Chapter 8: The author's reflections on the allure of metaphysics¶

This chapter is written in the first person.

One thing needs to be said at the outset. This chapter recounts my experience; it is not an argument. My insights are only mine and need not be representative. To put it more strongly, they very likely are not. Yet over these years of reading the discourses, I have repeatedly encountered my own predicament in them. Someone in those conversations more than two thousand years ago had already lived through these confusions, fears, and attempts to be too clever before me. This record may therefore still be of some use, but only as one case.

There is another reason, which readers who have come this far will probably have noticed: this book has a fault of excessive candor. The involvement of AI, the inclination to classify and rank teachings, and the motives for writing may all weaken the book's credibility, and all may be used by critics against it. I have not avoided any of them on that account. In this chapter it is the turn of my own process of understanding, and here too I intend to hold nothing back. Readers have a right to know what kind of mind a book comes from; the author has no right to conceal it.

A few sentences will suffice to introduce my younger self. An engineering student, with a high opinion of myself, devoted to metaphysics, convinced that logic and science would sooner or later explain everything. Beneath that confidence, however, a few things resisted explanation: why human beings exist, why I am I, why suffering falls precisely on things that can feel pain. As for where people go after death, I scoffed at heaven yet never quite accepted annihilation as a foregone conclusion. I thought little of either side and could let go of neither. Over the decades, both my outlook and my understanding have changed several times. But readers can probably still see it in this book: I still have an immense craving for thinking something through, for seeing the truth, and for logic and intellect themselves. I use that word precisely: craving. Chapter 4 of this essay analyzed its mechanism. I am one of its instances.

The story proper begins with not-self. When I first encountered the Nikāyas, this shook me most. The ship of Theseus and the teletransportation paradox had already brought me to this point: the continuity of the self was probably an illusion. I had reached that step on my own.¹ But discovering that someone more than two thousand years ago had put it so clearly, so cleanly, shook me as nothing had before. My thought at the time was: the ancients foretold the truth. Looking back, I see that this very thought is something to guard against; the previous chapter has just explained why. At the time, however, it was precisely what drew me in. I kept reading, the Dīgha, Majjhima, and Saṃyutta Nikāyas in parallel, with the Abhidhammatthasaṅgaha also at hand.

The difficulty that followed arose where the doctrine was clearest. The more deeply I read and the more I understood early Buddhist teaching, the harder one thing became to evade: after an arahant dies at the breakup of the body, consciousness no longer appears in the three realms. The end of practice thus became practicing oneself out of existence forever. This was not merely death. Death I could probably imagine; this looked like a disappearance more thorough than death.

What finally brought me out of this difficulty was again the four noble truths. The truth of suffering first put the weights in their proper order: rebirth is an unbearable weight, not neutral wandering. Under such a weight, even the wish to preserve oneself must be weighed anew. Then the truth of cessation offered its peculiar promise: a "destination" that is neither annihilation nor continuity. The quotation marks are necessary. Chapter 2 of this essay has already made clear that there is no grammar in which a destination can be placed there. Yet it was precisely this something outside that grammar that slowly dispersed my fear. I cannot say what it is. I know only that it is neither the disappearance I feared nor the continuation I secretly hoped for. Only later did I understand: fear and hope were two sides of the same thing. The four truths canceled that thing in its entirety.

The next difficulty was the Theravāda Abhidhamma. The Abhidhammatthasaṅgaha's minute classification of phenomena and comprehensive exposition of conditions were precisely what made it frightening. On first reading it, I again had the illusion that the ancients understood neuroscience. This time I was somewhat on guard. What truly unsettled me was something else. For a time I read it as a sentence passed upon us, as if it were saying: everyone is a philosophical zombie, a p-zombie, experiencing and acting slot by slot according to a prescribed cognitive process and eighty-nine kinds of consciousness. What freed me from this reading was a sentence from Bhikkhu Bodhi: treat it as a map.² A map is not a verdict. It gives the terrain; one must still walk the road oneself. I had already made the mistake criticized in Chapter 3 of taking the wrong examination paper: reading a first-person list for contemplation as a third-person machine manual.

The feeling of confinement also had more everyday sources. The more accurately the five aggregates were inventoried and the three poisons named, the stronger the confinement felt. So each day of mine repeated within these few categories, and had done so for who knew how many lives. For the first time, knowledge brought powerlessness instead of power. During that period, rebirth felt like an invisible restriction that trapped me within the five aggregates and kept me from truly knowing the world. As I write that clause, I already know that the "me" and the "within" are themselves wrong views. But that was how it felt then. What the world really is like could never be known: this thought itself became another limit I placed on myself. What later let me out was again the Blessed One's question: why must someone struck by an arrow first establish its material and place of manufacture?

Later still, I arrived at the question in the Full-Moon Discourse, this time in a personal version: if there is no self, why fear bad kamma? Chapters 3 and 4 of this essay have answered the question in its clean form. But having answered it philosophically does not mean having finished with it inwardly. For me it remained confused for a long time. What I finally understood was roughly this. Under not-self, the weight of suffering falls not on an "I" but on countless future phenomena that will mistakenly take there to be an "I" and take things to be "mine." Those phenomena will feel pain, and the pain is real. Ending suffering thus ceases to be self-preservation; it becomes compassion for this continuing stream of experience. Fear of kammic retribution had all along been a remnant of the dispossessed owner's outlook. Once the dispossessed owner is let go, what makes kammic retribution fearsome changes: it is not that it will eventually find me, but that suffering will arise again.

Some time later, one day I suddenly became certain: the twelve links of dependent arising were the axis of the Buddha's teaching. Add the twenty-four conditions of the Paṭṭhāna and the microscopic network spread out by the fifty-two mental factors, and I thought I had touched the essence. Everything looked different; all things became footnotes to dependent arising. I had taken a handy tool for a universal explanation. Two things corrected me. First, I went back to Ānanda's passage. He too had eagerly reported that dependent arising was perfectly clear, only to be stopped at once by the Buddha. Chapter 4 of this essay opens with that scene. My elation and his were the same; the only difference was that no one was there to stop me, only the text. The second was again the four noble truths. What matters about dependent arising is that it discloses the source of suffering. It serves suffering and its cessation; it is not the foundation of another metaphysical palace. I had nearly built, with my own hands, just the kind of unauthorized structure on a restrained teaching that the previous chapter describes.

Doubts continued afterward, large and small, and I will not list them all. But from then on the main thread was clear: the four noble truths, which the Buddha speaks of again and again, really are the central concern of the Nikāyas. Not a treasure trove of metaphysics, not the intellectual pleasure of not-self, not a universal framework of dependent arising: suffering, its origin, its cessation, and the path to its cessation. I took a very long detour before I was willing to lower my eyes to the few leaves in the hand.

Looking back, almost everything recorded here (shock, fear, the sense of a verdict, and the joy of sudden insight) fits the circuit of the previous chapter: a teaching enters perception; perception gives rise to thought; thought gives rise to proliferation; perceptions and categories born of proliferation turn back and assail the person. I am no exception to this circuit. I am another example of it.

How Madhyamaka unsettled me and corrected me once more can wait for the essays on Madhyamaka. This essay closes here. The first seven chapters were my commentary on those few leaves. This chapter is the commentary those leaves have written on me.

References¶

This chapter is a personal record in the first person. The doctrines and discourses it discusses are documented in the notes to the first seven chapters of this essay; only two references are added here.