Everybody seems to agree, except for the sarcastic rich, that materialism doesn’t bring happiness. Is it true? If it is not, why are so many people racing for more material goods? When SGI counsels us to help everyone become happy, are they simply talking about money?
If you have been listening to and reading SGI experiences for years, you know that there are very few that talk about some particular material item, such as getting a new car. Those I have heard like that have treated the new item as a means to another, higher goal. The car might be desired so that the person could go to school or to a job.
Deprivation, on the other hand, is concomitant to unhappiness. If you cannot afford necessities, such as medical supplies, you are pretty sure to be unhappy, and to chant for some relief in this regard. To generalize, some money is of tremendous value, and then the utility of it declines. This is the same “utility saturation” that marks almost every material object. The first car you own is very valuable and useful, the second less so, the third even less so, and the fourth less than that, unless you are a specialist such as a car dealer, restorer, racer, or something similar. Because of the burden of caring for the vehicles, the actual usefulness of the Nth car might be less than the cost of ownership.
It’s the same for most items. Food is mandatory for survival, and more and more allows one to choose healthier items, but after a while, there is only so much time and attention and money one can usefully spend on food. Obesity is obviously the wall one runs into.
For non-food items, most have a maintenance cost, which is exacted in both money and time, and the more we have, the more nuisance it is to keep it all maintained, safe, up-to-date, clean, or whatever the particular vulnerabilities of the item is. The burden of maintenance builds up as we accumulate items. This is just another piece of the utility saturation problem. Having more than you can use of something might be no big deal, if you never have any contact with it. However, there are almost always costs.
What about money in the bank? Why not have more and more and more money? There are obviously large numbers of people who think that this is the metric for life. The more money you have, the happier you are. Many of them are still living on the low side of the wealth and income distribution curve, so they haven’t yet appreciated that the millionth dollar isn’t nearly as nice as the first.
Money and possessions do give a kind of cheap happiness, through status competition and attention. If you’ve got a lot of money, people pay more attention to you, for the purpose of getting some or just because you might give them some clues as to how to get it, or whatever. To the extent that having a lot of attention brings happiness, this might. The other side of this belongs to those people who don’t want the attention of others, but they want to feel superior. If they can exceed some record or level of somebody else, they feel better. It’s like a sibling rivalry situation, except you pick and choose who your siblings are. Often, once you achieve superiority, the bloom fades quickly, and you need to find someone else to beat. A continual fix of competition and success keeps them stoked up.
Buddha taught us about the futility of all this. Being better than someone else, or dominating them, doesn’t make us happy, it alleviates our unhappiness of desiring to be better. Buddha teaches us to stop desiring this goal, and to be happy because we do not have unfulfilled desires. The same holds for money. Buddha didn’t live in a money culture, but possessions took its place. By not trying to get more possessions than others, or to beat some imagined goal, we can be internally happy.
Our culture regards the Buddha’s thoughts as worse than heresy. This is one reason why kosen-rufu is not a piece of cake. We are opposing the social design of our culture.
Buddhism undermines the social contract we have with each other. When the nation was formed, the founding fathers inspired their contemporaries with some goals that resonated. They talked about setting new standards for justice, freedom, liberty, and more that were far beyond the standard of England, their mother country. These great ideas were embodied in our constitution and Bill of Rights, and have inspired generation after generation within the United States, and countless others throughout the world. However, they are fairly passé at this point. We have transformed our nation.
We have built our nation into one that is based on unhappiness. Our national success was formerly based on the ideals we espoused. For most of the history of the United States, we were not a very rich nation. We were a hard-working nation that built itself up and up.
This all changed with the invention of the consumer culture. Now we work very hard, with advertising, to increase everyone’s unhappiness. Our society functions by selling everyone consumer products, either imported or domestically manufactured. Corporate success depends on consumer unhappiness with what they have. We have entire, hugely paid, staffs in all large corporations, given the task of increasing the nation’s unhappiness by making them think they need some new goods, some new food, some new experience, some new spectacle, some new trip, and on and on. National advertising is solely concerned with making sure no one thinks they are happy, and the only way to be happy is to be a bigger consumer.
Buddha is the exact antithesis of this. He had everything there was to offer based on his birth as a prince. He dumped it all to live as a homeless teacher. For almost all of his life, he possessed nothing except a robe. He lived on charity. Yet his teachings have spread to hundreds of millions.
His understanding of materialism was not unique. There have been no rich religious teachers. In order to understand life well enough to become someone like this, you have to realize the futility of materialism. Yet the masses of consumers in America and around the world at blasted hundreds of times a day with the message of materialism.
How much endurance can an average person have when faced with the onslaught of advertising? Every mass media is stuffed to the brim with it. The more vulnerable of our society, those who do not have strong background training in resisting consumerism, fall prey to it for their entire lifetime.
Does SGI practice help or hurt this situation? There is no prohibition that seniors give to new members telling them not to chant for material things. It is even encouraged, as when some wish is fulfilled, it serves as a verification that the process of dai-moku (chanting) focuses the mind and help achieve goals, even material ones. We only need to remember that study is a critical component of SGI practice. Buddhist study is the key to breaking out of the consumer mentality.
If, as in our hopes, Buddhism and SGI became widespread in America, would that lead to some dire economic consequences? Just suppose that materialism began to be abandoned. How would our society function? It was Henry Ford who understood that workers and consumers were the same people. If we cease consuming, what work is needed? Or better stated, if we reduce our consuming to a low level, what will happen to all the employment that is solely based on stuffing consumer goods down our throats?
What would happen to our nation, if our GDP, the measure of goods produced, starts to drop because domestic consumption declines? Once again, we return to the question of Buddhism and stability. A highly Buddhist nation, where the population simply rejects materialism, would not have a great industrial base. This means, that if another nation sought to conquer and capture it, it would not have the ability to defend itself economically. In the modern world, weapons win wars. Weapons are built by a nation’s economic base, and if that base has shriveled, there will be no basis on which to establish a weapon industry, even if the Buddhist nation decided to defend itself.
So, once again, it appears that our hope of a world of Buddhist nations, living without conflict, is a pipedream, as the situation is unstable.
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
Existentialism and Buddhism
Existentialism questions the reasons for living, or for accomplishing things. Buddhism attempts to answer these questions, as do many other religions. Therefore, existentialism and Buddhism have an incredible amount in common. However, this connection doesn’t seem to have engaged anyone’s attention.
Existentialism became a named philosophy with the advent of the French philosophers, Sartre and Camus, of the previous century, and, of course there were many precedents for their thinking, stretching a bit further back, Nietzsche, Heidigger,…. None of them were particularly succinct. Perhaps it takes a tremendous number of words to convey some simple concepts if the concepts are particularly jarring or particularly out-of-resonance with the reader’s contexts and background.
To try to be succinct for those whose background already has this material embedded in it (and didn’t we all have to read these books in college?):
What’s the point of living if there is no eternity?
What’s the point of doing anything if nothing makes any difference in the long run?
Now, 99.9999+% of humanity could care less, as they have dogmatic answers to these questions, and it is certainly wonderful that they do, for that keeps the world running (unless, of course, the existence of the world doesn’t matter to you.) This expedient learning, about various forms of nirvana, gives people a goal to try for. When you have a goal, you can determine your actions and proceed toward it. It happens to be that these dogmas fit into a scheme that underlies society. It’s obvious why that came about.
Consider two city-states around the dawn of civilization. One has a theology that tells the folks, who are not thinkers as thinking about anything but the harvest and similar daily activities hadn’t been invented yet, that they will come back as a more well-off person if they work hard while alive. Another has a theology that tells the folks that life is life and death is death, and there isn’t any bridge. People in the first city-state will be much more likely to survive starvation, war, natural disasters, droughts, and what ever else nature throws at them. The second city-state has people who will give up earlier. Come back a couple of centuries later, and ask which city-state still exists, and which city-state has let to the foundation of other ones. It is simply trivial social evolution, not based on genes, but based on memes – little bits of dogmatic thought, that has led to the concept of nirvana and its competitors and variants.
So, it is obvious and trivial how the various supernatural answers to existentialism’s questions were answered in the many millennia before the French philosophy was invented. It doesn’t matter what the details are, just that there is a dogma that keeps people working on survival and growth. That’s why there are so many various belief-systems around. They all meet the sufficiency needs for continued social existence.
Finally, along comes the French school, and asks these questions explicitly, or in terms of novels with obvious philosophical content. SGI answers the questions in terms of individual happiness, and the spread of happiness through support and assistance. The answer is, of course, not on point, but it is a sufficient answer, and it doesn’t have to call on supernatural existences. The SGI answer is that people want to be happy, and practicing SGI and promoting it through kosen-rufu (conversion of others), and assisting others in achieving their own happiness leads to more individual happiness. Who doesn’t want to be happy? Rather than take on the French with their own deep thoughts, SGI has adopted the very Japanese philosophy that hard work is an end in itself, and directed it toward a non-national goal (unlike Japanese in history), individual happiness. It is almost as if Japan has absorbed the American consumer culture, abstracted it away from materialism, and fed it back to the world.
American consumer culture is all about exploiting natural resources to produce commercial products, and the acquisition of these products is supposed to translate into happiness for the recipient. Japanese thought seems to have, culminating in SGI’s philosophy, turned this into a non-material thing, that intangibles are the thing to go after, and if one does, one will be happy.
The existential question of what about eternity and the absolute lack of utility for an individual of anything in the long term (as there are no individuals in the long term), is buried. Don’t be thoughtful, be happy. Why waste time contemplating the future when there are things to be done right now. If you are unhappy about death, chant.
Sakyamuni faced the problem of death, along with the other three miseries of life. I think that he solved the problem in a way that was completely not appreciated for the last two and a half centuries. Sakyamuni may have been the most brilliant person ever. He used the concept of humility in a very interesting way. Because no one person is important, we should not attach any importance to our own life. This seemingly violates the natural survival instinct, but only seemingly.
We keep on trying to survive, but when our time comes, we pass on gently. Socrates was one of the wisest men of history, and he was quite calm, at least as recorded by his students, about being put to death. He had no philosophy about a soul that was going to outlast his body. When there is no chance for survival, the survival instinct may simply fade away.
Sakyamuni’s idea is that there are countless other beings as important as we are, and why should any person attach any special significance to his own life, as it is simply not much different than any others? The essence of life is that life goes on, with or without us, and because we are not very special, it makes no difference to anything whether we go on or not. This is almost an existentialist answer to the first question, about why live. If we care sufficiently about life, or about others, our own existence is not too consequential.
The second question, about why strive, is more a tad more difficult. Sakyamuni venerated life, global life, not individual life. Our individual lives should make global life better, and therefore we should strive. SGI talks about the same thing. We can make great causes such as universal peace by striving for individual peace in our own lives and in those lives of those we contact. The grand Buddhist concept of the venerability of life itself, maybe DNA life to be specific but they didn’t understand genetics 2500 years ago, overwhelms the existential questions.
This is, of course, Buddhist dogma, not scientific deduction, and it remains to be connected to more deep thinking of the scientific community. The evolution of dogmas is not highly competitive, so Buddhist dogma may not displace others through the same course of events over centuries that led to the development of so many different ones. It remains to be seen how science will treat Buddhist dogma, and whether it must transform itself further as more is learned about the universe, about genetics, about society, and anything else related.
Existentialism became a named philosophy with the advent of the French philosophers, Sartre and Camus, of the previous century, and, of course there were many precedents for their thinking, stretching a bit further back, Nietzsche, Heidigger,…. None of them were particularly succinct. Perhaps it takes a tremendous number of words to convey some simple concepts if the concepts are particularly jarring or particularly out-of-resonance with the reader’s contexts and background.
To try to be succinct for those whose background already has this material embedded in it (and didn’t we all have to read these books in college?):
What’s the point of living if there is no eternity?
What’s the point of doing anything if nothing makes any difference in the long run?
Now, 99.9999+% of humanity could care less, as they have dogmatic answers to these questions, and it is certainly wonderful that they do, for that keeps the world running (unless, of course, the existence of the world doesn’t matter to you.) This expedient learning, about various forms of nirvana, gives people a goal to try for. When you have a goal, you can determine your actions and proceed toward it. It happens to be that these dogmas fit into a scheme that underlies society. It’s obvious why that came about.
Consider two city-states around the dawn of civilization. One has a theology that tells the folks, who are not thinkers as thinking about anything but the harvest and similar daily activities hadn’t been invented yet, that they will come back as a more well-off person if they work hard while alive. Another has a theology that tells the folks that life is life and death is death, and there isn’t any bridge. People in the first city-state will be much more likely to survive starvation, war, natural disasters, droughts, and what ever else nature throws at them. The second city-state has people who will give up earlier. Come back a couple of centuries later, and ask which city-state still exists, and which city-state has let to the foundation of other ones. It is simply trivial social evolution, not based on genes, but based on memes – little bits of dogmatic thought, that has led to the concept of nirvana and its competitors and variants.
So, it is obvious and trivial how the various supernatural answers to existentialism’s questions were answered in the many millennia before the French philosophy was invented. It doesn’t matter what the details are, just that there is a dogma that keeps people working on survival and growth. That’s why there are so many various belief-systems around. They all meet the sufficiency needs for continued social existence.
Finally, along comes the French school, and asks these questions explicitly, or in terms of novels with obvious philosophical content. SGI answers the questions in terms of individual happiness, and the spread of happiness through support and assistance. The answer is, of course, not on point, but it is a sufficient answer, and it doesn’t have to call on supernatural existences. The SGI answer is that people want to be happy, and practicing SGI and promoting it through kosen-rufu (conversion of others), and assisting others in achieving their own happiness leads to more individual happiness. Who doesn’t want to be happy? Rather than take on the French with their own deep thoughts, SGI has adopted the very Japanese philosophy that hard work is an end in itself, and directed it toward a non-national goal (unlike Japanese in history), individual happiness. It is almost as if Japan has absorbed the American consumer culture, abstracted it away from materialism, and fed it back to the world.
American consumer culture is all about exploiting natural resources to produce commercial products, and the acquisition of these products is supposed to translate into happiness for the recipient. Japanese thought seems to have, culminating in SGI’s philosophy, turned this into a non-material thing, that intangibles are the thing to go after, and if one does, one will be happy.
The existential question of what about eternity and the absolute lack of utility for an individual of anything in the long term (as there are no individuals in the long term), is buried. Don’t be thoughtful, be happy. Why waste time contemplating the future when there are things to be done right now. If you are unhappy about death, chant.
Sakyamuni faced the problem of death, along with the other three miseries of life. I think that he solved the problem in a way that was completely not appreciated for the last two and a half centuries. Sakyamuni may have been the most brilliant person ever. He used the concept of humility in a very interesting way. Because no one person is important, we should not attach any importance to our own life. This seemingly violates the natural survival instinct, but only seemingly.
We keep on trying to survive, but when our time comes, we pass on gently. Socrates was one of the wisest men of history, and he was quite calm, at least as recorded by his students, about being put to death. He had no philosophy about a soul that was going to outlast his body. When there is no chance for survival, the survival instinct may simply fade away.
Sakyamuni’s idea is that there are countless other beings as important as we are, and why should any person attach any special significance to his own life, as it is simply not much different than any others? The essence of life is that life goes on, with or without us, and because we are not very special, it makes no difference to anything whether we go on or not. This is almost an existentialist answer to the first question, about why live. If we care sufficiently about life, or about others, our own existence is not too consequential.
The second question, about why strive, is more a tad more difficult. Sakyamuni venerated life, global life, not individual life. Our individual lives should make global life better, and therefore we should strive. SGI talks about the same thing. We can make great causes such as universal peace by striving for individual peace in our own lives and in those lives of those we contact. The grand Buddhist concept of the venerability of life itself, maybe DNA life to be specific but they didn’t understand genetics 2500 years ago, overwhelms the existential questions.
This is, of course, Buddhist dogma, not scientific deduction, and it remains to be connected to more deep thinking of the scientific community. The evolution of dogmas is not highly competitive, so Buddhist dogma may not displace others through the same course of events over centuries that led to the development of so many different ones. It remains to be seen how science will treat Buddhist dogma, and whether it must transform itself further as more is learned about the universe, about genetics, about society, and anything else related.
The Saharan Ant
We grow up, most of us, with somebody to make a fuss about us. Babies need to be cared for, and our first experiences are those of the mother or a substitute taking care of our needs. If we were lucky, there was lots of bonding and tender loving care. These experiences are locked down in the deepest recesses of our minds. We form our first picture of what the world is like from these experiences. They tell us “People care about me” – although not expressed verbally, but totally in terms of emotions and expectations. Babies learn how to interact with their caregivers to get their needs fulfilled, both physical ones and emotional ones.
As we get older, these experiences are buried, but never lose their impact. It seems natural to almost all humans that something, somewhere, loves us and wants to give us TLC. Possibly a sociologist could look at baby care patterns in different cultures and see if it correlates with how the society behaves and with their religious beliefs. For the purpose of this article, I just want to say that what we experience as a baby is a function of the way we have evolved, away from those creatures that deposit eggs somewhere and the young simply start off unnoticed by the genetic parents.
This fact of evolution comes from the need to provide cross-individual information about the local world environment. It’s not possible to code into DNA the details about how to gather food, avoid predators, and interact socially the way mammals, and maybe some lower creatures, do. Thus, if there is social interaction and local environmental habits to be learned, there is a necessity to build in, probably genetically, some care for the young of the species. Likely also, as we go up the evolutionary chain, care for young becomes socially transmitted as well.
The needs of the evolutionary process don’t have anything at all to do with supernatural stuff, but there is obviously an analogy here. In the early days of Buddhism, people expected that there were all manner of supernatural creatures, and put the Buddha among them, who were somehow interested in their lives and going to help them get their needs satisfied. People would make offerings to the statues of Buddha, and still do in great numbers, as they think they will get some magical assistance from outer space or wherever they think the Buddha lives. They beseech the Buddha the same way a baby beseeches his caregiver. It’s simply an irremovable early experience, coming to the surface in an adult in a slightly transformed way.
Nichiren was well past this elementary practice. He was a philosopher as well as a practical theologian. It existed at his time, the thirteenth century, as it does now, but only among those still wrapped up in the earliest versions of Buddhism. He was, as we are now, able to think beyond the repetition of infant experiences transformed into adult modes.
The idea of a monotheism belief, or a small pantheon, is very reminiscent of the infant experiences. Some Buddhist sects believe that the Buddha is the only power around. Others have uncountable minor figures. Nichiren wrote that one of the most important things to do for a good Buddhist was to clean up the religion, in other words, to help those mired in non-consistent and illogical beliefs, no matter how deeply they resonate with the person’s brain from infant experiences, to get to a higher philosophical level. Why that’s important is left for another place and time.
In order to use Sakyamuni’s revelation of the countless worlds beyond our own as a device to help people understand the true framework of the universe, it might be useful to present an example.
There are a trillion worlds out there with life forms, give or take a few zeroes. We have no contact with any of them. The effect of any one of us, no matter what we do, is infinitesimal. To picture that, consider an ant in the middle of the Sahara desert. On the leg of the ant is a virus, one of billions there. That virus is as important to you as you are to the rest of the universe.
The rest of the universe cares about you as much as you do about that virus.
As we get older, these experiences are buried, but never lose their impact. It seems natural to almost all humans that something, somewhere, loves us and wants to give us TLC. Possibly a sociologist could look at baby care patterns in different cultures and see if it correlates with how the society behaves and with their religious beliefs. For the purpose of this article, I just want to say that what we experience as a baby is a function of the way we have evolved, away from those creatures that deposit eggs somewhere and the young simply start off unnoticed by the genetic parents.
This fact of evolution comes from the need to provide cross-individual information about the local world environment. It’s not possible to code into DNA the details about how to gather food, avoid predators, and interact socially the way mammals, and maybe some lower creatures, do. Thus, if there is social interaction and local environmental habits to be learned, there is a necessity to build in, probably genetically, some care for the young of the species. Likely also, as we go up the evolutionary chain, care for young becomes socially transmitted as well.
The needs of the evolutionary process don’t have anything at all to do with supernatural stuff, but there is obviously an analogy here. In the early days of Buddhism, people expected that there were all manner of supernatural creatures, and put the Buddha among them, who were somehow interested in their lives and going to help them get their needs satisfied. People would make offerings to the statues of Buddha, and still do in great numbers, as they think they will get some magical assistance from outer space or wherever they think the Buddha lives. They beseech the Buddha the same way a baby beseeches his caregiver. It’s simply an irremovable early experience, coming to the surface in an adult in a slightly transformed way.
Nichiren was well past this elementary practice. He was a philosopher as well as a practical theologian. It existed at his time, the thirteenth century, as it does now, but only among those still wrapped up in the earliest versions of Buddhism. He was, as we are now, able to think beyond the repetition of infant experiences transformed into adult modes.
The idea of a monotheism belief, or a small pantheon, is very reminiscent of the infant experiences. Some Buddhist sects believe that the Buddha is the only power around. Others have uncountable minor figures. Nichiren wrote that one of the most important things to do for a good Buddhist was to clean up the religion, in other words, to help those mired in non-consistent and illogical beliefs, no matter how deeply they resonate with the person’s brain from infant experiences, to get to a higher philosophical level. Why that’s important is left for another place and time.
In order to use Sakyamuni’s revelation of the countless worlds beyond our own as a device to help people understand the true framework of the universe, it might be useful to present an example.
There are a trillion worlds out there with life forms, give or take a few zeroes. We have no contact with any of them. The effect of any one of us, no matter what we do, is infinitesimal. To picture that, consider an ant in the middle of the Sahara desert. On the leg of the ant is a virus, one of billions there. That virus is as important to you as you are to the rest of the universe.
The rest of the universe cares about you as much as you do about that virus.
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
Why we pray for the dearly departed
Part of the SGI prayers include some for those who have left us. These are to be said twice daily. As a scientist, I can think through what this is all about. Since it’s interesting, I’m presenting my thoughts here.
When we pray for someone alive, we may have hopes for them. Perhaps some change in their life condition, some improvement, some progress on something important to them. Alternatively, the prayer could be for them to have a better relationship with us, or with someone close to us. In Buddhism, we feel that the way to a better future is to help everyone be happy. That’s the enlightened self-interest thing discussed elsewhere.
But what about dead people? Happiness is a matter of brain chemistry being proper. Dead people’s brain chemistry is completely out of whack within a few seconds of being dead, and even if they did have the right chemistry, it wouldn’t do them any good.
Long ago, and nowadays still in places where expedient beliefs are prominent, there might be some hope that the dead person’s identity is going to be improved somehow. As discussed previously, this “bar-coding” doesn’t have a self-consistent explanation, i.e., it can’t exist. So, praying for dead people has to mean something else.
It does. It is all about the “essence of life”, which is a top concept in modern Buddhist thought. “Essence of life” means that life is a complex continuum, tied together through society and ecology. How do dead people relate to the “essence of life”? They are the ones who built your brain programming. What you think comes from your parents, teachers, friends, mentors, examples, and others that influenced you. These influences do not go away when the people die. They remain just as strong. They are written in your neurons forever.
When you are young, your mind is a huge empty storehouse, just waiting to be filled up by those who influence us. Even writers and composers who have died long ago can fill up our minds. The brain works by building little bundles of neural connections that translate our perceptions into memory.
But the brain is huge, and the storehouse is not organized coherently. When we pray for the deceased, we remember them and we pull together the good things they taught us. Maybe occasionally we remember the bad examples they sometimes gave, but this is good education as well. Our prayers for the dead is just like other chanting – it strengthens our minds. It focuses our goals. It makes clear how to accomplish what it is that we have chosen to do. It explains experiences that might otherwise be cloudy. All this happens by pulling together the almost innumerable experiences and insights we have picked up.
Thus, the SGI prayer for the deceased is a perfect complement to our other beliefs. It is consistent in that it is strongly connected with how our minds work. It is absolutely not reminiscent of the “ancestor worship” that previous religions have had, and it absolutely does not have anything to do with the dead people anymore. It has to do with those influences the dead people left inside us.
When we pray for someone alive, we may have hopes for them. Perhaps some change in their life condition, some improvement, some progress on something important to them. Alternatively, the prayer could be for them to have a better relationship with us, or with someone close to us. In Buddhism, we feel that the way to a better future is to help everyone be happy. That’s the enlightened self-interest thing discussed elsewhere.
But what about dead people? Happiness is a matter of brain chemistry being proper. Dead people’s brain chemistry is completely out of whack within a few seconds of being dead, and even if they did have the right chemistry, it wouldn’t do them any good.
Long ago, and nowadays still in places where expedient beliefs are prominent, there might be some hope that the dead person’s identity is going to be improved somehow. As discussed previously, this “bar-coding” doesn’t have a self-consistent explanation, i.e., it can’t exist. So, praying for dead people has to mean something else.
It does. It is all about the “essence of life”, which is a top concept in modern Buddhist thought. “Essence of life” means that life is a complex continuum, tied together through society and ecology. How do dead people relate to the “essence of life”? They are the ones who built your brain programming. What you think comes from your parents, teachers, friends, mentors, examples, and others that influenced you. These influences do not go away when the people die. They remain just as strong. They are written in your neurons forever.
When you are young, your mind is a huge empty storehouse, just waiting to be filled up by those who influence us. Even writers and composers who have died long ago can fill up our minds. The brain works by building little bundles of neural connections that translate our perceptions into memory.
But the brain is huge, and the storehouse is not organized coherently. When we pray for the deceased, we remember them and we pull together the good things they taught us. Maybe occasionally we remember the bad examples they sometimes gave, but this is good education as well. Our prayers for the dead is just like other chanting – it strengthens our minds. It focuses our goals. It makes clear how to accomplish what it is that we have chosen to do. It explains experiences that might otherwise be cloudy. All this happens by pulling together the almost innumerable experiences and insights we have picked up.
Thus, the SGI prayer for the deceased is a perfect complement to our other beliefs. It is consistent in that it is strongly connected with how our minds work. It is absolutely not reminiscent of the “ancestor worship” that previous religions have had, and it absolutely does not have anything to do with the dead people anymore. It has to do with those influences the dead people left inside us.
Sunday, September 03, 2006
Is Chanting the Advil of Unhappinesss?
SGI teaches us to chant for happiness. In other words, if we don’t have happiness, we should focus our chanting on getting it. Of course, if we are happy, we chant for the happiness of others, but that’s not what I’m writing about.
As anybody with any significant years knows, unhappiness is everywhere. It springs out of nowhere and grabs us when we don’t expect it. We run into it constantly. It is a part of life.
It is impossible to avoid, and so we need something to help ourselves when we meet it. Unhappiness, in its various forms of death and grief, suffering, want, and the rest, were what motivated the Buddha to devise his belief system, Buddhism, which led through a two and a half thousand year history to the founding of SGI last century. So unhappiness and chanting are intertwined. Buddha didn’t chant Nam MyoHo RenGe Kyo, as that got started with Nichiren in thirteen century Japan, but he probably chanted some mantra, as this was the Hindu tradition he grew up in. We would be chanting something else if Nichiren had been Mongolian, for example, so it likely does not make any difference what we chant, as long as it means the same thing in some language, and has the same physiological effect. Maybe someday somebody will study this and let us all know.
The point is, when we are unhappy, what should we do? Should we seek some chemical assistance, like alcohol or an illegal hallucinogen? Should we seek therapy from a licenced or unlicensed professional, or a friend? Should we seek amusement, like a comedy? Should we join a group and get our minds off it? Should we just get more rest and hope for the best? Should we just tough it out and wait for it to pass? Obviously, the unhappy person has a lot of options. Chanting Nam MyoHo RenGe Kyo is only one.
Let’s compare them. Some are distractions: drugs, alcohol, amusement, group interaction on non-related topics, rest and ignoring it. Clearly, they help pass the time, and since most unhappiness is a passing thing, they can provide a mitigation. Maybe distractions will work, and the huge number of people who use them probably means they have found some success, some relief, in doing so. This doesn’t work very well when the unhappiness is caused by a material lack, but likely better when it is caused by a life event.
Others involve reaching out to understand the cause. We can help ourselves by understanding the nature of the unhappiness and then dealing with it. We can seek counseling for this, from a bartender, a psychologist, a close friend, an intelligent advisor, a co-worker, or a SGI colleague. This is one step closer to resolving the unhappiness. This helps us figure out a course of action. Sometimes it is not needed, as the cause is obvious. You have no job. You need a job in order to pay for necessities or to provide mental satisfaction. You need to find a job. You don’t need a counselor to tell you that you need a job. The same also goes with life situations, like a death in the family. More complicated things might need some advice, like in dealing with other people.
Besides distraction and reaching out, there is doing something about it. If it is a life event, you have to do something to your own mind to improve the situation. If it is a material want, you have to do something externally, and to do that effectively, you need to make some internal decisions in your mind, resolve to follow them through, and then do it. This is where chanting excels.
Chanting focuses the mind. It clarifies thinking. It improves introspection. It quiets the noise that interferes with our thinking. It helps us put aside the internal mental obstacles that block our moving forward. It helps make connection between things we know and didn’t connect. It helps us remember things we may have forgotten or deliberately obscured. In dealing with unhappiness, it is hard to imagine a better antidote.
Thus, chanting is like an Advil for unhappiness, but not in the sense that you can take a pill and your unhappiness goes away. It is analogous in that it attacks the problem. Advil is a chemical that interferes with the pain network of neurons, and blocks them from the pain center in the brain. It allows the brain some peace and quiet, so that we can do something useful, like curing the cause of the physical pain. Chanting helps us with a more subtle kind of pain, the kind caused within our mind, by what we perceive about the world and about ourselves. It blocks the noise created by the pain of unhappiness, and helps our minds find ways to resolve the causes. So in that sense, it is much like Advil for non-physical causes of unhappiness.
As anybody with any significant years knows, unhappiness is everywhere. It springs out of nowhere and grabs us when we don’t expect it. We run into it constantly. It is a part of life.
It is impossible to avoid, and so we need something to help ourselves when we meet it. Unhappiness, in its various forms of death and grief, suffering, want, and the rest, were what motivated the Buddha to devise his belief system, Buddhism, which led through a two and a half thousand year history to the founding of SGI last century. So unhappiness and chanting are intertwined. Buddha didn’t chant Nam MyoHo RenGe Kyo, as that got started with Nichiren in thirteen century Japan, but he probably chanted some mantra, as this was the Hindu tradition he grew up in. We would be chanting something else if Nichiren had been Mongolian, for example, so it likely does not make any difference what we chant, as long as it means the same thing in some language, and has the same physiological effect. Maybe someday somebody will study this and let us all know.
The point is, when we are unhappy, what should we do? Should we seek some chemical assistance, like alcohol or an illegal hallucinogen? Should we seek therapy from a licenced or unlicensed professional, or a friend? Should we seek amusement, like a comedy? Should we join a group and get our minds off it? Should we just get more rest and hope for the best? Should we just tough it out and wait for it to pass? Obviously, the unhappy person has a lot of options. Chanting Nam MyoHo RenGe Kyo is only one.
Let’s compare them. Some are distractions: drugs, alcohol, amusement, group interaction on non-related topics, rest and ignoring it. Clearly, they help pass the time, and since most unhappiness is a passing thing, they can provide a mitigation. Maybe distractions will work, and the huge number of people who use them probably means they have found some success, some relief, in doing so. This doesn’t work very well when the unhappiness is caused by a material lack, but likely better when it is caused by a life event.
Others involve reaching out to understand the cause. We can help ourselves by understanding the nature of the unhappiness and then dealing with it. We can seek counseling for this, from a bartender, a psychologist, a close friend, an intelligent advisor, a co-worker, or a SGI colleague. This is one step closer to resolving the unhappiness. This helps us figure out a course of action. Sometimes it is not needed, as the cause is obvious. You have no job. You need a job in order to pay for necessities or to provide mental satisfaction. You need to find a job. You don’t need a counselor to tell you that you need a job. The same also goes with life situations, like a death in the family. More complicated things might need some advice, like in dealing with other people.
Besides distraction and reaching out, there is doing something about it. If it is a life event, you have to do something to your own mind to improve the situation. If it is a material want, you have to do something externally, and to do that effectively, you need to make some internal decisions in your mind, resolve to follow them through, and then do it. This is where chanting excels.
Chanting focuses the mind. It clarifies thinking. It improves introspection. It quiets the noise that interferes with our thinking. It helps us put aside the internal mental obstacles that block our moving forward. It helps make connection between things we know and didn’t connect. It helps us remember things we may have forgotten or deliberately obscured. In dealing with unhappiness, it is hard to imagine a better antidote.
Thus, chanting is like an Advil for unhappiness, but not in the sense that you can take a pill and your unhappiness goes away. It is analogous in that it attacks the problem. Advil is a chemical that interferes with the pain network of neurons, and blocks them from the pain center in the brain. It allows the brain some peace and quiet, so that we can do something useful, like curing the cause of the physical pain. Chanting helps us with a more subtle kind of pain, the kind caused within our mind, by what we perceive about the world and about ourselves. It blocks the noise created by the pain of unhappiness, and helps our minds find ways to resolve the causes. So in that sense, it is much like Advil for non-physical causes of unhappiness.
Saturday, September 02, 2006
Jesus is wonderful, and a route to Buddha
SGI seems to have a policy of reaching out to other religions. President Ikeda has had uncountable meetings with religious leaders of other faiths. Many other religions do not have this great level of tolerance. What is behind the position of SGI?
I can not speak for SGI; I can only try to figure it out by logic and investigation. I think the key is the invention by Buddha of expedient teaching. If someone already has beliefs that encompass part of the Buddhist thought, then why not build on that part? The beliefs that the various Christian sects have many aspects that agree with Buddha’s teaching. Buddha’s eightfold way and the tremendous organization of ideas within Buddhism are certainly clearer and more logical than any Christian teaching, but that only means that the step to Buddhism should be easy for more logical people.
On the other hand, there are aspects to some Christian sects that clash with Buddha’s teachings. For example, lack of tolerance for other sects is common. SGI has had its share of disagreements with the Nichiren temple sect, so it is familiar with such things. SGI has put this schism behind it and struck off to build a lay religion, quite successfully. For some Christian sects, the conflicts have gone on for centuries. Instead of pointing out differences like this one, SGI ignores them. SGI writers and speakers do not attack Christian sects for any of their beliefs, as that would undermine the willingness of believers in these sects to listen to what SGI speakers have to say. Instead, SGI members doing kosen-rufu (conversion) stress the building blocks of common beliefs.
The idea of expedient teaching is to understand the context of belief that the listener has, and then frame Buddhist ideas in that context. If the Christian believes in supernatural creatures like angels and devils, the ancient Buddhist sutras involving various supernatural creatures might fit right in. If the Christian believes in repeatedly praying on rosary beads, chanting with our beads might be a natural and small switch. If the Christian sincerely believes that Jesus was opposed to killing people and therefore opposes war, SGI’s work toward world piece should be a natural bridge. These are just three linkages between various Christian beliefs and SGI’s and Buddha’s ideas.
Thus, a sincere belief in Jesus and Christian teachings makes a person more likely to be receptive to kosen-rufu than someone who is simply giving his life over to materialism. Materialism has little in common with either Buddhism or Christian beliefs. Thus, the statement that Jesus is the best way to Buddha means that, for Americans in that religion, their sincerity will help them understand what Buddha has to say. As we all know, many people claiming to be religious are not sincere. These people may be disguised materialists, and pose a bigger challenge to kosen-rufu than sincere believers in a Christian sect, or in any other religion for that matter.
I can not speak for SGI; I can only try to figure it out by logic and investigation. I think the key is the invention by Buddha of expedient teaching. If someone already has beliefs that encompass part of the Buddhist thought, then why not build on that part? The beliefs that the various Christian sects have many aspects that agree with Buddha’s teaching. Buddha’s eightfold way and the tremendous organization of ideas within Buddhism are certainly clearer and more logical than any Christian teaching, but that only means that the step to Buddhism should be easy for more logical people.
On the other hand, there are aspects to some Christian sects that clash with Buddha’s teachings. For example, lack of tolerance for other sects is common. SGI has had its share of disagreements with the Nichiren temple sect, so it is familiar with such things. SGI has put this schism behind it and struck off to build a lay religion, quite successfully. For some Christian sects, the conflicts have gone on for centuries. Instead of pointing out differences like this one, SGI ignores them. SGI writers and speakers do not attack Christian sects for any of their beliefs, as that would undermine the willingness of believers in these sects to listen to what SGI speakers have to say. Instead, SGI members doing kosen-rufu (conversion) stress the building blocks of common beliefs.
The idea of expedient teaching is to understand the context of belief that the listener has, and then frame Buddhist ideas in that context. If the Christian believes in supernatural creatures like angels and devils, the ancient Buddhist sutras involving various supernatural creatures might fit right in. If the Christian believes in repeatedly praying on rosary beads, chanting with our beads might be a natural and small switch. If the Christian sincerely believes that Jesus was opposed to killing people and therefore opposes war, SGI’s work toward world piece should be a natural bridge. These are just three linkages between various Christian beliefs and SGI’s and Buddha’s ideas.
Thus, a sincere belief in Jesus and Christian teachings makes a person more likely to be receptive to kosen-rufu than someone who is simply giving his life over to materialism. Materialism has little in common with either Buddhism or Christian beliefs. Thus, the statement that Jesus is the best way to Buddha means that, for Americans in that religion, their sincerity will help them understand what Buddha has to say. As we all know, many people claiming to be religious are not sincere. These people may be disguised materialists, and pose a bigger challenge to kosen-rufu than sincere believers in a Christian sect, or in any other religion for that matter.
Friday, September 01, 2006
Reincarnation reincarnated
When Buddha lived, 2500 years ago more or less, there was so little science that any kind of idea could be promulgated. Just like now, except that it’s possible to unravel weird ideas now.
Reincarnation was the common belief in India at Buddha’s time. He continued to use it as expedient teaching. As we know, expedient teaching is using the cultural context of the time and place of the teaching to make new ideas understandable. Speaking about scientific concepts to uneducated people just leaves them unhappy and uninformed. Buddha was a superb teacher, and knew exactly how to convey his theories to different groups. His legacy is proof of his genius.
Nowadays it is very easy to analyze concepts like reincarnation. The elementary concept fails at the very definition stage, but advanced concepts do not. What is reincarnation? It was the ancient Hindu belief that there is something about a person that persists beyond their death. Clearly it is not material. Everything that belongs to a person’s body disperses at death. Let’s call the immaterial thing, soul or essence or identity. Hindu belief is that a person after death, depending on his position and behavior during this life (and past lives), transfers his identity into some other creature born soon after. If you followed the rules of Hindu theology, you could move up in status. There were human castes, and one could possibly rise. Falling could leave you as an animal or an insect, and supposedly being a good insect could get you to be a better one, or maybe an arthropod or a small mammal…
There are obvious problems with the transmission of the identity, but there's no need to quibble with the concept on these grounds. It fails even earlier that that.
Seriously, what could this identity be? Could it be like a bar code? Somewhere, something was recording the bar code of every living creature, and assigning used ones to new creatures at or before birth. Nobody knows the bar codes, and nobody can find them out. Guessing could happen, but so what? What difference could it make for anyone’s life? Maybe there is a piece of Hindu theology that says your bar code can make a difference in your life. That would mean it interacts with the world, and therefore it somehow becomes partially material. Some type of connection with the real world has to be made, and if it is made, it can be measured. However, there has never been the slightest claim by anyone that your identity, transferred through multiple creatures, could be detected and tracked. We understand how material things interact in great detail, and there isn’t any room in the theories of interaction for any supernatural bar codes. Everything measured to date has checked out.
What would the material piece of the identity hook on to? Is it a pattern in the brain? If you turn into a cockroach and later make it back to a human, all your pattern was encoded into the few cells that serves for a cockroach's brain. The cockroach's brain has so few cells that the barcode must be very low in information content. However, if one counts all the insects in the world presently living, there are trillions, maybe quadrillions. More data than can be encoded into the cockroach’s brain, or the ant’s either. To say nothing about protozoa, which might be the temporary resting place of the worst behaving individuals, which have no brains and therefore no bar code area. So brains are out.
What’s left that’s in common between the entire animal kingdom? Nothing but DNA. However, there is no way human DNA can be encoded into the simple DNA of a much lower creature. There is hardly any “junk genes” (ones which are never expressed in any fashion – just leftover from previous steps in the evolution process) in the simplest of creatures, which is where one could write some bar code information. Exactly what difference could it make anyway, even if there was a way to encode a bar code into some “junk genes” because they do not interact with the organism. They simply are carried forward in the replication and reproduction processes. So we must conclude that there is no bar code for individuals which is transferred after death to a new creature.
However, the modern terminology for reincarnation, as seen in SGI’s newspaper, for example, is that the “essence of life” goes on. This is a little vague, but in general it means that when you are dead you are dead, but you are part of the whole complex of DNA-based life-forms, and what you did while alive has had some effect on it, and that effect will go on and on, mixing and melding with what every other life-form does. Basically, becoming a cockroach is not an option, but making an improvement in the world is an option for humans. Improving the lives of others, who carry on that to improve the life of others, is the essence of “good life”. This, in my humble opinion, is what reincarnation would have meant to the Buddha, if he had any context to express it in, and anyone able to comprehend it.
We can affect both other human beings, through social change and individual interaction, and we can affect the rest of the life-forms, mostly by how we change their habitat. The scientific field working to comprehend how this works is ecology, and it is not a mature field, like physics or chemistry. Some norms are known, but there are no clear guidelines for what to do and what not to do; there are no metrics as to what is good and what is bad, and how to measure them in situations that have potentially multiple effects. So, how to be a good SGI member with respect to the rest of life remains to be determined. We are left with being good to other humans. That is certainly complicated enough as is.
Reincarnation was the common belief in India at Buddha’s time. He continued to use it as expedient teaching. As we know, expedient teaching is using the cultural context of the time and place of the teaching to make new ideas understandable. Speaking about scientific concepts to uneducated people just leaves them unhappy and uninformed. Buddha was a superb teacher, and knew exactly how to convey his theories to different groups. His legacy is proof of his genius.
Nowadays it is very easy to analyze concepts like reincarnation. The elementary concept fails at the very definition stage, but advanced concepts do not. What is reincarnation? It was the ancient Hindu belief that there is something about a person that persists beyond their death. Clearly it is not material. Everything that belongs to a person’s body disperses at death. Let’s call the immaterial thing, soul or essence or identity. Hindu belief is that a person after death, depending on his position and behavior during this life (and past lives), transfers his identity into some other creature born soon after. If you followed the rules of Hindu theology, you could move up in status. There were human castes, and one could possibly rise. Falling could leave you as an animal or an insect, and supposedly being a good insect could get you to be a better one, or maybe an arthropod or a small mammal…
There are obvious problems with the transmission of the identity, but there's no need to quibble with the concept on these grounds. It fails even earlier that that.
Seriously, what could this identity be? Could it be like a bar code? Somewhere, something was recording the bar code of every living creature, and assigning used ones to new creatures at or before birth. Nobody knows the bar codes, and nobody can find them out. Guessing could happen, but so what? What difference could it make for anyone’s life? Maybe there is a piece of Hindu theology that says your bar code can make a difference in your life. That would mean it interacts with the world, and therefore it somehow becomes partially material. Some type of connection with the real world has to be made, and if it is made, it can be measured. However, there has never been the slightest claim by anyone that your identity, transferred through multiple creatures, could be detected and tracked. We understand how material things interact in great detail, and there isn’t any room in the theories of interaction for any supernatural bar codes. Everything measured to date has checked out.
What would the material piece of the identity hook on to? Is it a pattern in the brain? If you turn into a cockroach and later make it back to a human, all your pattern was encoded into the few cells that serves for a cockroach's brain. The cockroach's brain has so few cells that the barcode must be very low in information content. However, if one counts all the insects in the world presently living, there are trillions, maybe quadrillions. More data than can be encoded into the cockroach’s brain, or the ant’s either. To say nothing about protozoa, which might be the temporary resting place of the worst behaving individuals, which have no brains and therefore no bar code area. So brains are out.
What’s left that’s in common between the entire animal kingdom? Nothing but DNA. However, there is no way human DNA can be encoded into the simple DNA of a much lower creature. There is hardly any “junk genes” (ones which are never expressed in any fashion – just leftover from previous steps in the evolution process) in the simplest of creatures, which is where one could write some bar code information. Exactly what difference could it make anyway, even if there was a way to encode a bar code into some “junk genes” because they do not interact with the organism. They simply are carried forward in the replication and reproduction processes. So we must conclude that there is no bar code for individuals which is transferred after death to a new creature.
However, the modern terminology for reincarnation, as seen in SGI’s newspaper, for example, is that the “essence of life” goes on. This is a little vague, but in general it means that when you are dead you are dead, but you are part of the whole complex of DNA-based life-forms, and what you did while alive has had some effect on it, and that effect will go on and on, mixing and melding with what every other life-form does. Basically, becoming a cockroach is not an option, but making an improvement in the world is an option for humans. Improving the lives of others, who carry on that to improve the life of others, is the essence of “good life”. This, in my humble opinion, is what reincarnation would have meant to the Buddha, if he had any context to express it in, and anyone able to comprehend it.
We can affect both other human beings, through social change and individual interaction, and we can affect the rest of the life-forms, mostly by how we change their habitat. The scientific field working to comprehend how this works is ecology, and it is not a mature field, like physics or chemistry. Some norms are known, but there are no clear guidelines for what to do and what not to do; there are no metrics as to what is good and what is bad, and how to measure them in situations that have potentially multiple effects. So, how to be a good SGI member with respect to the rest of life remains to be determined. We are left with being good to other humans. That is certainly complicated enough as is.
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