The Dhammapada and the study of classical texts

[Part 4]

The Dhammapada, which is basically a manual that summarizes the teachings of the Buddha in a readily understandable form, consists largely of propositions taken from earlier discourses. there are 423 stanzas in all, and as with most compilations of this nature, some of the verses are extremely poetic and enforce their intended message through the power of phrase and image, while others are less so, and carry less poetic conviction.

Many of the most poetically memorable verses contained in the Dhammapada, as indicated earlier, locate the reader in a familiar and neatly realised natural and cultural world. The following are some representative examples that illustrate this aspect of the text.

Death carries off a man who is gathering flowers, whose mind is distracted, just as a flood carries off a sleeping village.

Just like a lake that is deep, clear, and calm, the wise become tranquil, having absorbed the doctrine.

Virtuous

From after shine the virtuous like the Himalaya mountain. But the wicked are not visible like arrows shot by night. He who, like water on a lotus petal, or a mustard seed on the tip of a needle, who does not cling to sensual delights, him i call a Brahnmin.

It is evident that there is a sense of urgency in the message of the Dhammapada, and many of the exhortations and admonitions that spring from the nerve-center of Buddhist thought convey this feeling very powerfully. The following stanzas that are frequently cited in countries such as Sri Lanka, Thailand, Myanmar, capture well this sense of urgency, this imperative to act soon and decisively.

Even the gods cherish him whose faculties have been subdued like horses well tamed by a charioteer whose pride has been destroyed and who is free from taints.

Withered leaf

You are now like a withered leaf, even the messengers of death are standing around you. You stand at the portals of death and you have no provisions for your journey.

Like a frontier town well-guarded both from within and without, protect yourself. Let not a moment pass by, for those who have let the moment slip away do indeed grieve, being consigned to hell.

People driven by craving run round and round like a trapped hare; bound by the fetters and shackles they experience suffering again and again for a long time.

To a reader from a different culture other than the one in which the Dhammapada is a venerated text, the Dhammpada can open up a new cultural territory for travel. It can dramatise how others think and feel and the kind of things they value. Clifford Geertz, the well-known anthropologist, said that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun, and that he takes culture to be those webs of significance.

Awareness

He also said that culture provides us with the frames of awareness within which people live and form their convictions, their selves and their solidarities. Anyone reading the Dhammapada, whether from a Buddhist or non-Buddhist country, will gain a clear understanding of the webs of significance that people have spun around themselves.

Geertz sees culture as an historically transmitted patterns of meaning embodied in symbols, as a system of inherited concepts and articulated in symbolic form through which human beings circulate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge and attitude to life.

A work like the Dhammapada with its dense network of cultural valuations and religious allusions enable those living outside the gambit of the culture represented to gain access to a vital segment of that terrain of meaning in Buddhist societies. By reading the Dhammapada, for example, a western reader can acquire a greater understanding of the different ways in which fundamental issues of life and death are discursively produced in different moral and cultural spaces. In a very insightful commentary, Clifford Geertz made the point that the importance of religion lies in its capacity to serve as a model of and model for society. The Dhammapada serves both of these functions and has the merit of opening an interesting window on to Buddhist culture. Indeed it projects a field of consciousness that encompasses both these important aspects.

Cultural enlargemnent

Reading texts valorised by other cultures enables one to shed one’s parochialisms and provincialisms, and enter imaginatively into other modes of being-in-the-world.

Such an effort repays in cultural enlargement and expansions of horizons. At the same time, it also helps to see the topography of one’s own culture with newer eyes.

It encourages one to observe ones own culture as one possible form of organisation among many others, and ones own spirituality as one discourse among similarly fashioned ones.

It is evident that the world human beings inhabit is a world of meaning, and the more territories of it that we begin to understand, the richer our lives Richard J McCarthy, the translator of al-Ghazali’s Freedom from Error (which he has chosen to call Freedom and Fulfillment) says, ‘my reading of Ghazali has made me, or at least incited me to be, a better practicing catholic in the fullest sense of the term.

It has not made me, despite my real admiration, and even veneration, for Ghazali to embrace Islam. Rather, it has made mo more aware of the general spiritual riches at hand in my own catholic tradition.’ And the renowned literary theorist, Fredric Jameson has underscored the value of being ‘vulnerable in some new and original sense’ to influences from distant culture.

Next, in discussing the importance of the Dhammapada as a classical text, the whole issue of virtues and their bearing on human flourishing and happiness merit closer study.

I said at the very beginning of this essay that for me the great attraction of the Dhammapada lies in its embodiment and articulation of virtues that would lead to the ultimate freedom of human beings.

Freedom, in a deeper sense, presupposes the seeing through of the fictitious nature of the world we live in, says the Dhammpada, and hence the gaining of freedom and the acquisition of virtues both as a means and end, that is to say, instrumental virtues and ultimate virtues. Hence I believe the virtue of virtues is a topic that this text foregrounds in a way that would appeal to both Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike.

Amelie Oksenberg Rorty says that dispositions, habits, skills, and capacities that can be voluntarily and discriminatingly exercised are classified as virtues when they are admired or when they are thought socially beneficial, and when acquiring them is thought to involve some initial effort. She goes on to point out that some of the virtues are identified against ‘the background of theories about ideal exemplas of human excellence’ and that such virtues represent the realisation of ‘what a culture prizes as expressing what is highest and best in us.’

This is a good enough starting point; this characterisation of virtue makes a great deal of sense in terms of the themes and strategies of representation, that literary scholars normally find interesting, contained in the Dhammapada. The text clearly enunciates what a Buddhist culture prizes in terms of human values and goals.

Humanity

Virtues like self-control, detachment, humility, and steadfastness which are articulated in this book are basically attributes of human character. This highlights the projection of an ideal person, an exemplar of human excellence that I pointed to earlier. That brings these virtues into vivid embodiment. As many philosophers have observed an ethic of virtue significantly overlaps with an ethic of person. The fact that human beings are rational, social, fallible, desiring, self-reflective animals who are educable and persuadable makes this connection between virtue and personhood an inevitable one. Hence the emphasis on virtue as a pathway towards human contentment and freedom as explored in the Dhammapada has two salient sides to it; the focus on the dispositional possibilities of human beings for self-enhancement and the pointing out of the nature of superior persons who have thoughtfully made use of those potentialities for the achievement of the ultimate human goal of total freedom. As the Dhmmapada clearly bears out, virtues can best be understood in terms of moral psychology and psychology of character.

The whole terrain of virtues is extraordinarily complex and cannot be mapped very easily. We can, at best, to use Sidgwik’s memorable phrase, talk about the ‘whereabouts of virtue.’ Virtues can be categorised as public and private, instrumental and final, culture specific and culture transcending and so on. However, these distinctions cannot be enforced with great certitude or any finality. For example, it is generally held that the courage is a public virtue as exemplified in the brave way that soldiers fight in the battlefield.

However, should one not consider a patient bravely bearing up his pain in the privacy of his room as an act of courage? At times virtue can be in conflict depending on the play of such variables as age, location, cultural beliefs.

To take a simplex example, some of the virtues associated with youth are not necessarily relevant – at times could be even antithetical-to the concerns of old age. Hence, when any work seeks to clear a path of virtue through the dark and forbidding jungle of human desire and interaction, we need to take into consideration the internal consistency and mutual compatibility of these virtues.

Virtues

In other words, the preferred virtues should constitute an interactive and mutually supporting system. It seems to me one of the strengths of the Dhammapada is that it succeeded in reconfiguring just such a mutually supporting system. The virtues of mental purity, good will, self-restraint, vigilance, thoughtfulness, in speech and action, serenity of mind, forbearance, non-violence etc. that it advocates form, in the unfolding message of the book, into an interactive, integrated, and mutually supporting system. This appeal of the Dhammapada is enhanced by the fact that there is in it a nice balance between what ethicists normally refer to as first order and second order judgments. That we should refrain from hurting others is a first order judgment, while an elucidation of how we think about that injunction is a second order judgment. Second order judgments serve to elucidate how we think about ethical matters.

In the Dhammapada, we see the play of both instrumental and ultimate virtues. The kind of virtues that I referred to few sentences earlier, which appear frequently in the body of the text, can be termed instrumental virtues in the sense that they are all signposts to the acclaimed ultimate virtue of wisdom. Emancipation and wisdom, as the Dhammapada delineates them, are coterminous. The ultimate virtue upheld by this book is wisdom, and in this, one might recognise a superficial resemblance to some of the ideas contained in Plato’s dialogues.

The concept of wisdom as articulated in the Dhammapada merits closer examination. We generally take wisdom to be the kind of knowledge required to live purposefully and morally, and to encounter courageously the crucial problems of living. However, the way the concept of wisdom is given expression in this text one senses that there is more to it than meets the eye. Wisdom is seen not only as understanding the truths of life but also living according those insights.

In other words, the Dhammapada projects a notion of wisdom in which both theory and praxis are equally important. Indeed, one arrives at the portals of wisdom only by leading the kind of virtuous life inseparably linked to wisdom. This is to say one who has wisdom is the one who uses it. Moreover, in common parlance, wisdom is usually seen in relation to different and competing segments of reality.

However, as delineated in the Dhammapada, it can be considered a unifying force that brings together the different perceived wisdoms into one focal point by pointing out the basis of all wisdom- in other words, by focusing on meta-wisdom. Therefore, the Dhammapada is right in asserting that wisdom is not an instrumental virtue, like self-control or humility, but an ultimate one that is coterminous with total freedom.

Cultural landscape

The kind of issue related to virtues that emerge from a reading of the Dhammapada has a wider application vis-à-vis the cultural landscape and intellectual cartography of the West. Today, we clearly see a renewal of interest in virtues among philosophers, notably those in the domain of ethics of virtue. Thinkers such as Alasdair Macintyre, Bernard Williams, Charles Taylor, in their different ways and from their respective vantage points, have focused the spotlight on virtues.

There is an increasingly perceptible dissatisfaction with moral discussions confined to Kantianism, utilitarianism and deontology. These were the areas that attracted the most attention until recent times. This desire to re-focus on questions of virtue and character is not confined solely to the formulations of philosophers.

In disciplines such as political science, one notes an emergent interest in human virtues and their bearing on public policy. Hence, one can justifiably say that the problem of virtue has once again entered the arena of intellectual discussion and debate and theorisation.

These developments, which to my mind are extremely salutary, underscore the topical interest in books like the Dhammapada. Like the Analects of Confucius or Plato’s republic, it can be termed a canonical work. A distinguishing feature of such a work is that it has a permanent value; paradoxically, it has a permanent value because it has a permanent topicality. This fact has great implications for the study of classical texts which indeed is our primary focus. This interplay of universality and topicality is at the centre of any programme designed to further the imaginative and productive study of classical texts.

These are just some of the reasons why the Dhammapada should prove to be of interest and value to those living outside Buddhist cultures this is, of course, not to suggest that these reasons can be relevant to these those living inside Buddhist cultures as well. I started out this essay by observing that the Dhammsapada seeks to answer the question; how should one live purposefully and morally/ in answering this question, it presents an image of an ideal person, a venerable exemplar, and a paradigm of human excellence.

By reflecting on the nature of this ideal person and the cultural and religious discourses from which it emerges, we should be in a better position to participate in a wider conversation across cultures, religions, space and time related to central issues of living.

Humanism

As we read the Dhammapada, it becomes clear that it can be described as a text that represents the essence of Buddhist humanism. Now the term humanism has taken on the character and power of a smear-word in current academic polemic in the west, and this bent of mind is travelling to the East as well. It has been reduced, unjustifiably in my judgment, to a colonising and reactionary ideology.

This is largely due to the writings of such thinkers as Michel Foucault, who drawing on the formulations of Nietzsche, have counter-posed an anti-humanist critique to humanistic thought and reflection. The Dhammapada allows us the opportunity to examine some of the criticisms leveled against humanism, in a wider cultural canvas.

The question of humanism, in relation to the Dhammpada takes on an added urgency in view of the fact that Irving Babbit, who is generally regarded as a latte-day Matthew Arnold and an indefatigable advocate for modern humanism, was responsible through his English translation of the Dhammapada and his celebrated essay Buddha and the occident in generating a great measure of interest in this text in particular, and Buddhist thought in general, in the United States.

Babbit’s translation, which is for the most part based on Max Muller’s translation made in 1870, is elegant but misses out on some of the nuances and cultural resonances of the original.

Some of the charges levelled against European humanism by modern theorists are legitimate and merit closer study. The need to contextualise, historicise, these texts and their attendant values as ageless and universal by humanists, the tendency towards walled-off elitism, the neglect of the institutional and discursive networks from which the canonised texts emerge certainly deserve careful examination.

It is interesting to see how the Dhammapada relates to some of the issues highlighted in current debates in the western academe. In the case of the Dhammapada some of the charges brought against humanism to lose their sting. Here I wish to focus on three intersecting areas of concern.

Ideology

First, humanism is generally perceived as a form of ideology that tends to de-contextualise some of the ideas and values associated with the renaissance in Europe, and to freeze them into universality. It is thought of as a way of dissolving plurality and diversity and reducing difference to subservient otherness. Jean Paul Sartre went so far as to say, ‘humanism is the counterpart of racism; it is a practice of exclusion.’

However, a study of a text like the Dhammpada will surely have the opposite effect; it will display the shaping of other cultural worlds, other forms of being-in-the-world, other values and belief systems. This will have the salutary effect if extending the discursive boundaries of traditional European humanism and counter-posing possible alternative paradigms of human excellence.

Second, humanism as generally understood in western discourse, places at the centre of interest the sovereign individual – the individual who is autonomous and the originator of action and meaning. It is linked to specific concept of the self. However, the concept of the self that is represented in the Dhammapada, as we saw earlier, presents a very different picture.

The nature and significance of the idea of the self propounded in Buddhism differ considerably from the nature and significance of the idea of self associated with European humanism.

The Dhammapada, to my mind, underlines the need to de-substantialise the concept of self and point out its illusory nature. Consequently, the idea of Buddhist humanism is not constructed on the conviction of a autonomous self as in European writings.

Critics

Third, it has often been remarked by critics such as Michel Foucault that humanism should be understood not as a free-floating, timeless entity, but as a human creation that bears the distinct imprint of specific discourses and institutions. This is indeed a valid argument, and one that humanists would be well advised to take seriously. In reading texts such as the Dhammapada, we need to lace them against their proper historical and institutional background, and examine the discourses that subtend them. This is a matter of historical placement. In addition, as I stated in the beginning, the Dhammapada should be subject to a careful reading, critically examining its message and structure.

This calls for reading against the grain, identifying silences, gaps, seeming elisions and contradictions in the text as well as probing into the interplay between the rhetorical and religious dimensions of it. Such a historically grounded critical reading of it will enable us to meet some of the criticisms levelled against humanism by certain segments of prominent thinkers. In addition, such an effort carries the additional virtue of underlining some of the important aspects of what a serious study of classical texts would entail.

Sensibility

One useful way of understanding the kind of humanism that animates the Dhmmapada is to see how Martin Wickremasinghe articulates his version of Buddhist humanism. He was a great admirer of numerous Buddhist texts including the Dhammapada. He advocated a form of humanism that grew out of Buddhist thought and sensibility. He pointed out tat humanism s not monolithic and that there could be other forms different from the European version.

Wickremasinghe rejected the notion of a sovereign, totally autonomous individual which is at the heart of western humanism and pointed out the individual is a product of language, history, culture he also make the point that humanists, at times, tend to privilege a moral universalism that pays insufficient attention to questions of difference that should be so vital in any discussion of this nature.

His assertion was that it was precisely this notion of human dignity, integrity, commitment, that served to reinforce recognition of human otherness and difference.

Without the ideas of human dignity, integrity, commitment and so on, he contended, one cannot appreciate the true magnitude of otherness and difference.

The kind of humanism that flows within the lines of the Dhammapada, and which has been ably re-interpreted by Martin Wickremasinghe, is different from the European variety: one important difference in this regard is the valuation he places on intellect and rationality. Western humanists generally consider rationality to be supremely significant in the conduct of human interactions and mapping the social world we inhabit.

Wickremasinghe, on the contrary, in his numerous studies of Jataka stories and other Buddhist writings has demonstrated the limitations of rationality. It is not that he devalued rationality; to be sure, he recognised its importance. However, his ambition was to point out the compelling need to buttress rationality with intuition and the capacity for empathy. Indeed, in recent times, philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum have made clear how feeling, empathy, intuition are vitally connected with the human thinking process and the critical imagination..

Empathy

What Wickremasinghe successfully demonstrated was that rationality is not self-sufficient and absolute and it has to be supplemented by the human capacity for empathy, imaginative identification, intuition. Hence, the kind of humanism that he promoted was not a sterile academic endeavour but rather a cultural practice that was deeply rooted daily life. And this is the kind of humanism that one finds in incipient form in the stanzas of the Dhammapada. When we study this work as a classical text this is indeed an aspect that invites close scrutiny.

Another facet of the kind of Buddhist humanism that Wickremasinghe promoted that is somewhat different from the concerns of western humanisms is the emphasis given to the idea of carma. This is also present the Dhammapada. This relates to the idea of karma or moral retribution. The Jataka stories narrate experiences related to the present world and the previous world, the migrations from life to death to life. The idea of carma is central to comprehending the traffic between these two worlds. Wickremasinghe glosses the idea of karma in interesting ways to focus on ideas of human agency, responsibility, moral retribution and freedom. What is interesting about these re-interpretations of the notion of carma is that they underline the fact that Buddhist humanism cannot be facilely contained within the discursive space of standard and falsely universalised form of European humanism. It is apparent, then, that there is not one, unitary, humanism, but rather a plurality of them. Both the Dhammapada and Martin Wickremasinghe’s exegetical writings serve to draw attention to this fact.

What I have sought to do in these columns on the Dhammapda is to focus on the numerous issues that we should concentrate on if we are to study it fruitfully as a classical text. I have explored the themes, forms, styles, rhetorical strategies and vision that emerge from this text as a way of advancing the project of studying classical texts. The Dhammapada serves as an encouraging example. An interesting point about classics is that literary critics as diverse as T.S.Eliot and Frank Kermode have perceptively explained that they have stood the test of time. They have done so because they were able to establish continually their contemporary relevance and display their topical value. What I have laboured to do is to establish the contemporary relevance of the Dhammapada. The central question for me was, how might a reader in the twenty-first century respond to this text?

This indeed involves an act of re-contextualisation. To understand a classical text afresh is to locate it in newer contexts of interests. This is what the high-sounding term ‘hermeneutics’ points to. It is concerned with understanding, the dynamics of textual understanding. We can best appreciate a text by promoting a dialogue between the text and the reader, an active one.

Thanks to the important work of modern literary theorists, we no longer believe that the reader is a passive absorber of meaning; rather, he or she is a co-creator of meaning. This fact becomes even more important in the study of classical texts.

Dialogue

A text such as the Dhammapada was composed thousands of years ago. How can a reader in the twenty-first century enter into the experience of the poem and explore its meaning and significance? Here the active dialogue between the text and the reader assumes a great importance. We need to appreciate the historical moment from which the text arose and the traditions within which it operated.

At the same time, we can bring modern understandings of literary analysis to the task of uncovering the complexities in the text. This is indeed what I have sought to do in my last few columns on the Dhammapada. The fusion of horizons that takes place – those of the text and the reader – that the eminent German philosopher Gadamer talked about in relation to the understanding the generation of textual meaning is extremely relevant to this endeavour.

To be continued