Entities, Communication and Emptiness

One of the fundamental teachings of Buddhism is 'lack of inherent existence'. This directly follows from from the third 'mark' of all entities, that they lack 'essence'.

This can lead to lots of fruitless arguments about whether 'things' are 'all in the mind'. I say 'fruitless' simply because most of those arguments dwell solely in the realm of words and the participants have not explored the nature of the objects they discuss with sufficient immediacy to be able to ground their arguments on their own direct perception.

I cannot claim any great insight into emptiness, but I'm going to write about it to the extent that I do understand, in order to try and clarify some of the thoughts that have been developing over a number of years.

The first thing to grasp is what we mean by a 'thing' or 'entity'. It is important to grasp this because this is what Buddhist philosophy is negating. When you look at a tree or a rock or a mountain, Buddhist philosophy isn't saying that the area to which you give the name 'tree' (or rock etc) is indistinguishable from its surroundings. What it is saying is that you are labeling a changing flux and treating as though it were fixed. It is as though we gave names to individual clouds. In the sense that there is a relatively stable equilibrium of activity which can sustain the use of a name for a relatively long period of time. To take another example, perhaps you have heard of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. It has been there for a few hundred years. It is stable enough to be given a name, but current evidence suggests it is a weather system. It arose, it is sustained and it will pass away. Similarly a seed falls to the ground, germinates, grows, flourishes into a tree which occupies a certain place in a wood for decades, or centuries and in the fullness of time it collapses, rots and ceases to be anything one would apply the word 'tree' (or even 'fallen tree') to. We tend not to name clouds because their rate of change (and lack of individual relevance) does not support the activity, but we do tend to identify trees, especially those which we see regularly. However the use of a convenient 'signpost' in our communication about the world does not justify the assumption that some kind of 'entity' had been created. The apparent 'things' of our world have more the nature of verbs than nouns. They are actions. They are, as it were, slow moving energy.

Looking at this in another way, consider again the tree. A typical large tree in the height of summer pumps a huge amount of water through itself from the ground to the air. It produces leaves, it converts sunlight, it synthesizes resins, oils and much more besides. If you walk through a pine forest on a hot day it is easy to appreciate that you are no only surrounded by trees but have trees within you. I don't mean this in any kind of a spiritual, airy-fairy way. You can smell the trees. The only way you can smell the trees is by the trees being in contact with your taste and smell receptors. The trees give off volatile material which floats in the air and you breath it in. You may well limit your application of the word 'tree' to the relatively solid bit attached to the earth, but that is something you are doing, not something that is inherent in the nature of the tree. The tree has many processes, some of which we choose to be included within the scope of the world 'tree' (such as the transportation of water) and some of which we generally exclude from the scope of the word (such as the evaporation of volatile oils). The tree communicates with you. There is a process of exchange between you and the tree (such as the oxygen/carbon dioxide exchange). In a conventional, everyday sense it is convenient to apply conventional labels to distinguish different parts of the person-tree process, but these are labels of human convenience. Because of human capabilities (both in perception and action) certain boundaries (i.e. Places where properties change) become significant. Those significant boundaries might be quite different to beings with different capabilities. For instance a bacterium or a virus may place (in terms of their behaviour) great significance on the chemical composition of a fluid yet be relatively unconcerned (ie unreactive) to the edge of what we treat as an entity. Neutrinos pass through solid matter with almost the same ease as they pass through empty space.

So, in this view, the world is made up of swirling patterns of change with some patterns having a temporary relative stability. Buddhist philosophy simply says that the swirling patterns are no more (and no less) than that. Suffering (dissatisfaction) arises when we attribute permanency to the impermanent. So long as we continue to grasp at things we are grasping at dissatisfaction for there are no ultimate things. We pick up a ball of wet sand, and as it dries in our hands the sand slips between our fingers. That is the fiction inherent in grasping at entities.

The point at which many people baulk is the application of this teaching to people, the teaching of 'soul-less-ness'. This is not denying a 'spiritual' side to people's nature. Buddhism is certainly not a materialist teaching. However it is saying that change and lack of entity is as true to the spiritual as it is to the material. Indeed it is only by lack of soul that there can be salvation.

In effect we 'digitize' the world. We split it up into chunks to which we can apply labels and then apply labels to all the ways in which those chunks interact or communicate with each other. Imagine you took a subtly coloured picture (for instance something by Turner) and then described it in the words. We now give that description, and that description alone, to a second person and ask them to reconstruct the picture. Assuming that the second person has all the technical skills to accomplish the task, how similar do you suppose the reproduction would be to the first picture. Clearly this type of reproduction can be done by the much subtler, more fine grained language of computer encoding of pictures and in that way the reproduction can be done with high accuracy. But solely relying on the words we normally use to describe the world it would be a practically impossible task. Yet those words are the agents of the mental entities we use to decompose the world. The 'digitization' we apply is crude compared with the world of our perceptions and cruder still when compared with the ever-changing flux of existence.

Showing Respect to the Name

In Jewish tradition a name is very important. In fact names are pretty important in a lot of cultures from ancient times. There is some kind of idea (or maybe its more of a feeling) that a name is closely linked to the essence of a person. In ancient Egypt it was believed that by knowing the true name of a supernatural entity (or of a powerful person) you had power over them, and could command them by their true name.

So is there almost universal disrespect for Yehoshua bar Yosef by naming him by a name he never knew in his short life? How many of the people who insist that the chronicles of his life are literally (word for word) true ever baulk at calling him a name he and his contemporaries never used? None ... well very few to say the least.

In case you hadn't guessed, I am talking about the person more familiarly known as Jesus.

One of the Bible stories tells of how his name was chosen. 'Chosen' is probably the wrong word, since it was more of an instruction, or at the very least a strong suggestion, that the new child should be given a certain name. The trouble is for historians and chronologists alike - there is actually no contemporary record of his name. By the time the gospels were written his name had been handed around and mangled by ears accustomed to Greek and Roman and recorded in New Testament Greek - so we have Ιησους i.e. Iesous which became Jesus. So you have apparently, according to his own legend, a name being given by God and then universally ignored and replaced by a name made up by Greek writers.

So all the people who want to praise his name ought to perhaps rethink the name they want to praise.

And then you have 'Christ' - from which the name of the religion is derived. Well, first of all, its not a given name - nobody in his own time and circle would have used the word. Its Greek in origin and means something like 'annointed' (its related to the word 'chrism' being the oil used for annointing). Remember that Pilate used the abbreviated term 'INRI' - from Latin for 'Iesous of Narareth, King of the Jews'.

However it was a title used very in the early of the religion (since it appears in the book of Acts)- though interestingly the associated word 'Christian' appears to be been first used as a rather derogatory term by those of the citizenry of Antioch who were not members of this new movement. It is important to realise that in the very early history of Christianity it was view by almost everyone as a Jewish schismatic group - just another curious school of Judaism. So finding a name, and one that implied a limited cult appeal, was a useful way of separating these newcomers from the body of mainstream orthodoxy.

And so people around the world now praise a name that was a piece of made-up Greek - and treat it as though it had divine authority rather than simple centuries of lazy acceptance.

Sex before Marriage - crazy Christianity

Most Christian sects are against sex before marriage. Whilst there may well be very sound property-ownership and psychological reasons for insisting on marriage when sex is likely to lead to off-spring, the Christian argument usually involves some religious rather than practical element. In other words, their claims purport to rest on universal law rather than cultural convenience.

Before writing this I started to look for the first recorded marriage in the Bible - I was curious to know what the prototype of marriage was. Well I didn't actually get very far, but I did notice that that it was commonly assumed that the bonding of Adam and Eve in Genesis was 'marriage'. Ignoring for the moment the obvious objection that an argument based on mythological characters is hardly sound, consider what this proto-marriage means. Adam and Eve were brought together by God. Indeed within the story Eve was made especially for the job. There was no priest, no ceremony, no special form of words. This really was a case of a marriage made in heaven.

At least within the Catholic church one can find some semblance of logic to their position. The priest is acting as the conduit for holy authority. One could well argue that until the priest has brought together the couple they are not joined in any religiously legitimate sense. But what of the churches in which the minister/pastor/preacher can make no claim to special priestly powers beyond any member of the congregation? If all they and the congregation are doing is witnessing the union, when did the union take place? Perhaps God had brought the couple together long before the ceremony witnessed the marriage. Since they acknowledge that the 'true' marriage (as opposed to the civil registration of the fact) is brought about by God, the ceremony, ritual and general fuss is no indication of this. It is no indication because nobody present can claim to be a conduit of God's authority - or at least cannot make any greater claim than the couple getting married.

Indeed to go further, the couple might be seen to be destined for each other, 'married' before they were even born. In which case sex with a life partner can never be 'before' marriage - unless the minister and congregation presume to speak on behalf of God.

There is a fascinating article about the various models of marriage mentioned in the Bible without criticism - involving the ownership and rape of slaves, captives and relatives. It is clear that much of marriage was a question of owning a breeding partner and had little to do with the modern romantic image. When the Bible speaks of a man taking a woman as his wife, it could mean forced sex according to custom - or it might be the lesser relationship of concubine in which the woman has fewer rights. It certainly didn't mean a white wedding and all the present day razzle-dazzle.

So the next time a Christian argues against sex before marriage, you might just ask at precisely what point the happy couple are deemed married in a religious sense rather than a civil or ritual sense. If the answer involves some moment in the ceremony, one might well ask where they derive this authority from.

(The Buddhist answer to this foolishness is very simple: marriage is a civil matter, not a relious one. Monks are often called upon to give a blessing to the union but that does not change the fact that marriage is viewed purely as a social and civic convenience).

Karma - Sowing and Reaping

Karma: Sowing and Reaping

If someone were to throw a fire bomb into your house and burn it down would you say it was the bomb that was responsible for burning your house down, or the person who threw the bomb? Or would you blame the house for burning or possibly even yourself for not make your house of fire-proof material? Or anyone of a million other factors going towards the resulting inferno. I'd guess that most people would place the blame at the feet of the person who threw the bomb - possibly reserving some responsibility for any others who conspired with the perpetrator of the act, or those who helped in its execution. That is just common sense - but it is interesting to see why is that 'common sense'. We know in our gut who should be held responsible. We don't need any clever argument to be convinced of the identity of the guilty party. After all, if you found the person about the throw the bomb would you start to tell the bomb not to explode or to burn, or would you try to prevent the person using the bomb? The bomb is simply doing what it is its chemical nature to do - given the right conditions it explodes and sets a fire. So we place responsibility at the feet of the bomber, their conspirators and accomplices because they had a choice and they choose. The guilt and the responsibility lies in the choosing (and the following through). The bomb, the house, the inflamable curtains and all the other conditions have no room for choice to change the outcome, but the people do. The people have minds; the inanimate objects do not have minds. This, it may surprise you to discover, is what karma is about.

'Karma' has come to mean something almost like 'fate' or 'destiny' and used in this sense as an excuse (at least as presented in drama) for lack of responsibility for the outcome. Karma, in its original philosophical and religious meaning is 'willed, deliberate action' - and this is the sense in which it is used by millions across the world. In a sense it is the actions (in word, thought and deed) that you perform which create the future, and the world. I use the word 'create' here deliberately. In the case of actions without willed choice the outcome is virtually part of the pre-conditions: a bullet racing towards your unprotected head will continue along its path and cause injury and damage in relation to the laws of physics. However when you 'choose', you create - you weave another strand into the pattern of the future, rather than simply following the path of a pre-existing strand. However, Karma is not like a sportsmans score card, to be assessed at the end of the season and a decision made about how well he did during the season. Karma is more like the training, exercise, games and good nutrition of the sportman throughout the season - he might carry around a record of all those things, but what really counts is the effect they have on the sportsman. Skipping on a training session but entering it on the written training record doesn't actually contribute to his or her training - you don't get fitter by writing down that you have trained, you get fitter by actual training.

Actually attributing misfortune and lack of success to 'karma' is a misuse in two important senses. (It is also right in an important sense and I will say more about this below). The first important sense in which this is both wrong and destructive is that deliberate action/karma can only be in the here and now. Certainly you can refer to your past actions and choices as guides and lessons, or as salves to accept the present with equanimity but the only field in which karma is created is the present instant. The upshop of past action is technically called 'the fruit' of the action. It is hardly surprising that past teachers of ethics turned to agricultural metaphors when their audience mostly lived on the land and by the land. So biblically we have the maxim 'as you sow, so shall you reap', and six centuries before that the Buddha was teaching about actions and their fruits. Neither teacher suggested that accepting the consequences of previous actions absolved one of responsibility for present actions. Quite the opposite in fact - if you see yourself rushing headlong toward disaster it is sensible to do something to avoid it, if at all possible.

There is a sense in which 'karma' can seem like destiny and it is important to understand that so as not to confuse it with real predestination and thus simply waiting like animals before a slaughterhouse for the outcome to happen. Suppose you stand on the top of a cliff and you are told that very shortly you are going to have to jump off the cliff. You have a choice between strapping on a heavy boulder to help you or alternatively being strapped into a hang-glider. If you opt for the heavy boudler, when you jump of the cliff you will plummet down ... well like a stone. You may be able to grab on to a branch on the way down ... but it will be hard to hang on to because of the extra mass you are carrying. You still have some freedom to choose and act, but you have already chosen, right at the beginning, to attach your future to something which limits and controls your choices. You may have heard the expression 'heavy karma': falling off a cliff strapped to a boulder would be a good image for what that really means.

Suppose instead you chose the hang-glider. You may not have much experience with a hang-glider, and you may not figure out how to control your descent before its too late but it has given you a much better chance and more choices than the boulder did. So, in this sense past karma can seem very much like destiny, and there really is no point in refusing to accept it - you can't wish the past away. However, as the saying goes, 'you play the cards you are dealt' - that too is very much a karma/'fruit' attitude, the only difference being that you are the dealer (and you've rigged the deck).

In traditional Buddhist teaching karma is said to be one of the most complex things to understand, not because of the inherent complexity of the ideas (though it is true that they are slightly more involved than I have presented here) but because of the vast number of deliberate actions that each of us have made and woven into our existence over an inestimable length of time. Compared to understanding this, something as huge as the human genome project seems minute.

As with most teachings in Buddhism the punch line comes down to personal responsibility. Understanding yourself and the world in terms of the indelible trace woven into your being by each karmic (deliberate) action of thought, word and deed might make you pause to think about what you want to build yourself out of. (Given the number of people who want to build their bodies out of cheap fatty burgers, it really doesn't give that much hope for what they'd want to build their characters from).

There is quite a lot in traditional Western ethics that uses the same ideas as the teachings of Karma. Just to take one example, we have the expression that 'virtue is its own reward'. Cynically this may be used to convince people to do something of no obvious benefit to themselves (and quite possibly for the benefit of the person advocating the magnanimity). A less worldly view of this is that virtuous actions are not rewarded afterwards, but in their actual doing. You might think of this like disolving sugar in water. The water isn't sweet because it wants to reward you for adding the sugar - it is sweet simply because it has been changed by the adding of the sugar.

One final note: you may have been wondering where 'Karma Sutra' comes in. Well it doesn't - its actually 'Kama Sutra' (that is the famous one with the infamous illustrations). Its a completely different word. 'Kama' means 'sensuality' and whilst there may be quite a lot a deliberate action involved in following the instructions of that famous document, its whole different story. (Sutra, by the way, is related to the word used by surgeons for stitches - sutures - but the story behind that can wait for another day).

Gee - its a Camel

A particularly fascinating question to ask of almost any thing you may find is this: "How did it come to be?" Everything has a history and leaves a trail. We take many everyday objects completely for granted - like staples, paperclips and string - but they all come from somewhere. Not only do the objects come from somewhere, but the idea behind the object and the know-how to turn that idea into an object comes from somewhere. The world did not wake up one morning to find that paper clips had been created, as though handed down by the gods of Mount Olympus. However that is another story.


Something we take even more for granted are the letters of the alphabet. Although there are many different systems of lettering used by different languages and different peoples (and languages which do not use individual letters at all) I will be discussing the Western (Roman) alphabet. In fact I will be mainly discussing just one letter: 'C'. In the letter 'C' you will find some the of steps on the trail which leads from its origins to the present. The important thing to remember is that these apparently random signs we use to write words have a human history - this is a story of people as much as symbols.

Many centuries ago, long before the Romans held power in the Mediterranean, a people from the East held sway over a huge and powerful commercial empire stretching from the shores of present day Lebanon to Southern Spain. These people, the Phoenicians, established a great city in North Africa called Carthage, a city comprehensively destroyed by the Romans, and a mighty port in Southern Spain which still exists to this day, Cadiz. This city has a strong claim to be the oldest continuously used city in the Western World.

Apart from an apparent liking for calling their cities names beginning with 'C', the Phoenicians have another fascinating connection with that letter (and with its cousin, the letter 'G').

In both Phoenician and Hebrew the word for a Camel is 'gamal' (or 'gamel'). So people have been calling a desert tolerant animal with a hump pretty much the same thing for a long, long time. In Phoenican the symbol for the sound at the start of that word (a sound similar to something between an English 'C' and 'G') was - yes you guessed it - a simplified picture of a camel. Incidentally, in Hebrew the third letter of the alphabet is a 'G' sound and is still called 'gimel'.

So whenever you write a lower case 'g' remember the Phoenicians who called their beasts of burden 'gamel', and used its picture to name a letter - rather as we would say 'Bravo Tango Foxtrot' if we wanted to be absolutely clear about the letters BTF. You are sharing a sound and a thought with a person from the Middle East thousands of years ago.

Good or God ... Due Process and Arbitrary Power

Due Process and Arbitrary Power

On the whole, apart from the dictators themselves and their minions, most people think that dictatorships are 'a bad thing'. For all the flaws of democracy, people generally don't like arbitrary power placed in the hands of one person or group without any accountability. This has not always been the case, and it is not universally the case even now, but it is generally a hard, up-hill slog to argue against democracy at the present time. There is also little faith in the idea of benign dictatorship. This is hardly surprising since even benign dictatorship rests on the arbitrary, and possibly idiosyncratic, decisions of one person or small group of people, and the power to challenge decisions rests either on coercion or influence, rather than good governance.

'Due Process' is an important notion because it embodies what people sometimes call 'a level playing field'. It is no use having a democratic process and a system of laws if the application of the laws themselves is partial, selective and arbitrary. This can be hard as King Arthur discovered when forced to try his own wife in order to uphold the rule of law (so the legend goes). Through most of history there has been very limited 'due process' - there have usually been underclasses to whom the law gave lesser protection and privileged groups who believed (or maybe hoped) that the law was mostly there to protect their interests rather than to serve all with impartiality. These are issues that can seem theoretical and abstract if you just concentrate on the words rather than the very practical issues behind the words. So far from being just abstract theories, these are issues behind both the English Civil War in the seventeenth century and the American War of Independence in the eighteenth century, not to mention the civil rights movement of the twentieth century.

Interestingly, and perhaps paradoxically, Western civilisations have not only accepted but positively encouraged dictatorship in one field: religion. In the West we tend to associate religion with god, and generally with a single creator god. So much do we do this that it seems like a contradiction in terms to speak of a religion without god, or perhaps a corruption of the word 'religion' (as when 'Marxism' is sometimes referred to a godless religion). However not all religions place a (possibly) benign dictator at the pinnacle of creation. Some religions place good before god, and this is where the interesting link with 'due process' comes in.

Let me pose a question: can a creator god be 'bad' (in the sense of doing something that contravenes ethical law)? If a creator god is the ultimate standard of all that is, then surely the answer is 'no', because his (or her or its) word would, literally, be law. Not just conventional, negotiated state law, but ultimate absolute law. Unlike ex-President Nixon who though that an act was legal because he said so, a creator god makes an act right by doing it - for there is no higher standard to appeal to. What God does is good by definition. You can't really argue that God has 'off days'. Since, in this view of existence, morality depends on the benign, but arbitrary, application of the will of a supreme being one day you could wake up and discover that the rules have been changed and coveting, killing and adultery are all obligatory and proper. (The order of application would probably be covet, steal, adultery and then killing unless human nature was radically changed at the same time as the ethical basis of existence). In this view of existence you can't say that its not in God's nature to make such a change, because God is not constrained by any higher force and can arrange things as he/she/it pleases and change them at a whim ... though there would be nobody with the right to judge such actions 'whims'.

Yet somehow I guess most people feel that there is a right and wrong that does not depend on arbitrary commandments. There is a sense that God tells people what is right and wrong, but they would still remain right and wrong regardless of whether we were told about these rules of existence. Various Eastern religions (notably Buddhism and certain aspects of Taoism) embody this view at the heart of their teaching. Although they both accept the existence of 'higher beings' (gods of various kinds), some of which have awesome power, the ultimate purpose of life and nature of existence is not about conforming to the will of higher beings or appeasing them. Even the gods must accept the consequence of the moral order of the universe. In the Buddhist view of existence there is 'due process' both on Earth and in Heaven (to rather simplify their world view).

For centuries there has been hatred and oppression resulting from opposing factions both claiming to be performing 'God's will'. The oft-given apology for this from each side is that the other side is deluded (at best) or an evil corruption (at worst). From the view a non-theistic religion the justification of 'doing God's will' avoids the real question: is the action constructive and helpful. Clearly the terms 'constructive' and 'helpful' need a lot of unpacking to make the meaning clearer, but the fundamental point is that 'doing it because the boss says so' does not remove responsibility for the ethical consequences of an action.

One final provocative thought: if you really believe in a lawful, 'fair' universe perhaps deep in your heart you are closet Buddhist who has not yet 'come out'.