The Buddha Before Buddhism

Having read a little bit about the subject of "early Buddhism" (mostly from Leigh Brasington) I've long wanted to read Gil Fronsdal's translation of "The Book of Eights".  This short collection may be the oldest stuff in the Pali Cannon, and hence the closest to what the Buddha himself taught in his lifetime.  While Fronsdal's introduction and afterword review the multiple strands of evidence for this chronological position, it remains speculative.  And he suggests that, in the end, it may not be all that important.  What's clear is that this text is different in both tone and teaching from the other parts of the Pali Cannon that I've encountered.  For one, it's all in short verses, instead of long stories (though there is still a question posed to the Buddha that frames many of the chapters).  Perhaps because of this, it relies much more on paradox and aporia than other suttas.  The teaching is mostly about what not to do -- chase after sex, hold onto and quarrel over particular views -- and not about the traditional Buddhist lists of characteristics and factors.  

While I've found those lists incredibly helpful devices, it's refreshing to find the message here pared down to what I take to be its essence -- don't hold onto anything, even Buddhist doctrine.  Holding fast to any belief will eventually cause us to suffer; the path to peace and freedom lies in moving through life without needing these supports.  In short, the message is very Mahayana, and if these poems indeed represent the undiluted and uncodified teachings of the master, then it's much easier to understand why Nagarjuna felt the need to renew the tradition beyond all the Theravadan apparatus.  This is not to suggest that anything here contradicts the Theravadan interpretation.  In fact, we get pretty clear statements of dependent origination and not-self and the noble truths.  But we hear these doctrines before they have been formalized, at a point where they feel less like truths to be taught and memorized than experiences to be encountered along the road to peace.  

James

I'm likely the last human alive to read Percival Everett's re-writing of Twain's masterpiece.  Fortunately, everything I heard about it is true.  The novel is smart, funny, deep, and just plain great entertainment, regardless of whether you remember the original very well or not.  

Part one of the novel (roughly 2/3rds) is roughly what I would have expected upon hearing the premise.  It sticks relatively closely to Twain's plot, but tells the same story from Jim's perspective.  It's a clever enough trope, but the real delight is in Everett's masterful execution of it.  Here, Jim is not only human being from the outset (something he can only grow into in Twain's telling) but he's sardonically literate to the point of being erudite.  Twain's thick negro dialect is recast as a put-on invented by slaves to keep white people imaging they're simple fools.  The titular 'adventures' of Huckleberry Finn that occupy the bulk of Twain's lazily floating novel are immediately converted into the terrors of Escaped-slave Jim, who now finally gets to tell his own story, rather than being forced to entrust it to a well meaning white man.  

I won't spoil parts 2 and 3 by giving away Everett's twist, except to say that his ending has all the power of Twain's, and is a good deal less open to misinterpretation. Go read it.

Stages of Meditation

I no longer remember how the Dalai Lama's commentary on a Tibetan translation of Kamalashila's Bhāvanākrama ended up in my to read list, but when I saw it at the cat bookstore it went on the pile.  I vaguely remember that the idea was that this was deemed HH's most 'technical' writing about meditation, which I probably found intriguing.  And it is indeed pretty technical.  The basic idea of the original text is that there can, perhaps paradoxically, still be stages to the cultivation of awakening despite the Mahayana view that everything and everyone is already empty.  So in a sense, it a meditation instruction manual.  Meanwhile, the commentary from HH sticks pretty tightly to the original, without a lot of tangential attempts to modernize the text or discuss how he practices with it day to day.  

The stages Kamalashila describes are pretty simple actually.  First, cultivate compassion for all beings.  Interestingly, the text suggests going about this in the opposite way from which it is often taught.  Instead of beginning with metta, we are told to begin with an equanimity that regards all beings as equal.  That is, we first cultivate an equalization of feeling towards ourselves, our friends, and our enemies -- ultimately, we are all in the same boat.  Then, when we focus on wishing beings well in our metta, we are able to extend this loving-kindness to all beings equally.  After this, a feeling of compassion for all beings will arise naturally anytime we discover that they are not doing well.  Finally this mind of universal compassion for all beings inspires the Bodhisattva vow characteristic of the Mahayana.  After establishing this base of compassion, the practitioner can then focus on developing samadhi and vipassana, here termed "calm-abiding" and "special insight" meditation.  The latter of these is the specific Mahayana insight into the emptiness of all things.  And that's basically it, both the text and the Lama emphasize that these two aspects of meditation need to be balanced to achieve awakening.

While it appears that these stages or components of the path are relatively familiar and straight-forward, I should acknowledge that I don't think I understand this text very well.  I've come away with this summary high-level view partly because the material is coming from traditions that I am not that familiar with.  It's 9th century Indian Mahayana practice reflected through a 20th century Tibetan lens.  So what feels to me like needless repetition in the text regarding the balance of calm-abiding and special insight, and then later "method" and "wisdom", is probably a subtle distinction that I just don't understand.  Like most of these older texts, the material is not meant to be read on a standalone basis, but under the guidance of competent teacher.  The Dalai Lama's commentary certainly makes the original more accessible, but mainly to those already steeped in the Gelug tradition from which he teaches.  So basically I was just not the intended audience for this one.  Interesting nevertheless.

The Sound of Silence

 Since I've been training in the Thai Forest lineage for the past year and a half, when I saw this collection of talks from Ajahn Sumedho (one of the more important teachers in this tradition and one of its key links to the West) in the cat bookstore, I thought I would set it aside for later.  But after perusing the initial talk (which is probably on dharma seed) I found the style so direct and engaging that I just wanted to keep going.  These are really wonderful teachings that one can hear on a variety of levels.  They're very straightforward, without a ton of technical meditation details or lots of pali terms; I think most anyone could get something out of them.  But they are also profoundly encouraging -- this guy has been meditating for 60 years, and yet he describes starting the process of de-identifying with his own mind again and again, moment to moment, as if he were always a beginner.  And we can all aspire to be beginners.

Cosmopolitanism

It was Evan Thompson's thought provoking Why I Am Not a Buddhist that originally made me aware of Kwame Anthony Appiah's philosophy of "universality plus difference".  Since that discovery I managed to put two and two together and realize that Appiah is also the author of the NYT column The Ethicist, which I have occasionally enjoyed without much noting who was playing the role of Anne Landers.  So, despite the fact that I was underwhelmed by Evan's presentation of the philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, when I saw the book at the cat bookstore I figured I should give it a chance  And ... I remain underwhelmed, at least philosophically speaking.  Though I enjoyed and would happily recommend the book.

Appiah is an elegant writer, especially if you're into the whole brevity thing.  One fairly wizzes through his clear arguments and entertaining stories.  There's a great deal of food for thought in both these aspects of the book, and they are woven together especially tightly in this case.  Appiah grew up in Ghana, went to school in the UK, and now teaches in Amerika, so he tells engaging stories about the many cross-cultural ethical dilemmas he has navigated over the years.  Meanwhile, he argues that despite all these cultural differences, we still share so much that we are almost always capable of understanding, tolerating, and even learning from one another, if only we are willing to put a little effort into building what my meditation teacher would call a "universal translator".  So it's both argument and lived experience together that lead him to a slogan for cosmopolitanism that he draws from one of Terence's plays -- "I am human: nothing human is alien to me".  It's an attractive idea that expresses confidence in the possibility of a coexistence without conclusion, an openness that doesn't require agreement on universals (beyond an attitude of openness).  We are all different; but we are similar enough to appreciate and live with that difference.

While this is an attractive vision, I think it's rather underwhelming as philosophy proper.  What Appiah lays out is more properly a matter of religion or politics or just plain common sense.  And much of the philosophical argument in the book is aimed at undermining the various narratives we hear that purport to order all values in light of the one true universal value.  Value-free scientism, religious and racial fundamentalisms, and even all-encompassing theories of colonial cultural appropriation are critically examined and found lacking.  Much of the task of building a cosmopolitan outlook lies in the negative work of loosening up the boundaries and deconstructing the reasons we erect to separate ourselves from the rest of humanity and reinforce our own identities.  In essence, Appiah is just trying to extend the innate moral sensibilities that evolved from our tribal ancestry to cope with a much larger modern world.  This doesn't require him to build a new ethical philosophy (and in fact he is quite skeptical of rationalist ethical philosophy) but mostly just to remove the obstacles we constantly erect to feeling interest in and compassion for people who are different from us.  So in the end it's not really a critique of the book to call it philosophically underwhelming.  Whether or not you consider it our 'natural' tendency, the cultivation of kindness to strangers is something that requires practice, not theory. 

The Phenomenon of Life

I've enjoyed several of architect Christopher Alexander's other books, especially A Pattern Language, and I've always been curious about his 4 volume magnum opus The Nature of Order.  So I was pretty excited when I found a (slightly) discounted copy of volume 1 at the used bookstore.  Unfortunately, as so often happens with magnum opera, here he jumps the shark.  I got something out of reading it and I even share many aspects of the same vision.  But his attempt to create a grand unified theory of everything is too long, too abstract, and too full of breathless insistence on its own profundity to make me want to read the other 3 volumes. 

The basic idea is simple and lovely -- architecture is about bringing space to life.  In retrospect, we can see this as a simple way of describing what the patterns in A Pattern Language are meant to do.  By paying attention to these simple functional patterns we can create spaces that are more pleasant to live in because they respond to many natural human needs.  The resulting spaces don't merely solve a particular problem but weave together a container or a frame that contributes to our overall mood and vitality day after day.  So the goal is to create spaces that create more life, spaces that amplify life instead of disciplining it.  This seems like a fine theory of architecture (and fits remarkably well with Cache's theory in Earth Moves or Stewart Brand's discussion in How Buildings Learn) that lets us clearly articulate some aspects of what's gone wrong with modern architecture.  The fanciest postmodern facades routinely contain nothing more than a set of boxes, optimized for properties such as cost of construction or maximum workplace productivity, boxes which remain utterly indifferent to the actual experience of the human beings they discipline.  At its worst, this 'architecture' actually aims to produce a space that reduces the amount of life that can happen in it, and even at its best it assumes that life is something which can only be properly ascribed to the occupants of space, rather than the space itself, as if our outer context had nothing to do with our inner experience.  Even quite high end contemporary architecture frequently produces these big neutral rooms that function like a sack of space, a container fit for potatoes not people, and then dress this failure up in stylized features that look good in magazines.  The real art here lies not in the architecture, but in the sculpture or the photography, or perhaps simply the marketing.  It frequently seems like we've forgotten that architecture is for living in.

Alexander's goal, however, is not simply to define architecture, or critique other pretenders to the throne (although there is quite a lot of the latter here).  He wants to systematically explore how to create spaces which are alive.  Which brings us to the tricky question that occupies all of volume 1 -- what do me mean by life?  With this book, Alexander tries to go well beyond the somewhat vague and intuitive way of posing this question that I've started with.  He wants to literally define the life of a space in an 'objective' manner, as if the space itself had a sort of structural life inherent in its geometry, irrespective of the humans who might happen to occupy it.  In fact, in some sense, Alexander's vision has no place in it for living humans per se, since in the end nothing exists for him but space itself.  This would be the supposedly objective medium that nevertheless has a quasi-mystical capacity for arranging itself into subjects or, as Alexander terms them, "centers".  These centers are not pre-existing entities, but arise as nodes in a field constituted by smaller centers.  But then they also react back upon the smaller nodes that they unify, modifying those centers, and hence modifying themselves in a perpetual feedback loop.  It's turtles both all the way up and all the way down.  It's an empty non-dual world where all of space is alive to varying degree, and "life" is little more than a measure of the sort of "density of space" in a certain region.  Thus when Alexander talks about architecture bringing a space to life, he means it literally -- architecture is the queen of the arts and sciences because it manipulates space directly, and the architect is a kind of god because they create life through this manipulation.  Like I said, it's a theory of everything. 

Setting aside the architectural hubris of it, I find the general idea quite attractive.  It's very similar to Deleuze's idea of folding, or Joanna Macy's understanding of dependent origination as a form of systems theory, or Simondon's crystallization schema for individuation. All of these are descriptions of the way something arises out of nothing in the manner of a vortex.  And they all share an infinite recursive structure  both in spatial and causal terms (what Macy calls mutual causality).  Insofar as I have a philosophy, this is pretty much it.  So Alexander adds another metaphor we can use to think about how ontology works -- he thinks of it as the production of centers.  He also fleshes out an interesting list of 15 ways that centers can interact to amplify one another and even create new centers.  I'm unclear how useful these would be for creating architecture in the colloquial sense (for those purposes, we might be better served by treating them as 15 categories that encompass his 253 pattern language), but they do provide food for thought.  Perhaps in principle anything can happen in mutual causality, but in practice there do seem to be certain ontological patterns that frequently repeat.

Why then, if I like this vision, am I not going to read volumes 2-4?  Ultimately, the problem isn't with Alexander's vision, but his articulation of it.  While he endlessly insists on how this view of the world is profoundly different, he spends a lot of time trying ineffectively to justify it using the same old philosophical concepts of 'objectivity' and 'subjectivity' that it clearly explodes.  So, for example, he spends forever telling us how life is an 'objective' property of a region of space that can measured mathematically.  But this mathematics is pretty sketchy, which of course is hardly surprising given the complexity of the question and the recursive creativity of life.  Having failed to convincingly calculated objective life, the text promptly pivots to assure us that the best test of life is actually the "mirror-of-self" test, a completely subjective measure that asks whether space A or space B is more like a "picture of our deepest self".  We are to assume that this will somehow just naturally agree with the previous objective measure, even though we are simultaneously cautioned that it takes a lot of introspection to perform this test correctly.  All of this risks legislating that what is 'natural' or 'living' is simply whatever Alexander likes.  In fairness, he contends throughout that, at bottom, we all basically like the same stuff, or at least feel alive in the same spaces.  And while I think there's a lot of truth in that, it's pretty clear it doesn't make for a scientific consensus.  If I tell you that 75% of physicists think theory B is better, you'd hardly consider the matter settled, and yet Alexander seems routinely willing to dismiss this level of diversity of opinion about his own measures as due to people just not getting it.  So ultimately the problem is that these elaborate justifications of his theory take up a lot of space and yet actually end up detracting from it for everyone.  They won't change the mind of the 'hard-nosed' materialists who will remain unconvinced that the universe contains anything but marbles.  And for those of us who have already joined the choir, they simply get in the way, muddy the point with amateur philosophy, and dilute what we can take from his ideas by spreading them out of four times as many pages as were required.  I find I'm slowly becoming more curmudgeonly with long books -- if you can't say it in 150 pages, you probably don't know what's truly important to say, and if you find yourself talking for 1500 pages, something has clearly gone wrong.  Don't give me your magnum opus that sums up everything.  Give me a single idea worked to completion.

Breakfast of Champions

I decided to quickly breeze through this one because I just saw Alan Rudolph's cinematic version.  Though the film was a complete commercial flop it actually had some interesting elements that reminded me of things like Fear and Loathing and Schizopolis.  I can't say it was a great movie, but it was kinda entertaining, and this is exactly how I would describe the novel as well. It's certainly not one of Vonnegut's best.  It's too scattered and indulgently meta-fictional to not feel a bit like a well know writer trying to come up with just anything to publish.  But it's also got a few great laugh-out-loud moments that only the non-author of "Wear Sunscreen" could have come up with.