The Buddha on Meaning and Responsibility (Part 2)

How the Buddha checkmates the nihilist

This is a follow-up to last week’s post which can be found here. https://recontextualize.substack.com/p/the-buddha-on-meaning-and-responsibility

I suggest reading this first, but will also summarize enough that this post can stand on its own.

Let me start here by being a bit more precise about what I mean by nihilism. I am not using this term in a technical way, but rather intending to capture an existential attitude of despondency, apathy, and despair that many are concretely affected by in their day to day lives. By nihilism here, I simply mean any ethical or metaphysical view that leads to the conclusion that it does not matter how we act or what we do, that it is irrelevant how we treat ourselves, others, or the world around us. My aim here is not so much to give a logical counterargument to a very specifically defined philosophical view, but rather to use the Buddha’s theory of the co-dependent origination of the khandhas, or aggregates, to suggest a way of understanding life in which every choice and action overflows with meaning and responsibility. This is because, on my understanding, the theory of co-dependent origination provides us with a vision of reality that adequately accounts for and explains our experience of the world and also removes the metaphysical assumptions upon which the possibility of this kind of nihilistic interpretation are based.

The khandhas are one of the ways the Buddha breaks down our immediate first-person experience into component parts. One of these khandhas, rūpa-khandha, points out the material impressions in perception while the other four, the nama-khandhas or mental aggregates, describe the mental processes through which those material impressions gain their determinate structure through the act of conceptual cognition and the way that conceptual cognition conditions physical, vocal, or mental action. Upon any moment of perception, these khandhas arise in such a rapid cascade of mental processing that we often find ourselves taking a certain action without even noticing this flow of causal conditioning that has been activated. I am sure we have all had the experience of opening the refrigerator and then finding ourselves eating a cookie before we have time to think. The Buddha would say this action is caused by the flow of the khandhas that are operating behind the scenes based on how we have interacted with cookies in the past. Our body and mind have been primed to interpret this visual stimulus as a cookie and to reach for the cookie to reproduce the pleasant feeling we are used to getting from eating coolies. This pattern of interpretation and reaction simply runs through our mind/body system whether we like it or not. In the last post, I suggested that if we agree with this description of experience, it gives us a strong pragmatic reason to avoid nihilistic interpretations, as these interpretations will condition, and continually re-condition, reactions of apathy, despondency, and despair until this becomes a feedback loop that is very difficult to escape.

That being said, I am aware there is the possibility of a counterargument here. One might argue that this theory of the co-dependent origination of the khandhas only acts as an argument against nihilism if our aim in life is to feel good and live in a wholesome way. What if our aim is truth and we want to face that truth even if it means that our lives are ultimately meaningless? I would suggest that if we understand this co-dependent origination in a nuanced way, we find that the theory not only pragmatically advises us to avoid nihilistic conclusions, but points out that the philosophical presuppositions on which nihilism is based have no place in a co-dependently arising universe.

The conclusion that “nothing we do matters” arises when we seek but fail to find a final, static understanding of human purpose that can be grasped by the mind and applied across the changing moments of experience.  If we look deeper into the theory of co-dependent origination, we find that this very project is predicated upon an assumption that does not exist within the worldview that co-dependent origination articulates. One implication of dependent origination is that there are no separate, independent things or forces but that every “thing” or every “force” is a temporary crystallization of a stream of cause and conditions. (If you are worrying that this claim defeats itself because it would imply that we can’t point to any cause that crystalizes as a particular object as a real, independent cause either, then you are on your way to understanding this view! This is why Mahayana Buddhism will go on to say all things are Śūnyatā, often translated as emptiness. This is also why, as we will see later, every view, even co-dependent origination itself, is ultimately only a “skillful means” in the path towards Nirvana.) This is true of the khandhas as well. These are not independent substances or forces that come together in a causal way to generate experience. It is more accurate to think about each aggregate as a useful “snapshot” in a continuous process that helps us gain more clarity about how that process works, even though that snapshot does not represent anything that has existence independent of the way it comes into being in and through the flow of the process. This is the way many natural processes work; let us take the water cycle for example. Although it is helpful for scientists to isolate and name the different forms water takes as it goes through the water cycle to get a better sense of how the cycle works, none of these forms can be understood independently of the way they arise out of the causal flow of earlier forms and then transform into later forms. It is similar to the flow of experience the Buddha is describing with the aggregates. This is why the Buddha refers to this as co-dependent origination, no aggregate can be understood outside of the way it co-dependently arises with the other aggregates through this casual flow. There is no mental or physical “foundation” out of which experience arises for the Buddha. 

The search for meaning that often ends in the frustration of nihilism is rooted in the common conception that there must be an existential foundation to our experience; whether that be an ethical norm or some divine deity telling us how we should live. The Buddha’s teaching does suggest that this foundation cannot be found. However, the Buddha offers us another option. From the Buddha’s point of view, the universe is a continual, ever-changing flux of causality in which even the smallest movement, like a ripple in a pond, creates cascades of causality that have repercussions throughout the entirety of the cosmos. By explaining the co-dependent origination of the aggregates, the Buddha points out how this causality functions locally, how the body/mind interacts with streams of causality and transmits those streams back out into the world by processing them and redirecting through its causal mechanism of the khandhas. Within this worldview, looking for an ethical or existential ground to experience would simply not make sense. All we would be doing is taking one conditioned way our saññā khandha, the aggregate that interprets experience, has been conditioned to interpret experience and then abstract and reify that interpretation as existing independently from the causes that gave rise to it. This lack of foundation is not nihilistic, however, because we always interpret and act within a context, and everything we choose within that context has reverberations throughout the entire causal network of the universe. In a certain sense, what the Buddha is encouraging us to see is very simple. If we simply stop abstracting the meaning of actions and interpretations from the concrete context in which they causally arise and in which they have their causal effects, we find that it is obvious that what we do in the present matters. If I choose to withdraw from life based on a nihilistic interpretation, it will affect my own health, my loved ones, and my wider community and ecosystem as I will not be concerned with acting in a way that supports their well-being. 

From the Buddhist perspective, one adopts views and interpretations that condition a softening of the sense of self until one gains direct insight into anattā, or non-self; directly realizing in a non-conceptual way that there is no separate “me” within the body/mind system that is controlling this steam of causes and conditions. (This takes ethical and meditative training as well in the Buddhist tradition, but this “right view” is fundamental to Buddhist practice.) For these purposes, one who practices Buddhism might be asked to adopt the view that all things are impermanent, all things are empty, all human beings are awakened Buddhas, and the view of co-dependent origination itself. Thus, in the Buddhist practices associated with this theory, we see that there is no suggestion of nihilism. This lack of foundation does not at all imply that it does not matter how we interpret experience or what we do. Whether or not we adopt the Buddha’s practical suggestion on how to choose skillful schemes of interpretation, I encourage us to take seriously the Buddha’s suggestion that any existential or ethical orientation, even orientations rooted in meaninglessness and apathy, will always have effects both within ourselves and throughout the networks we inhabit. The human being is a participant in the world, not a disinterested observer. As participants, everything that occurs within us: our emotions, our thoughts, and especially our ontological frameworks that determine our overall orientation in the world, like ripples in a pond, have repercussions in the causal web of the cosmos that extend far beyond what we can even imagine. 

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Please feel free to leave a comment if you have clarification questions, feedback, critiques, or anything to add. Philosophy is all about dialogue! I will do my best to respond to all questions and concerns.