A review / critique of "The Nippapañca Blog - Abhidhamma Studies II - Arising and Passing Away" – as referenced in the thread "Monks opinion about Abdhidhamma"
(http://www.dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/5724863)
The whole article in the
The Nippapañca Blog is, IME, bogus, at several levels. I will try to here elucidate how, using both domain evidenceand literary criticism. Not that it will influence the understanding of anyone who accepts it's findings (who shares its mindset), but rather as an exercise in expressing an understanding of conflicting culture-bound viewpoints.
In brief, the author uses Western literal translations of foreign (culturally and historically distant) metaphorical or symbolic concepts, applies evidence and logic germane to Western physical science to posit the 'impossibility' of such notions, then projects the perceived irreality back into the Asian Buddhist mentality to utterly refute it. It's overall a variation on conspiracy-theory argumentation. Plus, the author voices blatant misconceptions of the Asian concepts to begin with, which is actually easier to demonstrate.
"The journal of an American Theravada Buddhist monk, sharing experiences and philosophical reflections after his return from 20 years in the forests of Burma."The author was apparently wasting his time for those 20 years (if, in fact, it's true he spent that time actually immersed in Burmese Buddhist study and practice), if he wasn't able to recognize that there are fundamental differences between his native mindset and that of the Burmese Buddhists (and Asian cultures in general). Though it's incomprehensible to someone who hasn't experienced it, there's an extremely valuable benefit to immersing oneself in a 'foreign' culture, learning to live it and becoming able to see all of reality from its viewpoint. Note that in traditional upper-class education in many European cultures, an important step (after going through education in one's native culture, up through at least the collegiate level) was to live and/or study in an other country, learning it's language, customs,viewpoint, etc. At first, it's quite strange, counter-'intuitive' relative to one's native perceptions and judgments; after sometime (minimum, say a couple of years), one learns to operate more wholly in the new environment – speaks, understands, dreams in the new language; understands the idioms and biases, and, at best, also the historical cultural influences that condition them. Emerging from this experience, say when coming back 'home' (or even during the experience), one gains the opportunity to notice that one's own native mindset is essentially conditioned and in many ways arbitrary and strange, just like the foreign one. One can see one's native culture, so to speak, through the eyes of the s/w acquired foreign cultural viewpoint. This was once considered proper 'e-ducation' – Latin 'being led' (
ducere) 'out of' (
ex-) one's native conditioned, supposed 'reality', to realize how each culture has its own version of, holds itself as self-evident reality. In a word: cultural relativity.The evidence (this blog article) suggests that this person didn't quite appreciate that opportunity, wasn't able to let go of native biases sufficiently to get the pointof this sort of education, to reach the point of being able to see the relativity of his own native baises. (This is by no means a unique case. Another, more prominent, example could be argued in the case of the writings and viewpoints of Stephen Batchelor – but that's another story.)
"The Abhidhamma philosophy of Theravada Buddhism has interpreted this impermanence to mean that every conditioned entity in the universe exists for only about a trillionth of an eye-blink, i.e. less than a thousandth of a nanosecond."
It is true that the fascination with numerology evident in Asian cultures (among others) of 2000+ years ago resulted in writings calculating both macro and micro dimensions in terms of very large (or very small) numbers. (I noticed this earlier with Chinese medical and philosophical writings of about the same historical period, in a study of the history and theory of Chinese medicine.) One can see this in passages in the (Buddist)
suttas enumerating the life-cycles of beings in the multiple levels of divine beings of Buddhist/Indic cosmology – 10's, 100's, 100,000's of 'eons', etc. These were literary devices, conventions to impart a sense of magnitude beyond the ordinary, NOT literal devices intended to represent exact measurement (a more modern device) in terms of practical lived experience.
It's also true, that, for instance, the Pa Auk Sayadaw in his books uses similar computations, e.g. that mental events occur at extremely high rates – millions of millions per second. I believe that this is meant to convey that mental phenomena consist of subevents that operate at rates well beyond 'normal', untrained perception, and that trained perception can detect events occurring orders of magnitude faster then we usually think of them. In practice, and with current understanding of the neurological basis, while 'ordinary' perception may recognize 'several' events in a second, it's conceivable that 10's or even 100's could be brought into awareness in some sense. It's accepted that the basic cycle time of neurological events is in the neighborhood of a couple of milliseconds (ms); complexes of these that make of functional (potentially experientially detectable) behaviors are in the range of perhaps 10-20 ms, or 50-100 per second. This basic cycle-rate of human nervous system is relatively sluggish, compared to current digital logic (supercomputers are measuresd in 'tera-flops' – trillions of cycles/second). BUT the human brain functions with
massive degrees of 'parallelism', way beyond computers. The currently fastest Cray supercomputer consists of 200,000 microprocessors, but the human brain (30 billion neurons, at last count, with trillions of interconnections and astronomical numbers of possible discreet events) has 10's-100's of millions of simultaneous operations going on at once, where some smaller number, maybe 100+-, are candidates, are lurking at the borders of sub-consciousness, ready to potentially rise to that singular focus of attention we call 'an object' of consciousness.
"This idea has diffused out of Abhidhamma, and has come to be considered a mainstream tenet of Theravadin philosophy as a whole; and it has been cited as authoritative Buddhism by very reputable Western Dharma teachers, including Ram Dass."
Not true. It remains a relatively fringe (
abhidhamma specialists) technicality (and essentially metaphorical rather than literal). Very telling is the author's citation of Ram Dass as evidence of this 'mainstream tenet'. To be sure, he's a 'reputable Western Dharma teachers', but by no means representative of Therevadan understanding.
"Sayadaw U Pandita of the Mahasi tradition has declared many times that one should not accept a Dhamma teacher who has not at least experienced udayabbaya ñāṇa, the insight into arising and passing away, interpreted as seeing this trillion-times-per-second process."For sure, U Pandita would emphasize the importance of deep understanding of A&P. That he would bind this to experiencing it at literally trillions of Hz – I'd have to see actual quotations from him where he clearly interprets the mythic numerological quantities with observable experience. U Pandita, one sees quickly in reading his stuff, is pretty smart, enough to appreciatethe difference between Asian metaphor and Western literalism. The author here is clearly, repeatedly juxtaposing ideas from disparate areas in ways that are more rhetorical than logical.
"He stressed that the meditator does not experience it as it is happening, but "reviews" it afterwards. However, this would seem to require one of two things—either the meditator is remembering the past, or else he/she is seeing into the past clairvoyantly. But neither alternative seems to work, since one can't remember what one never experienced, and looking into the past, according to Abhidhamma, is impossible since the past is absolutely no longer existing, and one cannot see what is nonexistent."Yes, 'reviewing' experience while resonance of it is still presence in the neurology. This is readily experiencable. In absorbed
jhana there is no logical menta lfunctioning to speak of, but for a period after emerging from absorption the experience is still within reach and can be analyzed by a sharp, insight trained mind. Traditionally experience is said to linger in the
'hadaya-vatthu', the 'heart-base' of consciousness, where it can be viewed and analyzed. This too is metaphorical – not a location in the physical heart organ, but some sense of bodily-mental basis, and readily possible in terms of current understanding of neural imaging and memory mechanisms.
"According to Abhidhamma, the mind arises and passes away at a rate seventeen times faster than does physical matter. For each moment of matter, a seventeen-stage mental process called citta-vīthi is claimed to occur. This process is also supposed to be observed by very advanced meditators; although this implies some more convoluted complications."The author actually steps on his own foot here -- 1st sentence: the mind (
citta) cycles 17x faster than "physical matter"; 2nd sentence: "each moment of matter" is a 17-stage process… The first sentence cannot be attributed to
Abhidhamma (what does he attribute it to?); the second sentence is fairly accurate. This is 17-stage process is known as the 'cognitive series' --
citta-vithi -- an analysis of the smallest-scale phenomenologically discernable structures of the phenomena of conscious experience (the individual stages of which the author accurately lists further on), which combines experiencable events with many standard Buddhist terms. It is considered to have 17 discreet component stages (or only 11 if it’s a 'mind-door' 6th sense arising, without external sensory stimulus). But these sub-steps are NOT "physical matter". Maybe he means 17-times faster than a single one of the 17 subevents, each of which is 'physical' in the sense of being somehow correlatedwith physical neurons? But 'material' (
rupa) sensations (which are
conscious events of materiality) are each a whole 17-partseries.
The author mixes literal Western logic with mis-understanding of
abhidhamma ideas, motivated by wanting to assert the bias that the foreign ideas are impossible because they don't translate 1-to-1 into Western schema. The literary evidence suggests, too, that he's no rocket scientist.
"However, it would seem that this would be impossible, even for a fully enlightened Buddha. For starters, one could not observe the seventeen-step process because it requires a complete seventeen-step process to perceive anything, including one of the seventeen steps. So by the time the very first step had been perceived, the other sixteen would no longer be existing to be observed."
This demonstrates that (probably naively unselfconscious) mixing of viewpoints, with an Escher-like twist. And another basic flaw running through here is interpreting 'passing-away' (trillions per second) as an irretrievable disappearance. Yes, the raw experiencing of the moment is gone when it's over, but there's also an at least momentary echo of it available to succeeding conscious moments. This is both neruologically plausible and easily verified by a discerning but not necessarily that advanced mind. (I could cite both Daniel Ingram and Ven. U. Thuzana – abbot of a near-by Mahasi monastery – as to the experiential reality that a moment of raw sensation is immediately followed by a moment of purely mental awareness of it.)
"The very fact that so many meditators sincerely believe that they have experienced this momentary arising and passing away of phenomena, including their own mental processes, is some fairly good evidence that much of what passes for deep meditative states (jhāna) in Theravada Buddhism is actually hypnotic trance, and the resultant "insight" merely the result of hypnotic suggestion."Here the author extrapolates from the imposssiblity of truly having experience (of A&P) at the granularity of a trillionth-of-a-second to evidence that Theravadan
jhana and
vipassana (insight) are reducible to hypnosis-related delusion. The 'logic' of this paragraph distinctly reminds me of the rhetorical and logical style I've seen, and studied extensively over decades, in the area of acupuncture medicine and the rabid attacks on its credibility by a rather prominent organization called the "National Council Against Health Fraud
". This organization, originally set-up and run by some de-licensed (obviously embittered) MD, has in recent times reshaped itself to become more respectible. Acupuncture has in the meantime garnered substantial experimental verification of medical effectiveness (albeit in specific, limited areas – not the whole system with all its metaphorical aspects). People who still voice those earlier kinds of refutational attacks are largely overt crack-pots. Anyway, thelogical/rhetorical
modus operandi is clearly recognizable in our monk-author's style of argumentation.
(Back then, as acupuncture student and later practitioner, I developed a habit of searching-out and carefully studying such critiques, to see if/what they actually had to offer, to also better understand my own potential biases. As now I eagerly study the theory and research of things like 'Secular Buddhism', 'early' teachings theories, etc., to see what perhaps valid evidence and viewpoints are there, and to be able to clearly understand what biases and fallacies might be there, as well as understand the nature, perhaps biases, of my own 'viewpoints'.)
"I would guess that most people who consider themselves to be ariyas, or Buddhist "saints" who have had at least a glimpse of Nibbāna, are mistaken. Especially if their tradition insists that they are required to see what is impossible, yet they manage to see it anyway."
Here one notes the subtle linguistic nuances used in this type of argumentation: "I would guess… most … are mistaken." Also in the prior quotation "The very fact that… is some fairly good evidence that…". (Even the grammar is weak: "some fairly good" – double equivication in that 'some' and 'fairly' are both hedges.) There is a pattern here seen similar to one found in most conspiracy-type theories, and often in second-rate academic writing. In the first couple of pages comes suggestion that some evidence or other possibly, might be intrepreted to mean xyz… This is repeated every page or two, and by page 20 or so the qualifications ('might', 'perhaps', 'guessing',…) begin to be left out. And by the final concluding summary, the issue is considered conclusively proven, without, however, additional, stronger evidence having been revealed – just repetition and elaboration of the obvious, dubious, premises. Also, "ariyas, or Buddhist 'saints'" is a bit peculiar coming from a 20-year monk.
