PHILOSOPHER’S STONE

My title here is a complicated associative chain that may require an explanation. “Philosopher’s Stone” is a playful version of Philosopher’s Rock, Biblically associated with Church via Matthew 16:18: “…and upon this rock I will build my church.” The uncomplicated title would be Philosopher’s Religion, and I am now talking about Buddhism, one of the least dogmatic, and therefore the most philosophically inoffensive of all world religions.

Mind you, whereas in most cases when I discuss religion I necessarily tie it to the corresponding culture that it represents, in this particular case I am deliberately disconnecting the religious beliefs of Buddhism from the cultures which claim to profess it. Modern, as well as historical, Buddhist cultures can hardly be called benevolent, displaying strikingly negative political characteristics virtually incompatible with the teachings of religious Buddhism. In this entry, though, my specific focus is exclusively on the philosophical value of the Buddhist religion. (In this connection, see my entry The Path Of Dharma, posted on this blog on August 25^th, 2012.)

Buddhism is generally represented as “a way of living based on the teachings of Siddartha Gautama, also known as the Buddha.” Nietzsche calls it “the product of long centuries of philosophical speculation.” (In The Antichrist, XX.) A similar, and perhaps even greater appreciation of its philosophical value is found in Schopenhauer’s tribute to the Eastern religions, at the expense of the monotheistic creeds, described by him as “the Jewish faith and its two branches, Christianity and Islamism” all three of which he apparently abhorred.

In order to understand why Buddhism can be called a philosopher’s religion, let us begin with Gautama’s First Noble Truth: All living beings suffer. The origin of evil and human suffering are perhaps the highest practical subject of interest to a philosopher, and here is the Buddha tackling it head on! The world as such is an evil place (Buddhism and Christianity are in agreement on this point, as Schopenhauer also observes in his comparative analysis of religions), and the person’s noble task is to find his own weak spot (desire), and learn how to overcome his weakness. As the ultimate reward for his victory, he shall enter the eternal bliss of Nirvana, blessed nothingness, non-existence, which is good, as opposed to existence, which is evil. And, so that nobody bails out of the cursed life via a shortcut, here is the punishment of reincarnation! If you thought this life was bad, just wait to see what your next life has in store for you hereafter!

Buddhism, like Hinduism, is sometimes called a “godless” religion. It is not quite true, however, because in order to merit such a distinction, it has to be proven first that God is absent, and not just unmentioned, which may be the case when the idea of an unknowable God allows Him to transcend the limitations of a finite human mental capacity. In other words, the absence of God’s mention may be a token of reverence, rather than a statement of denial. On the other hand, the rather dramatic concept of Hell is not there, and in its stead Buddhism has the unspeakable horror of returning to a life of even greater misery than the life we are having now. And rather than engaging our mind in another perplexing contemplation of what the Paradise is, we have the philosophical unknowability of “non-existence.” Remember the classic Greek line of questioning about the meaning of is and is not! Perhaps, if the evil “is” is this world, then the good “is not” can be the unknowable God!

There is another striking feature in Buddhism, drawing universal praise from all philosophers and turning it into a true philosopher’s stone: its extraordinary tolerance. In this respect, the Buddhists must make the best citizens of the world, in the universal sense of gens una sumus.

Having gone to such great lengths in my praise of Buddhism, the sense of fairness prevents me from going into a serious discussion of some of its demonstrably specious elements, such as the multiplicity, and even the eternity of the Buddha or should I say, the eternal recurrence, which is part of the dogma among most of the existing Buddhist sects. All these dubious features belong to the traditional cultures of the Buddhists who embrace these beliefs, and that is good enough for me to leave them alone as a set of foreign beliefs of a different culture.

Talking about the absurdity of some religious beliefs, here is our insightful Schopenhauer again ridiculing our own Christian doctrines, while praising the Eastern religions, not for their lack of absurdity, of course, but for avoiding the kind of “absurdity” which he associates with the Christian doctrines of Predestination and Grace: “We must recognize the fact that mankind cannot get on without a certain amount of absurdity and that that absurdity is an element in its existence, and illusion indispensable; as indeed other aspects of life testify. I have said that the combination of the Old Testament with the New gives rise to absurdities. In illustration of what I mean I may cite the Christian doctrine of Predestination and Grace as formulated by St. Augustine, and adopted from him by Luther; according to which one man is endowed with Grace, and another one is not. Grace, then, comes to be a privilege received at birth and brought ready into the world; a privilege in a matter second to none in importance. What is obnoxious and absurd in this doctrine can be traced to the idea contained in the Old Testament, that man is the creation of an external will which called him into existence out of nothing. It is true that genuine moral excellence is really innate; but the meaning of the Christian doctrine is expressed in another, and more rational way by the theory of metempsychosis, common to Brahmans and Buddhists. According to this theory, the qualities which distinguish one man from another are received at birth, are brought, that is to say, from another world and a former life; these qualities are not an external gift of grace, but are the fruits of the acts committed in that other world.”

(In fairness to Schopenhauer, he next proceeds to point out that our doctrines of Predestination and Grace are revolting only when taken literally, whereas allegorically they make good sense. Perhaps this is what I should do in the next stage of my work: attempting to find a good allegorical sense in the Buddhist as well as in other Eastern religions’ doctrines, which are otherwise hard to swallow in their literal sense…)

In the meantime, I would much rather stay positive about the philosophical value of Buddhism, as a quest for spiritual enlightenment with an extraordinarily benign attitude of tolerance, not that kind of wholesale tolerance that tolerates everything and anything, but the smart kind, particularly of the legitimate religious and cultural differences among the multitude of world nations.