Culture, Knowledge, Relativism and Bududahama – II

Before answering the questions raised by Prof. N. A. de S. Amaratunga it would be beneficial to at least some of the readers if the objective existence is discussed without referring to any texts in Bududahama or western science or any other tradition. It is clear that the objective existence is something that has no “objective” validity. There is nobody who can establish, prove, show, ascertain etc., objectively that objects (including sathva) exist independent of the mind. Objective existence implies that objects exist irrespective of any observer, and if there are observers then the objects are independent of the observers. In other words an object should be the same for all observers. Thus a ball is a ball to any observer and different observers using different languages would mean the same thing whether they call a ball, a ball, panduva, bolaya or whatever. Different observers may have different views of a statue but a statue exists independent of the observers and whether it is observed from the front sides or from any other angle. These observations are different views of a statue existing independently of the observers from different angles. Or else there may be close ups, zooms etc. of the same statue as captured by cameras placed at different positions.

Now how do we know that irrespective and independent of the observers the statue exists. It is nothing but knowledge and no knowledge is independent of the mind. Whether Prof. de S. Amaratunga would reply or not I cannot resist asking him a question. How does he know that an object exists, say the statue exists, if he does not have a mind? It has to be emphasised that the mind exists relative to the mind and has no objective existence in “Nirmanathmaka Sapekshathavadaya” as described in “Mage Lokaya” and other works published by me. If Prof. de S. Amaratunga calls it Mahayana it is immaterial to me as my views are in agreement with Buddha Desana. Could Prof. de S. Amaratunga explain objective existence without appealing to the mind that also has no existence independent of the mind?

Objective existence is also a concept, and all concepts are created by the mind. There is no concept as far as observers are concerned that is independent of the mind. Thus objective existence is also a concept created by the mind and hence objective existence is also subjective. Has Prof. de S. Amaratunga pondered on how an animal other than a human being grasps what the humans observe as a ball? This question is not clearly formulated as it could mean that it is asked to “describe” how a ball is grasped by an elephant for example. It is not the case as an elephant could “sense” much more or less than what a human being grasps as a ball. Our knowledge is relative to our senses and a fish who (that, if necessary for some readers) could sense what is known as an electromagnetic field may see the sea differently from what the human divers see.

A well known Sinhala novelist has told a newspaper that the cup before him existed therefore the cup has an objective existence. For him it is as simple as that! However, what he does not realise is that the cup, exists are his concepts created by his mind and relative to his culture. Any concept is created by an observer relative to his mind, sense organs and culture. If the cup was shown to a member of the Vedda Community say hundred years ago, would he have come out with the response “koppa pojja” or something to that effect? I have described this phenomenon using the example of an “udakkiaya” type “chairs” in “Mage Lokaya”. Perhaps Prof. de S. Amaratunga could write a critique of “Mage Lokaya”.

Of course it does not mean that each and every observer creates all the concepts he uses. Most of the concepts are introduced to an observer by his culture through parents, relatives, teachers, media people etc., and it may be that he adds his own flavour to the concept that he had been introduced by the culture. In any event no observer without a mind can have the concept of objective existence neither can he express objective existence without using concepts created by the mind. The objective existence is nothing but a concept created by the mind through induction which is a process “exercised” by the mind. We as observers are introduced to concepts such as cups, trees, flowers, animals etc., and since almost all human beings experience the same cups now a days, and trees we tend to think that all observers have the same experience. This is an abstract generalization of the mind which comes to the conclusion that cups, at least trees exist independent of the mind and the observer. A tree is a tree for all observers independent of the observer is a generalization and an abstraction extracted through the process of induction and the tree has been elevated to an objective tree in the process. The fact that all human beings have the “same sense organs” and “similar minds” enables the mind to make this abstraction and generalisation and hence at least some human beings believe in objective existence.

This is only a fraction of ideas I have expressed on objective existence and it is very unlikely that Prof. de S. Amaratunga, the Sinhala novelist would have missed all that I have written in Sinhala over the years. I wonder why he has taken upon himself the task of objecting to relative existence in English at this juncture. Of course, there are half baked relativists in the west but that does not imply that I am imitating them in rejecting objective existence. Even in the theories of Relativity both Special and General, Einstein was interested in expressing objective existence and not relativities. It is true he considered different observers and how they observe (measure) phenomena, but his theories more than anything else express the invariants that are independent of the observers.

In Newtonian or Galilean Relativity, the velocities of objects relative to different observers may be relative. However, Newtonian Mechanics and in general Newtonian Physics depend on the invariance of distances between objects as measured by different observers. In other words the distance between any two objects is the same for all observers irrespective of the velocities of the objects relative to the observers. In Galilean or Newtonian Relativity the so called objectivity is regarding the distances between objects. However, in Einsteinian Relativity the distance between two objects do not remain the same for all observers neither the time interval between two events as measured by different observers.

What is observed to be the same between two events is what is known as the space –time interval between two events. This invariance of the space – time interval between two events is a corner stone of both the Special Theory of Relativity and General Theory of Relativity and the invariance of the space - time interval is a so called objective fact independent of the observers in both theories. The various disciplines of western science including Theories of Relativity are based on this objectivity though objectivity has no objective existence. What is said here is that there is no way of proving, establishing, showing etc., of objective existence or objectivity in an “objective” manner.

(To be continued)

Copyright Prof. Nalin De Silva

The existence of objects – II

We return after more than a month to the discussion on “the existence of objects” the first installment of which appeared on 1st August 2012. The so called objects are creations of the mind and can be considered to be atmavadi in Theravada Bududahama. It is anicca, dukka, anatta and shunya according the teaching of Sammasambuddha, which are not concepts though we attempt to understand anicca as impermanence using the concept of permanence. It is anicca, dukka, anatta and shunya that we do not understand thus extending our sansaric journey. We attempt to understand anicca, dukka, anatta and shunya in terms of concepts due to our ignorance. Unfortunately most of us do not realize there is no conceptual understanding of Nibbana, which cannot be expressed in terms of words.

If anybody thinks that Sammasambuddha has expressed Nibbana in words he/she should give the Sutta in which it has been done so without trying to claim that Nibbana can be expressed in words. If the western intellectuals consider Bududahama is not transparent as a result let them think so as we should not distort Bududahama in order to satisfy a few theses examiners and such others living in the west. The aim of the Buddhist scholars should be to achieve Nibbana rather than to get higher degrees.

We are entangled in a conceptual web, and as has been mentioned earlier it is not necessary to have words in order to formulate concepts. The babies also have their concepts as citta rupa and any satva as described in Buddha Desana too have concepts. We all have the concept of “I” though we know that there is no atma. However, when we claim that there is no atma it does not mean that we have vidya about it. Vidya is not used as a term for western science in this context and it is unfortunate that we refer to western science as vidya in Sinhala.

The concepts are illusions created by the mind, and I refer the interested readers to the book “Concept and reality” by Ven. K. Nanananda Thero, not as an authoritative work on the subject but as a “short cut” to understand Buddha Desana on concepts. I read this book more than twenty five years ago when I was having problems with the conceptual foundations of western science and it helped me to understand the drawbacks of science as such.

Though I have understood that there is no “I” as such, I have not realized it as my understanding is still conceptual. If I had realized that there is no “I” as such, I would not be writing this article, as I would have released my concepts except when they are useful in order to engage in routine work. I am not as bhagyavath as Rahathan Vahanse to release ny conceptual baggage together with my tanha. I am attached to things including concepts and it would take kalpas for me to drop my conceptual baggage.

We consider ourselves to be real first and then formulate other concepts. This is in contradiction to the so called postmodernist views on I and the other where I is determined by the other. Having grasped ourselves as real and existing we consider our creations in terms of concepts also to be real. The reality of not only of ourselves but of others is only a creation of the mind due to moha and it is finally the moha that has to be given up if one is interested in achieving Nibbana. Now I have used the words if one is interested when there is no one as such. There is no one to achieve Nibbana and in a way achieving Nibbana is also misleading.

Unfortunately we have to use concepts in discussing these matters and the most difficult things to get rid of are concepts. Very often it was the Brahmins who lived in the time of Sammasambuddha who argued with the Bhagayavatun Vahanse conceptually but not the ordinary people such as Sopaka, Suneetha, who were not tied down to concepts. The intellectuals find it very difficult to get rid of or release concepts unless one has fulfilled parami dhamma in Sansara.

There are no objects as such existing even for what could called an instant (kshana) according to Theravada. There is no titi in Theravada and there is only uppada and bhanga. The Sauthranthikas believe in uppada, titi, bhanga and thus an existence of objects as such may be for an instant. It is this titi that has created lots of problems and many Buddhists are of the opinion that objects exist at least for an instant.

When Mr. Upali Gamakumara says without existence of objects “then all what Buddha has preached on ‘good’ and ‘bad’ becomes null and void”. If there is no person (object) as such who is responsible for one’s karma? This is the most difficult question to answer conceptually and there have been number of schools such as pudgalavadin who attempted to answer the question by admitting that there exists a person or individual (pudgala) who is responsible for one’s karma.

This answer had to be given by some schools, when they had no other answer, especially to the Vedic Brahmin scholars who were atmavadins who believed in Sansara. The Brahmins were believers in a three valued logic, like the Catholics after them, and were prepared to admit that a proposition and its negation could be true at the same time. This is in contradiction to Aristotelian Logic where if a proposition is true then its negation is not true. In Aristotelian Logic the God and His Son cannot be the same as if somebody is God is a true proposition then that somebody is the Son of the God is not a true proposition. However, neither the Brahmins nor the Catholics had a four valued logic or Catuskoti.

Aristotelian Logic is inducted from day to day experience where we find that if one person is equal in height or weight to two other persons then those two persons are also equal in height or weight. This day to day experience has been inducted and generalized in the form if A=B and A=C, then B=C. However all these assume that the A’s, B’s and C’s exist and existence is expressed in the form A=A. It has to be mentioned that even Catuskoti is an induction not by ordinary people but by those who had spiritually advanced.

The logic applied in Bududahama is Catuskoti, that had been known to the people of Dambadiva even before Prince Siddhartha was born. It is not Buddhist Logic as such as Nibbana can be achieved only after getting rid of Catuskoti as well. However the identity crisis referred to by Mr. Upali Gamakumara is resolved within Catuskoti through the famous answer given by Ven. Nagasena Thero in Milinda Panna. When asked by King Milindu when somebody dies who is reborn or have the next bhava, the Thero replied na ca so na ca anno or neither he nor somebody else. There is no person or individual who goes to the next bhava, nevertheless it is neither somebody else who is responsible for karmic actions.

This answer one of the most beautiful I have found in an intellectual discussion, which has enabled me to interpret Quantum Physics in a Sinhala Buddhist Ontology (I do not expect any westerner or anyone who has been trained by westerners to believe the new interpretation though it has been published in a so called peer reviewed journal), is in agreement with Catuskoti according to which both A=B and A≠B can be false. Thus it is wrong to say that the person who is born in the next bhava is either himself or somebody else. There is no person who goes from bhava to the next bhava nevertheless action is identified as a person. It is “action” without an actor, and it is applicable to what is identified as the mind. It is only a procession of thoughts without a mind as such and it is due to avidya this procession is identified as a person or an individual.

One does not have to think of this in terms of punabbhava as even in this present bhava there is no individual as such. Lots of karma have passed and actions taken place from the time of beginning of writing this article to now and, there was no person who was present continuously to write this article. It is “action” without an actor but the conventional wisdom says it is one Nalin de Silva who wrote it.

Copyright Prof. Nalin De Silva

The existence of objects - I

Mr. Upali Gamakumara referring to what he calls my reply to Prof. Carlo Fonseka states that an average person may go haywire reading it. It may be so as the average person has been taught by the western educational system to think in a particular way which has become the so called standard way today. However, Mr. Gamakumara says that sometimes he values my ideas and I am thankful to him for his compliment. In any event I was only responding to Prof. Fonseka’s article with some questions. Basically Mr. Gamakumara queries my views on existence of “objects” and says if we do not “accept the existence of particles or objects, then all what Buddha has preached on ‘good’ and ‘bad’ becomes null and void”. In order to answer the queries of Mr. Gamakumara it is necessary to give a summary of my philosophy which is based on Buddhism.

The materialists starting with the Greeks in the west, and the Dravyavadins in Bharat, in general attempted to reduce all phenomena to a materialist base. The Buddhist idealists in the form of Vinnavadins and the Greek idealists on the other hand wanted to show that the mind was supreme, and that the so called material world was the creation of the mind. We present a different approach, where the world as an observer “sees” is created by the observer due to “avidya” of anicca, dukka and anatta which could be “roughly translated” as ignorance of impermanence, suffering and soullessness.

We begin with the Theravada view that the “world” is anicca, dukka, anatta and sunya. However anicca and anatta are not concepts, and as such it is futile to attempt to translate them into English or any other language. Even in Pali they should be considered as non concepts that defy explanation using concepts or other words. Though the “world” is anicca, dukka, anatta and sunya, unlike in Madhyamikavada, sunya is not elevated to a concept with sunyata coming into the picture as a noun.

When it is said that anicca, dukka, anatta and sunya are not concepts it means that they cannot be grasped by the mind either in terms of other concepts or directly as an image formed in the mind. There are no perceptions of them and there are no citta rupa associated with them. Anicca should not be considered as non permanence, as while the latter is a concept that the mind can grasp, the former cannot be known by the mind. If “one” “grasps”, anicca, dukka, anatta then “one” attains Nibbana, and it is clear that knowing non permanence of “objects” is not sufficient to attain Nibbana.

There are two concepts that are important in any discussion on epistemology and ontology. Epistemology deals with knowledge while ontology is on existence. Though there are two branches called epistemology and ontology in western Philosophy, they are interwoven. The existence is not independent of knowledge of existence, in contrast to one of the ideas expressed on existence in western materialistic Philosophy. Does the world exist independent of the mind? Or is there a world independent of the mind? The answers to these questions also have to be considered as knowledge, if we are to build a theory of existence. The ontology is not independent of knowledge and theory of knowledge.

Whatever the answers given to the above questions, they are finally constructions of the mind. Nobody has ever found a way of expressing that the world exists independent of the mind, without finally getting the mind involved. Even if one is of the opinion that the world exists independent of the mind, one has to express that in words, and words are nothing but constructions of the mind. There is no way of expressing that the world exists independent of the mind, without involving the mind. Thus there is no Cartesian wall, as the existence of a world (observed) on the other side of the wall itself is a statement by an observer who has a mind.

One could say that it is the statement of a fact. However, the question arises as to how does one know that it is a fact. There are no facts by themselves. The so-called facts have to be known even if words are not used. It is not essential that knowledge has to be expressed in words. However, knowledge has to be known, even if with the use of images, which we call citta rupa, and images are associated with the mind. Thus there is no knowledge without mind, and the existence of something without knowing is unimaginable.

One could object to the above and say there are so many millions in the world who have no knowledge of the existence of far away galaxies whose existence cannot be doubted. Also it could be pointed out that just seventy five years ago nobody in the western world knew anything about the other galaxies but they had been in existence for millions of years. Thus it could be argued that the objects could exist without them being known to anybody in the universe. However, this is a statement by an observer living today, and not a statement of an observer who lived millions of years ago. It is the knowledge of an observer of the twenty first century, who argues or extrapolates that the universe had been in existence for millions of years. What the present observer says is that the objects he identifies as galaxies had been in “existence” in what he identifies as space and time, in the Newtonian picture, or that the galaxies had modified the space-time for so many millions of years, if he believes in Einstein. The statements which appear to be objective are not so, as any statement made today is an utterance by an observer living in the twenty first century. What are identified as galaxies, perhaps together with some other “objects”, could have been identified as something else, if our five sense organs and/or the mind (in Buddhism mind is also identified as a sense organ) had different “forms” from what we have now. Even if the five sense organs have remained the same for millions of years from the point of view of an “average’ person living in the twenty first century, the way people think has differed from culture to culture and from time to time.

We argue that the world is nothing but the creation of the observer, and that the world is the same as the knowledge of the world of the observer. In the present approach it is not assumed that a world exits independent of the observer who attempts to know or gather “information” of an already existing world. The observer creates knowledge of the “world”, and hence the “world” is relative to the sense organs, mind and the culture of the observer. The knowledge is thus created by the mind with the aid of the other sense organs. There is no knowledge or world, before such knowledge of the world is created, and the knowledge is created as concepts theories etc., by the observer. Thus the so called world is the conceptual and theoretical world of the observer that has been created by the mind. It should be noted that the concepts need not be in the form of words, as images formed in the mind (citta rupa) are also considered as concepts. (To be contimued)

Copyright Prof. Nalin De Silva