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'The Trouble with Buddhism' Chapter 2 (The sources of justified belief in Buddhism) part b

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Justified beliefs from the Middle Way

One of the major insights of the Buddhist tradition is that our experience (or our interpretation of experience) is often distorted by greed, hatred and ignorance. The version of events on which we judge our actions is often created by wishful thinking rather than the fullest attempt to uncover the truth of the matter. We make ourselves believe in someone’s virtues because we desire them, or we go to war in Iraq in the belief that this will contribute to reducing terrorism. We can even delude ourselves that we are following higher spiritual teachings whilst following the basest of motives. Our experience, it seems, is not to be trusted to let us know what is true or what is good.

Yet we also have no alternative. We are trapped within our own experience, and everything is mediated through it. We cannot simply escape from our own skins into some sudden godlike eminence, where we know the truth for sure. Even if it is true that there are or have been enlightened beings who have got beyond all greed, hatred and ignorance (let us grant it for now, though this may well be a fantasy too), we cannot avoid interpreting what they say or do through our own unenlightened experience. Whatever we believe, the justification for it will have to come through our own flawed experience, because that’s all we’ve got that does not involve the delusion of some leap beyond it.

However, there is a way forward in this situation that does not involve either the deluded god-fantasy or, on the other hand, a slide into relativism where no justified belief is possible and there are only many jostling opinions as good as each other. This way forward is offered by the Middle Way, which provides us with a way of testing the conclusions of experience for objectivity. Science may be helpful in pursuing the Middle Way, but the Middle Way goes much further than science, encompassing objectivity in relation to our internal experiences, and objectivity in moral and spiritual judgements, not just objectivity in relation to publicly observable factual claims.

The Middle Way allows us to become more objective because it consists in the avoidance of both eternalist metaphysics on the one hand and nihilist metaphysics on the other. It alerts us to the kinds of dogmatic assumptions we might make that will trap us in illusion, and thus enables us to cast off burdens of falsehood, even if we are never sure of having reached complete truth. What we do know is that experience does not offer either positive or negative certainties. We cannot ever say either that we have reached the complete truth, or that there is no truth. Instead, we can work with the information that experience provides us with to get ever closer to the truth.

We do this, however, not by developing a final verbal account of it, such as a revelation or a scientific law, but by becoming gradually more objective as people. Objectivity as offered by the Middle Way is dispositional (based on the tendencies of people) and incremental (involving gradual change, never reaching an absolute point). It does not give us a verbal description of the absolute truth, but it provides two rocks of falsehood between which to navigate, eternalism and nihilism. Broadly speaking, eternalism involves the positive assertion of absolute metaphysical claims, whilst nihilism involves their equally absolute denial.

At the time of the Buddha, the predominant positive and negative metaphysical claims which people tended to become attached to were those concerning the presence or absence of the self. Belief in the existence of an absolute and permanent self or soul, which existed unchanging through an infinite series of lives, was linked in early Hindu thought with belief in the moral laws of the universe, which provided the standard according to which the self could be judged. A meritorious life where moral credit had been earned would result in improved status in one’s next reincarnation, but on the other hand bad deeds would result in moral debits and a worse position in future lives. This was the eternalism of the Buddha’s day, which formed the basis of moral order in society.

The nihilism of the Buddha’s day consisted in a denial of this: the belief that there was no permanent self, and thus no continuity between one life and the next. Without this there was no basis of judgement of right and wrong, and thus the complete denial of the permanent self was associated with the denial of all moral values.

The major mistake made by traditional Buddhism in interpreting the Middle Way is to identify eternalism and nihilism with their specific manifestations in the time of the Buddha, rather than generalising to the more universal insight that underlies it. Thus, many Buddhists will simply tell you that eternalism consists in the belief in the eternal self, and nihilism (or annihilationism) consists in denial of the eternal self. If you take this narrow and limited approach, the Middle Way simply becomes a belief in the effects of actions continuing into future lives as a personal causal link rather than as an unchanging self, (the issues of rebirth that this raises will be explored more in chapter 4). The Middle Way thus betrayed becomes merely an irrelevant piece of metaphysics rather than the practical solution to the problems of philosophy that it potentially offers.

For who cares about the permanent existence of the self in the West today? Nobody is better or worse because of believing in it or not. Believing in it may possibly have been the basis of the moral order in the Indian society of the Buddha’s time, but it can hardly be said to be the basis of any moral motivation today. Not even the traditional Christian equivalent, the threat of heaven or hell following the judgement of God, any longer inspires more than a small minority to moral belief. Nor, on the other hand, does disbelief in it have either a particularly moral effect or a particularly immoral effect. Reincarnation, rebirth, and the soul are simply moral and spiritual irrelevancies, the concern only of a few speculative theologians. Thus a bunch of people wandering into the Western context claiming that the Middle Way between believing in future lives and not believing in them is somehow the basis of all our salvations are deservedly ignored. Presented in this way, it is not surprising if even many Buddhists just find the Middle Way irrelevant and forget about it.

No, the eternalism and nihilism of today are found in the types of metaphysics that people are actually attached to and care about: for example the saving power of Jesus, the “Pro-life” convictions, the Fundamentalist belief in the word of the Bible or of the Qur’an, the belief that following “nature” will cure our ills; or on the other hand, consumerism, youth culture, conventional values, and hedonistic excess, all of which place immediate beliefs or desires before any higher or more objective beliefs. There are other kinds of moral absolutes in currency today, and other ways of denying them. If Buddhism is to be relevant, its account of the Middle Way needs to encompass these.

However, the Middle Way should also not be too strongly identified with the “sensible” conventional middle ground of opinion. If society is heavily influenced by metaphysical assumptions, then the Middle Way can be quite radical in challenging them. If major aspects of people’s moral behaviour are hugely adrift from facing up to conditions (as is the case in many Western people’s attitude to eating meat and dairy products, for example) then the Middle Way may be quite radical in urging an objective need to address those conditions. Radical changes can result from applying it, even if the need to address psychological conditions still forms a part of the picture. It is not easy to change people’s habits, and much easier to delude ourselves that we have changed when we have not. The Middle Way always demands real change rather than short-lived fake change, but the demands may still be radical for all that, and despite the name there is nothing essentially moderate about it.

So, however much it may have been neglected or misunderstood by Buddhists, the Middle Way does offer a way of justifying our beliefs. Such justification is based on experience of all kinds, examined through reason. If we avoid the dogmatic extremes offered by metaphysics, we are at least equipped for engaging with the truth. The justified beliefs it yields will never be absolute, but they can be objective, moving beyond our previous limiting assumptions. It offers us a far more reliable approach to justifying our beliefs than any supposed revelation, for there are no short cuts to the truth, only a long slow process of peeling away delusion.

Continue to next section of chapter 2: 'The trouble with Buddhist metaphysics'

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