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INTRODUCTION TO THE  STUDY OF BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY

 

SEMINAR EIGHT

 

TEXT VIII The Dhammapada[1] on dharmas, mind, and thought

 

  1. [1] Mental are dharmas, preceded[2] by mind, distinctive of mind and mind-made.[3] When one speaks or acts with muddled mind, suffering will follow him as the wheel of cart follows the steps of ox.

[2] Preceded by mind are dharmas, prevailed by mind and mind-made. When one speaks or acts with purified mind, happiness will follow him as a never leaving shadow.

  1. [1] Just as a fletcher makes straight his arrow, the wise man holds firmly his shaking, wavering thought, so difficult to direct and restrain.

[2] A a fish pulled out from its watery abode and thrown on the dry ground writhes and quivers, so this thought moves restlessly about trying to escape the power of Måra.[4]

[3] Hard to restrain is thought, fickle, flying up and down as it likes; wholesome is its taming. The tamed thought leads to happiness.

[4] Let the wise man guard his thought which is difficult to see, subtle, and flying up and down as it likes; the guarded thought leads to happiness.

[5] Those who restrain thought which travels far, alone, uncorporeal[5], concealed in the cave of heart – they will be free from the bondages of Måra.

[6] If one’s thought is unsteady and ignorant of the True Dharma and one’s serenity is troubled, one’s wisdom is not perfected.

[7] But for one whose thought is unperplexed and psyche[6] untroubled, who had ceased to think about good and evil, for him who is wakeful there is bo fear.

[8] Him, seeing that this body is like a jar, making this thought like a fortress, let him fight against Måra with the weapon of wisdom, guarding what had been already conquered.[7]

[9] Before long, alas, will that body lie on earth, contemptible, bereft of consciousness,[8] senseless like a burnt faggot.

[10] Whatever an enemy may do to an enemy, whatever a hater may do to a hated one, a mistakingly directed thought will do us much greater harm.

[11] Neither mother nor father, nor any other relative will do us so much good as will do a rigthly directed thought.

 

SEMINAR VIII Dharmas, mind, and thought; mind – when and where

So, “mental are dharmas, preceded by mind, and (..) mind-made” – such is this uniquely precise Buddhist postulate about dharmas, but note, it is about dharmas, not about mind. An explanation is here in order: since mind is already operationally defined as “that which thinks in thoughts”, then a dharma is an object of thought, of any thought present, past, and future. This, however, is but one sense (not a meaning!) of dharmas’ mentalness, in which dharma is almost synonymous in its meaning with phenomenon in the phenomenological sense of the latter. Wherefrom, that very postulate, but in a slightly changed wording, will read: “all objects of thought, including thinking, mind, and thought itself are mental… etc.” Let it look as sheer tautology, but here tautology serves as a special methodological device that indicates the further step in explaining dharmas. To wit, that dharmas: (1) are mental as objects of thoughts, all objects, mental and non-mental (material, physical); (2) are mental as specifically mental objects, such as thought, mind, thinking, idea, cognition, etc. In the later abhidharmic classification of dharmas the first come under the rubric of “having form” (rüpîn), and the latter come under the rubric of “formless” (arüpîn). But again, since all phenomena are mental on the strength of their being objects of thought, we may redefine dharma as the indicator of mentalness of any thing and, at the same time, as a unit of mentalness or as the final indivisible unit of all that there is thinkable and thinking, indivisible in space and time. It may even be said that dharma is the “limit” of atomization in the universe of Buddhist philosophy.

But the gist of the problem here is quite different. So far we have been dealing with dharmas as mind, thought, etc. Now we have come to the point where we shall be dealing with mind, thought etc. as dharmas. In other words, at this juncture of our deliberations on mind, dharma becomes a position, from whose point of vie mind was investigated in Buddhist philosophy. It would not be too large an assumption to suggest that somewhere in North India between 5th and 4th centuries BC, a “strange” tradition came into existence, a tradition, at that time purely oral, of dharmic thinking and dharmic meditation. Let us not forget that the word dharma was amply used in North Indian religious, philosophical, and legal texts from time immemorial.

The reader of these pages, while using the words “thinking”, “mind”, “consciousness”, normally does not reflect on his use of them. As regards his knowledge of what thinking, mind, and consciousness are as phenomena, and not as mere words and their meanings, this knowledge may be one or another, common or scientific, one’s own or received, differentrt from mine or the same as mine and, finally, different from the knowledge of the Buddhist masters of old or even – however incredible a proposition – coinciding with it. The latter, however, seems to be sheer impossibility, and for one reason: to think about and meditate on “all that there is”, their own thinking inclusive, the Buddhist masters of old invented their own concept of dharma, or it would be more exact to say, they invented a radically new way of thinking – thinking in dharmas. Moreover, each of the dharmas in which you think about a given object may, in its turn, become a particular dharmic position as a particular case of the general dharmic position noted above. You do not any longer live in the world of things, facts, and events, but in a totally different world, the world of dharmas. Dharma is the universal denominator in the language of Buddhist philosophy and the chief instrument of Buddhist reflection on thinking. Thus, for us it would be totally impossible to think in a Buddhist way about thinking, mind, and consciousness without dharma as the point of departure. It is so particularly because dharma is, apart from its general meaning, a special concept connecting mind, thought, and thinking. So, in the final analysis, any Buddhist knowledge of thinking is dharmic knowledge (however, speaking about the Buddhist concept of knowledge, we must bear in mind that in Buddhist philosophy any knowledge is possible only from the objective point of view, that is from the point of view of the highest knowledge of the omniscient Buddha, from which alone any other knowledge can be considered true or untrue, right or mistaken).

But why thinking, why think about thinking? In answering this question, we cannot help but admit that reflecting on our thinking is not one of our habitual preoccupations as it undoubtedly was for the Buddhist masters of old.

Having learnt from text VII that mind is that which thinks and I am what think, we find ourselves now dealing with the text VIII where all is in the third person, where we have “one” or “he”, one’s mind, one who acts, speaks, and… thinks. But here mind is separated from one or him, who acts, speaks, and thinks, in a way quite different from that in which it is separate from “me” in text VII. Here mind alone produces the (karmic) results which he or one will have to reap in future for one’s or his thoughts, words, and actions. Mind here is constant which, however, is not to say that it produces thoughts for, as it will be shown further in seminar IX, when a thought has arisen, the mind “that thinks” is already there, as it were “coinciding” with the former in the moment of that thought’s arising. But what, then, about mind’s future? Will the mind be there at the time of one’s reaping the results determined by the mind? Then, in that future, or, more exactly, from the point of view of one’s present in that future, mind will be seen as one’s past mind. From this, among other things, may follow that, unlike a separate thought momentary and always in the present time, mind is a phenomenon relating to time. And also the other way around: time is the time of mind’s workings.

Moreover, of “one” or “him” who acts or speaks it may just as well be said, that the time of his acting and speaking is the mental time. If following the text VIII literally, we assume that one’s mind is synchronous with one’s actions and words, then we may consider this synchronicity as micro-time of mind; then the time between that “mind-action-speach event” and its future results will be that mind’s macro-time. All this, however, is not to say that mind in one’s past, present, and future could be deemed as the same phenomenon continuing from the past, through the present, into the future: this is so not only on the strength of the Buddhist postualates of un-substantiality and impermanence of all phenomena, but first of all because to speak of one’s mind now and his mind at another time as of one mind would be possible only for one’s mind which thinks of another mind as of “itself as another time”.

Now, speaking of one’s mind we have to proceed from time to space. Then “ome” or “he” could be considered a spatial unit of mind at the present time or, if we put it somewhat differently, the place of mind, limited by the body of a corporeal living being. But what, then, can be said of so called “uncorporeal” or “formless” states of mind, about which we read in the text VII? This is the case when one’s mind is the mind of one whose complex of aggregates of individual existence lacks the aggregate, skandha of form or body. Such a mind is located not in a concrete place separated from all other places, but in empty, imfinite space, åkåsa. As a concept (P. pannati, skr. prajnapti), space is the means by which mind, in its external (that is directed to outside objects, not to itself) perception distinguishes objects. Thus space is to external perception of mind what time is ti mind’s perception of mental objects. But what is space in the sense of “that in which mind is situated”? The answer, simple and unambiguous, is: space is a pure potentiality of being occupied by any objects, mind in the first place. In the sense of “natural philosophy” space is not a positive medium, but voidness (P. sunnata, skr. ßunyatå), which cannot be thought of as any kind of form.

From text VIII, 2 we may extract an utterly abridged exposition of phenomenology of thought though without any reference to mind or even to a possible transition from mind to thought (which led many a scholar to quite mistaken conclusion that citta and manas are used synonymously here). Thought, however, is implicitly opposed to mind as something far more dynamic, changing, on the one hand, and on the other as something which could be referred to as such, not necessarily attributed to “one”, “him” or anything else. So even when something is said about thought in general, we can see in this the first glimpses of the conception of one thought vs. another, that is the abhidharmic conception of a separate, atomary thought. At the same time we may suppose that, at least in some early schools of Buddhist thought, thought represents the dynamic aspect of mind.

Now, the following moments concerning thought are in order:

  • Thought is described here from the point of view of those whose thought is restrained, completely tamed, and yogically trained. That is why all its inherent, as it were “natural” features, such as “fickle”, “unsteady”, “difficult to perceive”, “abstruse”, “very subtle” are yogically negative.
  • At the same time, thought figures here as if it were possessing of its own intentionality, positive, negative or neutral, which is clearly seen in such expressions as “thought wanders as it likes, far and alone”, and “as a fish (..) thrown on the dry land, this thought quivers all over to escape the dominion of Måra.” In this we may surmise a tendency, here still in its germ, in Buddhist philosophy, to endow thought with its own, not its “thinker’s” transcendental subjectivity. That tendency can be clearly seen in verse 371 of the Dhammapada: “O monk, let not your thought delight in sensual pleasures!” However, for thought to become a kind of “micro-subject” would be necessary to become, first, its complete objectification in the Buddhist philosophy of abhidharma, to which we shall come in the next text (IX).
  • It would not be making too large an assumption to say that it is only due to to their dharmic approach to thought, that they came to the discovery of separate It was not, however, the idea or concept of separate thought that they discovered, but the phenomenon of it. As if it were a “micro-entity”, transcendental, discernible only by yogically transformed mind, and inaccessible for any empirical scrutiny.
  • However, one very queer question remains unanswered: is that separate, atomic thought conscious of itself or, shall we say, self-reflective? Note, if we ask the same question concerning “a thought” in our own thinking, the answer will be definitely – it is not. I know of no philosopher or psychologist today who would have attempted to ask, “what is thought?”, however hopeless the question. No one, from Descartes to Main de Biran, Bergson, and William James, and from Wittgenstein to Searle braved the question. A philosophical answer shall wait until we have come to the text X. What we see in the text VIII is no more than a distant approach to it.

 


[1] The Dhammapada of the Khuddaka-Nikåya (of the Sutta-Pitaka of the Pali canon), verses 1, 2, 33-42. The theravåda tradition connects every verse with an episode in the life of the Buddha and with his own explanation of the episode.

[2] Probably better: “having their origin in mind”.

[3] This is an extremely abstruse notion (P. and Skr. manomaya), which means both “made by mind” and “made of mind”.

[4] That is, the power of sensual desires, manifested by Måra.

[5] Incorporeal here is literally “without body” (P. asarîra, Skr. aßarîra).

[6] The term (P. ceto, Skr. cetas) connotes a wide range of meanings from “mind”, “mentality”, and “thought” to “will”, “consciousness”, and “sentience”. In its general, philosophical sense it is used to denote all that does not pertain to one’s material body. This term also denotes the active, energetic aspect of mental and psychical faculties.

[7] This is the reference to the epithet of the Buddha, “Victor”, “Conqueror” (P. and Skr. jîna).

[8] Consciousness here is almost synonymous with the idea of life-principle.

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