Becker on Buddhism

Recently I managed to discover another book by Carl B. Becker, this one titled Breaking the Circle: Death and the Afterlife in Buddhism (Southern Illinois University Press, 1993). I’d mentioned earlier here (link), Becker’s Paranormal Experience and Survival of Death (State University of New York Press, 1993). Becker is a professor of comparative philosophy and religion at Kyoto University in Japan.

Both of these books are of the highest excellence. The second is, for me, the best ever summation of its subject, human survival of death. The second, it turns out, turns out to be one of the very few coherent accounts of the evolution of Buddhism over time. That development has to be sketched in order to present the development of Buddhist views on the afterlife. The presentation is brief but—Becker is a very clear thinker and a talented writer—wonderfully clear.

Even approaching this pair of subjects—Buddhism and the afterlife—seems harshly daunting. The seeming object of Buddhism is nirvana, a kind of absolute enlightenment. The Buddha himself (he lived 560-477 BC) maintained that nothing whatever could be asserted of it pro or con. The earliest Buddhist school (the Theravada, later renamed by its opponents as the Hinayana*) asserted that nirvana meant annihilation; the Sanskrit meaning of the word is “blown out.” Buddhism itself came to be powerfully linked to the concept of anātman, meaning “no soul” or “no self”—although the Buddha actually denied that. In practice, however, anātman came to mean that, on death, what remain are packets of karma—read residuals of action—not tied to an “owner” or “a carrier”; therefore rebirth is not the reincarnation of a person but that of karmic packets. So how are we to understand an afterlife? But hold for a moment. With the rise of the now dominant form of Buddhism, the Mahayana, coinciding with the first century of our era, the religion came to be transformed into a faith complete with heavens and hells—and beyond them the Realm of Nirvana, a realm that a Catholic, anyway, might be forgiven for thinking of as union with God.

How we get from no-self to saved-self is a major part of Becker’s story told here. I’d been exposed to the transformations within Buddhism earlier through the writings of D.T. Suzuki. particularly his Essays in Zen Buddhism. These volumes, however, concentrate on the history of Zen, and Zen, hews close to the Hinayana throughout time. And while the surprises of history are there in Suzuki as well, much greater light falls on the subject in Becker’s work. I recommend The Closing Circle highly to other amateur scholars—a work written by a gifted professional.

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*Theravada means the “teaching of the elders.” Hinayana means “the lesser vehicle,” so labeled by those who thought they were riding in the Mahayana, “the greater vehicle.”

New Year: Marking Eternity

Henry Corbin, the French philosopher, relates an amusing and meaningful exchange at a conference in 1954. Present at this encounter were Corbin, Mrs. Fröbe-Kapteyn, Mircea Eliade, and D.T. Suzuki, the Japanese author on Zen. In conversation with Suzuki, the company asked him what had been his first encounter with occidental spirituality. Suzuki answered that his encounter had taken place fifty years before when he had translated four of Swedenborg’s works into Japanese. To continue in Corbin’s words:

Later on in the conversation we asked him what homologies in structure he found between Mahayana Buddhism and the cosmology of Swedenborg in respect of the symbolism and correspondences of the worlds … Of course we expected not a theoretical answer, but a sign attesting the encounter in a concrete person of an experience common to Buddhism and to Swedenborgian spirituality. And I can still see Suzuki suddenly brandishing a spoon and saying with a smile: “This spoon now exists in Paradise…” “We are now in Heaven,” he explained.*

Thoughts along these lines have been running about in my head of late: the difference between what we call time (time-as-motion, as I like to put it) and eternity. I like the notion that eternity is pure duration—and think that we actually experience it whenever time-as-motion, Einstein’s time, you might say, is temporarily forgotten, when events don’t interfere with our experience of being: contemplative or creative time, also physically active times when we are in control and in the flow.

This morning it struck me (or struck me again—this is not an original observation, certainly not in a context in which Mircea Eliade, who wrote The Myth of the Eternal Return, is mentioned)—it struck me, to repeat, that our ritual markings of anniversaries, like Christmas and New Years, are (perhaps paradoxically) assertions of eternity. On days like today, time stops in a way. Our urge to set such markers—and they are absolutely arbitrary—arises, I think, from the very experience Suzuki highlights, spoon in hand, namely that we already are, if we could but keep it always in mind, already in eternity. We keep falling out of it, of course, day after day. We fall into the hectics of a lower kind of existence, into the rapids of ordinary time. But the odd feelings that mark transitions produce in us a kind of suspension; they serve as reminders that, above the torrent that keeps raging on, there is another time, that of duration, that of eternity. Swedenborg himself struggled to give this feeling expression. In Heaven and Hell (and elsewhere) he suggests that the concept of time in heaven is transformed into something else, what he labels “states.” Yes. But in this life too we can sometimes achieve states in which we slip out of the turbulence into experiences—not of magical exaltations, not of remarkable ecstasy, but of sovereignty.

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*Corbin, Henry. Alone With the Alone. Princeton University Press, 1969. p. 354.

China’s Religious Experience

I’ve always considered the religious forms native to China the most sophisticated—at least in comparison with religious forms in India and in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim world. The last three, of course, are closely related. The specifically Chinese forms are a belief in spirits, especially those of the ancestors, and Taoism, a much later mystical form, in which the ultimate is pictured as a transcendental All. The chief similarity of Chinese and all other religions is that it is based on a conviction that a spirit world exists beyond this one. The chief difference lies in the absence of a personified God, a God whose characteristics are based on the human model. The great benefit of the religious view for the Chinese people has been that a sophisticated view of the All High is almost impossible to exploit for political purposes. Hence China has been spared the vicious religious wars that have plagued other parts of the globe.

Of course, as many, many people have observed over time, The Chinese temperament is practical and down to earth. Indeed, calling it a “temperament” is probably wrong. It is a cultural blessing, in a way—and in China the culture has been pretty continuous for at least 4000 years. No lesser person than D.T. Suzuki has elaborated this very point. Suzuki, a Japanese, is the chief introducer of Zen Buddhism to the West, and in his Essay in Zen Buddhism, he too stresses the point. Zen, as he points out, is as much a Chinese creation as an Indian, and Zen Buddhism is practical and down to earth.

This works out well. Ancestor worship enlarges the sense of living in this dimension by extending it into the invisible. The ancestors are seen as able to influence one’s banal fortunes in this dimension—and we can please ancestors by upholding the ethical norms. So at the bottom of society. At its highest levels, the concept of Heaven, impersonal but not unaware, has been developed as the sanction of rule. Those whom Heaven favors, have the Mandate of Heaven. Those whom Heaven would depose are deprived of the mandate and, no matter what they do, they will swept away. It is the only culture on the planet in which the personal virtue of the ruler is conceived of as directly related to success in governing a realm—and in which the ruler’s chief activity is to let ordinary people live while keeping the lesser lords from exploiting them. That works for me.

And then, at the very highest levels, the mystical and philosophical, the conception of divinity is appropriately high, always reverent, never inclined to suggest that you can bribe, fool, or otherwise influence the highest. It shall prevail, through any and all contingencies at precisely the distance from us which we also feel when contemplating our own puny selves.