The non-retributive Karma theory

(Abstract of my lecture at the World Conference on Logic and Religion, 4-8 November 2022) Everyone nowadays has heard of the retributive Karma doctrine. Internationally, and among Western-influenced Indians, it doesn't have a very good reputation, for it is deemed to justify injustice. In many classical sources, this is precisely what it does. Thus, when Śākyamuni’s friend general Bandhula and his sons are sentenced to death for high treason, his widow consoles her daughters-in-law that while their husbands were ostensibly innocent, they must have earned this punishment through a wrongdoing in a past life. This way, any injustice can be justified as the consequence of an unseen past sin. Indeed, the very earliest scriptural introduction to the karma doctrine already does this. The Chāndogya Upaniṣad introduces jointly the doctrine of reincarnation and the doctrine of karma. It says that a fortunate birth in a high caste is the consequence of past good behaviour, an unfortunate birth in a low caste or as an animal the consequence of past bad behaviour. In all anti-Hindu literature, the link between the karma doctrine and social injustices like Untouchability is emphasized. An even more fundamental objection to this retributive karma doctrine is that it implies that the universe is just. The conspicuous fact that many good people end in misery while many evil-doers flourish, is nullified here by the unproven hypothesis that this misery is explained by past evil and this good fortune by past good. Isn’t this wishful thinking? No sudden good fortune is innocent anymore, it all becomes part of a universe-spanning calculus of reward and punishment. There are two alternatives to this widely-believed retributive karma doctrine. One is to preserve reincarnation but drop the "action at a distance" between good or evil acts performed in one life and attraction of good or bad fortune in a next life. Outside India, many reincarnation beliefs are ignorant of a karma doctrine, both ancient ethnic (Druze, Amerindian, Celtic) and among modern reincarnation researchers (Ian Stevensson, Erlendur Haraldsson, Hans ten Dam). Kṛṣṇa's explanation to Arjuṇa that dying is but an illusion, like taking off old clothes to put on new ones tomorrow, does strictly not posit an "ethical causality" either. The other alternative is the non-retributive karma theory. The purpose of this paper will be to analyse and evaluate this lesser-known understanding of karma. The non-retributive understanding of karma shares with the retributive variant that it extends the field of causality: the former gives it a psychological dimension, the second an ethical one. It fits the Buddhist theory that a life is conditioned by the quotum of desires, including negative desires, i.e. fears, with which you die. Hence the focus in some Buddhist schools on purifying the thoughts you will entertain in your dying moments: they will determine the contents of your next incarnation. For an example in a non-Buddhist source: when Ambā gets consumed with a desire for revenge upon Mahābhārata hero Bhīṣma, she is reborn in circumstances where she can join the enemy army and thus kill him. Here your quotum of good or evil committed is of no consequence, there is no reward or punishment. (In the debate on karma and the problem of evil, as recently in Philosophy East & West, it essentially cuts short the debate, or at least is one of the extremes within it: no relation!) Yet there is a precise connection between past and next lives, viz. your sum total of desires determines the contents of a next life; that's why desire is the motor of reincarnation, and is the target for destruction in Buddhist meditation. This version of karma is a "law of conservation". To be sure, Buddhism is not exclusively wedded to this more subtle theory of karma. Common Buddhists are just as much into the more vulgar retributive version, and even the Buddha himself was. An illustration is the Buddhist story of the Śākya-hatya. When his own tribe is being massacred by the soldiers from Kośala, the Buddha explains that this is a just punishment: in a past life, the Śākyas were villagers who heartlessly refused to throw fish that had landed on the dry during the hot season, into the remaining rivulet; so now they get punished. The soldiers back then were those fish, who now take revenge. So that is the hypothesis of reward and punishment at work. But it is not over yet. The soldiers go home and camp out on the riverside. That night, the rainy season starts, the river overflows, and the sleeping soldiers get drowned. Karmic reason: in their past lives they had begged to be thrown in the water, and now they have gotten what they had asked for. That is the "law of conservation" version of karma, a desire having effect at a distance. But the two versions are conceptually distinct, and purists may fully reject the retributive version while accepting the non-retributive version. The modern age with its positive valuation of rationality favours such an outcome: an automatically just universe may satisfy our wishes but is unproven and unlikely, while a law of conservation might be scientifically tenable even if applied to desire.
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A Buddhist Ayodhya? The curious case of TN's Thalaivetti Muniyappan and secular discourse

(Swarajya, 15 August 2022) https://www.wayofbodhi.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Thalaivetti_Muniappan_Buddha_Salem.jpg (from Wikimedia) During the Ayodhya controversy, the Eminent Historians and their supporters tried everything to counter the ever-mounting pile of evidence that there had been a Rama temple at the site. One stratagem was to claim the site had been (apart from vacant land, a secular building, a Shiva temple or whatever) a Buddhist place of worship. Actually, before the Islamic destruction, there had been quite a few Jaina and Buddhist places in Ayodhya, they were well-known, but the contentious site was not among them. Meanwhile, the archaeological excavations have confirmed that this was not a Buddhist site. But one failure is no reason for giving up. Indeed, now that the denial of Islamic temple destruction has lost all credibility, the attraction of turning Buddhism into a weapon for use in the secularist Jihad against Hinduism has only increased. Out of the blue, a press report appeared about a temple controversy most of us had never heard about, in the far-away Periyeri Village in the district of Salem, Tamil Nadu. The Madras High Court has decreed that the worshippers of Thalaivetti Muniyappan are to be deprived of their temple because the central Murti has been certified to have been a Buddha statue. So we learn in “Idol in Salem temple is of the Buddha, not Hindu deity: Madras High Court” (Prime Times, 2 August 2022); then confirmed in “Madras HC directs restoring temple in Salem to its original Buddhist character – Has an important precedent just been set?” (swarajmag.com, 3 August 2022); and “Tamil Nadu's Thalaivetti Muniyappan Temple is Buddhist site, says Madras HC; halts further pooja” (First Post, 5 August 2022). So, no puja for the deity will henceforth be allowed. On Court order, the temple is secularized and entrusted to the Archaeological Survey of India, in expectation of a planned transfer to a local Buddhist society, presumably the Buddha Trust. The verdict is the result of a case filed in 2011 by a local Buddhist, P. Ranganathan, now deceased. The Court had the state’s Archaeological Department take a close look at the Murti, and it found, after cleaning away the sandal paste and turmeric, that it had the so-called Mahālakṣaṇas, the marks distinguishing a Buddha from ordinary mortals, such as elongated earlobes. It was seated on a lotus in ardhapadmāsana (half lotus pose) with its hands in dhyana-mudrā (meditation hand-pose). The High Court concluded that “the assumption of the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowment Department that it is a temple is no longer sustainable and the control must go into the hands of some other authority. (…) it will not be appropriate to permit the HR & CE Department to continue to treat this sculpture as Thalaivetti Muniappan. (…) treating the sculpture as that of Thalaivetti Muniappan would be against Buddhist doctrines.” Now, what to make of this? If you were to close a Shiva temple, you could cynically say to the deprived worshippers: “Go to another Shiva temple, there’s enough of them.” But Thalaivetti Muniyappan is a purely local deity. Closing his temple means depriving his worshippers of their focus of worship. Our knowledge of the law is a little vague, but is this even allowed to a Court of Law in a secular state? No question mark is needed when we look into this verdict in the light of the Places of Worship Act 1991, freezing the character of all places of worship as on 15 August 1947. The verdict flies in the face of this Act, it is blatantly illegal. And it opens the door to similar shifts: all the mosques that proudly show off their history of temple destruction by containing a part of the temple in their architecture (such as the already contentious Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi), could readily be forced to re-become Hindu, overnight. Back to this particular case. What exactly is the relation between Thalaivetti Muniyappan and the Buddha? We find more details in a Buddhist article about recovered Buddha statues in South India: “Ancient Buddha Statues of Salem and Dharmapuri” by Yogi Prabodha Jñana and Yogini Abhaya Devi (21 October 2020, published on the wayofbodhi.org website). It explains: “About a hundred years ago, someone found this broken Buddha statue with its body and head separated. The statue also had its nose broken. Someone affixed the head to the body but not in a proper way. The affixed figure looked odd, with its head slanting to the left. The nose that was added to the statue didn’t come out well. The outcome looked a little wrathful, unlike the usual Buddha statues. The eyes were also later painted in a wrathful way. So people consider it as some fierce local god and worship him that way with animal sacrifice. Thalaivetti means with a cut head.” And Muniyappan is a Tamil way of saying: Muni Baba. This is not some mischievous Brahminical cover-up from Ambedkarite mythology, but a very open reference to a well-known Muni: Siddhartha Gautama, the Shakya-muni (“hermit of the Shakya nation”), after his Awakening also called the Buddha (“awakened one”). So this deity is “the Muni with a cut head”. After his material recomposition, he looked wrathful, different from the standard Buddha, so he got a somewhat distinct persona. That’s how it goes in polytheist cultures, like that of these Tamil villagers. This is something the secularists in the media, the Courts and the Dravidianist parties won’t understand. Illiterate in religious matters, through their English-language textbooks they borrow some basic concepts from the Christian worldview. There, the word “religion” means a box-type division of the ideological landscape, excluding any other. Thus, when the Heathen Frankish king Clovis converted to Christianity in 496, his baptism father commanded him: “Now burn what you worshipped.” No compromise or half-way stance is possible, you have to burn all bridges with your former religion. This view was unknown to, of all people, the Buddha, who recommended the continuation of the existing sacred sites, festivals and pilgrimages, and who integrated the Vedic gods and Rishis in his discourse. (The very first “conversion” to Buddhism, and where the converts were to “burn what they worshipped”, was BR Ambedkar’s in 1956; though most of his followers continued to have a variety of Hindu gods on their house-altar.) But it was this view of religion that informed the unforgiving Christian and Muslim policy of iconoclasm: annihilate all reminders of Paganism. Thus, the Islamic destruction of Buddhist monuments from Bamiyan to Nalanda originated in the conviction that the true religion could not tolerate any expression of a rival religion. That attitude, well-attested in Muslim history vis-à-vis Hinduism (including Buddhism), is then projected by the secularists onto Hinduism, or more precisely “Brahmanism”, vis-à-vis Buddhism. After all, “all religions are basically the same”, as even many unthinking Hindus will parrot after them. Well, no, that breezy equation does not stand up to scrutiny. Thus, when the Muslim armies appeared in Nalanda Buddhist University, it was all over in no time; this after 17 centuries when the Buddhist institutions had flourish unperturbed under Hindu rule for 17 centuries. Is that no difference? Let’s listen to another passage in this Buddhist article: In the nearby town of Thiyaganur, the villagers worship a “majestic Buddha statue of 6ft height recovered from a field. We found it placed inside a beautiful meditation hall made by the collective effort of the villagers. A farmer donated the land, and the villagers pooled in money to build the meditation hall in 2013. They also constructed a lotus seat inside and installed the Buddha on that. Here, the Buddha is regarded according to his teachings and not as a God. This new home for the ancient statue exemplifies how to preserve ancient statues most beneficially.” Look, that is how Hindus treat icons: they don’t break them, they worship them. They don’t even ask questions about its identity, and the difference between the formal name “Buddha” and the descriptive name “Thalaivetti Muniyappan” is inconsequential to them. It is nonetheless on this flimsy difference that the whole verdict depends. It is now secularist discourse (and the Court verdict is entirely part of it) to claim that the Islamic treatment of other people’s gods merely follows an existing Hindu practice, equally intolerant. If so, then it shouldn’t be difficult to find numerous cases of Muslims installing statues of Shiva, Krishna or indeed the Buddha for worship. Any takers?
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The shoulders he stood on: the Buddha’s teachers and their legacy within Buddhism

 

 Conference on Buddhism & World Peace

Utkal University & KIIPS, Bhubaneshwar, 8 February 2020

 

 

 

 

 

Abstract

 

The Buddha was not the inventor of a new method in the service of a new philosophical goal. He trod into existing footsteps: seeking the goal of Liberation through the method of Meditation. This ideal was already available before he was born and that was what beckoned him into a spiritual career. Even more specifically, he learned meditation techniques from established pre-Buddhist masters and integrated these prominently in the Buddhist meditation curriculum.

 

 

 

1.     Navel-gazing

 

Less contemplative religions denounce Buddhists as “navel-gazers”. Indeed Chan/Zen Buddhists even literally focus on the energy centre just below the navel, a point borrowing its special meaning from Daoism, which calls it Dantian, ‘the field of cinnabar’. But the good thing about this focus on the navel is its unintended symbolism: a navel presupposes birth from parents. It proves you are part of a lineage, you have been born as an heir, and with a debt to your ancestry.

So indeed, Buddhist tradition pays a lot of attention to the role of Śākyamuni’s ancestry in his unique life path, particularly his father, also his foster-mother, his wife and concubines and his son. We know more about his family situation than of that of most sannyasins, who tend to keep their pre-initiation lives secret.

 

 

 

2.     Anti-ancestry bias: the Buddha as rebel

 

Every great thinker has numerous studies dedicated to the influences that formed him. For Siddhārtha Gautama, the Buddha, however, this question is now systematically ignored or downplayed. Instead, the claim is propped up that he was a radically different mind from what surrounded or preceded him.

Either he is deemed a rebel against the ambient (partly or predominantly Vedic) culture. This view came about among 19^th-century Protestant Orientalists as a conscious projection of Luther rebelling against Popery or of Jesus challenging the Pharisees. Thought up in Germany, today it is taught worldwide to almost everyone through school manuals and introductory books, both abroad and in India; the only exception is Buddhist countries to the extent that they maintain their own centuries-old tradition (e.g. the Buddha biography by Hsinng Yun 2013 used by the Fo Guang, “sunbeams of the Buddha”, school), but not to the extent that they too have absorbed the Western “consensus”. You can find it strongly in Bhimrao Ambedkar’s The Buddha and His Dhamma, less strongly in Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India (because he contradictorily adds that the Buddha’s contribution is typical for Indian culture).

The most subtle recent variation on this approach is by Richard Gombrich, who admits the Buddha borrowed from both Jainism (whose historical tīrthaṁkara Pārśvanāth lived some 250 years earlier) and the Upaniṣads: the Buddha “was alluding primarily to teachings in the early Upaniṣads, especially the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, (ĀUP) teachings which are usually known as Vedānta, a term which literally means ‘Conclusions of the Veda’. With some of these teachings the Buddha agreed; others he criticized, though usually he did so obliquely.” (Gombrich 2009:60) However, he only agreed with the words, not the meanings: he used the old words but gave them a new meaning entirely his own. Thus, for the Jainas karma refers to a form of matter, but for the Buddha, this existing term becomes a matter of intention. (Gombrich 2009:75)

So: “On the one hand, the Upaniṣads had a gnostic soteriology: our basic problem is a lack of understanding. (…) On the other hand, Jainism and related sects saw our basic problem as involvement with the world through desire: the answer lies in acquiring total self-control. (…) Though the Upaniṣads also deprecated desire and Jainism also advocated understanding, it was the Buddha who found the perfect combination of the two approaches.” (Gombrich 2009:74)  For Gombrich, the Buddha formally walked in the trodden paths of the ambient society, but only to revolutionize it in a very subtle way.

But if true, this reinterpretation does not put Buddhism outside Hinduism, on the contrary. Reinterpretation is already part of the evolving Vedic thought. Thus, Karma as understood in Vedic Karmakāṇḍa (ritual work) differs from what it becomes in the Bhagavad Gītā (in the source text and even more as nowadays interpreted: “the yoga of work”) and in reincarnationist context. The common measure is “action at a distance”: in Vedic ritualism, a fire sacrifice is performed with a chosen goal in mind, say victory on the battlefield, and hopefully causes through action at a distance the desired result, crossing the space and time between the ritual and the battlefield result; in reincarnationist parlance, karma from past actions signifies the causation at a distance of a destiny in the future. The shift is from a ritual causation to a moral causation, but the same term remains in use.

 

 

3.     The Buddha as fountainhead

 

An even more daring alternative within the ancestry-denying consensus is the one we might summarize as: “All roads lead to the Buddha.” Since rebellion against something is still a form of relation, a newer school claims that he was not a follower of nor even a rebel against earlier models, but an incredibly creative founder from whom his surroundings borrowed. Here he is the fountainhead of all that not just Buddhist but even Hindu culture has to offer: either it is Buddhist and obviously his, or it is non-Buddhist, and in that case it has been borrowed (or in neo-Ambedkarspeak: “stolen”) from the Buddha. “Hinduism bad, Buddhism good”, seems to be the operative guideline, so anything bad that can be found in Buddhism is a contamination from Hinduism (or “Brahminism”), anything good in Hinduism must be an import from Buddhism.

One core of truth in this view is that we may be mistaken in deducing all spiritual developments in India from the Vedas, too often seen as the source of everything worthwhile. Vedic culture with its hymn recitation and its fire sacrifice, and with an array of sciences growing around it (astronomy, mathematics, grammar) was only one of the tributaries of Hindu culture, viz. the tradition of the Paurava tribe centred on the Sarasvatī basin in present-day Haryāṇā. It was not the mother but the sister of other tributaries, like the devotional culture with its idols and idol-houses (temples), originating in peninsular India; the culture of mother-goddess worship with blood sacrifices, rooted in every village but centred mostly in Bengal and Assam; and the culture of Greater Magadha, roughly Bihar, where asceticism and the belief in reincarnation originate. It is when the Vedic culture expands to the east, where Yājñavalkya wins a debate at king Janaka in Videha (northwestern Bihar) that these elements become central in the youngest layer of the Veda, the major Upaniṣads. So, less than a reaction to the Vedas, the Śramana (renunciate) culture may be a sister tradition developing on its own, with the Buddha as one of its children.

As Shrikant Talageri always emphasizes: “In this Hindu culture, the original religious elements of the Pūru tribes (the Vedic hymns and different types of Vedic yajñas) became just one nominal part of the whole religion, subordinated in actual importance to the elements from the other tribes: the philosophical concepts (Upaniṣads, Buddhism, Jainism, Charvaka’s philosophy etc.) from the Ikṣvāku tribes, Tantrism from tribes further east, idol-worship and temple culture from the tribes in South India, etc.” (Talageri 2019:169)

An academic support of this view is to be found in a Buddhacentric chronology. Johannes Bronkhorst (2000:112-123) has argued that the Upaniṣads actually postdate the Buddha, making the yogic ideas in them a calque on Buddhism. He brings in rather convoluted philological arguments, which have failed to find much approval among specialists in a position to judge this hypothesis. Thus Gombrich cites several Upaniṣadic verses as known to the Buddha (BĀU 1:4:5-6, Gombrich 2009:76; Gombrich 1987). However, the implied conclusion of Upanishadic non-originality has become popular in politically motivated circles in Western and Indian academe and in the Ambedkarite movement.  

Gombrich identifies the earliest reference to yogic practice as: “Therefore, knowing this, having become calm, subdued, quiet, patiently enduring, concentrated, one sees the soul [ātman, more usually ‘self’] in oneself.” (Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 4:4:23) Even later is the first formal, self-conscious definition of the term Yoga (‘a yoke, the yoking’ > discipline): “The earliest known definition of yoga comes in the c. third-century BCE Kaṭha Upaniṣad” (Mallinson & Singleton 2017:xv), viz.: “When the 5 senses are silenced, along with the mind, and the intellect stops its activity: that is called the highest state. Strongly restraining the sense is what is called Yoga." (Kaṭha Up. 2.3.10–11)

 Having done a lot of research in Indian chronology, but without presupposing the late Aryan Invasion sequence (Ṛg-Veda in -1200 etc.), we always wonder where people get those dates from, posited with such confidence. The texts themselves don’t give these, and we know these dates are partly determined by the cramped and unhistorical hypothesis of an Aryan invasion ca. 1500 BCE. We find no reason to insist that the Kaṭha Upaniṣad postdates the Buddha. And let this still be a legitimate topic of debate, the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad’s higher antiquity is just too well-established. That it is earlier than the Buddha, follows from the fact that, as per Gombrich, he quotes from it.several times. It is also taken to contain some ideas known through Buddhism but in less systematized form, not because the Brahmin editors were too simple to properly digest ideas borrowed from a prior-existing Buddhism, but because they came earlier and expressed the same ideas in a more spontaneous form.

Unlikely and criticized as it is, the hypothesis of a post-Buddha date for the Upaniṣads deserves to be taken seriously, if only as a thought experiment. Supposing it is true, then the Buddha’s lonely and therefore titanic achievements are impressive, but then this begs the question where the Buddha had it all from: if he did not build on the older tradition, Vedic or Magadhan, did he get is from revelation, or from pure genius?

 

 

4.     Proto-Buddhism

         In Siddhārtha Gautama’s life story, the presence of spiritualism and asceticism in his pre-ascetic years is striking. At birth, he is predicted to either become a great ruler (as had been planned by his father) or a great renunciate,-- a category clearly already known.  In the classical story of his four meetings at age 29, it is the sight of a renunciant that sets him on his distinctive course. He wants to realize an ideal that others have already pursued and, given the inspiring effect this renunciant had, probably realized.

No mention is made anywhere of his contemporaries being surprised that someone would go and become a forest ascetic. Among the Romans or the Aztecs or most peoples, this would have been considered strange: a healthy young man who spurns a family life with wife and child and, for a prince, even concubines, in order to go to the forest to pursue a bizarre state of mind which he fancies to be Enlightenment. This was, after all, Hindu civilization, already familiar with the lifestyle that the Buddha would make world-famous. It was a long-existing footstep in which Siddhārtha followed. And in a next phase, once in the forest, he does not just go his own way. Famously, for a while, he joins a group of extreme ascetics, perhaps Jainas or a similar sect already in existence: as sons of the same culture, they were on a search for the same thing as he. It is only after sharing with them a part of his spiritual path that finally he leaves them, continuing his search into its more distinctively Buddhist phase.

More than forty years later, in the final years of his life, after having amply developed his own Dharma, he lays down his view of the good society in “the Seven Injunctions of Non-Decline”. (Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūkta 1.1-5, “Chapter of the supreme exctinction”, Sanskrit; and Satta-Aparihāniya-Dhammā: “Seven non-decrease duties”, in Aṅguttara-Nikāya 7:21, Pali, treated by Elst 2018). These relate the sapta śīla, the “seven precepts” of non-decline. Just as in spiritual life, the Buddha’s apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree, so in his social vision: it reproduces the institutions and traditions he has grown up with.

The first principle is unity in decision-making, deliberation till a consensus is reached, as the key to social cohesion and national invincibility. This was the political institution he had grown up with in the Śākya republic, and as a member of the Kṣatriya elite, he had been a full member of the Republic’s Senate, where deliberation and forging a consensus was his way of life. For the rest, a good cohesive spirit in society is furthered by respecting the laws, respecting women, respecting holy men, and preserving the existing religious traditions (sacred places, pilgrimages, festivals). Far from being a rebel, we learn that the Buddha was a conservative. Like his Chinese contemporary Confucius, he did not advocate draconic laws nor “more blue on the street”, but the force of traditional mores and the awe for the sacred to streamline society.

 

 

5.     The Buddha’s teachers

We know some specifics of his culturally approved search in the footsteps of earlier philosophers and renunciants. According to the Ariyapariyesana Sutta (“syllabus on the noble search”), before reaching his Great Awakening, he had two meditation teachers. The first one was linked with the philosophical school Sāṁkhya, “enumeration”, then having a more general meaning compared to later centuries when it had to compete with an array of other schools, roughly “philosophy”. These were Ālāra Kālāma, a famous expert in breath control and Dhyāna mārga, “the way of meditation”; and Uddaka Rāmaputta, closer to Jainism. They taught him two advanced meditation techniques: “staying in nothingness” (ākiñcaññāyatana), c.q. “entering the dimension of neither perception nor non-perception” (nevasaññānasaññāyatana), also qualified as “the peak of existence”.

The scenario in both cases was the same. He mastered the techniques in months, became equal to his teachers; but then he grew dissatisfied with them because these mental states did not, after the return to ordinary consciousness, eliminate suffering. In the Buddha’s own words: “But the thought occurred to me, 'This Dhamma leads not to disenchantment, to dispassion, to cessation, to stilling, to direct knowledge, to Awakening, nor to Unbinding, but only to reappearance in the dimension of nothingness.' So, dissatisfied with that Dhamma, I left.”

Since the beginning, he had had this idiosyncratic concern, not shared with all other aspirants. Indeed, in the critiques of Buddhist meditation (as by Dayānanda 1875), the seeming self-evidence of suffering (duḥkha) as motivating starting-point of the spiritual search is rejected. Human searches for lofty goals including the quest for Awakening can have more positive origins than the attempt to quell suffering. The Upaniṣads strive for Mukti or Mokṣa (liberation), viz. from Avidyā, (ignorance), a very similar goal to Buddhist Nirvāṇa, “extinction”, but don’t start out with declaring that this is a matter of escaping from this Vale of Tears. Only in the Buddhist-influenced Yoga Sūtra of Patañjali do we find a less emphatic but real enough acknowledgment that “to the discerning, everything is painful”, 2:15; Yardi 1996:166).

Sometime in mid-quest, people redefine their goals, and the Buddha’s mature understanding of his spiritual goal could have changed from his juvenile impulse. But no, he remained entirely serious about his original goal, so after learning meditation, he moved on to develop his own variation. In modern introductions, to Buddhism, this is often portrayed as a revolt, even done in disgust. Thus, Bronkhorst breezily dismisses this evidence for the Hindu roots of Buddhism: “…the Bodhisattva’s training under Ālāra Kālāma and Uddaka the son of Rāma, which he then discarded as useless.” (Bronkhorst 1993, emphasis added) This conflicts with the source text, and with Buddhist practice, which has integrated these meditation techniques in its training programme. They received the place of honour in the Buddhist curriculum: as the last two stages before Liberation, the final two of the four Jhānas (“meditations”, Sanskrit Dhyānas). It is not a rejection but rather a case of Friedrich Nietzsche’s remark that “you don’t honour your teacher by remaining his pupil”.

         The Buddha went beyond what he had learned, but the information given by the Sutta about the mutual relationship between him and his teachers during and after his apprenticeship is all positive. They remained friends, he called them “my companion in the holy life”. After his discovery of Nirvāṇa, the Buddha sent for them to share it, only to find that they had already died.

 

 

 

6.     All this and world peace

That Buddhism is but one of the evolutes of a much older tradition, is a modestly useful insight for world peace. It takes the doctrinal dimension out of the modern anti-Hindu animus in Buddhist countrie, which has led to the expulsion of Hindu populations from Myanmar, Sri Lanka or Bhutan. Inside India, it takes away a similar anti-Hindu animus among the followers of Jawaharlal Nehru, who turned Buddhism into India’s unofficial state religion, (reviving Aśoka’s state symbols). They and the Ambedkarites have started to wield Buddhism as a weapon against Hinduism. The Buddha himself would be surprised to see what has become of his legacy. He himself never had a quarrel with the ambient Brahmin-dominated culture, and the only attempts on his life were by one of his own jealous disciples.

But even without these political benefits, it remains worthwhile for its own sake to raise awareness of Buddhism’s profound rootedness in a much older Hindu culture. Compared to the Western and neo-Buddhist conflict models of the Buddha’s relation with Hindu tradition, it is simply more truthful.

 

 

Conclusion

Gautama the Buddha was part of an ancient tradition. Just as it is false to dub Mahatma Gandhi the "father of the nation" (because he considered himself the son of an ancient nation), it would be false to call the Buddha the father of anything. He was the founder of a monastic order, the Saṁgha, but not of a new religion. His Dharma was a variation on the teachings that already existed, perhaps with a few unique touches, just like most other Sampradāyas. Indeed, the differences between them are mirrored by the differences that soon developed between sub-schools of Buddhism. Nobody calls Mahāyāna a break-away from Buddhism, just as nobody calls Advaita a breakaway from Vedānta. Similarly, we should not call Buddhism a breakaway from Hinduism.

 

 

 

Ambedkar, Bhimrao, 1957 (Akash Singh Rathore ed. 2011): The Buddha and His Dhamma, OUP, Delhi.

Bronkhorst, Johannes, 2000 (1993): The Two Traditions of Meditation in Ancient India, Motilal Bannarsidass, Delhi.

Dayānanda Sarasvatī, Svāmī, 1875 (2014): Satyārtha Prakāśa (Light of Truth, Sanskrit text with English trannslation), Vijay Kumar Hasananda, Delhi.

Elst, Koenraad, 2018: “The Buddha as political advisor”, unpublished paper read on 23 January at Jindal University, Sonepat.

Gombrich, Richard, 1987: “Old bodies like carts”, mentioned in Gombrich 2009:63, 213n.

--, 2009: What the Buddha Thought, Equinox, London.

Hsing Yun, 2013 (Chinese original 1998): The Biography of Sakyamuni Buddha, Foguang Publ., Taiwan.

Nehru, Jawaharlal, 1994 (1946): Discovery of India, OUP Delhi.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, ed., 1992 (1953): The Principal Upaniṣads, Humanity Books, New York.

Talageri, Shrikant, 2019: Genetics and the Aryan Debate, Aditya Prakashan, Delhi.

Yardi, MR, 1996 (1979): The Yoga of Patañjali, BORI, Pune

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"The founder of my religion" and the wisdom of crowds

(The question of what sources of religious insight are valid, comes up whenever you meet people of various religions who take the truth claims of their own tradition seriously. Is the authority of the founder or prophet sufficient as reason for accepting his truth claims? What follows is the text of my speech at the Ahmadiya interreligious colloquium of May 2009 in the Basilica of Koekelberg, a borough of Brussels. The Ahmadiyas are the sect founded ca. 1900 by Mirza Ghulam Ahmed, mentioned near the end.)



When an official of the Indian Embassy in Brussels told me he was looking for someone who could speak on Hinduism at the present colloquium on the theme of "The Founder of My Religion", I told him that among the numerous Westerners who do Hindu things (and this includes myself), he would not find anyone willing to self-identify as a Hindu. The word "Hindu" has a connection with the geographical unit India, and is in that sense irrelevant to anyone who does not have this connection. But more importantly, it is, just like "Christian", a label on a box. The type of people involved in the Western discovery of Hindu wisdom tend to reject labels of religious membership. Indeed, it is usually this very refusal to be boxed into a single religion that predisposed them towards attraction to Hinduism. They believe that, in contrast with Christian Christ-centric monolatry, there are numerous teachers who embody the Way, the Truth and the Life; which is what Hindus have understood all along.

I am a member of the largest faith community in Belgium, viz. the ex-Catholics. That is not a community with a sense of unity and structures of its own, like the Catholic Church. As the former EU commissioner Karel Van Miert, ex-Catholic and a leading unbeliever in Belgium, once said (quoting from memory): “No, freethinkers don’t need structures of their own. It’s not because diabetics get together in their own self-help group, that non-diabetics should likewise get together.” So, I have not been mandated to represent the millions who fall in the category of ex-Catholics, I am only representative in the sense that I am a typical case. I am an apostate, I no longer espouse the beliefs I was brought up with.

An earlier generation of ex-Catholics, when they were still a small minority of the Belgian population, often became anti-Catholic, anti-Christian and anti-religious with a vengeance. Today’s far more numerous ex-Catholics no longer have serious accounts to settle with the Church of their childhood. They, i.e. we, are simply skeptical of its defining beliefs. No hereditary sin of Adam and Eve, no virgin birth of Jesus, no resurrection.

Not that we reject everything about Jesus. He’s still popular for some of his sayings, especially when he was being anti-authoritarian like ourselves, when he went against the stifling weight of tradition and prejudice. But Son of God, no, most baptized Belgians don’t believe this anymore. That defining belief of Christianity is doubted now even by many of those who still go to church on Sundays. I understand that Muslims likewise venerate Jesus but reject his divine status. This at least proves that it is possible to be religious and yet not believe in Jesus as the divine Saviour. Which is the position where numerous ex-Christians have now landed themselves, viz. belief in "Something" but not in Jesus as the resurrected Saviour.

One component that recurs in many though not all religions, is God. People who have had bad experiences with a tough and authoritarian religion, tend towards a wholesale rejection of religion, including and especially God. They find something heroic in atheism, like standing on top of a mountain with no one above you. Or as John Lennon used to sing: “Above us only sky.” To assert human freedom, they would find it a crucial point to reject God. In Jean-Paul Sartre’s words: “Si Dieu existe, l’homme est un néant. Si l’homme existe, Dieu n’existe pas.” ("If God exists, man is a nothing. If man exists, God does not exist.") Among ex-Muslims, this is still common, e.g. Ayaan Hirsi Ali describes her discovery of atheism as a liberation. By contrast, now that Catholicism has lost its teeth, most ex-Catholics don’t bother to rebrand themselves as atheists or God-deniers anymore.

The anti-authoritarian generation dislikes the idea of a monarch in the sky, but then He can be redefined as something hazier, genderless, faceless, a mere “something”. We are the Something-ists. If you ask us whether we believe in God, we say: “It depends on how you define God.” Tongue-in-cheek, God is still okay, though the old expression “the fear of God” can now only be used in an ironical sense. Conversely, long-standing atheists have lately explored the idea of an “atheist religiosity”. Their rejection of the Pope and of Biblical authority need no longer imply a wholesale rejection of religion. Or “spirituality” as some insist on calling it, with studied vagueness.

We learn that Buddhism and some lesser-known Asian tradition also fall into this category of “religion without God”. That’s why the Buddha is so popular in modern culture: he reputedly doesn’t want you to submit to some omnipotent authority in heaven. At the same time, the millions of modern Westerners who do Buddhist things, like practising “mindfulness”, don’t become card-carrying Buddhists. They don’t want to put all their eggs into a single basket.

It is like in science. Everybody accepts that many pioneers have contributed to the present state of our scientific knowledge. Nobody swears by only one of them, nor denies the importance of all the others. Everybody knows that Aristotle’s work was, by all accounts, path-breaking, yet his knowledge was tentative and often clumsy. Both these facts, glorifying as well as belittling Aristotle, are equally true, and uncontroversial. Of course his work was a tremendous contribution to science, and of course it was very incomplete, in need of improvement by others who came after him. Nobody faults him for the immaturity of his theories, because everybody knows a single man couldn’t have created the whole edifice of science. Nobody says that Aristotle was the science god's only-begotten son, nor that he was the seal of the scientists, never to be equalled.

A poet has said that after Isaac Newton, “all was light”, so decisive was his breakthrough in physics. Yet to those who would dismiss the preceding generations of thinkers and researchers as merely caught in darkness, Newton admonished that he could only see as far as he did because he stood on the shoulders of giants, meaning his predecessors in thought and research. No scientist would ever say that he received the whole of scientific knowledge in a flash, devoid of any prehistory nor in need of any additions or improvements.

In the experience of most moderns, the same is true in religion. Earlier, a very monarchical view of religion prevailed: one founder, a single leader with a single book, and the rest are either devout and obedient followers, or outsiders to and enemies of the religion. Today, we are evolving towards a more democratic view of religion. It is open-ended on all sides.

It is open-ended in a geographical sense: valid religious teachings have originated in many parts of the world. In the colonial age, Christian travellers were puzzled to find noble people in China, in Arabia, in Africa and other heathen countries: “How can they be so good and not be Christian?” And they had qualms of conscience: “How sad that this Chinese new friend of mine, this thoroughly good man, will have to go to hell because he wasn’t baptized!” Today, ex-Christians and quite a few Christians are confident that even God hasn’t put all his eggs in a single basket: non-Christians had been provided with their own Zarathustra, their own Yajñavalkya, Confucius, Bodhidharma, or Shankara. Post-Christian people quote from Jesus, Laozi, Kabir or Jalaluddin Rumi with equal respect.

It is open-ended towards the past. Every teacher was a pupil once. Everyone has a navel as visible proof that he was born from a mother and is indebted to earlier generations. The Buddha, who is often venerated by Buddhists as totally unique and original, acknowledged that he had merely walked the path that all the earlier Buddhas before him had walked. After him, his tradition spawned equally important masters like Nagarjuna, Bodhidharma, Huineng or Dogen. Mahavira Jina, the supposed founder of Jainism, saw himself as the 24th of a lineage of "ford-makers" (tirthankara-s) stretching back into prehistory. The leading lights of Daoism and Confucianism in the 6th-3rd century BC traced their own vision back to ancient sages like Fu Xi, Huang Di (the Yellow Emperor), Yu the Great or king Wen. They had no notion of "Jahiliya", the Age of Ignorance preceding the arrival of the Prophet.

Evolutionary psychology shows that the germs of religion go back very far. We now know that a sense of morality, of altruism and fellow-feeling, which religious teachers usually claim as a special merit of religion, is present already in the higher animal species. Apes already have an (admittedly very embryonic) sense of religion. Some of you may have seen the documentary in which a gorilla flares up in anger against a burst of lightning and throwing a bone into the sky: he is filmed in the act of inventing a personal god behind the phenomenon of thunder and lightning. Right there, he just thought up a thunder god, like Jupiter or Indra or Thor. Later mankind has discarded this belief in personal agents behind the natural phenomena, but it was a step on the way forward and upward. While it is still controversial here and there to say we are the descendents of apes, I dare say that we are, moreover, the pupils of apes. But we did them the honour of not remaining their pupils forever.

Modern religiosity is open-ended towards the future. More teachers are bound to come, equal in rank with the ancient teachers. Nobody is the last prophet. We’ve heard that after Mohammed, some Muslims had a Baha’ullah or a Mirza Ghulam Ahmed. Without going into the merits of these specific individuals, we can generally say that most people influenced by modernity agree that renewals are called for once in a while, and that even in religion, progress can be made. In the post-Christian religious scene in particular, nobody is credited with a monopoly on the road to truth or salvation.

This approach has always prevailed in Hindu civilization. It has no founder, yet it has many founders of tributaries to its mainstream. The Vedas were composed by a whole constellation of seers, whose names are practically unknown to non-Hindus and even to numerous Hindus. Have you heard of Bhrgu, Vishvamitra, Jamadagni or Dirghatamas?

Realistiscally, you cannot expect guidance in every field from a single human being, no matter how saintly or wise. The Buddha was an outstanding organizer of a monastic order that made its mark on all of Asia, and more importantly, he developed or at any rate practised and taught a highly effective meditation technique, Vipassana or "Mindfulness". And yet, on family values he was a disaster. He had no way of honourably integrating the indispensible functions of marriage and child-rearing into his vision. Shall we renounce the Buddha then? The whole and indivisible Buddha, perhaps. But not the Buddha who matters, the meditation teacher. For family values, we can simply look elsewhere.

It is always a funny sight, religious people trying to find guidance in their scriptures for typically modern questions. The exercise may be interesting and may sharpen our wits: trying to churn or shake a modern message out of an ancient scripture. And interesting it remains even if we don't (as I don't) accept the believers' assumption that their scripture contains the words of the omniscient and prescient God, who must have foreseen the modern problems centuries or millennia ago when his words were recorded. But it is only an exercise.

Hinduism looks up to the accumulated wisdom of numerous sages. The possible excesses of one among them are outweighed and neutralized by the input of all the others. None of them was totally the first, or the absolute authority. Even before the dawn of mankind, Hindu tradition envisions divine incarnations in the shape of the Fish, the Tortoise, the Boar, the Hobbit... There are ancient sages, but no founder-sage, and no chosen people, no only-begotten son or final prophet.

In Hinduism, authority rests with a vast array of scriptures: the Veda-s and the Bhagavad-Gita most famously, but also in the Agama-s or doctrinal scriptures of all the various sects, such as the Nanak Panth (= Sikhism)'s Guru Granth. But more importantly, it rests with every enlightened master, everyone who visibly embodies the sacred. It rests with your parents and personal teachers, and ultimately also with yourself. Your own common sense and intuition are the most important guide in your life's choices, informed by the plethora of Hindu sources of light, and not excluding even the non-Hindu sources. Living Hinduism is an application to the religious sphere of "the wisdom of crowds", the principle the combined insights of many provide a more accurate guide than the insights of an individual, be he prophet or messiah. I note with satisfaction that the Ahmadiya movement has incorporated a bit of this Hindu attitude by acknowledging Krishna and the Buddha as legitimate religious teachers.

May all beings in the Universe be happy.

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