Nagarjuna's Middle Way

I mentioned a month ago that I thought plowing through Nagarjuna's seminal Mulamadhyamakakarika was going to take a while.  So I'm pleased and surprised to report that the reading sped up considerably after the first few chapters.  Initially, I worried that following Nagarjuna's analysis might require dipping into some secondary literature that outlined the various issues at stake in second century Indian philosophy.  The first chapter in particular seemed to be a highly technical analysis of the concept of causality that presumes the reader is familiar with the positions adopted by a number of different schools of Buddhism from that time period.  Or at least, that was the impression given by the combination of Nagarjuna's terse style and the academic commentary that accompanies the verses in the translation I used.  And of course, treating it as a piece of logical philosophical analysis that responds to various sectarian debates of the time would be one legitimate way to read the book.  But as I read further, I began to see that this wasn't the only way to read Nagarjuna.  

Gradually, I started to notice that the text was pretty repetitive from a philosophical perspective.  The same strategies of argumentation led to the same types of conclusions again and again.  I also started to notice that while Siderits' and Katsura's commentary was very helpful, it always tried to map the poetry directly into analytical prose, as if the form were just an external constraint.  They continually cite a number of other commentators and try to triangulate just who Nagarjuna might have been arguing with and exactly what his argument was.  Basically, they try to convert him into an analytic and scholastic philosopher.  Meanwhile, the literal translation they provide of the verses slowly makes clear that a lot of what Nagarjuna is doing here relies on the way language can quickly frame a seemingly insoluble paradox that on closer inspection turns out to reveal basic flaws in our assumptions.  In short, you can also read Nagarjuna as a sort of proto-zen poet whose goal is not to prove anything but simply to get your conceptual mind to unclench and surrender its dualistic categories.  I suspect that Stephen Batchelor's translation may lend itself to this koan-ic type of reading, and I plan to revisit Nagarjuna in the future from this angle.  

What I'm left with is something between these two readings.  I do understand Nagarjuna as having written a logical, analytical text that attempts to make philosophical arguments.  But the important thing is not the many details of the arguments, but their unvarying form -- effectively there's just one argument in the text.  Whether we're talking about the self, or about agency, or arising and dissolution, or even about nirvana and the buddha himself, the point is ultimately always the same.  Whatever it is we're talking about does not have an essential intrinsic nature.  It does not stand alone, in itself, naturally distinct from all other things in the universe.  Whatever we're talking about is not ultimately real, but is constructed, fabricated.  It is just a conceptual fiction that is more or less useful ... for liberating ourselves from our conceptual fictions.  In short, the only argument is that everything is empty.

One way to see Nagarjuna's concept of emptiness is as a total critique of Plato's notion of the Forms.  The Forms are quasi-divine bits of pure essence.  Each exists entirely in-itself, distinct from all the others and especially from every possible empirical exemplar of that Form.  At the same time each Form is pure in the sense that it is nothing but itself.  The Form of Beauty alone is truly beautiful.  Actually beautiful things derive from it through a process of getting mixed up with other stuff.  In the long history of Western philosophy, this essentialism will change shape many times.  Instead of the Forms, the essential thing will be the atoms, or our ideas, or God.  But each update of this essentialist philosophy will maintain the same form.  Ultimate Reality is made up of something that is absolutely identical to itself and utterly distinct from everything else.  The core building block of true reality will always remain simple, pure, unchanging, and essentially in-itself.  And as a corollary, everything that is composite, mixed, impermanent, and tied up with other things will be cast out of the realm of essence.  These things are ultimately not real at all, but just shadows on the wall, semblances, appearances, illusions that cannot properly be said to truly exist.  If there are essences, there must be accidents.  If there is reality, there must be mere appearance.  Every essentialist philosophy (every realist philosophy?) is dualistic.

Emptiness is the antidote to essentialism.  Over and over again, Nagarujuna will point out the problems that arise when we take something to exist essentially and in-itself.  No matter what thing we're talking about, he will extract logical paradoxes from its hypothesized 'ultimate reality'.  His goal is not to replace one set of proposed essences with another, truer or more accurate, set.  His goal is to treat our addiction to essentialism itself.  When properly understood, emptiness is exactly the concept for this job.  Because emptiness ≠ non-existence.  It's not the same thing as mere appearance or illusion.  The contention is not that most things are empty, but some special class of things are nonempty.  That is the old Theravadan statement of the problem -- sure, the self is empty, but the dharmas (the ayatanas, skandas, and dhatus of Abidharma orthodoxy) are underlying real elements that compose the unreal self.  In the Mahayana tradition Nagarjuna argues for here, the contention is that everything, not just the self, is empty.  So empty, in fact, that there aren't even things to be individually empty.  So empty that even emptiness itself is empty.  As Nagarjuna makes clear many times over, the concept of emptiness goes beyond the dualistic opposition between existence and non-existence, reality and appearance.  An anti-essentialist philosophy must be inherently non-dual.  

If an anti-essentialist philosophy is inherently non-dual, then it is also inherently paradoxical.  You can see this immediately in Nagarjuna's repeated negation of the four possibilities of the tetralemma -- the Buddha neither exists, nor does not exist, nor both exists and does not exist, nor, finally, does he neither exist nor not exist.  Strange as it sounds, these logical categories simply don't apply -- not to the Buddha, and not to anything else either, because there simply isn't any real thing for them to apply to.  But you can also see the essential paradox of this line of thinking when we reach the question of whether things are "truly" empty.  How can Nagarjuna even coherently write down his philosophy of emptiness?  Isn't the very concept of emptiness yet another empty conceptual fiction?  After expounding emptiness, how could you ever hope to claim this view is more accurate than any other?  Nagarjuna does not treat this question head on aside from a few passages that make clear he understands the problem, and would apply the same deconstruction to his own philosophical notions that he has applied to everyone else's.  At first I found this light treatment was insufficient to the gravity of the problem.  But the more I've thought about it, the more I've realized that there simply is no way to tackle the problem head on via philosophical content.  No matter how many caveats you explicitly add to your metaphysical concepts, someone can still ask whether, for example, it's "really true" that emptiness itself is empty or whether that statement too is empty, etc ...  There's no escape from the paradox of taking relativism as a truth, no end to the proliferation of metas within the realm of content.  However, the realm of content is not the only one available to us.  We should not forget that Nagarjuna is a poet.  While Siderits and Katsura mainly treat the text as a philosophical opus that was accidentally squeezed into verse form simply to accommodate the demands of tradition and pedagogy, we've already observed that their own translation suggests that this content focused reading is not the only one.  Nagarjuna (just like Plato, incidentally) has real style as well.  And when we reach this outermost layer of emptiness with its reflexive self-application, style becomes essential.  The language Nagarjuna uses is constantly sharpened to a striking point.  The paradoxes he so consistently creates keeping halting us in our tracks as we read, trying to force us to experience this philosophy for ourselves.  Style is actually the only way to cope with the fractal vertigo of anti-essentialism.  How could you be satisfied with the usual discursive style of philosophy when your point is that there is no real world waiting out there to be described or theorized?  When you abandon this presumption of metaphysical objectivity, the medium becomes part of the message, the style becomes essential in its own right, rather than serving merely as an accidental and irrelevant casing for the content.  In fact, the very distinctions between these two sides collapses.

The final idea I will take away from reading Nagarjuna is the link between emptiness and dependent origination.  The most famous verse in the Mulamadhyamakakarika is 24.18.

Dependent origination we declare to be emptiness.
It [emptiness] is a dependent concept; just that is the middle path.

As we just discussed, the second line of this verse seems to be saying that emptiness itself is just another empty concept, meaning that Nagarjuna's critique of essence applies to his own favorite concept as well.  But the first line introduces the idea that emptiness = dependent origination.  The simplest way to understand this connection is to see that in a world without essences, everything comes into being and goes out of being, gets fabricated and falls apart.  Nothing stands apart, permanent and self sufficient.  Instead, everything depends on causes and conditions, and this explains why everything is empty.  Siderits and Katsura point out that this basically amounts to saying that emptiness is a consequence of dependent origination.  While I think that way of understanding it is useful as far as it goes, I think it misses a deeper aspect of the connection between emptiness and dependent origination.  As Leigh Brasington pointed out, dependent origination is not the same thing as causality.  He says that this is because dependent origination only concerns necessary conditions, and leaves entirely to the side the question of the sufficient conditions that go with those to complete our usual understanding of causality.  But we can cast the same observation in a slightly different light by noticing that in Nagarjuna's world, there is no thing to serve as cause, and no thing to serve as effect, simply because there is no-thing at all.  In other words, in this second understanding, we might reverse the earlier logic and claim that dependent origination is a consequence of emptiness.  The doctrine of dependent origination isn't talking about causality, it is simply telling us that if one thing does not arise, then another thing which depends on its arising will likewise not arise.  One example of this would be our usual understanding of the way that the arising of an effect depends on the arising of its cause, but there's nothing special about cause and effect here.  It's just that if we know thing B needs thing A in order to arise, then the realized emptiness of thing A prevents thing B from showing up.  

That last sentence deliberately introduced an ambiguity that I'm not sure I know how to resolve completely but that I feel lurking.  Are we talking about the arising of our concepts here, or of actual things?  Is this an epistemological or an ontological question?  After all, if thing A just is empty, then neither it nor thing B should arise, right?  Why is our realization of the emptiness important, and how can this realization alone prevent real things from arising?  Or does the pairing of the two lines in the verse indicate that we're only really talking about the dependent origination of concepts here?  If there aren't "really" any things in the world, then we must be inventing them.  In which case we could avoid the arising of thing B simply by not fabricating thing A.  I think this reading is on the right track but is still slightly missing the deepest point. In Nagarjuna's world there cannot be any real distinction between things and concepts.  It seems to me that the ubiquity of emptiness is clearly pointing us to the idea of a flat ontology.  We can either say that concepts are also things or that things too are concepts, but it makes no sense to choose one side of this duality as opposed to the other.  Perhaps this turns the middle path mentioned in the verse into a sort of Mobius strip where all our apparent dualities can be balanced by remembering that there's actually only one side?  Maybe Nagarjuna's middle way is more extreme than it sounds.

 

#reread  

A Manual For Cleaning Women

I'm not sure how this collection of Lucia Berlin short stories made it on to my list, but it made for fine bedtime reading.  Berlin's craft is both accomplished and understated; she really knows how to pack a lot into an allusive short story without making it seem dense or difficult reading.  Nevertheless, I found myself feeling only lukewarm towards these stories.  Perhaps I've been spoiled by the "big ideas" of sci-fi, but these sober little realist vignettes apparently drawn mostly from Berlin's own life seem kinda ... dull.  And a bit repetitive.  Given her many geographics, husbands, and bottles of bourbon, Berlin seems to have been a pretty hard liver who never really changed so much as just got older.  Despite the selection of stories spanning the whole sweep of her life, they all sound pretty similar not only in the tone of the writing but in the tone of the main autobiographical character.  Who knows though?  Maybe this is how we all are, trapped in brain freeze in our mid twenties, thawed only by the universal warmth of impending death.

No Bad Parts

A number of folks in my meditation group had mentioned Richard Schwartz's No Bad Parts, and since I've actually already done a little bit of IFS therapy, I figured an overview of the modality's methodology written by its inventor could be an interesting follow up on that experience.  Turns out, the book isn't aimed to give a full theoretical account of the IFS methodology, but instead to bring its basic ideas to a wider audience.  In other words, it falls into the pop-psychology, self-help genre.  As a result, I still feel like I don't completely understand IFS as a philosophy, and I still have lots of questions about how to apply it to my own psyche that I imagine only a professional therapist could answer.  Nevertheless, I enjoyed the book and would recommend it.  It outlines a simple and relatively easy to follow method for investigating your inner constitution, and it lays out an easily graspable world-view that is eminently compatible with the non-dual interpretation of Buddhism I've been interested in lately.

The basic trope of IFS is pretty simple.  You dramatize your inner life by treating your various thoughts and emotional reactions as if they belonged to other characters living in your head -- your parts.  Schwartz of course believes that this is much more than a mere metaphor, that we all suffer from something like multiple personality disorder.  But I don't see why one would need to opine about the ontological status of these parts to use the method, and indeed, I think that the parts he described really only exist as useful metaphors.  Of course, I believe that "useful metaphor" may in fact be the sole category of existence, so this may not mark any substantial disagreement.  The only important thing is to allow these parts to have enough reality that you perceive them as independent characters who are not identical to "you".  

The IFS methodology has you look for these parts in and around your body by examining various physical manifestations of the emotions associated with the part (eg. pain in your neck associated with a chronically tense inner critic).  Once you've identified a part, you enter into dialog with it.  What are its concerns and emotions?  How does it feel about your other parts? How does it feel about you?  This might at first sound pretty woo-woo, but like I say, I don't think it the methodology suffers from treating these "parts" as simple heuristic devices.  In fact, I find it easier to approach this work of identifying parts from the perspective of meditation.  For example, Shinzen Young encourages us to examine our mental images, our emotional bodily sensations, and our mental talk as a set of spaces with his See/Hear/Feel framework.  Practicing his techniques greatly improved my ability to notice all the various 'voices in my head' -- some of  which speak in images, some through emotion tied to a particular bodily region, and some of whom simply blah, blah, blah, end end quote.  Similarly, a number of traditions use the concept of spacious awareness to explore our ability to not identify with our thoughts.  You can instead imagine yourself as the space in which thoughts take place, just as the clouds 'take place' in the sky, or the waves in the ocean.  When you start paying attention to your inner life in these ways, you not only awaken to the fact that there's an awful lot going on in there, but you begin to be able to classify what's happening and locate it in a larger space as well.  The crucial thing is simply to create a separation between events in your inner space and 'you'.  With this distancing, it becomes much easier to see repeating patterns of thoughts, images, emotions, and voices when they occur.  I would submit that Schwartz's parts are none other than these repeating patterns.

Once you've found some parts, what do you with them?  On a practical level, you pull up a chair and invite them to talk.  But the initial goal of this conversation is to examine how the parts relate to form your inner system.  IFS has a pretty clear framework for classifying parts.  Basically, there are two possible roles for a part: exile or protector.  Exiles are parts you don't want to look at.  All the examples of these that Schwartz gives in the book are wounded or needy parts of you that resulted from some early childhood trauma.  Protectors are parts that keep your exiles hidden away so that you don't have to be re-traumatized by looking at them. Protectors come in two flavors.  Managers are, as it were, chronic protectors, that organize your world and your reactions so that you and your exiles never meet.  You might say that they scan the contents of experience looking for trigger warnings.  Firefighters, as the name implies, are acute protectors who show up to minimize the damage when some exile has already been triggered.  Most of our obvious problems result from the maladaptive behavior of our firefighters.  We get angry, we dissociate, we get drunk, etc ...  Firefighters cope with fires as best they can and don't worry about the consequences, because, well, they killed your fucking car!

Once you've gotten to know your parts and classified them, the ultimate goal of IFS therapy is to 1) separate yourself from your protectors, 2) get your protectors to relax enough to let you talk to your exiles, 3) get your exiles to trust you enough to tell you what trauma they suffered, 4) soothe these now unburdened exiles and credibly promise that your not going to let this sort of thing happen to them again, and finally, 5) live happily ever after, together with your parts as one big family -- naturally with 'you' as head of household.

While I'm no psychologist, this therapeutic trajectory doesn't seem all that novel.  Basically it seems like a version of the oldest psychotherapeutic playbook out there -- treat your problems as symptoms of an underlying disease, as psychological coping mechanisms that seek to protect you from some trauma (presumed to have occurred in early childhood).  Cure the disease by reenacting it, or at least laying it bare to conscious inspection.  Methodologically speaking, perhaps treating these coping mechanisms as independent parts, as little people in their own right, is a fairly new idea.  Though again, it seems to me that Freud's emphasis on myth and dramatization would represent a precedent for this line of thinking.  This is not to argue that the repetition of an idea makes it any less important; all the great spiritual truths are clichés because they've been around for so long.  The important thing is simply to ask what kind of life you will lead if you follow this methodology.

Schwartz makes it clear that he himself has explicitly spiritual aims for IFS.  He would like to see us follow this methodology so as to become "self-led systems".  In other words, he identifies the 'you' that I have been putting in scare quotes this whole time with our "true self".  He conceives this self as distinct from, and bigger than, what we usually refer to as our ego.  With this self as our leader, we can learn to love and value and harmonize all our parts (hence the title).  In other words, the self, in Schwartz's terminology, is not merely a part, but some sort of integration of parts, some sort of space in which parts can interact in a healthy way.  It is curios, calm, confident, compassionate, creative, clear, courageous, and connected (to list Schwartz's eight C's).  In the end, it is a bigger, better, more open and more caring version of our everyday self.  

As I mentioned before, this conception of who we are (or can become) is very close to the Buddhist idea of non-self.  Strangely, while Schwartz is generally positively inclined towards meditation he either doesn't see or doesn't want to draw our attention to this very strong anti-parallel.  After reading David Loy though, we know enough not to be fooled by this self vs. not-self debate; he convincingly explains how these opposed terms represent different descriptions of one and the same non-dual experience.  Schwartz describes the self in almost exactly the same glowing terms that non-dualists like Michael Taft use to describe vast spacious awareness.  Or perhaps the better comparison would be to a contemporary advaitist like Maharshi who explicitly used the term Self.  

These comparisons also highlight the final spiritual aims that Schwartz has for IFS.  When non-dualists talk about Self or Non-Self, they are talking about a field of awareness larger than the individual.  Whatever they call it, they are talking about some absolute and unlimited fabric in which our individual selves are enfolded.  Which is to say that this individuality we cling to is ultimately illusory, and that the point of these meditations is to bring us to a sense of boundless connectedness.  While Schwartz may not go quite this far (he is a therapist, not a guru, after all) he does devote the end of the book to the ways in which the IFS methodology can help us to more compassionately connect with the world and open up to what he calls the SELF.  Once we have embraced the complexity of our microcosm, we become more aware of and compassionate towards our own parts, we can begin to recognize these parts in others.  We can even begin to look at society as a whole as a sort of self that we, in turn, are parts of.  

While there are are some good ideas here -- like compassionately exploring our own inner racists rather than exiling them -- I feel like Schwartz's writing begins to get a little mushy and nebulous at this point.  It's too tempting to just repeatedly apply the same logic of Self and Parts at higher and higher levels, as if the whole world were a neatly nesting series of Russian dolls.  The problem with this way of thinking is not its dalliance with the mystical interconnectedness of all things.  The problem is that, like Ken Wilber, it tends to picture this connectedness as a strictly hierarchical great chain of being.  But the unfolding of awareness is surely much more like a tangled web than a series of concentric circles.  There's little doubt that local hierarchies (or holarchies) are an important principle in nature's self-organization.  But as the example of racism illustrates, my parts do not belong to or impact me alone.  They are formed in the context of a larger society alongside the sense of self that they become parts of.  Various local hierarchies become entangled in a global rhizome.  I distrust any totalizing spiritual system that suggests there is a 'largest' or 'most important' level we should focus on to the exclusion of all else.  This shortcut to 'the highest' seems like a simulacrum of enlightenment designed to trap the unwary.  It's unfair to accuse Schwartz of taking this route, especially seeing as how he takes care to end the book with a chapter on embodiment.  However, are there points where he perhaps teeters?

Pale Fire

Despite the fact that it's one of the greatest 'novels' ever, it's actually pretty hard to know what to say about Nabokov's masterpiece.  In fact, since it's not really a novel in any conventional sense, it's hard to even summarize what the plot is.  Nevertheless, it's a brilliant, funny, moving, puzzling, and always dazzlingly written sort of wild goose chase through Nabokov's imagination.  As with Infinite Jest, part of the fun of Reading Pale Fire is figuring out what the fuck is going on.  So if you follow my advice and really plan to read it, you might want to stop here with the ...

SPOILER ALERT

I started Pale Fire about 5 times before I really got into it.  This is only partially due to the fact that the poetic density of the language doesn't make for good bedtime reading.  For example, early on we get The Best Sentence in English®:

As a rule, Shade destroyed drafts the moment he ceased to need them: well do I recall seeing him from my porch, on a brilliant
morning, burning a whole stack of them in the pale fire of the incinerator before which he stood with bent head like an official mourner among the wind-borne black butterflies of that backyard auto-da-fé.

The novel at first repulses any attempt to enter its world, paradoxically because there seem to be too many points of entrance.  Of course, you start at the beginning, with a genre you think you understand -- Professor Charles Kinbote writing a foreword for a critical edition of his late friend John Shade's final poem.  Right away though you are put off by strange interruptions in the text that turn what appears to be a standard, overly literate academic foreword into something more bizarre and auto-biographical.  Professor Kinbote seems to have a strange agenda connected with the poem, but at first you can't really piece together what's going on.  Nevermind though, the foreword is relatively short, so you plough on into the poem and the copious accompanying footnotes ... only to get more confused.  Is the good Herr Doktor reading the same poem that you are?  The notes seem only dimly related to what's happening in the clever, but seemingly fairly light, lines of iambic pentameter.  The foreword actually suggested reading the notes first, which seems odd, but okay, so you try that for a while, perhaps flipping back and forth to the poem, until it's clear that the notes are gradually veering off into some other story about a place called Zembla that has nothing to do with the lines these notes refer to in the poem.  Hmmmm ... So you go back and just read the 999 line poem itself one time through.  It's actually quite a lovely and moving meditation on untimely mortality.  The language and images are beautiful and surprising and not infrequently funny, and the rhymed couplets in strict meter set up an interesting rhythmic game that reminds you of the creative power of constraints.  However, by the end, it's clear the this poem has nothing to do with Professor Kinbote's homeland of Zembla, nor with the story he has begun to unfold through the notes of its recently deposed and exiled king -- Charles Xavier the Beloved.  So, you just go all the way back to the beginning again and start over.  And this time you notice a conspicuous reference to the very last footnote right in the foreword.

I think of John N. R. Wayne, who would have won this year's WhataBurger, standing watch in a mask as Donald Gately and I dig up my father's head.

Of course, that's not really what it said.  But it reminded me of exactly the way DFW hid the secret of Infinite Jest in plain sight, but so early in the novel that you don't know how to make use of it.  It turns out that Kinbote's final footnote gives away the ending, where the attempted regicide of Gradus (aka Jack Grey) results in the accidental death of John Shade, author of his then nearly complete final masterpiece Pale Fire.  Suddenly you have learned that the disconnected strands of the poem Pale Fire and the exiled  Zemblan king are destined to intersect at this fateful climax.  With this structure in mind, the trajectory of the whole book begins to make sense.  

Though now as you begin again from the beginning, there are a whole new set of questions.  Is Zembla a real place?  Is Professor Charles Kinbote himself the exiled king?  And if so, why was he so convinced that Pale Fire would be a poem about his dramatic escape from the revolution?  Is the murderer really from Zembla?  Or just some deranged lunatic from a local asylum?  And, wait, is Prof. Kinbote himself a reliable narrator of events?  Is he sane?  Is he even real?  In fact, are John Shade and his poem even real then?  Hold on, what sense does a question like that even make in the context of a work of fiction that pretends not to be?  Perhaps we are only left with the miracle of fireflies and bats.

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable (so I used to tell my students).  Although I am capable, through long dabbling in blue magic, of imitating any prose in the world (but singularly enough not verse - I am a miserable rhymester), I do not consider myself a true artist, save in one matter: I can do what only a true artist can do - pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web. Solemnly I weighed in my hand what I was carrying under my left armpit, and for a moment, I found myself enriched with an indescribable amazement as if informed that fireflies were making decodable signals on behalf of stranded spirits, or that a bat was writing a legible tale of torture in the bruised and branded sky.

#reread