Back again, not dead but reborn.

I’m back, after a hiatus.  At long last, since I’ve had a lot of time to think about it in the meantime, I’m dealing with the subjects of death and rebirth.

Among other concepts, the traditional Buddhist six realms of rebirth seem to be inherited from Hinduism, which is to be expected given Buddhism’s roots.  As for how rebirth is supposed to work under these circumstances, look at the literal description: being reborn as a different life form, but retaining the knowledge of the previous life forms.  According to this view, any knowledge from previous lives has to be stored independently of the form, and in a format compatible with all possible forms, which is a problem.  Also, this view assumes that what you are is stored entirely in your knowledge, which is another problem, as your form also affects you: what you do, how you react, and the like.  Furthermore, someone else who gains your memories won’t become you; at best, they may interpret some of those memories the same way you do.  Your memories may influence them, but influence is not the same as identity.  (The technological goal some people have of achieving immortality by copying their consciousness into a computerized form not subject to ordinary human limits has this same discrepancy.  Running the same software on two different kinds of hardware, so to speak, will not give the exact same results for both.)  The alternative to it all is to just look at what’s there with regard to rebirth.  Both your knowledge and your associated form change from moment to moment.  Who and what you were five minutes ago, or even a split second ago, is not who and what you are now.  Rebirth is therefore a continual process, just another form of change and, hence, impermanence.  You cannot be reborn as another life form in the literal sense because of anatman: there is no permanent you.  As such, the six realms would be metaphorical states of mind, rather than literal places.

(As an aside, with regard to forms, I’ve always found the pretas to be the most fascinating in terms of imagery.  They’re the embodiment of a self-imposed addiction, an inability to appreciate what fills the void for more than a moment, if they can appreciate it at all.  “I’ll never be happy until I have this bright shiny thing!  Okay, I have it.  Now I’ll never be happy until I have this even newer bright shiny thing!”  There’s also another interesting form mentioned in the Brahmajala Sutta of the Digha Nikaya: the unconscious devas.  These seem to be the embodiment of quietism, of the idea that blocking out all thoughts is the solution to the problem of duhkha.  Eventually, of course, they’re supposed to have conscious thoughts in spite of this, and these thoughts kill them and lead them to be reborn elsewhere.  In a similar vein, ordinary humans who try to stop all thinking the same way will eventually fail the same way, although their thoughts will, of course, be non-lethal.)

Compared to the above framework, rebirth in Sukhavati according to the Pure Land viewpoint is much simplified.  The goal is simply to be reborn under the optimal conditions there, and the only other realms accessible for rebirth after that are the human and deva realms.  The latter is apparently an extension of Sukhavati’s egalitarianism, as humans and devas are supposed to be practically indistinguishable there.  Additionally, per the Larger Sukhavativyuha Sutra, a practitioner is supposed to see a vision at death, either of Amitabha and his entourage personally, or a facsimile practically indistinguishable from it (presumably unless the practitioner isn’t one with Amitabha already).  This is a recurring metaphorical theme: all distinctions between human and deva, supposed reality and vision, and Sukhavati and the myriad other Pure Lands it encompasses, become blurred, and the false concept of duality is effectively broken.

For the sake of argument, I’ll also take a materialist tack.  The idea of having your existence cease upon death is dubious, as you have to properly determine exactly what ceases to exist for that to make sense.  It can’t just be consciousness, since you can be unconscious without being dead.  It also can’t just be the matter and energy of the body and mind, since both do begin to decay but do not disappear immediately upon death.  Additionally, living things can be revived under limited circumstances after being dead for a short time.  Also, all cells in the living body continually die and are replaced until, given enough time, the body as a whole has been replaced.  Furthermore, having things cease to exist, as opposed to having them merely change into other things (as parts of them do throughout existence anyway), violates the law of conservation of mass.  In short, everything gets further muddled.  There seems to be the same kind of flawed connective logic here as in Descartes’ axiom: “I think, therefore I am.”  It sounds good until you look at the implications in enough detail, at which point the two qualities show themselves as correlating in some instances, but effectively separate.  “The chair I’m sitting in must think, because it is.”

In the end, focusing on any metaphysical issues of death and/or rebirth will lead to speculation due to lack of evidence.  The aforementioned Brahmajala Sutta goes into much detail about avoiding this (also with other forms of speculation not related to death and rebirth).  While it does assume that memories attributed to past lives are actually from said lives, it cautions against extrapolating anything from them; for example, if you remember only so many eons of past lives, you can’t draw the conclusion that you’ve existed for eternity based on that, since you don’t remember eternity.

On the scientific side, science can provide more than enough details of the decay of the physical form upon death; that isn’t in question.  What is in question is whether there’s more to it than the physical form.  Regardless of belief, the only way to know for certain what happens after death is to either wait until science advances to the point where it can tell us, or, failing that, to die and see for oneself.  The character of Lazarus Long in Robert Heinlein’s Time Enough For Love covered this succinctly: “Soon enough you will know.  So why fret about it?”

Universal overkill and related things.

One of the many things I haven’t gotten around to talking about yet is the subject of karma.  (There’s the related subject of rebirth, but I’ll deal with that separately.)  The raw definition of karma is action.  I’ve often heard it used as a synonym for fate, but that seems to refers to the effects of karma rather than karma itself.  Essentially, karma and the effects of karma are really just different terminology for cause and effect, or for action and consequence.  As such, it’s not good or evil in itself.  To quote Robert Green Ingersoll: “The idea of right and wrong is born in man’s capacity to enjoy and suffer.”  Good effects or consequences will come from good actions, and bad from bad, after the fact.  This is the universe in action.

The paradox here is that you often don’t know what consequences an action will have, and, even when you do, you have to look at all of those consequences.  Hypothetically, if doing something will give you a few short-term negative results but many long-term positive results, you should do it, since the good outweighs the bad.  If you really don’t know what all of the results of an action might be, as happens most often in the real world, you just do what you can with what you do know, or what you can guess.  If what you do involves enjoying yourself by making others suffer, you’ll eventually suffer for it too, because you’ll eventually lose the capacity to cause such suffering, and your unfulfilled desire to do it will punish you; you’ll become bored with it, and your boredom will punish you; etc.  Or, if all else fails, you’ll die and be unable to do it anymore, and knowing that you can’t do it forever, even before your actual death, will punish you.

Of course, it’s not really fair if you get away with inflicting suffering for too long, but the universe isn’t fair, as anyone living in it can tell you.  It’s the best you’ll get unless someone or something intervenes in the interest of justice, assuming it even knows enough to determine what justice is.  It’s like expecting the universe to, say, solve all human problems: in the extreme long term, it will, if only because humanity will go extinct, and then there’ll be no more human problems because there’ll be no more humans.  The only thing the universe loves is overkill, if it can be said to love anything; it’s not completely indifferent to you, or you wouldn’t be subject to its rules, but it certainly doesn’t love you.  Although, in a sense, your seeing it as it is could be interpreted as your loving it.

(The bodhisattva ideal of omniscience, or, to an extent, any story in which a character has knowledge of the future, leads to an interesting angle here.  If you know what all possible results are, you can do whatever will lead to the best results, regardless of whether those with incomplete knowledge regard it as good or evil.  Incidentally, a state of complete knowledge is the only one in which doing something for the so-called greater good makes any sense.)

And all of this assumes that your circumstances permit you to actually do what you want to do, which isn’t guaranteed.  There’s a Shin Buddhist example in Tannisho XIII dealing with this: Yui-en promises in advance to follow an order from Shinran, but after learning that the order is to commit a thousand murders to be reborn in Sukhavati, he can’t bring himself to do it.  But it turns out to be a lesson on karma’s effects: they can make us desire to do evil for whatever reason but end up doing good, or vice versa.  So, even if Yui-en were a psychopath and had no qualms about the mass killing, it wouldn’t necessarily mean that he would succeed in doing it, and if he did end up in the Pure Land for it, he would be subject to the same fate as anyone else, with the same state of mind as anyone else (which would presumably give him enough insight to abandon his murderous ways).  I would note that, as used here, karma seems to refer to the potential for action, or motivation, as part of action.  As Shinran said: “Under the influence of our karmic past we human beings will do anything.”  Effectively, then, Murphy’s Law is just another manifestation of karma.  Chaos is built into the system.

In this way, human moral perfection is shown as the impossibility it is.  It also ties into what I see as the limit of enlightenment: just because you know the right thing to do doesn’t mean you’ll always do it, whether from a flaw inherent to humanity or from the universe’s not cooperating.  If I ever reach enlightenment myself, I might see this differently, but as it is, if I claim to be enlightened, the only sign will be my glowing with a brown aura, because of what I’ll be completely full of.

Walking my admittedly twisted path.

I figure I should get around to describing how I practice.  I use the usual techniques when I can, but I also have to look beyond them to an extent.  Beyond chanting, I’ve had to come up with a few others, some rooted in tradition and some not.

First, there’s visualization.  Shin doesn’t require it, but the Visualization Sutra and earlier Pure Land sources mention it.  I have a vivid imagination, and even if I can’t use the exact technique laid out in the Visualization Sutra (for example, I can’t always watch the sun set), the Pure Land sutras themselves are filled with enough colorful imagery, among other things, that they can be a proper substitute.

Second, there’s breathing, as it’s also used in some Theravada meditation techniques.  I find it easy enough to mix with the chanting if I do the latter mentally: for example, the first two syllables of “Amitabha” when I inhale, and the last two when I exhale.  Incidentally, the reason why I find chanting effective is because it helps me set up a mental rhythm, as this kind of breathing also does.  (Besides, if I can get songs stuck in my head as often as I do, it’s not hard to get some kind of rhythm going.)

Third, there’s a type of contemplation I’ve been doing for awhile.  It’s difficult to describe; there’s probably a term for it somewhere.  I just look at anything in chaos (which, to a degree, covers most things), and try to see the beauty in one still frame of it: an unmoving mess, in various levels of decay and disorder, scattered, strewn around, in disharmony, distorted, uneven, with its reeling halted for a split second.  This is how it is.  It has its own kind of order and its own standard, and you can see both if you just look at it without trying to mentally reshape it first to fit your own ideas of both.  Whatever this is called, I get a calming state of mind from it, and so it’s useful.

For whatever good it might do, I’m looking for the path to, if not a completely pure mind, at least a vaguely cleaner one.

Power, ego, and their misuses.

I’ve been thinking about the nature of power lately, and what it means with regard to others.  There are more than enough arguments over whether or not supernatural beings exist, and, if so, what their natures are.  I figure that the more important question is what you do with literal supernatural beings if you have them, since it’s a reflection of what you do with other beings in general.

For the record, the only voice in my head is my own, and has been for as long as I can remember.  This means that for me, prayer in the traditional sense is effectively like talking to myself.  And I can clasp my hands and talk to myself all I like, but it won’t be productive.  However, that’s not the only reason why I have little use for the supernatural.  I’ll explain below.  Furthermore, for simplicity’s sake, I’ll limit my explanation to single gods, although anything perceived as superhuman can be used according to the same principles, even impersonal forces that aren’t beings as such.  Finally, note that I’m generally referring to extreme cases and not ordinary ones.

Starting off, an important aspect of how any supernatural beings are treated by humans is how much power is attributed to them to intervene in human affairs.  Naturally, the more power they have in this area, the more their worshippers will try to make use of it.

At one end, there are things like the deistic viewpoint, that a god intervened only to initially create the universe, and the pantheistic viewpoint, that a god and the universe are one and the same, in which case the idea of intervention as such becomes nonsensical.  The latter is the furthest I’ve ever gone in the theism direction: if one interprets the universe as having an ego, one can call it a god, although it’s still an abstraction rather than a literal being.  A similar idea can be applied elsewhere: for example, if one interprets Buddha-nature as having an ego, one can call that abstraction Amitabha.  (And, as before, being an abstraction, he wouldn’t intervene as such.  Although some people might think otherwise, for the wrong reasons: “I call upon Amitabha to turn his back on you!  And may you be blinded by the infinite light shooting from his posterior!”)

At the other end, there are things like the Abrahamic god, described as the model for humanity and purely omnipotent. (I would note that one of the main uses of power is to get away with things that one would not otherwise get away with, to defer the consequences of one’s actions.  Used this way, it effectively dissociates one from reality, since it leads to thinking that lacking consequences are the norm.  However, it’s only temporary, as power itself is.  If omnipotence means complete freedom from consequences, then there’s no such thing as omnipotence.) This other end is where the problem occurs, that of attribution.  When it comes to a god’s will, you first have to decide what that god’s will is, which means that you’re the one in control.  And if you’re the one in control, you can decide that something is a god’s will only when it aligns with your will.  Accounts of a god may influence your ideas of what that god is; but the stronger your belief gets, the more you’re convinced of your own rightness in general; the more you worship what you believe your god is; the more you remodel your god after yourself due to your perceived rightness; and the more you turn whatever flavor of theism you started with into closet autotheism.

This is what fanaticism is: the loss of the ability to tell the difference between what’s true and what you’ve made yourself believe is true, because your beliefs define reality, instead of the other way around.  If the facts don’t match reality, change reality, because you can never be wrong.  It’s the difference between doing evil and telling yourself it’s good, and doing evil and making yourself believe it’s good.  It’s the difference between using morality as a socially acceptable cover for self-interest, and conflating morality with self-interest with no need for cover.  In this example, your god serves you.  He loves you because you order him to.  On your orders, he takes responsibility for any negative condequences of your actions so you don’t have to.  He is nominally omnipotent, but he needs you for everything, and he can do nothing without you.  He gets called evil in your stead, and you threaten people weaker than you into worshipping him in your stead.  He speaks only as a voice in your head, and even then, only to say yes.  If he says no, or anything else you don’t want to hear, he’s not your god, but your anti-god (your devil, assuming you have one), an auditory hallucination, or the like, until he starts cooperating again.

Even under normal circumstances, the same issues with attribution occur to a lesser extent; the egoistic roots are there if one doesn’t keep them in check.  From the theistic viewpoint: “[Something I want] has been done, so there is a god!”  “My prayers have been answered, so there is a god!”  And from the opposite viewpoint, not so much atheistic as anti-theistic: “If a god existed, he would do [something I want], but it hasn’t been done, so no gods exist!”  “My prayers have gone unanswered, so no gods exist!”  Both groups operate under the same assumption: A god’s existence depends on how often he does what you would do, and on how well he answers your prayers (i.e., how well he takes your orders).  Gods exist because they’re good servants, or they don’t exist because they’re bad servants.  Just as the extremists do, these groups need only one thing from gods: agreement.

And even if you take supernaturalism entirely out of the picture, the same issues remain.  A conscience that always agrees is worse than none at all, because it acts as encouragement.  The strictly materialistic idea that what is morally good for humans is defined not by supernatural things, but what is good for human society or the human species, merely replaces a supernatural imperative with a natural (or biological) imperative; what if, through some set of unusual circumstances, such as a human consciousness transferred into a machine, there is no such imperative?

So the point of all this is that a major reason that I have little use for the supernatural, besides my distrust of the magical thinking that many such things require, is because there’s too much potential for misuse.  It promotes a slaveowner mindset, and where’s the good in that?  If there actually are supernatural beings, leave them alone.  If there aren’t, leave them alone anyway for the principle of it.  If what you call supernatural beings exist as powerless creations of men, give their creators reason to stop exploiting them.

Zen and Shin, from one to the other.

I tried Zen Buddhism for a long while, but I couldn’t get that particular approach to work for me.  Due to a lack of masters anywhere near where I live, I had to make my own attempts at mental discovery, and I eventually grew tired of not knowing what I was doing on that front.  Also, due to medical circumstances which still persist, I could only sit cross-legged for twenty or thirty minutes at the most, after which the only things I could concentrate on included whether om my f***ing f***ing motherf***ing hamstrings svaha counted as a mantra.

I ended up on a quest to find something that did work for me, and my encounter with Shin started out as curiosity as to how a branch of Buddhism could end up sounding like Protestant Christianity.  After studying it in detail, starting with D. T. Suzuki’s Buddha of Infinite Light (which, admittedly, took a Zen-like approach) and then going into the earlier traditions it drew from, I found that it was only superficially so, and actually kept most of what I thought of as the philosophical core of Buddhism.

Effectively, Zen and Shin are two different paths to the same goal.  The goal of Zen is apparently to realize Buddha-nature by wearing out the self, through sitting with no goal (Soto) or trying to answer impossible questions (Rinzai).  On the other hand, according to Shinran Shonin’s works, Shin seems to do the same by treating Buddha-nature as an other, and focusing on that other (Amida, a.k.a. Amitabha) to the exclusion of the self.  And all this doesn’t even account for other types of Buddhism that mix Zen and Pure Land elements, such as Obaku Zen.

In any case, Amitabha is another archetype of Buddhist ideals, without the constraints of the human world which are imposed on Shakyamuni.  If you’re an embodiment of compassion and wisdom, trying to bring all beings to enlightenment, and you hypothetically have infinite power to achieve that goal, what do you do?  Set up a perfect environment for enlightenment, to make it easy for beings to achieve it, and make it easy for beings to reach that environment as well.  Let them come to you, in accordance with Shakyamuni’s mentality of ehi passiko: come see for yourself.

Also, as an aside, Shinran’s division of Buddhist practices into self-power and other-power nicely demonstrates the paradox of dualism in a sense.  Zen may be self-power in the sense of using the ego against itself, but it still requires the other-power of e.g. a master to properly guide you as a student.  And Shin may be other-power in the sense of subsuming the ego in Amitabha, but it still requires the self-power of e.g. sincerely chanting Amitabha’s name.

Statues and archetypes.

I have one Buddha statue.  It’s a six-inch lump of metal shaped like what someone imagined the Buddha to look like long after the fact, and in all likelihood got wrong due to the twistings of history, culture, and time.  (And that’s not even counting confusion with, say, Hotei; the traditional Buddha image isn’t of a bald smiling fat man.)

In a sense, the statue is just another indicator that the true Buddha is a product of mind.  Like the statue, the historical accounts of Shakyamuni have been twisted.  (This can, of course, also apply to any other human or human-like religious figure.  I’m focusing on Shakyamuni for now because, for one thing, he’s depicted in more human terms than Amitabha is.  Literally shooting infinite light from every bodily orifice is problematic, to put it mildly.  But I digress.)  The Shakyamuni described in the sutras may have been based on an actual person at one time, but he’s been exaggerated and reshaped to produce a legendary figure, more like what some believe he should be than what he is.

Despite the distortions, however, the current accounts are still useful.  The ideals have become more important than their origins, and survive because they’re something to strive towards.  Some people need role models (and even those who don’t will still end up influenced by any humans they come in contact with, positively or negatively), and these ideals, these archetypes, provide them.  The archetypes shouldn’t be confused with reality, as they’re too perfect.  They also tend to ignore the laws of reality, substituting magic in order to demonstrate ideal behavior without the limitations imposed by reality.

All these things aren’t literally true, but they don’t need to be, and if one lives in anything like the real world, they shouldn’t be.  Any accounts outside of abstract facts are going to be filtered through others’ egos, perspectives, cultures, languages, etc., anyway.  See them for what they are, take the useful parts, and leave the rest.

Duhkha in heaven.

One subject that I think about fairly often is the nature of happiness.  In the spiritual sense, it’s commonly associated with the subject of heavenly realms of various kinds.

An example that deals with both is in Mark Twain’s Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.  When the title character is trying to understand how Twain’s version of heaven (which seems to be somewhere between Christian and Universalist) works, and has the mistaken impression that it’s free of pain and suffering, he’s set straight as follows:

“Oh, hold on; there’s plenty of pain here – but it don’t kill.  There’s plenty of suffering here, but it don’t last.  You see, happiness ain’t a thing in itself – it’s only a contrast with something that ain’t pleasant.  That’s all it is.  There ain’t a thing you can mention that is happiness in its own self – it’s only so by contrast with the other thing.  And so, as soon as the novelty is over and the force of the contrast dulled, it ain’t happiness any longer, and you have to get something fresh.  Well, there’s plenty of pain and suffering in heaven – consequently there’s plenty of contrasts, and just no end of happiness.”

This is dualism and duhkha in so many words: your current source of happiness has faded, so you have to find a new source of happiness to replace it, over and over again.  Is it really heaven (or a different realm at all) when your underlying mindset hasn’t changed, and you keep doing the same things, thinking that they’ll lead to different results?

This problem also ties back into the case of Amitabha, and his Pure Land of Sukhavati.  According to Steve Hagen’s Buddhism Plain and Simple, sukha and duhkha are antonyms.  To be free of dualism and duhkha, Sukhavati must be a pure mindset rather than a literal pure realm, dualistically separated from other realms.

If there’s duhkha in heaven, it’s not heaven.

The beginning.

Where to begin?

I came to Buddhism mostly because I reached some of the same conclusions on my own, and discovered it afterwards.  I’ve had to learn about it mostly academically, and the only non-Western practitioner I’ve encountered so far was one Tibetan monk who spoke at a local university.

This means that I may not have the most conventional views.  I don’t care much about orthodoxy, though, since terms like “orthodoxy” and “heresy” are defined by the winners.  The goal is the most important.  Whether I call it awakening, attaining enlightenment, reaching the Pure Land, etc., it’s the same: breaking my brain, as it were, and seeing things in an entirely different way, no longer as isolated eternal “things.”  All that I really need to have faith in is that such a state is achievable by some means, whether spiritual or scientific.

As for how this blog got its name, it came to me while I was watching my lava lamp flow as it would.  And if you couldn’t tell, despite having a lava lamp, my views on most issues pretty much make me the anti-hippie, so be warned.