Billiard Buddhism
I plan a chapter in Undecorated Buddha on how to translate Buddhist texts from Sanskrit without sounding like a total goon on bhang, but in the mean time trying to write clearly about Buddhism presents an interesting and sometimes annoying problem: lots of the technical terms have become loan words in English, and those loan words are usually very bad translations of the real term.
The worst of these, I think, is karma. We’re used to the word, and most people understand it to mean something like “fate.” If you asked in any rec center Yoga class, someone would undoubtedly talk about how your karma follows you from incarnation to incarnation, and bad things that happen to you now are because of some “evil karma” you picked up in a previous life.
This whole understanding of karma is really a sort of mashup of some Hindu concepts, and some ideas from Jainism, but even then it’s a very unsophisticated view, sort of like the Christian picture of Heaven as a place where you sit on clouds playing harps.
The word, however, is very practical; it means “action”. It’s paired with vipaka which means “consequences.”
You can understand karma and vipaka in terms of a pool game. You start a pool game with the 10 pool balls arranged neatly in a triangle. One player hits the cue ball into that triangle, and they scatter — a “break”.
Karma.
If you watched in slow motion, you’d see the cue ball start moving from the way the cue strikes it. The cue striking it is karma; the way the cue ball moves is vipaka. Then the cue ball hits the racked pool balls, and that’s karma; the ball or balls it hits start to move — vipaka — and hit other balls in turn — karma. The moving balls interact with the felt — karma — and slow, as well as not following an exactly straight line because of spin and irregularities in the tabletop — vipaka.
I am not sure where you learned this from, but your sir are exactly correct. Most people have no idea about Buddhism, and just take some already misused misinterpreted concepts from Hindus of the 60′s, 70′s, aka hippies version of it, which was western cultured into Yoga themes, etc..
The western conceptual difference between the way life and your soul of existence is viewed, is very different, ie; very east and west.
Buddhism is based on more of a logical science, than a theory, but which the main difference is that Buddhism’s religious theory is one of actual proof in one’s life that is put into practice to overcome your negative karma, and become happy and enlightened. Relief of one’s suffering is the main objective t becoming happy. This is what real Buddhism is all about.
Buddhism originated in India, then moved to China, then to Japan, and throughout the rest of Asia.
Japan is now the Major center of Buddhism, which is not to confused with Shintoism, which is not a real religion, but a cult of Emperor worship.
Also, Buddhism being passive in nature, is not, and never has been used for political purposes and agenda, unlike like Islam and Christianity. It is strictly for human being’s own self.
Hm. Well, I’ve been actively studying Buddhism for almost 50 years, so I’ve picked up a bunch of stuff. You’re confused about Shinto, however — you’re thinking about State Shinto which particularly venerated the Emperor; Shinto overall is an animistic religion which venerates the world overall.
I’d also argue that talking about “negative karma” is a mistake, although it’s certainly common in a number of Buddhist groups. It’s more correct I think to say it’s all karma, and you don’t so much overcome it as you recognize and accept it. According to one story, a Zen master was doomed to 500 lifetimes as a fox because he said a master overcomes karma/vipaka or cause and effect, and was liberated by hearing Hyakujo Zenji say a Zen master is one with cause and effect.
I am confused. EVERYTHING is the result of cause and effect. Fine, sounds good, I am tempted FREELY (ooops) to accept the thesis if only I could know what caused Buddha to assert the thesis and me to accept it. If one believes in the thesis, one’s belief is caused to so believe. And the cause? Is the cause a freely accepted insight into the objective reality of the content of the thesis? If so, Buddha’s reductionism falls through leaving his beliefs without foundation. If not, Buddha cannot, based on his own thesis, justify its validity. Indeed, any question about validity is itself caused by something else. An infintely spinning merry-go-round that demands “silence”, which seems to me to be the essence of Buddhism. One cannot disprove silence, only enjoy it.
Yes, you are confused.
Confused because of my limitations or because of the internal logic (sic) of Buddhism? Buddha made one fundamental error. He spoke! Silence and the inner life, not esoteric philosophy is his wisdom or he had none.
Salt is just a word until you taste it. Some things are only learned through experience. I suggest you experience a ten day vipassana (mindfulness) meditation course. I favor courses given by the Vipassana Foundation which has centers scattered around the US and Canada. It’s non-sectarian, courses are free. The emphasis is always on learning and practising the technique passed down from the Buddha. You begin with anapana, mindfulnees of the breath, which is the basis for many eastern diciplines. After you have developed some concentration you learn a more intense type of satipatana, mindfulness of the body. Near the end you learn metta (loving kindness) meditation. It’s hard work, and you are largely alone with your own mind, with few distractions, for a long time, but it’s well worth it. Call a center for details.
Actually, this whole question is dealt with explicitly and extensively in the sutras, particularly in the Turning of the Wheel Of Dharma. Speaking about Bodhi, Enlightenment, is inherently inaccurate and limited. Siddhartha decided to do so anyway, because by doing so he had the potential to reduce duhkha. According to legend, he was talked into doing so by Brahman, who said basically not just humans but the Gods need this.
Coem to think of it, the Arrow or Dart Sutra may be even better. Basically, Siddhartha makes this analogy: if you’re hit by an arrow, do you insist that the arrow be identified, that you know who shot it, what wood the shaft was made of, what kind of bird the feathers came from, and so forth, or do you want someone to take out the damned arrow?
I think you’re looking in the wrong place. For Buddha, this isn’t a statement of ontological truth; it’s an empirical based on observation.
I never question “experience”. I do question what this word as a concept means. “Empirical experience” is not the language used by Buddha as it stems from another age. Such terms receive conceptual meaning within philosophical thinking at certain times. If person X experiences that everything he does and says (including the very “saying” itself) is caused by something else, I find myself faced with the self-contradiction explained above. Instead, I oppose MY experience of FREELY accepting insights as valid or not. If it is claimed that this “empirical experience” was caused by something else, I must object the the claimant has fallen into a semantical merry-go-round, i.e., is saying something that his asserted thesis does not logically allow to be said. Now “I” can claim this because I freely accept MY insight into said contradiction. (I may be wrong in my judgment, but I with my free insight claimed the hoped for truth.) If Buddha wants to play with causality language, then let us accept an idea of Spinoza, namely “causa sui”. My experienced freedom of “causa sui” in my case breaks the billard-ball causality of Buddha (which quantum theory rejects as empirically false). A Buddhist should be consistent saying (if speaking at all): “Feel it, do not think it”. Fine, good idea. But then please, shut up. “Silence” is your wisdom. Do and do not say anything. If my suggestion is followed here, we both can enjoy our own particular “SILENCE”. You feel, I think. Where is the problem?
Go do a ten day course and you will likely be amused by the things you wrote here. Vipassana translates as insight. The object is to purify the mind. It’s a truly worthy undertaking. You are clearly a thinker. I’m bugging you to do a course not to win an argument but to share a blessing.
I am not seeking to win an argument, but to pursue a path to truth insofar as I can understand. “Insight” means that I grasp a unifying “concept” that unites a manifold into an intelligible totality. If I am presented with a billiard-ball presentation of Buddha, I must answer rationally within the framework of the presentation. If I argue against the theoretical integrity of Buddha’s apparent explanation of cusality, I do so in order to find the truth, to which I submit my mind. I am urged to take a course. Fine, that is feeling, experience, calming and whatever. But what it is, however, is not an appeal to MY rational capacity and I have no other. I examine the billiard-ball causality preached and I find that it entails a logical inconsistency. It threatens to become nonsense. A course is no refutation of a rationally constructed argument, rather an avoidance of needed intellectuality. I recognize your desire to “purify” my mind via a course. Since you do not think my thoughts, how do you know that they are not purifying? Ah, once again, concepts, e.g., “to purify”. Are you implying that I have a “dirty mind”? But, then what does “dirt” mean here? I will cease as I am only trying to bring you to the “insight” that insights are precious things and, well, what are they?
Professor, there’s a reason that Buddha said there were questions which, if asked, were not conducive to ending suffering. Now, it happens I was a philosophy major once, and I know the tricks, and you’re on to a good one — redefine the terms in your own sense in order to have an argument. The problem is that I won’t play.
You’re absolutely right that Siddhartha never used those Greek-root words to describe what he said; we have to figure out what he meant ourselves. And it’s “absolutely” he said rhetorically the case that words are feeble tools for this effort, but they’re also the ones we’ve got. If you want to know exactly what is recorded as Buddha having said about it, you might look at the Lankavatara Sutra.
But what’s also recorded is that Buddha said “I saw this, and saw that as a result that happens. If you look at it in real life, you’ll probably see the same thing.” Fussing with fine parsing, while a good game in itself, doesn’t lead to ending suffering.
Just a short remark as I am just suffering to think other things today. “Suffering”, in what language? What does it mean? As I walked through Dachau (I live in Germany), no sutras could help. Those there, Protestants and Catholics and some Jews (Dachau was not a primary camp of extinction of Jews) cooperated with each other seeking redemption, not the numming of pain, redemption not of this world. Christians could, if they were not drivin into insanity by the pain inflicted there (again Dachau was no major killing camp), place their suffering and destruction into the hands of their Savior, not of this world. I am not preaching here. I am scared by the suffering which the land of my parents caused. I do not seek freedom from suffering per se, rather redemption from it. Here we are at logger-heads with each other. So I end asking with the father of Western thinking, Socrates: “What is suffering?” Any answer in words entails concepts and that means that you step into my world. Act, do not think. If you think, you will lose all freedom from suffering. Peace be with you, my brother human.
“First, empty your cup.”
there are 15 balls in a rack, except in 9-ball, which has, well, you do the math
Sigh.
No, Charlie, not “sigh”, rather “insight”. In to what? Ask Buddha!
Leonard, I forgot to mention that the effect of purifying the mind is the development of equanimity, and that is the yardstick for progress. It may not be your bag, but it is pretty special.
Gary, I appreciate, quite sincerely, your evaluation of equanimity. It may seem strange to you, but, when I think leading to an article or book and, indeed, in the process of writing, I have equanimity or nothing gets written. As I remember from my Kung Fu and Karate days (I even published an article on the meaning of “forms” in a journal for the Martial Arts) that my sensei often smuggled in some Zen. The Japanese warrior of old had equanimity or he was a lousy and, above all, dead Samarai. So, the pop wisdom was passed on to me about Zen exemplified in professional soldiers full of equanimity, and all that leaves me thinking, thinking and thinking some more. In other words, the point is that “equanimity” does quite the soul, but leaves it to be what it is, and that does not exclude being a death machine. I used to have friendly duals with an advanced blackbelt of another system. We both had to have equanimity as one nervous error would have resulted in serious damage.
But, alas, I find out of moral reasons that it is impossible to walk the corridors of Dachau and view documentaries on Auschwitz and seek “salvation” in an equinamity developed by some exercises. I suggest to you to listen to the liturgy of Sergei Rachmaninov, specifically to the “Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom”, Op. 31, particularlly “Bless the Lord” and spend time with me in a Russian monastery in prayer to the savior who died suffering. I find peace, a peace beyond the sufferings of this world, indeed, beyond the sufferings that I cause, willy/nilly. And such peace centers around forgiveness imparted by suffering on a cross. In the old Latin mass, one chanted “Domine, non sum dignus ut entres sub tectum meum”. In my case, the “non sum dignus” (as are all humans, including Buddha–assuming he ever existed) does not leave me in peace, though equanimity is possible. Relative to this MY problematic, equanimity does not help, rather dampens my consciousness of the madness of life unto death. (My uses of “madness” stems from Ernest Becker’s “The Denial of Death”.)
I apologize to any followers of Buddha who do find peace and yet seem to find my reluctance and accusations of irrationality to be, evidently, disturbing. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! I cannot argue against experienced inner calmness. But, then I find redemption evidenced in Rachmaninov’s liturgy in practice and Buddha cannot argue with that. But, “inbetween” the realms of “can’t argue with that” there is room for reason, for philosophic reflection, relative to which I have some 17 years of study in 4 languages in 5 countries. Charlie Martin was once a major in philosophy and accuses me of tricks!? I possess various doctor titles in the subject and reject the accusation of such diviousness. To inflict such an accusation on me strikes me as questionable and I experience it as demeaning. I, alas, sense something humanly inauthentic, though human, all too human with such a strategy of evasion. With such an accusation, rational discussion is denied as but a trick. I am no trickster and no one writing in support of Buddha-istic wisdom has argued philosopically with my critique of a billiard-ball explanation of causality (not my pedagogic example). So, let me calmly think and I will let you feel equanimity. Just, please, for the sake of not losing the game to suffering, say nothing or you cross into by world of ratiocination which may cause you some suffering. Can we make a truce and let peace be between us?
Thanks to Charlie for clarifying the dynamics of karma. When I was a freshman at Okla. State I had a comparative religions teacher who grew up in India, a child of missionaries. She had us going to the library to look up passages in the Rig Veda. I thought it quite something to read texts so incredibly old. “Thus thou art, Svetuketu.” I always assumed the Vedas were written in Sanskrit and that Pali was the language of South India. I studied several Mahayana writings, The Diamond Sutra, The Sutra of Hui Neng, D.T. Suzuki, and Gary Synder. It finally dawned on me that these writings required a foundation in the basics: The Four Noble Truths, The Eightfold Noble Path, and proper instruction in meditation. I made some some friends on the All-One Farm west of Portland while pruning their apple trees. These “India walas” included several students of Hindu guru Neem Karoli Baba, who had sent them to a Buddhist teacher to learn meditation. When I visited them in the fall they were sponsoring a vipassana course taught by a colleague of that teacher in India. So it was a multitude of karme trails that brought me to the forn of satipatana handed down through Burma and spead to lay people by U Ba Kin, a minister of agriculture in Rangoon.
PS: This story began in 1969. I tured on, tuned in, dropped out. Tramped all over this continent, rode freight trains in Canada, US and Mexico, worked in orchards and vineyards in the West. I was lucky to come across the All-One Farm, some very nice people.
the words are only pointers. see what is being pointed to.