Saturday, May 4, 2013

Nagarjuna, religion and self-identity

Nagarjuna, religious belief, and self-identity

My religious experience was transformed by taking a course in college, at Harvard, when I was 20 years old, called “Buddhism in India.” I was at that time deeply questioning my religious beliefs. The course was taught by a gifted professor named Nagatomi[1]. His lectures, like many undergraduate lectures at Harvard, were masterpieces that I did not appreciate until twenty years later when I was faced with lecturing to undergraduates myself.
            I had been struggling, during those years at Harvard, with confusion and depression. I later understood this as a developmental transition. William Perry, a Harvard emeritus, counselor, and student of Erik Erikson, had described a developmental transition in intellectual development among college students that seemed to speak to my experience. He developed his model through his many interviews with undergraduates.[2] In Perry’s view, the chief intellectual challenge for Harvard undergraduates (or any undergraduate at a large college or university) was pluralism: each of us came there with a world view, and there we met others who rejected our world view. And those others could not be easily dismissed—they were smart, articulate, friendly, sitting at the dinner table, and a lot like us.[3]
So it was typical for Harvard undergraduates to have something of an identity crisis (as the psychological school of thought referred to as the Eriksonians would have it), in which beliefs were challenged, as we moved from what Perry called one “position” to another. (Initially Piaget talked about cognitive development as a series of stages, and Erik Erikson adopted the same motif for identity development. But post-Eriksonians at Harvard in the 1970’s and 1980’s, were skeptical of the rigid stage concept development, noting that people can be at different ‘positions’ in relation to different topics or aspects of their lives). Perry ultimately suggested nine positions (stages), but they can be simplified to make my point.
Adolescents typically came to college living their identify and beliefs in a form of dualism, in which there is a “right” and a “wrong” way to see things; a Truth of their own that does not take into account other truths. Perry argued that the adolescent views his or her beliefs in an absolute, black and white context—the truth must, by definition, be true for everyone, everywhere, always (otherwise, how can it be “true”??). From that position, (we) were observed to transition to a recognition of multiplicity or pluralism. This more mature view is seen by Perry as the realization that different people in different times and places, find different answers and hold different beliefs—that beliefs are contextually shaped, because in fact we are not capable of directly knowing Reality or truth. Indeed, self-observation, and more recently formal psychological science, demonstrate that not even our sense perceptions are perfect representations of the Real, but are rather constructions made in an attempt to approximate the real or the true. (Some philosophers see Truth and Reality as distinct; I use the terms interchangeably).
From this position of pluralism, different beliefs are recognized as valid. The young adult now sees that these different beliefs may speak to the same truth or they may not, but they surely use different symbols and language to do so, and those differences are not readily bridged.
This first transition into this new understanding can be incredibly painful. It means, at first, in some sense failing to uphold the beliefs of one’s family and upbringing in a foreign place—spurring a strong sense of cognitive dissonance and thus a strong interior pressure to resist this change. This stage can also be hazardous, as many young adults stop here, and fall into simple “relativism” and indifference, in which all views are equally valid—the great pitfall of modernism in the eyes of fundamentalists.
But in fact, the “positions” are expected to continue to evolve as one makes the next transition: renewed value and moral commitments within a relativistic frame. In short, “There are many ways to live: this is mine.” “There are many faiths, but this one is mine.” “Others may be called to other beliefs, but I am called to these.” My moral and value commitments are my contribution to the collective journey of the community of human life. Getting to this place takes some work. It’s not all relative, in the end. Some truths are better than others. Some really work, some really don’t. Like psychological adjustment or defense, when it comes to moral and value commitments, some choices draw us closer to Reality, and to life and fulfillment, and some draw us further from it and into unreality.
            I remember meeting with Perry as a college student and talking about this, in my sense of being lost. Seen through his eyes and perspective, my experience became somewhat normal, rather than unique or pathological. It was impressive to me that what I was going through “made sense” to someone else (and this stimulated my early interest in clinical psychology). The experience that made no sense to me still made sense to him. But, while that was some comfort, the problem was my experience still made no sense to me. Instead, I fell into a major depressive episode during my first year at Harvard, though it went unrecognized and untreated, until I diagnosed it myself post-hoc many years later. I suffered, as I often have, with my best stab at stoical endurance, but without either the imagination to recognize that this suffering was not God’s will and must be ended, nor a grasp of the redemptive power of inescapable suffering entered prayerfully. Neither science, nor logic, nor art, nor religion, nor medicine rescued me in that short run. Instead, I was stuck in misery.
            In fact, although Perry painted a logical picture, somehow I could not work out the alternative to my literal view of religious beliefs. I was simply inadequate to the task at that point in my intellectual development. It was here that Nagarjuna, introduced by Nagatomi in his lectures, led me to a kind of awakening and showed me a way forward, though he was twenty-four centuries dead.
            Nagarjuna, several hundred years BCE in India, taught a philosophy of sunyata or emptiness; this work became a precursor to the later emergence of Zen. Nagatomi explained Nagarjuna’s purpose and philosophy this way, in my impressionistic memory: Nagarjuna was challenging positivist philosophies of the day (many very similar to modern western philosophies and religions which assert absolute truths). He taught that all things are emptiness. All. Everything is sunyata. Even the Buddha is sunyata.
All things and all beliefs are lacking in essential being, because they depend on prior events to bring them into existence. This abstract point (which foreshadowed theological arguments in the West about the existence of God over a thousand years later) was stunning to me in my college years, on the outer cusp of adolescence. It was threatening, troubling--and intriguing, because I sensed it led to something deeper.
            In Nagatomi’s telling, Nagarjuna’s teaching set the stage historically for not only the passing on to China of the Three Treatise school of Buddhism, but from there onto Japan and to lay the foundation and the roots of Zen. And in Zen, as in Nagarjuna, I located a metaphor that anchored me there in the end. All things are emptiness.
            Even sunyata is sunyata. Do not cling to sunyata. Do not cling to a theory of emptiness. Do not cling to the Buddha! This is why the Zen master can cry out, “if you see the Buddha on the road, kill him!” Most pointedly, as the Zen teachers later would say very simply, “the raft is not the shore.” A man or woman who gets on a raft to cross the river, leaves the raft when he or she reaches the far shore.
            This was the way it was taught by Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist who was involved in the Third Way of resistance to the Vietnam war in South Vietnam in the 1960’s, who became friends with Thomas Merton (of whom, more later), and who finally moved to France and began to write books with titles like The Raft is Not the Shore to help young idealistic peace activists like me find their way in a world of inter-religious confusion and political chaos.
            I came to translate that simple Zen story as told by Thich Nhat Hanh[4], in light of what I then understood of Nagarjuna’s philosophy, this way: The river is our earthly life, and the far shore is our eternal destination. The raft is religion and belief. We need religion, doctrines, and belief to help us make it to the far shore. But no religious belief or teaching can be absolute, because all of them arose contingently in history, all of them are human constructions even if divinely inspired. That is, they convey Truth but in fallible containers. The only “absolute” is the Unknowable Mystery, what we refer to as God. When we come face to face with God, religion will be abandoned. Religion, as the vehicle that helps us find and know God, will be irrelevant in “heaven” if there is a heaven. When we are with God, we have no need of the vehicles that helped us come to God.
            I subsequently learned that this in fact is what Catholic theologians have taught for 1500 years, from Augustine to Aquinas to Rahner. More on that later! But all this, which seems obvious to me now as it did then, disturbed me at first. In the end, however, that insight came to change my faith life permanently. It became possible for me to see the value in inter-religious dialogue—because we all have a bit of truth to share[5]. We are all floating on a different boats on the same river (this existence) toward an unseen shore (what we sometimes believe is the next existence but is simply our final encounter with the Ultimate). This recognition enabled me to begin to study and appreciate the historical relativism of some of my Catholic beliefs without abandoning them. This was important because it enabled me to retain the tools and language and symbols by which I could comprehend the religious element of my life, while moving past a childish understanding of them.
By historical relativism of Catholic beliefs, I mean two things for my Catholic brothers and sisters. First, some religious teaching is historical accident and must change when history changes. For example, in Catholic moral teaching usury was a sin until the Middle Ages, when the teaching was overturned. Another example: celibacy was required of Catholic priests beginning a thousand years after the Church began, but not required before then. Second, other teachings are central, fundamental truths taught in my faith. Yet even these are expressed in limited terms. The basic truth that Jesus Christ is the son of God, whose death and resurrection redeemed me—is still expressed in language, symbol, and ritual that arose at a time and place in history. The surface expression of these truths is not the same as the underlying truth to which it points. Such a subtle but crucial distinction! Yet I can recognize that and still be committed to both the truth, and the form of expression of the truth.
I reasoned, “What would I gain by my contingent beliefs with other contingent beliefs (and I considered that one cannot escape from contingent beliefs; atheism is merely another contingent belief)” Most of all, this insight freed me to commit to my own religious perspective—commitment within plurality. All religious truths are sunyata, and therefore no religious belief is better than my own. This does not mean they are all pointless; this is not an excuse for nihilism, but the opposite. For even nihilism would be emptiness--would be false, would be a failure to grasp the truth. The better interpretation is that I can get to God on many rafts, but not on all rafts. I must choose a good one. This one is a good one, and it is mine. I will trust it, and row it hard.
            And when I turned to the Gospels and read them in this light, I could see them afresh. I could see for the first time that Jesus was not proving my beliefs. He was not concerned with my beliefs or for that matter with any system of beliefs. He was about something else—the creative and life-giving encounter! He was not seeking “beliefs,” but to bring his children, his brethren, to God. He was alive, unpredicated, unplanned, unsystematic, and free. He–his spirit, his identity—was non-contingent: something Original. This is why they saw God in him, why they applied their language of revelation: “son of God,” “savior.” That was what I discovered when I read those Gospels in my twenties.
            And so Nagarjuna, by teaching me the emptiness of all my religious beliefs, freed me to seek their deeper purpose and meaning, and to commit to my religious faith anew and to encounter Christ in a new way, afresh. As a clinical psychologist, now, I can ask whether that was simply an instance of resolving cognitive dissonance by “believing” more deeply, but with the benefit of thirty years of subsequent observation of my own journey, I can see that what occurred then was an increased and greater maturity, joy, and capacity for love—signs of a healthy resolution grounded in reality, rather than a removal from reality.
            By the same token, with this understanding, I became consciously committed to opposing religious-inspired violence. How could one ever kill for a contingent belief or for an “identity”? How could anyone take a life for what is not absolute—and how could anyone claim to know the absolute, without being guilty of soul-killing arrogance and, as likely, of blasphemy? I noted that those great religious geniuses who did seem to know the absolute, such as Jesus Christ, Buddha, had no interest in killing[6]. Religious violence became for me an obvious testament to simplistic, dualistic, adolescent worldviews, in which there is one absolute right and the rest is wrong. Religious violence became proof of immature religious understanding. Religious violence became, simply, a complete self-contradiction: there is no religious violence, because violence cannot be religious, violence cannot be a vehicle to God. This became a core belief for me and indeed a core of Christianity as I read it.
So the beauty of Nagarjuna’s teaching is that once we see that religion is a vehicle, and God is the ultimate, we cease to be able to kill in the name of religion (or in the name of God). We cease to panic or be threatened by challenges to our beliefs, for the beliefs themselves are merely a vehicle, “empty” in some radical and mysterious sense, are more like means to an end.[7]. Our end is a deep Mystery that we call God, and that alone grounds us in Reality. Therefore, you can take my religion, and I will still pursue God all the same and love God and serve God. But if I kill anyone for disagreeing with my religion, I violate my religion.
            In fact, I will add word on the allegation that religion is responsible for war. In Europe, we saw true religious violence a few hundred years ago: men and women being killed for believing differently. Most of what passes for religious violence today is not: it is political violence between groups who happen to be identified by a particular religion. This is not to say that we do not see true religiously motivated killing, as in the misguided blasphemy laws in Pakistan, but often what appears as religiously motivated is in actuality politically motivated-by desire for power and place.
Returning to my story: At that point the “dispute” between science and religion was recast for me, although it would take many years for this to become articulate. It became clear that science, or logic, or textual analysis, would disprove the literal truth of one religious belief or another over time. But that is not of great interest, for Nagarjuna has already done this centuries ago using nothing more than logic. So the literal belief itself was never more than emptiness (as is the scientific “belief” –but that is not important here). The religious belief is not a scientific assertion—it is a means to God. It is a riddle, a mystery, a koan, a symbol, a way. Use it for its intended purpose, I reasoned, and find God and your salvation thereby, and so learn how to live and how to die. Do not weary yourself arguing with the sunbeam!



[1] Nagatomi Masatoshi (1926-2000) was Harvard’s first fulltime Professor of Buddhist Studies. While earlier faculty has lectured on Buddhist subjects in various temporary capacities, Nagatomi was the first to teach an ongoing series of graduate and undergraduate courses on Buddhist subjects. Many of the current generation of Buddhist scholars in America studied under him (http://harvardealc.org/about/BP_Nagatomi.htm; 1/26/13).
[2] For subsequent written development of his theory, see Perry, W.G. (1999). Forms of Ethical and Intellectual Development in the College Years. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers. Although the book is based on interviews with Harvard men and Perry did interview me when I was at Harvard, I was not part of the year-end interviews on which he based his theory.
[3] In later chapters I will talk about cognitive dissonance—a psychological phemonenon that makes it difficult for us to change our mind when we get new information or evidence. Here is an example of cognitive dissonance, however: your classmate presents a better argument that you cannot answer, about religion or belief. Like some atheists and agnostics, I realized that I could not hold on to religious beliefs as if they were scientific-logical assertions. However, I resolved the dilemma in a different way than choosing atheism. Ultimately, the dilemma for me of cognitive dissonance was answered this way: I cannot logically uphold all of my religious beliefs as literal assertions, yet I cannot logically eliminate them either. In short, I could see that logic cannot solve the question of God. I chose not to abandon my religious faith because if I do so I lack a way to participate in or to express or even to understand the full meaning of the deepest and most powerful experiences in my life. Atheism would entail, for me, even more cognitive dissonance than would belief. Therefore, I concluded that the experiences spoke to something real, and that the beliefs and rituals are an attempt at expression of experience, not a factual polemics. At the level of scientific logic, I am an agnostic; at the level of how I live my life and interpret it, I have chosen the way of faith because it alone is able to speak to the full range of my own apprehension of reality, in a way that science or even poetry cannot sufficiently do. I affirm science, but neither science nor reason alone are capable of encompassing the range of human experience or meaning. More on this as I go on.
             [4] Thích Nhất Hạnh (1926-present) is a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, writer, poet, and activist who corresponded with Thomas Merton. He currently lives in France. His books provide marvelously lucid introductions to Buddhist practice and had a big influence on me in my twenties. He remains an inspiration to many in Christian and Buddhist circles for his open ecumenism, his lucid teaching, and his activism against war and for peace,
[5] This is different than reducing all religions to the same thing or saying they ultimately are all going to the same place (though they might be). To say that is to disrespect their particularity. Rather, inter-religious dialogue can be seen as a profound learning for all concerned, but without artificial collapsing of particular expressions that have, or may have, an essential piece of what is necessary. For any religion that claimed to have the entire truth encompassed would be claiming an impossibility—that it had completely encompassed the infinite Holy.
[6] In the West, we sometimes think Mohammed was an inciter of religious violence. But apparently this is not accurate. As carefully recounted by Karen Armstrong in her short but well-documented biography of Mohammed, he was pulled into secular conflicts as necessary evils in his role as a political leader, but he did not advocate or practice war or killing for religious reasons, and in fact taught on the basis of religion to seek to avoid war. He also saw Jews and Christians as neighbors that he could co-exist with.
[7] This is why, in the end, logical-rational attack on religious belief as a philosophical system is like trying to hit the air. Religious beliefs are not a logic-system, they are, like their accompanying rituals and images, a method for describing and remembering an experience and for moving the believer toward the Ultimate

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