Abstract
Though Buddhist texts often assume that the nature of nirvana is ineffable, some offer arguments for this claim. It is commonly said that this claim rests on the premise that gnosis of the required kind involves intuition rather than conceptualization; but there are problems with such a premise, even in terms of standard features of Buddhist philosophy. Some suggest instead that the claim rests on a premise about how thought relates to conditioned and unconditioned phenomena; but similar problems arise with this alternative premise. It is both textually and philosophically more plausible to hold that the Buddhist explanation for this ineffability rests on a certain meta-ethical understanding of the normativity of the ideal of nirvana. It is suggested that the conception of normativity that sustains this claim is better articulated in Yogacara sources than in other, more familiar, sources of Buddhist ethics and epistemology.
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Notes
- 1.
In the Dhammapada, nirvāṇa (nibbāna) is famously described as ‘paramaṁ sukham’, variously translated as ‘supreme happiness’, ‘supreme bliss’, or, as in Wallis, ‘supreme ease’. This is a common expression elsewhere in the Pali Canon, and in the Milindapanha. The opposites of greed, aversion and delusion are the roots of nirvāṇa, and are called ‘kusalamūlani’ – i.e. roots of good – kuśala being more general than sukha. Cf. Gombrich on the Theravāda tradition, and Nayak on the Mahāyāna. Norman argues that even the Buddha’s choice of the (Pali) term nibbana was likely guided by the scope for resonant word-play with nibbuti (blissful). See Wallis (2004); Mendis (1993); Gombrich (2009); Nayak (1979); Norman (1995).
- 2.
Gombrich implies the possibility of such an interpretation, but does not develop it. See Gombrich (2009, p. 153).
- 3.
Cf. Premasiri on their use of ‘kuśala’. Premasiri, P.D., “Ideas of the Good in Buddhist Philosophy,” in E. Deutsch & R. Bontekoe, eds., A Companion to World Philosophies. Oxford: Blackwell (1997).
- 4.
An exception is Finnigan and Tanaka (2011), who focus on meta-ethical anti-realism in Nāgārjuna and his followers. Mahāyānists like Nāgārjuna are sometimes thought of as anti-realists about everything except nirvāṇa. But ch. 25 of Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way Verses seems to show that his anti-realism applied to nirvāṇa also (controversially). Since nirvāṇa is a value that plays a structuring role in Buddhist ethics, Nāgārjuna’s approach implies some kind of meta-ethical anti-realism (allegedly without entailing moral scepticism in practice). Hence, while they lacked a name for what we call ‘meta-ethics’, early Buddhist philosophers were clearly engaged in debates that had implications for the area that now goes by this name. (In the next note, I suggest an even stronger claim along these lines.) Also see Davis (2013).
- 5.
Along with Plato’s tentative explorations of the form of the Good, the works of these early Mahāyāna Buddhists may thus be considered the first examinations of meta-ethics in history. Though some writers voice scepticism about the presence in Buddhist texts of any clear distinction between intrinsic and instrumental value (arguably a precondition for inquiries into meta-ethics), something along these lines seems evident in some contrasts between ‘paramārthasatya’ and ‘vyavahārasatya’ (and/or ‘saṃvṛtisatya’) – i.e. reflecting the ultimate/conventional distinction just discussed. Treating ‘paramārthasatya’ as insight into (supreme) intrinsic value and (e.g.) ‘vyavahārasatya’ as concerning instrumental value raises some problems, but, one could argue, no more than the problems we face in mapping the intrinsic/instrumental distinction onto formulations in ancient Greek ethics. Nonetheless, for present purposes, I will not make any assumptions about the relationship between different senses or aspects of ‘paramārthasatya’. As Premasiri (ibid.) indicates, Pali and Sanskrit offer other possibilities for expressing the concepts involved here.
- 6.
A.W. Moore (2003b, p. 170) also challenges this assumption; and in one place he suggests that our understanding of the notion of intrinsic value may be a good example of the ineffable. Moore also clarifies the relation between indescribability and indefinability. These are quite different; but since he takes semantic understanding to be the prime locus of ineffability, there is a natural connection: ineffability results in indescribability, but it is due to the indefinability of certain terms, in the first place, that the attempt to explain our understanding of the corresponding concepts highlights the ineffability of this understanding. See Moore (2003a, b).
- 7.
- 8.
Kalupahana (1976, p. 74) notes that the same passages have “been utilized by almost all Buddhist scholars to prove the existence of an ineffable transcendental reality in Buddhism” – though he himself is sceptical.
- 9.
In his commentary on Vasubandhu’s works, he explains: “in order to make known the essential nature of space… [Vasubandhu] describes its essential nature with the phrase ‘a place for form’… ‘place’ describes a region where [the type of] form that possesses resistance is not obstructed. Therefore, the term ‘space’ refers to [a region that] gives way to physical entities” (Engle 2009, p. 349).
- 10.
With respect to symbolic systems in some religious traditions, this may need to be qualified. Expressing one view – and perhaps overgeneralizing – Mircea Eliade claims that “[f]or religious man, space is not homogeneous; he experiences interruptions, breaks in it; some parts of space are qualitatively different from others.” Given the significance this would have for spiritual orientation, this implies that space itself somehow becomes normative. But in the case of Buddhist Abhidharma, it is considered ultimate truth that space is homogeneous, and in any case not normative in anything like the way nirvāṇa is. See Eliade (1959, p. 20).
- 11.
We can also read Plato, somewhat more speculatively, as suggesting something along these lines, e.g. in the Republic.
- 12.
Not to mention a number of non-cognitivists who accept one or another version of Moore’s anti-reductionist argument (I pass over the non-cognitivist approach in what follows, since the Buddhist philosophical tradition that delves most deeply into these questions seems to constitute a form of meta-ethical realism, albeit one tempered by quietism.)
- 13.
From the Mahāyānasaṃgraha, composed by Asaṅga in the fourth century CE.
- 14.
- 15.
As noted earlier, one might think that at least some Mādhyamikas avow ultimate truths in (and only in) soteriology; for example, Candrakīrti says, “conventional truth is the means, the truth of the highest meaning is the goal, and one who does not appreciate the distinction… treads a wrong path…” – from Candrakīrti’s Madhyamakāvatāra 6: 80 in Huntington (1989, p. 167).
- 16.
The ultimate truth, he says, is “without citta [mind]… It is the inconceivable, beneficial, constant Ground, not liable to affliction, bliss… the Dharma-body…” – verses 29–30 of Triṃśikā-kārikā; Anacker (1984, p. 189).
- 17.
Verse 17 in Anacker (1984, p. 293), Tri-Svabhāva-Nirdeśa, a title Anacker translates as Teaching of the Three Own-Beings.
- 18.
The second ellipsis marks Anacker’s insertion of ‘realisation’, which he adds, redundantly, to gloss prāpti in another way (echoing ‘attainment’). At the beginning of the last verse, ‘with’ – elsewhere translated as ‘by’ – correctly reflects the instrumental declension in the Sanskrit, applied to a phrase that reiterates the peculiar way in which we must apprehend the normative use of ‘fulfilled’ (pariniṣpanna). Hence my account of the order of explanation – from a claim about normativity to an ineffable understanding of the highest good.
- 19.
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Davis, G.F. (2016). Conceptions and Intuitions of the Highest Good in Buddhist Philosophy: A Meta-ethical Analysis. In: Bilimoria, P., Hemmingsen, M. (eds) Comparative Philosophy and J.L. Shaw. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17873-8_17
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