Basic Premises of the Buddha's Message of Liberation

Nalin Swaris

The construction of 'a religion called Buddhism' by Western scholars and Christian theologians towards the end of the 18th century, and their presentation of Siddhartha Gotama Buddha purely as a religious leader, has distracted attention from his teachings on social, political and economic affairs. The impression given suggested he was primarily concerned with personal liberation from cosmic existence and that the way to realise this came to him in a flash of mystical illumination. This view persists even though the Buddha repeatedly insisted that his Teaching (Dhamma) was not based on mystical insight or intuition. The Buddha's Way is also generally understood, especially in the West, as a way of meditation for achieving inner tranquillity, ideally practised in solitude, away from the vexations of everyday life. Thus, the social outreach of his Ethical Path is either ignored or underplayed in the hybrid forms of Buddhism propagated in the West today.

In the Buddha's Day, the paths to liberation from socially engendered suffering took two forms: the practice of yogic exercises to attain states of mystical euphoria and ascetic mortification of the senses to release the 'spiritual self.' The Buddha tried both of these paths and found them wanting. After six years of relentless investigation and experimenta-tion, he realised that the principal obstacle to true freedom was the notion of the self as a transcendental being independent of its existence. He saw clearly that there is no permanent self existing independent of a person's actual life processes. The idea of an immortal self, he realised, is born of the desire for self-perpetuation: personally and collectively in terms of one's gender, social class or ethnic group. The individual self and the Absolute Self are products of craving for eternal ego-existence.

The Law of Conditioned Co-Genesis

Through his radical epistemo-psychological breakthrough, the Buddha shifted the point of departure for investigation from substance thinking to process thinking. Mainstream ancient Greek and Indian thought posit a contradiction between the appearance of a thing and underlying reality. The Buddha rejected this distinction as a delusion produced by an illusory perception of actuality; people cling to this delusion not because it is true but because it satisfies their desire for personal immortality. The Buddha's assertion of the primacy of flux has truly revolutionary sociological implications. It demolishes ideological views that gender, class, caste or ethnic identity, social institutions, etc., are reflections of eternal and unchanging universal essences or ideas.

When the Buddha declared that impermanence is real, he was not replacing one dogma with another. He clarified step by step how human beings tend to perceive a kinetic actuality in terms of relatively stable 'beings' and 'things' because of the limitations of their senses. The mind constructs mental representations of perceived forms and reifies them through verbal labels. The mental representation of a thing becomes more real than the 'thing' from which the image was abstracted. The mind then clings to these constructs, the most intractable being the fiction of a permanent ego or self as the sovereign subject of thought and action. This delusion is continuously birthed and rebirthed by desire and craving for ego-maintenance. Once individuals and 'realities' are turned into things in themselves (reification), they can be perceived as bearers of good and evil in themselves and become objects of both lust and revulsion (fetishisation).

The heart of the Buddha's ethic is his doctrine of anatta or 'no self.' This is a two-edged sword that strikes at the spurious notion of self-subsistent subjects of knowledge and equally self-subsistent objects of knowledge. It also shows the emptiness of the Aristotelian theory of substances and innate natures. Clinging to the theory of permanent self and unchanging substances is, for the Buddha, not merely a question of mental error: it is a delusion produced by the desire for power to organise all of reality into a totallising system and claim that this is according to faith, reason or logic. The political applications of Brahmanic and Aristotelian thought vindicate the Buddha's viewpoint that clinging to the notion of a permanent self and of eternal unchanging substances is the principal source of violence in the world.

The Buddha was able to unravel this process of reification and fetishisation because of the great discovery he made about the character of human knowledge and desire. He formulated this discovery as the Law of Conditioned Co-Genesis: 'Paticca Samuppada.' The Buddha's Teaching and Ethical Path cannot be grasped without comprehending this Law. 'He who understands my Dhamma,' he said, 'understands Paticca Samuppada. And he who understands Paticca Samuppada understands my Dhamma.' This discovery puts an end to the age-old debate about Freedom and Necessity. Freedom and Necessity are not two irreconcilable opposites. Freedom can be realised, not by defying Necessity, but through insight into it. Human existence is necessarily conditioned. Impermanence is an inevitable law of existence, but the rise and dissolution of phenomena take place according to observable patterns and regularities. With Conditioned Co-Genesis as the guideline for investigation, the Buddha showed that phenomenaÐwhether natural, psychological or socialÐare neither chance happenings nor the creation of a god. They are also not the result of separate individuals' free will. Events arise under specific conditions, and they cease with the cessation of these conditions. The arising of an unwholesome state of affairs can be prevented by the eradication of conditions giving rise to it. The Buddha called for an empirical investigation into actual conditions instead of engaging in abstract speculation about the extraterrestrial origins and purposes of the universe and human existence.

Towards Universal Friendliness

With his unique insight into the birth and cessation of all perceived realities, the Buddha formulated a radical theory about the character of human action, or kamma. He understood and clarified kamma as 'a creative process, which ripens into effects': there is conditioned activity, but no actors existing independent of their real-life conditions; when these conditions cease, the empirical self ceases to exist, just as 'a flame goes out when its supply of fuel is depleted.' It is because human activityÐthoughts, words and deedsÐhas verifiable effects for oneself, for others and for the living environment; it has an ethical character. The Buddha did not posit 'a ghost in the machine' to explain the practical character of human action, which would have reduced the body to an instrument of an alien being. He used systematic observation and experimentation to deduce that human beings have a highly developed capacity for registering internal and external impulses and for self-regulation, which places them in a unique position among living beings. While other creatures adapt themselves to their environment, humans have gradually fashioned their own. The Buddha described the world, not in an ontological sense, but with reference to the world humanity constructs through perceptions, concepts, designs and practical actions. The Buddha's call for compassion towards all sentient beings is because, from his point of view, the difference between animals and humans is one of degree and not kind.

The Buddha, unlike most moral philosophers, began not with subjective intentions but with verifiable effects. The human will is not a transcendental but a conditioned faculty. Human beings are not born into an abstract cosmos but into the specific conditions produced by pre-existing human beings. He asked human beings to consider the effects of their actions that go beyond the petty claims of their little egos and act responsibly by purifying their thoughts, intentions, words and deeds so that they could live lives without causing harm to themselves or others. The Buddha did not try to goad people into morality through a system of rewards and punishments. In fact, the terms 'good' and 'evil' did not exist in his moral lexicon. He spoke rather of skilful and unskilful responses to the challenges of the human condition. The entire ethical attitude of Buddhism can be summed up as follows: 'Knowing that nothing is permanent and that we must all die, how can we live skilfully, harming neither oneself nor others?'

The answer to this question is given as the Four Noble Truths. Human suffering is a problem created by human beings, and human beings alone, because they seek to escape the inevitability of change, decay and death. Radical Buddhism does not offer escape from these inevitable realities. The liberation offered is from self-constructed suffering. At the psychological level, this suffering takes the form of existential anguish, arising when the individual divorces himself or herself from the very conditions of existence and regards them as alien to the real self and treats them as 'other-than-the-body' and as 'external nature.' Paradoxically, the ego then craves for and clings to the very things it regards as 'not itself' and as impermanent. It has put itself in a double bind. Craving is expressed and reinforced by ego-centred projects for self-perpetuation, like family, class, caste, nation and other social institutions, which continuously produce ('birth') and reproduce ('rebirth') the privileges of birth, property and power. But this Craving, the Buddha taught, can be eradicated, and there is a method for realising it: the Noble Eightfold Path.

The realisation of anatta by eradicating the notion of the self as a permanent, unchanging and immortal being amid change is not annihilation but the dissipation of a delusion. When this is achieved, there is an exhilarating expansion of consciousness. The pigeon holes into which language has crammed consciousness are demolished. The Buddha called this the 'signless deliverance of consciousness.' Consciousness becomes 'non-representative, limitless and lustrous.' Representations of actuality, both linguistic and imaginative, are seen for what they are: representations of actuality, not actuality itself. The sense of Self and Other is dissipated. Both are seen as conditionally co-arising constructs of experience and thought. The Buddha used a precise term to explain the basis of the sense of self and self-identity: an-annata, a sense of not-otherness. The individual imagines being itself and by itself, but, in fact, its asserting of selfhood is conditioned by the negation of otherness: 'A man is not a woman'; 'a Sinhala is not a Tamil'; and so on. Negate this sense of otherness and the sense of 'self' ceases. The role of delusion is to create the sense of self-identity by erasing from consciousness the trace of the Self in the Other. The Self and Other are no longer seen as mutually conditioning-conditioned relationships but as separate and intrinsically different entities. Each can now perceive the other, and other others, as objects in themselves of one's lusts, phobias and hatreds. The other becomes the means rather than the condition of one's self-existence.

Once all culturally constructed barriers between oneself and other others are demolished, what arises spontaneously is an immense sense of anukampa, or 'compassion': literally, 'pulsating along with.' This experience of anukampa produces feelings of universal friendliness, metta, towards everything that lives because all life is experienced as part of a single and unbroken stream. Universal friendliness evokes an attitude of active kindliness towards all beings. The concomitant of metta is ahimsa: an attitude of non-injuriousness towards oneself and others. Since life is experienced as a continuous flow, one realises that, in protecting oneself, one protects others and that, in protecting others, one protects oneself. All living beings form a single web of life: what one does to the web, one does to oneself. This concrete experience of actuality as an unbroken flow is not a mystical experience. It is a bare perception of actuality, unmediated by concepts and names. The Buddha described this as sati, or 'Right Mindfulness.' In his Universal Friendliness Discourse, the Metta Sutta, the Buddha explained that sati and metta amount to Right Mindfulness. The dichotomy between thinking and feeling is superseded. The realisation of anatta, or de-individuation, does not therefore produce a sense of emptiness but a sense of fullness as the living being pulsates with feelings of universal friendliness. When the Buddha founded the Fourfold Community, the Buddha Sangha, he envisaged it as the efflorescence of egoless living: the visible embodiment of universal and inclusive friendliness. The aim of Buddhist self-liberation is not a negative mysticism. The emptiness spoken of by the Buddha is not an ontological void but the absence of Craving in its triple form: lust, hatred and delusion.

Implications of the Buddha's Realisation

In his discourses, the Buddha applies his basic insights to refute oppressive ideologies and to expose the emptiness of claims that the social order of his day was and would continue to be forever. The Buddha realised that if people believe permanence is real and that change is illusory they will not even begin to think about changing the conditions in which they find themselves. He insisted on the conditioned co-arising of suffering. His radical prescription for liberation is authentically revolutionary because in it there is a coincidence of self-change and of the surrounding conditions.

The basic premise of the Buddha's ethic, anatta, has a radical implication: craving for and clinging to things as if they are permanent and laden with intrinsic significance is based on a commonly shared delusion and is a vestige of primitive animism. The empirical outcome of this deluded belief is ego-selfishness for material goods, sensuous pleasures, political power and, most sinister of all, a dogmatic clinging to sectarian views. This is why the debate over whether there is an eternal, unchanging reality behind and beyond the changing appearance of things ceases to be purely theological or philosophical when one addresses the question of 'fundamental rights.'

The Buddha recognised the intrinsic connection between the views a person clings to and his or her psychological disposition. He shifted traditional concern from the abstract or logical truth of ideas to investigation of the connection between ideas and their practical implications. People, he pointed out, dogmatically cling to or reject views, not because they are true or false, but because they are in accordance with their likes or dislikes. Long before Friedrich Nietzsche, the Buddha masterfully disclosed that the belief in a permanent ultimate reality is fuelled by a compelling will-to-power, a strong desire to ground one's ideas, projects and institutions on an eternal, unchanging and invincible principle. To desire an infinite being is to magnify desire to infinite proportions. Today the practical outcome of this condition is a belief that the economy driven by a desire for profit is also an unchangeable, sacred reality manifesting itself as a spiral of infinite growth. Apologists for this system argue that its demi-urgeÐthe profit motiveÐis the logical expression of human nature, which is intrinsically egoistic. The Buddha declared the most dangerous of all deluded views to be the belief that the self or ego is a sovereign and immortal entity, that its body and the physical world are merely instruments of the ego's self-realisation. He established that such hubris is the root cause of conflict in the world.

(This is the fourth in a series of 10 articles extracted from the text Buddhism, Human Rights and Social Renewal by Dr. Nalin Swaris and published by AHRC. To obtain copies, please contact AHRC.)