permeates everything.
Then, if we ever have a glimpse of what that merging would/will be like, we discover that it’s a liberation, not an anihilation.
Best wishes,
Jerry
What is there to be absorbed? What does the absorbing? In Buddhism’s state of non-differention the all is in the one, the one within the all. Even the fear becomes just another aspect/element of the total. It can’t be gotten rid of, as it is a part of the whole, but it should be taken in perspective of the whole, and not blown out of proportion.
djm (slacker Buddhist)
Wonderful question.
The truth is, nothing ever happened and nothing ever will happen. You get to the end of it and it all turns to be a great, cosmic joke (in the best sense – you end up laughing).
Best wishes,
Jerry
My wife did a ten day meditation course–up at 5, silence, no
eye contact–one interview a day with the teacher, a
dharma talk a day, to explain to the yogis why they
were doing this. Your standard Theravada
Buddhist meditation course.
On day seven she was sitting by a pond which she
visited daily. There were several frogs, whom she had
named Huey, Louie, Dewey, and Ananda.
As she sat there visiting the frogs and watching her
breath she realized she didn’t exist.
‘Oh, I see. There’s nobody in here.’
This usually happens on seven or eight.
So afterwards she told me:
‘I realize I don’t exist.’
‘Have you transcended suffering?’ I asked her.
‘I think so. Noone here to do any suffering.’
‘Well good!’
‘I don’t like it.’
‘Beg pardon?’
‘I want to be somebody. I don’t want to be enlightened.’
And she stopped meditating. The only way I can
get her to meditate is if she leads the retreat.
The power trip keeps her safely anchored in delusion.
I just asked her if she would like to start meditating
again. ‘I’m tenured now’ she said. ‘Maybe it’s safe.’
Stay tuned.