Marcus’ creed held that virtue was its own reward and the only life goal worth pursuing. On the Stoic view, we have no power to determine whether we’ll be rich or poor, famous or infamous, sick or healthy, but we can control whether or not we are good. Thus, life’s pleasures and pains–poverty, disease, fame, death-become “indifferents” to the Stoics–i.e. matters that have no direct bearing on our moral wellbeing and so are irrelevant. As a Stoic, I might be poor and sick and my family might die, but none of this hurts me because it does not impair my ability to be good, which consists in working for the good of my fellow human beings.

“Remember that everything is but what we think it,” Marcus writes, and what he urges himself to think is that we are all ears of corn for the reaping, “leaves that the wind scatters earthward”:

But a little while and thou shalt be burnt ashes or a few dried bones, and possibly a name, possibly not a name even….And all that we prize so highly in our lives is empty and corrupt and paltry, and we but as puppies snapping at each other, as quarrelsome children now laughing and anon in tears.

…

Stoic holism offers a refuge from individualism, the intrinsic faith of our age, and its petty, exhausting calculations. Through Marcus’ writings, individual self-interest and concern for others become mutually supporting ends: The well-being of others and my own well-being are one and the same. And so my happiness consists in orienting my actions toward others and the good of the whole, rather than in pursuing the endless vagaries of earthly desire-sex, fame, fine things, the love and approval of peers-the Goblin Market cravings (to borrow a term from the poet Christina Rossetti) that contemporary society usually encourages us to indulge as the means to self-fulfillment. Have more orgasms, we’re told, wear spiffier outfits, watch another movie, speak more assertively, and the longings, the sense of something missing, will abate.

Stoicism says just the opposite: Stop indulging illusory physical and emotional longings and see your real happiness outside of yourself, your body, your emotions.

The book being reviewed, incidentally, takes a very dim view of Stoicism, finding it “inhuman.” That in itself is interesting. As the reviewer points out, Stoicism led its practioners to be “different from the man guided by physical desires and emotions, better than that man and less human, partaking more of something metaphysical, something divine” — that is, “inhuman” in a positive sense. The Buddha too, when challenged to acknowledge his ontological status (God? Man? Something else?) denied that he was a human being. The Buddha too, in a sense, was “positively inhuman.”

Related posts:

1. Tricycle on Buddhism and politics
2. Buddhism and Sarah Palin
3. Arthur C. Clarke on Buddhism

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1. Danamaya explains why she’s a Buddhist who’s not vegetarian
2. Anilasri explains why she’s a vegetarian
3. Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View – The Launch Party!

It’s the day that the new and updated edition of my book on Buddhism and Vegetarianism, Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View, will become available.

I’m celebrating the day by dedicating my whole time to being on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/bodhipaksa), (Facebook), and my blog (that’s where you are right now), talking about Buddhism and vegetarianism. And just generally hanging out as well, so that things don’t get too serious.

As well as playing the suave host and urging people to mingle, mingle, mingle, I’ll be posting articles, quotes, and video to feed into a discussion about this important topic. I’ll also be happy to take questions.

I’ll be online all day, from 9 until 9 (Eastern), but you can drop by on any of those three platforms (again, that’s Twitter, Facebook, my blog). Just remember to say “hi”! Unless you post a comment I won’t know you’re there. That’s the internet for you.

Oh, and I genuinely almost forgot to add this — I’ll post links in case you want to buy my new book from Amazo

Related posts:

1. A short video about my Nov 13 book launch party
2. One final book-launch party offering, via Dirk Johnson
3. Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View – The Launch Party!

Related posts:

1. My life in bullet-points (again)
2. My life in bullet points: 2010-08-13
3. My life in bullet points: 2010-08-22

You might even want to skip the long intro that covers the four noble truths to get to the section on the eightfold path, which starts:

Right view: bi-partisanship, triggers, co-ops, public options, market competition, socialism, single-payer, profit margins, trillion dollar price tags. In what way do any of these describe a working health care system?

Right view would be to start by looking at the problem. What is, are, the problems with health care? Primarily, that some 45 million or more don’t have access to affordable coverage; that the costs for those of us that do are spiraling out of control; that the current structure of our health care system is unable to address these problems.

Read the rest of the article…

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1. Health “care” in the US
2. Peter’s health insurance reform march on Washington
3. The end of health insurance companies?

One of the greatest misunderstandings of what the Buddhas taught is the idea that “everything that happens is a result of karma.” You’ll see many Buddhist teachers saying this, especially those teachers from the Tibetan traditions where this actually seems to be the accepted teaching on karma.

Karma, first of all, is just the Sanskrit word for “action” but it refers specifically to moral action. Vipaka is the word for the result of actions, which manifests as either happiness or unhappiness. The karmic status of an act depends on the underlying emotional/cognitive motivation, so that if we act on the basis of unskillful mental states such as greed, hatred, or delusion, we will experience suffering, while if we act on the basis of skillful mental states such as love, compassion, and mindfulness we’ll experience happiness. This is an example of “conditionality,” where certain causes will lead to certain results in a predictable way. It’s conditionality as it operates on the moral level.

But there are other forms of conditionality. The later Pali tradition enumerates five “niyamas”:

1. The physical inorganic
2. The biological
3. The psychological
4. The karmic
5. The dharmic/transcendental

I’m not going to explain these fully because I don’t need to in order to make my point: many of the things that happen to us are a result of the other, non-karmic levels of conditionality. If a bolt on your bicycle shears and you are injured by falling on the road, that’s got little or nothing to do with karma. (Sure, if you’re the kind of person who rides recklessly or doesn’t maintain your bike then those are karmic factors, but I’m assuming these don’t apply in this particular hypothetical situation). What’s happened is that on the level of physical/inorganic matter, a piece of metal broke as a result of the physical stresses placed upon it. No karma required.

Where the karmic level of conditionality comes into play is with how you respond to that situation. If you’ve trained your mind to be mindful and equanimous, you won’t be too upset when you take the tumble. If on the other hand you’ve trained yourself (through unmindfulness) to be angry, depressed, resentful, etc, then you’ll be plunged into mental suffering as you cast around for someone to blame, see this as a sign that the universe is out to get you, start figuring out who to sue, etc.

There are many problems with the idea that everything that happens is a result of karma. One is the absence of any causal mechanisms that would, for example, bring hundreds of people into the same plane at the same time if it was their “karma” that caused them to be in a plane crash — not to mention the absence of any causal mechanism that links their moral actions to, say, an engine catching fire. Buddhists who believe such things are positing mysterious and mystical forces at work in the world which, frankly, just aren’t there. They are, I think, uncomfortable living in a world in which random crap happens. But a universe in which random crap happens is the very kind of universe we live in. Bad things happen to good people. Good things happen to bad people. We need to get used to that and not create a delusion that “everything happens for a reason. It’s uncomfortable, perhaps, to accept that we live in such a universe, but the Buddha’s teaching on karma was outlined because he thought (or saw) that it was true and helpful, not in order to comfort us.

Another problem with the idea that everything that happens is a result of karma is that we inevitably end up blaming the victim. You’re a Jew who gets gassed in the Holocaust? Sorry, it’s your fault. You must have done something bad in a past life. This inevitably entails a certain loss of compassion, although not perhaps a complete loss because we can certainly observe people doing things that cause them pain and experience compassion for them. But any level of blaming people for things they have no control over involves the non-compassionate application of judgments.

Although the teaching of the five niyamas is a later elaboration, the Buddha was quite clear that not everything that happens is a result of karma. So don’t take my word for it, here’s the Buddha himself:

Once the Blessed One dwelt at Rajagaha in the Bamboo-Grove Monastery, at the Squirrel’s Feeding Place. There a wandering ascetic, Moliya Sivaka by name, called on the Blessed One, and after an exchange of courteous and friendly words, sat down at one side. Thus seated, he said:

“There are, revered Gotama, some ascetics and brahmins who have this doctrine and view: ‘Whatever a person experiences, be it pleasure, pain or neither-pain-nor-pleasure, all that is caused by previous action.’ Now, what does the revered Gotama say about this?”

“Produced by (disorders of the) bile, there arise, Sivaka, certain kinds of feelings. That this happens, can be known by oneself; also in the world it is accepted as true. Produced by (disorders of the) phlegm…of wind…of (the three) combined…by change of climate…by adverse behavior…by injuries…by the results of Kamma — (through all that), Sivaka, there arise certain kinds of feelings. That this happens can be known by oneself; also in the world it is accepted as true.

“Now when these ascetics and brahmins have such a doctrine and view that ‘whatever a person experiences, be it pleasure, pain or neither-pain-nor-pleasure, all that is caused by previous action,’ then they go beyond what they know by themselves and what is accepted as true by the world. Therefore, I say that this is wrong on the part of these ascetics and brahmins.”

When this was spoken, Moliya Sivaka, the wandering ascetic, said: “It is excellent, revered Gotama, it is excellent indeed!…May the revered Gotama regard me as a lay follower who, from today, has taken refuge in him as long as life lasts.”

Samyutta Nikaya XXXVI.21, Moliyasivaka Sutta, translated by Nyanaponika Thera

Now some Buddhists will take great exception to my contradicting their favorite Rinpoche or Lama in this way. Some get very annoyed and I’ve been called all sorts of names in the past for pointing out what the Buddha actually taught. But I think this annoyance (some) people feel is perhaps natural — when you put your faith in non-rational and unverifiable explanations for how things work in this universe, your defense of those beliefs is also likely to be non-rational. And so I’m sure someone is going to point out that I’m just not spiritual enough to appreciate that everything that happens to us is the result of our karma. Or worse.

I’d suggest that it’s always useful to check back to the closest we can come to what the Buddha taught, which is the Pali scriptures. I don’t want to imply that we need accept everything in the Pali scriptures absolutely literally, and we certainly don’t know that everything they claim the Buddha to have said was actually uttered by him, but we have to have a really good reason for deciding that something in the earliest teachings is a mistake — and the fact that some Buddhists in a later tradition have different ideas is not, in my view, a sufficient reason, especially when that view is fraught with as many difficulties as is the idea that “everything that happens is a result of karma.”

Related posts:

1. Danger, karma at work
2. Tibetan karmic ameliorism

This post is part of some writing I’m doing for a book. It’s the first part of a chapter giving the background behind the Buddhist teachings of anatta (non-self) and sunyata (emptiness). Hopefully it’ll be followed soon by the second part of the chapter. Comments are welcome!

I became interested in Buddhist teachings because I was interested in meditation. At that time time I was still in high school, and experiencing some of the usual angst that teenagers experience, plus an extra dose because all of my best friends at school had moved away. Isolation, at that age, causes a pain that is piercing. I’d heard of meditation, and had the idea that it involved looking inside of yourself for your sources of happiness, well-being, and security. Since the outside world had proved to be very unreliable, that promise was alluring to an extraordinary degree.

Unfortunately I lived in a small town, the nearest meditation classes I saw advertised in the newspaper were a long way off, and I couldn’t drive. This was the 1970s, before the explosion of Buddhist publishing, and there were very few books available on the topic of Buddhism, and none on meditation — at least that I could find. So it wasn’t for a couple of years, until I went to Glasgow, in my native Scotland, to study veterinary medicine, that I was in a position to go to a meditation class. In fact it wasn’t until after two years of university, by which time I was living in an apartment rather than in student dorms, that I had the leisure to attend a class.

My second year final exams under my belt, I nervously climbed the stairs to a large, rather shabby apartment in Glasgow’s bohemian West End, and joined about 30 other people in a magnificent room with a huge, western Buddha statue, a mural of clouds and lotus flowers, and a dreadfully unfashionable dark brown shag-pile carpet. The air was filled with the heady scent of incense, and the atmosphere equally filled with the expectation of secrets to be learned. There I was encourages to focus on the breath, to notice when my mind had wandered, and to bring the mind back to the breath, over and over. The practice was in theory simple and although I found it challenging I also found it liberating, and I felt happier for having done it.

In the social period at the end of the class, when people were either drifting away or taking the opportunity to get into discussions, I gravitated shyly towards the people who had been practicing the longest. I didn’t gain a lot of insight into Buddhist philosophy through talking to them, but when one of the teachers learned I didn’t have any summer employment lined up he offered me a job with a Buddhist gardening cooperative that was raising funds to renovate a city center space and turn it into a proper Buddhist center. I said yes, and so it was that I ended up spending several weeks weeding, hoeing, and cutting lawns with a bunch of intense young men passionately interested in Buddhism.

As we tended gardens, we talked about the theory and practice of Buddhism. And we tried to practice mindfulness of our thoughts and bodily movements. The people I worked with readily invited me to other events being held in the apartment where I’d just learned meditation, and so it was that I was exposed to a late Buddhist teaching called The Heart Sutra.

The Heart Sutra is so-called because it represents the core, the heart, the essence of Gautama’s perspective on life. It is, to say, the least, not very accessible or even, on the first or second or even the fiftieth hearing, very heart-warming. But I ended up with its words rattling around in my mind that summer, challenging me, even taunting me, and demanding to be understood:

Form is no other than emptiness
Emptiness no other than form.
Form is only emptiness.
Emptiness only form.

All things are by nature void;
They are not born or destroyed.
Nor are they stained or pure,
Nor do they wax or wane.

These are difficult words, but also intriguing ones. And I experienced the difficulty and allure of them day in, day out, for several weeks. These are words attempting to describe a different mode of perception from our normal way of seeing things. They suggest that the mind makes some fundamental mistakes in interpreting what we encounter in the world around us, and even in the world within us.

The drawing above is a famous optical illusion called a Necker Cube, after the Swiss crystallographer Louis Albert Necker, who first drew it in 1832. Necker’s Cube is an ambiguous wire-frame drawing of a cube in isometric perspective, meaning that parallel edges of the cube are drawn as parallel lines in the picture. The drawing is ambiguous because it contains no indication, where lines cross, of which is in front.

The mind immediately interprets the Necker Cube as having one particular orientation, but with continued viewing another version of the cube will suddenly present itself. We can see the cube from an apparent viewpoint that is slightly above and to the right of the cube, or we can see it from one that is slightly below and to the left. We are physiologically incapable of seeing both perspectives simultaneously, although with a little practice we can learn to flip rapidly from one to the other.

We inevitably start by seeing just one interpretation of the Necker Cube, but we don’t start by seeing it as an interpretation at all. We think that what we see is what’s actually there, and that there is therefore no other possible interpretation. We make one interpretation of reality and assume that we see reality. Then some shift in perspective takes place and we realize that there’s another way of seeing things.

The Heart Sutra suggests that all of our experience is like this. We don’t just see, we interpret. And, Buddhist teachings assert, we mis-interpret. With the Necker Cube there’s no suggestion that there’s a right way or a wrong way to interpret the cube. Both ways are equally valid. Or, given that there’s actually no cube on the paper at all but simply a two-dimensional shape, we could say that both are equally delusional.

Einstein talked about the “optical delusion of consciousness” that leads to us seeing ourselves as existing as separate entities, and that is the nature of the delusion that our mind presents us with. We see ourselves as being separate and enduring, and independent, when the opposite is the case. These are the two perspectives that the Necker Cube of life offers to us. Or it potentially offers those two perspectives, but we’re capable, at present of only seeing one of them. It doesn’t even occur to us that there is another way of seeing.

With the Necker Cube it doesn’t take long, and it doesn’t generally take any effort, before our initial (mis)perception gives way to a new way of seeing. But to move from the perspective of seeing ourselves as separate, enduring, and independent to a more realistic view of ourselves as interconnected, ever-changing, and contingent is the work of a lifetime (or, in certain Buddhist teachings, the work of more than one lifetime).

Unlike the Necker Cube illusion, the way we currently see things is mistaken, and there is, according to Gautama’s teaching, a more accurate way of interpreting our experience. The Heart Sutra seems to be pointing at a Necker Cube-like switching of perspectives: Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form. To the awakened mind — one that has seen through the delusions that we currently live with — two perspectives are possible, and just as we are able to switch from one perspective to another, so the awakened mind is able to see from two perspectives.

One day — and I can remember with vivid clarity exactly which patch of earth I was hoeing that day — my mind presented me with an image that helped me to understand, on a more experiential level, what the Heart Sutra was talking about. I spontaneously saw an image of an eddy in a river. I realized that the mind, as soon as it sees an eddy, creates an interpretation that includes the notion of separateness. The mind in some way sees the eddy as one thing, and the river as another. It’s as if the mind has drawn an arbitrary boundary around the eddy, separating it from the rest of the water in the river. And yet when we look closely, what do we see? Is there any separateness? Of course there isn’t. There is no boundary. The water that forms the eddy is constantly changing, so that in fact there is no “thing” there to be called “an eddy.” The mind merely imputes separateness. This is Einstein’s “optical delusion of consciousness” — the one
he said is like a “prison” from which we must free ourselves.

This insight, of course, doesn’t just apply to eddies and rivers, but to all things, ourselves and other beings included. All things exist, not separately, but as eddies within the stream of becoming, inseparable, with no fixity, and existing only in dependence upon other things.

This experience, I stress, was just a glimpse into reality. It wasn’t a full-fledged insight experience, in which we become able to flip through an act of will the Necker Cube of experience into a new form in the mind. It was the briefest hint that there was another perspective available to us. The forces in the mind that cause us to misperceive reality as formed of separate things, rather than appreciating the underlying continuity and wholeness of things, are very powerful. They can’t easily be overcome, and to do so takes an enormous amount of reflection. And those forces run very deep in the mind. They go right down into the deeper substrata of the brain’s assumptions of how things are. They go right down into the deepest roots of our language.

Seeing the distortions that language imposes on our interpretation of reality is our next task, but one that will have to wait for another article.

Related posts:

1. Calmness, Contentment, Concentration: Part 2
2. Calmness, Contentment, Concentration: Part 1
3. Calmness, Contentment, Concentration: Part 3

The notion of in vitro meat — flesh harvested from a vat rather than a living animal — seems straight from science fiction, which is perhaps not surprising given that NASA, the US space organization, originated the idea as a way to provide better-quality food for astronauts in space.

While the notion may seem far-fetched, some people are taking it very seriously indeed. PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, announced in 2008 a $1 million prize for the “first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012.”

New Harvest, a nonprofit organization formed to promote the adoption of alternatives to meat, points out on its Web site, “Because meat substitutes are produced under controlled conditions impossible to maintain in traditional animal farms, they can be safer, more nutritious, less polluting and more humane than conventional meat.”

There are immense technical challenges in producing in vitro meat that has a suitable texture and flavour, but it may not be long before it’s an option in our supermarket shelves, alongside the Quorn, the textured vegetable protein, the tofu, and (of course) regular meat taken from the bodies of animals. What should Buddhist vegetarians make of this?

First, whether we would personally choose to eat in vitro meat ourselves, I think we should welcome the development as an alternative to the suffering that is involved in eating animals. The initial tissue for in vitro meat could presumably be obtained by means of a muscle biopsy sample that’s no more invasive or harmful than many a standard medical procedure.

The environmental benefits could be immense, there might well be less bacterial contamination, and such meat could also potentially be free from growth hormones and antibiotics.

But of course the very prospect of in vitro meat is controversial. One of the founders of PETA commented that the decision to launch the $1 million prize lead to “a near civil war” in the organization. Many committed vegetarians in PETA were repulsed by the very idea of eating meat, even if no animals were harmed.

As with the issue of transgenic vegetables (the famous tomato containing fish genes) questions of taste arise here that have nothing to do with the Buddhist ethic of non-harm. I don’t think I’d be inclined to eat in vitro meat. For one thing I don’t want to eat heavily-processed food, and for another I find the smell and sight of meat repulsive because of its associations with death and destruction. But in principle there’s no inherent ethical reason why a Buddhist vegetarian should avoid meat grown in a vat.

Related posts:

1. Vegetarians ‘avoid more cancers’
2. Meet your meat
3. Another good reason to be vegetarian

Mobile post sent by bodhipaksa using Utterli.  Replies.  mp3

This is my first post created using Utterli, where I call a phone number and the message is automatically turned into an audio file that can be posted to my blog. It seems to have gone well, technically speaking, except that the email I sent with accompanying text didn’t make it into the body of the post. It seems that was my fault though, I posted from the wrong email account.

Update: For some weird reason the link to the post didn’t work. Utterli automatically gave the post the URL http://www.bodhipaksa.com/archives/1529 – but that came up as a broken link, even though “1529″ was actually the “post slug.” Once I renamed the post slug the link worked fine. The post also lacked a title, but that’s probably because I messed up the email. I also neglected to set up a default title, which is what should have shown up when the email didn’t arrive. Teething troubles! I’ll try again soon and see if I an get this to work more smoothly.

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1. A Zen Questions Utter
2. On being a prison volunteer
3. True appreciation is…

I have a long-standing interest in science, and in fact I came perilously close at one point to getting into veterinary research after completing my vet degree, and I also have a passionate interest in the relationship between science and religion. So that — combined with the 200th anniversary Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of “The Origins of Species” gave me the perfect opportunity to post an article entitled, “Four reasons Buddhists can love evolution.”

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2. Wildmind Buddhist Meditation » Top 10 celebrity Buddhists
3. Military Buddhists