Baishui Zen

As we attempt to lay out the cornerstones of Buddhist philosophy, we’ve talked primarily about philosophy of mind. This approach has sought to balance what in the west, we would contrast as materialism, the view that all things are material, with idealism, the view that all things are primarily mental. The “Middle Path” of Buddhism seeks to harmonize these views by recognizing the role of mental faculties in understanding the world, with their physical existence and properties. This was particularly relevant in the last section, when discussing the idea of “suffering” or “discontentment,” as a primarily psychological phenomena, which is related to the concept of ignorance. Different writers across schools of thought have tried to organize the different ontological categories in different ways, so rather than try to lay out any particular system of thought, in this article, I’m going to try to lay out the main tenets and consequences of this hybrid view.

Let’s elaborate again on the role of ignorance. Ignorance is a mental factor which causes us to believe that things in the world, including ourselves, have a fundamental essence, and that that fundamental essence is knowable to us. Furthermore, this misconception is roughly similar to what in western philosophy, we’d call “causation,” in that it underlies all phenomena. Our goal for this article is to attempt an explanation of exactly why this is a misconception, and see how the proper conceptualization ties together much of what we’ve been talking about throughout these articles.

Buddhist thought breaks down phenomena as we experience them into three categories, each of which it denies independent existence to in its own way. As the book lists them, these are

1. Causal dependence.
2. Designation by term.
3. Mutual dependence.

Causal dependence is perhaps the most philosophically difficult to understand. At least, it was for me. His Holiness says on this point, that a table depends on its wood in order to exist, it was fashioned from wood by the people who made it. These causes and the conditions surrounding and enabling them, are necessary for the table to exist, but none of them were truly necessary. In other words, it is merely a contingent truth that the table exists. The same kind of reasoning applies to all the objects and experiences we have, even our bodies and minds. Thus, on one hand, things do not arise haphazardly or randomly. On the other, they are dependent on a host of hard to pin down little things that have to be just so in order to come about. This amorphous collection of causes and conditions is nevertheless critical to things existing, and so their existence cannot be thought of as fundamentally independent.

I find it helpful on this point to bring up, for the sake of comparison, a common collection of arguments from theology, which we associate with Thomas Aquinas. These are from his Summa Theologica, and he gave 5 arguments for god there. The second of these, goes roughly as follows:

“Things change in the world. They can’t change themselves because in order to do so, the effect would have to come before the cause, in order to cause itself to do the changing. This means that each thing that comes into being has a separate cause, and that that cause forms a chain going backwards. That thing at the beginning of the chain is what we call god.”

Buddhist thought is essentially interacting with this kind of idea when it discusses causal dependence, because it is using the fact that there is such a chain to undermine the idea of inherent existence. Moreover, Aquinas seems to be thinking that each thing has one cause, like when one billiard ball collides with another. Buddhist thinking doesn’t visualize causation as a chain. In fact, I don’t know of any place where it is visualized at all. If we were to make a visualization of Buddhist concepts of causation, it would be a complex interconnected web of small factors which can ebb and flow, and their confluence at any given point is what we call causation. Moreover, Buddhists do not conclude that there is a god somewhere in this chain. The ebbing and flowing of causes and conditions throughout this world or maybe even other worlds simply is without beginning or end.

Dependent designation by term is next, and this deals not with physical objects but with descriptions of them, hence, “designation.” When we place things into categories, there is an inherent bias involved which often goes unnoticed. For example, if I grow up somewhere where people tend to be a certain height, I will be acclimated to this idea of what a “normal” person’s stature is. If I travel to somewhere far away, maybe people in that other country are substantially taller or shorter. Obviously enough, this can be a bit surprising if we don’t know to expect it, but it reveals the nature of dependent designation. Whether or not someone is tall or short is something we create in our minds. The property of tallness or shortness isn’t something real.

This is the case for essentially any property. One might think that we could avoid this by making concrete measurements of things. Then instead of having concepts in our mind for what is tall or short, big or small, we’d just have precise measurements whenever possible. First, this does not remove the mental habits associated with tall and short. One is still somewhat surprised when one encounters a man who is 7 feet tall, even if we are now calling it 213 centimeters. Second, it doesn’t resolve a philosophical problem either – introducing units and systems of measurements are terms, and we would refer to the height of such a person by this term, so we’ve really just shifted the issue around. As an aside, it turns out this sort of thing is always the case – it’s a theorem of mathematics that all classifications induce some amount of bias in the form of setting up the classification scheme. This is called the Ugly Ducking theorem, but I think the details might be a bit technical for this discussion. Score 1 for the Buddhist philosophers.

The last form of dependent origination is mutual dependence. This is when concepts reinforce each other and prop up each others existence in our minds. His Holiness gives a great example: a baseball. A baseball is no ordinary ball. It has a very specific size and weight, color, a distinctive stitching pattern and composition. But even with all of these things, if I could show a baseball to an 11th century monk, he would have no understanding of what it is beyond the apparent properties I mentioned. A baseball is more than a white ball with red stitches in a certain pattern, because of the existence of the game of baseball. Without some knowledge of pitchers, batters, innings, strikes, balls, and so on, this ball is just a weird ball.

Many examples fit into multiple of these categories, or even all three. The reader shouldn’t expect that all phenomena get classified into just one of these things all nice and neat. For example, a parent literally causes their child, by conceiving and birthing and raising them, alongside all the myriad causes and conditions that lead to those actions and enable the birth of a healthy child. But also, the concepts of parent and child are inherently relational – it only makes sense to say that someone is a parent if they have a child, and all people are children, since they didn’t come from nowhere, but they are only children because they do in fact have parents. To my view, this illustrates both the interdependent nature of these concepts, as well as their reliance on the words.

Now the upshot to all this isn’t that objects aren’t real – Buddhist thought is not solipsistic about the world because of these truths. What it shows is that it is not enough to look at physical reality – we have to understand the role that mind plays in adjudicating for us what it is we are experiencing. With so many complications that our minds sweep away for us with just mundane, physical objects, it is no wonder that our emotional worlds can be so chaotic. The irony is of course that our internal states seem like they should be the most accessible things in the world, because of how much mind plays a role in our experiences as it is.

One common objection to this line of reasoning that I want to address comes from physics, or just broadly speaking, scientists. It goes something like this.

“All this mumbo jumbo about dependent origination is pointless. We have very detailed understanding of the world and causation. Your arguments boil down to throwing up your hands at the complexities of the world, when actually it is possible to know very precise causes for specific events. It only seems abstract because the causes are abstract. Get down to brass tacks about a specific event, and I’ll tell you its very specific causes.”

I don’t think this is a bad point. In fact, I think this view is quite complementary to the one I am laying out here. Let’s return to the parent and child example. One could say on the most basic level that there is a child because a child is conceived. There are some surrounding causes and conditions (( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)), as well, we all know where children come from. One might say on a more granular level, that there are egg cells and sperm cells, and they combine and share DNA. There are many causes and conditions here that have to be just right. Never mind the human action of creating a child, how do the cells merge? How do they know how to bring their DNA sets together? How do the DNA combine in just the right way to have the new information needed for a child?

For each of these questions, we could give even more specific answers. I am sure doctors and biologists know the answers to these questions, but I don’t. What I know is that for every underlying biochemical process, a very specific collection of little proteins or fats or fatty acids or whatever, they all have to be able to be in the right places at the right times, or bounce around and get there, to enable the next step in the process. That life creates all those things in order to propagate itself is necessary for anthropic reasons. If life didn’t “work,” it’d die out and we wouldn’t be here. Nevertheless, any specific incident of life has to go through all these very complicated steps in order to come about.

I call that dependent origination on causes and conditions. And I call all the high falutin’ technical jargon that scientists will use to describe it “dependence on terms.” So I think actually, the process of “getting down to brass tacks” is actually where the hypothetical interlocutor is actually saying they agree with Buddhist thought!

By my view at least, scientific jargon creates a dictionary for us which maps out the experiences we will have when certain precise experiments are done. They give us a language to talk about specific types of events in a clear way. This is very helpful for advancing our understanding, undoubtedly. But it’s also very much like the baseball. Our understanding of what DNA is and how genetics work all mutually reinforce. It’s not that they’re not real, it’s that the Buddhist view forces us to recognize that they’re not purely and independently real, these processes are organized and structured by our minds. After all, there is no perception of these small-scale properties at all without a mind to conceive of it.