moralobjectivity.net: copyright Robert M. Ellis 2008
'The Trouble with Buddhism' Chapter 6 (The trouble with Reality) part a
Some years ago, I attended an academic conference of British philosophers. At that time, I was less doubtful than I am now about using the term “Buddhist” to describe myself, but to openly confess to being a Buddhist amongst analytic philosophers was often a complete conversation stopper. Eventually I started to have a conversation with one philosopher who was at least mildly interested in the fact that I was a Buddhist. I tried to explain some of the key practical points of what I thought Buddhism was about.
“So how,” he then asked, “do you reconcile all that with the belief that the universe doesn’t really exist?”
I don’t think I gave a particularly coherent reply, as I was rather surprised to find out that I didn’t believe that the universe really existed, and that it was taken for granted by Western philosophers that this is what Buddhists believed. At the time I thought he had got it wrong, but over time it’s become clearer to me that this idea hasn’t reached common belief out of nowhere. It is indeed an aspect of what Buddhists commonly assume.
The view that the universe doesn’t really exist is called idealism. Buddhism is idealist in the sense that it believes that all our everyday experience is based on delusion. Those who gain enlightenment learn to pierce this delusion and understand things as they really are, but in the meantime, due to our delusion (and the greed and hatred it gives rise to) we are affected by Reality without really understanding it. Thus Buddhism is idealist as far as the unenlightened are concerned, but realist as far as the enlightened are concerned.
Another way of putting this is to claim that conditioned existence is delusory, because it is only the product of changing conditions which we grasp only with a deluded mind. However, in traditional Buddhist teaching there is a further Reality beyond this which is not conditioned in the same way:
There is, monks, an unborn, and unbecome, an unmade, and uncompounded; if monks, there were not here this unborn, unbecome, unmade, uncompounded, there would not here be an escape from the born, the become, the made, the compounded[1]. (Udana 8)
The idealism in relation to the unenlightened here depends on the realism in relation to the enlightened and vice-versa. We are only supposed to be able to recognise that we experience an unreal universe because there are those who have experienced the real one and who can make a comparison. However, belief that there are or have been such people (the enlightened) and that they have experienced the real depends purely on faith, as I have already argued in chapter 2. This claim about an ultimate reality is no less remote and unprovable for us than, say, the claim that God made the universe.
In a universe in which 99.99% (or more) of the inhabitants are deluded, there is also no way of telling whether those who claim to have experienced reality are not deluded as well, but have just experienced another type of delusion or another level of delusion. If they are wrong, the whole idea of unreality collapses because there is no measure of reality to compare it with. The idea of basing a standard of reality on so few people is comparable, say, to calling everyone else “stupid” because one in a billion has an IQ over 200, and having an IQ over 200 is the only basis for not being stupid. This means that even highly intelligent people would be “stupid”, just as, according to traditional Buddhism, many extremely wise people are still living in an unreal fantasy-world.
The drawbacks of this approach are obvious. The type of delusion that Buddhism is concerned with is that of not recognising and responding adequately to conditions, which is something we fail to do to varying degrees. Delusion lies on a continuum, yet enlightenment is apparently an all or nothing affair. It has to be an all or nothing affair so long as it is linked with the belief that the enlightened get to understand Reality. Reality is an all or nothing affair, as you either understand it or you don’t: anyone who hasn’t got there yet may be wrong.
Once again, Buddhists have weighed themselves down with metaphysical baggage that is completely unnecessary. If we saw reality as a continuum rather than as absolute Reality, and the understanding of it as also a continuum, the model of spiritual progress in Buddhism could accord much more closely to people’s experience.
To do this would not mean giving up on there being a Reality. Perhaps there is, or perhaps there are just endless layers of interpretation and differing types of experience: we don’t know. What we experience is delusion, which we become aware of when our assumptions are proved false by subsequent events: we do not experience Reality. To be able to unpeel layers of delusion does not require knowledge of Reality, only a careful interpretation of our experience. If we are honest, then, we should give up all pretensions not just to direct knowledge of Reality, but also to indirect knowledge through the appeal to the enlightened.
To do this would mean not giving up any guarantees that existed before. Believing in a Reality, and believing that this Reality is communicated by the enlightened, does not give anyone a guarantee either that this belief is correct or that they have grasped the teachings of the enlightened correctly. So in dropping the pretension of Reality, no-one is left any more uncertain than they were before. Relative experience always had to be the basis of judgement in any case, as this is all we ever have to go on.
Buddhism without an appeal to Reality would not be getting lost in nihilism. It would not lose its basis for objective values, because these were always based on relative progress known through experience in any case. Instead it would be returning to the
Buddhism without an appeal to Reality would also no longer be idealist, because its idealism regarding the unenlightened, as I noted above, depends on its realism regarding the enlightened. If you accept the implications of the admission that there may only be a continuum of reality, then we are also no longer condemned to Delusion as an inevitable fixture until we are enlightened, only to delusion as a relative experience. The universe we experience is not necessarily unreal.
This also seems by far the most sensible way to interpret the world around us. As I look out of the window as I write this, there is a young olive tree, glistening in the sunlight and swaying slightly in the breeze. Is it not likely that there is in fact an olive tree there? Granted that my view of the olive tree is partial, and that there will always be some degree of doubt about it, nevertheless, there being a real olive tree there, rather than an illusory one that is only in my mind seems by far the most plausible interpretation of my consistent experience of it.