THE NAME BLAME
A few weeks ago His Holiness the Dalai Lama got into a dialogue with a bunch of brain scientists at Stanford University on two topics that seemed stubbornly common to all human behavior: craving and suffering. Since the mind science of Buddhism was set up 2500 years ago at the intersection of these two words, all Buddhists on hand were presumed to know their meaning. To rush the others to understanding, the medical doctor in chief started the Western brain science talk with what he called a demonstration of the inevitability of human craving: he asked the audience to hold its breath for a minute. “Now,” he said sixty seconds later, “breathe in. Well, that’s it—you’ve satisfied a craving and doesn’t it feel good!”
The cameras panned to the noticeably dismayed face of the Dalai Lama. “I think,” he said through his translator, “we have differing ideas of this word craving.”
As His Holiness tried to explain that the human body’s very real need for air did not fit into the Buddhist concept of desire, the dialogue swerved into that breakdown lane called failure to communicate. Despite good intentions and efforts to bridge two valiant paths, both had been laid out with the shifting sand of words because, to paraphrase the Bee Gees, words are all we have to take our “apart” away. We are hinged on experience and held together (I am trying not to say “screwed’) by how we are able to describe it to each other, which means of course that what we haven’t experienced isn’t going to be in our dialogue let alone in our vocabulary. The Penobscot Indians of Maine, for instance, had no word for famine while the Indians of the northwest coast had potlatch as insurance against it. The initial monotheists had no word for God because they could find no accurate way to describe the phenomenon; they kept saying “that which cannot be named” or “that which cannot be described” which, maybe not so oddly, is why highly refined Buddhist practitioners cannot find a way to describe the great mind/body transcendence to the gargantuan experience of enlightenment. It’s always that “you had to be there” thing.
Of course experiences are out there to be had and with them the dictionary fattens. Look at the words thrown into our melting pot as we came face to face with the world: baksheesh and assassin from Arabs, gourmet and boutique from the French who gave us bourgeoisie, chutzpah and maven from Yiddish, macho and guerilla from our forays into Latin America, mogul and pundit and Brahmin from India. These words are evidently now such a part of us that not one of them makes my computer scold me with red underlining.
You can understand a people through their language. The Chinese have no past or future tense; everything in German is tense or a federal case. French is elegant but it’s inflexible. English is highly absorbent. In America opening windows no longer describes letting in fresh air, mustangs and pintos do not bring wild but iron horses to mind and all those weirdly spelled incarnations of Vishnu in crossword puzzles have been replaced by weirdly spelled corporate brands so that 1.down Jelly is no longer jam, it is KY.
A very literate foreigner pointed out that Americans are a culture of complaint with rare words for joy so I opened my Roget’s and all I found for joy was pleasure, cheerfulness while complaint took up a lot of index space with cry, illness, deprecation, annoyance, discontent, lament, wrong, accusation, blame, indictment, disapprobation, malcontent. Eskimos as we all know by now have a veritable panoply of synonyms for snow. We have 33 Internet pages of names for shampoo, from before Aveda to Weleda.
What the Stanford scientists didn’t seem to know is that Tibetans do not think as they do that brain and mind are absolutely equal let’s stop there synonyms. For one thing, to symbolize the body, Tibetans point at the forehead, to symbolize the mind they point at the heart. Then too, Tibetan has many words for our one English word mind, each delicately nuanced to its various phases of experience because, not tied up puzzling over the difference in those brands on those 33 pages of shampoos, they’ve been able to have those experiences. They also have several words for knowledge, indicating different levels of attainment the highest being wisdom, for which they also have calibrated synonyms (the lowest reflects outer earned "scientific" knowledge). Obviously this is an issue for them.
Buddhists also have more than one word for meditation because they could be seeking serenity or insight or the experience of emptiness. They could even be visualizing while reiterating mantra. It is through the inner eye of meditation, often symbolized in drawings as that third eye on the forehead, that they are able to dissect and discuss the mind which Western scientists with all their microscopes and electrodes and magnetic imaging still can't do. They can't see it and the invisible brings them up empty. Because it won't cooperate with all their high tech toys they can't trust the mind to its own devices so that perhaps eventually like Buddhists they could. Hell, they have all those pharmaceutical devices for the brain that they can see.
To make matters worse, the scientists were stuck with only five sense portals while the Buddhists had six because they consider the invisible mind, the portal of thoughts, to be another way we sense the world. Also, in relation to all the senses, Tibetan contains eight words for our single word consciousness; Buddhists carefully link each sense portal to a particular and separate consciousness. There was no way in the same short time it took the medical men to describe using electrodes or how Prozac changes this corner of the cortex that His Holiness could read from the complex Abhidharma, the behavioral laws scientifically discovered and codified more than two millenniums ago, or explain all those consciousnesses and subsets of ayatanas, dhatus, indriyas, kleshas that lead to them and how they all integrate to create behavior, especially to folks who live as Americans do on the shiny surface and believe only what is tangible—what can be bought, sold or controlled in the marketplace. Remember, to us Samsara is a French perfume, Nirvana a beach resort.
It was, as I said, a matter of time. Our vocabulary resounds with words like instant, snappy, immediate, convenient, easy, fast, zip, quick. Consumer culture is so addicted to instant gratification that our increasing desperation for the quick fix to stay high has turned our holy grail into the magic bullet. Bullets, of course, are for killing, if not people then maybe viruses, bacteria, cancers, depression, anxiety-- anything we don’t like we can shoot down with them. In his summary of the dialogue, one distinguished doctor mentioned that his own physician, warning him that his cholesterol level had risen to the danger zone, offered him the choice of drastically changing his eating habits or taking Lipitor for life. The doctor looked at the Dalai Lama, looked at the audience, and said with a laughing shrug: “I said ‘Give me that prescription!’”
His Holiness got that dismayed look back on his face because of course Buddhism is about changing habits, drastically changing habits because there is no magic bullet, no God, nothing to save you but yourself. None of the scientists disagreed that in carefully controlled experiments meditation had shown a positive effect on brain so none doubted its potential in their work of curing suffering. But, they complained, it took a long time, many years, to make a realized meditator. Who had that kind of time? “How long,” one of the Buddhists shot back, “did it take you to become a fully realized surgeon? A year? Didn’t you pass through 12 years of school, four years of college, four years of medical school and then many more years of training to get here today? It’s just a question of what you find important to learn.”
In the end that too was a matter of words. Stanford was proud to have hosted a dialogue between Buddhists and scientists so its final speakers chided the neuroscientists who petitioned against a similar dialogue in Washington DC. Many of those naysayers were Chinese and His Holiness represents a people their people have been trying to demolish for the last fifty years, but politics had been left out of the petition. The vehemence came from semantics. For lack of a better word, English defines Buddhism as a religion. This puts it in our experience right up there with the Catholic Church insisting the sun revolves around the Earth to ensure life on Earth revolved around their Pope and the American Christians screaming for Intelligent Design to avoid dealing with the unHallmarky fact that we humans are animals too. Having no words, no way, no third eye to see or allow there could be systematic knowledge of the physical and material (my dictionary’s definition of science) in something as immaterial as what we call religion, those brain guys didn’t want Buddhists meddling with their mind. It was stuck on a cherished belief in their own absolute objectivity and thus on the godlike omnipotence of science, desired ruler of the world.
There at last was a good example of the bad craving both sides of the Stanford dialogue could agreeably seek to end.
Technorati Tags: The Name Blame. The Dalai Lama. Yours In The Dharma. Sandy Garson, Dharma, Buddhist
The cameras panned to the noticeably dismayed face of the Dalai Lama. “I think,” he said through his translator, “we have differing ideas of this word craving.”
As His Holiness tried to explain that the human body’s very real need for air did not fit into the Buddhist concept of desire, the dialogue swerved into that breakdown lane called failure to communicate. Despite good intentions and efforts to bridge two valiant paths, both had been laid out with the shifting sand of words because, to paraphrase the Bee Gees, words are all we have to take our “apart” away. We are hinged on experience and held together (I am trying not to say “screwed’) by how we are able to describe it to each other, which means of course that what we haven’t experienced isn’t going to be in our dialogue let alone in our vocabulary. The Penobscot Indians of Maine, for instance, had no word for famine while the Indians of the northwest coast had potlatch as insurance against it. The initial monotheists had no word for God because they could find no accurate way to describe the phenomenon; they kept saying “that which cannot be named” or “that which cannot be described” which, maybe not so oddly, is why highly refined Buddhist practitioners cannot find a way to describe the great mind/body transcendence to the gargantuan experience of enlightenment. It’s always that “you had to be there” thing.
Of course experiences are out there to be had and with them the dictionary fattens. Look at the words thrown into our melting pot as we came face to face with the world: baksheesh and assassin from Arabs, gourmet and boutique from the French who gave us bourgeoisie, chutzpah and maven from Yiddish, macho and guerilla from our forays into Latin America, mogul and pundit and Brahmin from India. These words are evidently now such a part of us that not one of them makes my computer scold me with red underlining.
You can understand a people through their language. The Chinese have no past or future tense; everything in German is tense or a federal case. French is elegant but it’s inflexible. English is highly absorbent. In America opening windows no longer describes letting in fresh air, mustangs and pintos do not bring wild but iron horses to mind and all those weirdly spelled incarnations of Vishnu in crossword puzzles have been replaced by weirdly spelled corporate brands so that 1.down Jelly is no longer jam, it is KY.
A very literate foreigner pointed out that Americans are a culture of complaint with rare words for joy so I opened my Roget’s and all I found for joy was pleasure, cheerfulness while complaint took up a lot of index space with cry, illness, deprecation, annoyance, discontent, lament, wrong, accusation, blame, indictment, disapprobation, malcontent. Eskimos as we all know by now have a veritable panoply of synonyms for snow. We have 33 Internet pages of names for shampoo, from before Aveda to Weleda.
What the Stanford scientists didn’t seem to know is that Tibetans do not think as they do that brain and mind are absolutely equal let’s stop there synonyms. For one thing, to symbolize the body, Tibetans point at the forehead, to symbolize the mind they point at the heart. Then too, Tibetan has many words for our one English word mind, each delicately nuanced to its various phases of experience because, not tied up puzzling over the difference in those brands on those 33 pages of shampoos, they’ve been able to have those experiences. They also have several words for knowledge, indicating different levels of attainment the highest being wisdom, for which they also have calibrated synonyms (the lowest reflects outer earned "scientific" knowledge). Obviously this is an issue for them.
Buddhists also have more than one word for meditation because they could be seeking serenity or insight or the experience of emptiness. They could even be visualizing while reiterating mantra. It is through the inner eye of meditation, often symbolized in drawings as that third eye on the forehead, that they are able to dissect and discuss the mind which Western scientists with all their microscopes and electrodes and magnetic imaging still can't do. They can't see it and the invisible brings them up empty. Because it won't cooperate with all their high tech toys they can't trust the mind to its own devices so that perhaps eventually like Buddhists they could. Hell, they have all those pharmaceutical devices for the brain that they can see.
To make matters worse, the scientists were stuck with only five sense portals while the Buddhists had six because they consider the invisible mind, the portal of thoughts, to be another way we sense the world. Also, in relation to all the senses, Tibetan contains eight words for our single word consciousness; Buddhists carefully link each sense portal to a particular and separate consciousness. There was no way in the same short time it took the medical men to describe using electrodes or how Prozac changes this corner of the cortex that His Holiness could read from the complex Abhidharma, the behavioral laws scientifically discovered and codified more than two millenniums ago, or explain all those consciousnesses and subsets of ayatanas, dhatus, indriyas, kleshas that lead to them and how they all integrate to create behavior, especially to folks who live as Americans do on the shiny surface and believe only what is tangible—what can be bought, sold or controlled in the marketplace. Remember, to us Samsara is a French perfume, Nirvana a beach resort.
It was, as I said, a matter of time. Our vocabulary resounds with words like instant, snappy, immediate, convenient, easy, fast, zip, quick. Consumer culture is so addicted to instant gratification that our increasing desperation for the quick fix to stay high has turned our holy grail into the magic bullet. Bullets, of course, are for killing, if not people then maybe viruses, bacteria, cancers, depression, anxiety-- anything we don’t like we can shoot down with them. In his summary of the dialogue, one distinguished doctor mentioned that his own physician, warning him that his cholesterol level had risen to the danger zone, offered him the choice of drastically changing his eating habits or taking Lipitor for life. The doctor looked at the Dalai Lama, looked at the audience, and said with a laughing shrug: “I said ‘Give me that prescription!’”
His Holiness got that dismayed look back on his face because of course Buddhism is about changing habits, drastically changing habits because there is no magic bullet, no God, nothing to save you but yourself. None of the scientists disagreed that in carefully controlled experiments meditation had shown a positive effect on brain so none doubted its potential in their work of curing suffering. But, they complained, it took a long time, many years, to make a realized meditator. Who had that kind of time? “How long,” one of the Buddhists shot back, “did it take you to become a fully realized surgeon? A year? Didn’t you pass through 12 years of school, four years of college, four years of medical school and then many more years of training to get here today? It’s just a question of what you find important to learn.”
In the end that too was a matter of words. Stanford was proud to have hosted a dialogue between Buddhists and scientists so its final speakers chided the neuroscientists who petitioned against a similar dialogue in Washington DC. Many of those naysayers were Chinese and His Holiness represents a people their people have been trying to demolish for the last fifty years, but politics had been left out of the petition. The vehemence came from semantics. For lack of a better word, English defines Buddhism as a religion. This puts it in our experience right up there with the Catholic Church insisting the sun revolves around the Earth to ensure life on Earth revolved around their Pope and the American Christians screaming for Intelligent Design to avoid dealing with the unHallmarky fact that we humans are animals too. Having no words, no way, no third eye to see or allow there could be systematic knowledge of the physical and material (my dictionary’s definition of science) in something as immaterial as what we call religion, those brain guys didn’t want Buddhists meddling with their mind. It was stuck on a cherished belief in their own absolute objectivity and thus on the godlike omnipotence of science, desired ruler of the world.
There at last was a good example of the bad craving both sides of the Stanford dialogue could agreeably seek to end.
Technorati Tags: The Name Blame. The Dalai Lama. Yours In The Dharma. Sandy Garson, Dharma, Buddhist
posted by Sandy Garson @ 2:46 PM
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