Buddhist philosophy, if it is not the oldest continuous tradition of philosophy in the world, is certainly among the front-runners for that distinction. It was given its seminal expression in northern India roughly 2,600 years ago by Siddhartha Gautama—known more commonly as the Buddha, or “enlightened one.” In characterizing his own teachings, the Buddha most commonly compared them to a raft or a medicine that is used for as long as needed and then discarded. Both metaphors suggest that the work of Buddhist philosophy is not one of generating eternal and absolute answers to ultimate questions, but something much more modest and situationally specific. Most simply, it is the work of disclosing the root conditions of currently experienced trouble or suffering and providing guidance in resolutely dissolving them.
Doing so clearly requires intimate understanding of the world and worldview of one’s audience. As Buddhism spread, so did the scope of the imperative to sensitively engage lived (and culturally embedded) experience and to teach with “live words.” By the seventh century C.E., the largest Buddhist universities of south and central Asia already had “international” enrollments of over 10,000 students, and they offered broad interdisciplinary courses of study, including the study of literature, science, mathematics, and medicine. At the center of the curriculum were studies of the most important schools of Buddhist thought in dialogue with one another and with other philosophical systems. The legacy of pluralism, critical thinking, and a willingness to engage contemporary issues that characterized these universities are—fourteen hundred years later—still very much in evidence.
On the basis of its long history, diversity, and radically situated nature alone, introducing Buddhist philosophy—especially in just twenty or so pages—would be a daunting task. This difficulty is compounded by the fact just alluded to: Buddhist philosophy has always been a part of the greater whole of Buddhist practice and is, indeed, inseparable from it. From its earliest beginnings, Buddhism has included important somatic, social, and ritual dimensions, as well as deep commitments to meditative and other forms of attentive and relational training. Within this whole, Buddhist philosophy focuses on explaining why things have occurred as they have (Pali: yathabhutha)c for us as persons-in-community and on providing resources for revising what things mean in order to bring trouble or suffering to an end. The activities summarized by the term “Buddhist philosophy” are thus an integral part of an entire way of life.
Given all this, it seems best to introduce Buddhist philosophy through the critical resources used by the Buddha in responding to his contemporaries and their troubles or suffering. Because these resources are a common heritage of all Buddhists and because they serve as basic structural supports for all forms of Buddhist practice, introducing Buddhist philosophy through them foregrounds the actual work done by Buddhist philosophy. Although doing so means forgoing even cursory reviews of distinct schools and movements in the history of Buddhism, it has the important advantage of inviting reflection on how Buddhist thought and practice might contribute to our own lives-in-community, complementing and extending our existing critical paradigms.
When the Buddha began his teaching career, India was in a period of tremendous philosophical fertility. For nearly a thousand years, social, political, economic, and religious institutions that were based on the sacred hymns known as the Vedas had framed the intellectual life of the subcontinent. For a variety of reasons, these institutions and their textual basis came under increasing criticism during the century preceding the Buddha’s birth, and a wide spectrum of new beliefs came into currency.
At one end were relatively orthodox reform movements based on the Upanishads— a loosely affiliated body of literature that extended and refined themes raised in the Vedas. Although these movements had considerable variation among themselves, they did share a broad consensus that individual beings only exist provisionally and that ultimate reality consists of a singular consciousness-existence-bliss known as Brahman. The apparent separation of beings from one another and from the universal godhead or divine Being was understood to be a function of illusion (maya) and the deterministic effects of morally freighted action (karma). In the absence of illusion and the negative consequences of morally binding action, our true selves (atman) are freed into liberating union (yoga) with the absolute singularity of Brahman.
At the opposite end of the spectrum were rational materialists who argued that all existing things are essentially physical in nature, that there are no such things as true selves or souls, that no universal moral law exists, and that there is no limitless and absolute divine being or godhead. Death, they insisted, is final; good and evil are purely human inventions; liberation can only be the freedom to have the experiences we want in this world, more or less as we want them. Among the materialists, the most extreme advocated unrestrained hedonistic celebration of sense pleasure; the more moderate, a utilitarian approach to maximizing pleasure over the course of a lifetime.
Between these diametrically opposed views were a great variety of hybrid movements blending positions taken by both Vedic traditionalists and their materialist opponents. Many of these were thus effectively dualistic in orientation, accepting the reality both of the one and the many, both spirit and matter. Often, they were the product of ascetic movements more concerned with determining which purification techniques result in individual liberation (moksha) than with establishing unassailable revelations of the true nature of ultimate reality.
In summary, the spectrum of beliefs current in India during the Buddha’s life encompassed—at least in rudimentary form—virtually all of the major metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, and theological positions that have broadly characterized the history of philosophy, both East and West. The Middle Path articulated by the Buddha was not an attempt to find a happy medium among all these views or a common point upon which their reconciliation might be centered. On the contrary, the Buddhist Middle Path consists of a counter to this entire spectrum of belief as such.
After an early life of pleasurable self-indulgence, a sudden exposure to the suffering seemingly inherent to all sentient life, and six subsequent years of ascetic discipline aimed at breaking free of all such suffering, Siddhartha had a key realization. Suffering cannot be ended either through a hedonistic affirmation of worldly life and pleasure or through their ascetic denial. Neither was suffering ended through attaining mystical insights, through realizing altered states of consciousness, or consciousness without an object, or even fully blank unconsciousness.
Abandoning all his prior strategies for attaining ultimate liberation, Siddhartha nourished himself with an offering of rice and milk and seated himself beneath the spreading limbs of a tree in simple and steadily deepening mindfulness. In the course of the night, he witnessed the dissolution of his own limited sense of personal identity and saw that the course of human experience is a function of our individual and shared values and intentions. In the quiet hours just before dawn, he finally saw—“like a city, long forgotten and overgrown by dense jungle”—that all things arise pratitya-samutpada, or interdependently.
With this, he became a Buddha—one of a long series of beings stretching into the beginningless past, each of whom had realized that it is precisely ignorance of the dynamic and dramatic interdependence of all things that lies at the root of suffering. We are not afflicted with trouble and suffering by the will of the gods, or by fate, or chance, or the operation of morally blind natural laws. The roots of suffering are sunk into the world in the act of splitting it into mutually exclusive entities or identities like ‘self and ‘other’, ‘subject’ and ‘object’, ‘reality’ and ‘appearance’, ‘humanity’ and ‘nature’, ‘mind’ and ‘body’, ‘spirit’ and the ‘world’, ‘life’ and ‘death’. Succinctly stated, ‘is’ and ‘is-not’ are “the twin barbs on which all humankind is impaled” (Samyutta Nikaya, w. 752–53).
Crucial to all of the positions taken along the spectrum of belief prevalent in India during the Buddha’s lifetime was the assertion of some absolute and ultimate ground(s) upon or out of which all contingent things come to be. The Buddha’s radical insight was that there is nothing at all that exists in this way and that any view’s assuming that there is will only distill and further amplify the causes of suffering.
Carefully refusing to take a stand on ‘this’ or ‘that’—on any of the positions situated along the spectrum of beliefs espoused by his contemporaries—the Buddha advocated instead restoring the normally excluded middle ground between what each thing supposedly ‘is’ and all that it supposedly ‘is-not’. This meant first dropping any pretense of either complete certainty or equally complete doubt and, second, vigilantly undermining the central conceit that “I am,” that “this is me,” and that “this is mine.” The Buddhist Middle Path to the resolution of all suffering is nothing other than a healing of the “wound of existence.”
The Buddha often said that he taught only four noble truths: that all this is suffering or trouble (duhkha); that suffering arises through the coming together of certain conditions; that it ceases with the absence of these conditions; and that there is an eightfold path for bringing about a full resolution of suffering through complete and appropriate views, intentions, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and attentive virtuosity.
The term translated as suffering—duhkha—refers to the experienced results of riding in a cart that has wheels with their axle hole drilled off-center. No matter how smooth the road is and no matter how carefully we drive, we are treated to a jolting and disturbing ride. The shared underlying sense of the English words “turbulent,” “disturbing,” “turmoil,” and “trouble” comes closest to capturing the root connotation of duhkha as a situation both unsatisfactory and impossible to anticipate.
To begin fleshing out the conditioned origination of suffering, imagine that you are a child and are racing your best friend across the schoolyard. Just before the finish line, your friend takes hold of your shirt from behind and tugs it just enough to throw you off balance. You fall, skinning knees and elbows, losing the race. Here, the physical pain of the scrapes and bruises is easy to explain in strict and linear causal terms. But such pain is not yet suffering. If you had tripped on your own, the pain would be just as bad and might be accompanied by a momentary thought about your bad luck. There would be nothing, however, like the anguish you now experience as you wonder why your best friend intentionally tripped you. Friends are not supposed to act like this, especially best friends.
Unlike pain, suffering arises on the basis of who we take ourselves to be, what we understand as our place in the world, and what we have good reason to expect should happen to people like ourselves, in relationships like ours, situated more or less as we are. Without the expectation that friends do not act spitefully, and at least “play by the rules,” the encounter on the playground will not result in anyone’s suffering. If, instead of racing, you had been playing football, such a “tackle” from behind might have been praised as “game-saving” brilliance. If you had not forced your friend to cheat for you on the last math test, maybe he would not have had an impulse to “prove” to you that cheating hurts.
Our suffering, in other words, is never just a function of so-called objective events or facts. It is never absolutely predestined, and it can never be traced back to a single “first cause” or point of blame. Suffering marks our arrival at a relational or dramatic impasse where we simply don’t know how to go on, and it thus necessarily arises only through a complex of factors expressed in our personal histories and dispositions as well as those of our culture and society. It ends only when we successfully “move on” from the point of impasse—when we are able to take up the story of our lives and our relationships and go on with the work of making sense of things in ways that (hopefully) open up more opportunities for making still better sense of them.
Traditionally, insight into the conditioned arising of suffering was initially cultivated by attending to the twelvefold chain of interdependent origination (pratityasamutpada ), linking ignorance, dispositions, discursive awareness, name-and-form, the six sense organs, contact between sense organs and sense objects, feelings, wanton craving, clinging, coming into existence, birth, and old age and death. In this heuristic of twelve mutually conditioning aspects of our human situation, three were often singled out: ignorance (avidya), habit formations (samskara), and wanton craving or desire (trsna). Not surprisingly, the path to the resolution of suffering—the fourth noble truth, or eightfold path—was often summarized as a three-dimensional praxis able to effectively address precisely these conditions: the cultivation and exercise of wisdom (prajna), attentive virtuosity (samadhi), and moral clarity (sila). These practices form the basis of all Buddhist philosophy.
In a Buddhist context, wisdom is best understood as an ongoing practice of realizing the interdependent origination of all things and insightfully revising or dissolving patterns of interdependence conducive to trouble or suffering. Functionally, wisdom entails the falling away of the central conceit that “I am”—an active closing of the “wound of existence.”
Most generally, this process can be described as undermining the root conditions for distracted and disturbing awareness and conduct. In the early Indian Buddhist traditions, wisdom was negatively characterized as the absence of polluting effluents or attentive tendencies (asrava). Primary among these was prapanca, or “mental proliferation” based on wanton cravings, the conceit of self-existence, and the holding of set views about the essential nature of things. On the basis of prapanca, we are beset by “calculative perceptions” that effectively split or fragment our situation, eventually resulting not only in psychological turmoil and obsessive emotional engagements, but discriminatory biases and, finally, “resorting to rods and weapons, quarrels, brawls, disputes, recrimination, malice, and false speech” (MajhimaNikaya 18, the Madhupindika Sutta). Cultivating and exercising wisdom means decisively cutting through these entanglements so that we are not caught by anything seen, heard, smelled, tasted, touched, or cognized. In later Mahayana traditions of Buddhism, not getting caught by our situation assumed the more active connotation of realizing an unlimited capacity or skill (upaya) for relating with others beset by such entanglements in an enlightening way.
Among the most common teachings of the Buddha specifically related to the realization of wisdom, and central to all Buddhist traditions, is the teaching of the three marks (trilaksana): for the purpose of bringing about peace and realizing the meaning of nirvana, all things should be seen as troubled or suffering (duhkha), impermanent (anitya), and as not having any self or essential nature (anatman). This teaching is often and mistakenly taken to assert that everything is troubled, impermanent, and lacking in anything like an essential self. On the contrary, however, it is a carefully phrased injunction to adjust how we relate with things. Both practically and metaphysically, the difference between as and is makes a crucial difference.
Saying that all things are troubled or suffering is, at least some of the time, empirically false. Just after eating a wonderful meal or making passionate and satisfying love or witnessing our firstborn child’s gleeful first steps, trouble is nowhere in mind. At such times, one might say that things are as good as they get. What, then, is the point of enjoining us to exercise the utter pessimism of seeing all things as troubled or troubling?
To begin with, doing so makes apparent and then challenges the conventional (that is, nonnatural) nature of the horizons we normally set for what is and is-not relevant to adequately engaging and evaluating our situation. This allows us to see, for example, that our hunger is almost invariably relieved through the death of one or more living beings. Seeing all things as troubled or troubling is to engage our situation from the perspective of another, even if only through an act of imagination. It is, among other things, a way of opening a space for realizing our shared presence and thus the possibility of entering into ever-deepening community with them. This, in turn, is to see that we are connected with things in such a way that we all make a difference to one another. Our responsibility, it becomes clear, is to reflect on exactly what kind of difference we are making. Seeing things as troubled or troubling—as suffering, or duhkha-is to begin actively dissolving the conceit that “I am” an independently existing being and, through doing so, to begin establishing the roots of truly felt partnership or compassion.
The injunction to see all things as impermanent generally raises fewer immediate objections. Indeed, most people will intuit a significant advantage in being able to do so. Hardly a day goes by that we are not troubled by the passing of some good situation or by fears of losing loved ones to illness or old age. Seeing things as impermanent effectively undermines the very structure of expectation and its roots in the belief that things will or should be a certain way. To do so is to already cut off the possibility of many of the most common forms of suffering in our day-to-day lives.
But beyond this, seeing all things as impermanent is also to realize that we cannot hold onto the belief—oddly comforting at times—that there are situations that we can do nothing to change. Seeing all things as changing means seeing that no situation can be regarded as truly intractable. Since every situation continuously exhibits the energy and movement associated with change, all that can really be open to question are the rate and direction in which our situation is being transformed. Seeing all things as impermanent thus carries us, moment by moment, beyond our customary or habitual horizons of readiness, increasing our sense of this present moment as one ripe with opportunity for responsive engagement.
It is important to note that this practice can be carried out regardless of its ontological purchase. Although all limited and physically present things—in spite of appearances to the contrary—can be observed to be changing at some spatial or temporal scale, the question is, Can the same be said of the universe as a whole, of God, of the laws of nature and mathematical truths? What about the status of enlightened beings? Confronted with similar questions, the Buddha typically refused to answer, remarking that such questions are not answerable (avyakrta) in terms conducive to the realization of peace and the resolution of suffering. Having done so, he would redirect his interlocutors to the witnessing quality of their own attention, again enjoining them to relate with all things as troubled, impermanent, and without self.
By far the most challenging part of practicing the teaching of the three marks is seeing all things as having no-self—that is, as absent any abiding and essential nature or fixed identity. At a very practical level, to do so involves resisting our tendency to see things as being inherently or objectively ‘this’ way or ‘that’. Thus, forced to attend to the primacy of differing qualities of relationship, we witness a steady erosion of the grounds for prejudice and the kinds of racial, ethnic, religious, or cultural stereotyping that fuels so much of the conflict we experience socially and politically. Even as we do so, however, we find the ground beneath our own feet dissolving—our own sense of being simply who we are.
In introducing the teaching of no-self, the Buddha often began by asking members of his audience to take a moment to reflect on their own individual sense of self—the sense of being a particular and apparently unique “I” or center of experience. Although there raged among his contemporaries, as is still true in some circles today, serious debate about whether such an “I” was destined to survive the demise of the body or to perish along with it, there was no questioning of its existence as such. Whether this existence was material or immaterial, whether it was limited or limitless, was a question that could be debated. What was not at all questionable was the presence of at least one such center of experience: my own. As Descartes would make famous in the Western philosophical tradition, even if I doubt my own existence, that very doubt is nevertheless mine. Doubting my existence, far from calling it seriously into question, actually confirms it.
As the Buddha would insist, however, and as many members of his audiences would go on to realize for themselves, truly serious and vigilant reflection leads to a rather different conclusion. While the arising and passing away of thoughts is utterly apparent, no evidence whatsoever exists of any thinker. While feelings clearly and continuously come and go, no amount of reflection or observation reveals the supposed being who has these feelings. The same turns out to be true for bodily forms, dispositions, and even consciousness itself. Moreover, if reflection is further deepened on these aspects of personal being—the five skandhas, or “aggregates” of bodily form, feelings, perceptions, dispositions, and consciousness—it becomes clear that none of these exists independently. On the contrary, each arises as a function of particular patterns of interdependence. Bodily form, for example, arises only with the coming together of seeds from a man and a woman, the provision of various kinds of nourishment, the continuous availability of air and water, perceptual contact with an environment, and so on. Even consciousness—often assumed to be the irreducible core of our sense of personal existence—arises conditionally as relationships between sense organs and appropriate sense objects. In the absence of sense organs and sense objects (including, for the Buddha, the mind as a sense organ and thoughts as mentally sensed objects), consciousness does not arise.
As this kind of analytic reflection on personal experience deepens, it becomes clear that our sense of self—the conviction that “I am”—depends entirely on the ongoing interrelationship of all five skandhas, which themselves depend on the ongoing interrelationship of still other factors and conditions, and so on, ad infinitum. If anything might be considered basic, it is not a particular self or being or essential ground through which all things come (contingently) to be. What is most basic is the absence of any such self—the reality of interdependence or interrelatedness as such.
In later forms of Buddhism, the teaching of no-self came to be explicitly associated with seeing all things as manifestations of emptiness (sunyata)–that is, as horizonless patterns of interdependent relationships. Consider, for the sake of analogy, the stable interference pattern that results when two or more stones are dropped into a still body of water. Concentric rings of waves radiate outward from the point of impact of each stone, and these waves intersect at various points on the surface of the water, creating a particular pattern. The ‘things’ we experience in our day-to-day lives are like these points of intersection, and our situation is like the overall pattern they create. As soon as waves stop radiating from the impact of the stones, both the points of intersection and the overall pattern fade back into stillness. Likewise, when the conditions sponsoring the presence of various things and situations have run their own course, these things and situations pass away.
It should be stressed that this analogy should not be taken to imply that emptiness is a basic something like water. The Mahayana teaching of emptiness directs us to see all things as relationships and all related things as abstractions from them. As Nagarjuna—a famous Mahayana Buddhist philosopher of the second century C.E.—insists, we must strenuously guard against thinking that emptiness refers to some kind of underlying reality or independently existing substance out of which all things emerge. “Emptiness,” he assures us, “is just the relinquishing of all views” (Mulamadhyamakakarika 13.8)—the erasure of all limited and limiting standpoints, which is itself just the process of realizing the horizonless and mutual relevance of all things (MK, 24.14).
As most succinctly stated in the Heart Sutra, emptiness is thus indistinguishable from the infinite fullness of things. Far from signifying privation, the emptiness of things consists in their unique ways of bringing all other things into focus. Through each thing, all things join. Perhaps the clearest observable example of emptiness is the relational field of a sustainable ecosystem in which each species offers some distinctive way of processing and circulating the resources of the system as a whole, more or less directly contributing to the welfare of all other species.
Seeing all things as empty or having no-self opens us to the unique ways they contribute to our nature and the meaning of our presence together. It is also to realize that what we typically refer to as “trees,” “human beings,” “planets,” or “histories” are simply our personal (culturally informed) editions of the total pattern of relationships that they focus. For a lumber manufacturer, trees are simply raw materials to be harvested for profit. For a child, a particular tree can be a place of refuge and retreat, an axis of play and quiet reflection. For Thai villagers and Buddhist monks engaged in grassroots resistance to environmentally disastrous corporate development, large and commanding trees can be consecrated as individual centers of sacred precincts off-limits to all forestry activities. What we take trees to be reflects our own values—the horizons of what we believe (or will allow) to be relevant.
Put another way, the particulars of our experience are deeply conditioned by our values and intentions. Far from yielding accurate and complete pictures of our situation, they tell us more about ourselves—about our purposes and accustomed horizons of relevance—than they do about the world as such. And yet, in the context of the teaching of the three marks, this conclusion should not be at all surprising. If all things have no-self (no fixed and essential identities), then they are fundamentally neither ‘this’ nor ‘that’. In philosophical jargon, their ontological status is finally indeterminate. If there is a metaphysics implied by the teaching of the three marks and the Buddhist understanding of wisdom, it is a metaphysics of ambiguity.
With sufficient practice, seeing all things as empty or having no-self means realizing that what we take to be independently existing objects are, in actuality, compounded or put together (samskrta) out of habitual patterns of relationship. At the same time, this insight (vipasyana) means actively dissolving those habits to more fully and freely realize the mutual relevance of all things. Interestingly, then, cultivating Buddhist wisdom does not lead us in the direction of absolute certainty, but into ever deepening appreciation of the ambiguity or ontological openness of our situation and all that it comprises. It does not involve realizing the necessarily “one right thing” to do in any particular situation, but rather it opens up unlimited means (upaya) of directing our situation away from samsara (continued trouble and crisis) toward nirvana (their meaningful resolution). Wisdom is inseparable, in other words, from demonstrating appreciative and contributory virtuosity.
The cultivation of attentive virtuosity (samadhi) is thus crucial to the overall practice of Buddhism. But it is also an indispensable part of the exercise of Buddhist philosophy. Although insight (vipasyana) into the emptiness of all things can be achieved analytically by persistent investigation of the conditions of their arising, insight alone will not resolve the suffering of all sentient beings. Not only must we have insight into the interdependent origination of all things, we must be in a position to perceive and creatively refocus the mutual relevance of all things so that the meaning of our situation—its relational movement—can be turned away from samsara.
Traditionally, then, the analytic cultivation of insight was coupled with the meditative cultivation of serenity or calm-abiding (samatha)—a capacity for utterly poised and undistracted awareness that literally embodies attentive virtuosity (samadhi). The most common Buddhist technique for cultivating attentive poise is exercising simple mindfulness—often through focusing on the utterly mundane process of breathing. Of all the activities in which we are involved over the course of a lifetime, breathing is the most constant. It is something we can do either automatically or intentionally, but which we must do, every few seconds, every day of our lives. For this simple reason, it makes good sense to use the breath as a meditative focus—it is something we literally cannot do without.
But there is a deeper reason for attending to our breathing. It is quite easy to be freshly and fully attentive when greeting a new and exciting situation. We are all familiar with the heightened awareness that characterizes meeting an attractive person for the first time or responding to a life-or-death emergency. It is not at all easy to maintain such fresh and full awareness, moment to moment, while simply breathing. Doing so means realizing a capacity for uninterrupted and undistracted awareness even in the most uneventful of circumstances, thus placing ourselves in a position of being at all times as keenly attuned to our situation as possible.
The intimate relationship between wisdom and attentive virtuosity can be clarified by considering the first several links in the twelvefold chain of interdependent origination. The first link is that joining ignorance (avidya, literally “not-seeing” the interdependence of all things) and samskara—a term that refers to a relational structure comprising conditionally arisen or compounded objects, value-driven volitional activities, and attentive habits or dispositions. Ignorance is thus a function of intentional and perceptual habits, which are in turn a function of ignorance. Put another way, ignorance arises when we consistently and intentionally narrow the relevance of things to relate with them in functionally restricted ways, forming habits of attention (both perception and action) that further constrain our capacities for relevant response, practically compelling us to relate with things in still more restricted ways.
The second and third links in the twelvefold chain are those among samskaras, the six sense consciousnesses (visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, and mental), and specific pairings of name-and-form (nama-rupa). Considering just this much of the entire circuit of the twelvefold chain, we can say that the Buddhist cultivation of wisdom—the overcoming of ignorance—consists of the situational exercise of attentive virtuosity, a process of dissolving habit formations that otherwise give rise to patterns of sense relationship (consciousness) through which apparently abiding and verbally designated ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ are abstracted from emptiness or relational fullness of all things. These ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ are the stuff of everyday experience—the ‘things’ by means of which we literally define or limit ourselves.
It is the primary work of Buddhist philosophy to call these ‘things’ and their supposedly inherent natures and identities into question. It is a work that pivots on clearly demonstrating that all ’things’ arise conditionally as a function of our own limited views and at the same time dissolving the fixed dispositions through which they come about. On one hand, to do so frees us from our own habits of perception and action—opening new possibilities for conceptual and attentive improvisation. On the other hand, it frees others from the imposition of our own hierarchies of importance—opening a space within which it is possible for them to contribute to our situation in otherwise prohibited ways. Buddhist philosophy is an exercise in critical creativity.
An important implication of this work is realizing that the objects of conventional (samvrti) knowledge or truth and the subjects who possess such knowledge are equally manifestations of ignorance—evidence of what we might call virtuosity-inhibiting attention deficits. This is not to deny the ‘practical’ importance of such knowledge or the very real joys and anguishes of subjectively experienced day-today life. It is conventional knowledge that allows us to build a house or carry out preparations for a wedding or run a business. The events we experience are an ineradicable part of our life stories. What such knowledge alone cannot do is free us—all sentient beings—from suffering. That is possible only to the extent that we are able to demonstrate what in Buddhism has been traditionally referred to as “ultimate” (paramartha) knowledge or truth: according with every situation and responding as needed to orient it toward enlightenment.
With the development of wisdom and attentive virtuosity, our situation comes to be characterized by a tremendous fluidity and openness. Although our factual circumstances may have changed very little, we have a growing sense that there is no longer anything blocking us, and this arrival brings with it as well a growing awareness of opportunity for contributing to our situation. By themselves, wisdom and attentive virtuosity provide both a general orientation for such contributions and the improvisational skills needed to sustain it in practice. But even though the meaning of turning away from samsara to nirvana may be clear enough in considering all situations generically, the situations in which we find ourselves are never generic. Indeed, as our capacity for attentive virtuosity deepens, we realize that all situations are dramatically unique and that differences among them do make a difference. We cannot truly accord with our situation and respond as needed if we ignore or fail to fully appreciate the complex and historical interplay of emotions, intentions, desires, values, social norms, and cultural constructions that make our situation unlike any other. Insight and fluid attentiveness to things as they have come to be must be complemented by profound attunement to shifting currents of value and meaning. Wisdom and attentive virtuosity must, in other words, be complemented by moral clarity.
Insight into the conventional nature of personal identities, gender norms, behavioral codes, and social institutions brings very real freedom from their otherwise almost automatic force. Things that would have been done unreflectively, simply as a matter of course, are opened as sites of evaluative inquiry and meaningful improvisation. Because the Buddha took as students both men and women of all castes and social standings, he was often asked about the meaning of appropriate conduct in settings ranging from the forest retreat to the royal court; questions also involved a full range of concerns about family relations, work, financial security, community development, governance, and so on. Often, these questions centered on how these aspects of the human experience should be challenged or changed.
In most cases, much to the surprise and disappointment of many contemporary audiences, the Buddha seldom recommended rebelliously challenging existing norms and customs. Most often, he encouraged his questioners to better understand the conditions giving rise to their situation and to then use their existing position within it to bring out its enlightening possibilities. This apparently “conservative” response affords great insight into the practice of Buddhist moral clarity, the role of nonattachment, and critical importance of the teaching of karma.
In both monastic and lay settings, moral discourse often rested on considerations of the links of the twelvefold chain of interdependent origination centered on wanton craving or desire (trsna). In Sanskrit, trsna literally denotes a “burning thirst” and is figurative for any utterly overwhelming sense of deprivation and craving. Such wanton desires are said to arise through mutually conditioning relationships with both feelings (vedana) and clinging (upadana), out of which there arises a “life” or “existence” (bhava) bound by birth and death.
Feelings are one of the five skandhas, or interdependent factors constituting the human personality. Including mental experience, they consist of three broad modalities of response to sensory experience: movement toward, movement away, and an absence of clearly directed movement. Subjectively, these movements manifest (for example) as attraction, aversion, and indifference; or as pleasure, displeasure, and neutrality. Feelings express the value awarded to situationally focused relationships and establish their basic meaning or direction of change. They also imply having arrived at a conclusion about what things are and are-not, and they typically imply beliefs that they should be ‘this-wise’ or ‘other-wise’. All of this consideration, however, involves taking a position with respect to the objects of experience and assuming a fixed location within the situation as a whole.
Thus, as feeling arises, so does a sense of limited presence, or bounded existence. Resulting from this state of mind are cravings or desires to redress our wants or lacks—to extend the boundaries of our presence—and a deep impulse to hold on to what we take to be our own. This clinging to who we are—based on our evaluations of our situation and the things we identify within it—establishes the parameters of our life as a whole. It also sets up a framework of expectations that feed back into our feelings about our situation and the changes taking place in it, as well as informing our compulsion to hold on to what we believe is rightfully our own.
The associated occurrence of feelings and wanton cravings is thus tied to the development of self-identity and the possession of conceptually fixed denials of the interdependence of all things—what the Buddha referred to as views (drsti). In other words, the ego-self is defined through a circular or spiral function of having wants (or lacks). Moral clarity requires challenging the conceit that “I am” in such a way as to dissolve the boundaries of concern or responsibility implied in self-centered craving for completeness and in clinging to what is ‘me’ and ‘mine’.
Importantly, the very denials of interdependence that allow us to develop a sense of independently existing selfhood also block the free flow of energy in our situation, thus rendering us incapable of truly and fully receiving the contributions or offerings of others. The problem with our circumstances and what they mean, more often than not, is rooted in how our ego-self interrupts or divides our situation, for example, into a subjective center of experience and an objective set of experienced surroundings. Healing the wound of existence means refraining from doing so. And it is for this reason that the Buddha systematically advised his audiences to more fully realize how they have come to be situated as they are, and on the basis of this understanding to begin orienting their situation, as it has come to be, in the direction of resolving all trouble or suffering: nirvana.
Being in want and craving what will ease it are a function of being self-contained or closed to our situation. Resolving the suffering these cause cannot be accomplished by engaging in still further self-centered activity; rather, they can only be eased by being more fully and openly present. This is the meaning of Buddhist nonattachment: the practiced absence of wanton craving and clinging—not an exercise in detachment, but in superbly poised movement in whatever direction and with whatever qualities of relationship needed.
This does not mean blindly endorsing or approving the way our situation is currently structured. Against all prevailing norms, for example, the Buddha not only took women and members of the lowest castes as students, he admitted them into the monastic order and affirmed their capacity for enlightenment. Nonattachment, or freedom from want, is demonstrated by skillfully entering into intimate partnership with all other beings in order to bring about the resolution of suffering. Moral clarity thus necessarily involves both nonattachment and a profound understanding of the forces that establish the direction and tone of our situation and where we are placed within it. In a word: an understanding of karma.
The Buddhist teaching of karma is an invitation to see both the shape of our life histories and the contours of our present experience as corresponding with our own values and intentions. According to this teaching, we are not thrown into our life circumstances by chance or by fate. Rather, we come to be situated as we are through the choices we make and the values we endorse, moment by moment. If all things can be seen as originally ambiguous, the precise complexion of our present situation is a function of how we have disambiguated it.
The conflicts, suffering, and trouble we encounter are not the strictly determinate outcome of our past actions—whether according to the blind operation of universal moral law (as was widely believed in India during the Buddha’s lifetime) or the equally blind workings of natural law. Rather, they reflect ongoing tensions among our own values and aspirations, the patterns of our liking and disliking, and the strength and intentional force of our desires and dreams. Likewise, things “working out” or “going well” should not be seen as a function of good luck or the inevitable result of our efforts, but as a reflection of an overall consonance obtaining among our values and commitments.
Seeing things karmically is thus to realize that the world in which we find ourselves is not fundamentally factual in nature, but dramatic. Although its measure can be taken in yards or meters, its character is both narrative and improvised. That is, it is a world in which values have ontological force—a world that is continually being shaped by our intentions and that is thus irreducibly meaningful. The teaching of karma affirms, finally, that we have (and share) responsibility for the direction in which things are headed. Our situation and its meaning are always open to revision.
Cultivating Buddhist moral clarity entails establishing a clear and unwavering orientation of our conduct toward ending the suffering of all beings. This heading is most generally and explicitly expressed in the taking of vows. Especially in the Mahayana traditions where the bodhisattva ideal is most prominent, these typically took the form of resolving to offer unlimited resources for the enlightening benefit of others. Indeed, in these traditions, enlightenment itself has often been characterized as the perfection of offering. It is true in all Buddhist traditions, however, that vows play a central role in practice and that the high esteem in which Buddhist monks and nuns are held rests on the moral compass they make manifest through the sincerity of their vows and their intentional or karmic transparency.
However, while vows and the insights out of which they grow provide Buddhist practitioners with a dramatic heading relevant in all situations, the general character of vows prevents them from affording specific counsel in how to revise present conditions in order to bring about an appropriate shift in a situation’s meaning. Carrying out such revisions depends on sustaining a profound attunement to the values, intentions, emotional complexes, historical encounters, and qualities of action and attention that together establish a situation’s dramatic contours and that powerfully affect what kinds of revision are immediately possible and relevant. If vows and the example of eminent practitioners can be compared to the arrangements of stars that allow sailors to navigate on the open ocean, then such dramatic attunement to the intricate karma of our situation is comparable to skill in reading continuously shifting combinations of currents and winds.
As most fully manifest in the Mahayana ideal of the bodhisattva, exercising moral clarity thus entails both an unshakable orientation toward realizing enlightening relationships and limitless skill in entering into truly liberating intimacy with each situation, as it arises. Like wisdom and attentive virtuosity, moral clarity is not an achieved state of affairs, but an ongoing practice for which there are ultimately no set formulas. Importantly, it is also a practice that can only be fully undertaken in dramatic partnership with others—most especially, through relationship with exemplary teachers capable of directly demonstrating its transformative character.
Altogether, the system of Buddhist practice—the lived meaning of the Middle Way—involves relinquishing all of our horizons for relevance, readiness, and responsibility. Traveling the Middle Way is thus a commitment to personal and cultural transformation—a path of increasingly liberating intimacy among all things. It does not mean eliminating suffering or bringing it literally to an end, but rather fully resolving it, moment by moment. Since nothing at all ultimately exists or arises and abides independent of all other things, there is nothing—not even suffering—to drive out of existence. Rather, the task of Buddhist practice is to change the direction or meaning of our situation, to resolve our suffering by resolving to conduct ourselves through any impasses into which we fall—moving steadily in the direction of greater clarity and compassion.
Buddhist philosophy does not guide or direct Buddhist practice; rather, it is a critical support for it. As stated in the introduction, the aim of Buddhist philosophy is not the assertion of universal and eternal truths about how things are or should be. It is to open ourselves to the creative possibilities afforded by our present situations, whatever they might be. Because of this, it is not a tradition of philosophy that can take criticism as an end in itself or that can develop in abstraction from the concrete needs of specific persons and communities. Rather, it is a means to freely revising our relationships, as they have come to be, in an enlightening way.
Buddhist philosophy thus differs in very significant ways from the “deconstructive” traditions that have developed recently in the West and with which Buddhism has come to be compared. In the Sutta Nipata and other collections of the Buddha’s teachings, those who have fared long and well on the Middle Way are not described as detached, reclusive pessimists or prevaricators who question all previously cherished values and beliefs while offering little or nothing in return. On the contrary, they are described as having developed “immeasurable” capacities for relational transformation through loving-kindness (metta), compassion (karuna), joy in the good fortune of others (mudita), and equanimity (upekkha). Their lives are celebrated as concrete expressions of public wisdom, demonstrating harmonious and calm relationships; and they are purified of negative qualities of thought, speech, and action, being joyful and clear of purpose. Similarly, the ideal Buddhist world, as represented in many early teachings of the Buddha and their narrative popularizations, is no austere place of sensory deprivations and minimal stimulation, nor is it a world spinning aimlessly through an infinity of equivalent possibilities. It is a world teeming with people, animals, and plants of every sort—a world that is explicitly worldly, with all manner of good food, music, architecture, and activity. In Mahayana literature, scenes of sensuous abundance and aesthetic richness are repeatedly employed to evoke the lived quality of Buddha-realms in which all things constantly and directly carry out the work of enlightenment.
In such depictions, it is as if the “lost and forgotten city” representing the culminating insight of the Buddha’s six-year quest had been restored to its former vibrancy and brilliance. But Buddhist practice is not simply restorative. Cultivating appreciative and contributory virtuosity brings about karma for fuller and fuller attendance to the emptiness or dramatic richness of our situation. The karma of wanton desire and the exercise of control are an entrapping circle: the better we get at getting what we want, the better we get at wanting; but the better we get at wanting, the better we get at getting what we want, only we won’t want what we get. By contrast, the karma of appreciative and contributory virtuosity is that of opening ourselves to the value of our situation, thus finding ourselves ever more richly situated and increasingly well placed to offer or contribute to our situation as needed. This process has traditionally been referred to as the karma of building of merit or virtue. Buddhist practice is a process of creative enhancement.
A primary function of Buddhist philosophy is thus usefully mapping and maintaining the conditions of creativity, which means, at the same time, bringing into critical focus the conditions that lead to creative impasse and the experience of suffering. The conceptual resources developed over the history of Buddhist thought can be seen, then, as ideally suited to confronting and cutting through the mire of collapsed opportunity that signals the exhaustion of our existing paradigms of thought and action. The promise—especially in a comparative setting—of studying and practicing Buddhist philosophy is that new evaluative light can be shed on precisely those problems that have proved to be effectively intractable within our accustomed critical frameworks. The results of such critically improvised collaboration may well be precisely what will enable us to fully and freely accord with our situations and respond as needed.