Early Buddhism as Philosophy of Existence: Freedom and Death

By Susan E. Babbitt

The Buddha was what today is called an empirical philosopher, taking his philosophy from careful study of the empirical world, and rejecting “high flown” philosophies. As philosophy of existence, his view overlaps with Marx in his most interesting form, which is not the way Marx is typically understood. Marx was reduced to economics while the Buddha was reduced to religion. Many shared his view, including Dostoevsky, Proust, and Victor Hugo. Death is present in such views. But they are not recognized as philosophy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: May 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9781839983368

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Early Buddhism as Philosophy of Existence

Early Buddhism as Philosophy of Existence

Freedom and Death

Susan E. Babbitt

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2022

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

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Copyright © Susan E. Babbitt 2022

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Babbitt, Susan E., author.

Title: Early Buddhism as philosophy of existence : freedom and death / Susan E. Babbitt.

Description: USA : Anthem Press, 2022. |

Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2022000039 | ISBN 9781839983344 (hardback) |

ISBN 9781839983351 (pdf) | ISBN 9781839983368 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Nature–Religious aspects–Buddhism. | Buddhist cosmology. |

Buddhist philosophy. | Buddhism–Philosophy. | Buddhism and philosophy.

Classification: LCC BQ4570. N3 B33 2022 | DDC 181/.043–dc23/eng/20220129

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022000039

ISBN-13: 978-1-83998-334-4 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-83998-334-5 (Hbk)

Cover Image: Photograph by Susan E. Babbit

This title is also available as an e-book.

Dedicated to Virginia Hamilton

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1.

Why Philosophy of Existence?

2.

The Art of Dying is the Art of Living: Rationality

3.

Relational Philosophy and the Law of Dead Ends

4.

Living Philosophy, and Philosophy Must be Lived

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to all the practitioners of vipassana meditation, both within and outside the organization. Some who have never heard of vipassana nonetheless practise the values and way of life of the Buddha. They may find this helps them. In any case, I am grateful to those who helped instill in me the love of wisdom which is, more than any text or example, my salvation.

INTRODUCTION

And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.

And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.

Kahlil Gibran

Early (Theravada) Buddhism is philosophy of existence. Many practitioners are not ‘Buddhist’. They practise vipassana meditation as art of living, a way of knowing and realizing human potential. It is a way of thinking about freedom and death. These ideas are the focus of this book. They matter to how we live, day by day, as individuals. And they matter for global justice.

They matter for truth – about existence. The Buddha’s view of morality is different from commonly assumed. He understood the moral order as the necessary fixed result of good or bad action. For instance, expression or even thought of anger is loss of beauty – for oneself.¹ Every good or bad action affects us and remains with us. It means that morality is in the first instance existential.

The Buddha said, ‘All beings own their deeds, inherit their deeds, originate from their deeds; are tied to their deeds; their deeds are their refuge. As their deeds are base or noble, so will be their lives.’²

An epidemic of loneliness rages and some blame social media. Others urge connection to nature, including wild animals.³ It is a popular theme. But connecting with nature is not a matter of will. It can’t simply be chosen any more than one can choose to run a marathon. The mind needs training as the body needs training. Connection to nature is learned, and it has to do with thinking.

The way we think, being self-centred, opposes the essential truth of nature, which is constant change. The idea of an enduring, transparent self alienates us from nature, which is in flux, always ephemeral. It prevents us from understanding the sort of effort required to know nature as it is.

The universe contains mostly dark energy. Yet we think of ourselves as secure, enduring entities, enthralled by ‘light at the end of the tunnel’. The beauty of darkness, which after all explains health, is metaphorically challenging. The universe unfolds in complex and mysterious ways. Yet we expect to ‘seize our destiny’ even facing death, considered unjust.

It is a false and debilitating expectation. It is also uninteresting.

It prevents us from knowing the invisible. Marcel Proust wrote about his character, Swann, that through ‘the presence of one of those invisible realities in which he had ceased to believe […] he was conscious once again of the desire and almost the strength to consecrate his life’.⁴ One of the ‘invisible realities’ of our lives is causation. Universal laws of cause and effect are the centre of the Buddha’s philosophy of existence. Human beings are subject to such laws in mind and body.

Swann knows an ‘invisible reality’ through music. It awakens emotions with a ‘sort of recreative influence’ on the ‘moral barrenness’ of his life. I discuss others who knew the interdependent nature of human existence and implications for self-knowledge. When we happen upon truths about humanness, even if we don’t yet know they are truths, we do indeed experience ‘recreative influence’.

If mental actions, like anger, are themselves loss of beauty, and if this can be known, and one refuses to notice, instead telling a story, over a lifetime, about deserved continuity, one cannot connect to nature.

One runs in the opposite direction.

I came to vipassana meditation because of cancer, considered terminal. I discovered that analytic academic philosophy offers few resources for living with death. The explanation involves a view of knowledge, as we’ll see. Living with death is more significant and interesting than surviving death. It has to do with truth, not just about existence but about people, indeed, about how to discover people, as people. It is seeing in the dark, knowing invisible realities, and their recreative influences.

I speak of truth as conventional truth. The Buddha spoke also of ultimate truth. The ultimate truth is that things and persons do not exist – only the elements exist. But here I speak mostly of conventional truth. The two are compatible but this book is for those who know only the former.

It is about living in the moment, of course, mastering one’s mind so that one’s attention is on what is happening now, not what might happen, or what ought to happen. But ‘living in the moment’ is cliché. In fact, it depends upon ideas. This is sometimes overlooked. In Chapter 3, I discuss the philosophical issue of kinds or names, arguably the most useful contribution of analytic philosophy of science. We give names to entities of the same sort, and names then carry us along, compelling a certain understanding, dependent upon tradition. No individual impressions are possible. Relying on names, we think socially.⁵

The Buddha knew this phenomenon. It means not only that we know existence – our own – when we think without names; it also means, as Proust expressed, that ‘living in the moment’ depends on the past – the thinking past. He wrote, ‘For just as it is not the desire to become famous but the habit of being industrious that enables us to produce a finished work, so it is not the activity of the present moment but wise reflections from the past that help us to safeguard the future.’⁶

Proust was aware of how names limit understanding. In ignorance, we accept ‘group think’.

A note here about the use of literature. I rely on literature rather than thought experiments, which is usual practise in academic philosophy, for two reasons. One is that artists are better able than philosophers to portray the complexity of the human condition. For example, Adam Smith said no one in any culture can live well without being able to appear in public without shame: Living well is dependent upon relations with community. This is true. But Proust expresses additional dimensions when he writes:

All these people who paced up and down the esplanade […] covertly eyeing […] the people who were walking beside or coming toward them […] became entangled with them, because each was mutually the object of the same secret attention veiled beneath the same apparent disdain – love, and consequently fear, of the crowd being one of the most powerful motives in all human beings, whether they seek to please other people or to impress them, or to show that they despise them; and in the case of the solitary even if his seclusion is absolute and lifelong it is often based on a deranged love of the crowd which so far overrides every other feeling that, unable to win the admiration of his hall porter, of the passers by […] he prefers not to be seen by them at all, and with that object abandons every activity that would oblige him to go out of doors.⁷

Philosophy is about the human condition and we need help to understand it properly. Whereas what Adam Smith states is evidently true, it is complicated by the fact, observed by Proust, that we misunderstand our own motivations. We need human community, but we don’t always know how and/or whether we pursue such need. This raises additional, and for the Buddha more important, questions about living well – about knowing. I will explain.

Similarly, Karl Marx was distrustful of morality (although he was committed to it on his understanding) because it expresses the ideology of dominant classes. But Proust (somewhat sarcastically) explains in a bit more detail how this works:

In the country, Mme de Marsantes was adored for the good that she did, but principally because the purity of a blood line into which for many generations there had flowed only what was greatest in the history of France had rid her manner of everything that the lower orders called ‘airs’ and had endowed her with perfect simplicity […] She never shrank from embracing a poor woman who was in trouble. […] She was, people said, the perfect Christian. […] Being a great lady means playing the great lady, that is to say, to a certain extent playing at simplicity. It is a pastime that costs a great deal of money, all the more because simplicity charms people only on condition that they know you are capable of not living simply, that is, that you are very rich. ⁸

As we’ll see, the Buddha’s philosophy of existence gave priority to truth over goodness for somewhat the same reasons that Marx worried about morality and Victor Hugo warned against having a star on one’s forehead but not eyes. We come back to this.

A second reason for citing literature is that it tells us about popular culture. Some writers express the human condition, which philosophy aims to explain, but many writers merely express beliefs about the human condition, which popular culture then promotes. Such (often false) beliefs determine ‘the present moment’, as Proust points out, making it about the past. I offer examples in Chapter 2.

The book is not about the technique of vipassana meditation, although the first chapter includes an overview.⁹ Rather, it explains implications of applying the technique in daily life, and why it amounts to a ‘revolution in thinking’, as I explain later. The Buddha was clear: If you don’t live a life good for yourself and others, meeting responsibilities with peace inside, making healthy decisions, more respectful of nature, and thus more humane, meditation is merely a ritual.

The Buddha did what we now call ‘empirical philosophy’, starting with scientific or sociological research, that is, factual investigation. The Pali word ‘vipassana’ means seeing the world in a special way – as it is. The Buddha studied the world scientifically, starting in his own body. He was the quintessential relational philosopher, a term popular, even trendy, in modern Academe.

But modern Academe doesn’t take relational philosophy far enough. It doesn’t go to the ‘winters of your grief’, mentioned earlier. It doesn’t go to existence. Meditation practise in the Theravada tradition, as originally practised, is not just about individual well-being. It is about the world, including its ‘dark energy’, giving life. The teachings of the Buddha are called ‘the Dhamma’, and the Pali word ‘dhamma’ means laws of nature and cause and effect. Theravada Buddhism is knowing nature within oneself. It is the ultimate and enduring relational philosophy, connecting to nature’s invisible realities – causation.

It is about learning to draw on such realities to know oneself, as human and as nature. As Swann becomes able to consecrate and strengthen his life, encountering invisible realities, we learn how to know and to know we know, as we become aware of causal relations, within ourselves and with others. But it takes practise. It takes work. Philosophy must be lived, as I argue in Chapter 4, and the Buddha’s philosophy must be lived, to be understood as existence. The Buddha said,

Someone may recite much of the texts, but if he does not practise them, such a heedless person is like a herdsman who only counts the cows of others; he does not enjoy the rewards of a truth-seeker. Another may be able to recite only a few words from the texts, but if he lives the life of Dhamma, taking steps on the path from the beginning to its goal, then he enjoys the rewards of the life of a truth-seeker.¹⁰

Taking steps on the path involves philosophical ideas. Philosophy is sometimes treated with disdain for being abstract. But if we cannot think abstractly, at least occasionally, we are imprisoned within the current context, involving false ideas about, for instance, freedom and death. Abstraction, as I argue in Chapter 3, is a powerful faculty of the mind that allows us to identify and challenge convention. Again, to draw on Proust: ‘our age is infected with a mania for showing things only in