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The argument in the previous section is likely to leave other questions. What exactly counts as metaphysics? Is it really possible to separate metaphysics from claims about what can be experienced? Is Buddhist metaphysics not different from other metaphysics?

These kinds of issues have really not been clarified by the Buddhist tradition. The Buddha gave four metaphysical topics that he said it would not be helpful to give answers about: the end of the universe, the end of time, the existence of the self or soul, and the continued existence of the Buddha after death[1]. As with the Buddha’s teachings on the Middle Way, the way to make these teachings useful in contexts other than the Buddha’s is to interpret them as examples, and work out the general principle which makes a topic metaphysical and thus not useful to speculate about, which could be applied to other examples. However, the Buddhist tradition has not done this. Instead, it has largely limited its discussion to these particular examples, which reflect the metaphysical concerns of the Buddha’s time rather than ours. It has also succeeded in removing a lot of the power and insight from the Buddha’s teaching on this point by claiming that the Buddha did in fact know the answers to these questions, but that he did not consider his disciples ready to understand the answers[2].

If it is interpreted as just a piece of esotericism, then the Buddhist tradition has completely misunderstood the insight that can be gained from the Buddha’s teaching here. It is not that there are metaphysical truths, but they can only be known by the enlightened and cannot be expressed in words. If you believe this, then you have no access to the truth from an unenlightened state, and you are inevitably led back into dependence on revelation from the Buddha, and thus abandonment of the Middle Way. The Buddha’s point is much more profound than this: there are no metaphysical truths. If “truth” takes a metaphysical form then you are just barking up the wrong tree. If the enlightened have grasped anything, it is that truth lies beyond metaphysics.

Take the example of the beginning or the end of time. There is no “answer” to the question as to when the universe began, because any possible answer will still raise the further question “What happened before then?”. The Big Bang Theory may well be correct, but it is not about the beginning of the universe. Physicists simply do not know (though they may speculate) what happened before the Big Bang. Even if further theories about what happened before the Big Bang turn out to be supportable with evidence in the future, we will still always be able to ask what happened before that. The question is fruitless because we know when we start asking it that we can never possibly find an answer. It is necessarily true that all answers to this question will be speculative and the pursuit of it will be a waste of time.

What makes it a waste of time is the lack of relationship of any possible answer to the question to any possible experience. Without such a relationship, not only are answers going to be speculative, but also any such answers (even if they happen, by chance, to be correct) have no further moral or spiritual relationship to our practical experience. Christians may claim, for example, that because God made the universe, everything in the universe is essentially good. However, neither “God” nor “essentially good” have any purchase on our experience. Whatever happens, even if the whole universe was a hell of endless suffering, it would not be incompatible with it being essentially good, for what is essentially good does not have to be good in our experience. Any possible experience is compatible with the claim that God exists and created a good universe, or that he didn’t. Explaining away the apparent counter-examples, such as Auschwitz or toothache, is child’s play to a practised theologian. So, whether God exists and created the universe and whether it is essentially good or not, we are under no new moral obligations compared to the ones we had before, since moral obligations can only be found in experience. Similarly, God’s existence or non-existence yields no new spiritual insights, because these too need to be experienced.

Christian dogmas can easily be identified as metaphysical, but even those who readily acknowledge the uselessness of such dogma may still defend other types of metaphysics. For example, it may be claimed that some scientific theories are metaphysical, because they can never be conclusively proved in their own right, even though they imply other theories that can. Nevertheless, these “metaphysical” scientific theories have practical implications, and thus are not subject to the same criticisms as dogmatic metaphysics. We cannot prove through observation, for example, whether electrons exist or not. However, theories involving electrons have explanatory value, and are consistent with other theories that do relate to experience – hence they are not metaphysical. The same is true of the theory of the Middle Way itself, which cannot be directly proved, but only applied and proved fruitful indirectly.

It may also be the case that the boundaries of metaphysics are fuzzy. With some sorts of claims, it may be doubtful whether or not they are metaphysical: however, the fuzziness of boundaries should not stop us using the term “metaphysics” any more than it should stop us using any other useful concept. It may not be clear, as the suburbs gradually peter out, where the town ends and the countryside begins, but this does not stop us usefully using the terms “town” and “countryside”. Nor does the concept of metaphysics require non-metaphysical claims to be conclusively provable through experience: the point is that metaphysical claims are clearly neither verifiable nor falsifiable, and that their promotion involves avoidance of the healthy uncertainty surrounding every other kind of claim.

If we take the Buddha’s metaphysical questions merely as examples from his own time, there are many other kinds of claims in our own time that are clearly metaphysical. They are the basis of endless, fruitless argument, both by philosophers and by ordinary people. The answers to the questions could not possibly make any difference to anyone’s life, because any answer is consistent with any experience or the justification of any action. However, people nevertheless believe these claims to be the essential basis of their beliefs. Some of the important ones of our time are as follows

The problem with holding beliefs on any of these questions is that they are inevitably dogmatic. The only possible motivation for holding them is not a justification based on experience, but attachment to an idea believed in by a group. Believing in God, for example, will help to gain the approval of the other people in my society who believe in God. I can then be easily manipulated by religious leaders who tell me what God’s instructions are. These instructions could be anything – for example killing my only son, going on a Crusade, or defending the interests of the ruling classes – and I would have no way of checking out whether they were really God’ s instructions or not. If they seem evil, they will be presented as serving a higher good known only to God.

Some positive effects are often attributed to metaphysical beliefs, when it is the practical insights that accompany them that enable those positive effects. For example, was Mother Theresa enabled to care for the dying in Calcutta by her belief in God, or by her practical compassion and awareness of the needs of the people she served? Well, one can imagine an atheist doing what she did practically, but one cannot imagine someone without compassion doing so: it is clearly the compassion that is essential, not the belief. It is when Mother Theresa invoked her metaphysical beliefs directly that her actions became much more morally questionable – for example her opposition to any larger changes in society to prevent the causes of poverty amongst the people she served, because she did not believe it to be the will of God.

Metaphysics is at best a waste of time, but more commonly the source of evil. Having a fixed idea in our minds that is not open to examination, we do deeds that are out of harmony with conditions. In more traditional Buddhist terms, we act on the basis of ignorance. Some metaphysics is explicitly invoked to justify evil, as in the case of Islamist terrorism. Other metaphysics is only lurking in background assumptions and would take much analysis (either philosophical or psychological) to bring out: for example the effects of an assumed metaphysical belief that someone else is not as fully human as you are, or of the belief that the consequences of one’s actions are unreal.

If this is the central point offered by the Buddha, then far from being universally recognised by Buddhists, it is at best inconsistently applied and at worst totally ignored. For most of the Buddhist tradition, far from avoiding metaphysics, actively promotes it. “Buddhist metaphysics” is even accepted as a field of study without being considered an oxymoron.

We have already mentioned some of the metaphysical beliefs to be found in Buddhism. The following are strong candidates for the label “metaphysical”:

None of these beliefs, at least when commonly put into a metaphysical form, bear any justification through experience. Whether the Buddha did or did not achieve enlightenment, it is my practical understanding and inspiration that supports my spiritual progression, not this. Similarly, since we cannot even imagine a world that we do not assume to be conditioned, we are in no position to find out through experience whether the world actually is completely conditioned or not (see chapter 5 for more on this issue).

The question of metaphysics is subject to much Buddhist exceptionalism. Buddhists often seem to think that other religions have metaphysics of the type the Buddha criticised, but they do not really, or their metaphysics is different. The Buddha’s criticism of metaphysics, in fact, primarily seems to have the function of preventing Buddhists from really asking the same questions about their own beliefs as the ones they ask about others. It is assumed that because the Buddha’s doctrines contain a criticism of metaphysics then Buddhism cannot possibly be metaphysical. The Buddha’s criticism of metaphysics commonly serves as a spoiler for criticisms of Buddhism, or as a diversion, but it is certainly not applied to the central doctrines of the religion or to their interpretation.

Much of the rest of this book is concerned in one way or another with Buddhist metaphysics, and Buddhism’s slippage from the Middle Way into eternalism. Each of the areas of metaphysical claims mentioned above will be discussed in more detail, and the metaphysics differentiated from the useful associated ideas. For the moment though, I want to complete this chapter with more discussion of the sources of knowledge commonly used in Buddhism: that is Buddhist teachers and scriptures.

[1] This formula, often known as the avyakrta or ‘Silence of the Buddha’, is found at several points in the Pali Canon. One of the best-known is the Culamalunkya Sutta (Majjhima Nikaya 63)

[2] The idea that the Buddha actually knew about an unconditioned reality is often supported by the passage in the Udana (section 8) quoted here in chapter 6: “There is, monks, an unborn, unbecome…”

The trouble with Buddhist metaphysics