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Remaining Agnostic About Agnostic Buddhism

Remaining Agnostic About Agnostic Buddhism

Last updated on: November 1, 2011 at 3:13 pm by James Ford

Remaining Agnostic About Agnostic Buddhism 2011-11-01T15:13:14-07:00 James Ford

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The following is an essay written by Victor Lapuszynski. Vic is an old friend and Dharma companion with both a strong practice and a reflective habit. Here he shared a note taking umbrage with my Batchelorphilia, making some very strong points. I think they should be considered by anyone engaged in the conversation about the shape of Batchelor’s Agnostic Buddhism.

I had thought to write something to you in response to an older post, but procrastinated. Then you mentioned Batchelor again, and critiques. Before I read the critiques, and the critiques of the critiques, I feel I should utter a few of my own observations.

In your blogpost, “Getting Over Ourselves,” , of April 6, 2008, you wrote:
“One of Gautama Siddhartha’s great contributions to the spiritual quest is how he challenged the idea of some part to a person that continues past that person’s death. He denied there was some essence, a ‘soul’ occupying our bodies like a passenger on a bus eventually departing for a new ride. At the same time, as Stephen Batchelor points out, Gautama Siddhartha wasn’t able to completely shake the concept. He denied the existence of a ‘soul’ but also spoke of his past lives. While denying any continuing essence to a person, he did posit a way in which the intentions and actions of a person led to specific rebirths for many, many lifetimes.”

Then you praise Batchelor’s advocacy of an agnostic approach to such questions. That would be fine. I think Batchelor’s is an important viewpoint, bringing an important counterweight to New-Age excesses. The trouble is, he is not really agnostic. Look again at the paragraph above. Batchelor obviously believes that Gautama’s acceptance of interlife rebirth was metaphysically impossible. Which gives a metaphysical assertion — that Gautama should have been agnostic about it because it’s impossible to what what can’t be — a privileged position, accepted as truth. He seems unable to consider that perhaps the standard Buddhist model has some real, literal truth to it.

People have all kinds of blind spots. I think the modernist paradigm encourages this particular one. The thing about paradigms is that it is impossible to see how things could possibly be any other way. In much of current American Buddhism, the modernist paradigm of materialism seems to be becoming the normative stance.

It would not be so bad if it were just another culturally shared opinion unconsciously masquerading as common sense. What gets me is when I get characterized as superstitious, thinking wishfully, or failing to consider the matter thoroughly whenever I talk of things that go counter to that paradigm. Where, then, is the agnostic attitude of open listening?

(By the way, this has happened a couple of times to me within our own sangha, with people I regard as friends. They did not say anything, but I could tell from their uncomfortable quiet that they felt much as I would if a friend told me they had converted to a fundamentalist church and were now aggressively going to seek my salvation. [And should you wonder, I feel entirely comfortable with your agnosticism.])

Stephen Batchelor implies that Buddha was unable to shake the concept of rebirth because it was so culturally ingrained. Yet the Buddha broke through the cultural structure of the caste system, and even allowed the ordination of women. Karen Armstrong says that the formal idea of reincarnation was not all that ancient in his time, as has been supposed by practically everyone else. India of the time was an intellectual ferment where many competing ideas were argued everywhere, including atheism and materialism. You are perhaps familiar with the Brahmajala Sutta?

Buddha claimed that he knew the truth of the matter directly, and not through surmise or conjecture or even compelling reason. Typically, he would reject the proposition that the self does not survive death, yet also reject that it does. What ever you think, it is otherwise. His inclusion of multiple lives in the frame of his teachings was not as straightforward a proposition as Batchelor’s dismissal would imply.

So where would that leave us, who admire the obvious wisdom of the Buddha, when he said that he knew directly the truth of rebirth? If we are so embedded in the materialist paradigm that we cannot accept his matter-of-fact assertions as to our continued karmic process in future rebirths, he have to doubt his honesty or else considered him deluded. No one wants to believe the Buddha could have been dishonest, knowingly telling metaphysical lies, no matter how white he thought them. Since our culture has recently become aware of how pervasive and overpowering cultural influence is, we would rather project delusion onto the Buddha from cultural influence. Even though one might summarize Buddhist practice as essentially cultural dehypnosis.

I have friends who are sane, practical, educated, and scientific, who understand how to reason and weigh evidence, who have lucid and obvious encounters with intelligent entities most of us find imperceptible. How do I interact with them? Knowing how much a trickster the Mind is, I fall shy of complete acceptance of what they say as “real.” Yet I have found them reliable in all other ways. Since, in most cases, I have no urgent need to judge their stories as true or false, I do not, but store their stories as testimonial evidence for further consideration.

The situation is somewhat the same in my relation to the Buddha’s teachings, explicit or implicit. There is some difference, however, in that I am a student of the teachings and need to interact with them as a matter of practice. Any spiritual tradition worth pursuing is an organic body, and we hazard its effectiveness if we reject parts of it too readily. Some things might be obviously discardable, like the doctrine that only those born male can become Buddhas, but the stage of endless rebirth is the backdrop of much of the Buddha’s preaching. So, I approach it with agnostically tentative acceptance, which I believe is a proper and sufficient attitude for practice. But I do not say that others should share this attitude in order to practice Buddhism properly.

If Stephen Batchelor had said something like, “Well, the Buddha implicitly and explicitly accepts a metaphysical framework of multiple lifetimes connected by karma so as to say in some way that an individual continues from life to life, but we need not think a) that we know what the Buddha means by this, or b) that what we think he might have meant is true,” then I would have whatsoever no problem with his agnosticism. As you point out, certainty is a hindrance to understanding. Agnosticism is a vital attitude, I think, to Buddhist practice, but why consider it necessary for a teacher? Especially one who claims direct knowledge from advanced yogic practice? Rather pointless preaching agnosticism about superior spiritual beings to one who experiences having angels over for lunch.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~O~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A brief interlude in the flow:

Irony abounds in this whole matter. On the side of those who wish to believe in multiple births, one can ask, What is the practical difference between death and oblivion, and death and forgetfulness? In either case, the previous life is gone. We count amnesia a tragedy, and also Alzheimer’s. Yet those who crave continued existence feel a comfort in the thought they will continue to exist, though all previous memory be drowned in Lethe. Perhaps those memories will be retained in the Akasha and someday retrievable when the person has attained a high yogic aptitude, or maybe God will remember; but even if all memory is lost forever, such people still feel comfort in the thought that they will continue. Why not take comfort in the thought that the thought of discomfort will disappear?

Those who do not believe in continued existence still believe in other lives that will continue beyond their own. Yet, since an individual is an expression of the All-inclusive Whatever, and our karma obviously lives on to condition future expressions of the All-inclusive Whatever, what is the practical difference between that and rebirth?

A key point of Buddhist practice is to counter the influence of the three cravings. How sense-desire gets us into trouble is easy to see. But then one must confront one’s craving for existence, a very deep and possibly prebiological urge, something some scriptures say is responsible for the round of birth and death. Even if one is convinced utterly of one’s future existence, one has to discard all desire for it and welcome oblivion and annihilation should they come, as I understand this Path. Those who disbelieve in continued existence may pride themselves in their resistance to wishful thinking, in facing up to hard facts, in having no craving for existence, and even in finding solace in the peace of that fore-imagined oblivion:

From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be That no man lives forever, That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea.

Yet what if safety did not await old Swinburne? Craving for non-existence was taught as another hindrance long before Freud recognized it as a component of the turbulence of consciousness. If one expects an analgesic blankness, panic and confusion may very well arise after death, and pity the surprised suicide!

Existent beings, the most prevalent kind, who contemplate their own nonexistence may get a creeped-out kink in their consciousness, a kind of “does not compute” monkey-wrench similar to division by zero. Isn’t it funny that only beings that live fear death?

Think about it — here we have a tiny slice of time sandwiched between two eternities. Yet all we who think about it are in this infinitesimal slice — what are the odds!? Perhaps we are never nowhere. Assuming we are somewhere at all.

All this suggests that our ways of thinking about rebirth, annihilation, and all that is very flawed. Our conceptions are not very applicable to whatever the reality might be.
Consider the statement, “Gautama Siddhartha wasn’t able to completely shake the concept [of rebirth],” in the light of what he said about craving for existence or nonexistence. Doesn’t it seem oddly incommensurate that someone who says dropping the attachment to the three cravings is one’s practice, can’t drop an attachment to the idea of rebirth for cultural reasons?

My approach, as already stated, is to take the Buddha at his word, as best I can understand it, knowing I can be wrong or Buddha could be wrong, but not to worry about it much, and instead pay attention to what is before me. Shakyamuni has a good track record, so far as I have been able to verify his teachings, and I have nothing which detracts from it so far.

I have experienced the universe’s benevolence. I hope to enter my death like a child going to sleep with parents hovering over me in protection, with what dream I wake into unknown, but alright with me.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~O~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You wrote:

“And, who knows? There really is more to heaven and earth than can be encompassed by our ideas of what should be. At the same time I have to admit I find the lack of any obvious mechanism to facilitate one life leading to another a daunting obstacle.”

The materialist paradigm is very convincing, but what else would you expect from a paradigm? These are magic shows so skilled we have no idea how what we perceive can be anything other than what it appears to be. But ultimately the materialist stance is no different in nature than any other mythology, given to us by priests to organize our understanding of life. Time will refine or supplant it as our understanding changes.

Although philosophical materialists look to science for the confirmation of their philosophical ideas, science doesn’t give a hoot about anything except the study of the evidence of the senses. Science neither affirms nor denies metaphysical propositions, except insofar as they enter the sensory world (e.g.: geocentrism). With wonderful self-correcting mechanisms and checks such as peer review and predictability and universal reverifiability, it is indeed a marvelous tool of the intellect, and the best mythology yet for describing usefully the recurrent patterns of the regularities of our sensory experience.

Yet mythology it is. It is a story told. A narrative handed down by priests. No one now can say they have verified all of science, or even all of a branch or subbranch, by their own observations and experiments. Even those who mock others for accepting “truths” on authority, must themselves rely on the authority of others for their knowledge. Even those who abhor “truths” taken on faith, must have faith in the consensus of the scientific collegium, for life is much shorter than the totality of the scientific enterprise.

“I have to admit I find the lack of any obvious mechanism to facilitate one life leading to another a daunting obstacle.” How did you feel when you first heard of the Big Bang and its attendant concepts, like time having a beginning and no “before”? But do you now have any difficulty accepting it, as it seems the vast majority of priests agree?

I would guess that your criteria for a suitable mechanism would have to conform to certain accepted norms of time and causality. How well have you examined these norms? Is time understood well enough to know that it either ends at death, or continues the same way afterwards? What is the meaning of causality, anyway . . . what causes causality?

The narrative of philosophical materialism is grander than that of science and says things science does not — that the material world exists independently of our experience of it, and that all phenomena are ultimately explainable in material terms. These are unprovable assumptions taken in a usually unacknowledged leap of faith. They are not unreasonable assumptions, but there is some arrogance associated with their being taken for absolute truths.

I’m sure you’ve run across David Bohm’s idea of Explicate and Implicate Orders of reality. It’s easy to argue that any system must refer outside itself for consistency. The universe, for example. What was it that allowed it to happen, where were those rules stored? I don’t believe in some supernatural parallel reality, but inside and outside are not hard to conceive of.
The conceit of philosophical materialism that material existence is all there is sustains itself like any paradigm — instances of incongruent evidence are actively unperceived save in rare circumstances that may lead to the cracking of the paradigm into a new one. Breadcrumb trails from locales of an Elsewhere. When a paradigm cracks, it might be seen that evidence for the new understanding was there all along. But I’m not clear on whether some indigestible new evidence is necessary, or just a good shake to the faith one has unconsciously in one’s favored present paradigm.

I recently had a quasiformal argument with the only hard materialist on my little Zen buddies’ list. The end of it was like this:

I want to finish with a certain consideration. Here are two possible ontological scenarios.

The first is that the material world has an independent reality which can exist whether consciousness does or not. All other things, non-material realities, like money, patterns, and consciousness, are derived from relations between material objects.

The other is that awareness is coextensive with existence. All entities and objects possess/are awareness in order to exist at all. Matter is essentially a creation of awareness. Although all things have awareness, it functions in complex ways in sentient beings.

In alt.zen, years of ontological wrangling have culminated in the brain-vat principle, which all the reasonable regulars at a.z I’ve read seem to have accepted. I accept it also. It’s like this:

Q: How can you know that you are in the reality you seem to be,
and not some brain in a vat being fed hallucinations
from a computer input?
A: You can’t.

Ontologies are not provable. Our life, whatever it is, is demonstrably hallucinatory. We live an illusion of our own making, depending on our cravings and fears. We can know this, because sometimes we step outside, just a little, and see beyond our cravings and fears, and see how reality changes. We know sometimes we dream and usually do not know when we are dreaming. Chuang-tzu’s question was regifted to me by my mother half a year after she died. I assumed that, since I saw her alive and real, that I must have dreamt her death. She asked how I know I wasn’t dreaming then. I examined her and the surroundings, my body, the sunlight, the breeze, and all was as it should be in reality. I told her I was definitely awake. Then I awoke, and was cured of certainty for good. I would not be surprised if the history of consciousness were nothing other than waking from one dream into another, ad infinitum.

The two ontological narratives given for example above are equally unprovable, by the brain-vat principle. Does this make their status equivalent?

Actually, one of them has something going for it the other does not. That awareness exists is directly verifiable, but there is no evidence for material existence that is independent of awareness.

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