Putting it in context

Apart from the universal law or truth, the other aspect of the traditional Dharma is the teachings given in specific times and places, by the Buddha and by other great teachers of the Buddhist tradition. These teachings are often believed, to a greater or lesser extent, to be a result of the skilful means of the enlightened, being exactly the right words that needed to be uttered to a particular person, in a particular context, at a particular time. This skilful means is particularly stressed in the Mahayana as part of the training of the bodhisattva, a being dedicated to saving all other beings who should thus be truly flexible in the way he/she communicates. Among engineers, the bodhisattva will speak the language of engineers; among Muslims, the language of Muslims, etc.

Skilful means can otherwise be thought of as the skill of education, and involves bringing down the universal Dharma to a level of particularity. It is very obviously sound. If people are to benefit from Buddhist teachings and practices, they need to hear them in a language they will understand. What would be rather odd, though, is if a particular example of the contextual Dharma were to be taken out of its context and represent the universal Dharma. Supposing the Buddha had talked to a convention of engineers and explained the Middle Way to them in terms of weight-bearing ratios, then for ever afterwards, whenever the Middle Way was mentioned, it could not be done in any other way than in terms of weight-bearing ratios. This would seem rather odd, but it is exactly what has happened in a good deal of the Buddhist tradition: specific contextual manifestations of the Dharma have been confused with the universal Dharma.

The largest contextual manifestation of the Dharma is that of the Buddha himself. He appeared in a specific context (northern India) and a specific time (approximately 500 BCE). All the teachings he is recorded as giving should thus be treated as contextual Dharma directed to the people of that time and place, unless we can also find genuinely universal teachings (such as that of the Middle Way) amongst them. However, the default position should not be (as many Buddhists seem to assume) that the Buddha’s teachings are to be treated as universal until shown to be contextual: instead, they should be assumed to be contextual until proven universal. Of course the Buddha will have been addressing particular people with words that related to their circumstances, but these words may or may not be relevant to ours at all. To be relevant to our time his words need both to be justifiable, and to imply other points that would impact on our practice and experience in our own context.

Of course, just because a piece of Dharma is contextual rather than universal does not mean that we have nothing to learn from it: but it does mean that we are in the position of overhearing a conversation that is intended for someone else. That other context may have concerns that overlap with our own as a matter of chance – but there is no reason to assume that it always will. This is why reading the Buddhist scriptures is largely an appropriate pursuit for an antiquary: from Buddhist scriptures we largely learn about other people’s lives as we do from any other historical document, and it is only here and there that we can gather scraps that are either universal or coincident with our own context.

Even the style of the Buddhist scriptures derives from their use for another purpose than the one we use them for today. The scriptures of the Pali Canon were used for memorisation and chanting before being written down, so they are full of repetitions and memorable patterns: they were not produced for thoughtful individual reading at all. Even once you have got past the style, the remaining material often involves highly contextual discussions, which may be of historical or human interest, or show the Buddha as an inspiring figure. However, the content of the universal Dharma in the whole library of the Pali Canon could probably be summarised in a few pages at most. One has to pan a great deal of water to discover a few tiny nuggets of gold. To describe the Pali Canon as a whole as “Dharma” is a bit like describing the whole river Yukon as “gold” because those few tiny nuggets have been found in it.

We cannot create our own contextual Dharma simply by borrowing from someone else’s contextual Dharma – or if we do, its truth will be a matter of accident. As argued earlier in the book, we also cannot justify contextual Dharma by anything other than universal Dharma, meaning a connection with the Middle Way, rather than appeal to tradition or to metaphysics. Teachings need to be derived from justified principles, not the other way round.

Note that I do not go to the post-modernist extreme of saying that all Dharma is contextual, or that all truth is context-dependent. The false assumption made by post-modernists here is that we are bound by the limitations of our language, which cannot describe any universal truth. If that language is restricted to principles about method, however, it can be universal in the same sense that scientific language can be universal: that is, interpretable (or discoverable) by all (even if it can also be misunderstood). Language cannot be universal and also try to represent a state of affairs, for the way we think things are is necessarily conditioned by our individual or cultural experience, and ever shifting. Instead, the language of universal Dharma needs to be confined to the question of how to approach and interpret whatever we experience, so as to distinguish justified belief from falsehood. Inevitably, then, the language of universal Dharma will be a philosophical language. Such philosophical language is at least capable of its own type of justification – a universal practical objectivity.

Continue to Chapter 8 part c 'Righteous Christians and holy Hindus'

Return to Chapter 8 index page

Return to 'Trouble with Buddhism' index page

Return to moralobjectivity.net home page