Dependent Origination and Emptiness

I recently started reading Nagarjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā.  After only a few chapters it became clear that there was going to be some heavy philosophical lifting involved.  In other words, the forthcoming review of the Root Verses of the Middle Way may be a while in coming forth.  Meanwhile, I discovered that Leigh Brasington had written a new book on dependent origination that devoted some space to Nagarjuna's philosophy (you can download it here).  Since I enjoyed Brasington's practical treatment of the jhanas, I figured his latest effort would serve as a good warm up for understanding Nagarjuna.  I was not disappointed.  Brasington's book is straightforward to the point of being almost conversational, so I read through the electronic version quite quickly.  I plan to get a paperback copy and go through it again more thoroughly once I've finished with Nargarjuna.  As a result, this review is going to be pretty summary.  I just want to jot down some of the more eye-opening points that I think might be immediately useful.

The first part of the book gives some background on the importance of dependent origination in the Buddha's teachings.  Indeed, Brasington produces a lot of textual evidence to the effect that dependent origination is the Buddha's teaching, full stop.  That is, if you really understand dependent origination, you'll understand the four noble truths and can end dukkha (which Brasington proposes to translate "a bummer").  Brasington's biggest claim here is that the practical power of dependent origination lies in the fact that it talks only about necessary conditions, and not about causes (which would be necessary and sufficient conditions).  We cannot know the full cause of every bit of suffering in the world.  However, we can learn to see what conditions have to be present for dukkha to arise.  If we can take away any of those necessary conditions, suffering will cease to arise.  I've always wondered why people call it the doctrine of "dependent origination" rather than just saying that the Buddha taught about cause and effect.  Brasington's distinction between conditionality and causality answers this question precisely, and highlights how the Buddha was not a metaphysician but a pragmatic healer.  While we could endlessly debate the true cause of any event, and at the limit always discover that the true cause of anything is everything, what we want to do in practical terms is see a necessary condition of our suffering and prevent that condition from arising.  As the book goes on, Brasington delves into exactly which conditions we might prevent from arising.

It is essential that you keep in mind that these links are not about causes; rather they are about necessary conditions. If you start trying to figure out how some link causes the next one, you will miss the actual teaching because that is not what is being taught. Dependent origination is about dependencies – it's right there in the name; it is not about causes. Keep the basic meaning of idappaccayatā in mind: this arises dependent on that; if that doesn't happen, this doesn't arise.

The second part of the book has an interesting historical and textual analysis of the links of conditions that form the orthodox teaching of dependent origination.  It turns out that the full list of 12 links is a rather late-breaking idea within Buddhism.  Other versions of this list (with fewer links) existed before, and yet others were developed later.  I won't go into the details of this section, even though they're interesting, because they are in a sense beside the point for me (and to some extent for Brasington as well).  I've seen the list of the 12 links numerous times before, and some of them make reasonable sense from a practical psychological perspective (eg. Contact → Vedanā → Craving → Clinging → Dukkha).  But if you look at this list as a theory, you can't help but wonder why there are exactly 12 links.  Are all of these really necessary?  How do we know there aren't any other intermediate ones hiding in there that we haven't listed?  Brasington's discussion of the history of this list makes it clear that 12 is not really a magic number.  In fact, in his reading of it, there are really only 3 important links -- ignorance → craving → dukkha -- because it's really only at the ignorance or the craving links in the chain that we can do anything practical about our conditioning.  Essentially, the road to the end of suffering lies either in: 1) seeing how the valence of your experience usually leads you to crave the pleasant and avoid the unpleasant (which can be combated by cultivating equanimity) or 2) removing our ignorance by realizing that there's no one there to suffer to begin with.   The latter is of course the realization of not-self, or emptiness.  One of Brasington's main points in examining all these different lists is to suggest that the Buddha had something more general in mind with the theory of dependent origination.  It's not the specific links that matter so much as understanding the general idea that if X depends on Y, then if Y doesn't show up, neither will X.  In which case, the theory of dependent origination could be shortened to read: a suffering self necessarily depends on having a self to suffer.  No self, no dukkha.  

The third part of the book examines the consequences of this "general theory of dependent origination", which was essentially elaborated by Nagarjuna.  Since suffering depends on a self arising and a self is a type of thing, then suffering depends on things arising.  That is, without a (reciprocal) distinction between subject and object, suffering would be deprived of one of its necessary conditions.  So Brasington argues that the deepest understanding of dependent origination leads us towards emptiness and the non-dual.  Suffering ultimately depends on the way reification carves up the world into essentially distinct parts that differ in kind, the most important example of which is the cleft between subject and object.  If there were no-thing to suffer, suffering would not arise.  While Brasington grounds this vision of emptiness in the arguments Nagarjuna presents, he also coins his own term for this worldview: SODAPI.  Streams Of Dependently Arising Processes Interacting.  This is a world where there are no objects, but only processes, no nouns, but only verbs.  And while this world can unfold in a law-like manner, it's not appropriate to say that its evolution is governed by our typical idea of cause and effect because each of these would be a thing.  Here at last you can see the metaphysical importance of the distinction between dependent origination and causality.  There can still be necessary conditions in a world without any objects to serve as causes.  And in fact, it turns out that the first chapter in the Root Verses of the Middle Way will be devoted to demolishing the idea that causality is a category that could apply to real (non-empty) entities.  I told you this would come in handy in reading Nagarjuna!  

Brasington sums up this idea in a way that any mystic or Deleuzian could appreciate:

Any piece of the universe that you pick up is not a separate thing. John Muir stated this brilliantly: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."  It's all very much interconnected/interrelated.†. There are no separate entities anywhere in the entire universe. We concoct separate entities; we thingify our experience, because that's the only way we can manage to deal with it. But it's all just SODAPI, and all those streams are entangled enough so it's impossible to divide up the universe into separate entities and have an accurate picture of what's actually happening. I said earlier that it's all verbs, but truth be told, there is only one verb: "Unfolding." We could say "the universe is unfolding" but actually "the universe is" is superfluous; there's just Unfolding.

 

The footnote in that third sentence is especially interesting since it points precisely to what you might call a transcendental empiricism.

"Interconnected" would imply that everything is connected to everything else. "Interrelated" means that everything is connected to enough other things so that all the connections yield chains of connections from any one thing to all other things. Given these
definitions, "interrelated" more closely matches the way the world is constructed.

Everything is indeed connected to everything else, but not in any order.  To unfold the order of connections between processes that lie beyond or before the subject-object distinction would entail a special type of empiricism.

Empty and Full: The Language of Chinese Painting

Francios Cheng's wonderful study of Chinese painting marks the final book in my Taoist phase.  While Cheng doesn't explicitly argue that all Chinese painting is necessarily Taoist, it's clear that his conception of the art form is dominated by the interchangeability of opposites we already associate with that school of thought.  Hence the title.  He argues that Emptiness is not different than Fullness.  While this may suggest that they are "two sides of the same coin", that way of putting it misses the crucial point that the two are asymmetrical.  In fact, a fractal multilevel emptiness is the necessary precursor to the appearance of fullness.  In a sense then, this makes emptiness the deeper of the two concepts, or at least the one that applies to itself as an ongoing process rather than a product.  I think this may be the crucial insight into the paradoxes of non-duality -- it's not that supposed opposites are really identical, it's that they are not dual, not negations of one another, not balanced or equilibrated as conflicting poles, but yoked together in a productive symbiosis.  What I mean by this asymmetry may seem a little obscure now, but the beauty of this book is that it develops these highly abstract ideas by reference to the concrete techniques of Chinese landscape painting.  At the end of the book, Cheng even carries the analysis down to the level of the particularity of a single painter, Shih T'ao, a Qing dynasty master famous not only for his art but his theoretical writings as well.  Since I really enjoyed this book for the way it deepened my understanding of emptiness (perhaps analogously to the way Deleuze's cinema books deepened my understanding of time) I'll try to go through it in some detail.  

1 -- Emptiness in Chinese Philosophy

After a short introduction to the history of Chinese painting, Cheng's first task is to clear away the notion that emptiness refers to something vague or non-existent.  Emptiness is not lack.  Non-being is not the being of the negative.  Instead, emptiness is an animating principle that allows things to flow, transform, and act.  Cheng sketches out this theory of active emptiness by quoting extensively from Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, and Huai-nan-tzu.  While I'm still glad I read the originals, his short gloss on these texts probably taught me more about Taoism than all of them combined.  As I'm discovering, many of these older texts were really designed as compressed mnemonic devices for the student.  Philosophically, they depend on a teacher or commentator to flesh out the context and expand on their poetry.

One of Cheng's main contentions is that in Taoism, emptiness is both before and between things.  It serves not just as a point of ultimate origin, but also as a wellspring or reservoir of potential that constantly intervenes in the functioning of the world by allowing opposites to circulate.  Crucially, this gives it a kind of fractal quality.  The 'big' emptiness of the origin is reiterated at multiple levels by the 'little' emptinesses present throughout each level.  Later Cheng will elaborate this idea by reference to the way that emptiness is present at every level of a great painting -- from the brustroke, to the composition, to the meditative intention behind it.  For now, he's content to take this paradoxical self-similar structure on its most philosophical level.  Because emptiness itself is empty, or there's emptiness within emptiness itself, or something else of the sort, emptiness turns out to be within all things as the animating principle that allows them to achieve fullness.  In other words, emptiness and fullness are non-dual.  

In more concrete terms, he shows how the Taoists represent emptiness as the valley or ravine.  This gap in the mountains is the fertile ground from which the fullness of the "ten thousand things" spring up.  Though he doesn't mention the buddhist connection, the idea fits perfectly with the etymology of the Sanskrit term śūnyatā, which links emptiness to the hollowness of a pregnant belly.  I don't know if mahayana (or perhaps vajrayana) buddhists have a parallel framework that links emptiness to phenomenon via some process of mediation, but Cheng outlines a theory of this sort of Taoism.  For the Taoists, the primordial 0 of emptiness gives rise to the 1 breath, which divides into the 2 vital breaths of yin and yang, active and passive (presumably these are modeled on inhaling and exhaling).  In a final step, a "median emptiness" (the "little" emptiness between things) relates yin and yang and prevents them from becoming static and unproductive opposites.  Thus, the ten thousand things are modeled on, and produced by, the 3 part relationship of yin, yang, and median emptiness.  Cheng summarize this mediating scheme as:

A binary system that can be ternary and a ternary system that can be unitary: two equals three; three equals one.  This is the seemingly paradoxical but constant mainspring of Chinese thought. (pg. 51)

[And here I can't resist quoting the footnote (from Granet: La Pensée chinoise) that accompanies this passage because it is so close to Deleuze's description of Lacan's object a or the empty square of structuralism.

One is never anything other than the whole, and two is nothing but the pair.  Two is the pair characterized by the alternation of yin and yang.  The one, the whole, is the pivot that is neither the yin nor the yang but by which the alternation between yin and yang is coordinated.  It is the central square that does not count (like the hub, which the Taoist authors say is able to make the wheel turn because of its emptiness) ... Both together, unity and pair, the whole, if we want to give it numerical expression, is found in odd numbers, and first of all in the three (the one plus the two).  Three, as we shall see, amounts to a hardly attenuated expression of unanimity.       

The Western translation of the concept of emptiness would go in this direction I think.  It is the "paradoxical object" that is always missing from its place, always circulating through a series of transformations.  This ceaseless movement though, this constituent lack, is what allows it to stand in for the whole and create a symbolic order.]

The final theme Cheng tackles in his philosophical exposition of emptiness is also the most difficult  to understand.   What is the role of emptiness in human life?  The idea is that it's only through our own emptiness that we can become the model or mirror for the world.  It's only by a long process of emptying our self that we become capable of painting the emptiness/fullness of the natural world.  Though Cheng chooses terms like "mirror", "model", and "microcosm" here, it seems to me that this could easily convey the impression that the goal is an accurate representation of the world in the form of some sort of miniature recreation of it.  In fact, the goal of cultivating our internal emptiness is to stop representing the world, and start becoming it.  Since the universe is already empty, re-creating it in painted form is less a matter of capturing a particular scene than it is of continuing the process of unfolding emptiness that gave rise to it.  Human creation "mirrors' this process only by being swept up in it so that our little or median emptiness resonates with and develops the larger emptiness.  If, despite Rorty's objection, we want to stick with the mirror metaphor, we need to emphasize the surface of the mirror itself rather than the images that appear in it.  The mirror really adds nothing to the world.  Similarly, the surface of the mirror remains unchanged no matter what contents it happens to reflect.  So in a sense the mirror is nothing in itself but the simple passive act of reflection.  The mirror metaphor changes if you focus on the emptiness and superficiality of the 'act' of mirroring instead of the objects pictured in the depths.

Cheng adds a final twist to this now familiar mystical breeze-blowing-right-through-you moment by linking it to a transformation of time into space.  He observes that humans, after all, are finite, mortal, creatures.  How could we possibly expect to re-create the whole with our limited means?  Our only chance is to re-create a sort of infinite fractal depth within ourselves, to make each of our finite moments communicate with the whole.  Citing Lao-Tzu -- "... it flows on pushing ever further, and having gone far in its going, it ends up effecting the return" (25) -- Cheng interprets the concept of the return as something that doesn't happen at the end of time, but between any moment and its successor.  It's as if the whole universal sweep of the tao is reinserted into every gap within it.  But making each instant recapitulate the whole (which is composed of instants recapitulating the whole ...) has the effect of converting time into space.  An endless process of temporal unfolding is converted into a single space that can be apprehended at once.  Obviously, this idea is crucial if you want to capture the universe in a painting.  Later Cheng will analyze various concrete techniques for adding a temporal depth to the painted surface, all of which will depend on a lived emptiness on the part of the painter.

Thus, with regard to the manner in which man should live space-time, Confucius and Lao-Tzu both proposed emptiness of heart, which makes humans capable of interiorizing the entire process of qualitative change that I have been discussing.  Emptiness implies interiorization and totalization. (pg. 58)

2 -- Emptiness in Chinese Painting

After outlining his philosophical theory of emptiness, Cheng proceeds to apply all the concepts described above to Chinese painting.  By quoting extensively from various painters he shows us how they conceive of their discipline as the fruit of a long meditation, the flowering of a spiritual process that makes painting into a sort of "philosophy in action" designed to mirror the creative process of the cosmos.  In fact, many of them describe the ultimate goal of painting as the ability to create an image as real as the nature that inspired it.  Of course, this doesn't mean they want to produce a perfect objective representation of nature, but to capture its li, its inner pattern or principle. Our Western temptation to call this the essence of things is misplaced but instructive -- the whole point is that there aren't any essential things to begin with, but that everything is wrapped up in a process of becoming and creation that only reaches totalization with the (empty) act of painting itself.

Cheng outlines four nested levels that structure Chinese painting, each of which is composed of a duality whose terms are held together by emptiness.  Brush-Ink refers to the way the properly executed brustroke can create form, texture, and even dimension in painted objects.  Emptiness holds brush and ink together both through the way many specific types of stroke introduce un-inked areas within the stroke, but also in the rhythmic separation of one stroke from another can be made to produce the sense of volume.  Manipulation of the Brightness-Darkness (Yin-Yang) duality is responsible for the creation of color in both the literal and atmospheric sense.  The relationship to emptiness becomes clearer here when you know that most of Chinese painting has only black ink on a white page.  Any coloring is an illusion created by a variety of washes and other brush techniques.  Since most of these are landscape paintings, Mountain-Water is the most obvious dualistic pair.  When we observe mountains which pile up like waves and a roiling sea that has its peaks and valleys, it becomes clear that these opposites are often painted so as to unite them.  In between, holding them together, we find the emptiness of the clouds.  Finally, at the level of the overall composition, we immediately notice the heavy use of negative space.  Cheng identifies the opposition of painted and unpainted space with the Heaven-Earth duality.  These two are united by the emptiness in the painter himself as he tries to include the very process of making the painting within it.  It reminds me of Cezanne's description: "man absent from but entirely within the landscape".  The painter appears in his landscape in the way it expresses a mood, in its a-realistic use of perspective, and, in many later paintings, in the form of an original poem inscribed in the black space.  All of these techniques serve to transform a lived process of painting into a living space, one that reflects a spiritual journey that inherently involves time.  The end result is another non-dual paradox: a visual music.

3 -- The painting of Shih T'ao

The final section of the book doesn't really offer any new ideas, but simply particularizes what has been said to the case of Shih T'ao.  Cheng quotes extensively from his Enlightening Remarks on Painting and reproduces several of his paintings in the glossy plates section to bring all the abstractions down to concrete images.  Here is a nature that lives and breathes as we do, an emptiness mirroring emptiness.

 

 

Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea

I have no idea how this collection of short stories by Sara Pinsker ended up on my list, but it is easily some of the best sci-fi I've read and the best short fiction since discovering Ted Chiang a while back.  In my experience female authors seem to more frequently escape the boys-with-toys trap implicit in the genre and instead manage to write genuinely speculative fiction.  In this sense, Pinsker follows in the footsteps of Le Guin and Jeminsin in creating possible universes that address genuine human problems to characters we care about.  Of course, this is not meant to typecast her, and in other respects her writing is completely different from these other women.  In this collection at least, most of the stories eschew any of the world-building I associate with the other two, and instead just drop you without explanation into a twisted future that insightfully illuminates some emotional situation.  

So, for example, we find a woman who has lost her dream-child discovering a whole community of folks suffering from the same problem.  Or a soldier and mother whose memory of a horrific war has been neurologically blocked except during the annual "Remembery Day" parade.  And when we get to the inevitable dystopian stories about societal breakdown driving the wealthy to take a neverending cruise, or the utter hollowing out of rural America and the death of live music, the focus isn't on what happened or how it will all end, but on how people are coping, and what regular folks are like after the apocalypse.  Even in the brilliant finale And Then There Were (N-One) the focus is not on the dizzying metaphysics of the multiverse but on the clever crime story plot the setting generates, and the deep questions it asks about all the counterfactual divergence points that create our identity.

A highly recommended collection.

The Body Has a Mind of Its Own

Someone in one of my meditation groups recently recommended this The Body Has a Mind of Its Own.  Seems meditation kindles an interest in brain science for other folks as well.  This pop science book doesn't have anything to say about the science of meditation (though it seems that mentioning the subject is now necessary when discussing the brain -- Koch also felt the need).  Instead, it focuses on the various ways the body is represented in the brain.  While the idea that the brain represents anything at all is, I think, a philosophically bankrupt one, no one can deny that there are a number of cortical maps that appear to us, as third party investigators, to represent sensation or movement in various parts of the body.  That is to say that there are cortical areas that have a constant 1-to-1 correspondence between their activity and a stimulus.  Moreover, if a stimulus applied to, say, my left big toe, causes activity in a particular region of the brain, then a stimulus applied to my left index toe causes activity in a neighboring cortical region.  In other words, what we mean by "a map" in the brain is a topology preserving correspondence (I think this is a homeomorphism, but I ain't no mathematician) between a set of stimuli ordered according to some metric (often just regular cartesian space) and cortical activity (ordered, again, according to regular cartesian space, though perhaps accounting for the way the brain is basically a folded up surface.  Nearby stuff, as measured by one metric, maps to nearby stuff, as measured by the other metric.

Because this is a pop science book that trusts no reader as capable of looking at a footnote or understanding an analogy that does not involve either NASCAR or their family pet, their definition of "map" is limited to one sentence.  After all, everyone already knows what a map is.  At this point, everyone probably even already knows about the most salient maps in the brain, the sensory and motor homunculi.  These are indeed fascinating maps, and the first part of the book explores many of their interesting functions and dysfunctions (like perhaps surprisingly in anorexia).  Unfortunately, after the first couple of chapters that deal with genuine cortical maps, the authors then begin to serially abuse the concept.  The basic goal is to use the intuitive notion of maps to hold together an only loosely related collection of anecdotes about the latest in brain science.  So we get "maps" for higher order motor programs, and emotions, and all sorts of things with no obvious metric and no discussion of how this metric would be preserved in the cortex.  This all culminates in a discussion of the infamous mirror neurons, "the most hyped concept in neuroscience", in which each of these neurons is presented as in itself a "map" of various observed movements.  In other words, they push the word map to the point of meaninglessness, and then beyond.  Without a metric you simply can't talk about a "map".  At best you are describing a "circuit".  At worst you are saying things like, "this is the neuron for recognizing that a lefthanded jewish lesbian from Latin America is scratching the right side of their face with their toe".  

So while there are plenty of nice anecdotes about scientists and their research (and the research subjects and the serendipitous whatever that inspired the research and its feel good implications and blah blah blah) ultimately the book is just too light to get much out of either scientifically or philosophically.  However, the overarching point they make is a good one -- many of our "higher" cognitive functions are clearly related to our brain's relationship to our own body.