video
Episode
Eastern Traditions: What is the Human Person?
How do Buddhism, Chinese traditions, and Hinduism address the essence of human sentience? What is consciousness? What is the self? What is qi? Do humans have souls or spirits? Are humans dualistic beings? Or pure souls/spirits?
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- What is the human person — the real human person? Physical body only? Physical body and nonphysical essence — soul or spirit? Nonphysical essence only? Consciousness – our inner mental awareness – and the deep nature of the human person – have been lifelong passions. My PhD thesis was on the brain’s cerebral cortex. I’ve immersed in philosophy of mind. Consciousness, certainly, is a pillar of Closer to Truth – I’ve thought I had covered it all — The science and the philosophy of human nature and human sentience – I had not. Because the philosophy was largely western and analytic. I’ve known, obviously, the major eastern traditions – Buddhism, Hinduism, Chinese, Confucianism and Daoism. But I’d felt no pressure to pursue in depth – Why? Because I’d assumed the philosophical ideas had limited serious metaphysics. I was wrong. I now start afresh, explore what I didn’t know… that I didn’t know. How do eastern traditions address the real human person? Body? Soul? Both? Neither? In eastern traditions, what is the human person? I’m Robert Lawrence Kuhn and Closer to Truth is my journey to find out. Here’s my plan. I seek philosophers or scholars of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Chinese traditions, Confucianism and Daoism. While practitioners, believers, devotees would bring first-person perspective — and perhaps mystical insights — these I could not assess. That’s why I seek third-person perspective — those who think with rational clarity and argue with analytic precision. I begin with Hinduism, for two reasons: It may house the most complex systems of thinking about consciousness, and it is derived from perhaps the oldest scriptures, the Vedas. I meet the leader of the Vedanta Society of New York – a spokesperson for Hinduism generally and Advaita Vedanta specifically – an expert on consciousness — Swani Sarvapriyananda. Swami, in Hindu thought, what is the person? What is personhood? Do we have a soul, a spirit? Are we a soul or a spirit? Is this a union of body and spirit? How is the human person put together?
- Swami Sarvapriyananda
- All of those. [Laughing] Yes, I like this thing. I don’t know who said it, but I like the saying that it’s not that we are human beings in search of a spiritual experience, but we are spiritual beings having a human experience. And that, I think, perfectly sums up the Hindu idea of the person. Basically, the person can be analyzed into I would say three compliments. One is the physical body, we’re all embodied, so here is a physical body. In Sanskrit, Tula Shaleda [ph]. Shaleda means bodies, Tula means physical, gross, heavy, physical. Then there is another aspect to ourselves which we all experience. We experience our bodies, but each of us has a private inner life, a first-person life. Our thoughts, feelings, emotions, that’s more intimate to us. And that’s called the subtle body. In Sanskrit, sukshma sarira – subtle body. But it’s also body. Notice, it’s a body, it’s not you. And it’s very important because in Hinduism, the mind is not you, as the body is also not you. It is yours, you are there, but it’s not you. And then it goes deeper into what is called the Ātman, the Self. So, the self, is understood variously. In Advaita Vedanta, it’s understood as pure consciousness, existence consciousness. So, the self, or the Ātman, and it is the subtle body, physical body. You can make it even more fine-grained. There are five layers of the human personality. Physical body, vital body, mental body, intellectual body, and a causal body. But the principle is still the same. Beyond the causal body, is you, the self. They call it the soul.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- How does that soul come about? Is the soul, is it an immortal soul? Is our immortal soul part of a cosmic consciousness? Is there a God who puts a soul into us? What is the mechanism by which we become this person?
- Swami Sarvapriyananda
- Right. So, we are immortal. The Ātman, the self, is immortal. And we have had many lifetimes.
So, how this works is these bodies die. The body dies, the physical death, the body’s gone. It’s not going to come back. So, the Hindu is very happy cremating it, because it just goes back to nature, earth to earth, and the water, and fire, the five primordial elements back to the natural elements. But the subtle body continues with the self. So, there’s a physical body, a subtle body, and you, the self. So, the physical body is gone. The subtle body continues. Think of it as your laptop, and the data in your laptop. When the laptop – if it breaks down, but your data is backed up in the cloud, your data is still there. So, when you get a new laptop, you can download the data. So, you continue, you, the self, you continue with your distinct personality, your past experiences, even the covered-up store of memories which may sometimes be revived of past lives, past conditioning. You get a new body. Could be usually a human body, but maybe some other body also. And this is how we go from lifetime to lifetime, until, and this is not good news, that we are immortal is not good news. Because this kind of immortality is a changing – you’re subject to continuous births and deaths. One of the Upanishads puts it [Speaking Hindi], it goes from death to death which is not a good place to be. So, the whole goal is to be free of this cycle of birth and death. And in Advaita Vedanta, that is when you realize that you are not the physical body, not the subtle body, you are this infinite, unchanging, existence consciousness place. You already are free, then this trans-migration stops, this going from birth to birth, it stops. - Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- And then, what happens?
- Swami Sarvapriyananda
- Then you remain as you are your infinite nature. You can still come back and have as many bodies and lives as you like, but you’re free. Generally, you do not. The reason why we are in this cycle is we’re trying to attain fulfillment. We’re trying to attain infinitude. There’s a beautiful saying in the Upanishads, Chanda Upanishads that says, [Speaking Hindi]. That which is the infinite, that is bliss. [Speaking Hindi] There is no true happiness in the limited. So, we, in this limited embodiment, we are looking for happiness. We’re looking for it in the wrong place, in limited things, in the world. With a limited ego, with a limited body, with limited objects, you will only get limited happiness. But this unlimited fulfillment which is our very self, Vedanta says, it’s always attained, it’s always there. But we don’t see it. So, in our journey, we come upon a spiritual quest. But this material search for happiness is not working. Now, here is spirituality which promises liberation from this limited existence, this self-seeking, and it shows you your greater self, the infinite self, beyond its limited self. And when you realize I am that [Speaking Hindi], I am Brahman, infinite awareness. And realize it, not just read about it, it becomes a living reality to you. Then you are free. That would be your last life. You would be enlightened and that would be your last life.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- To Advaita Vedanta, the real human person is a spiritual being having a human experience, not a human being seeking a spiritual experience. The “self” — a kind of soul — is the “real” you. I like Vedanta’s flipping the western view. The body does not have a self or a soul. The self or soul has a body! Hindu schools and philosophies – though based on the same Veda Scriptures – are certainly diverse and sometimes contradictory. Is there an alternative understanding of the Vedanta Soul? I speak to a monk who compares metaphysical positions between Advaita Vedanta and western philosophy — He has a doctorate from Berkeley – Swami Medhananda.
- Swami Medhananda
- One thing to emphasize is that the soul is not sort of completely distinct from God because the soul is always intimately related with God. You can think of the soul as a kind of child of God.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- And – – the whole karmic reincarnation process is to reach – to escape the cycle in a sense – and to have some permanence.
- Swami Medhananda
- Absolutely. And that different traditions within Hinduism have radically different conceptions of what the ultimate picture of salvation is. They don’t use the word, but liberation, Mukti, is the term. Liberation from what? From rebirth. Devotional traditions within Hinduism, traditional schools that believe in a personal God, they tend to conceive the final eschatological state as a kind of eternal heaven. It’s called Loka in Sanskrit and it’s – it’s an abode which is eternal in which you can dwell in an eternal loving relationship with the form of the personal God that you love. And there’s an entirely different paradigm of eschatology in the tradition of Advaita Vedanta, which is the non-dualistic school of Vedanta. There’s no going and coming, there are no eternal heavens. There’s a kind of temporary heavens, which you can dwell in for some time, but ultimately, the ultimate state of liberation is one in which you just rest in your true nature as nondual pure consciousness.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Whatever the ultimate state is, does everyone get there ultimately, however long ultimately takes?
- Swami Medhananda
- Yes.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- The so-called universal salvation.
- Swami Medhananda
- According some modern Hindu schools, the one that I belong to is the school of Ramakrishna Vivekananda. We believe in universal salvation. But that – the form that that salvation takes may differ from individual to individual. The view I prefer is one that was espoused by Ramakrishna, a nineteenth-century mystic. He used a really nice metaphor of eating sugar versus becoming sugar. And he says that the soul has a preference in this and the soul may prefer to eat sugar and by that he means the soul can choose in the final eschatological state to dwell in an eternal heaven with – with the personal God. But the soul can also choose to become sugar in the sense of just resting in its own nature as non-dual pure consciousness. And I like this both-and approach to eschatology, which is that we can think of salvation as a kind of many-roomed mansion and you can choose the room you want to dwell in. You can choose to dwell in the Christ room or the Allah room or the Vishnu room or the non-dual pure consciousness room, but they’re all sort of part of the same mansion.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- And can you switch?
- Swami Medhananda
- Sure. Why not? Yeah, I think that there’s a flexibility there and some souls may, after a long time in the heaven, choose to dip into non-duality and then maybe even come – dip back into – [overlapping voices].
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- If I go into non-duality, can I come back as a – [overlapping voices]?
- Swami Medhananda
- Yeah. Yeah, you can.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- You can?
- Swami Medhananda
- Yeah, I think that, again, it depends on the tradition, but in some traditions you can.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- I want the tradition with the most flexibility.
- Swami Medhananda
- That’s the one – I’m with you on that.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Maybe I have to come with you to get – to get that.
- Swami Medhananda
- We’re happy to have you on board.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- To me, whether to “eat sugar” or to “be sugar” epitomizes Vedanta philosophy – whether, in the afterlife, to remain an individual, a personal center of consciousness and experience personal ecstasy — “eat sugar” — or, to lose one’s individuality, lose one’s personhood, dissolving back into the infinite ocean of consciousness — and experience collective ecstasy — “be sugar.” This radical difference of the human person in the afterlife, implies a radical difference of the human person in this life. Whether the human person is fundamentally an illusion—or fundamentally real. But Vedanta is not the only major tradition originating in India. What is the human person, the self, in Buddhism? I meet a leading Buddhist expert – a philosopher of mind and a philosopher of religion – Jay Garfield.
- Jay Garfield
- The question about the nature of consciousness in Buddhism is a complicated question, in part because we have to move back and forth between the English word consciousness and the underlying poly- Sanskrit or Tibetan terms that we’re translating which might not always map perfectly. The second reason is that because the Buddhist tradition is internally complex with different accounts in different schools. The first thing to say is that when we put that substantive ‘ness’ on the end of conscious in English, we kind of create the notion that there’s a thing there, or a single process, a thing called consciousness. That somehow, we have or that we don’t a lot of people think about that as there being kind of a light switch, right? You turn it on and we’re conscious, and everything appears. Turn it off and we’re unconscious. Nothing like that is posited in any Buddhism school. Instead, we think of what it is for a subject to be conscious of an object that’s understood as a relation between me and the object, that is that I’m responding to the object in a particular way. And when we do this, Buddhists often indicate a number of different kinds of consciousness, or of conscious relations. So, we have six sensory consciousnesses, or six ways of being consciousness sensorily. The familiar external five, and then introspective consciousness that gives us awareness of our own inner states, which is thought of as perceptually.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- In Eastern traditions, you often find that what we consider consciousness in a human sense is somehow related to a cosmic consciousness of some kind. Do you find that in Buddhism?
- Jay Garfield
- No, Buddhism is a reaction against that. So, that in the orthodox Indian traditions, and when I use the word orthodox, I’m using it in a technical sense. By orthodox, we mean the traditions that posit a self.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Right.
- Jay Garfield
- So, these traditions posit not only an individual self, or Ātman, but a cosmic self, usually referred to as Brahman, and in a lot of these traditions, the goal of spiritual practice is to understand the unity of Ātman and Brahman. Buddhists are reacting against that, and very explicitly so. So, when Buddhists reject the idea of a self, or an Ātman, they’re rejecting both this kind of individual self, 15:13:29, and a cosmic self. And they see that as akin to rejecting the idea that external phenomena have essences or selves because they regard the posit of the self, the one that we normally think of, as a way of positing an essence or an intrinsic identity.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Which goes against the emptiness?
- Jay Garfield
- Exactly, which goes against the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness which is always emptiness of any intrinsic identity. And so, you sometimes will hear people talk in the Buddhist world about the selflessness of the person, and the selflessness of phenomena. So, I can talk in this register about the selflessness of a table. But what I mean is, it has no intrinsic core.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- So, this is a perfect segue into understanding the Buddhism concept of No Self.
- Jay Garfield
- Okay. Let’s begin with the idea of a self, and see why it’s a bad idea. Imagine somebody whose body you’d like to have, just for a little bit.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Sure.
- Jay Garfield
- And if I can imagine that, then I know that I don’t think of myself as my body, or my body is constituting me. I can do the same trick with the mind. I can say, gosh, I’d love to have Carlo Rovelli’s mind. Because if I had Carlo’s mind, I would understand quantum gravity. But I don’t. Again, I don’t want to be Carlo. Carlo is already Carlo. I want to be me with his mind. And I can form that kind of desire. If I do that, then I realize I don’t even identify with my mind. 15:16:25 I think of myself as a Jay with a body, and with a mind, and it’s that thing that we’re targeting, that thing that we posit, that stands behind our body and mind, and that has them. Another way to think about that is when we experience ourselves as selves, we experience ourselves as standing subjects or agents against the world, rather than in the world. We also think of ourselves as capable of just initiating free action with no causes. I’ll say, I will now causelessly raise my arm but of course, that’s crazy. We know all of that is crazy, but that’s what bound up in the self-idea. Instead, what we are, are causally opened continua of psychophysical processes, which is a conventional identity. So, a person is something that exists conventionally. Because we regard a particular causal continuum of processes that was born a long time ago, and is sitting here now, and has a lot of intermediate temporal states as constituting the same thing, as constituting Jay. We experience ourselves as though there’s kind of a center core, that has all of that. But that’s simply a super imposition. That’s a kind of cognitive illusion.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- And this answers the question of the persistence of personhood through time? Because you don’t have the self, but you have these continuous physical processes that relate to each other.
- Jay Garfield
- That’s right. The self doesn’t exist at all. It’s not caused by anything. It’s like Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. It’s something that we might believe to exist, but it doesn’t exist. And a fundamental idea in Buddhism is that our primal confusion, it’s the root of our suffering, is taking things to be more real than they are. This is the sense in which we take the person to be more real than it is.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Buddhism has no self – personhood continues, but personhood is not a self. Buddhism’s no-self is so radically opposed to Hinduism’s core self. Buddhism’s consciousness, personal or cosmic, is not even a “thing.” Like everything else, consciousness is empty of intrinsic existence. Thus far, I have three choices: Vedanta’s self as an illusory human person. Vedanta’s self as a real human person.
Buddhism’s no-self — the human person is not a thing. But are these the only options in eastern traditions? How did the human person develop in ancient China? I speak with a scholar of Chinese philosophy, a rare expert in Chinese metaphysics – Franklin Perkins.
- Franklyn Perkins
- So, the Chinese ontology is one of qi. And qi, I think, we could say, is physical, ultimately. And everything is made out of qi. So, our body is made out of qi. Our thoughts are like a lighter form of qi, our bodies are heavier forms of qi. And actually, the Chinese word for self also means body. And when you’re translating it, it often would be self, but sometimes, it’s clearly referring to a body, as a public presence. So, the grounding of it, is the body. And then the self – what we think of as the self, the identity, is going to be kind of formed out of the body, in different ways.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- In western thought, we have the question is the self totally material, is there some kind of spirit or a soul? Is there an equivalent in Chinese philosophy?
- Franklyn Perkins
- There’s some similar distinctions, but ultimately, in Chinese philosophy, it’s a monistic system. Everything is made out of the same stuff, which is qi – qi like vital energy. So, there’s no radical mind-body dualism. The idea is that we have of the soul are really kind of gatherings of this thinner qi. So, it’s not going to be a non-physical soul, but there is still something like an idea of the soul.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- But qi is sort of this energy, It’s a physical kind of energy, or does it have some non-physical aspects to it?
- Franklyn Perkins
- It’s a little hard to say if it’s physical – some people will talk about a neutral monism.
So, a monism that there’s some basic stuff, and it becomes matter, and becomes mind. But it’s not either one. It could be something like that, but I take it to be physical because it’s always referred to as located, right? - Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Oh.
- Franklyn Perkins
- So, it always seems like it’s in space. It’s always described as like flowing, as taking up space.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Even when it’s the thin qi, or the mental, it’s still taking up space? Because a lot of times, we define mental activity as non-locatable in space. That’s the problems of consciousness.
- Franklyn Perkins
- Yes. They still think of it as in space, yes. I have to say they don’t theorize it a lot.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Do you have different schools of thinking of the human person?
- Franklyn Perkins
- Yes, so I think one thing that’s distinctive with these is that – in a way, I think we tend to take the person for granted. Like, we’re all kind of rational agents that make decisions and partly because the basic self is the body, and the body can be aligned in lots of different ways. They all look at the self as more of an achievement, right? So, one of the probably most fundamental ideas across all Chinese philosophy is self-cultivation. And you have to make yourself into a certain kind of being. And so, the Confucians will see us as naturally chaotic, right? So, we have different reactions to different things in the world. We want good food. For monks or the person that work on war we also feel compassion, we feel shame. Like, we have good motivations, but we also have these other motivations, and they arrive in a very chaotic way. So, what we have to do is achieve a set purpose, which involves cultivating our emotions, shaping our emotions, so that we become – so, that we get a kind of control over ourselves, that we don’t naturally have. Most of the Daoists, most of the Daoists, think that our natural response is we’ll actually be fine. They’re aligning us with the whole cosmos, and everything else in nature seems to work spontaneously pretty well, and is sustainable. So, the fact that human beings cause such problems that nothing else in nature causes, makes them think that it’s a deviation from nature that causes that. So, for them, there is still self-cultivation but it’s almost like uncultivation. So, the idea is that we’re all corrupted by false desires. So, the Dao De Jing says you know, if you don’t display precious goods that are hard to obtain, people will basically be peaceful and content. But once you start showing them things that only a few people can get, they’ll all start fighting for it. In the Dae De Jing, it’s even more radical that we need to free ourselves from the ways that we conceptualize things, and judge things even on a more basic level.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- How would you distinguish sharply between the classical Chinese and Buddhist Chinese approach to the nature of the person?
- Franklyn Perkins
- I think in the early Chinese context, there are – some Daoists will talk about having no self, but what they really mean there is having no fixed identity. And so, they’re still taking ultimately the body as the self. And so, the radical Buddhist idea that there’s no self, and that undermines then, you know, self-concern, undermines responsibility, right? That idea – they don’t really take up that idea. So, ultimately, they’re still going to think, I am myself, which is my body.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Eastern uniformity about the human person, is refuted by the opposing views of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Chinese philosophy — whether human beings are physical, spiritual, or dualistic creatures. In Hindu philosophy, Advaita Vedanta, the human person has three parts: The physical body; the mind; and the self — the self being the real you, which is pure consciousness, pure existence — thus, the human person is an illusion. But in other Hindu schools, in the afterlife, the self, the soul, maintains personal identify — thus, the human person is real. In Buddhist philosophy, there is no self. The self is incoherent, “a bad idea.” The self, like all else, is empty of intrinsic identity. The human person is just continual of physical and psychological processes. In Chinese philosophy, the self, the soul, is a gathering of “thin qi”, a kind of monism that manifests as matter and mind. The soul “takes up space,” so it is not non-physical. What do these eastern traditions have in common? A deep interconnectedness between the human person and the world, not just a human person in an extrinsic world, but a human person as an intrinsic part of the world. Eastern traditions make me think afresh about selves and persons and about consciousness. I feel, in a way, enlightened, but I cannot say tell you… I am any… Closer to Truth.