We are all ripples in a still pool. We spread out around our center, in circles that become larger as they grow weaker. Experience lays itself out around us, for we are all the center of our own world. The Buddha is no different. Only when the ripples are fading, we throw another pebble in the water. The Buddha lets the ripples fade, the energy disperse, until there is no sign of his presence, still less his passing.
We are none of us ripples, for ripples have no agency. The ripples’ center remains in place, but we move, creating complexes, eddies, and currents. Nor is there, in the strictest sense, a pool, for what pool is still enough for us? No water is truly still. And not all energy requires a medium.
We are light, passing through a vacuum, illuminating that which we pass, bearing no weight except the whisper of atoms.
We are darkness, hiding our true nature from ourselves, and from others. On the surface is a mere reflection of a shadow, while we remain unknown. We are known only by inferring from our absence; we know darkness because of the light.
We are knowing, we are ignorance. We are sane, we are crazy. We are truth, we are lies.
We are metaphor. For metaphor is what language is—one thing pointing to another thing, as like it as seems it, but no more. And our self is forged in the fires of language.
What we are not is proto-. We are as is, full and complete. Nor are our thoughts, our words, our ideas proto- anything. They are our center. Our world emerges from us like ripples in a still lake, like light in a dark place, like knowledge among the ignorant.
Davids Graeber and Wengrew, in their The Dawn of Everything, discuss the historical framing of cultures as “proto-” this or “proto-” that. They point out that to the people living in those cultures, they were not proto- anything: they were how they lived. Often such “proto-” cultures lasted for thousands of years.
Historians inhabit their own ripples. Modern historians like to imagine that industrial, secularized, democratic, capitalist societies are the end point of human evolution, because that’s where they are. That’s what pays their bills. That’s what they learned, im- and ex-plicitly their whole lives, from everything they saw and heard.
Or something is proto- because it precedes something that they think is important: the Roman Empire, the Enlightenment, WWII.
No goatherder on the hills of Sicily thought of themselves as proto-. They herded their goats. They cursed the weather, made love to their wife, scolded their children, and made cheese from goat milk. The fact that, many years later, their land would be included in a historical entity that future generations would call the “Roman Empire” is a fact of supreme irrelevance. Calling them proto- tells us nothing about them, and quite a bit about the person who calls them that.
No human is proto-. We can’t understand people or what matters to people without setting aside what matters to us, our own conceptions and priorities, and thinking what matters to them. We live in our own ripples, intersecting with the ripples of the past, and anticipating the ripples of the future. But whatever the time may be, we are in the Middle. We are meso-.
The Buddha called his path the Middle Way and his teaching the Middle Teaching. He defined these in various ways; they don’t have a single meaning. Rather, they are a perspective, a way of seeing.
A view, if you will.
I can’t say whether the Buddha originated the idea of the Middle Way. It is an obvious idea, so I doubt he was the first to think of it. There’s always a middle between the goal-posts: the point is how you place the posts.
The Mādhyamaka school arose much later, positioning itself as a re-assertion of the Middle Way where the goal posts were other Buddhists. But the Suttas aren’t “proto-” Mādhyamaka. They are what they are, and they say what they say.
Why is the history framed this way? The answer is always the same: because of the interests of the history’s author. I don’t know anything about Gomez, the author of the “proto-Mādhyamaka” idea, but I’d guess they’re primarily a Mādhyamaka. That is where their ripples are centered.
That means that they are interested in a teaching that claims to stem from the Buddha, but which was formulated much later. This creates a stress, which provokes a creative response. This is good: insight comes not from passing down received truths, but from dynamic resolution of opposites.
Mādhyamaka, rightly or wrongly, is usually considered as a philosophical school of Mahāyāna. Like all traditions, Mahāyāna is both conservative and creative. It is a lamentable reflex to consider the creativity of traditions as a flaw. On the contrary, traditions must be creative, else they become dead letters, stifling, rigid, and oppressive. The creativity of Mahāyāna is its glory: it shook things up. Of course, it is now 2,000 years later. The authors of Mahāyāna texts are long dead and their creativity long fossilized, so that today mainstream Mahāyāna tradition is interred in its own orthodoxy, no less than Theravada. Creativity today exists in exactly the same place that the early Mahāyāna flourished: the margins.
So the question is not whether the Mādhyamaka added anything new. That’s a given. Nor is it whether Mādhyamaka (or the Mahāyāna in general) inherited things from early Buddhism. That’s another given. The actual historical question is whether certain things that were thought to be creative turn out to be conservative. In other words, did Mādhyamaka draw on the Suttas in ways that have not always been appreciated?
We know that this happens. A classical example is when Nāgarjuna says that emptiness is dependent origination. It seems like a bold creative stroke, as no such statement is found in the Pali canon. It turns out, however, that it is found in the Saṁyukta Āgama, which is the version of the early canon that Nāgarjuna was using. So when he said that dependent origination is emptiness, he was not being creative, he was merely quoting a well-known saying from the Suttas, assuming that his audience would have been familiar with it.
The Mādhyamakas were answering to early Buddhism. But it’s asymmetrical: early Buddhism is not answering to Mādhyamaka. This is where the “proto-” framing is misleading; it implies early Buddhism is leading to something. But it isn’t. Like Mādhyamaka, the Suttas are responding to what came earlier.
The proto- framing sees the Suttas as leading to the Mādhyamaka:
- Suttas → Mādhyamaka
But the Suttas have never heard of Mādhyamaka. From their point of view, the Suttas are answering to the Upaniṣads (which, in turn, answer to the Vedas). Mādhyamaka in turn is answering to the Suttas.
- Upaniṣads ← Suttas ← Mādhyamaka
In this case, when we say “Upaniṣads” we pretty much mean just one sage: Yajnavālkya. Several relevant terms of the “Proto-Mādhyamaka” argument are found in his works. Mostly, in fact, in a single passage, the dialogue between Yajnavālkya and his wife, Maitreyī. I believe that the Sutta passages have adopted these terms directly from his teachings.
Yajnavālkya was the center of his own ripple. He inherited the colossal weight of Vedic tradition, and according to that tradition, compiled a massive tome on ritual methodology. Yet he broke with tradition by insisting that truth was to be found only in the Self, which he identified with “infinite consciousness”. To accomplish this realization, he broke further with tradition, leaving home to devote himself to contemplative renunciation.
He insisted that the things we think we know are not what we really know. All that which we take as most valuable is but the fleeting manifestation of a deeper reality. He was the master of ritual who said ritual is only valuable to “one who knows this”, where “this” is the hidden, secret meaning. He was a master of debate, but knew that what is thought or spoken is but a symptom of the truth. He used an apophatic analysis, the way of negation, to cast aside all that is unnecessary—not that! not that! All these are but perceptions, transient and limited ways of knowing. They disappear, like ripples, in the vast ocean of consciousness: the unseen seer, the unheard hearer, the unthought thinker, the unknown knower.
It is a curious thing that, generation after generation, people who study Buddhism get excited when they think they’ve discovered a radical new teaching in the Suttas, and it turns out to be just Yajnavālkya. Non-dualism, anti-realism, objectless awareness, the via negativa.
Sometimes I feel like it would be a lot simpler to be a Hindu. I don’t understand why so many people seem to just not like Buddhism.
Or perhaps something else is going on. Could it be that when we decry the “dualistic” and “realistic” teachings of the Suttas, with their insistence on “right view” and their morality and their monks, we are rather missing something? Might it possibly be that the problem is not the rigidity of the Suttas, but the rigidity with which they are apprehended? Could the whole thing be a straw man? Could it really be about … us?
I know little about Mādhyamaka, but I was struck by one odd detail of the Proto-Mādhyamaka argument. If I understand correctly, it argues that there is a strand of early Buddhism (primarily in the Aṭṭhakavagga) distinct from mainstream teachings that articulated non-dual and anti-realist views, thus supporting the (otherwise heretical) views of Mādhyamaka.
But that’s not the Mādhyamaka position. The Mādhyamakas argued that the ordinary mainstream teachings (four noble truths, dependent origination, etc.) had been mistakenly interpreted as dualist and realist, whereas they were in fact relational and phenomenological. Mādhyamaka did not argue to dismiss the mainstream teachings of early Buddhism as philosophically crude (and probably inauthentic). Rather, like all Buddhists, they accepted the mainstream teachings. They just thought there were subtleties to them that then-conventional exegesis was overlooking.
For what its worth, I agree.
The Mādhyamakas didn’t rely on the Aṭṭhakavagga, and I don’t know if they’d even read it. You don’t have to, because the teachings of early Buddhism are not secreted away in special obscure teachings. They are right there, out in the open where they have always been.
I started out this essay with a series of contradictions. I’m messing with you. But not really. That’s how language works. A paradox is not a metaphysic: it’s a language game. Truth is flexible and many-faceted, and people, actual live humans like the Buddha, express those truths is complex ways that, on the surface, seem contradictory. They must do, because the world is like that. “It is dark” is true at a certain time. “It is light” is equally true at another time.
The Buddha studied a Vedic literary culture that raised to the highest level the methods of hiding and obscuring the truth, of saying the same thing and its opposite, of concealing anything important behind layers of deception—for “the gods love hidden things”. For the most part, the Buddha preferred to be explicit and clear. But give him a break: how about we don’t throw a metaphysical conniption every time he plays with words?
The burden of the Aṭṭhakavagga is to warn us against taking our “perceptions”—borrowing from Yajnavālkya the term saññā for reductive, limited knowing—as the truth, for any “knowledge”—and here the Pali ñāṇa is used in a distinctive way to include “false belief”—based on what is “seen, heard, or thought”—the traditional means of acquiring spiritual learning, here excluding meditation, which elsewhere is included as viññāta, the “known” (not viññāṇa, the “knowing”)—is unreliable, leading to endless squabbles and runon sentences. But we can’t help it. We invent metaphysics based on passing nothings and defend them till the day we die, whenupon our tombstone is etched, “Here lies Sujato. He will be fondly remembered for winning many arguments on the internet.”
I do apologize, but it seems to me that’s what academic debates are doing to the Aṭṭhakavagga. They are taking it, not as a warning against fruitless metaphysical speculation, but as an invitation. Based on a few lines and phrases, a whole metaphysic is invented. Not just in the Suttas, but stretching forward in time, a vast superstructure of abstracted thought. As alien to the Aṭṭhakavagga as, well, aliens.
The view of no-view is a trap. Of course we have views. That’s how the mind works. And it’s not just that no-view is a view, not just that it is a view that makes no sense, it’s that it is a view that undermines sense-making and autonomy. It’s an authoritarian view. “Why are you thinking so much? Let go of your views and you will be happy!”
No-view sounds cool and hip, but it is a favorite among a certain kind of cult leader. No-view means what prevails is not reason but the other thing. You know, that one. The view of the one sitting in the big chair. He Who Sits In The Big Chair does not have views. Whatever he thinks just is. It manifests due to awesomeness. Some call it “wisdom”, some “power”.
I call it a reason to get up and leave.
An empathetic reading starts by listening closely and carefully to the text as it speaks. I left the Aṭṭhakavagga and the next chapter, the Pārāyanavagga, to the very end of my translation project. I wanted to make sure I had the full context of the whole Suttas behind me before beginning. As I delved deeply and slowly, visiting again texts that I had memorized decades previously, I found, again and again, words that still laid largely unheard.
The greatest scholars of modern Buddhism have exercised themselves on these verses. They clarified much, yet much remained. I did what I could, but I am sure there is much left to do.
As I translate, a good friend walks by my side. I call it “the principle of least meaning”. The idea is that texts, and ancient spiritual scriptures most of all, become overburdened with a surfeit of meaning. It becomes impossible to read them or think about them without carrying the great weight of all the past opinions. So our task should be to divest them of meaning wherever possible. If the same passage can be interpreted in a slighter sense, we should do so.
Let it breathe. Be kind; they’re only words. Asking a few lines of ancient poetry to bear the weight of a trans-historical metaphysic is unbecoming, ungracious. Let us read lightly.
Look at the volumes and volumes of Zen literature, for example!
Because I’m just asserting something very briefly without giving any much proof. It’s the conclusion I came to after reading the text, but I know I haven’t really supported it here (nor do I plan to for lack of time).