An End to Suffering

by Pankaj Mishra

  David Hume among western philosophers had a view of the self closest to that of the Buddha:

  When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.5

  From this Hume concluded that

  we are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity…The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations…6

  It was this theatre of the mind that the Buddha exhorted his son, Rahula, to observe during meditation. For to do so, he said, was to abandon the conceit ‘I am’. Hume himself drew no such practical implications from his analysis of the data of consciousness, although he helped establish for later philosophers the roots of the intellect in feeling. The idea of reality as a process, first proposed by Heraclitus, entered the mainstream of western philosophy only with Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, William James and the discoveries of modern physics. It was the literary artists of the modern era, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky and Proust, who spoke in their work of the unstable nature of the experiencing self.

  Proust in his evocations of memory seemed to hint that the self was nothing more than a convenient name for causally connected experiences. The narrator of his novel In Search of Lost Time wishes to be a writer but despairs of ever finding coherence in his life; of making sense of his many selves that have had love affairs, conducted friendships and travelled widely. In a famous passage, he describes how one day late in his life, when he has given up on his literary ambitions, he eats a pastry cake dipped in tea:

  No sooner had the warm liquid and the crumbs with it touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory…7

  The taste brings back to the narrator his childhood in a country town where on Sunday mornings he had the same kind of cake dipped in tea. The town and its buildings and people suddenly arise into brilliant clarity in the narrator’s consciousness:

  I feel something start within me, something that leaves its resting place and attempts to rise, something that has been embedded like an anchor at great depth; I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed…8

  It is the epiphany brought on by the cake dipped in tea that suggests to Proust’s narrator a self held together by involuntary memory, the self that reveals itself in particular experiences and can be recreated briefly only when certain causal conditions – smell, taste, sound – are present:

  But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfalteringly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.9

  The series of mental and physical events that are the individual arise dependently at any given moment and over time. They form certain patterns, which tend to reproduce themselves and are relatively stable. You are not the same person at thirty that you were at five, but neither are you completely different. ‘You cannot step into the same river twice,’ Heraclitus claimed, implying that both the river and the person stepping into it change. But they don’t become entirely different entities.

  As Proust discovered, there is a continuous causal relationship between the patterns of mental and physical events that occurred then and are occurring now. It is why he is able to remember. According to Vasubhandhu, the fifth-century Indian philosopher, ‘Remembrance is a new state of consciousness directed to the same object, conditioned as it is by the previous states.’

  The Buddha often spoke of how without milk there can be no yoghurt, and without yoghurt there can be no buttermilk, etc; and how within this process nothing remains unchanged or is totally altered. This continuity also made it impossible for individuals to escape moral responsibility for their acts. As Nagasena explained to Menander, someone who stole mangoes from another man’s trees couldn’t plausibly claim that the mangoes he stole were not the mangoes their owner planted since the mangoes he stole arose dependently upon the mangoes that were previously planted.

  The Buddha extended the principle of causality to human life. There is a short formula that explains how everything is connected and in a state of change and how this change is not random or chaotic but a stable process of causation:

  When this is, that is

  This arising, that arises

  When this is not, that is not

  This ceasing, that ceases.10

  As the Buddha put it:

  From wisps of grass the rope is spun

  By dint of exertion

  By turns of wheel the buckets are raised from the well

  Yet each turn of itself is futile.

  So the turning of all the components of becoming

  Arises from the interaction of one with another

  In the unit the turning cannot be traced

  Either at the beginning or end.

  Where the seed is, there is the young plant,

  But the seed has not the nature of the plant,

  Nor is it something other than the plant, nor is it the plant –

  So is the nature of the law of Righteousness, neither transient nor eternal.11

  The more ambitious twelve-point chain of what Buddhists call dependent origination describes how life exists, arises and continues:

  Through ignorance, volitional actions or karma-formations are conditioned.

  Through volitional actions, consciousness is conditioned.

  Through consciousness, mental and physical phenomena are conditioned.

  Through mental and physical phenomena, the six faculties (five senses and the mind) are conditioned.

  Through the six faculties (sensory and mental), contact is conditioned.

  Through (sensory and mental) contact, sensation is conditioned.

  Through sensation, desire is conditioned.

  Through desire, clinging is conditioned.

  Through clinging, the process of becoming is conditioned.

  Through the process of becoming, birth is conditioned.

  Through birth, decay, death, pain etc are conditioned.

  The general idea here, rendered obscure by the technical language, is no different from the one the Buddha proposed elsewhere: that ignorance as to the impermanent nature of reality and grasping make for continuous rebirth and suffering. As the Buddha told Ananda,

  Were there no grasping of any sort of kind whatever of anyone at anything – that is to say, no grasping at things of sense, no grasping through speculative opinions, no grasping after mere rule and ritual, no grasping through theories of the soul – then, there being no grasping whatever, would there, owing to this cessation, be any appearance of becoming?12

  Since nothing could arise out of nothing, the Buddha denied the notion of an omnipotent creator God. Instead, he posited a world which with its diversity, its structures and capacities had come into being as the result of prior actions of living beings motivated by greed, arrogance, passion and envy – by what he called klesha, afflictions, and their latent counterparts: ignorance, desire for sensual pleasure, thirst for existence, grasping onto identity, etc.

  *

  For Proust, sensual memory lay dormant within human
beings and managed to outlast all changes of personality in our entire lifetime. For the Buddhists thinkers of the Yogachara school, the traces of previous actions outlast even death. Using terms close to the Freudian notion of the unconscious, they asserted that every thought, utterance and action deposits a karmic trace upon the consciousness, which already contains the residue of past lives and so is a bridge across not one lifetime but several.

  The Buddha once spoke of the infant who lies prone and does not even have the notion of ‘personality’, of sensual pleasures, or of aggressiveness towards others. But these dispositions lie latent within him, waiting to mature and influence his actions. As the Yogachara philosopher Vasubhandhu put it:

  The world in its variety arises from action (karma). Actions accumulate by the power of the latent afflictions; because without the latent afflictions (they) are not capable of giving rise to a new existence. Consequently, the latent afflictions are the root of existence.13

  The ‘subject as multiplicity’, man as nothing other than ‘the totality of his drives’ – this was how Nietzsche saw human personality. For him, too, the body was a dynamic process, in which a number of thinking, willing and feeling subjects constantly ebb and flow. The person was a constellation of fluctuating forces, where such impulses as love, malice, sexual desire, pride, cunning and jealousy dominated, and in which even ‘conscious thinking is secretly directed and compelled into definite channels by instincts’:

  The course of logical thoughts and inferences in our brains today corresponds to a process and battle of drives that taken separately are all over illogical and unjust; we usually experience only the outcome of the battle: that is how quickly and covertly this ancient mechanism runs its course in us.14

  As Nietzsche saw it, all human beings came into the world with the same animal-like impulses. What distinguished them from each other was the particular pattern created by the past struggle among these impulses – the pattern that the higher type of man, the self-aware superman, has the ability to override. This was Nietzsche’s own version of karma: man as a psychological complex, who is a consequence of his past dispositions, of how and what he thought and said and did.

  For the Buddha, it was the variously configured psychological complex of human beings that determined their next form of existence – what he called nama-rupa (name and form, denoting the incorporeal and physical aspects of the new person). Consciousness carried over from previous lives could alone explain the presence of consciousness in living creatures:

  Consciousness conditions name and form (i.e. the new empirical person). That should be understood thus: If the consciousness (of one who has died) were not to descend into the mother’s womb, would name and form (the new person) develop there?15

  There were other, more mundane causes attending birth, apart from a conditioned consciousness: a woman and a man. When they come together, new life sprang into being. The conditioned consciousness of a dead man kindles new life, and a new flame burned in the womb, conditioned by, but not identical with or different from, the spark of the dead man’s consciousness. Consciousness thus was conserved in the same way that energy was conserved in the world of matter: something that was never destroyed but only transformed.

  Rebirth will seem impossible only if you think of the self as a stable, enduring substantial entity instead of, as Nietzsche partly understood it, a series of mental and physical events – a conditioned stream of consciousness. According to the Buddha, death doesn’t break the causal connectedness of these events. It breaks up only a particular pattern in which they occur. And such is the nature of causal connectedness that these events start forming another pattern as soon as rebirth takes place. The Buddha thus made rebirth somewhat plausible, even though this remains the one part of his teachings that requires a leap into faith.

  This was not as deterministic for individuals as it may appear. It is true that there is no such thing as an absolutely free will in this Buddhist view of the world. For will and freedom are conditioned by cause and effect, like all other phenomena; the idea of free will is itself conditioned. But as the ‘self-overcoming’ man in Nietzsche’s optimistic vision can rise above the reality of his basic drives and change the pattern formed by them, so the individual in the Buddha’s vision is free to act within this conditioned realm, and strive for liberation from the cycle of rebirths.

  Salvation exists in the purest kind of awareness, which consists of knowing the conditioned nature of phenomena: of knowing how past karmic activities become present predispositions and determine the quality of the current of consciousness that survives the death of the physical body. This awareness was reached through meditation, which weakened preconceptions and psychological constructs formed during these previous karmic activities.

  The acts with the least karmic consequences are those that flow from this awareness: that we lack a fixed or unchanging essence but are assemblages of dynamic yet wholly conditioned mental and physical processes; and that suffering results when we seek to assert our autonomy in a radically interdependent world, when a groundless self seeks endlessly and futilely to ground itself through actions driven by ignorance, greed and delusion, which when frustrated lead to even further attempts at self-affirmation, making suffering appear inevitable and delusion indestructible.

  In the second century AD, Nagarjuna took further the Buddha’s notion of dependent origination.16 He systematized the Buddha’s rejection of theory and concepts; he asserted that all known realities are constructed realities used to order the world and make it intellectually comprehensible. He asserted that nothing can be known except in terms of something else. In itself, each entity is empty of essence.

  We move in our quest for knowledge from concept to concept, but no concept exists on its own: it depends for its existence on other concepts. Analytic and rational thinking produces ideas and opinions, but these are only conventionally true, trapped as they are in the dualistic distinctions imposed by language. Reason throws up its own concepts and dualisms, and tangles us in an undergrowth of notions and views, whereas true insight lay in dismantling intellectual structures and in seeing through to their essential emptiness (shunyata).

  For Nagarjuna, the only right view is no view at all. His suspicion of metaphysics and his view of language as embodying cultural presuppositions make him appear an early precursor of the structuralists and deconstructionists of today. Claude Lévi-Strauss may have been thinking of Nagarjuna’s attempt to deconceptualize the mind when he spoke of the ‘decisive wisdom’ of the Buddha, ‘to which my civilization could contribute only by confirming it’:

  Every effort to understand destroys the object studied in favour of another object of a different nature; this second object requires from us a new effort which destroys it in favour of a third, and so on and so forth until we reach the one lasting presence, the point at which a distinction between meaning and the absence of meaning disappears: the same point from which we began.17

  The Fire Sermon

  THE WORLD AS A network of causal relationships, the emptiness of the self, the thirst for stability, the impermanence of phenomena, the cause of suffering, its cessation through awareness – all these ideas formed the systematic view of human existence that the Buddha offered in Sarnath during the first weeks after his enlightenment.

  When the monsoons ended, he decided to return to Bodh Gaya, where he had spent six years as an ascetic before reaching enlightenment. In a forest on the way, he ran into a group of thirty friends, sons of rich people, much like Yasa and his companions. They had come to the forest on a picnic of sorts. One of the men had brought a courtesan, who had stolen some of their belongings and escaped while they were distracted. The men were looking for her when they came across the Buddha and asked him if he had seen a woman.

  According to some texts, the Buddha asked them if it was better to seek a woman than the self. When they conceded that it was better to seek the self, the Buddha asked them to sit down. He then taught them
the four noble truths. The men were promptly converted.

  What this episode further highlights is how almost all the Buddha’s first lay followers were people from the commercial class – the class that had begun to emerge in the new urban centres of North India just a few decades before the Buddha’s birth. These were people who, in the new conditions of urban living, had slipped out of the Aryan four-fold caste system that held sway in the villages. The old rules didn’t apply to them; they were still outsiders in their new society.

  Like mercantile classes everywhere later, they were insecure, yet to find their intellectual and spiritual culture and construct the grand monuments to reflect it. They chafed at the continuing dominance of the Brahmins, who denied them the status they now felt they had earned through the creation of wealth, and who reserved the right to bestow religious merit. The Buddha’s lesson – that it was up to the individual to examine himself and strive towards goodness – couldn’t but be gratefully received and promoted by the new business class.

  In Bodh Gaya, however, the Buddha faced tougher resistance to his teachings than he had met so far in the callow merchants or the decadent young men of Benares. It is likely that he was tempted to return to the site of his enlightenment by the prospect of converting an old ascetic called Uruvela Kashyapa, who lived on the banks of the river in Bodh Gaya and was respected and revered all across the kingdom of Magadha. He, his brothers, who lived downstream from him, and his hundreds of followers followed the sacrifice-based religion of the Vedas. The Buddha may have seen their conversion as a propaganda coup for himself.