Buddhist Literature as Philosophy, Buddhist Philosophy as Literature

Rafal K. Stepien

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781438480701, 9781438480718
• eBook ISBN: 9781438480725
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism

Explores the relationship between literature and philosophy in classical and contemporary Buddhist texts.

Can literature reveal reality? Is philosophical truth a literary artifice? How does the way we think affect what we can know? Buddhism has been grappling with these questions for centuries, and this book attempts to answer them by exploring the relationship between literature and philosophy across the classical and contemporary Buddhist worlds of India, Tibet, China, Japan, Korea, and North America. Written by leading scholars, the book examines literary texts composed over two millennia, ranging in form from lyric verse, narrative poetry, panegyric, hymn, and koan, to novel, hagiography, (secret) autobiography, autofiction, treatise, and sutra, all in sustained conversation with topics in metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophies of mind, language, literature, and religion.

Interdisciplinary and cross-cultural, this book deliberately works across and against the boundaries separating three mainstays of humanistic pursuit-literature, philosophy, and religion-by focusing on the multiple relationships at play between content and form in works drawn from a truly diverse range of philosophical schools, literary genres, religious cultures, and historical eras. Overall, the book calls into question the very ways in which we do philosophy, study literature, and think about religious texts. It shows that Buddhist thought provides sophisticated responses to some of the perennial problems regarding how we find, create, and apply meaning-on the page, in the mind, and throughout our lives.

Part One

Buddhist Literature as Philosophy

1

Transformative Vision

Coming to See the Buddha’s Reality

AMBER D. CARPENTER

The Bodhisattva in Philosophical Debate

We begin with a story in which the Buddha does some philosophy—indeed, does some metaphysics. In Ārya Śūra’s “Bodhi the Wandering Ascetic,”1 the Bodhisattva2—an erudite ascetic called Bodhi (Jm. 23.1)—becomes the favored advisor to a well-meaning king, to the consternation of the king’s other ministers, who respond by speaking ill of Bodhi to the king. The king, who is also trusting and gullible (Jm. 23.22), believes the slander—or at least allows it to affect how he receives Bodhi. The Bodhisattva in turn, perceiving the new coolness of the king toward him, after first carefully determining that this is indeed personal (not a matter of the king simply being a busy person) decides it is best, for the king as well as for himself and their friendship, to quit the kingdom. Some time later, however, seeing that the naive king’s misguided ministers are trying to lead the king equally astray about the nature of reality and causation, Bodhi returns to sort the situation out.

Before returning to court, the Bodhisattva magically generates a giant monkey, slays it, and puts on its skin as a cloak.3 Thus attired, Bodhi presents himself before king and ministers. The ministers smirk at a renunciant revealed as someone who would slay a monkey to wear its skin, supposing he has simply disqualified himself now from being taken seriously as an advisor, particularly on matters of morality. Bodhi nevertheless addresses each minister in turn regarding his particular view on the nature of causation and the universe, giving arguments against the nihilist (who denies causality altogether), the theist (occasionalist), the fatalist, and the materialist.4 In each case, the Bodhisattva gives metaphysical arguments that are worth being taken seriously: to the nihilist, “If the arrangement, colour, and so on of the different parts of the lotus were not caused by anything, surely they would occur under any conditions” (Jm. 23.27); to the theist, “How can you hope to propitiate him [God] with hymns and prostrations and all that sort of thing when he himself, the Self-Existent, is performing those very actions of yours?” (Jm. 23.35); and so on. In each case Bodhi also points out that, if that minister took his own claims seriously, he would be in no position to judge the Bodhisattva ill for the slaying of a monkey and wearing of its skin. If no events are results of causes, then Bodhi cannot be said to be the cause of the monkey’s demise; if God is the cause of everything, then God killed the monkey, not Bodhi. The set of refutations in fact is framed with the general announcement that each minister will be convicted of self-refutation, and therefore of bad faith: “Anyone who, in his antagonism toward another, says things that undermine his own arguments, as good as destroys himself in his desire to discredit that other person” (Jm. 23.24). In their eagerness to judge ill of Bodhi, each minister has in a different way overreached himself, passing judgment in a way inconsistent with his expressed claims about causality.

Having “crushingly defeated the ministers” (Jm. 23.57),5 the story concludes with Bodhi, restored in the king’s esteem, revealing his clever device (“of course I didn’t kill a live monkey”; Jm. 23.57). He explains that it would in fact be impossible for him to kill a monkey, precisely because of his correct grasp of causation: “Can anyone kill a living creature if he sees that every result stems from a cause, if he behaves responsibly and is aware of a future existence, if he acknowledges goodness and is sensitive?” And the audience is treated to the lengthy homily Bodhi gives the king on virtue, good companions, and a king’s responsibilities to his people.

Here is a case of the Bodhisattva actually doing what is indisputably philosophy.6 He gives reasons and arguments for a conceptual-metaphysical claim about cause, effect, action, and the structure of reality. He systematically argues against each of four incompatible positions in turn, with appeal to reasons that this interlocutor in particular must acknowledge, and which people generally could be expected to acknowledge, independently of any prior ideological commitments. This sets him up to conclude with a specific articulation of the correct view—where that is the only candidate view that avoids all objections brought against the others. Extracted from the surrounding story, this would be an excellent teaching text for introducing students to dependent origination in the context of human social life, and for reflecting on what “karma” ought and ought not mean, and why.

Against Extraction

But the arguments do not come so abstracted. And we might object that my proposal so to abstract them for my students is an ill-conceived one, because students are distractible and find abstract arguments, just handed to them cold, hard to follow. This is essentially the view of Aśvaghos.a, who explains that “it is the way of poetry (kāvya)—one adds honey to the bitter medicine to make it palatable” (Saundarananda 18.63). Peter Khoroche, citing this passage in his introduction to the Jātakamāla, glosses a similar remark by Kumāralāta, to the effect that narratives aim to “present the Buddhist ethic in attractive and easily assimilable form” (Khoroche 1989, xiv). On this view, Buddhist narratives present the Buddhist ethic (and sometimes some highly specific views about the nature of reality) in a friendly sort of way. In a case such as “Bodhi,” the advantage of embedding this philosophical exercise (and argument) within a narrative is that it makes the bitter pill of abstract reasoning easier to swallow. Stories about persons being more entertaining, the philosophy goes in more easily.

Now the bitter pill of abstract philosophy is not frequently an explicit event within Buddhist narratives generally—the Buddha is only depicted “crushing” his ideological opponents in debate so often. So we must consider why the “Buddhist ethic” generally should need honey to make it ‘go into’ its audience. Is the Buddhist ethic especially rebarbative, or is it something about us? The “bitter pill” account of the relevance of narratives (and literature generally) implies a certain moral psychology, and even a kind of metaphysics and epistemology. The underlying idea is that there is truth, reality, and facts that we can understand; but this understanding involves just one part of ourselves. There are other parts to us that do not aim to understand, are not suited to it, but have different and conflicting aims—we like novelty and beauty and play in addition to truth, and sometimes more than it, always regardless of it. Because of this, our attention is easily distracted from the focused attention that the intellect requires if it is to achieve understanding. The antidote to this waywardness is to engage the other non-truth-seeking aspects of ourselves7 in the same activity that the intellect engages in. The only way to do this is to provide pretty pictures, entertainment—pleasure and beauty and play—along with the intellectual stuff, for that is what the noncognitive aspect of us is attracted to and will stick with.8

The window-dressing understanding of narrative, which takes the story to be the pretty but irrelevant dressing up of extractable cognitive content, imagines its audience as having something irrational inside which needs the force of images to keep us on topic. If we were not so swayed by the vivacity of images, and for those who are not (if any such there may be), we could dispense with the story and go directly to the facts, the principle, reality—as perhaps Nāgārjuna (c. 150–250 CE) does in the opening chapter of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, on the topic of cause. We might further think of the ability to dispense with the pretty pictures and go straight to the facts as a sign of intellectual maturity. Many schoolchildren are taught mathematics in this way, via short narratives in which the context-independent relations between numbers (2 + 2 = 4) are embedded in any arbitrarily chosen narrative (Ananda has two flowers; he picks two more. How many flowers does Ananda have now?). One may need some such context to learn at first, but the aim of such exercises is to enable one to recognize the same relations in any context, or indeed independently of any context whatsoever. If we think that narratives might be similarly used to convey ethical truths, we can wring an implicit conception of ethics out of the window-dressing view of narratives. For we are then supposing that there are ethical truths and principles that are context independent in the same way as mathematical principles, not reliant on concrete situations of human life for their sense. If we could master the principles of ethics so as to deploy them context-independently, then we would be morally mature.9

The fact that most Buddhist tales—those collected as the Dhammapada Commentary, those comprising Ārya Śūra’s Jātakamālā, and the Pāli jātakas—begin and end with a framing bit of wisdom, often in verse, may seem to support this function of the Buddhist morality tale. In the case of “Bodhi,” the framing adage is “for those who have helped them in the past, good people feel a sympathy that subsequent ill treatment can do nothing to weaken. This comes of gratitude and ingrained patience.” The story practically advertises, we might say, what the extractable moral content is, and thus advertises the accompanying story as the mere illustration it is. Illustrations are of great benefit to the learner, but are as much use to the morally mature as arithmetical word problems are to the mathematically mature.

It would go too far to deny that Buddhist tales ever or partially work in this way. Many stories have a home in the vinaya literature,10 where they act as stories of first-time offenses, showing what were the events that led to the establishment of a certain monastic rule. Here there is no denying that there is something extracted—a principle, a rule—from the story. Even here, however, the moral psychology and vision of moral maturity implicit in the window-dressing view is rejected. For extracting implies discarding the source, and that is not what we have here—nor are these stories in the vinaya for the sake of preserving the historical record. If they liven up the tedium of a long list or rules, this is because they make rules come alive—or rather, preserve the living expression from which the rules were drawn. Their retention in the vinaya is evidence of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Languages
• Introduction: Philosophy, Literature, Religion: Buddhism as Transdisciplinary Intervention
• Part I: Buddhist Literature as Philosophy
• Part II Buddhist Philosophy as Literature
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover