Tag: Buddhism

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The Christian “soul,” the Hindu “atman,” and the Buddhist “consciousness”

In my most recent trip with students to our local Buddhist temple, I asked the monk who hosts us: “What’s the difference between Hindu ‘reincarnation’ and Buddhist ‘rebirth’ or ‘reincarnation’?” In short, his answer was that while Hindus believe that the Atman or soul reincarnates, Buddhists believe that consciousness is reborn/reincarnated.

For (most?) Hindus, the Atman is our true, unchanging “Self”. When we die, it finds a new body/materiality. For Buddhists, we are five “Skandhas,” or “aggregates” of (1) form, (2) sensation; (3) perception; (4) mental formations; and (5) consciousness. “I” am the intersection of these five things; there’s no “true” me. But if there is something that transcends one life to the next, it’s consciousness. My sensations/perceptions/mental formations change, rapidly. My body does too, though with more consistency, but only across a single lifespan. My consciousness changes too, but unlike the other four Skandhas, this process continues. It’s not an unchanging soul, but it does seem (and maybe Buddhists would reject this) as something of an anchor for identity.

My tradition, Christianity, tends to be dualistic. I perceive this to be more akin to Hindu’s Atman than Buddhism’s consciousness. That said, I find myself attracted to Buddhists consciousness in the sense that I think even if there’s something semi-stable, something “anchoring,” I don’t see how it’s static. But I want to have my cake and eat it too, because Christian eschatology, at its best (and I would say Gregory of Nyssa is my greatest influence here), imagines us endlessly (?) unifying with our “Source” (God). Similarly, many forms of Hinduism say we merge in some way with the ultimate reality, Brahman. So, I want my use of the word “soul” in a Christian context to be akin to Buddhism’s consciousness in that I want to use language that sees sentient creatures like me as processes, and that’s where our identity is both real, because we are an ongoing process, maybe even after death, but is not hounded by some of the problems with dualism. But I want to imagine this process as sustained and continued by our “Source,” so that while there may be no static part of me, and therefore when I speak of my “soul,” I’m not saying the real, static “me,” but there is a reality that has continuation. I see this as analogous to how I’m both the same process but not the same being as seven or fourteen or twenty-one year old Brian LePort. There’s continuation and discontinuation.

I presume that there are some forms of Buddhism where this vision of an ongoing “I” that’s not static, that’s a process, but that’s not merely the materialist illusion of a heap of materiality, exists. And if so, I think this is where Indian philosophy, modern philosophy of mind, and my own Christian tradition intersect.

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Lucretius, resurrection, and bodily regeneration

Yesterday, I was reading some excerpts from Lucretius, the first-century Roman philosopher. He is considered to be a central contributor to the philosophy of Epicureanism. He was an “Atomist” which was akin to modern materialists. In his On the Nature of the Universe (De rerum natura ), he declares that “death is nothing to us” since his understanding of death is that it’s a mirror to our non-existence prior to birth. We don’t feel sadness about all of the cosmic history that we missed before our birth, so why should we care about all that we’ll miss after our death? He states, “…when the union of body and spirit that engenders us has been disrupted—to us, who shall then be nothing, nothing by any hazard will happen any more at all.”

Then he says something that has stuck with me since I encountered it as an undergraduate a couple of decades ago. He writes,

If any feeling remains in mind or spirit after his has been torn from our body, that is nothing to us, who are brought into being by the wedlock of body and spirit, conjoined and coalesced. Or even if the matter that composes us should be reassembled by time after our death and brought back into its present state—if the light of life were given to us anew—even that contingency would still be no concern of ours once the chain of our identity had been snapped.

Except found in The Good Life edited by Charles Guignon, p. 45

Lucretius’ statement causes trouble for people who believe in religious/philosophical concepts like resurrection and reincarnation but also for some post-humanists who imagine someday uploading our consciousness into a digital utopia. For Lucretius, even if this body or this body and mind combination would be reconstructed, it wouldn’t be “me”. I ended. This is someone new with recycled parts!

This raises the “Ship of Theseus” (Greek) or “Chariot Simile” (Buddhist) problem. If discontinuity is measured by change, then how do we have any continuity. In both the Greek and Buddhist ways of framing the problem, we have an object made of parts—either a ship or a chariot—that can have parts replaced. Since theoretically each part can be replaced to the point that there’s no original ship/chariot parts, we must ask, what’s essential to the identity of Ship A or Chariot A. If Ship A’s parts have all been replaced, how can it be Ship A still? But if it’s now Ship B, when did it become Ship B? And if we can take all the old parts in a pile that was made as Ship A was being deconstructed, would rebuilding it make it the real Ship A?

An answer to this that comes from the Buddhist monk Nāgasena is that we’re thinking of identity wrong. He claims in the Chariot Simile that the name “Nāgasena” isn’t referring to a singular static person but an observable process. The child named Nāgasena isn’t the adult named Nāgasena but they’re connected in that the child is part of the same process that led to the adult who will lead to the old man before the whole process ends with death. Nāgasena isn’t a fixed object; Nāgasena is an organic movement.

I don’t know that I had encountered Nāgasena in college (pretty confident that I hadn’t) but I do remember doing a presentation that made a similar argument in favor of the coherence of the doctrine of bodily resurrection. If we’re a process now, why can’t that process resume at the eschaton? My criticism of Lucretius’ idea is that he sounds like he assumes we’re static now, but we’re not. If we’re not static now, but our modern self has a sense of continuity with our former self, then why wouldn’t our future resurrected self, as different as it may be from our previous self, maintain that same sense of continuation. Now, obviously, we’re talking about taking a logical argument only so far before having to use a God-of-the-gaps to get us from death to resurrection, but I was proud of the argument nonetheless.

In some way, this could work for reincarnation or post-humanism too. But does it work or does Lucretius’ critique hold? I think there remains a problem. Often we hear about how the human body regenerates new cells every seven years, on average. And this gives us a sense that we experience something like complete bodily renewal every seven years but that’s not quite accurate. Here’s a summary of what happens in actuality:

Some parts of our body are renewing constantly but some parts of our heart, brain, eye lens, and another source I read said cells within our spinal cord, last a life time. Therefore, unlike the Ship of Theseus or the Chariot Simile, we never quite get to the point where we’ve been completely replaced. Until we die, there is some stability though not much. What does this do to undergraduate me’s argument that our existence is dynamic already therefore a resurrected identity (or reincarnated or uploaded) isn’t a massive discontinuation as it may have been claimed. It would seem that if our bodily life is anchored to even a few bits of continuation, then when those end we lose what we were and Lucretius’ point stands centuries later.

Obviously, I’m pondering this on Easter Sunday when Christians celebrate Jesus’ resurrection. I’m wondering what it means for our understanding of the doctrine. I know that the Pauline interpretation in 1 Corinthians 15 makes it clear that discontinuity is built in. He talks about how Jesus’ resurrected body is animated by spirit and how our bodies are “flesh-and-blood”. Whatever we may do with his language, his point is that Jesus resurrected body, while a body, isn’t like our body. The Evangelists do something similar when they talk about Jesus appearing and disappearing but also being able to be touched and even consume food. But this brings me back to Lucretius: if this is the resurrected body, how is this not a new Jesus? How does the resurrected Jesus related to Jesus of Nazareth?

Analogously, let’s imagine that in the future people can map our brain patterns. As we die, they scan our brain and upload that pattern to a computer. My body dies but my “code” awakens in post-humanist, digital bliss. Is that me? Is that a copy of me? If my current bodily state is impacted by everything from my synapses connecting to my gut bacteria to my external stimuli, would merely reproducing my brain patterns be preserving me? This may be where religious thinkers retreat to a dualism: the soul (or “Atman” in Indian philosophy) is the real me, it interacts with my body, but it’s independent of my body in some way even now. But that pushes us to deal with the problems of dualism, and there are many! But is dualism the only escape if you want to preserve concepts like resurrection or reincarnation? Or does the Buddhist claim that we’re processes already, even if there is a portion of who we are that remains static, continue to hold in some way that I’m not considering?

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Buddhism, Existentialism, and the Enneagram

I’m suspicious of personality tests like Myers-Briggs and the Enneagram. My suspicion is based on a principle. Those tests are understood by many who take it to reveal the static personality-type that you inherited. Whereas I tend to see people as creating the dynamic personality that they want. Or, if you want to propose a more passive way of seeing personality, we are dynamic personalities that are created by realities ranging from our genetic inheritance to our social situatedness.

My views begin with the influence of Buddhism. I’m not Buddhist but I’ve studied enough Buddhism over the years to know that Buddhist concepts of the self—or more precisely the no-self (anattā /anātman)—make a lot of sense to me. Our existence is transient. Our bodies are constantly changing. Yes, there are consistencies in our personalities and appearance over time but consistencies don’t reflect concreteness. Buddhism places a premium on the changing nature of reality, which includes us. When I reviewed Jay L. Garfield’s Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self, I said this about anattā /anātman:

its a Buddhist doctrine that teaches there’s no essential “I” underneath my physicality, emotions, perceptions, mental formations, or even consciousness. Instead, “I” am the culmination of these realities; their intersection, if you will. Buddhists call them “Skandhas” or “Aggregates” or “Heaps” that together make “me”. Buddhists reject the idea, encapsulated in the Indian concept of the “Atman” which has parallels to the “soul” of the Abrahamic religions. Hinduism’s “Atman” is the “real me” underneath it all. You could change my body, thoughts, feelings, etc., but those aren’t the “real me”. The “real me” is the Atman that holds it all together. Buddhist say “no,” there’s no “Atman” (hence, “anatman” or “no-Atman”) underneath it all. What makes “me” who “I” am are all these realities. For those familiar with Greek philosophy, which posits an underlying “essence” that shouldn’t change (e.g. humanness) and “accidents” that do change (e.g. gender, eye-color, weight, height) from human to human, in a way Buddhism teaches we are our collective “accidents” and that’s what we must embrace when we speak of “I”.

Or, as K.T.S. Sarao states it (“Anātman“), more succinctly, “the ‘self’ or ‘person’ (Pāli. puggala, Skt. pudgala), conceived as an enduring entity, simply does not exist and that everything is a succession and in flux, there being nothing that is substantial or permanent.”

I’m not saying that I’ve abandoned something like the “soul” or “mind” as an emerging property when I say that I find this Buddhist concept attractive. I’m saying that the Hindu concept of Atman, which can understood to be somewhat static, or the “soul” of Cartesian dualism, seems unsatisfactory. Whatever it is that we experience when we experience metacognition, when we reflect and when we speak of “I,” it seems unlikely that it would be static while everything else about us and our world is dynamic. So, no, I haven’t embraced a more extreme form of anattā /anātman, or the language we hear from philosophers like Daniel Dennett, that consciousness is illusory. But I do want to say that whatever consciousness is, whatever mind is, whatever “soul” is trying to capture, that changes with us like all of us changes. It’s evolving. It’s not static and there to be “discovered”.

The aforementioned personality tests, whether intentionally or not, leave people seeing themselves as something settled. They need to find what that is. Then they can appreciate it and use it to their benefit. Each form of settledness includes strengths to be harnessed and weaknesses to be suppressed.

There are some aspects of Existentialism that align with the Buddhist critique of a static-persona paradigm. Kevin Aho’s Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article “Existentialism” is helpful here. First, Aho’s comments about Existentialism’s emphasis on embodiment:

Against the standard “Cartesian account,” the body is not regarded as a discrete, causally determined object, extended in space, and set apart from the disinterested gaze of the cognizing mind. The body is not something I have. It is a site of affectivity and meaning. It is who I am. And I cannot obtain objective knowledge of my body because I am already living through it; it is the experiential medium of my existence. “The body,” as Sartre puts it, “is lived and not known.”

We aren’t being with bodies; we are bodies. We are a static personality in a dynamic body. All of our existence is dynamic.

Second, Sartre’s comment that “existence precedes essence” is key. Aho summarizes it this way, “there is no pre-given or essential nature that determines us, which means that we are always other than ourselves, that we don’t fully coincide with who we are. We exist for ourselves as self-making or self-defining beings, and we are always in the process of making or defining ourselves through the situated choices we make as our lives unfold.” At a glance, this may sound like the claim that we’re not limited by our bodies but that’s not the claim at all. Existentialism posits two important concepts: facticity and transcendence. Aho summarizes facticity this way:

Acknowledging existence as a self-making process does not mean the existentialist is denying that there are determinate aspects or “facts” about our situation that limit and constrain us. This is our givenness (or “facticity”), and it includes aspects of our being such as our embodiment and spatiality, our creaturely appetites and desires, and the socio-historical context we find ourselves in. But what distinguishes us as humans is that we have the capacity to rise above or “transcend” these facts in the way we relate to, interpret, and make sense of them. If I am compelled by a strong desire for sex, alcohol, or cigarettes, for instance, I do not out of necessity have to act on these desires. I have the freedom to question them and give them meaning, and the meanings I attribute to them shape my choices and the direction my life will take going forward.

How does facticity relate to our transcendence? Aho notes, “we are self-conscious beings who can surpass our facticity by calling it into question”. We can see what we are but then reinterpret it and even will to reshape it to a degree. This means that we are “free” but as the more mature expressions of Existentialism acknowledge, that freedom is “mediated”. Aho observes of Sarte:

…he realized that this early account was far too abstract, interiorized, and influenced by Cartesian assumptions. It failed to engage the social, historical, and material conditions that invariably limit and constrain our freedom. He came to recognize that our choices and actions are always mediated by the world, by the sociohistorical situation we’ve been thrown into. He sees that the idea of radical, unconditioned freedom “is nonsense. The truth is that existence ‘is-in-society’ as it ‘is-in-the-world’”.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty developed this insight. Aho summarizes, “In Phenomenology of Perception, for example, Merleau-Ponty makes it clear that the options we choose to act on do not emerge out of nothing. They are already embedded in a sociohistorical situation ‘before any personal decision has been made.’ The ways in which we create or make ourselves, then, are always circumscribed by the meanings of our situation. We are simultaneously self-making and already made.”

Finally, Existentialism emphasizes “Authenticity”. This is the desire to live as ourselves; to avoid the herd-mentality as much as possible. This isn’t being non-conformist for the sake of non-conformity but instead being honest about our likes and dislikes, our desires, tastes, dreams, and ambitions, even when the broader society of which we’re part doesn’t sign off on them. This is where the concept of “bad faith” enters the picture. Aho again:

Sartre and Beauvoir refer to inauthenticity in terms of “bad faith” (mauvaise foi), where we either deny or over-identify with one of the two aspects of human existence, either facticity or transcendence. I am in bad faith, for example, when I over-identify with my factical situation and deny my freedom to act on and transform this situation. I am also in bad faith when I over-identify with freedom and deny my past conduct and the fact that my choices are limited and constrained by my situation.

When I hear people say “I did this-or-that because I’m Enneagram 8,” I hear a bad faith comment. We may say this in jest. I joke about being from California or my French heritage when something I do irritates or intrigues people I know, but it’s mostly a joke. I know that being from California isn’t determinative and even less so that a bunch of people in my family tree have French surnames. But there are those who take these identities to be determinative of who they’ll be…no, who they are since being and becoming is incorrect. Personally, I want to say that Buddhism’s emphasize on the transitory nature of all reality and Existentialism’s emphasis on our ability to self-reflect and self-interpret (and to some degree, though limited, self-improve) means that Enneagram-identities are choices. We want to understand ourselves. We want an identity. These are convenient pre-packaged ones. I guess they’re no worse than when I identify with my career or field(s) of study. There’s an urge to say, “that’s me, that’s my ‘type’ and my identity and my place with my people”. But I think in doing this we’re saying this is who we want to be and we’re saying this is the interpretation of ourselves that we like.

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A Short Note on Christopher Bartley’s An Introduction to Indian Philosophy

Christopher Bartley, An Introduction to Indian Philosophy: Hindu and Buddhist Ideas from Original Sources (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

(Amazon; Bookshop)

The other day, while reading Christopher Bartley’s An Introduction to Indian Philosophy, I sent a text to a friend marveling at the fact that Indian philosophers like Ramakantha and Dharmakirti were debating ideas related to the self centuries ago that sound a lot like what we might hear from David Chalmers and Daniel Dennett today. But it takes some work to find these thinkers and their writings. For this reason, I’m grateful to Bartley for the volume he has created. This book introduced me to a wide variety of Hindu and Buddhist intellectual traditions with which I was unfamiliar. It made most apparent something I teach my students over and over again: “religions are internally diverse”.

Hinduism and Buddhism are oversimplified labels that we use for pragmatic reasons. Beneath these labels there are many Hinduisms and many Buddhisms. Bartley guides the reading through the dense arguments. The reading takes some work, or at least it did for me. (I purchased the book in May, 2022, and it’s only about 300 pp. of content!) But it’s worth it.

In my estimation, the major philosophical topics that this book addresses are the self, consciousness, cosmology, and epistemology. The reader will learn that Indian philosophers have been addressing questions centuries before Descartes, Hume, et al. Yes, the Indian milieu is different but I contend that Hindu and Buddhist philosophers are easily as thought provoking and challenging as their European counterparts

A year ago, I finished reading Bryan Van Norden’s Taking Back Philosophy, which passionately argued that we must include world philosophies into our philosophizing or start honestly labeling what we call “philosophy” more precisely as “Anglo-European philosophy”. I’ve taken his argument seriously, and in doing so, I feel like my brain has been stretched in a good way. Indian thinkers have been deeply engaging our world for millennia and we do ourselves a disservice if we ignore their contributions or mistakenly dismiss them as “religious”. I highly recommend Bartley’s book for anyone interested in world philosophies, the philosophical categories I mentioned above, or Indian traditions in general.