Reason and Transcendence: A Response to Stephen Batchelor

[The following is a response to Stephen Batchelor’s blog-post, Reason and Transcendence (2), which can be found on Tricycle’s website.]

First of all, i want to thank Stephen for his thoughts in the Reason and Transcendence posts. They raise several questions that are important and relevant for Western Buddhists to reflect on. As someone who has spent several years wrestling with questions like these – questions that are often dismissed or ignored by some of the more dogmatic members of my Buddhist family – it is reassuring to know that other people recognize the unique dilemmas that these questions pose for Western practitioners. In particular, like Stephen, i have also been interested in and confused by the progression from a conceptual understanding of emptiness to a non-conceptual realization of emptiness. How and why does a non-conceptual experience emerge from a conceptual understanding? Although we first need to understand the traditional explanation of how and why this progression occurs, i think we also need to develop the ability to translate this experience into terms that are recognizable and meaningful to the established fields of Western epistemology and psychology.

The question of how a conceptual understanding of emptiness can transform into a non-conceptual experience is a good example of a Buddhist belief that needs to be translated into Western terms. What is the psychological explanation of this transformation? The resolution of this question has been one of the main objectives of my meditation practice in the last few years. An authoritative answer would demand not only that the practitioner experiences and completes each stage of the path to realizing emptiness but that he or she also have sufficient experience of other psychological models in order to elucidate the areas in which the two models (Buddhist and Western) either overlap or conflict with each other. While i cannot claim to have either of these requisites, my investigation so far has led me to believe that a resolution is perhaps simpler than we usually imagine.

As Stephen mentioned, Dharmakirti makes an epistemological distinction between objects that are known by the senses (evident objects) and objects that are inferred through reason (hidden objects). (As for the category of very hidden objects, perhaps it is just a faithful way of referring to things that are beyond the capacity of the human mind…) This distinction between sensory objects and conceptual objects is a mental separation of two things that actually constitute an indivisible whole: our experience of the world. The world that we experience is divided into two parts – evident objects and hidden objects – which each have a corresponding state of mind: sense perception and conceptual inference. This division is useful for conceptually understanding phenomena, such as emptiness, but it is important to recognize that it is a false separation because things that we experience do not actually exist as either ‘objects of the senses’ or ‘objects of the mind’, but as a union of both.

By separating things into categories such as ‘evident objects’ and ‘hidden objects’, we are able to refine our conceptual understanding of phenomena, which helps us clearly identify obscure concepts like emptiness. However, a merely conceptual understanding of emptiness is misleading because it is an abstracted idea separated from the reality of sensory experience. The concept of emptiness is the mental appearance of a hypothetical, abstract emptiness which supposedly points to the real emptiness. Like all concepts, the concept of emptiness is somewhat deceptive because it is the representation of emptiness instead of emptiness itself.

In order to overcome the deceptive nature of the concept of emptiness (and all concepts), we need to progress to a non-conceptual, direct experience of emptiness; we need to realize emptiness itself. Like Stephen mentioned, the traditional explanation for this progression is that single-pointed concentration is unified with a conceptual understanding of emptiness to induce a non-conceptual direct realization of emptiness. Although i accept the practical efficacy of this method, for the modern psychologist or cognitive scientist it does leave several unanswered questions. Why does such a concentrated state of mind induce a non-conceptual experience? What change is occurring in the mind at that moment of realization? What type of knowledge does a non-conceptual realization induce?

It seems to me that what we call a ‘non-conceptual realization’ is simply a act of reintegrating what has previously been conceptually divided. All of the conceptual discriminations that we make on the path to a conceptual understanding of emptiness are introduced merely for pragmatic purposes, to help us develop a clear idea of emptiness; those discriminations are not intended to be adopted as absolute definitions. Once we have clearly identified emptiness, those distinctions have fulfilled their purpose and need to be dismantled so that we can again see the world as a unified whole instead of as disparate parts. In particular, we need to deconstruct the practical, but ultimately false, dichotomy between sensory experience and conceptual experience so that we again relate to the world as one holistic experience.

This process of dissolving the conceptual distinctions that we have been utilizing is essentially non-conceptual because we are undoing our conceptual projections of how the world exists; we are non-conceptualizing our experience of the world. It is as if we are erasing all the conceptual lines that divide and fragment our uniform experience of the world into things and non-things. Contrary to our usual interpretation, we do not develop a non-conceptual state of mind which then observes and realizes emptiness because such a view implicitly separates the mind and its object, which prevents a direct and immediate experience of emptiness. This hypothetical ‘non-conceptual’ state of mind – which is presumably beyond both sense perception and rationality – is a transcendental state of mind, which we assume provides transcendental knowledge. Rather, a non-conceptual realization of emptiness is an experience in which the conceptual distinction between emptiness and other phenomena is unmade.

This unmaking of conceptual distinctions can be achieved by meditating on emptiness with a mind of deep concentration because such a concentrated mind does not experience the duality between subject and object. This mind does not relate to emptiness as an object outside itself; the mind and emptiness merge into each other. First we develop a conceptual understanding of emptiness which is implicitly dependent on projecting emptiness as an object and then, when we combine this with deep concentration, the objective quality of emptiness is undermined, which functions to neutralize its conceptually fabricated nature. Our concentration induces a de-conceptualizing experience: a non-conceptual realization.

Essentially, what we are doing is adopting a series of conceptual classifications (such as evident/hidden objects), using them to reach a clear idea of emptiness, and then discarding them. It is like drawing a line on a sheet of paper to separate it into two halves and then erasing the line to reunite the two halves into one whole. One might think that since we ultimately abandon the conceptual divisions that there is no difference between our experience prior to their adoption and our experience after their abandonment (i.e. that our experience of reality before we study emptiness is the same as our experience after we fully realize emptiness). This is worthy of debate but my feeling is that there is a difference. Although it could be argued that there is not a difference between the objects that an ordinary being realizes and the objects that a Buddha realizes, it seems to me that the process of differentiating emptiness and then reuniting it with conventional existence will add a quality to the Buddha’s experience of those objects that the ordinary being will not have. There is a difference between drawing and then erasing a line, and never having drawn the line at all.

This process can be likened to someone who lives in a village at the base of a mountain. One day he walks to the top of the mountain where he gets a very different perspective of his village and the surrounding area. At the top of the mountain, he observes the village from a distance and sees how small and insignificant it is in relation to the vastness of the countryside, which provides a stark contrast to his normal view of village life as all-important. Then he returns to the village and reintegrates with ordinary village life. From one perspective, that villager has not done anything significant; he simply went for a walk one day up a mountain that all the other villagers know and see. And, from the perspective of the other villagers, he did not do anything noteworthy because his life in the village was the same before and after climbing the mountain. However, for him there is a great difference between how he saw the village before his hike and how he saw the village after his hike. The experience of hiking to the top of the mountain gave him a broader perspective of life in the village that he didn’t have before. Although there may not be any externally recognizable change in his life, he is a changed man for having undergone the journey to the top of the mountain. Likewise, the journey to realizing emptiness – first conceptually and then non-conceptually – may not change any of the particular facts about our life but, yet, the process will completely change our life. (Of course, the change in perspective that emptiness brings will naturally lead to other more tangible changes but the point is that emptiness is not a transcendental truth that will magically create the type of life that we have always dreamed of.)

When we understand emptiness conceptually we are viewing emptiness in a reified and abstract way. We are seeing emptiness as a thing, ‘out there’, which can be observed and analysed. When we interpret a non-conceptual realization of emptiness through the eyes of the conceptual mind, we imagine that this non-conceptual realization realizes something beyond the concept of emptiness. We assume that the abstracted emptiness known by the conceptual mind is further abstracted by the non-conceptual mind. This leads to the conclusion that a direct experience of emptiness is beyond our normal understanding, inaccessible to thoughts and words. While emptiness can be very difficult to express in words, we have to be very careful to avoid the tendency to over-abstract it by supposing that it exists in a transcendent epistemological realm, inaccessible to ordinary knowledge. (I think this may be the main point of Stephen’s posts.) I believe that the reason why a profound experience of emptiness can be so difficult to articulate is because it so closely resembles our ordinary experience, not because it is a transcendental experience.

We often think of the Buddhist path of realizing emptiness as progressing in a linear fashion with the effect that we assume that our practice will take us further and further away from our present location on the line. It can be helpful to use the metaphor of travelling along a path but i think it is more accurate to visualize the path as circular because by continuing in one direction our practice eventually leads us back to where we started – though when we reach that place again it is no longer the same place because we have been transformed by the journey. In this analogy, the first half of our journey along the circle corresponds to developing a clear conceptual understanding of emptiness. During this part of the path it feels as if we are progressing farther and farther away from our original position. (Imagine starting at the uppermost point of a circle and tracing the curve on one side downwards to the lowermost point.) The second half of our journey along the circle corresponds to developing a non-conceptual experience of emptiness. This part of the path is a continuation of the first half: we progress from the lowermost point of the circle upwards along the other side of the circle until we arrive back at the starting point. Although we might expect (based on our experience of the first half) that the second half of our journey will continue to lead us farther and farther away from our starting point and culminate in some unknown (transcendental) destination, this expectation is simply the result of an unjustified preconception, an over-abstraction of emptiness. Eventually we arrive back at our original location (at the top of the circle) but, because of the process of actually undertaking the journey, it is not really the same place as it was in the beginning. Although the second, non-conceptual half of the journey functions to see through and undo the conceptual distinctions that were drawn during the first part, the process is not the same as simply retracing one’s steps backwards to return to the starting point; the process must be carried forward to completion. There is a world of difference between regressing to a simpler, more peaceful state of mind and progressing to the peaceful mind of enlightenment.

In short, a complete realization of emptiness depends on both developing a clear conceptual understanding of it and then dissolving the conceptual framework for that understanding. The construction of a conceptual understanding of emptiness depends on logical reasoning but the destruction of it is carried out by subverting the foundation of conceptual discriminations. This can be achieved with the help of deep concentration because such a concentrated mind does not support subject-object duality, the premise of all conceptuality. Although it may appear that the construction and destruction of a conceptual understanding of emptiness achieves nothing because it does not provide any new specific knowledge, the achievement derives from undergoing the process of creating and destroying that understanding.