Quest Magazine

Science and Philosophy in the Indian Buddhist Classics, Volume 1: The Physical World

Edited by Thupten Jinpa
Somerville, Mass.: Wisdom, 2017. 530 pp., hardcover; $29.95

Monks and scholars, just as you test gold

By burning, cutting, and polishing it
So too well examine my speech.
Do not accept it merely out of respect.
—The Buddha

The Buddha said to accept the validity of what he taught only after direct experience; the mere testimony of scriptures is not sufficient. The examination of the nature of reality is only real when it is accompanied by direct perception. Scientists take a similar approach, with experimentation and mathematical logic as pillars of inquiry. Buddhism and science thus share this mode of critical inquiry, which draws its conclusions from evidence and reasoning. In Buddhism, however, empirical observation has a wider scope than the range of the five senses and includes experiences arising from meditation practice.

This, the first of a four-volume series, presents classic Buddhist scientific and philosophical explorations of the nature of reality for the contemporary reader. This series was conceived by the Dalai Lama and compiled under his supervision. The ancient Buddhist treatises identify three domains: the scientific, the philosophical, and the religious. The first two volumes in this series cover the scientific domain, with volume 1 presenting the physical world and volume 2 presenting the mind sciences.

Buddhism has two things that have great potential to serve everyone, regardless of their faith, as the Dalai Lama explains in his introduction. One is the presentation of the nature of reality (or science), and the second is the methods for training the mind to alleviate suffering and discover inner peace. Four principles of reason characterize the Buddhist outlook on the world: the principle of nature (that is, the way it is); the principle of dependence (cause and effect); the principle of function (those we perform and those we support); and the principle of evidence (drawing inferences: if such is the current state, such will be the future state). Contemporary science gives us the Big Bang theory for the emergence of the universe, but the Buddhist sources answer further questions, such as “what is the relationship between the natural world and the sentient beings that came to evolve with it?” The presentation of the nature of reality in Buddhism is fourfold: (1) the nature of the objective world; (2) the presentation of the mind, the subject; (3) how the mind engages its object; and (4) the means (the science of logical reasoning) by which the mind engages its object. This framework has been adopted for volume 1.

The depth with which volume 1 is presented is astonishing. The exploration is divided into six parts: “Overview and Methodology,” “Knowable Objects,” “Subtle Particles,” “Time,” “The Cosmos and Its Inhabitants,” and “Fetal Development.” Each part is introduced by Thupten Jinpa (the editor of this volume and the Dalai Lama’s principal translator) and provides a list of further readings in English. It is almost impossible to describe what each part entails in a short space. I was especially interested in causality and time.

The impulse to avoid pain is our nature, and being conditioned beings brings forth suffering (the First Noble Truth). Suffering necessarily has a cause (the Second Noble Truth). The ultimate cause of suffering is ignorance, but ignorance can be resolved (the Third Noble Truth). The cessation also has a cause (the Fourth Noble Truth).

The section on cause and effect in this volume is enlightening. Dharmakirti’s treatise The Exposition of Valid Cognition states:

Where it exists that arises

And when it changes that changes as well

This is referred to as the cause.

The section on time says that it is posited on the basis of “three states of conditioned things”: (1) that which is not yet risen; (2) that which has arisen but has not yet ceased; and (3) that which has arisen and ceased. This in turn relates to “entities of cause and effect that have already come, are coming, and will come into being.” In Buddhist thought, the shortest unit of time can be thought of as a moment. The Buddhist texts describe two types of moments: (1) the shortest moment of time; and (2) the moment required to complete an action. Vasubandhu posits that the “shortest moment” is 1/65 of the time it takes a strong man to snap his fingers. One hundred and twenty of these short moments are one second.

Major sources in this work have come from Tibetan translations of original Sanskrit works, which are mostly lost. Two canonical collections are used: “The precious collection of Kangyur contains translations of Buddha’s words embodied in the three baskets (Tripitaka), and the precious collection of the Tengyur contains treatises of great Nalanda masters such as Nagarjuna and Asanga.” (Nalanda University in India was the great center of Buddhist learning until it was sacked by the Muslims around AD 1200.) Works of the Buddhist sages Vasubandhu, Dignaga, and Dharmakirti are also quoted throughout volume 1. This is an astounding effort and a rich treasure, with the Dalai Lama’s vision shining through.

Dhananjay Joshi

The reviewer, a professor of statistics, has studied Hindu, Zen, and vipassana meditation for the past forty-five years. He is a regular reviewer for Quest and volunteers in the archives department of the TSA.

Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump

Gary Lachman
New York: TarcherPerigree, 2018. xxii + 234 pp., paper, $17.

It is always a pleasure to read a new book by Gary Lachman, as there are few writers in the field of esoteric and occult studies who write as clearly and engagingly while also maintaining a mind-boggling level of output. Like his mentor and literary hero Colin Wilson, Lachman (a longtime Quest contributor) has the gift of digesting an array of ideas, theories, historical details, and mostly obscure thinkers, and rendering up highly readable books that avoid both scholarly nitpicking and pop sensationalism.

Dark Star Rising is no exception and, for bonus points, it may be Lachman’s most timely book, given its relevance to the Age of Trump, which continues to unfold on a daily basis.

To briefly summarize, Lachman starts out pondering the possible causes behind Donald Trump’s unexpected and, for millions, perplexing election victory. Rather than focusing on theories about Russian meddling, Lachman notes several factors that may have eluded most people’s attention.

One is Trump’s decades of practicing Norman Vincent Peale’s power of positive thinking (most famously described in his best-selling book of that title). Trump’s father introduced his son to Peale’s perspective in the 1950s and initiated his lifelong attendance at Peale’s Manhattan church. Lachman explores the history of New Thought, the hugely influential spiritual movement that blossomed in the late nineteenth century and counted Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science and Ernest Holmes’s Science of Mind among its propagators. Peale was perhaps the most famous of its exponents.

In a nutshell, New Thought teaches that we create our own reality through the thoughts we cultivate; that our individual minds are a manifestation of the universal mind or intelligence; and that if we wish to be healthy, wealthy, and wise, we can attract those states through prayer, creative visualization, a positive attitude, and maintaining a faith that the bounty of life can be ours.

Lachman suggests that Trump’s insistence on his own positively defined reality, which strikes so many as delusional or sociopathic, is rather an ingrained case of positive thinking, which for the most part has served him well throughout his life (taking him to the White House, for example).

Lachman also notes the pervasive influence of postmodernist theories that have saturated academia and oozed into Western culture at large. Rejecting the grand narratives of historical and cultural explanation that have characterized modernity, postmodernism has championed the rise of a subjective fracturing of the notion of truth. This feeds into the present space, where consensus reality has broken down. Accusations of “fake news” arise from both left and right, exacerbating the sense that everything is just a matter of interpretation. “You create your own reality,” indeed.

 Lachman also examines the Internet-based phenomenon of meme propagation, which amounts to the rapid spread in social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and 4Chan) of catchphrases, images, and clusters of ideas that have widespread social influence. According to Lachman, these resemble the practices of Chaos Magick and the sigil-based magick of Austin Osman Spare. (This spelling of magick originated with occultist Aleister Crowley, who used it to distinguish occult magic from the sleight-of-hand variety. Chaos Magick uses unorthodox, often ad hoc, ritual forms and stresses the subjective nature of belief.) In other words, the “anything goes” meme propagators of the alt-right, who spread the cartoon image of Pepe the Frog in mockery of progressives, may have been unknowingly (or not) using an esoteric practice that harnesses the power of intention, will, and mental energy to produce real-world results. As unlikely as this may seem, Lachman makes a plausible case for it.

 The most extended section of Dark Star Rising ponders the influence of Traditionalism on current political trends. This includes both the Traditionalism of René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon on the one hand and the more politicized version of Julius Evola on the other. Most curious among the defenders of Tradition in this sense is Alexander Dugin, a Russian intellectual who has bounced between supporting National Bolshevism, a Russian “red-brown” mixture of Stalinism and fascism, and Eurasianism, a geopolitical strategy that tries to cast Russia and its surrounding countries as an allied bloc. Given that Dugin identifies with the Traditionalist philosophy of Evola and savors the “positive” aspects of Stalinism and Nazism (whatever those may be), he is a controversial figure, to say the least. Lachman sees Dugin’s Eurasianism as a significant influence on Vladimir Putin’s attempts to restore Russia as a geopolitical force.

 But here too postmodernism may have the last laugh. If truth is up for grabs, and powerful rulers see fit to create their own realities, we may need to harness our own mental capacities and visualize a future that trumps those of both Putin and Trump.

In any event, Dark Star Rising is a stimulating read, and a provocative meditation on the hidden forces at work in our present juncture. Its timeliness, which is its greatest strength, may prove its greatest weakness a few years down the line. But for the time being, it serves as one of the most acute studies of the present moment.

 Jay Kinney

Jay Kinney was founder and publisher of Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions and is a frequent contributor to Quest.

The Collected Letters of Alan Watts

Edited by Joan Watts and Anne Watts
Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2017. xv + 599 pp., hardcover, $32.50.

Collections of literary letters still emerge, but tragically there are ever fewer, because email has all but destroyed the art of letter writing. Yet when we find a collection of a great man’s or woman’s letters, doors open for us. We see into their minds and emotions, the weft and weave of their lives becomes an almost tactile texture. Sometimes we’re startled.

Author and lecturer Alan Watts (1915–73) is best known for introducing Zen Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies to the generation that came of age in the 1950s and ’60s. Watts’s importance as a both a commentator on spirituality—indeed a bona fide revelator—and an agent of interfaith communication is never in doubt. He did more to sow the seeds of Zen in the West than any other single writer. His insights into the human and cosmic condition are on par with those of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Swami Vivekananda, J. Krishnamurti, and Aldous Huxley.

This collection of his letters, edited by his two eldest daughters, Joan and Anne, occasionally renders up intimacy; certainly there’s insight, and plenty of intellectual shine. Of startlement there is little in the letters themselves. But the narrative presented in this collection of letters is agreeably goosed by intervals of commentary from Watts’s daughters. They tell us baldly what his letters only hint at: that he could be a womanizer and a kind of romance addict, often marrying and divorcing in search of a new fix. He struggled with alcoholism, and despite his good intentions he could be an aloof father.

The Collected Letters follows the arc of his life. They start with a number of precocious—and a little too precious—boyhood letters written from English boarding schools. This is followed by a good many somewhat stodgy college letters. Thereafter Watts moved to New York, became a citizen of the U.S. and, confronted with practicality, studied for the Episcopal priesthood. The constraints of this profession soon chafed, and he resigned after about six years, in 1950. Thereupon his letters—always well-written—become by turns academically austere, playful, and occasionally giddy during the balance of his life. This period was marked by an increasingly bohemian lifestyle, experimentation with psychedelics, deeper forays into meditation, and philosophical exchanges (only glimpsed in this collection) with the likes of Huxley, Henry Miller, Joseph Campbell, Gary Snyder, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The Collected Letters offers a selection of photos that illustrate the same arc, showing us a self-serious teen wearing a school tie, then an uncomfortable, mustachioed adult in suits, followed by the glowering priest in collar; on to long hair, trim beard, casual dress, Japanese kimonos, and loops of wooden beads.

Watts’s boyhood precocity and flair for independent thinking flowered in the 1930s, when he was captivated by a book on Buddhism. He officially became a Buddhist at the first opportunity. He wrote articles for a Buddhist magazine so well that he was asked to lecture, as his daughters tell us here, and when he arrived, the group was astonished to discover that he was a teenager. When he was merely twenty-one, he wrote to Carl Jung, taking him to task: “I was rather surprised to hear you say in your lecture . . . that you had never found any mandalas with six divisions.” He then gives Jung a longish epistolary lecture on the parts of mandalas.

 Watts was even younger, in his early teens, when he wrote An Outline of Zen Buddhism, a thirty-two page pamphlet. Just four years later, in 1935, E.P. Dutton published The Spirit of Zen: A Way of Life, Work, and Art in the Far East.

Even as a priest Watts engaged in a quiet but persistent return to esotericism, Eastern and Western. In a letter to a friend in 1944, he said “Prayer in its essence is, of course, the contemplation of God as the living void or . . . the ‘luminous darkness.’ That is to say the aim is to reach the point where you abandon all images and concept of God whatever, as well as all specific technique of prayer.” This kind of casual, heretical discourse would have shocked his superiors in the church. In a letter of 1947 he suggests that the vitality of any religion issues from its esoteric nucleus and without it “there is a general decline of the entire religious and social order.”

In a letter of 1948 to a Yale scholar it becomes evident that Watts has already crystallized one of his key ideas—that the central consciousness of the universe experiences itself through us; that our job is to be God’s means of experiencing itself. “The concept of the infinite giving itself to the finite . . . is the central meaning of most Zen anecdotes.”

As trippy as that idea is, he hadn’t yet taken LSD. That came in the late 1950s. Certainly psychedelic experiences informed his later lectures, his speculation, his aesthetics, and quite possibly his erotic life. There are a few letters here to women self-effacingly, yet cunningly professing love. In his 1959 letter to a woman who was later to become his third wife, he says he has “an awful blast from my former girlfriend in LA . . . pointing out the dreadful defects in my character and intimating I will exploit you just as I exploited her. Oh Jano, aren’t you simply scared to death of getting so involved with me? . . . Perhaps I can console myself with the fact that only for you have I dropped the desire for all other relations.”

Watts never did completely find his way out of a morass of vodka and romance, but he accomplished much, he opened eyes, and he grew spiritually. The Collected Letters is a bit ponderous, at around 600 pages of fairly small print. His true devotees will want to read every word of it; others may choose to dip in. If that’s what you do, don’t neglect the parts written by Joan Watts and Anne Watts: they are nicely composed and entertaining. And the book is a worthy contribution to the literature of letters.

John Shirley

John Shirley is the author of Gurdjieff: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas (Tarcher/Penguin), and such novels as The Other End (Open Road), Demons (Del Rey), and a novel of Arthur Conan Doyle in the afterlife, Doyle after Death (HarperCollins).

An Ocean of Light: Contemplation, Transformation, and Liberation

MARTIN LAIRD
New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 232 pp., paper, $18.95.

There is a wonderful dialogue quoted in the preface to this book. It is from the children’s classic The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams. When the Boy in the story starts loving any of his stuffed animals, they start to become real. The Rabbit, confused, asks the wise Skin Horse, “What is Real?” The Skin Horse tells him, “When a child REALLY loves you, then you become Real. . . . Sometimes pain is involved but then when you are Real, you don’t mind being hurt. . . . and it takes a long time.” Each of us can find a different meaning in this story, but the underlying truth is that love makes us real. Being real requires patience and endurance of hardship and struggles, but it can also smooth the jagged edges of life.

How do we find love that makes us real or, even more, makes those around us real? It is the faculty of loving that we reach through contemplation, which means that we stop clinging to thoughts (even though they may cling to us). Martin Laird’s book leads us through a journey within with a deep understanding of contemplative practice. It is our own unique conversation with the Skin Horse. Our predicaments are many—principally an inability to be aware of our thoughts. Such an awareness, if we develop it, allows us to choose what we give our attention to. The practice of contemplation is not only beneficial for us as individuals but also for the whole world. The fourteenth-century text The Cloud of Unknowing says that contemplation “is the work of the soul that pleases God most.”

Laird’s book is a companion volume to two preceding it: Into the Silent Land and A Sunlit Absence. The first addressed a need in the literature on contemplation for the “intermediates”—those who had a well-established practice. The second one focused more on the challenges in our practice and the nature of awareness: it is not what we are aware of but the process of being aware that needs our attention.

Laird’s current volume explores the themes from previous volumes from a different angle. It is composed of three parts. Part 1 goes into the illusion of being separate from God. We allow the voice of contemplation in our life so we understand the intimate presence of God. God does not know how to be absent. Why do we not see it? It is simply that our “vision is heavily lumbered” and our minds are cluttered.

Part 2 uses this metaphor of cluttering and decluttering as a pathway into the practice of contemplation. Laird stresses that the mind is not something static; it is impermanent. Laird highlights three aspects of mind: the reactive, receptive, and luminous, and he goes into each one with the same four questions: What is practice like? What is ego like? What contemplative skills are developing? What are special challenges?

We all know what practice is like for the reactive mind. It is constantly distracted by events. Our attention is stolen by thoughts and feelings. The ego comes in only one size: extra-large. It desperately tries to cling to what it wants and discards what it does not. The challenge is to bring awareness into the picture.

It is awareness that turns the reactive mind into the receptive mind. The receptive mind is less cluttered. Like the sun breaking through clouds, it has always been there. Sitting in silence is more natural to the receptive mind, and practice becomes a way of life for it.

Is the luminous mind any different from the reactive and receptive mind? Not really. It is indeed the underlying foundation of clarity, devoid of all clutter. The “I” present in the reactive and receptive phases has disappeared. It is radiant, present, pure and simple. It is true contemplative living.

Part 3 of Laird’s book deals with the immensely important topic of depression. Laird uses the term to include anxiety, dark thoughts, and other ailments. He says that the key to coping with depression is understanding that one may never get relief from it; for some, it is there to stay. What do contemplatives do then? They accept depression as a companion: this “frequent pattern of inner weather” needs to be allowed to be present. Through contemplation, we discover an inner stillness that remains even in the presence of depression. Understanding this darkness brings about light! It is a wonderful paradox of contemplative life.

Laird’s book introduces us to many voices of saints and authors and resources that are too many to mention. Some are old friends, some we meet for the first time. It is time worth spending.

Is Laird telling us something new? Jesus said, “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?” (Matthew 7:3). I remember my mother teaching me the same thing through a Marathi proverb. The underlying truth is profound and deep, no matter the language or religion or philosophy. A new expression always helps!

Dhananjay Joshi

The reviewer, a professor of statistics, has studied Hindu, Zen, and vipassana meditation for forty years. He is a regular reviewer for Quest and volunteers in the archives department of the TSA.