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Episode
Eastern Traditions: Why are Suffering and Ritual Vital?
How do Buddhism, Chinese traditions, and Hinduism address the perennial problems of suffering, ethics, ritual and contemplative practices? Why is suffering so important in Buddhism? Why karma in Hinduism? Why systems of nature in Chinese traditions?
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- I seek “meaning.” But the kind of meaning I seek… is “big meaning” – big meaning, for me, requires a “transcendent reality,” a realm or realms of existence beyond the physical world – which – I won’t fool myself – may not exist. Claims of a transcendent reality usually come from religious traditions. And while I’ve thought I’ve been comprehensive in my search of religious traditions, I’ve not been. I have “underweighted” eastern religious traditions. It is a deficit I need to fix. There are multiple facets of eastern traditions. Two foundational ideas, two philosophical pillars are: Suffering — including its causes and consequences. And ritual — the practices prescribed for harmony and alignment. In eastern traditions, why are suffering and ritual vital? I’m Robert Lawrence Kuhn and Closer to Truth is my journey to find out. “Suffering and ritual” characterize almost all religions. Yet, suffering and ritual seem to hold greater significance in eastern traditions than in western traditions. Are suffering and ritual critical clues in revealing transcendent reality? If so, what is it about them that could unlock the mysteries of big meaning? I begin with an overview of how eastern traditions link their transcendent realities with ritualistic practices. I speak with a philosopher of mind and religion – who specializes in comparative religion — Helen De Cruz. Helen, the importance of meditation and being connected to an independent other reality is a very important part of, of Eastern traditions, perhaps more so universally than Western religious traditions. How is that, and why is that?
- Helen De Cruz
- In all religious traditions, there is an intimate relationship between the philosophical concepts and the embodied practices. And I think that in Eastern religious traditions, this has been more explicit or foregrounded, and it seems to me like in Christianity, if we briefly compare, one of the reasons it isn’t so foregrounded is that, you know, you’d have to go to convents and monasteries, to really get the contemplative life. But in Eastern religious traditions, it’s something you try to incorporate in your everyday life. So, early Confucian said ritual is very important, ritual helps us to cultivate ourselves, helps us to become better persons. One reason they said that was that they felt the heat of this foreign Indian philosophy, namely Buddhism. And Buddhism had its own meditative practices, that basically, ultimately comes from Hinduism. You know, yoga. So, it has a physical aspect, and it has a dietary aspect, but it is basically trying to get the sense of being interconnected. But the problem is that we, due to selfish desires, so selfish desires and that’s always the sticking point in Buddhism. Selfish desires are things that spontaneously arise, right? But the problem is that that gets in the way of realizing that you don’t have an individual self, but these desires basically make that you don’t see that. That you don’t see the big picture. So, the meditative practices are there to clear your jewel, so to speak, that you become again aware of what is important. What is important is that you are part of this big universe, and that suffering is bad, and you want to end it.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- So, what about the specific physicality of the meditative practice in Eastern traditions? There’s deep spiritual meaning to it.
- Helen De Cruz
- Definitely. So, in Za Zen, which in Zen Buddhism is the sitting quietly, is this kind of way of sitting in such a way that is comfortable but not too comfortable. You know, there’s all sorts of ways to make sure your attention is just at the right level to get the benefit from the meditation.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- How does the progress work as you begin the meditative process? What is a goal that you try to achieve?
- Helen De Cruz
- So, I have done a bit of meditation, at first, you feel like your mind really rebels. And I find that initial phase really interesting. Like your mind is just like so busy. But then you can go deeper. So, people who can really make a quiet mind, who can get a sort of sense of mystical experience. That comes with practice.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- The generality is that you lose your sense of self, and you feel one with the cosmic universe or something beyond yourself. But beyond that, does each tradition have its own content specificity?
- Helen De Cruz
- I think that yes, they do have and we shouldn’t just like sweep that under the carpet of perennialism. So, like say in Yogacara philosophy, which is a particular Buddhist tradition, there is this idea that you will ultimately realize, you know, that that your perceptions, don’t reflect necessarily reality per se. So, you get a sort of sense of like, you know, the limitations of your own cognition. Whereas other religious traditions like Vedanta will sort of more talk about like the ultimate transcendent reality. And it’s the sort of introspective meditation that can make us aware that even though you really focus on yourself, you do get a bigger picture of how the whole of reality is interconnected.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Helen provides an engaging sweep of spiritual actions and behaviors in eastern traditions – linking the practice of ritual with the theory of transcendent reality. Personally, repetitive activities are alien to my nature – religious rituals, to me, are boring and unfulfilling… I don’t want to be offensive, but I do want to be honest – which may mean, I admit, that I have much to learn. But my discomfort with ritual must not deter my study of its theoretical insights — And because suffering and ritual are linked so closely in Buddhism, I should explore the profound significance of suffering in Buddhism. I speak with an analytic philosopher of mind and religion – an expert in the subtle essences of Buddhist philosophy – Jay Garfield.
- Jay Garfield
- The first of the four noble truths is the pervasiveness of suffering. And it sets the existential problem that Buddhism is trying to solve. Now, it’s important to see that suffering comes in three forms, or three levels. The first level of suffering, I’m going to the most superficial, is what is often called evidence suffering. And that’s things like headaches, and bad weather, and depression, and just all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that cause us annoyance through the day.
The second level of suffering is called the suffering of change. And the suffering of change itself has two dimensions. One is that the moment we’re born, we are heading towards death. And that we are basically, for all of our lives, nothing but the raw material for corpses. And a lot of people if they reflect on it, think it’s a downer. So, what they do is they don’t reflect on it. And by not reflecting on it, they repress it. And so, that every moment of their life becomes a moment of death, and they wonder why it all feels so bad. The second element of the suffering of change is that even things that are really good and pleasant, if they hang around too long, they start becoming unpleasant. We might talk about philosophy for a few minutes, or a few hours, but if I say no, no, no, stay here overnight, we’re going to keep talking. At some point, you’re going to say, this is, you know, unlawful imprisonment. But below that, is the most profound and important level of suffering, and that’s the suffering of pervasive conditioning. That’s the fact that what we really want is to be in control of our lives. But so much of what happens to us in our lives is due to forces outside of our control. We might have a terrible genetic condition that leads to an illness, a drunk driver might run us down. If you think about it, the fundamental level of suffering, the suffering pervasive conditioning, is what accounts for the suffering of change. And what accounts for evidence suffering. So, the Buddha’s insight was that once we pay attention to the world, and we pay attention to our own orientation, to what we want, the world is fundamentally unsatisfactory. There’s this kind of existential problem, how can we lead a life that is free of that suffering? How can we turn that suffering into its opposite? And when we take the term Nirvana, the term Nirvana, which is one of the goals of Buddhist practice, it really means – literally, it means blowing a candle out, and it’s a fire metaphor. Because the idea is that the suffering is like being on fire all the time. Because when we talk about the components of the person, we think of it as imposed skandhas, or five clusters of properties. But the word that stands under that word skandha which literally means a pile, is originally denotes the pile of wood over – that you pile over a body to burn it. And so, the Buddhist metaphor is our existence is always on fire, and always connected with death. And Nirvana isn’t the extinction of existence. It’s the extinction of the fire. How can we lead a life that’s cooled? And what’s really lovely is the word for ethics, or for proper conduct, in Sanskrit is Sila, and the word of that is cool. It means to be able to behave in a cool way, not burning with anger. - Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- So, how do you go from that perception of what suffering is, or unsatisfactory, to morality, and moral principles.
- Jay Garfield
- When Buddhists ask the question about morality and conduct, whereas most philosophers in the West have thought of that as on the output side, about what we do, or what we say, Buddhists tend to think of it as how we see, and how we experience the world. When Buddhists talk about the qualities that we cultivate on the ethical path, they’re qualities like patience, and attentive perception. Qualities like generosity. They’re qualities that involve seeing others and seeing ourselves in a different way. And so, when I say that it’s a moral phenomenology, it’s a way of thinking that vice emerges from fear. And by turning ourselves from enemies into colleagues, we can diminish fear, increase our awareness of interdependence, and replace pride with gratitude. Buddhist philosophy is about becoming a virtuoso person. That is somebody who simply sees the world, and responds spontaneously to what they see, rather than thinks about what should I do now? What must I do? Because the idea is that our actions and our speech flow naturally from the way that we see, and that the root of vice is seeing things incorrectly. And the root of virtue is seeing things correctly.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Suffering in Buddhism is striking in its sophistication and complexity, imbued with levels and kinds of suffering that are both baffling and revelatory. Whereas suffering, and how to deal with it, is the very foundation of Buddhism’s quest for transcendental reality – big meaning. What is suffering in Hinduism, the more ancient tradition that emerged in India? I speak with a Hindu monk who has a doctorate in German idealism from Berkeley. His insights interrelate Vedic and western metaphysics — Swami Medhananda.
- Swami Medhananda
- The problem of evil which occupies such a prominent place in Abrahamic theology, it doesn’t play nearly as prominent a role in Hindu traditions – Hindu thinkers are not nearly as bothered by the problem and the reason is because they have the doctrine of karma. The idea that we reap what we sow. And one of the reasons why it’s – it has so much theodical power is because it can explain, for instance, really difficult cases like a two-year-old baby who suffers let’s say terribly from cerebral meningitis ultimately dies. And you might ask, well, what did the baby do to deserve this? The moment you accept the doctrines of karma and rebirth, you can say well it did something in a previous life and that’s not – that’s not all. The idea – another conception which is at least common among a number of modern Hindu thinkers is that everybody will – will attain the highest goal of liberation in the end, eventually, in some birth. According to a number of Hindu traditions, the doctrine of karma is not primarily retributive, which means it’s not a doctrine of punishment, the ultimate purpose behind the law of karma is to create saints out of each one of us. Every soul is destined to become one with God or commune with God, depending on your understanding of the final state of salvation. That karma is the mechanism by which we grow morally and spiritually across different physical embodiments. So, every time we come in a physical body on this earth, we’re given another chance to grow morally and spiritually. And if we don’t succeed in this life, there’s always hope in the future because we know that we’ll be given another chance to come back again. Because a soul, remember, is the continuity of consciousness across lives. And, ultimately, every soul is destined to attain the highest goal of life. At the core of many Hindu responses to the problem of evil are three key doctrines. One is karma, we reap what we sow. Second is rebirth. This is not our only physical embodiment, but we’re going to be reborn again and again until we reach – and this is a third doctrine, the doctrine of universal salvation, each one of us will eventually attain the highest spiritual goal in the end. So, these three doctrines combined, I think, constitutes a pretty powerful theodicy, which is, I think, pretty unique in the global philosophy of religion.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Suffering in Hinduism has its own nexus with transcendent reality. Suffering is not so much itself the foundation of big meaning, but rather it is the signpost that leads to karma and cycles of rebirth. This is one reason the problem of evil has minimal force in Hinduism — it is said to be solved by karma and rebirth — reinforced, perhaps, by universal salvation. Since suffering in Hinduism reveals life after death, and suffering in Buddhism engenders multiple spiritual practices – what is suffering in Chinese philosophy – Confucianism and Daoism? I meet a scholar of classical Chinese philosophy and comparative philosophy – his uncommon expertise is Chinese metaphysics — Franklin Perkins. Frank, in Chinese philosophy, how do they deal with evil and suffering?
- Franklyn Perkins
- It’s not so much a philosophical problem for them because they never claimed that the world was designed by someone who wouldn’t want us to suffer, right? All living things suffer I think on their account, and that’s just part of the structure of things. So, the way we want to think about evil here would be not just suffering, right? But when things happen that seem like they’re morally wrong, right? And you could tie this into the idea of good people getting what they deserve, bad people getting what they deserve. The fact that the world wasn’t working that way, right, was recognized by these early Chinese philosophers, and this was part of the movement of the transition of their idea of Tian, or heaven, from a more personal God to a more just the system of nature. So, the earlier claims about heaven were that it cared for the people. And that maybe was plausible when everything was good, right? But when things all started to fall apart, that becomes not very believable anymore. And there you have things very close to the western problem of evil. So, the best example actually is in a text that was lost, and actually looted from a tomb maybe 30 years ago. It gives the standard examples of you know, the good rulers who didn’t have power but because they were good, heaven rose them up to power, and the evil emperors who had all this power, but they lost power, and were killed horribly because heaven punished them. And then, it gives an example of this guy who was kind of a folk hero named Xu Fu [ph] he was famously good, and died a horrible death. So, they said, what about this guy, Xu Fu? And then it lists some guy, who apparently was really evil, and like lived a long and flourishing life. And then, it says, is it that these divine forces know about it, and don’t do anything? Or is it that they can’t do anything?
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Wow, that’s very –
- Franklyn Perkins
- That’s very close to the western problem of evil, right? It answers skeptically and really, that’s connected to the fact that there’s no afterlife. There’s only this world for them, right? So, you just – I think you just can’t make the argument that this world is perfect, in itself, right? I do think the underlying idea of the problem really is that it makes us aware of the fact that the world doesn’t seem to be aligned according to our moral categories. Like, even on a karmic system, it’s somehow our morality that seems to run everything, right? For the Chinese side, once you start to think no, the world doesn’t work on these values, it has a way of de-centering human beings. For the Confucians, they will – they get into a very complicated position where they will say, you know, our natural motivations are to be good. And so, whether or not it gets rewarded, whether or not the world is structured that way, what drives us, is not that. What drives us is our own feelings, our own emotions. So, I think for the Confucians, these things, really, they’re bad because – we consider them bad because they’re bad for us, they’re bad from a human perspective. You know, so Mumza gives a famous example of seeing a child about to fall into a well, and he says, any human being would feel a sense of concern there for that child, and at least, feel an impulsion to help, right? But it’s not because we know that’s morally bad, it’s because that’s our nature to do that. And what we count as morally good and bad, ultimately derives from the things we care about.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- You don’t have to ground that in any supernatural or ultimate reality. It’s just a natural reaction which is the proper reaction.
- Franklyn Perkins
- Yeah, he even says explicitly that our hearts taste for ripeness and order is just like our mouths taste for – he says roasted meat, right, for good food. So, it really is, in the same way, you don’t need a transcendental ground for why you should eat this food. If you like it, you like it, that’s why you eat it, right? In the same way, like I would help a child in danger because that’s what I want to do.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- How ancient Chinese philosophy approaches suffering or evil – with its this-world grounding – is certainty meaning in an earthly sense –while it is not bothered by big meaning in the transcendent sense. But is the Chinese “this-world” perspective “religious?” are Chinese philosophers “religious thinkers?” And related, why is ritual so important to religious foundations? How does ritual relate to meaning? I speak with a philosopher who integrates Chinese philosophy with perennial philosophy – the idea that all religious traditions share a single, unified, big meaning truth – Yang Xiao.
- Yang Xiao
- Confucius is not an ethical theorist, right? Because these days, if you are an ethicist, if you’re a moral philosopher, you do ethical theory. So, you need to construct a procedure through which you can determine what are the correct things, morally right things to do, and so on, and so forth. That’s just not how philosophers in ancient China think about ethics. In Confucianism, the moment where you’re born until the moment you’re dead, also after you’re dead, every aspect of your life is regulated by rituals, by ethics There is no differentiation between rituals and ethics.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- …You’ve elevated the importance of rituals, and I want to see what’s the relationship between the rituals, and the fundamental principles of the ethics, the essence of the ethics? Are the rituals, the foundation, and then the ethics come out of that, as a result? Or are the ethics the foundation, and the rituals reinforce it?
- Yang Xiao
- Whenever you talk about rituals, people think you are a traditionalist, right? You are conservative. Maybe another way of putting it is we are philosophers. You have to justify normative claims. I’m saying that tradition or rituals can have a normative claim on how we behave. So, the question is, what justifies that, right?
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Yeah.
- Yang Xiao
- The rituals in the Confucian tradition is all about reverence, the reverence of the other. The evil actions are the ones that violates those rituals that are the expression of the reverence of the other. And the foundation is not based on personhood. You do find that in Christianity, for example. There is the personhood that’s the foundation of those moral principles or rituals. But I think for some of the Chinese philosophers the phenomenology is the foundation. I think that’s a better and universal – more universal way of gaining the foundation for these kinds of things.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- That makes a lot of sense in terms of Chinese philosophy that the foundation and the warrant for is the phenomenology of it happening, and then from that, you’re inferring the attitudes towards individuals, or towards morality, derived from it.
- Yang Xiao
- The rituals are not based on any metaphysical beliefs or theory. It’s that phenomenology, that’s the foundation for what’s sacred. You do find that in Confucius, he mentions, when you see a child about to fall into the well, right, that’s the famous story from Mencius, everyone’s heart started to react to that instinctively. I think that’s the foundation for some Chinese philosophers. But when you get to the Song dynasty, you have a different story. You find people looking for metaphysical stories.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- While all religions deal with suffering and have rituals, in eastern traditions, these elements constitute key pillars of their philosophical foundations. In Hinduism and Buddhism, it’s big meaning – transcendent realities. In Chinese traditions, it’s meaning — this world realities. Insights are gleaned by comparing practices and their related theories. From Buddhist philosophy: the pervasiveness of suffering — on three levels — as the existential problem. From Hinduism: karma, rebirth, and in some schools universal salvation, as a solution to the western problem of evil. From Chinese philosophy: systems of nature; also driven by our own feelings, our own emotions. Early Chinese philosophers were religious thinkers. Thus, the centrality of collective ritual and personal morality. Buddhism and Hinduism, although big-meaning foes from antiquity, have remarkably similar practices of rituals and meditation. And Chinese traditions, while differing metaphysically with its this-world grounding, does not differ in the primacy of rituals. While all this is true, is it…. Closer to Truth?