Non-Buddhism

By RAY NAITO

Anyone who has been following my work, particularly the work on education theory, knows how much the question of “meaning” animates my thought. In fact, my tract How to Fix Education: A Handbook for Direct Action was instigated by an exchange with Pierce Salguero over this very point: should the classroom be a site of meaning-making (Salguero’s position) or a site of the critique of meaning-makings (my position)? Anyway, I was pleased to see that Ray Naito addresses the matter as well. I am also always especially willing to help promote the work of independent researchers — you know, the academic nomads. — GW

Ray Naito on the following essay: “This reading is worked out at length in my book, Buddhism: 2,500 Years of Misunderstanding, which was written in Japanese and is now available in English. But the argument stands or falls here, on its own.”

MEANING AND BUDDHISM

What did the Buddha deny? And why was it misunderstood?

Let me begin not with Buddhism, but with human beings and meaning. This isn’t a detour. Without passing through it, what the Buddha was actually trying to do stays out of view.

What is meaning?

Picture a hundred-dollar bill. It is a scrap of paper with ink on it. Burn it and you get ash. And yet we work for that scrap, fight over it, sometimes give a whole life to it. We see, in inked paper, a meaning called value. But that meaning is not absolute. Show a typical American a 1,000-som note from Uzbekistan and they will not see what it is worth. The note itself is inked paper, to an American and an Uzbek alike. But its meaning changes depending on who is seeing it. And of course the value of money shifts across time as well. The meaning we call value is not absolute.

The same goes for borders. Seen from space, the earth has no lines drawn on it. As you know, those boundaries have been redrawn again and again. Companies, job titles, laws, religions — none of them are absolute. They are not there the way mountains and rivers are there. If human beings vanished from the planet tomorrow, none of it would mean anything at all. And still we treat them as solid reality.

We usually think we live by seeing the world. But we don’t only see the world itself. We see the meaning the world has been given. A newborn knows nothing of the value of money, of nationality, of success. But as the child grows, she learns all of it. What matters. What is right. What is shameful. People learn meaning, and then come to take it for reality itself.

Meaning is not an illusion. Money really does buy things; states really do enforce laws. Meaning acts on the world, and sometimes it is stronger than violence. But that force doesn’t well up out of nature. It comes from a single fact: that people share it. Sociology has studied this for a long time, and has called it exactly that — meaning.

The sociologists Berger and Luckmann said that human beings externalize meaning, objectivate it, and internalize it. First we pour meaning out of ourselves into the world (externalization). Then it stands up as a solid reality apart from us (objectivation). And finally we take it back into ourselves as though it had been there all along (internalization). Much of what we call “reality” is built this way, by people, and held up by people together.

People learn meaning and come to take it for reality itself. But the order is the reverse. First there is reality, and there are human activities. Meaning is added afterward. And yet somewhere along the way we flip it around. Because there is meaning, it must be real. Because there is meaning, this is how one ought to behave.

Take an old example: women should keep the home. At the root of it was probably a plain division of labour between men and women — pregnancy and birth, hunting and farming. But at some point people gave that division a meaning. And then they began to ask how a good mother should behave, how a good father should be. What began as circumstance became a rightness to be defended. Meaning overtakes reality.

And here is the seed of human suffering. To live as a good mother, as a good woman, a person must sometimes give things up. An education. Financial independence. The life she wanted. Letting go of those things becomes the work of being a good mother. There is real suffering in that. The suffering of not living the life you wanted. But that suffering is justified by meaning. And it stops being felt as suffering at all. It becomes reality — the reality a good mother accepts.

This is not only about sexism. A king ruling over subjects. Human beings owning human beings. People using animals without limit. Slaughterhouse work being done by minorities. A woman raped and pregnant and denied an abortion. People who love their own sex pushed to the margins. All of it is the same. There is suffering there. But meaning covers the suffering over. It makes the suffering that a society contains impossible to feel as suffering.

The process Berger called internalization is not just meaning being pushed onto us from outside. By taking into ourselves the meanings a society calls right, we get to feel that we are right — that we are good people. In the Middle Ages, in the modern era, and still today, there are women who believe that keeping the home is what a good mother is. Not because they are being forced. Because that meaning is what constitutes their own rightness. So people defend meaning. They don’t merely hold it; they defend it with their lives.

History shows it. Those who demanded democracy. Those who fought sexism. Those who tried to end slavery. Every one of them met a brutal backlash. And it is not only the past. Today, anyone who speaks against the exploitation of animals is attacked in the same way. Abortion, or no abortion. Immigrants, or no immigrants. People are endlessly defending their meaning and attacking someone else’s. This is not just a reaction to protect vested interests. It is a fight to protect one’s own rightness. To have your meaning denied is to be told that you are a wrong person. That is why people resist so fiercely.

Human beings make meaning, make it their own, and defend it.

Meaning in the India of that time

Some two and a half thousand years ago, the India where the Buddha appeared already had a highly finished system of meaning.

A person’s worth was decided by birth. There were those born high and those born low. This was not to be doubted; it was the order of the world. And that station was understood to be given by the gods, to preserve the order of the cosmos. It was not a distinction people had invented. It was a placement ordained from above. Which is precisely why it could not be questioned, and why stepping outside it was not permitted.

And what travels through that order? Each person was thought to carry an atman. Something like a soul. The body dies. The atman does not. It passes from life to life, and according to the deeds it has accumulated, it changes the vessel of its next life. An atman that has done good goes to a better station. Otherwise, lower.

Your present station is the result of deeds accumulated in past lives. A good station is proof of good deeds. A low station is proof of the opposite. So people held it good to live out fully the station they had been given. Because that was how good deeds were accumulated.

To step outside your station meant the reverse. It counted as bad deeds, and in the next life you would not be granted a better birth. You might fall to a lower station. You might not even be born human — you might come back as an animal. In this way, obedience to the present order was given a reason, and stepping outside it was bound to fear.

Meaning did not stop at station. Injury and illness were the fruit of bad deeds too. To be born disabled was the fruit of bad deeds in a past life. To wreck your back or your knees under heavy labour, so that you could no longer carry out your station, was also the fruit of bad deeds in a past life. Failing at work, losing someone you love — every misfortune was laid at the door of past-life deeds. There was no suffering anywhere without a reason.

And so people accepted it. They accepted, endured, tried to rise above. Endure this suffering now, and it becomes good karma; in the next life you will be born into a better station. That was the belief. Suffering was not merely suffering. It had been given meaning and converted into an investment in the future.

Every suffering those Indians experienced had been given a meaning. This is a trial. This is fate. This is the payment for a former life. People gave meaning to suffering and lived inside that meaning. And that meaning was bound to sacred authority, which made it immovable. In that time, this meaning was called dharma.

The Buddha’s teaching

Into this came a wandering ascetic. The man who would be called the Buddha.

What matters is what he did not say. The Buddha said almost nothing about how the world began, or how the cosmos is structured. Asked what happens after death, he often kept silent. There were plenty of teachings on offer that proclaimed the truth — and he declined to set out one more truth on that market stall.

Instead, he came back again and again to a single thing.

Clinging.

Here is the hardest-to-see core of his teaching. The problem, for him, was not that people did not know the truth. It was that people were convinced this is the truth, and would not open their hands. Good karma, bad karma, atman, rebirth. The people of that India believed these to be true. And they were afraid of departing from them. To use the language of sociology: they had internalized those meanings, and had formed their own rightness out of them. So they could not let go. They did not recognize it as suffering. If anything, departing from that order of meaning was what counted as suffering.

What the Buddha took issue with was that clinging. Clinging to meaning. How do you rescue people who cling to values like atman and rebirth, and who are afraid to step outside them? That was his problem. So his teaching was not there to hand over a new truth. It was there to loosen, gently, the meanings people had clenched in their fists. He was trying to peel apart the bond between human beings and meaning.

Read this way, impermanence, non-self, and suffering all change their shape.

Sabbe dhammā anattā — “Dhamma” here is dharma. What ought to be. What must be followed. That is to say, precisely the meaning that was circulating in the society of that time. And anattā: an- is a negating prefix, and attā is the Pali for atman. It means “not atman.” So the formula says:

Dharma is not atman. Do not bind dharma to your self.

Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudra, Dalit — every one of them had bound their station to their self. This is a teaching for undoing that bond.

The Buddha refused to answer the philosophical question of whether the self exists as an entity. So non-self cannot possibly be the claim that “there is no such thing as a self.” What we find instead, recurring throughout the early texts, is a short phrase: this is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self. Sensations, moods, beliefs, the story that says this is who I am — one by one, the closed hand quietly opens. Dalit is not mine. Dalit I am not. Dalit is not my self. To a person who believed that living as a Dalit was right, this is what the Buddha said. Non-self is that practice: letting go, little by little, of the “I” assembled out of scraps of meaning.

Read this way, sabbe saṅkhārā aniccā is not “all things pass away.” What is formed is not absolute. And sabbe saṅkhārā dukkhā is not “this world is suffering.” What is formed produces suffering. Then what are these formed things? Put the three lines side by side:

All formations are impermanent.
All formations are suffering.
All dhammas are non-atman.

The first two speak about formations. But in the third, and only the third, the subject switches to dhammas. This arrangement is no accident. The Buddha deliberately set dharma in the same position as the formations. Which is to say: dharma too is nothing but a formed thing.

And if it is formed, it is not absolute. Dharma produces suffering. Do not bind dharma to your self. The three marks are not the nature of existence. They are a teaching for letting go of meaning, addressed to people who have bound meaning to themselves and are suffering because of it.

Can you feel what this means? To people being exploited and hurt by a cult, the Buddha is saying: that truth of yours is not absolute, because it is a formed thing. To a woman enduring her husband’s violence because she wants to be a good mother, he is saying: that image of the good mother is not absolute, because it is a formed thing.

So the truth of suffering is not a verdict that life is miserable. It too is a teaching addressed to people who are not experiencing their suffering as suffering: this, right here, is suffering. Illness and injury are not a pile of bad karma to be overcome. They are suffering. Parting from what you love, not getting what you want — these are not trials. They are suffering. What does not go as you wish: that is suffering, the Buddha is saying. It was an attempt to expose the suffering that meaning had covered over and hidden. He is not saying everything in this world is suffering. He is not saying rise above your suffering, either. He is making people notice that the state they are in right now is suffering. To be exploited by a cult is suffering. To be beaten by your husband is suffering. That is what he is saying.

The Buddha saw it. He saw what is left when you take the meaning away. Not stations fixed by the order of the cosmos, but people dominating and people being exploited. Those with a monopoly on authority, and the outcasts who were not allowed to deviate.

If we, living now, saw the people called untouchables, we would see their suffering. But the Indians of that time saw bad karma and cosmic order there. The untouchable does not change. But depending on who is seeing, the meaning changes — just as an American cannot see the value of a 1,000-som note from Uzbekistan. Just as a child who doesn’t know its meaning sees the American flag as nothing but a bright pattern. What the Buddha took issue with was that difference in what is seen. Suffering covered over by meaning.

Twenty-five hundred years of misunderstanding

The Buddha taught that clinging to meaning produces suffering. But this was not a call to convert away from Brahmanism. He saw that even his own teaching could one day turn into a “meaning” — a new dharma for people to cling to. Which is exactly why he gave the parable of the raft, so it would not be taken as absolute. Why he gave the Kālāma Sutta, so that not even a teacher’s words would be believed blindly. It is so because it is so. That attitude is nothing other than what makes meaning absolute. The Buddha was plainly resisting the hardening of his own words into meaning. And yet, unfortunately, it was misunderstood all the same.

Because —

Human beings make meaning, make it their own, and defend it.

That is not a trait of the Indians of that time. It is a trait of human beings. There is no region on earth without religion. No region without states. If there is an exception, it is a place where nobody lives. Human beings and meaning are deeply bound together. You could say that meaning is what makes us human. We are the same today, and the Buddha’s own disciples were the same.

And so, inevitably, what the Buddha warned against happened to his own teaching.

His disciples came, in time, not to practise the teaching but to possess it. Not to understand it but to defend it. Not to use it, but to be used by it. The method for loosening meaning was itself clenched, made absolute, and turned into a truth.

Impermanence became a worldview: all things flow. Non-self became a philosophical proposition: the self does not exist. Suffering became a bleak verdict: life is suffering. The words meant to untie were tied back up, tightly.

You can watch the process in the Abhidharma, that project of analysing the teaching into ever finer parts. Break the person and the world down into components that cannot be divided further. And then those components acquired outlines, were catalogued, and came to be treated as things that really exist. The analysis meant to dissolve substance produced a new inventory of substances.

The Buddha has a parable of the raft. You use a raft to cross to the far shore. But once you have crossed, you leave the raft behind. There is no need to cling to it and carry it on your back. And yet the tradition has spent much of its history defending the raft as though it were the destination — debating what the correct metaphysics of impermanence is, what the precise ontology of non-self is. That is, taking the meanings that should have been held loosely and letting go of, and making them absolute all over again, this time at the level of the institution.

Much of what we call “Buddhism” is made of this misunderstanding. A teaching for letting go of meaning, not let go of but clenched instead — layer upon layer of that.

I am not saying Buddhists are fools. I am not saying it was misread on purpose. If anything they were diligent; they took the Buddha’s teaching seriously and tried to practise it. It was an utterly natural human thing to do. We want to believe that what we believe is absolute — because we want to believe that we ourselves, having internalized that meaning, are right. But that natural human thing was also the cause of people’s suffering. It was the very thing the Buddha was trying to resist.

If we read the early teaching as a practice for undoing the absolutization of meaning, then it also undoes the absolutization of the traditional interpretation of Buddhism itself. But Buddhists will not want that. Because they are already holding that “truth” tightly. Because they have internalized that meaning. Because that meaning is what constitutes them as Buddhists — as people who keep and practise the correct teaching.

I am not saying abandon Buddhism. Not if it isn’t suffering. Not if it produces no suffering at all. But the Buddha said that what is formed is suffering. An absolutized meaning can justify any suffering whatsoever. So: does Buddhism produce suffering?

In countries where Theravada flourishes, there are boys who weep as their heads are shaved and they are ordained. The adults see meaning in it. For the family. For the village. For the boy himself. I wanted to live as an ordinary boy. I wanted to play with my friends. I wanted to stay with my family. The adults do not see that boy’s suffering.

There is the same structure here as twenty-five hundred years ago. People who accepted the suffering of a low station because of meaning; boys forced into the suffering of an ordination they did not want, because of meaning. Is there any difference?

There is the Vietnamese monk who burned himself alive. There are monks who undertake the thousand-day mountain austerity. There are monks who take up weapons and join in violence, saying they are sending the enemy to enlightenment. There are monks who take part in the exploitation of animals, saying that the Buddha ate meat, so they may eat meat too.

There is suffering there. But those people cannot see the suffering. They see the meaning the suffering has been given.

Any sacred teaching, once made absolute, can produce suffering. The Buddha’s teaching grants no exemption to his own teaching, to Buddhism. Can you say, of the “truth” you are holding in your own hand, that it will never produce any suffering at all? When even the Buddha’s sacred words have produced suffering beyond counting.

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Ray Naito is an independent researcher based in British Columbia, working at the intersection of the sociology of knowledge and early Buddhism.