by M. LaFargue
One definition of Nibbana in the Pali Canon is that it is the complete absence of Tanha, Upadana, and Dukkha.
The Pali Canon tends to treat Nibbana as an all-or-nothing
affair. In encourages bikkhus and bikkhunis (monks and nuns) to strive for nothing
less than the complete elimination of Tanha, Upadana, and Dukkha.
This can make Nibbana sound like something very exotic and
fascinating, but of no relevance to the life of someone who is not willing to
enter a monastery or convent, and make attaining Nibbana the number one priority
in life.
It is also the source of common misunderstandings: A beginning student
tries to imagine what it would be like to exist in the state of full Nibbana
tomorrow. The result is that Nibbana is understood in near total contrast to
everyday life, contrasting especially with a number of things that most people
find most meaningful in life. Nibbana appears to be just ordinary life as it has
been lived up to now, minus most of the main things that make life meaningful,
interesting, and productive -- ordinary life minus close relationships and human
involvements, minus emotion, minus ambition, minus most motivations that now
motivate people to make better lives for themselves and contribute to society.
This is not the way Buddhist spirituality is presented by those Asian authors
and others adapting Buddhist spirituality to ordinary lay life in modern
America. They tend instead to emphasize the positive benefits that can be
achieved even by small and gradual steps toward the full Buddhist ideal, without
attaining full Nibbana or Enlightenment.
Treating Nibbana as something like a Platonic Form, and applying to it the Platonic Principle of Analogy and Participation, provides a further rational basis for this kind of understanding and provides guidelines for practicing this kind of interpretation. According to this principle, Nibbana is not totally unlike anything people already experience. Most people already participate to some degree in the goodness which Nibbana is the perfection of, already have something like Nibbana, although they have it in very imperfect form. (The principle of Analogy and Participation is explained as the Fourth Principle of Socratic/Platonic reasoning in the Four Principles essay.)
This also avoids the mistake of thinking of Nibbana as a "goal to be achieved," and regarding steps toward this goal as unimportant in themselves, since they are only a "means to the goal." Platonic Forms are not "goals" in this sense. Gradual steps toward becoming more courageous are not just a "means" to achieving the "goal" of Perfect Courage. Gradual steps toward becoming more courageous mean one is "participating in" the Platonic Form of Courage to a greater degree, and this is valuable in itself. In the same way, treating Nibbana as a Platonic Form means that gradual steps toward reducing Tanha/Upadana and Dukkha are not just a "means" to reaching the "goal" of Nibbana, unimportant in themselves except as means. If Nibbana is a Platonic Form, representing the perfection of some kind of human goodness, then each gradual step toward reducing Tanha/Upadana is an improvement in one's life, valuable and important in itself, constituting a greater "participation in" the perfection represented by Nibbana.
-- Like all transcendent Platonic Forms representing some
kind of perfect goodness, Nibbana is hard to understand. Simplistic
understandings of Nibbana -- that it is just ordinary life minus its most
meaningful elements -- are misunderstandings (like simplistic understandings of
perfect Courage, perfect Love, etc.)
-- One cannot directly intuit or grasp the goodness of
Nibbana by itself. The way to begin understanding its goodness is to start at
the bottom of a Platonic Ladder, beginning with concrete examples roughly
analogous to Nibbana, whose positive goodness is more readily apparent to us,
even though this goodness will be less perfect than the goodness of Nibbana.
-- The whole idea of a Platonic Form is that it is an ideal
to model oneself on, assured that every small step toward this ideal will make a
person more admirable. The realistic goal of a Platonist is not to fully
exemplify in her person the Platonic Form of perfect Courage or Perfect Love,
but to approximate "participate in" the perfection of these Forms in greater and
greater degrees. If one is able to formulate a concept of the Nibbana-ideal,
known by S/P reasoning to be perfect in its goodness, then any step toward this
goal will make a person more good, more admirable. In short, Nibbana is
the perfection of a certain particular kind of human excellence. Any step
toward Nibbana will make a person more excellent.
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Individuals heavily involved in Buddhist practice -- especially meditation practice such as Vipassana -- usually have first hand experience of how it improves a person's life. Meditation practices, intelligently done, bring about a certain enduring state of mind that can be directly experienced as something that improves a person's life and makes it more admirable and meaningful.
It can be very hard for those who have not had this first-hand experience to make sense of the Buddhist ideal. For most people, everyday life consists mainly in social interactions, so they generally have an experience of and appreciation of social virtues, virtues that improve the character and quality of social interactions and social relationships. It is hard to imagine that there even is such a thing as becoming a more admirable person by perfecting one's own being, done by a hermit living in solitary seclusion by herself in the wilderness.
The present essay is an attempt to address this problem by giving some examples of how the achievement of highly individualistic Buddhist virtues would also improve a person's social relationships. In Platonist terms, this amounts to focusing on Nibbana's more visible and external "appearances" not its internal and invisible essence. Nibbana's essence is wholly internal to an individual, a perfection of one's own being achievable in solitude. But the Platonist principle of analogy states that abstract and perfect virtue-concepts are what is most difficult to understand. For purposes of understanding, we need to begin with examples that are more concrete and therefore more accessible to understanding, even though they do not represent the essence of virtue, only its appearance.
This will be especially useful for those individuals who do not want to make achieving full Nibbana their number one priority in life. Life in a monastery or in seclusion is the obvious choice for such a person. But this does not mean that others cannot benefit by smaller steps toward the Nibbana-ideal (in Platonist language, "participating in Nibbana" in lesser degrees). For such persons, it is helpful to have some examples of how these smaller steps toward Nibbana could improve their everyday social interactions with others.
At the same time, this can be important for a critical interpretation of Nibbana. That is, if Nibbana is indeed something admirable, and is partially achieved by someone living in society, it should show itself in an improvement in social interactions. If it does not do so -- especially if it leads to modes of social interaction that are clearly not admirable -- this is a sign that a person is not really progressing toward admirable Nibbana at all, but progressing toward some "bad interpretation" of the Nibbana ideal, one that is not really admirable.
My basic proposal will be that, conceived in terms of interactions with the world, the positive goodness of the particular excellence called "Nibbana" consists in the fact that it frees a person from one basic way of relating to the world, in order to free her for a better way. This is a shift can be described in terms of a contrast between a needy relation to the world, on the one hand, and an expressive or appreciative relation to the world on the other.
That is, from the point of view of a person living in society, eliminating Tanha and Upadana should not mean disconnection and withdrawal, leaving a person uncaring, indifferent, and isolated. At its best it will free a person from a certain kind of "needy" relation to the world, based on a need to get something from others. At its best it will free a person for a certain other way of relating to the world, broadening her ability to appreciate things without becoming dependent on them, and enabling her to express the goodness within her without needing to get anything in return.
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The needy relation to the world I am speaking of, is one governed by the assumption that specific conditions in the world have power in themselves to confirm or undermine our sense of self-worth, or our sense that life is meaningful. Such conditions might be a job, possessions, pleasures, achievements, popularity, a loving mate, a close family, the esteem of people one is close to, and so on.
This sense of the power of things generates deep need, deep dependency (Upadana), a vulnerability to deep distress (Dukkha) when conditions we are dependent on disappear through loss of a job, possessions, or the love and esteem of important other people. It generates a deep sense of insecurity, a lack of confidence in one’s own self, a sense that self-worth and meaning in life depend on conditions in the world beyond one’s control.
Because of this, one relates to the world and other people on the basis of a deep, self-centered need for confirmation (Tanha). One needs achievements in order to "prove oneself," because it is difficult to feel confident in oneself without these external signs confirming one’s worth. One needs attention, admiration, and encouragement from others, because it is difficult to feel confident in oneself without this. One needs to fit in with the surrounding social environment, because it is psychologically difficult to maintain one’s sense of self esteem if one is out of synch with everyone else.
I am speaking here of deep psychological neediness. Everyone has certain physical needs for food and shelter, air to breathe, and so on. Buddhism focuses only on possible deep psychological aspect of such needs – for example, would a person deprived of food feel this only as a physical difficulty, or also as a deeper threat to her sense of self worth, becoming preoccupied with thoughts of "I don’t deserve this," "I deserve better than this," "why is this happening to me?".
A needy relation to the world makes a person concerned with what they can get from the world and other people.
An "expressive" relation to the world, on the other hand, is completely outgoing. One is concerned for other people out of pure outgoing generosity, without needing to get anything back from them, not even needing to be helping all the time because one’s sense of self worth depends on this. One undertakes ambitious projects because of an outgoing creative urge, not out of a need to "prove oneself," nor a sense of insecurity if one does not have achievements confirming one’s sense of self-worth. An expressive attitude is creative, fully acknowledging the reality of each situation, and imaginatively thinking of ways to make the best of every situation. The Pali Canon places special emphasis on cultivating feelings of compassion, and acting compassionately toward other people. In the case of the ideal Buddhist, freeing oneself from the need to get something from interactions frees a person from that kind of self-interest that competes and often overshadows natural feelings of empathy and desire to be helpful to them.
By "appreciative" I mean an ability to fully appreciate enjoyable and enriching experiences as gifts of the moment, without letting them generate dependencies that will cause distress when they pass, or inflexible expectations that will prevent one from adapting to radically changed circumstances. One can cultivate and find deep satisfaction in enriching relationships, for example, because they are enriching in themselves, not out of a self-serving need to get from them confirmation of one’s worth as a person.
Normally, of course, people’s relation to the world is governed by a mixture of needy, expressive, and appreciative motivations. People commonly undertake ambitious projects both to express their creativity and also because they need tangible achievements in order to feel good about themselves. People appreciate "magic moments" in their close relationships, and also come to become dependent on their regular recurrence because life does not seem very meaningful without them. Buddhism teaches a person how to raise the level of their lives by diminishing neediness and deep dependencies as a motivating factor, and increasing expressive and appreciative elements in one’s relation to the world.
"Nibbana" or "enlightenment" is an idealized image of this state in its highest form. It is best understood not as a goal to be achieved, but an ideal to be approximated. Each gradual step in this direction would then be an improvement in a person's life.
Release from inflexible dependencies would mean that an enlightened person would have an unlimited capacity to "rise to any occasion," express whatever goodness is appropriate to the occasion, no matter what the occasion be, whether the occasion calls for expressing love, courage, wisdom, creativity, patience, love for justice, and so on.
Release from deep dependencies would also mean that every small detail of life would have heightened meaning. One’s aesthetic appreciation for everything would be heightened precisely because one does not need to get something from anything. Again, human beings have a native capacity to find meaning in an extremely wide and varied range of life-experiences, but this capacity is usually limited by fixed and inflexible expectations. Rainy days have their own beauty, but an inflexible expectation of sunshine on a particular day might prevent a person from appreciating this beauty.
Human beings have a native capacity to rise to the occasion presented by an extremely broad range of circumstances, to find meaning in an extremely broad range of conditions. It is particular fixed and deep needs and dependencies that limit this capacity. If my sense of self worth becomes wrapped up in the particular occupation of being a teacher, this would prevent me from rising to the occasion if I had to become a garbage collector instead. Emotionally, I would refuse to be in this new situation. Instead of seeing it as an opportunity to express other kinds of goodness that are in me, and appreciating the opportunities it offers for enriching my life with new meaning, I would be preoccupied with thoughts of "this should not be happening," paralyzing my ability to rise to the occasion. My emotional energy would become wrapped up in frustrations, anxieties, and preoccupations that are relatively useless and lead nowhere.
One achieves degrees of enlightenment, becomes more enlightened and less unenlightened, to the degree that one is able to feel situations as opportunities rather than as threats.
Needs and deep dependencies on particular conditions in the world manifest themselves in compulsive and inflexible insistence on realizing one’s plans and desires, and compulsive and inflexible resistance to accepting some unchangeable facts about the situation one is in. This inflexible insistence and resistance usually takes on a feeling of urgency and impatience.
Neediness causes a person to become deeply invested in whatever they are trying to achieve. Even small things like traffic jams cause such a person to become very upset, because she has become personally invested in getting where she wants to go, and obstacles are felt as a personal affront which "I shouldn’t have to put up with."
I’m speaking here of compulsive neediness, manifesting itself in such a person’s psychological inability to give up internally insisting on getting her way. Instead of acknowledging that the traffic jam is now an unchangeable part of the situation she is in, and making the best of this situation, she will be seized with a feeling of urgency, a feeling that it is urgent to escape from this predicament. Consequently she will be full of internal unproductive turmoil.
For an enlightened person, no life situation would present a deep threat, nothing would be a personal affront. Every situation would present only opportunities for expressing new kinds of goodness and appreciating new kinds of meaning. An enlightened person would feel on unproductive urgency, but would calmly and patiently do what is possible to solve difficult problems. An enlightened person would have no preoccupations that were useless and led to nothing productive or meaningful. An enlightened person would have no fears about the future because she would have confidence in her mind’s ability to rise to any occasion. An enlightened person would not be preoccupied with the past because her mind would be focused on opportunities offered by the present.
Most desires to hurt other people are also the result of inflexible insistence and inflexible resistance. I become angry and malicious when someone is preventing me from getting my way. Malice is different from practical and productive attempts to get the person to change, or practical attempts to get what I want by other means. Malice is a lashing out against obstacles to what I am inflexibly insistent on, or to facts that I compulsively refuse to adapt to. For the person with a well developed moral conscience, malice is also the cause of internal conflict and turmoil, as feelings of wanting to lash out conflict with feelings of shame at this desire.
An enlightened person would have no feelings of malice because there would be nothing she would be inflexibly insistent on, and nothing about any situation that she was inflexibly resistant to. This absence of the normal causes of hostility and malice would leave only feelings of empathy and well-wishing toward others. These feelings would be the result of purely outgoing kindness, not out of any deep need to conform to social norms or gain others’ approval.
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There is a correlation between need and power. Conditions in the world have power to deeply undermine my sense of self worth only if I have a deep need and cannot feel good about myself or my life unless these conditions are present. For example, most people feel social pressure as a very powerful force in their lives. This power of social pressure seems to be something "out there" in the world. But social pressure would have no power over me if I did not have a deep need to fit in, and to feel approved by those around me.
Neediness causes people to live in a world full of rather intimidating forces, forces that seem to have power to which one must submit. Even people who feel confident in themselves usually gain their confidence because of past achievements (in jobs, school, relationships, etc.), and this dependence on the achievements gives them a certain power. A fading of one’s ability to achieve these things would result in deep anxiety, a feeling of need to regain this ability in order to feel good about oneself.
Enlightenment would bring about a fundamental shift in the balance of power, so to speak. An enlightened person would have an unshakeable confidence in her ability to rise to any occasion, to relate well and meaningfully to any situation that might arise. She would have a basic sense of self esteem solely dependent on this ability, and would be unshakeable in this because no one and no thing could take away this ability. Nothing in the world would be fundamentally intimidating. Power would reside in her unlimited expressive and appreciative capacities, rather than any particular conditions in the world.
An enlightened person would be deeply affected by other people in somewhat the same way people are deeply affected by stories we witness in a good play or movie. Movies allow a person to become involved in the lives of people in a way that has little to do with her own need to for tangible signs in the real world confirming her own worth. I might wish that I was as popular as some popular person in a movie. But I don’t have the same resentful feelings about the movie character that I might have for my brother who is more popular than me. Movies allow us to feel feelings in a more pure form, feelings that result from an appreciation of the dramas of human lives, rather than feelings that result from our own self-centered insecurities and neediness. An enlightened person would feel deeply and appreciate the dramas of human life in similar fashion.
All this describes the human excellence called "enlightenment" in its highest form. Everything described is also achievable by degrees. Normally, people’s relation to the world is governed by a mixture of needy, expressive, and appreciative motivations. Any decrease in neediness, and any increase in one’s ability to relate to the world expressively and appreciatively, constitutes a greater degree of enlightenment.
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Buddhism’s central insight is the correlation between neediness and power – between our own need for tangible signs confirming our sense of self worth, on the one hand, and the power of conditions in the world to undermine our sense of self worth and meaning in life, on the other.
The other essential feature of Buddhist teaching that must be mentioned is the idea that significant reduction of neediness is a matter of long term project of psychological restructuring. Neediness is deeply rooted in normal human psychology, in the normal human way of relating to the world. A certain level of reaching out for confirmation is a very fundamental part of the normal human relation to the world, and it happens prior to any conscious thought and decision on the matter. This kind of needy reaching out drives much of our conscious thought and decision making, rather than being the result of conscious thought and decision.
This means that conscious efforts to cut off neediness "on the spot," are relatively useless. Suppose my self-image has become very dependent on my job, for example; I then lose my job and feel my sense of self-worth deeply undermined by this. At this point I cannot just decide to excise my deep dependence on this job as a surgeon excises a tumor. Merely trying to behave as though I were not dependent on the job, or merely repressing my feelings of being deeply threatened, will not reduce neediness itself if it has become deeply rooted in my psychology. Feelings and behavior are symptoms of neediness. Trying to reduce neediness by repression of feelings and behavior is like trying to cure a cold by refusing to sneeze.
This is why Buddhist spirituality does not focus on "on the spot" advice, describing "correct conduct" in particular situations, but on techniques that will produce long term psychological change. To this extent, although the goals, techniques, and underlying theory are different, Buddhism is like modern Western psychotherapy. It is also like training for sports. Becoming a great basketball player has only a little to do with learning a set of rules for what to do in various situations that occur in a basketball game. It is a long term process that involves gaining muscular strength and agility, acquiring many skills through frequent practice, learning to work with others, and internalizing everything so that good play becomes largely a matter of spontaneous and instinctive reactions rather than conscious following rules. If a person has not gained all these skills through long term practice, she cannot enter a game and play at high level simply by trying to remember some rules or good advice about how to play.
In the same way Buddhist teaching focuses on a long term project aimed at gradually reducing neediness and increasing expressive and appreciative capacities, as elements in one’s basic psychology, and one’s basic and spontaneous way of relating to the world.
Part of this long term training program might consist in day to day watchfulness over one’s feelings and actions. A person can strengthen or weaken particular kinds of reactions, by deciding to fully identify with a given reaction or to distance oneself from it. For example, the practice of distancing oneself from malicious feelings and strengthening one’s kind feelings, repeated over a long period of time, can eventually have the effect of making kindness more habitual, more a part of one’s fundamental and habitual way of relating to others.
But a more important part of Buddhist teaching on this matter consists of a specific set of guidelines for meditation exercises. "Meditation" has many meanings. Many different religious traditions involve various kinds of exercises that can be called "meditation." Sometimes meditation aims at putting a person in contact with some supernatural reality such as the Christian God or the Hindu Brahman. Sometimes a person meditates on some truths with the aim of gaining more insight or internalizing these truths. Sometimes meditation aims to give a person more understanding of themselves. Sometimes meditation aims just to produce a state of deep relaxation and calmness.
Although some of these aims might serve secondary purposes, none of them adequately characterizes the primary and ultimate purpose of Buddhist meditation. The primary purpose of Buddhist meditation is long term reduction in compulsive and inflexible neediness, compulsive and inflexible need for tangible signs confirming one’s sense of self worth.
Various meditation techniques are described in the Pali Canon. The one that I want to focus on here is called by its modern practitioners, "Vipassana." Vipassana is relatively easy to understand and begin to practice, and yields useful results even at beginning stages, and so has taken a prominent place in attempts to adapt traditional Buddhist spirituality to modern life outside of monasteries. Vipassana is a way of gradually becoming free of the compulsiveness of one’s reactions, by practicing non-reactive awareness.
For example, suppose a person trying to meditate is annoyed by some noise in the next room. This annoyance is a knee jerk reaction to the noise, an involuntary automatic response to a stimulus. Buddhist teaching analyzes this reaction as something rooted in inflexible need. The person has an inflexible need to "get my way," to be free of obstacles to whatever she has decided she wants to do. The normal way of dealing with this problem would be to try to get rid of the noise, or to try to block it out from one’s awareness. Alternatively, one might suppose that Buddhist teaching would recommend trying to suppress one’s annoyance, or trying to suppress the need of which it is a symptom.
Vipassana advises a different way. Begin trying to practice non-reactive awareness of the noise. Gradually build up the skill of being aware of the noise, not as a personal affront to me, but as just one more neutral fact about the world, having no special significance. This is an indirect way of becoming free of one’s compulsive annoyance-reaction to the noise.
But further, suppose the annoyance remains despite one’s best effort. One now becomes annoyed at the annoyance. The annoyance itself becomes an obstacle to achieving a goal I have decided I want, so it becomes a personal affront to me. Again, Vipassana technique does not advise direct suppression of the annoyance. Rather, one should try to become a neutral observer of the annoyance itself. One does not become free of compulsive reactions by directly struggling with them. One becomes free by becoming a neutral observer. Becoming a neutral observer does not mean creating an image of oneself as a neutral observer and trying to realize this image. One becomes a neutral observer, free of compulsive reactions, by neutrally observing.
In practicing non-reactive awareness, it does not matter what one is aware of. Vipassana does not consist in concentrating on anything in particular, so strictly speaking there can be no "distractions" for the person practicing Vipassana. It is not a matter of what one is aware of, but how one is aware. One can be non-reactively aware of sounds in the external world, of bodily sensations, nervous bodily energy, thoughts, feelings of depression or elation, painful or blissful feelings, feelings of calmness or nervousness, and so on. The whole point is to gradually build up the mental skill of non-reactive awareness. Like any skill, there are degrees of this skill – it is not a matter of being completely free and non-reactive, or completely compulsive in one’s reactions. One gradually becomes more free as one gradually builds up the skill of being less caught up in compulsive, un-free reactions.
The purpose of this, of course, is not to go through life literally not reacting to anything. The practice of non-reactive awareness is a skill-building exercise, not an end in itself. It is like a piano player practicing scales, or a football player lifting weights. The football player does not lift weights because he prefers this to playing football, but so that he can play football better. In the same way, one practices non-reactive awareness at meditation, not because one prefers non-reaction to living one’s life, but so that one can live one’s life better. Done properly, Vipassana naturally flows over into one’s life, enabling one to be more free of compulsive and inflexible reactions stemming from neediness, and more able to react freely and flexibly, fully accepting whatever is unchangeable about every situation, and matching one’s response to the particulars of each situation as it occurs.