The Buddha on Meaning and Responsibility (Part 1)

The challenge the Buddha's teaching of co-dependent origination poses to the nihilist

These days the question “Is there a meaning to life?” has become a popular variation on the classic philosophical question “what is the meaning of life?” Those who contemplate this existential question may think themselves to be in the company of a long history of philosophical thinkers who dared to move outside the status quo and ask difficult questions. However, at least in my reading, this concern is not as wide spread in most pre-modern philosophical. To give a few examples: the Greeks concerned themselves with the development of virtue, Indian thought and practice teaches us how to awaken from what they understood to be an illusion most beings are trapped in, and Indigenous thought and practice teaches the importance of living in harmony with one’s environment and ecosystem. Although there have been thinkers who deny meaning and purpose throughout history, for the vast majority and most well known thinkers from these traditions it was simply the case that awakening, virtue, or respect for all life was fundamental to living a good life. The question was more about about how to nurture these wholesome traits and qualities rather than asking if they were worth nurturing. In this light, it seems to me that the modern philosophical and social climate has become fertile for nihilistic ponderings in a way that is much more prevalent than the past. One of the most, if not the most, popular models of the cosmos these days suggests that the world is made of dead atoms, and that all we do and think is a product of impersonal interaction between these atoms. Further, the information age has made such a plethora of metaphysical and philosophical options from different cultures available to us at the click of a button. It can seem daunting and or even disrespectful to claim that any one of these ways of understanding the meaning of life is correct. 

In this disorienting intellectual climate of pluralism and reductionist materialism, it may seem as if there is no way out of nihilism, no way back to the certainty of our ancestors that following a path towards wisdom, virtue, or awakening is inherently valuable. I want to suggest that the Buddha’s teaching of co-dependent origination provides us with a unique way of making sense of this nihilistic concern, a way that integrates these modern concerns, but also reinterprets them in a way that makes nihilistic conclusions impossible. Tibetan Buddhist master Zongtrul Losang Tsöndru describes dependent origination writing, 

“If we seek the permanence of an object as something existing from its own side, we discover something inexpressible. If we take three sticks and place them together in a certain way, they will all stand up. If each of the sticks could stand under its own power, it would remain standing even if the others were removed, but they cannot. In this way we must understand dependent arising precisely.”

 At first glance, dependent origination might seem to be a simple teaching that correlates with the causal view of reality of natural science; anything we experience is the result of a number of different causes and conditions coming together. There is no permanent, self-sustaining object independent of this momentary crystallization of a near infinite network of causes and conditions. Take a flower, for example. Philosophically and scientifically, we can not simply say the flower exists. As a Vietnamese Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh says, the flower is made of “non-flower elements:” the rain, the clouds, and the earth which produced it. The flower, strictly speaking, is not an independent thing, but a manifestation and conduit of this vast web of causal forces. This might seem intuitive to those who are sympathetic to the causal understanding of the universe science suggests. However, the Buddha takes this thoroughly causal picture one step further by integrating one element of our experience that the natural sciences and their materialistic ontologies leave out: the mind.

     The Buddha takes our experience not as a given, but as the result of the process of the causal interaction of what he refers to as the five khandhas, often translated as aggregates. Of these five khandhas, only one corresponds to material form, rūpa, or matter. The other four correspond to different functions of the mind: viññāṇa or consciousness refers to the flow of consciousness that makes experience possible, saññā or perception refers to the way we interpret our experience based on our concepts and past experiences, vedanā, or feeling refers to the pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral feeling tone which this interpretation generates, and saṅkhāra is the mental, vocal, or physical action (whether the action we take in response to a feeling is mental, vocal, or physical, is a direct function of the strength and force of our reaction. A weaker, less forceful reaction might only generate mental activity. A very strong reaction will first manifest as mental activity but then spill over into physical and/or vocal action) we take as a result of liking, disliking, or feeling neutral about the entire experience. Already in this demarcation of experience into the five khandhas we see a reason to challenge one who ponders the possibility of nihilism. The Buddha points out that any interpretation of experience inevitably produces a casual outcome in our own being. Our saññā interprets our experience based on the conceptual schemes we have adopted and then this interpretation immediately leads to a causal flow that produces a certain feeling tone in our body and a subsequent reaction that responds to that feeling tone. Simply put, the feeling tone of meaninglessness or existential confusion isn’t a pleasant one, and it usually leads to a saṅkhāra  or reaction of apathy, despondency, or a lack of care. 

  So now we have one response to the nihilist: be careful of what interpretation you identify with, as that particular interpretation will inevitably produce and continuously reproduce feelings and reactions that you will likely not be able to control. This pragmatic response is at the heart of the Buddha’s teaching; the Buddha suggests we adopt skillful views that help us live a more wholesome life. (I also have to mention, because it is so fundamental to the Buddha’s teachings even though it is not directly relevant to this post, that these more skillful views orient us in the direction of Nirvana, the unconditioned, which is beyond any view. So the Buddha encourages us to adopt views that will eventually be dropped, suggesting that certain views are more conducive to their eventual dissolution than others.) However, even if we accept the Buddha’s pragmatic argument, the nihilist could still flip this understanding of the khandhas on its head. One deeply concerned with ultimate truth might initially read the Buddha’s theory as a kind of giving up on truth; as a suggestion that since our experience is always constrained by our interpretative schemes, our saññā, we can never know the actual truth and so might as well just pick the metaphysical and ethical schemes that make us the happiest. In my interpretation, such a counterargument is only possible if we misunderstand the Buddha’s teaching of the khandhas. We can only make this argument if we think of the khandhas as substances that each have independent existence, which then come together and causally interact to generate experience. If this was true, we could despair that the rūpa khandha, the truth of the physical world “out there” can never be known, because it is always clouded by our saññā. We could also worry that any ethical orientation we pick in life is not the “right” one, but just a result of the way our saññā has been conditioned by our upbringing and culture. However, based on my interpretation, this would be a misunderstanding and we would not be grasping what the Buddha means when he says all these khandhas co-dependently arise. No khandha can be fully separated, or even has any real existence, independent from the role it plays in the overall processual flow of experience. In fact, if we understand the khandhas in a deep way, the Buddha not only challenges the nihilist but fully “check mates” the nihilist, displaying that the claim that there is no ultimate truth or an ultimate truth we cannot know is based on a confusion about the nature of experience. 

I will expand on this topic in next week’s post.

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