Buddhism: A Ridiculously Short History

I'm camped out in Cambridge, UK, for a week.  No particular reason, I just had a week to spare and wanted to wander the streets of my alma mater again.  Cambridge is at its most quintessentially Cantabrigian early in the year: it's cold and wet, but you can taste clarity in the air.

That's the theory anyway.  In practice, I've been ploughing through a borrowed copy of a Buddhist text called the Bodhisattvacaryavatara, idiomatically translated as The Path Of Light.  A couple of representative lines:

Pondering through many aeons, the Supreme Saints have found this blessing, whereby a swelling joy sweeps in sweetness down the boundless waters of mankind.

They who would escape the hundreds of life’s sorrows, who would end the anguish of living creatures, and who would taste hundreds of deep delights, must never surrender the Thought of Enlightenment.

...What the hell?

In light of spiritual-sounding purple prose like this, one of my first questions when I came across Techno-Buddhism is: does this actually count as Buddhism?  Or do we need to believe in Buddhist deities, Boddhisattvas, reincarnation, etc, to qualify for that brand-name?

The short answer seems to be: it maybe counts as Buddhism.  The long answer is a bit of a rabbit-hole.

Buddha, Where Art Thou?

Buddhism started about five centuries before the birth of another popular religious figure, with an individual who was probably called something like Siddhartha Gautama but has since become known as the Buddha (a term meaning "awakened one"). After being born into a privileged life, and finding it ultimately unsatisfying in a Maslow's Hierarchy sort of way, he went full religious ascetic, camping out on mountains starving himself to near-death.  Finding that equally unsatisfactory, he came up with what he called the Middle Way: an approach to managing the Self that required neither hedonism nor asceticism.

Whilst we probably don't have any texts Gautama personally wrote, we have plenty of stuff from the early community that grew up around him, including a bunch of speeches that are probably fairly accurate depictions of his views.  Our main source here is a corpus called the "Pali Canon", named after the classical Pali-Maghadi language in which it reached us via the Theravada branch of Buddhism.  It describes a very minimalist and mostly areligious set of concepts... plus a metric ton of commentary.  Academics will be academics.

So where did the religious trappings come from?  Enter Mahayana or "Greater Vehicle" Buddhism.  Just going off the name, you know they're going to be pretentious as all hell.

Where the more originalist Theravada Buddhism sees the goal of practitioners as becoming an "Arahant", someone who has peeked behind the stage curtains of reality, Mahayana says we should instead try to become a full-fledged "Bodhisattva", someone who has come back out to report to the audience.  That's not a huge difference in itself.  But the development of the Mahayana school also seems to mark the point where Buddhism got thoroughly mixed in with a bunch of ambient religious concepts and trappings: particularly the Vedic cosmology also found in modern Hinduism and Jainism.

(Incidentally, another branch of proto-Hindu philosophy, the Brahminist caste system, is a major part of why Buddhism died out in India itself for a while.  Because, after adopting Brahminism in response to political pressures, the Buddhist monasteries got increasingly detached from the average man on the street. Then, when Islam came through and started putting other religions to the sword - or, with a certain amount of grim comedy, repeatedly mistaking monasteries for forts in need of razing - there were few people willing to risk their own neck to take in the refugee monks.)

The Mahayana school, being happy to incorporate all sorts of religious junk, inevitably spread like a weed across South-East Asia.  In many places it metastasised into an even more virulent form: Vajrayana, the third major branch of Buddhism, which has its roots in various local superstitions.  Using the trifecta of Mantra (funny sounds), Mudra (funny hand signs) and Mandala (funny - and admittedly cool - artwork), Vajrayana - also known as Tantra - practitioners claim to be able to reliably achieve enlightenment in a single lifetime by Fucking Magic.

The combo of Mahayana and Vajrayana underlies traditions like Tibetan Buddhism - wherein the Dalai Lama seems to be generally a cool guy, but is undeniably sitting on a barrel of red-hot crazy - and Japanese Buddhism.

TL;DR: original Buddhism had a gentle Quakerist vibe; Theravada is more like the broader Protestantism; Mahayana is stylistically very similar to the high-medieval Roman Catholic Church; and Vajrayana is one of those weird Southern Baptist groups where people speak in tongues.

Sanity: From

So, if the majority of Buddhists today think that Buddhism should include divine and/or mystical elements - and if even the most secular major branch is perfectly fine believing in reincarnation - who is some random dude on the internet to tell you differently?

For this I will need to refer to the Pali Canon.  Brace yourselves.

A quick note on navigating the Canon: it's not easy.  The entire corpus takes up a reasonably large bookcase, and most of the indexing is in the Pali language.  In particular, the canon as a whole is split into three baskets called "tripitakas" (give or take a diacritical mark), which respectively cover (1) doctrine, (2) monastic rules, and (3) scholastic commentary (often school-specific).  For our purposes, we can mostly stick to the first Tripitaka, the Suttas or scriptures, which itself is split into five "Nikayas" or collections.

The Brahmajala Sutta - first of 34 in the traditionally-first collection, the Digha Nikaya - is poetically called "The All-Embracing Net Of Views", or similar.  In it, Gautama lists no less than sixty-two philosophies adhered to by ascetics, that they hope will help them achieve a higher state.  He then completely fails to address them on their merits, instead explaining that - if enlightenment is what you're after - they're all getting the wrong end of the stick by fixating on their preferred models of How Things Work.

When those ascetics and brahmins theorize about the past and the future on these sixty-two grounds, these things are only the feeling of those who do not know or see, the anxiety and evasiveness of those under the sway of craving.

What, then, is the right end of the stick?  According to Buddha - as passed through the mind of Lifewish - rather than trying to understand what the Self looks like from the outside, we should instead seek to comprehend what it feels like from the inside.  And, in light of that comprehension:

Having truly understood the origin, ending, gratification, drawback, and escape from feelings, the Realized One is freed through not grasping.

I would prefer to frame this in two principles.  Firstly, if the state of the world is dissatisfying to you, and you want to improve matters, you need to study either the world... or dissatisfaction itself.

Secondly, an outside-in perspective is grossly inadequate to develop a decent understanding of how we come to feel dissatisfied.  Or to put it in terminology that appeals to me personally: metacognition - the top-down analysis of our mental (or, hypothetically, spiritual) state and behaviour, as if by a third party - is no substitute for "propriocognition" which, by analogy with the sense of proprioception, attempts to develop a direct awareness of said state and behaviour.

This second principle is what I feel (hope) is missing from my previous Skeptical Atheist worldview.  But it is itself entirely non-religious.

So, TL;DR, it's possible that, as I read through and get to grips with more of the Pali Canon, I'll find that later sections are completely inconsistent with atheism.  But my first impressions are positive!

Unfortunately, the format of this dialogue is depressingly easy to misunderstand as a statement that all sixty-two views are factually inaccurate rather than simply unhelpful.  And, since one of the views Gautama listed was atheism - referred to as Annihilationism at the time - even scholarly works find it easy to read this as a pro-religious statement.  For example, from the prologue to this collection of early Buddhist texts, collated and translated by a tenured academic:

In fact, such a view is identified as "annihilationism" (a view attributed to Materialism) in the canon and is specifically listed in the Brahmajāla Sutta as a wrong view.

Whoops.

The Mahayana tradition, by contrast, avoided making small blunders like this by instead taking a gigantic leap off the edge of reason.  Reincarnation?  Yep.  Vedic cosmology?  Yoinked.  Gods and god-like Buddhas and heavenly Bodhisattvas, oh my.

The resulting medley can get really frickin' weird, even in comparatively mainstream groups.  For example, the Pure Land school of Japanese Buddhism claims that, rather than just seeking enlightenment in our current life, we should game the reincarnation system and aim to be born in an environment where seeking enlightenment is inherently easier.

Their preferred candidate is the Pure Land, a spiritual demi-plane ruled by Amitabha Buddha, a pseudo-god who was born Long Ago and quite possibly In A Galaxy Far Away.  (The Japanophiles amongst you may recognise the concept from the Naruto anime/manga.)  By reciting Amitabha's name, Hare Krishna style, we can induce him to reincarnate us in his interdimensional home once we pop our clogs.  This will thus hit the accelerator on our efforts to - per the joke about the hot-dog vendor - make us one with everything.

To which I can only say: what the actual hell?  Was someone smoking something they oughtn't?

Horrifically bizarre though they may be, these extremes of religious nonsense have unknowingly set the scene for the modern trend of explicitly secular Buddhist groups.  Because, whilst Gautama himself may have argued that little issues like Monism vs Dualism are irrelevant to the committed enlightenment-seeker, that was before people started trying to optimise their propensity to reach enlightenment across multiple sodding lifetimes.

Sanity: To

Even under the Mahayana umbrella, though, there are groups that are relatively non-kooky, and practices that are potentially interesting.

For an example of the former, I would present the school known in the West by its Japanese name of Zen Buddhism.  Originating as Chan Buddhism in China - itself loosely derived from the Indian Yogachara school, with a bit of local Taoism thrown in - Zen crossed the sea as part of a constellation of views and beliefs, most notably including the aesthetic principle known in Japanese as wabi-sabi (lit.: "forlorn rusticism").

Since then, it has spread heavily to the US and Europe.  It fills the self-help sections of bookshops.  It helps sell a range of Japan-ish products and services.  It gave us Star Wars.

Through all this buzz, it's important to be aware that Zen is still part of the Mahayana tradition.  The religious crazy is still present, just very de-emphasised... which is relatively easy given that Zen is very focused on silent meditation!  We've looped firmly back round to Quakerism as our closest Christian equivalent.

Even outside of Techno-Buddhism, some groups and practitioners take that further.  For example, since I started writing this post, I've moved on from That Sutra With The Unpronounceable Name and am now reading a book called Buddhism Without Beliefs.  Review to follow.

Beyond that, it's not impossible that some religious-themed activities may be beneficial from a secular perspective, even if they're usually justified by reference to divinities and semi-immortal souls.  There's a bad case of Chesterton's Fence here: just because mantras, for example, may be taught as essentially Buddhism-brand magic invocations, it doesn't mean that humming to yourself in a controlled fashion won't help you calm down and focus inwards.

I'll be experimenting with some of these ideas myself in future, to see if I can figure out what works (for some value of "works") and what doesn't.  Watch this space.

What Next

But let's not stop there.  "Hokey religions" - per Han Solo - don't have a monopoly on ideas that seem like they could be helpful for the aspiring secular Buddhist.  And this is where Techno-Buddhism shines.

In this blog, I'm planning to highlight a few areas from which we can pull useful insight.  Firstly, I'll draw from the scientific understanding of brain function, normally classified as Cognitive Psychology.  Because as far as we can tell, the Self is a property of the Mk 1 Human Brain.

Secondly, and relatedly, I'll be talking heavily about machine learning, particularly concepts involved in the architecture and training of neural networks (aka deep learning).  This is partly because I find it really damn interesting, but also because neural networks - and "connectionist" learning more generally - are close enough to how minds actually work that we can use them as a test-bed for interesting ideas.  In the last decade, the philosophy of mind has gone from pure armchair theorising to almost an experimental field.  Philosophers as a group don't seem to have weathered the transition terribly well.

Finally, and possibly most interestingly to the casual reader, I'll write about different science-fiction and science-fantasy settings from a Techno-Buddhist perspective, seeing what insights we can harvest.  I've already mentioned Warhammer 40,000 and Star Wars; Frank Herbert's Dune and the Cyberpunk 2077 universe are also high on the list, along with a number of the actual cyberpunk stories that fed into the latter.

But right now?  I'm going to stop writing and start meditating.  Because propriocognition might not be quite as complete a solution as Siddhartha Gautama imagined, but it's still very much the point of the Buddhist exercise.  Peace out.