Our certainty about the things we know varies on a
fairly wide spectrum when one thinks about it. We take for granted the reality
of things like a desk chair, our food, other people we interact with. But there
are things that are believed in that aren’t necessarily fully thought out, such
as our ethics, or even contemplated on as to whether they’re necessary, such as
supernatural thinking of one form or another. To focus too much on whether
something is absolutely or conventionally true misses the point of what I spoke
about in “Two Truths, One Path,” .
The fluctuating nature of existence necessitates that we take different
perspectives on things, but nonetheless maintain a degree of consistency even
in the vacillation. Knowledge is more difficult to remain constant on, since it
supports every other action we do. We behave ethically due to beliefs about
what is good and bad respectively, things are considered mistaken or accurate
because of prior experience and evidence considered together logically, and
even logic has a basis in what we consider valid and sound. Buddhism in
particular is something that many find to be highly lacking as concerns formal
knowledge. Everything seems more based in practice, which varies by the
individual, be they monastic or layperson or something in between. With this in
mind, it comes to the question: does Buddhism make any real knowledge claims,
philosophically speaking?
No formal structure exists across all of Buddhism
for karma or rebirth, two of the biggest issues in studies of the philosophy,
let alone whether Buddha was simply a wise man or a figure that possessed semi
divine powers of near omniscience even before he actually shuffled off his
proverbial earthly coil. This creates a lot of ambivalence that I noticed early
on when first studying Buddhism in a college environment five years ago. Our
introduction to Asian religions course focused on Hinduism, Buddhism and
Chinese folk religion for the most part, so there was more detail put into each
of them. A question I recall coming up for Buddhism that reflected issues I
spoke about in part with both “Seeds and Fruits, Actions and Results,” and “Rebirth, Not Reincarnation” was how a person’s karma can continue on if the person reborn is not the same
as they were before? There are a few answers to this, the one I prefer being
that karma is more a state of things instead of an individual person. There is
such a thing as individual karma in the sense of one’s own actions and results
affecting oneself primarily, but actions and results usually affect more people
than we realize in one way or another. And this also solves that issue of
rebirth in that karma isn’t co-opted by rebirth’s affecting any individual’s
identity, subject to impermanence as they all are, particularly at death.
Another answer to how a person’s karma might continue on even if the person
themselves is subject to dissipation at death in some sense is that there is a
stream of consciousness that is very subtly intertwined with the next rebirth,
which retains the person’s memories, thoughts, etc. This, of course, brings up
the more supernatural and even superstitious aspects of Buddhism as it spread
out from India, though there were those that believed these things even within
the founding country of Gautama’s teachings.
There is a tendency within lay Buddhism and even
ordained Buddhism to follow the school that affirms Buddha was supernatural in
some sense and that many aspects of Buddhism that are confusing should be answered
with some form of mysterious and transcendent reality, such as Gautama Buddha
being able to read people’s thoughts even in past lives, recall his past lives
in vivid detail, not to mention the stream of consciousness spoken of before
and the actual reality of the other six realms, particularly the lower and
upper 2 where entities of a very unfalsifiable nature, however limited in their
overall power, exist (hell beings, preta, asura and deva) I’m not saying this
isn’t genuine Buddhism in the sense of it developing within cultures that don’t
have opposition to a system as long as it can be incorporated into pre-existing
beliefs. This is how Buddhism coexists so well with the animistic and
polytheistic cultures that it holds high influence in today. The Buddha was
notoriously silent on many of these matters, and unfortunately people take his
silence as an ambivalent acceptance of the reality of things that he was
emphatically against believing in just because of traditions or the like. This
vague sense of “divine wisdom” we get from Gautama as depicted in many accounts
of his life is what creates much of the mixed ideas that exist in Buddhism as
it modernized and was incorporated into such cultures as Japan’s, where
everything was believed to have a spirit in it, including mountains and rivers,
let alone people and animals. Resolving the conflicts between them through
syncretism is a solution, though it only muddies the waters as to what might be
considered even remotely original Buddhism.
The Buddhist perspective on knowledge is not
absolute in the grandest scheme, but only in those things that are beneficial
to us. To know suffering is as valuable as knowing happiness, and knowing they
are both fleeting is even more important. What is worth knowing and being
confident, not arrogant, about are ideas that have practical applications in
everyday life. Not just in isolated academic discussions, but something anyone
can talk about in common language. Even if there isn’t always a structured
dogma or official teaching in any sense of the word about such things as the
principle of karma, derived in part from Hindu teachings that existed in the
same culture with similar ambivalence, it doesn’t mean Buddhism doesn’t have
certainty on other things. Life is most definitely dukkha, unsatisfactory in
our initial approach to it, the cause of it is a combination of craving and
ignorance, one can get over this dukkha approach to life and that is through
living the eightfold path. There are also the 5 precepts and other traditions
that are commonly held to have value across Buddhism, such as meditation and
the virtues of metta and prajna.
To say Buddhism is cryptic and mysterious is not
inaccurate, but rejecting it based on a standard of credulity requiring strict
Western logic can miss the point of the nondualistic perspective that much of
Eastern thought, Buddhism and Daoism especially, presents. Simply viewing
things through a lens of “either/or” neglects the “both/and” answers we can see
if we consider things differently, though not to the extent of throwing reason
out the window. But as there are many sides to a diamond, life has many
perspectives we can view it through and find different insights that we might
not have discovered otherwise. That’s where Buddhism benefits: it seeks out
answers wherever they may come and brings things together without reducing it
in scale. The holistic nature of it doesn’t mean we neglect reducing things as
is appropriate. It’s always a balance with Buddhist philosophy and practice and
to come even close to perfect takes a lifetime, if not more in a sense. Until
next time, Namaste and aloha.
