Buddha - Samsara, Suffering and Nirvana

Words in other languages can acquire an exotic allure. Since we do not encounter them often, there is little opportunity to interact with them in different contexts that could give us more information about their content (sense or meaning), and hence, they remain poorly understood and ill-defined.

It is not so different when we encounter a new word in English that we have not used before or have never heard others use it, and therefore, it appears to us like a novel object, an alien idea we cannot grasp well. I can think of when I encountered words like transcendent, immanent, phenomenology and existence for the first time. They held the fascination of a novel encounter but were I pressed to answer what it was that I had encountered exactly in those words – I would have been unable to answer.

This brings me to the question of Samsara. At a preliminary level, the word in Sanskrit can mean “passing through”. Imagine a long tunnel at one end of which something enters and passing through the tunnel emerges at the other end. If one passes through without any interaction, little could be said about that which passes or that which it passes through.

Should we allow for the possibility of interaction, the one passing through and the one being passed through could come to an understanding of each other that can help define the self against the other through repeated interactions. Think of a person in your life. Imagine the first encounter before you had recognized this person. Before the ritualistic exchange of names, your eyes brought to you a sight perception, your ears a sound perception, and so every other sense organ its own spectrum of perception, all of which was integrated into an idea of a person you beheld. 

Each of those perceptions evokes a reaction – what lovely hair, what a beautiful voice or such an irritating behaviour. These reactions are the acquirement of a lifetime. Samskara is another Sanskrit word for the aggregate of responses. Anger, love, irritation, compassion, these are all many samskaras, or responses that become a habit over time, so many shackles the self binds itself to in the process of myriad interactions with the world.

Notwithstanding your approximation of this other person, if you decide to interact with this other person, you will encounter a name, and immediately, a redefinition begins. If your earlier approximations are confirmed, your earlier idea of the person becomes strengthened. If the interaction reveals new information, you might make changes to your idea of the person before you. All of us get to know a few we have gotten to know better than others and they have gotten to know us better.

If one can integrate all such interactions over a lifetime, one can get a sense of the self as well as the world inhabited by so many others whom we have encountered in lesser or greater depth. And vice-versa. We have acquired new ideas and modified or rejected older ones. Those aspects of our personality that have become rigid and are no longer open to modification by fresh encounters and interactions can be understood as identity. (It is interesting that we speak of “introducing our ‘selves’” or speculating about our identities or that of others. After all, identity is a mathematical concept that usually implies equality between two sides of an equation, denoted by the “=” sign). To speak of an identity is to imagine, posit and preserve an unchanging self, and an unchanging worldview in turn.

All of us have a certain sense of self – it is an act of integration instantiated by an encounter. When asked to introduce myself in a graduate classroom, I might bundle my name and my research area together and introduce myself as such and such who studies such and such. In a workplace setting, I might bundle my name with my work – thus, I become such and such name (embodied) who works on such and such a thing. Or, abbreviated, I might say my name is [NAME], and I am a [DESIGNATION: student, professor, doctor, teacher, construction worker, electrician, sportsman, and so on].

We are all performing such instantiated integrations of the self all the time, for we are interacting with different bundles of the world all the time at different levels and in different settings. Even in the world of our thoughts and feelings which themselves are integrations of numerous interactions over a lifetime.

To speak of Samsara and the Self is to integrate a lump of information arising out of a lump of interactions – about the self, about perception, and the world. I am such and such, the world is such and such, and that’s how it is. I think that one word that closely corresponds to Samsara in English is Semiosis.

To use identity in its mathematical sense as a function equating two entities, we might say:

Samsara = Semiosis

The Self is a Semiosis, and so is Samsara, and so is the integration of the interactions between the two. There is no self without the world and vice-versa. Or, without interactions and integration of the information arising out of interactions, one would have no sense of Samsara, oneself, or passing through. Trillions of neutrinos pass through our bodies every second without interacting, and that’s why, for a long time, neutrinos did not exist for us, nor us for neutrinos. Such are the limits of awareness.

The Problem of Language

Let us take two systems. The only information we have about the two systems is the interaction between the two and the information arising out of that interaction. From that scarce information, we posit an idea of the two systems and refine them with the help of information arising out of newer interactions. Such is the fundamental problem of philosophy – what is reality, and what is perception? We are forced to use language and positivism as expedient means to posit a certain idea of the self, the world, and the cosmos through the perception of interactions. The problem becomes acute when one of the two systems is us.

Two frameworks have been posited – a dualist framework and a monist framework. Dualism implies that “I” and the world are two things; monism argues that “I” am continuous with the world. The first framework can be replicated across different levels. Thus, I – mind and body are two separate things. Perception and Cognition are two things. Cognition and Consciousness are two things, and so on.

Should someone ask if one can substantiate the claim that I and the world are continuous? It would be a great question. Only a mind that has learnt to think of itself as independent from the body can also think of the body as independent of the world. To substantiate this oneness – think of breathing, eating, and excretion on a bodily level. We consume food; it becomes part of us, nourishes the body, and the body discards waste, which goes on to have a samsara of its own, passing down the toilet through drains, into sewer lines, and eventually into rivers and the ocean.

Buddha and the Problem of Interpretative Labor

Buddha – the awakened one – sees this continuity and, therefore, speaks of dependent origins. The self and the samsara give rise to each other, and the world of phenomenon is what the senses have access to. It is an irony of the human condition that we have a discontinuity of perception to make sense of the continuity of phenomenon. Our eyes can see the visible spectrum – it cannot perceive infrared or cosmic background radiation. Our ears can hear frequencies between 20 Hz and 20 Kilo Hz. Dogs can hear a wider range of frequencies, and so can whales and dolphins. At a certain level, there is little difference between our eyes and other instruments of perception, such as night vision goggles. Both are technologies. One fashioned by evolution over millions of years, and the other by us. But they perform a similar function. Language, speech, writing, mathematics, science, and arts are all many technologies intermediating between ourselves and the world, integrating and reflexively fashioning the two in the process.

Based on a limited set of sense instruments and an aggregate of sense experience over a lifespan, we have a certain picture, sound, feel, and experience of ourselves and the world. What we have are approximations. For much of everyday tasks, these approximations work fine. And we get along, passing through the Samsara, an unfolding semiosis. It is when those approximations fail us that we are confronted with the problem of perception and reality – a perennial problem of philosophy.

The story of Siddhartha Gautama is one of moving from a separation between himself and the world – the dualism of Mind/Matter and Subject/Object instituted in a philosophical tradition from Rene Descartes that we have inherited – to the realization of his oneness with it. Buddha sees this dependent origination (of his luxuries as a prince derived from the suffering of so many unseen ones) and begins an exploration that turns both inwards and outwards. At one level, he torments his body – surviving on a grain of rice and a drop of water a day – and through different levels of absorption within the mind that take him from perception to phenomenon, from the perceived to the perceiver to non-perceiver and non-perceived, and finally beyond perception and non-perception.

He rejects the torments of the body and comes to the realization that suffering is born not from being in the world or passing through samsara but from identification with certain aspects of a changing reality and clutching hard onto it. It would be useful here to think of an instance when you were suffering. If you were to ask what it was that was suffering, you would find that there is no contentless you that was suffering but a self that identified as such and such in relation to something or someone. We suffer as parents or children, friends or lovers, students and teachers, as ailing bodies and minds, as professionals struggling at work, as graduate students struggling to write a paper, as a faculty vying for tenure or as a body grasping for luxuries. In brief, a mind shot with ignorance who thinks it is something and should be something, and failing to be that suffering arises. The why question is rarely asked. Why do we desire to be something, to do something, to want this or that, desire this or that luxury? Has the sum of all luxuries experienced so far, desires fulfilled, extinguished the desires? Or, merely given birth to new ones?

An aside on Ignorance and Concentration

We all think we understand what ignorance is, and yet we are all mired in it. Why is that? Psychologists propose that we suffer from something called a fundamental attribution error. We attribute our mistakes and errors to circumstances but that of others to disposition. We could not do something right because the circumstances conspired against us. Others did not do something right or did something wrong because that’s who they are by disposition. It is only natural to err this way. Fundamentally, we have a greater awareness of ourselves and our circumstances; it is, after all, a matter close to us. We can also have a better awareness of those close to us and their circumstances – our families, friends, and lovers. We call it empathy, but it hardly extends to strangers. We are indulging when it comes to ourselves and those close to us, but we are quick to pronounce judgment upon others.

Ignorance, then, is an act of jugglery, with hundreds of balls up in the air, and we drop all of them because we move on and throw another ball in the air without catching on to the previous ones or questioning why we threw a ball in the first place. And before we know it, too many balls and too few hands and little concentration wreak their havoc and someone else or ourselves will have to clean up after it. A master juggler knows this. He is concentrating on the act of jugglery and never drops the ball.

Take another example: one of the great sights India has to offer is that of children begging on the streets, and one dreads such encounters at red lights. It repeats so many times, day in and day out, and the people have tuned out of it. They choose to ignore it. Four sightings – of an old man, a sick man, a dead man and a mendicant – were enough to jolt Siddhartha Gautama out of the palace of his illusions. When he saw it, he did not ignore it and left to seek answers.

We, who call ourselves moderns, have been inoculated against such encounters with reality. We have put our faith in ignorance and theories born of ignorance. And the ignorance does not stop with encounters with the world. We go on ignoring ourselves – we have stopped listening to our bodies and minds, and we have ignored dependent origination and slipped into a master-slave dialectical dualism. Mind is the master and the body its slave – a hierarchy born of dualism based on command and obedience. And in this hierarchical relation, as turns out to be the case in all hierarchical relations, there arises the problem of interpretative labor.

Prince Siddhartha Gautama did not have to imagine the lives of others. He could very well have lived on, uncaring and unthinking about those whose sweat and blood brought him his luxuries. But even he could not have gone unaffected by the consequences. Driven by desire, we commit atrocities not only upon others but also on ourselves – body and mind alike. It is a continuous oneness, after all. Ours is a world of sickness and diseases on a large scale. These are sicknesses we have given ourselves – one sugar cube after another in search of taste and desire.

Siddhartha’s search could be seen as an act in interpretative labour concentrated upon a question – dukkha or suffering? It was not a personal framing – why I (Prince Siddhartha Gautama) suffer? It was the broadest imaginable formulation. And when he had understood the disease, he offered his diagnoses – such is dukkha, such is the arising of dukkha, such is the cessation of dukkha, and such is the eightfold path to the cessation of dukkha. Knowing thus, he became Buddha – the awakened one. Siddhartha Gautama, the Prince, had perished, and only the awakened one remained.

What transformed Sidhartha into Buddha – a moving away from Ignor(e)-ance towards con-centration. And he understood what lay at the centre by approaching it from all directions. That’s what con-centration means.

Teachings of Buddha – the Awakened One

Philosophers around the world have posited something that animates the mind and body – they call it the self, the soul, the atman, and a myriad of other names. Think of identity, personality, character, and so on.

The Vedics before the Buddha also posited an entity that animates or brings the world into being. Their inquiries – which one can find in the Upanishads – speaks of the integration of this atman across all dimensions. They name this act of integration “Yoga”. It is another one of those words whose contents we have filled based on our encounters with it, and some associate it with postures of the body or with contortions. Bodily postures and contortions are but one of the many dimensions of Yoga, the one called Hatthayoga – or integration through forceful practice. The Bhagwadgeeta speaks of three other dimensions of Yoga – integration through knowledge or jnana yoga, integration through faith or bhakti yoga and integration through action or karma yoga. (It is useful to think of these in terms of Weberian ideal types.)

Meditation and mindfulness can be understood as but other dimensions of Yoga, or integration of the self, the soul, or the atman by means of inward exploration combined with concentration upon an object in the first absorption, reflexive concentration upon the self in second absorption, concentration on the perceiver, perceived and perception in the third absorption, and beyond perception or non-perception in the fourth absorption.

Kant famously said that nothing straight was ever fashioned out of the crooked timber of humanity. That is another dualist reading. Neither self nor the world is fashioned in isolation but only in relation to each other. Every fashioning of the self also fashions the world in its image and vice-versa.

Having integrated across dimensions, the Upanishadic thinkers posited the Brahman as the ultimate reality that pervades the self, the cosmos and everything in between. Brahmand, the Sanskrit word for creation and cosmos, means the inflation, enlargement, expansion, of the Brahman. Thus, they proclaimed:

tat (it) tvam (thou) asi (are)

To put it differently - you are it! And so is everything else. Knowing this, and yourself as a participant in fashioning – as the brahman, the question becomes: what kind of a world would you fashion, and in the process, how will you fashion yourself – the two go hand in hand.

Atman (self), Anatman (no self), and Nirvana

Buddha goes a step further from his Vedic precursors. His understanding peers into the changing nature of the self. And thus, he sees no-thing of essence to this thing called the self, the atman or brahman. By eliminating this latching on to any idea or a bundle of ideas to attach to, stitch into, oneself, he argues for a radical fashioning (a continuous one) that keeps history forever open to change and betterment without becoming trapped in a structure of any sort. The extinguishing of the self is the mirror image of a continuously transforming samsara. Hence, the Buddha speaks of no-self (anatman) and the eightfold path, leading away from suffering that is the consequence of attaching oneself to an idea and becoming anxious about change.

Believing the Kuhnian Fallacy – The Structure of Ideological Revolutions – and the Confucian Way out of It?

During the class today, there were several questions about endpoints. It is a fascinating idea that posits an endpoint of history to strive forever towards, annihilating the present in the process fueled by the perpetuation of ignorance. Such a transcendental principle or an endpoint of human history can be seen in the doctrine of communism as well as that of neoliberal capitalism. Humanity finds itself deprived of a hand in its own fashioning by welding thought to transcendentally derived principles. Speaking of an ahistorical endpoint on which humanity should converge means believing in a single right answer to every question – a far cry from the Buddha’s teachings. Where does this idea come from?

As it happens, it comes from a philosopher of science who worked here at Harvard. Thomas Kuhn, the story goes, was living in the graduate dorms when one day, looking at the window with blinds halfway down and sunlight streaking in through the open half, he came up with the idea of paradigms and the structure of scientific revolutions. It mirrors the Hegelian dialectic and ends up positing something like an endpoint in Science, quite like Hegel and Marx had done for History.

A scientific paradigm shifts when the current body of theoretical explanations can no longer hold up to the burgeoning anomalies and exceptions that escape the explanations and predictions of a theoretical paradigm. Thus, for Kuhn, anomalies mounted high, and the Newtonian Mechanics had to give in to Einsteinian relativity, causing a paradigm shift in the sciences.

Our special misery is that we have pledged allegiance to axioms, assumptions, ideas and ideologies despite a large number of anomalies that theories built on those ideas fail to explain. In the process, we have also forgotten that these are all instruments to make sense of the world and should not be confused with the world. Why is that?

Another philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, was alert to these tendencies in the human sciences and showed that in human sciences, a new paradigm does not invalidate the insights of earlier paradigms but adds to a more comprehensive explanation. Economic history does not invalidate the great man theory of history. Cultural explanations did not undermine political ones. Together, they provided a nuanced understanding.

Scientific revolutions are never scientific alone. Divisions among disciplines do not mean a corresponding schism in human experience. The continuity of human experience does not become siloed into economic, psychological, social, cultural, etc. It is always all of them and more all the time. We do not encounter an economic man during transactions, a cultural man during a Broadway show, an athletic man during a game, a scientific man inside a lab, or a political man during elections and protests. Humanity is the aggregate of all of them, and any understanding must be encompassing and open to a refashioning of the selves that make the world.

Such is the Buddha’s teaching. Nirvana is the blowing out of the structures claiming permanence and reducing humanity into a cog or as is popular nowadays into a non-Player Character. His teachings show the irreality of permanent things; one can see that history is open to fashioning and refashioning over and over again, without an end to history or reduced to chasing some transcendental timeless principle. And it is a revolution of ideas that permeates all.

The way out of Kuhnian paradigms is the Confucian dictum: Reflection without learning leads to confusion, and learning without reflection leads to disaster. All our theories are mere instruments devised by us. Like language, they are expedient means. It would be an error to confuse either ourselves or the samsara with these theories.

Another pernicious influence of Kuhnian paradigms has been a paradigm shift in individuals’ relation to themselves. They went from self-possessing sovereigns of liberalism with rights to life, liberty and property to individuals speculating on themselves. Such an understanding is mirroring the financialization of capitalism on an individual level. We no longer think, like Kant did, that humanity is an end in itself. We now speculate on our value (as if we were a commodity), we value others in terms of money, we value time, and rank different modes of living. How did it happen? Should it be so?

The Fallacy of the Liberal Individual and the Mutuality of Being

The liberal individual, homo economicus, was a fallacy to begin with. It is an instance of an expedient means, an assumption that eventually became a dominant paradigm of what it means to be an individual. To seriously question whether we really are rational actors, individuals in extreme, independent of others, a simple look at our life processes is enough to reveal that we breathe, eat, and drink, and in those life-sustaining processes, one finds that being is mutual, based on mutual recognition, mutual aid. Any notion of progress towards a transcendental goal at the cost of our shared humanity with others is yet another example of a devious ideology.

Different aspects of our being are instantiated depending on how we interact with others. And our responses give rise to a certain aspect of others’ being. Buddha’s teachings call for a radical concentration on this semiosis, understanding samsara and freeing ourselves from all parochial notions of the self to fashion a new world based on deep interpretative labour. His teachings throw open the gates of history, show that structures are impermanent, and whatever timeless principles they appear to possess are, in fact, born from our ignorant beliefs in ideologies – of the self, of the world, samsara or semiosis, that is.

A quick glance at recent history shows that different ideologies have denied being and humanity to a large section of people, to other beings, and to nature. Oppressions based on Sex, Caste, Race, Faith, Ethnicity, Nationalism, Communism, Capitalism, Colonization, and Imperialism, too, were at some point defended in the name of transcendental doctrines and upheld as permanent, eternal principles on which the world works.

Has not the world moved away and transformed before our eyes; why do we hold these fallacies so dear? All ideologies colour the world in a certain light. They are a projection. Reality escapes all ideologies. Ideas are an expedient means – an upaya. Like language, they can be refashioned. And in a world free from the shackles of ideologies, closed systems, and structures by deeply understanding their impermanence, the self, too, is liberated (including from an ignorant idea of itself), and samsara and nirvana seem not so different after all. Perhaps this is what Nagarjuna meant when he said Samsara is Nirvana.