The Dhamma is not just one way of thinking amongst others

 

There are several new references to, and quotations from, Bradley. I had already referred to him in Anicca [a] without having read him, and merely on the strength of what others have said about him.

But now I am actually in the course of reading his Principles of Logic, and I find that the reference was fully justified. It is satisfactory (and satisfying) to find someone else who has had the same thoughts (within limits, naturally) as oneself, particularly after the singularly depress-ing experience of reading some of the more recent English philoso-phers (Bertrand Russell & Co.). Bradley’s idealism won’t do, of course; but it is incomparably better than the current realism.

I am always pleased when I find a connexion between the Suttas and outside philosophies: it is not, to be sure, that the former can be reduced to the latter—the Dhamma is not just one way of thinking amongst others—, but rather that the Buddha has seen all that these philosophers have seen, and he has also seen what they could not see; and to discover this is extraordinarily exhilarating. Nobody can say to the Buddha, ‘There is this or that that you have not taken into account’: it is all taken into account, and still more. The Suttas give not the slightest pretext for the famous Sacrifice of the Intellect— Ignatius Loyola and Bodhidharma are strange bedfellows, indeed.

Certainly there is more to the Dhamma than intellect (and this is sometimes hard for Europeans to understand), but there is nothing to justify the wilful abandonment of the Principle of Identity.

People, mostly, seem to be finding it difficult to make very much of the Notes (I, too, find it difficult sometimes, so I cannot say that I am astonished). The university professors who have had copies are silent except one from America who (very politely) attributes their unintelligibility to his ignorance of Pali, but whether this excuses me or him is not quite clear. Few bhikkhus have had copies, but one has remarked that ‘they contain a lot of mistakes’—which, from the traditional point of view, is quite true. This would probably be the opinion of the great majority, who, however, would perhaps add that, in a foreigner, it is excusable.

Laymen here are sometimes interested, and at all events not hostile (except for one, who has been provoked to a fit of indiscriminate xenophobic fury, embracing Dahlke and the Ven. Nyānatiloka Mahāthera as well as myself—also strange bedfellows!).

Expressions of approval have come from Germany and ‘Les Amis du Bouddhisme’ of Paris, I am pleased to learn, are enthusiastic. About thirty copies went to England, but (apart from a bare acknowledgement from Nottingham, and a brief note from a personal acquaintance) yours has been the only comment we have received. Of course, it is not easy to know to whom to send, and the choice of addresses is largely a matter of chance.
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The Principle (or Law) of Identity is usually stated as ‘A is A’, which can be understood as ‘Everything is what it is’. Bradley (PL, Ch. V, p.141) remarks that, in this form, it is a tautology and says nothing at all.

It does not even assert identity. For identity without difference is nothing at all. It takes two to make the same, and the least we can have is some change of event in a self-same thing, or the return to that thing from some suggested difference. For, otherwise, to say “it is the same as itself” would be quite unmeaning.

Stebbing (MIL, p. 470) says:

The traditional interpretation of the law is metaphysical. If “A” be regarded as symbolizing a subject of attributes, then the formula may be interpreted as expressing the permanence of substance, or the persisting of something through change.

The second paragraph of Attā says, in effect, that the Principle of Identity—taken, that is, with Bradley’s qualification that there must be ‘some change of event’ to make it meaningful—is no less valid in the Dhamma than it is everywhere else. Acceptance of this Principle (as you will see also from the Stebbing quotation and from my further treatment in Anicca, Paticcasamuppāda [c], & Fundamental Structure) means rejection of the popular notion that ‘impermanence’ in the Dhamma means ‘universal flux’. With the rejection of this notion we come to see that the question of anattā can deal, not with the self-identity of things, but only with ‘self’ as the subject (‘I’, ‘myself’ etc.).

But if one starts off sacrificing the intellect by assuming that the anattā teaching is denial of the Principle of Identity, then at once there is chaos.

In referring to Loyola and Bodhidharma in my last letter, I had in mind two ‘wilful abandonments of the Principle of Identity’.
(i) Loyola: ‘In order never to go astray, we must always be ready to believe that what I, personally, see as white is black, if the hierarchical Church defines it so.’ (ii) Bodhidharma (or, rather, a modern disciple of his, in an article—‘Mysticism & Zen’, I think—in The Middle Way1): ‘The basic principle of Zen is “A is not A”.’ (Note, in parenthesis, that once people start denying the Principle of Identity the question may arise whether the bare statement ‘A is A’ is quite as meaningless as Bradley supposes. A lot has been made in modern French writing, philosophical as well as literary, of Audiberti’s imaginative phrase la noirceur secrète du lait;● and this suggests that it may not be altogether meaningless to assert the contrary, ‘white is white’. This might perhaps seem trivial, except that a great deal of modern thinking—including mathematics—is based on a deliberate rejection of one or another of the Laws of Thought, of which Identity is the first. This may be all very well in poetry or physics, but it won’t do in philosophy—I mean as a fundamental principle. Every ambiguity, for a philosopher, should be a sign that he has further to go.)

● Audiberti: the secret blackness of milk. [Jacques Audiberti— 1899-1965—was a French poet, playwright, and novelist noted for his extravagance of language.]
**
This ‘sacrifice of the intellect’, which Saint Ignatius Loyola says is ‘so pleasing unto God’, is required also, incidentally, of the quantum physicist: he has to subscribe to the proposition that there are numbers that are not quantities. It is not, however, required of the follower of the Buddha, whose saddhā—trust or confidence—is something like that of the patient in his doctor. The patient accepts on trust that the doctor knows more about his complaint than he himself does, and he submits himself to the doctor’s treat-ment. So far, indeed, from saying to his disciples ‘You must accept on trust from me that black is white’, the Buddha actually says, in effect, ‘What you must accept on trust from me is that you yourselves are unwittingly assuming that black is white, and that this is the reason for your suffering’.
**
black is white: Cf. Bhayabherava Sutta <M. 4: i,21>: ‘There are, divine, some recluses and divines who perceive day when it is night and who perceive night when it is day. Those recluses and divines dwell confused, I say. I, divine, perceive night just as night; I perceive day just as day….’
**
The notion of two successive ‘moments’, A and B, as akālika or non-temporal is a confusion. Either A and B are simultaneous (as e.g. viññàõa and nāmarūpa), in which case they are indeed akālika; or B follows A and they are successive (as e.g. the in-&-out-breaths), in which case they are kālika. Even if there is no interval of time between the ending of A and the beginning of B, it remains true that B comes after A, and time is still involved. The source of the confusion is in the contradictory idea of a moment as the smallest possible interval of time—i.e. as absolute shortness of time—, and therefore as no time. Two successive moments are, thus, also no time: 0 + 0 = 0. This is nothing but a mystification: it is like the notion of ‘absolute smallness of size’ in quantum theory (Dirac, op. cit., pp. 3-4), introduced to compensate for other philosophically unjustifiable assump-tions made elsewhere. (Quantum theory, of course, being an elaborate and ingenious rule of thumb, does not require philosophical justification; but ipso facto it provides no foundation for philosophy .) To the idea of a ‘moment’ as the shortest empirically observable interval of time there is no objection; but this merely marks the threshold below which changes are too small and rapid to be clearly apprehended as discontinuous and are grasped irrationally and ambiguously as a flux. What it does not mark is the boundary between kālika and akālika. See Paticcasamuppàda [c]. A different approach to this whole question is outlined in Fundamental Structure.
Nanavira Thera
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Electrons, protons, neutrons are all conjecture, they are invented in the human mind and given as technical explanations for the elemental phenomena of fire, air, earth and water.

Quantum particles are mathematical in nature, they do not exist outside of the imaginal realm of concepts and ideals, they are not part of creation, they are not things in nature, they are hypothetical, unobservable and cannot be isolated or used to build anything.

To clarify, earthen materials do break down into grains of varying shapes and sizes which can be viewed under a microscope (like salt cubes and sand), and there are repeating geometric harmonic structures in crystals which give them their colour and form, interacting with specific wavelengths of light, but the fact is that the power contained in the substance is diminished at smaller and smaller scales. When it comes to matter, less is actually less.

Atomists however will contend that somehow the power gets greater as we venture into the tiniest of tiny realms, beyond the micro and nano and into the pico-, femto- and atto-meter scale of reality, way down there is an untapped source of world-destroying power locked up in the centre of the most infinitesimal corpuscular units.

Under the guise of an enlightened new perspective, atomism has subverted scientific thought over the last few centuries, normalising the belief that ‘everything is made from atoms’, and by the 19th century it incorporated with Darwinism into the belief that ‘everything is made by atoms’. In this worldview, the Atom has replaced the Adam as the origin of man, and has replaced God as the creator of all things. As such it became the focal point of all physical, metaphysical and political power in the 20th century, it changed how we view the universe and even how we view our selves. In this brave new world of the Atomic Age, we're all just a bunch of atoms bumbling around in space.

Nobody has ever really seen an atom though, as they’re way way beyond the range of senses, and there is this deep philosophical problem about the impossibility of effective  observation at the quantum level (‘the observation paradox’), but nevertheless we’re told that atoms hold massive amounts of ‘nuclear energy’ concentrated in their centre, as well as the ability to self-organise into molecules and complex lifeforms, giving rise to all known life, the human race and the entire universe as we know it without any need of an intelligent creator. The atomists have endowed the atom with the attributes of the divine, like a pagan idol, a humanist icon, an abstract mental concept to replace God, allowing the believer to discard any fears about judgement or morality.

A Fool’s Wisdom
Science Conspiracies & The Secret Art of Alchemy
Steven A. Young