Jack's Blog

Scroll down for articles (in ascending order) on:

What’s the point: Buddhism and Critical thinking.

A Digression on Deer.

On the Winter Blues.

Liberal Buddhism and the Politics of the Syrian Conflict.

Bowerchalke and the Gaia Hypothesis.

Haiku written on a Sŏn Retreat.

Methods of Ethical Judgement in Buddhism.

The Middle Way and Vegetarianism.

About Hannah Arendt on Radio 4, on 2/2/17.

The Canadian/Bowerchalke Poet, Marjorie Picktall.

Quasi-Idealism.

2016/2017 Accounts

November/December Disruption

Buddhist Meditation gives way to an 8-Week MBSR Course in the New Year

Book Review: Goodbye Things

‘The Stone’

The end of Wednesdays

What’s it like to attend a meditation retreat?

2017/2018 Accounts

Empires of the Imagination

Ideas for developing the group

Establishing a daily meditation practice

2019 Mindfulness (MBSR) Course

Engineering solutions to the climate emergency

Comment on Ronald Purser’s McMindfulness

September 2019 Silent Day Retreat

New Venu

In Praise of Gary Snyder

Anattā and Personality

Another question from within the Bowerchalke Group: ‘Is Buddhism a religion?’

‘A bunch of cells with a bit of feeling-tone.’

Ordinary life in Retreat

Reflection during pandemic

Back on the cushion

China on my Mind

Keeping going under coronavirus

Another question from within the Bowerchalke Group: ‘Loving-kindness for an enemy?’

Still Keeping going under coronavirus

Stonedown Wood: OS. 997 203

Not leaving but saving the planet

Outdoor meetings recommence

A new feature on the website

Taking stock at the start of 2022

Morning Meditation

Threat to Ukraine

Truth the first casualty

Another question from within the Bowerchalke Group: ‘Soul-like Self and Rebirth’

The End of the Line

2/07/22

The End of the Line

I am sorry to announce that, because of low attendance, Bowerchalke Buddhist Meditation Group is no more. It has been going for eight years, hopefully providing a useful service over that time, but it was always going to be hard to maintain interest in such a sparsely-populated rural area.  The website will eventually disappear from the internet, and the weekly mailing list will be discontinued. However, the 6pm Tuesday meditation continues as usual at the usual venue, open to all, and those who have the access codes are welcome at the 7.45am weekday meditation on Zoom.

2/3/22

Another question from within the Bowerchalke Group: ‘Soul-like Self and Rebirth’

Question:  Why is there considered a divide between body and mind? Surely it is not actually true? ... Our nerves go to every part of the body and I read there are more nerves in the digestive system than the brain. Christianity has body, soul and spirit. Does Buddhism have all 3 by another name? Or just body and something else. Perhaps there is only body, which includes the brain and the whole lot dies completely if there is no heaven/hell/reincarnation. Is there really some "spark of life"  which sets us apart from objects? If so does it include plants which are clearly alive, but not considered so in the same way as animals.   [I have] been building up to this for a few days during meditation. Misuse of meditation time, but "what is [this]?" is rather an open ended question!

Answer: There is no such single entity as ‘Buddhism’ that could hold a single opinion, and no central authority to decide what is and is not Buddhist teaching. But there are some keynote early teachings. They are so unique to Buddhism, that it is reasonable to claim that any other teaching has strayed into error if it is inconsistent with the meaning of these key teachings.

1.  The Four Noble Truths: existence normally includes dissatisfaction (suffering: dukkha), but because suffering has a cause (something makes suffering happen) it can cease (suffering ceases on the cessation of it’s cause). The way to end suffering is the (eight-fold) Buddhist path, which includes aspects of ethical behaviour, concentration (meditation) and understanding.

 2. The Three ‘Marks’: existence has three characteristics by which it is known: suffering (dukkha), impermanence (anicca) and not-self (anattā). We can observe our suffering by noticing that life is often unsatisfactory over the long and medium term or even from moment-to-moment. Part of this sense of dissatisfaction comes from life’s impermanence: it is always undergoing change; it never stays the same. Anything subject to continual change is not-self, because a (soul-like) self is defined as a personal identity that endures changelessly over time. That we do not endure changelessly is a prime cause of suffering. So, dukkha, anicca and anattā, the three marks of existence, form a mutually-reinforcing logically-coherent teaching that can be confirmed in experience.

 3. Dependent Arising: the teachings of impermanence (anicca) and not-self (anattā) both derive from the utterly basic Buddhist teaching that everything continually arises and ceases as a result of other things or events. In western terms, everything is the effect of a prior cause. In Buddhist terms, everything is a dependently originated, or, a conditioned co-production (paṭicca-samuppāda)

Note that I do not include body, mind or ‘spirit’ as keynote Buddhist teachings. We can dismiss the idea of ‘spirit’ straight away. Spirit is nothing but the notion of a ‘divine spark’ or soul like self (attā), which is explicitly denied by the Buddhist not-self (anattā) teaching. Persons who persist in thinking in terms of ‘spirit’ are caught up in the nebulous thought-world of Hinduism, Christianity, Paganism, and Huxley’s ‘Perennial Philosophy’.

However, persons do have self-identity, in the social-psychological sense of an identifiable character that has been, and is being, causally-constructed out of how we look, what we do, what happens to us, how others respond to us and how we react to our own experiences over time – but there is nothing to suggest that such a psychological self is not continually changing, or how it could possibly survive after death.

Buddhist views of body and mind are a bit more difficult to explain. Early Buddhist teaching describes the world in terms of six senses, sense faculties and their sense objects. For example: sight, the eye, and any object that is seen (such as mist, or a tree). The sixth sense is mental, it’s faculty is consciousness and it’s object is whatever appears ‘in’, ‘to’ or ‘as’ consciousness. No (ontological) distinction is made between external things (forms) and the mental activity that apprehends them. By not making such a distinction (in effect, between external bodies/body and mind) early Buddhist teaching is quasi-idealist: it stresses the undoubted fact that all we can ever know are our experiences, which are always conveyed through the medium of consciousness, since we have no direct contact with things-in-themselves: information about things is always brought to consciousness through the medium of the senses.

It gets even more difficult, because early Buddhists (much like most other ancient thinkers, including Aristotle) subscribed to yet another theory of the world: that it was put together out of four gross elements and two subtle elements: earth (solidity), water (fluidity), fire (relative heat) and air (wind or mobility), plus space and consciousness. In what amounts to an unjustified constraint on the utterly basic theory of dependent origination (paṭicca-samuppāda), it was thought that such a subtle thing as consciousness could not arise out of the four gross elements. Therefore, consciousness could only arise from a preceding moment of consciousness. It follows from this line of thought that consciousness could only arise, at the beginning of any life, as a direct result of the final moment of consciousness in a previous life. In this way, the ancient Indian belief in rebirth is provided with a (shaky) philosophical foundation.

We shouldn’t be too snooty about such an unverifiable theory, just because we have access to more information from modern science. In ancient times, the theory of rebirth was a reasonable logical inference to the best available explanation, and it offered both consolation for manifest inequalities in the world and hope for the future. So, just because it is now quite difficult to believe in rebirth, does not mean that we should not respect those (apparently including the Buddha) who were and are persuaded.

Fast-forward to the middle of the twentieth century, and it becomes apparent that the mind (the continually-changing flow of conscious mental events) is reliant upon the workings of the human brain. Particularly from brain surgery, it has become apparent that many features of consciousness, like sight, hearing, speech and personal character (sense of self), can be modified or even destroyed by interfering with particular parts of the brain with a scalpel or some other probe. Consciousness can be ‘turned off’ by interfering with the reticular formation and the periaqueductal gray in the brainstem. It now makes far less sense to conclude that consciousness can only be caused by a preceding consciousness, therefore far less sense to believe that some mental simulacrum of a dead person could be reborn in another body.

But the issue is not completely settled to everyone’s satisfaction. It never could be, since all our knowledge consists in degrees of probability. There are probably no unicorns (except pink toy versions), and the Earth is probably an approximate sphere. In the same way, on the balance of evidence, consciousness is probably what it feels like to be a brain: an embodied set of neurons that have evolved over millions of years to present accurate, yet imaginary, information about the external world, so that humans can survive and flourish within a wide range of risks and opportunities.  One piece of evidence in favour of that view is the counter-intuitive fact that the human brain is capable of more possible connections between neurons than there are atoms in the universe. With that degree of available connectivity, almost anything is producible, including consciousness.

Still, the argument is not completely settled, since some say that the feeling of consciousness is so different from observations of the electro-chemical interaction of neurons, that these two states of affairs cannot be the same thing; furthermore that, let alone causation, no correlation can be conclusively proved between thoughts and their instantiation in neuronal activity. The qualitative difference between feelings and neuronal synchronicity is what some philosophers call ‘the Hard Problem’, although others say it is not really a problem at all, because the difference between what consciousness feels like and what neuron activity looks like is nothing more than the mode of access: what it is like from within as opposed to what it is like from without.

To be clear about what is at stake here: as it becomes more and more probable that conscious mental activity is the same as embodied brain activity in relation to a world, it becomes more and more probable that some of the teachings of religion stand in need of modification: since there is probably no spirit or soul that can take leave of the body, we cannot continue after death, either as aetherially-embodied, floaty versions of ourselves in some sort of heaven or hell, or as a subsequent moment of consciousness reborn into another body in this or any other world. On the current balance of probabilities, these two ancient ideas turn out to be wrong.

Here are two relevant quotations from Stephen Batchelor:

A difficulty that has beset Buddhism from the beginning is the question of what it is to be reborn. Religions that posit an eternal self distinct from the body-mind complex escape this dilemma – the body and mind may die but the self continues. A central Buddhist idea, however, is that no such intrinsic self can be found through analysis or realized in meditation. Such a deep-seated sense of personal identity is a fiction, a tragic habit that lies at the root of craving and anguish[1]. How do we square this with rebirth, which necessarily entails the existence of something that not only survives the death of the body and brain but somehow traverses the space between a corpse and a fertilized ovum?...

It is odd that a practice concerned with anguish and the ending of anguish should be obliged to adopt ancient Indian metaphysical theories and thus accept as an article of faith that consciousness cannot be explained in terms of brain function...[2]

   Mind, for Dharmakirti,[3] is said to be ‘clear and knowing’. Clear means that mind has no material properties: it cannot be seen, heard, smelled, tasted or touched. Yet the mind is not a mere abstraction either, for it has the capacity to know things, initiate acts, and is thus capable of producing effects in the world. Being by nature immaterial, mind cannot, in principle, be produced by something material, such as a body or a brain. Therefore, the mind of a newborn baby must have come from a previous continuum of mind; it cannot have emerged out of mindless physical causes alone.

   I was skeptical. Given the current scientific knowledge of the brain, I did not find it difficult to believe that such an organ was capable of producing thoughts, feelings and perceptions. That seemed an entirely reasonable hypothesis to explain the origin of mental phenomena.[4]

        [1] At the time of writing this text, Batchelor was translating dukkha (dissatisfaction or suffering) as ‘anguish’.

[2] Stephen Batchelor, 1997, Buddhism without Beliefs: a contemporary guide to awakening, (London, Bloomsbury, pp.36-37.

[3] Dharmakīrti was a 6th or 7th century Buddhist philosopher, whose arguments are used in the monastic teaching of the Tibetan Gelug tradition. In this text, Batchelor is describing his early doubts about the traditional Buddhist view of mind and rebirth, doubts which arose while he was studying under Geshe Rabten in Switzerland.

[4]  Stephen Batchelor, 2010, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, (New York, Spiegel and Grau), p.36.

24/2/22

Truth the first casualty

Of my last post, I feared that I’d advanced an opinion hastily and off-the-point for a blog on a Buddhist website. Not so, for Buddhism is about skilful, peaceable means, and Russia has actually invaded Ukraine at the same time as they were occupying the Chair at a meeting of the UN Security Council – even though they are members of that organisation on the basis of a promise to act in good faith, and to resolve international disputes by negotiation.

They have acted in bad faith, concealing their intentions beneath a web of lies. People are now dying, but before that the first casualty was the truth. However justified some of their concerns might be, the Russian leadership denied any intention to invade Ukraine. Putin’s overnight declaration was supported by justifications that were a travesty of the truth. His declaration of war was disguised as ‘a special military operation’, requested by the people Donbass who had been ‘bullied’ and subjected to ‘genocide’. His aim was the ‘demilitarization’ and ‘denazification’ of Ukraine. In fact the diplomatic ‘Minsk Protocol’ provides an existing route to resolving tension in Donbass; ‘bullying’ is a silly description of the military stalemate between Ukrainian and Russian forces in this region; there has been nothing thereabouts that fits the meaning of genocide; what is about to occur is the precise opposite of de-militarization, and there has been no indication of anything like Nazism in Ukraine. Truth has been the first casualty. Why does that matter?

Truth, an Anglo-Saxon utterance with a no-nonsense aspect, is one of the most important concepts in any language. It indicates that which is the case: an ideal state of correspondence between what is known about and what is said about the ways of the world. These days, in political discourse, in marketing and in ‘fake news,’ the concept of truth is either ignored or promiscuously misused as a cover for its absence (Trump and Putin are prime examples). Even the truth of truth has been called into question: postmodern theory has popularised the view that understanding is always a matter of interpretation, which is always relative to each individual’s personal concerns. I disagree.

There may indeed be no possibility of arrival at the certainty of absolute truth, but some effort along a direction of travel towards an ideal of truth, however contested, is vital for the orderly functioning of any human community, especially where different cultures co-exist. Truth is not just a bald assertion of reductive propositions, but a governing principle whenever there are dialogues between opposing views and wherever there are dogged enquiries into all the ‘elements of circumstances’, that is to say: who, what, why, when, where, in what way and by what means something takes place. Without such a principled state of aspiration towards accurate, well-rounded, carefully-justified understanding of the world, people are vulnerable to systematic abuse by those in power, in a free-for-all of fakery, unenlightened self-interest, and brute dictatorship.

If the use of the concept of truth is to be principled and benign, then the path towards truth, it’s justification, needs to be methodically-based on an explicit theory of knowledge: on an ‘epistemology’; an open-ended discussion about how to argue, with confidence, why any statement is likely to be true, false, or something relative in between.

A statement may be confidently held to be true, if it forms part of a reasonably-accurate, coherent, useful and meaningful explanation of ‘the way things really are’ (Pāli yathā-bhūtaṃ) in the world.

According to this definition, truth amounts to correspondence between something said and some part of the world. Any statement is then questionable, maybe even false, if it inaccurately characterises what it indicates and seeks to explain. An assumption is being made here that ‘the world’ forms an overall system, which can be characterised by any language, such English, Sanskrit, Russian or Mathematics. Any truthful explanation should be additional to, but coherent with, all other explanations that together describe the world meaningfully, usefully and accurately.

I am not saying that Russian does not have some concerns about the political position of Ukraine that need to be heard and addressed (at the UN), but even from the silver tongue of Sergey Lavrov, still less from Vladimir Putin, Russia’s justifications for invading Ukraine are incoherent, meaningless, useless, and inaccurate.

14/2/22

Threat to Ukraine

My maternal grandfather, John Wilde, was killed in the First World War, leaving a widow and two small children without his affectionate support, or much in the way of sustenance.

The League of Nations, which morphed into the United Nations, was set up to ensure that there would be no more wars and no more innocent victims of warfare. Why has it failed my grandfather?

Because it has no mechanism for controlling nation states,or autocratic rulers, who seek to bolster their (in)security by expansion of power and influence beyond their borders.

The UN’s inability to act as guarantor of peace and stability stems from the warped constitution of the Security Council, which is effectively neutralized by the power of veto, all too-frequently exercised by the permanent member states.

The Security Council has failed to exert any pacifying influence on numerous occasions, both when states invade foreign territory and when they interfere in conflicts that are territorially-internal to sovereign states: in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Myanmar, Israel/Palestine, Afghanistan, Yemen, Ethiopia and so forth. In most cases the so-called ‘great’ powers – Russia, the United States and China, let alone France and Great Britain – are involved in overt and covert wrong-doing that goes unchecked by the United Nations. The world will always remain at risk of war until the great powers are brought under control by abolishing the veto in Security Council decision-making, and widening Security Council membership to include diverse nation states, and perhaps some non-territorial institutions.

These words appear today because yet another major war seems possible, as an invasion of the Ukraine is threatened  on the ground by Russia, at the same time as the Kremlin warps the language of truth, commonsense and diplomacy, by asserting that invasion is not their intention. Truthful, meaningful diplomatic discourse always seems to be the first casualty, whenever those with spurious authority seek to legitimise illegitimate actions.

The Soviet Union’s past mistreatment of it’s satellite states means that Russia has itself to blame for the expansion of NATO, yet it is understandable that they feel threatened by future Ukrainian membership of that organisation, on the grounds that Ukraine sits within their ‘sphere of influence’. Of course, there would be no such ‘sphere’, if it were not that the self-same concept has been used before, without much justification, by each of the ‘great powers’. So, there is something to negotiate about here, if there were any willingness on both sides; but goodwill now seems to be exhausted. Any long-term solution to the enduring problem of Russian insecurity and consequent belligerence[i] probably now rests with diplomacy at the United Nations. Otherwise, it looks like pre-emptive, bloody warfare is coming quite soon.

To be clear: this Buddhist is entirely opposed to pre-emptive, bloody warfare; I owe that to my maternal grandfather. And for what it is worth, despite previous conflicts in Bhutan and Sri Lanka, and current conflict in Myanmar, Buddhism in general is opposed to all forms of violence against persons. If there has ever been any exception to that doctrine, it is that the historical Buddha did not condemn the use of armed forces in a defensive role. But the concept of defense is meaningless in the absence of attack: whatever Bush or Blair (or Putin) might say, the idea of a pre-emptive strike as a form of defense is an abuse of both language and truth. Buddhism is against first-use warfare.

To be provocative, I wonder if the very concept of the nation-state, and especially the very large nation-state, has outlasted it’s usefulness. If warfare is about taking territory, it would be better if the large territorial institutions that tend to large-scale warfare were abolished, seceding some power to more peripheral, smaller, territorial entities, with the rest in the hands of the United Nations and it’s agencies. Warfare is getting in the way of the alleviation of poverty, of the rights of both humans and animals, and of any meaningful or timely response to climate change and environmental destruction. After all, since 1918 it has been crystal clear that warfare is an absurd waste of time and lifetimes.

[i] It is reasonable to argue that Russia has been both insecure and belligerent ever since Peter the Great spent time admiring western prowess in English naval dockyards.

30/1/22

Morning Meditation

Every weekday morning at 7.45 am we do a meditation on Zoom. Anyone, anywhere is welcome to take part: just use the website email contact page to get hold of the access information. If you do decide to come, since this is an unguided, silent meditation, please mute your audio.

For those who’ve not done it before, morning meditation can be a revelation, for it is amenable to routine and there is less of a tendency to lapse towards slumber. Our group have recently been examining the Ānāpanasāti (Mindfulness of Breathing) Sutta, (Majjhima Nikāya 118), so I’ve been doing mindfulness of breathing every morning, and since attending a Gaia House Zoom retreat on ‘dis-identification with the self’ (led by Juha Penttilä), I’ve been synchronizing breathing with the unspoken words:

‘This is not me, this is not mine, this is not myself.’

Of course, such a bold statement is liable to generate critical thinking as to whether it is meaningful, useful and true, but mental operations like that can wait until afterwards. During the meditation, these phrases just fall in with the rhythm of breathing, surrounded by an unquestioning silence, which can itself be questioned by the condensed koan ‘what is this?’  After more silent breathing, the sequence might begin again, or some sort of answer might appear, such as ‘emptiness’, ‘śunyatā’, ‘nothing’, or ‘mu’.

This use of words and phrases during meditation is a low-key form of ritual activity, designed to short-circuit the mind’s habitual tendency to fall away from attention into freewheeling, ruminative, speculative thought. But since words are thoughts in themselves, they need not be overemphasized. Once silently spoken, ritual phrases can be left to fade away, to reappear in their own time, while keeping attention focussed on the process of in-breathing and out-breathing.

1/01/2022

Taking stock at the start of 2022

Bowerchalke Buddhist Meditation Group has been meeting since 2015, but has always struggled to meld occasional attendees into a regular group of committed practitioners. Now, the second, Omicron wave of Covid infections has forced the group into a state of abeyance: indoor meetings are under suspension, and very few people are logging onto the Zoom meditations.

 Information about occasional outdoor meetings in fine weather, and the regular Zoom meetings, will continue to be forwarded to the mailing list over the winter months, but If the current poor attendance continues it is likely that the Group and the website will close.

16/07/2021

A new feature on the website

I invite you to click on ‘Meditation Handbook’ on the website frontpage, to download notes on nine important Buddhist texts (so far). There is also an introduction to the texts, which is copied below:

An introduction to the text discussions

At the start of 2021, and as a consequence of the coronavirus lockdown, Bowerchalke Buddhist Meditation Group combined on Zoom with East Dorset Buddhist Group to hold discussions about significant Buddhist texts.

Events of this sort do not occur very often, for practice tends to be prioritised over doctrine, certainly in both the Insight Meditation and the Zen traditions, on the grounds that intellectual activity (thinking) gets in the way of the rest of (meditative) experience.

The text discussions have not been particularly popular, but some of us have found them useful, or at least interesting, and so we continue.

Notes are made after each discussion, then circulated before being revised to include any further ideas or research.

Most of the texts are from the early Buddhist Pali Canon. They represent the memorisation and recall of words spoken by the Buddha and his immediate followers over two and a half thousand years ago, then transferred between generations, before being committed to writing on palm-leaf manuscripts, at least four hundred years after the event. And then those manuscripts were frequently copied against the depredations of tropical humidity, until and beyond the texts that have physically survived from the eighteenth century. It is up to you to decide whether they are accurate records of the actual words of such a historical personage, or whether there has been some creative editing in the first centuries of such a long period of transmission.

In the interest of variety, we are beginning to examine later texts from the Mahāyāna tradition, and are not averse to contemporary Buddhist writing.

We are grateful to all of the text translators, without whom we would have no access to the Dharma. They are referenced. Mostly, their work is available under Creative Commons Copyright. Our use of the texts is solely for research, education and edification, but of course, we will remove any text if any translator requests that via the website contact facility.

29/03/21

Outdoor meetings recommence

Like most small organisations, we have managed to keep going on Zoom. But from tomorrow, outdoor meditation begins again in my Bowerchalke garden, starting at 17:00 prompt and ending promptly at 17:45. This fierceness about timing is to allow for setting up the regular Zoom meditation at 18:00. Please get in touch via the website contact facility if you want to attend and need to know the location.

19/1/21

Not leaving but saving the planet

‘Cease to do evil,

Begin to do good,

Purify the mind,

This is the teaching of the Buddhas’.

Dhammapada 183.

...’when you know in yourselves: ‘These things are unwholesome; these things are blameworthy; these things are censured by the wise; these things, if undertaken and practised, lead to harm and suffering’, then you should abandon them.

Kalama (Kesaputtiya) Sutta AN 65.

Buddhist ethics is based on relatively simple statements, but of course, dilemmas arise when putting such statements into practice.

Take the general example of environmental devastation, and the particular case of plastic pollution. Nobody thought they were doing anything wrong, when the earliest plastics such as ‘bakelite’ were invented, at the start of an insidious process of replacing metal, wood, glass, animal and plant textiles, etc., with long-chain polymer hydrocarbon materials, which have made the trappings of life so much more convenient, cheaper, efficient, and more ‘disposable’.

My own father designed machines for extruding the new man-made fibres, such as nylon, courtelle and rayon, for the fashion industry. Now we strut the catwalks and dog walks, trek the wild places and conquer the high mountains, all in drip-dry, waterproof, breathable clothing that will be hanging around centuries after we have rotted away. Gone are the days when Mallory tackled Everest in Harris Tweed.

That’s a problem with all technological innovation: nobody foresaw the gigantic unintended consequence in the room: that plastic is not disposable at all. It pretty much hangs around forever, interleaving the embryonic geological strata, sloshing around in the oceans, emitting nano-particles and infiltrating the tissues of every sentient being.

Here indeed is a thoroughly modern ethical dilemma. When the entire supermarket chill/freeze retail method is dependent upon plastic packaging, how can any individual person avoid plastic when it is utterly ubiquitous in and around everything that can be bought? And how to dispose of plastic safely, without any reassurance from local councils about how, where and when it will be recycled or sagely incinerated?

If the dilemma is bad for the punter; pity the poor manufacturer.  INEOS, a chemical company, is the British maker of base plastic feedstock from oil. The company website says that ‘INEOS products make a significant contribution to saving life, improving health and enhancing standards of living for people around the world’, and states that: ‘Sustainability and petrochemical industry are not antagonistic, on the contrary’. Whatever ‘sustainability’ means, it sounds like INEOS have their head in the sand about their moiety of responsibility for the damage inflicted by their product. Yet their advertising strategy does indicate that they are worried about the consequences of being a crucial link in the polymer chain.

Unfortunately, INEOS remedial action, thus far, mainly takes the form of reputational damage amelioration. They sponsor things, like a professional cycling team, like a Formula-1 motor-racing team, like funding research into antibiotic resistance. Philanthropic activity is all well and good, but not as good as finding replacements for plastic, or designing and funding methods of removing plastic from the environment. Or, just abandoning manufacture of plastic for anything other than fairly vital agreed purposes, such as medicine and healthcare delivery; and in that special case, establishing a closed loop in which the manufacturer assumes responsibility for recycling all of the resulting plastic waste, clean or unclean, without remainder.

Are we humans making such a mess of our nest that we must turn our attention to flight? Surely, we will have to leave the earth eventually, in a few billion years, or else be gobbled up by an expanding sun. But while the earth is suffering, the siren voices calling out for space exploration and colonisation are manifestly unethical. Better to spend money putting right the damage we have done to this blue planet, before thinking of heading out to mess around somewhere else.

12/11/20

Stonedown Wood: OS. 997 203

 OS. 997 203

Dragon howls in dead tree[i]

Heaven and earth are still.

Tiger in hiding roars

And the cold valley warms.

Mind is Buddha: what is this?

The wind is still, birds cry

Woods are silent.

At the crossroads,

The doors of the senses

Are cool this autumn:

Sitting with and without doubt

Watching illusions flow by,

A lifetime

Completes itself.

Still, guard the doors:

Purification and defilement

Follow each other.

Commentary

[i] Thomas Cleary, 1992, Rational Zen, pp. 44, 46, 63, 66, 67, 104, 160.

  Charles Luk, 1993, Chan and Zen Teaching, pp. 128-129.

10/11/20

Still keeping going under coronavirus

Meditation outdoors on Tuesdays in the garden has ceased now that darkness falls so early in the evenings, and communal meditation indoors is not an option. But we are managing to continue: by sitting separately but at the same time at 6pm on Tuesdays, and by going out to sit at choice locations in the Chalke Valley countryside at 11am on Sundays. Unfortunately, the latter option discriminates against those with physical disabilities, but there is not much that can be done about that in these trying times.

Really, meetings are banned at the moment. We overcome that prohibition in three ways: by finding our own way to the location, by sitting within earshot but sufficiently far away from each other for it to be a moot point whether or not such a scattered event could be described as a meeting, and by very low attendance.

To be precise, I’m the only person turning up so far, probably because sitting over a 45-minute meditation outdoors in Autumn/Winter weather takes some thought and preparation in order to avoid hypothermia. Something like a yoga mat is useful to ward off damp ground. Upper and lower thermals, a good jersey, fleece, and rain gear are also wise precautions. Rule of thumb is that overheating on the walk in indicates clothing sufficiency.

It is thoroughly traditional to search out a sequestered place ‘at the roots of trees’ for meditation. And since there is no absolute distinction between the sentient human individual and the world they inhabit, it does feel right to meditate in all locations, at all times, in all seasons.

24/9/20

Another question from the BowerchalkeGroup: ‘Loving-kindness for an enemy?’

Here is another in the occasional series of difficult questions raised at Bowerchalke meditation sessions:

During ‘Loving Kindness’ meditation (metta-bhavana), how should one approach the problem of a person, chosen as the object of attention in the ‘enemy’ category, who is intractably hard-to-like because their behaviour is unethical, or even evil?

In the common terminology of Buddhist teaching, it is worthwhile being aware that feelings about the world give rise to cravings or desires, which give rise to intentions, which give rise to actions, and that this process is reinforced by an inflated sense of our own self-importance. In adults, these unfortunate aspects of personality are addictions, which have been caused, conditioned and reinforced by a succession of life-events. Traditional Buddhists imagine that the way in which the past affects the present, for good or ill, depends upon an unseen consequence-mechanism called kamma. Western psychology considers that events in early childhood are particularly influential on the formation of later character. Cognitive neuroscience reinforces that theory, adding the additional finding that some patterns of behaviour, especially those that involve strong emotional reactions, are so physically encoded in the architecture of neuronal connectivity in the brain that they are hard to change by willpower alone. Whatever the theory, the upshot is that, to a greater or lesser extent, the way in which we feel (vedanā) about things determines our intentions (saṅkhāra), and our selfish intentions determine our bad actions. When someone behaves unethically (as we all do from time to time), they are likely to be seeing, reacting, and acting towards the world in the midst of a delusion, because they cannot see any way to change either themselves or their habitual patterns of relationship with others.

What this means is that people who behave badly (and this will sometimes be ourselves) remain worthy of compassion, because as the bearers of past kamma, or as impressionable children, or as phylogenetically-evolved cerebral systems, they were not entirely responsible for their descent into addiction. They are worthy of kindness because they are deluded, because they have become enslaved by repeating patterns of behaviour, and, finally, because they have not really been able to establish contentment within their lives.

The Buddhist call to generate compassion and loving-kindness towards all sentient beings does not entail that persons behaving badly should be let-off responsibility for their actions. Communal life depends upon civil oversights and judicial systems designed to apply punishment and correction to those who wilfully transgress agreed social codes. Just like the unseen (and very likely imaginary) mechanism of kamma, it is right that consequences should rebound on those who commit bad actions.

Loving-kindness meditation is primarily meant to change ourselves. It would be awfully nice if good feelings really could be transmitted in all directions across the world. But let’s not be fooled by magical illusions. We change the world for the better by changing ourselves for the better: first by changing the way we feel about everything, then by exerting some retrospective control over our worst intentions, then by exerting prospective control over our worst actions. Individual effort isn’t going to heal the world anytime soon, but with a healthy dose of loving-kindness, alongside a smidgeon of realism, we are best-prepared to play our part in public, civil and political life. That is probably the only way to do anything meaningful about unethical human action in a fragile world.

`17/9/20

Keeping going under coronavirus

Bowerchalke Buddhist Meditation Group has survived the coronavirus pandemic so far, but only just. From an average attendance of 5.19 per session (plus myself) in 2014, we declined to 3.08 in 2019. We closed under lockdown from March 2020 until the beginning of June, since when we have been meeting outdoors, with average attendance reduced to 1.5.

The weather has been mild over the summer, but we may not be able to continue much longer. Although it can gradually get chilly when sitting outdoors in the rain or below about 18 degrees centigrade, there are ways to cope, on the basis that ‘there is no such thing as bad weather, only inadequate clothing’. But inclement weather will be compounded by reducing daylight hours. Sitting between 6 and 7 pm, already the first owl-calls have been heard. Soon twilight will be upon us, then dusk, then dark, whereupon evening outdoor meditation will no longer be an attractive prospect.

There are signs of an up-tick in coronavirus infections, making it unlikely that we will be willing or able to return to our little meditation hall anytime soon. So I suspect that regular weekly meetings will cease sometime in October, unless the group can agree on a convenient day-time during the weekend. The technological alternative of meditation via the Zoom platform would not  be much good, since that medium is more suited to group communication than to group introspection.

The only other way I can think of is for myself (or anyone else in the group) to email round some weekly meditation suggestions, with encouragement to sit at a particular time, or whenever convenient. That may be the only way to keep going over the harsh winter into a more hopeful spring.

20/7/20

China on my Mind

In China, from the earliest times, collective responsibility towards the hierarchical Han state has been more important than the autonomy of local organisations or the freedom of the individual.

Such a large country might not have survived without that level of control; presumably the current rulers fear that they too might not survive without that level of control.

Under the communist party, the privileging of the whole over the parts seems to have produced some truly obnoxious outcomes: the destruction of Buddhism in Tibet, the largest mass starvation in human history after the failure of the ‘Great Leap Forward’, the disorder, humiliation and starvation caused by the Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen Square Incident, credible reports of transplant-organ-harvesting from Falun Gong members and other extra-judicial prisoners, the cultural genocide of the Uyghers in Xinjiang, and now the abrupt end to Hong Kong’s fragile political autonomy: https://www.hongkongwatch.org/

Beneath this litany of abhorrent events, the general suppression of freedom of religious practice throughout mainland China goes almost unnoticed. It looks like the situation is worsening, with recent campaigns to destroy books, temples and statues: https://bitterwinter.org/ In China, it is not a good time to be Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Daoist, or anything in between.

How different to the Chalke Valley, where a secular majority merges amicably with the long-standing, fairly active Christian community, and isolated idiosyncrasies like our Buddhist meditation group are tolerated, possibly with amusement, but still as a matter of course. To be clear: from such a position of relative comfort, it is OK to feel personally powerless to effect change in China, because that’s an accurate description of what we can’t do. All that can be done from here is to encourage our government, of whatever stripe, to ignore the siren voices of economic self-interest when dealing with countries that consider themselves to be properly part of the family of nations, while continually and wilfully engaging in gross abuses of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

11/6/20

Back on  the cushion

Coronavirus lockdown is now eased to allow up to six persons to meet in a garden or public space, so long as social distancing is maintained. Therefore, Bowerchalke Buddhist Meditation Group has restarted, with up to a maximum of six persons meeting at 5.45pm on Tuesday evenings, weather permitting, in a garden large enough to allow 4-metre social distancing. Get in touch via the website contact facility if you would like to attend.

16/4/2

Reflection during pandemic

In the empty hours of the coronavirus lockdown, the simple question of what to do next squats on the mind, the heart and the guts, forcing reflection on what one has done so far and ought to do in the future, as all one’s past choices are called into question. Connected with the question of what one does is the issue of Right Livelihood. The enforced reconfiguration of society during this emergency makes it suddenly clear that, while some jobs are useful and necessary, others are more optional and supplementary, however enjoyable, desirable and remunerative they may be. Here is a list of the useful and necessary, in order of importance:

1.        Assistance for others, especially medical and personal.

2.        Food production.

3.        Food retail and transportation.

4.        Political decision-making.

5.        Communication.

6.        Inactivity.

Some reflections on that list:

1.        The pandemic has highlighted the social significance of the medical and caring professions, alongside their scientific hinterland. The National Health Service has received the level of support normally only offered to religious institutions and football clubs. Hopefully this degree of respect will ensure that the NHS survives into the future as a centrally-funded not-for-profit organisation offering care that is free at the point of delivery.

2.        Scarcities caused by panic buying have highlighted the importance of agriculture, horticulture and arboriculture. (Wo)man cannot live by bread alone, but flour, vegetables and toilet rolls turn out to be essential. That revelation raises difficult questions about the future shape of farming. In the interest of food security, what proportion of a nation’s food should be imported? What proportion of the land should be forested? Should most grain production in Britain go for livestock feed? Should discussion of vegetarianism move on from divisive questions of principle to consider more detailed and difficult practical questions, such as what grows most efficiently and economically on what type of land? Sometimes, the answer will be livestock.

3.        It is another revelation, that food shopping and food delivery are such essential social functions. It would be nostalgically-nice if everything was produced locally or delivered long-distance by train and from the railhead by electric vehicles. That probably won’t happen anytime soon, but there could be a revaluation of the worth of essential items and the level of wages in such an essential industry.

4.        Politicians and civil servants have been necessary during this crisis, in their role as decision-makers and coordinators. They will eventually be judged at the ballot-box, but hopefully not (so to speak) in isolation, for what has been most significant has been the relative quality of their dialogue with the public, mediated through the ‘fourth estate’ (the press). The people have had to accept unprecedented restrictions on freedom, and in return the politicians have suffered the acute discomfort of immediate feedback on the actual consequences of their decisions: it is embarrassing to claim there is enough personal protective equipment available, only for that to immediately be contradicted by a chorus of medics, nurses and carers. Politics only works in dialogue with the people.

5.        Many people have made isolation more bearable by communicating via apps: in the absence of face-to-face interaction a video call will do. Luddites (an honourable profession), will be unsure what to feel about this kind of virtual, two-dimensional reality, and fearful of what it portends for future social interaction. But it has been beneficial during lockdown

6.        Staying home has been a tonic for the environment. With factories closed, the sky empty of planes and the roads free from heavy traffic, flora and fauna have more opportunity to thrive unmanaged and un-decimated. And perhaps it will also turn out that inactivity has been a tonic for suffering humanity, of only by providing time for re-evaluation of the relative worth of various ways of earning a living. Even if they do end up being paid the same, we owe a debt of gratitude to all the doctors, nurses, carers, farmers, growers and millers, shelf stackers and delivery drivers, politicians and journalists, and to each other.

4/4/20

Ordinary life in Retreat

I notice in myself a preference for what’s special over what’s ordinary. The tendency is clear with respect to objects: liking new over old, beautiful over plain, handmade over mass-produced, fruitcake over bread. Objects are part of wider experience, which is replete with opportunities to like and dislike, to discriminate in favour of marvellous and magical, joke over fact, far-way over near-at-hand, loving over liking, social over solitary, well-being over just being.

What matters is the motivation, and in most cases the motivation for preference is desire, and most attempts at fulfilment are grasping. One good thing can lead to another in extended rounds of dissatisfaction, satisfaction, dissatisfaction and satisfaction... Is this living life to the full or is it hedonism? Either way, ordinary preferences are embedded in my, and everyone else’s, daily routine, so that criticism of motivation comes across as weird.

Under coronovirus lockdown, the scope for satisfaction of preferences is considerably reduced. No more evenings at pub or restaurant, no more lazing on the beach, precious little in the way of shopping and a hiatus in foreign travel, whether long- or short-haul. Everyone, rich or poor, is, or ought to be, reduced to the simple joys and sorrows of ordinary life within their own curtilage. Restriction on personal preference sounds a bit like going on retreat.

Sadly, most of us are powerless to prevent many people dying in the current pandemic, other than following the social distancing guidelines. Yet it is Spring. Here is an opportunity, albeit an unwanted opportunity, to practise having no preferences, to practise not being motivated by desire, to practise not doing (evil). At a remove from satisfaction and dissatisfaction, there is joy to be found in acceptance. Whatever happens, observe the everyday unfolding of cause and effect, without desire for anything special.

26/3/20

‘A bunch of cells with a bit of feeling-tone.’

That remark, by a member of the Bowerchalke Group, offers the briefest possible description of sentient being.  Fortunately, there is more to it than that: cells are marvellously intricate and feeling is a complex autonomic response to embodiment over time in a generally wonderful world. But while the good order of cells is disrupted by Covid-19, the suffering (dukkha) that marks human sentience becomes more than usually evident for all: for the suddenly unemployed, for high-risk groups in social isolation, and for those hospitalized with viral pneumonia.

It is not clear if the Buddhist doctrine, that dukkha is the mark of being, is an a priori (before the fact) metaphysical assertion, or an a posteriori (after the fact) inductive inference of strong probability on the basis of observation from experience. Either way, ecstasy and agony, joy and sorrow, well-being and suffering, satisfaction and dissatisfaction are all mutually implicative terms, never one without the other, all descriptive of mental states responding to what takes place between a bunch of cells and a world. The coronavirus pandemic has caused a gross departure from orderly, satisfying homeostatic balance in all sorts of systems: bodily systems, social systems and economic systems have all been thrown into disorder, while everyday peace of mind has given way to fear and confusion.

Talk about dukkha in the context of a pandemic may seem too cold, theoretical and general. It could be criticised on the ground that, rather than being about generalisation, Buddhism is concerned with the extreme particularity of events undergoing constant change (kṣaṇikatva). Maybe generalisation about suffering is a waste of time better spent on alleviation. Or maybe not, for when the times are out of joint, then empathetic activity may be random and misplaced, without some sound collective decision-making based on observation and generalisation, reasoning and intuition.

For individuals, looking after themselves at home so as to neither catch nor transmit Covid-19 may feel selfish, when the normal response to suffering is to offer assistance. Yet, for non-essential workers this is one of those rare times when Dogen makes sound commonsense, when he argues that not doing evil means not stirring cause and effect or just not doing.[i]

[i] Cleary, Thomas, 1993, Rational Zen: the Mind of Dogen Zenji (Boston, Shambala), pp. 88, 134.

10/3/20

Another question from within the Bowerchalke Group: ‘Is Buddhism a religion?’

The perception, that Buddhism is in decline, relies partly on statistics, but also on an uncritical view of what religion is and what religion is for: the view that religious behaviour always requires a devotional attitude towards extra-ordinary beings, such as God(s) or Buddha(s) who normally inhabit a metaphysically-separate other-world. The key idea here is that this world somehow depends upon a place-time external to itself, and that individual and social well-being always relies upon the beneficence of superior, absent entities, therefore religious forms of explanation are always fundamentally metaphysical. That view gives rise to the notion that there is a ‘perennial philosophy’ underpinning all forms of religion; despite markedly different forms of doctrine, mythology and ritual practice. But perennialism springs from the Near-Eastern Judeo-Christian-Islamic model. There is no reason why other religions, elsewhere, past or future, must conform to such a transcendental archetype, and no reason why religions should not surmount the onslaught of  scientific evidence, from evolutionary biology, neuroscience and astrophysics, that the peopled world gets along quite well without external assistance. Thus, it can be argued that there may be hope for those parts of religious thought and practice that operate outside the otherworldly, perennialist model.

                    There is scope for a more inclusive, this-worldly or immanent perspective, which defines religiosity as just the way in which individuals come to terms with the brute facts of their own existence, and religion as just the way in which social life shapes, and is shaped by, interaction with such individual religiosity. Metaphysically-transcendental beings are not the primary focus of attention for this way of looking at religion, which goes beyond normative questions of belief, to a wider focus upon explanations, practices, and cultural manifestations of all sorts. It might be hoped and anticipated that religions like Buddhism, which pay more attention to the ‘here and now’ of ordinary life, would flourish as a ‘this-worldly’ form of religion, yet it is becoming increasingly clear that Buddhism only plays a niche role in capitalist, consumerist western societies, attracting only around 1% of the population. Worse still, under pressure from the globalisation of capitalist consumer culture, some eastern heartland societies may be drifting towards the same sorry circumstance.

6/3/20

Anattā and Personality

A recent (3/3/20) meditation session included time spent with the hwadu (condensed koan) question: ‘what is this?’ Afterwards, someone said that, while she understood, right there and then, that there was nothing occurring but the sum total of her experience, was she not also the personality who has developed out of interaction with other people and the rest of the world?

This is a tough question, because it points to three genuine concerns:

Firstly, is Buddhist meditation practice nothing more than ‘navel gazing’ – a few moments spent escaping, ignoring, or even abandoning the serious business of doing things that really matter; for instance: sustaining a meaningful relationship, a happy family, useful employment, and a just world?

Secondly, just how meaningful is anattā (the Buddhist teaching about the absence of a continuous, unchanging self or soul) in comparison to the social significance of a personality, formed out of a unique history of interactions with significant others, particularly friends and family?

Thirdly, what is the difference between how we see ourselves and how we are seen by others?

On the first point (navel-gazing), one sort of activity does not preclude another. Lives are short but feel long: there is plenty of time in the day, the week and the year, to do all sorts of things that may seem incompatible, but which may turn out to be mutually supportive. In particular, Buddhism finds it worthwhile to pay attention to, and become comfortable with, precisely what we are when not engaged in interactivity with others. We are born alone, inhabit one body alone, and die alone. It is on this basis of brute existential equality that we are moved to truly recognise and act compassionately towards other sentient beings. Otherwise, we might be deluded into believing, on the qualitative or quantitative basis of some kind of endowment – intelligence, wealth, beauty and so forth - that we are somehow better or worse than other people.

On the second point, the Buddhist doctrine of the absence of a soul or self that possesses continuity over time (Palī anattā Latin animus) does not preclude having a personality. But a personality is not a well-defined thing. It is a public work of imagination, on the basis of acquaintance, which several people hold about a particular person. It is a social artefact: shared by others and by oneself.  It is indeterminate or fuzzy: around a central core of recognizable physical features and habitual actions, it probably includes different features for different observers. It is partially determined by circumstance, partially created by will-power. It is produced from causes and conditions, therefore lacks continuity, since it is always open to change. Buddhism does not deny the self-as-personality, but asserts that it is impermanent (anicca), therefore liable to be unsatisfactory (dukkha). In peaceful and prosperous times and places - such as much of the United Kingdom since the end of the Second World War - it is easy to acquire a false sense of security about one’s personality. The hwadu, ‘What is this?’ offers a corrective to that kind of collective somnolence, by pointing towards the way things really are: transient and poignant.

On the third point (the private versus the public perspective), it might be said that while social interaction draws attention to personalities, meditation draws attention to the five-fold aspect of human being (Palī pañca khandha): to physical form, feeling, perception, to intentions and to the consciousness that arises from the other four while also indicating their existence. But more needs to be said, for such a formulaic Buddhist teaching fails to capture the dynamism, and the imaginary nature, of most mental events. Form, feeling and perception are all cognitive creations: mental presentations of embodiment on the basis of sensory information. Feeling is mainly an awareness of chemical releases into the body by the autonomic nervous system, intentions (Palī saṅkhāra) are wholly mental formations, and tend to be largely unconscious; either becoming intuitively apparent, or rationally inferred, somewhat after the event. Perceptions are also in large part mental formations; even though they bear a reliable relationship to external objects, they are mainly an imaginative, constructive activity on the basis of past history of contact with the external world by both the individual and the species. So the mind that is actually found in meditation is not a thing: it is a spasmodic, momentary, various, almost indescribable sequence of mental events that manifest, both purposefully and randomly, as a range of possible objects of attention, without much in the way of conscious control.

Some degree of control is desirable, lest we be engulfed by randomness or locked into addictive habitude. In Buddhist terminology, there is a path of practice, a ‘middle way’, to be preferred over the extremes of hedonism and nihilism. In the absence of a continuous soul-like controller, and at the risk of being enslaved by an externally-determined personality, the aim of meditation - if there is any aim - is that the ‘middle way’ should become intrinsic: arising spontaneously from the activity of the mind in itself, rather than being foot-dragged into being by compliance with some tiresome, extrinsic ethical code. Thus, in meditation the body/mind should be given whatever time is required to slow down random mental activity, so that sustainable patterns can emerge, which could be labelled ‘enlightenment’ or ‘awakening’. But these terms are rhetorical metaphors, not accurate descriptions of the way things really are within the continuum of mental events. I prefer the term ‘homeostasis’ which points towards some degree of stability occurring within a biological system undergoing continual change. Mental stability is a good basis from which to encounter the unstable world of persons and personalities.

 28/12/19

In Praise of Gary Snyder

I’ve spent Christmas 2019 deep inside the Gary Snyder Reader. Always appreciative of his poetry, I’d been sadly ignorant of the wisdom spread throughout his prose. In the hope of attracting others to seek out the work of this magnificent environmentalist, poet and Buddhist, here’s (more than a few) snippets from that compendium text:

From Earth House Hold: ‘Class-structured civilized society is a kind of mass ego. To transcend the ego is to go beyond society as well.”Beyond there lies, inwardly, the unconscious. Outwardly, the equivalent of the unconscious is the wilderness...’ p. 56.

 ‘Civilization is so to speak a lack of faith, a human laziness, a willingness to accept the perceptions and decisions of others in place of one’s own...’ p. 59.

From The Practice of the Wild: ‘But how could we be if it were not for this planet that provided our very shape? Two conditions – gravity and a liveable temperature range between freezing and boiling – gave us fluids and flesh. The trees we climb and the ground we walk on have given us fingers and toes. The “place” (from the root plat, broad, spreading, flat) gave us far-seeing eyes, the streams and breezes gave us versatile tongues and whorly ears.’ p. 185-6.

‘The world of culture and nature, which is actual, is almost a shadow world now, and the insubstantial world of political jurisdictions and rarefied economies is what passes for reality. We live in a backwards time. We can regain some sense of that old membership by discovering the original lineaments of our land and steering – at least in the home territory and in the mind – by those rather than the borders of arbitrary nations...’ p. 192.

 ‘Before the expansion of early empires the occasional strife of tribes and natural nations was almost familial. With the rise of the State, the scale of destructiveness and malevolence of warfare makes a huge leap.’  p. 195.

Seeing the world in the light of Dōgen’s paradoxical ‘Mountains and Waters Sutra’: ‘If the background and the foreground are reversed, and we look at it from the side of the ‘conditions’ and their creative possibilities, we can see these multitudes of interactions through hundreds of other eyes. We could say a food brings a form into existence. Huckleberries and salmon call for bears, the clouds of plankton of the North Pacific call for salmon, and salmon call for seals and thus orcas.’ p. 209.

‘I suspect that primary peoples all know that their myths are somehow “made up”. They do not take them literally and at the same time they hold the stories very dear. Only upon being invaded by history and whip-sawed by alien values do a people begin to declare that their myths are “literally true”.’ p. 211.  

‘...our conservationist-environmentalist-moral outrage is often (in its frustration) aimed at the logger or the rancher, when the real power is in the hands of people who make unimaginably larger sums of money, people impeccably groomed, excellently educated at the best universities - male and female alike - eating fine foods and reading classy literature, while orchestrating the investment and legislation that ruin the world.’ p.216.

 ‘Otherworldly philosophies end up doing more damage to the planet (and human psyches) than the pain and suffering that is the existential conditions they seek to transcend.’ p. 236.

‘Our distance from the source of our food enables us to be superficially more comfortable, and distinctly more ignorant.’ p. 237.

From A Place in Space: ‘The soil is being used up; in fact, humanity has become a locustlike blight on the planet that will leave a bare cupboard for its own children – all the while living in an addict’s dream of affluence, comfort, eternal progress, using the great achievements of science to produce software and swill.’ p. 249.

‘The inner principle is the insight that we are interdependent energy fields of great potential wisdom and compassion, expressed in each person as a superb mind, a handsome and complex body, and the almost magical capacity of language. To these potentials and capacities, “owning things” can add nothing of authenticity.’ p. 250.

‘...land ownership is ultimately written in sand...The only jurisdiction that will last in the world of nature is the watershed, and even that changes slightly over time.’ pp.273-274.

 From The Great Clod Project: ‘Buddhism began and remains (at centre) a set of ethical observances and meditation disciplines by means of which hardworking human beings can win through to self-realization and understanding of the way of existence. This effort is instructed by the content of Shakyamuni’s enlightenment experience: a realization that all things are co-arising, mutually causing  and being caused, “empty” and “without self”.' p. 289.

‘Because [Chinese and Japanese poets] were men and women who dealt with budgets, taxes, penal systems, and the overthrow of governments, they had a heart-wrenching grasp of the contradictions that confront those who love the natural world yet are tied to the civilized.’ p.293.

 From the Paris Review Interview: ‘...life comes down to daily life. This is also a very powerful Buddhist point: that what we learn and even hopefully become enlightened by is a thorough acceptance of exactly who we are and exactly what we must do, with no evasion...physically or psychologically.’ p. 332.

 From Uncollected essays: Entering the Fiftieth Millennium:  ‘...there may be no “progress” in religion, in practice, or in the Dharma, either. There was an Ancient Buddha. There were archaic Bodhisattvas. All that we have to study, of them, is their shards and paintings. What was the future? One answer might be, “The future was to have been further progress, an improvement over our present condition.” This is more in question now. The deep past confounds the future by suggesting how little we agree on what is good.’ p. 393.

 Snyder, Gary, 1999, The Gary Snyder Reader, (Berkeley, Counterpoint).

24/11/19

New Venue

From 3/12/19, the Meditation Group will cease meeting at Bowerchalke Village Hall, and commence meeting (on Tuesdays of course) in the Workshop at 1, Woodminton Cottages, Bowerchalke, SP5 5DD. There will be a new start time of 5.30pm, to allow for tea and discussion, but the meditation will begin as usual at 6.00pm, so it will be OK to turn up around that time. During the winter it would be sensible to park in the cottage forecourt if you can, and/or to carry a torch and to wear stout shoes, as the farm track is sometimes wet and muddy.

I make this change of venue with some regret, as it does mean moving from a public space to a private space, and we did enjoy supporting the Village Hall, but falling attendance has rendered that option unviable. But on the plus side, the workshop is a congenial meditation space, which can be made much warmer over the winter months.

14/8/19

September 2019 Silent Day Retreat

There will be a silent meditation retreat, in Bowerchalke but not at the usual venue, from 10am to 4pm on Sunday September 29th 2019. Lunch will be provided and, as usual, there will be no charge, although donations are welcome. If you are interested, use the website’s contact page to get more information or to book a place.

14/6/19

Comment on Ronald Purser’s McMindfulness

Today the Guardian website carried, in the ‘Long Read’ strand, an adapted extract from Ronald Purser’s forthcoming critique of the Mindfulness movement: McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality. I should not criticise the forthcoming book on the basis of an extract, although the extract looks to contain a fair summary of the views expressed in the book, and a more succinct summary of Purser’s critique can be found on the Wikipedia page on Mindfulness (see web source note 8). But here are some preliminary comments:

Suffice it to say that, with some caveats, Purser’s general points are sensible:

Firstly, mindfulness should not bolster the neo-liberal justification of the economic system of global capitalism, either by ignoring the ethical understanding of insight (vipassana) that ought to be a consequence of the practice of mindfulness, or by turning mindfulness teaching into an income-generating and marketable commodity.  

Secondly, it is a mistake to imagine that retreat into the private life of individual psychology absolves anyone from their collective social responsibilities in public life. In other words, private mindfulness of moment-by-moment personal experience absolves nobody from their ethical responsibility to act with compassion towards all sentient beings, within the utterly interconnected homeostatic systems of cause and effect that constitute this fragile world.

On that first point, if mindfulness teaching is offered within powerful social structures, such as political or business organisations, it risks becoming a tool of management deployed to create harmony where discord might be a more appropriate response. By the same token, throughout its long history, Buddhism has invariably been used by powerful rulers to foster harmony within autocratic states. In both cases, there is, or has been, a marked and regrettable lack of mindfulness of ethical consequences.

Again on the first point, it is worth recalling that the practice of mindfulness has only survived down to the present day because it is an integral part of the Buddhist Dhamma (Pali) / Dharma (Sanskrit): explanations of a practice designed to access the way things really are in the world. It is traditional that the Dharma should always be freely-given, rather than sold. Thus, it is better that mindfulness-teaching is freely-given, and in any event it is a mistake to charge more for mindfulness-teaching than the cost of delivery. But outside the corporate and university sectors, it is doubtful, at least in Britain, that anyone makes much money out of mindfulness-teaching.

On the second point, Purser’s argument descends, in part, from some notorious criticisms of Western Buddhism, made by Slavoj Žižek in On Belief, (2001: 12-13). Yet Purser (I presume inadvertently) egregiously misquotes Žižek, who does not suggest that mindfulness ‘is establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism’ by helping people ‘to fully participate in the capitalist dynamic while retaining the appearance of mental sanity’.  Purser’s quotations are accurate, but they do not directly refer to mindfulness. In fact, Žižek wrote On Belief in 2001, before mindfulness teaching became an established trend in the psychology of self-assistance. That is presumably why he makes no mention of mindfulness in his critique. Žižek’s much more wide-ranging argument is that, at the very time when ‘European technology and capitalism are triumphing worldwide’, the Judeo-Christian ideological superstructure is being replaced by ‘New Age Asiatic thought’. Specifically, it is ‘Western Buddhism’ and its ‘meditative stance’ which permits the ‘appearance of sanity’ to ‘[participants]...in the capitalist dynamic’.

There may be some broad merit in Žižek’s thesis, but as I have previously argued (Kennedy 2004: 147-148), his strictures cannot be automatically applied to Western Buddhists who choose both to meditate privately and to participate in public life through political action against the worst excesses of the capitalist system. By extension, his argument cannot be automatically applied to politically-active mindfulness students.

Throughout the twentieth century, western Buddhist converts tended to avoid participation in public life, therefore Žižek’s arguments did have some merit. But attitudes changed in America during the Aids Crisis of the 1990s, and in Britain during protests ahead of the Iraq War in 2003. And since drastic climate change became apparent, Buddhist political activism has become the norm: it is now not at all unusual for Western Buddhists to interpret the ethics of the Dharma in ways that justify action. There need be no either/or between the private space of introspection and the politics of the public square (Arendt 1958).

Arendt, Hannah, 1958, The Human Condition,

Kennedy, Andrew, 2004, ‘Reflections on Buddhism in Leeds’, Contemporary Buddhism, Vol. 5, 2, pp. 143-156.

Purser, Ronald, 9th July 2019, McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality (Watkins Media).

Žižek, Slavoj, 2001, On Belief, (London, Routledge).

10/5/19

Engineering solutions to the climate emergency

In today’s leading environmental story on the BBC, Pallab Gosh reports that Cambridge University is setting up a Centre for Climate Repair, to investigate radical new ways to counter global warming. Ideas mentioned include: spraying saltwater into the atmosphere in order to cool and refreeze the Polar regions; carbon capture and storage; recycling CO2 into synthetic fuels using waste hydrogen, heat and power from steel mills; and fertilising the oceans with iron salts in order to create algae blooms that absorb CO2 through photosynthesis.

In similar vein, I also note that Lord Browne, former CEO of BP, will be coming here to the Chalke Valley History Festival (event 51, 6.30-7.30pm, Thursday 27th June, tickets £12.75) to promote his new book, Make, Think, Imagine: A Brief History of the Future. According to his publisher’s information:

John Browne argues that we need not and must not put the brakes on technological advance. Civilization is founded on engineering innovation; all progress stems from the human urge to make things and to shape the world around us, resulting in greater freedom, health and wealth for all. Drawing on history, his own experiences and conversations with many of today’s great innovators, he uncovers the basis for all progress and its consequences, both good and bad. He argues compellingly that the same spark that triggers each innovation can be used to counter its negative consequences. Make, Think, Imagine provides an eloquent blueprint for how we can keep moving towards a brighter future.

Against Lord Browne’s rosy view of past and future, it is reasonable to argue that most of the environmental threats faced by the planet are direct or indirect results of the western ‘Enlightenment’ ideal of endless innovation, progress or Modernity, which began with the revolution of medieval agriculture by the invention of the eight-ox plough, continued with the revolutionary dissemination of ideas through the invention of the printing press, then the revolution of commerce by the invention of shipping capable of oceanic trading, on through all subsequent engineering inventions: through the 18th and 19th century industrial revolutions, through the use of fossil fuels and nuclear power, and now through the internet. Indeed, if Brian Cox has his way, this onward march of progress shall thrillingly continue off planet, across the solar system, ever onwards towards the stars. But should we not clean up our act on our home planet before we decimate other ecosystems across the universe?

Are ‘we the people’ even being asked by the applied scientists – the engineers – for a free hand in creating ‘a brighter future’, on the weak basis of Lord Browne’s rather tiggerish assertion that ‘...the same spark that triggers each innovation can be used to counter its negative consequences’? By what democratic or meritocratic forum could such a carte blanche be considered? Should we just blindly trust the scientists, the engineers, and the industrialists who make money out of their innovations? Is there anything like a historical track record of Lord Browne’s ‘same spark’ of engineering imagination being used to counter the negatives, or does the dispassionate eye of history reveal a distressing catalogue of innovations that were introduced without any consideration for unintended consequences, thereby laying waste to a variety of environments, from industrial landscapes to uprooted forests and human communities, to interconnected webs of species extinctions, to global warming and the absolute ubiquity of macro and micro-plastics everywhere.

 Even so, is planetary engineering going to happen whether we like it or not? I don’t want to prejudge these issues, but I do think there ought to be much more consideration of the unintended consequences of engineering innovation, and since  today’s environmental threats have become planetary-wide, the forum for proper consideration of environmental engineering innovations ought to be a planetary-wide political body. At the moment, for all its faults, only the United Nations fits that description.

There is another view of the future: that since environmental disaster is a normal consequence of large-scale engineering, such innovation should be restricted, at least until the Earth’s ecosystem returns to some degree of homeostasis. Yet Pallab Gosh reports the view, that such a retrenched or ‘first do no harm’ approach is already too late: reducing CO2 emissions from now on will no longer be sufficient to stop catastrophic global warming. Perhaps so, but reducing CO2 emissions is the only possible contribution that can be undertaken by individuals, and perhaps the only possible approach for mid-range social structures such as civic authorities and national governments, when they can be bothered to get their heads out of the sand.

What do all these considerations mean for any partially-individual person (anyone who has to negotiate change within a family structure) such as you or I? They mean recycling whenever possible; not buying anything made of, or wrapped in, plastic; only buying clothes made of natural fibres; eating less meat or no meat; never, ever getting on an aeroplane; and, as soon as practically affordable, getting hold of a (second hand?) electric car and getting rid of heating and cooking by fossil fuels. It is instructive that the most difficult CO2 reductions involve the replacement of complicated fossil-fuel engines with renewable -energy systems that are equally complicated. So even vaguely individual attempts to mitigate the climate emergency turn out to involve engineering innovations that also have unintended consequences, which also ought to be foreseen.

Not much hope here, and not much about Buddhism in this blog post, other than that Buddhists ought to pay attention to the dynamic interplay of causes and consequences, whether intended or otherwise. There may be nothing inherently wrong with the engineering intention to make things, to innovate, or to apply innovations in practice. I’m particularly fond of biomedical engineering. But whenever the underlying motivation is grasping after fame and gain, out of greed, aversion or confusion, then it is highly likely that planetary engineering will produce yet more catastrophic unintended consequences.

14/12/18

2019 Mindfulness (MBSR) Course

From February 5th up to April 2nd, the regular Tuesday evening Bowerchalke meditation sessions will give way to an eight week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Course, which is run by Jean Carnochan, and which includes one silent day retreat on Sunday 17th March. If you would like to sign up for this course, email Jean: jean@mybreathingspace.net 

28/8/18

Establishing a daily meditation practice

1.   Choose a regular time when you are unlikely to be interrupted, such as the beginning or end of the day.

2.   If possible, meditate in the same place each day.

3.  Prepare the place. Always use the same seat, cushion or stool. If you like, place a vase of flowers or image of the Buddha before you.

4.  Meditate for at least 10 minutes, with the aim of gradually increasing to 20 or 30 minutes, but do not be concerned if you only find the time or inclination for 10 minutes. It is more important to establish a regular practice than a lengthy practice.

5.  Move successively and at your own pace through mindfulness of the body, of the breath, and of underlying feeling-tone. Finish with Silent Illumination meditation, or the hwadu ‘What is this’, as described in the Meditation Handbook.

6.  Having completed your meditation, make a small mark on your calendar. Keeping up the continuity of marks is a powerful incentive to meditate every day: if it is a shared calendar, it will prove both a personal and a social motivation.

7.  Try meditating in the early morning: that leaves the rest of the day to catch up, if for any reason you miss the morning time.

21/8/18

Ideas for developing the group

Two of us have just been on a short retreat at Gaia House, led by Zohar Lavie and Mark Ovland. It was an excellent group retreat about groups: how to facilitate groups, sustain and make them useful. We came back all enthusiastic, with a basket of new ideas, some realistic, some aspirational. So: for anyone who is interested, please keep an eye on the calendar over the coming months, just in case some of those ideas actually turn into practice.

 Here are some possibilities:

Occasional extensions to two-hour meetings in order to make time for walking meditation, a meal, a discussion or a visiting speaker.

Do something useful in the community: ecological work (footpath clearing, wildlife habitat), or social assistance (for the elderly nearby, or for the homeless in Salisbury).

Build relationships with nearby groups (East Dorset: steve.w@metronet.co.uk/  

Blandford Forum: a.lewissmith@btinternet.com/  

Salisbury: mrhenrygray@mac.com/ )

Build relationships with any other interested local social groups or faith groups.

Organise occasional silent meditation walks.

Empires of the Imagination

Think of the rural outdoors as the ‘Empire of the Grasses’. Marjorie Pickthall coined this phrase to describe the deep greensward of downland around Bowerchalke, but I’m using it to refer to our entire productive landscape. Only by nurturing and sustaining that empire: the order of vegetation, can there be any hope for insects, reptiles and mammals: for all animal, sentient life.

By contrast, think of the domestic indoors as the ‘Empire of the Imagination’[i]. Here are our internal worlds, made up as we want them to be, houses and dreams, cities and scenarios; an empire of enclosed spaces, be they rooms or minds, occupying and occupied by ourselves and our ideas.

These two metaphorical empires are not perfect, because their contents are not mutually exclusive, and because we only know of either empire by means of sensory and cognitive mental acts. That said, the largely-external Empire of the Grasses feels more real: it provokes the senses, marks the passage of time by carrying-on perfectly well in our absence, and, as a physical foundation for our existence, it cannot be doubted. In contrast, the largely-internal spaces of the Empire of the Imagination feel more fictional: sensory and temporal constraints can be warped or ignored at will, and there is an awkward tendency for our imaginary scenarios to melt into nothingness in the absence of close attention. As a commentary on our ordinary existence, the Empire of the Imagination can always be doubted.

There’s no need to say much here about the Empire of the Grasses: far better to go out amongst it in all weathers. More needs to be said, by way of explanation, about The Empire of the Imagination. I’ll do this by means of three examples: of three buildings, of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, and of Jorge Louis Borges’ Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.

It may seem odd to think of buildings – so solid, so physical - as imaginary entities, but so indeed is their origination and purpose. One of the finest edifices in the West, Chartres Cathedral, is really built of complex mathematical calculation, risk, space and sound, stone and glass, copper and iron, but it is a fictional representation of the Kingdom of Heaven. One of the finest edifices of the East, at Borobudur, is really built of mathematical calculation, risk, space and sound, earth and stone, yet it is a fictional representation of the Buddhist principal of cause and effect, of the Mahayana gradual and Mantrayana sudden paths to enlightenment, and of the ‘truth-realm’ of the cosmic Buddha (Maha)Vairocana: of the dharmadhātu[ii]. And to lapse from the sublime to the ridiculous, recently I have really been building a workshop out of simple mathematical calculation, risk, space, brick and flint, wood, slate and plaster, yet it is partly fictional, since it fulfils my dream of an ideal location for doing craftwork.

All these examples of the built environment began as works of the imagination, and depend for their continuing usefulness on the long-term survival of communal discourses about their nature and purpose. In some senses, these buildings are factual – they are part of the way things really are – yet their purpose is fictional because they are, first and foremost, projects of the human imagination. In St. Augustine’s use of the term, they are fantasies. Therefore, they are capable of disintegration by falling out of memory. If it prove too painful to think of anything so solid as Chartres, Borodudur or my workshop, anything so cultural as Christianity, Buddhism, or handicraft, as being imaginary, then perhaps it would be helpful to locate them in a liminal space, as ‘veridical fictions’, or ‘fallible veracities’[iii]. However located, like all buildings these works of the human imagination are harmful to the ‘Empire of the Grasses’: vegetation can’t flourish under the built environment.

Terry Pratchett (who lived nearby at Broadchalke) wrote a series of novels about a flat ‘Discworld’ carried by four gigantic elephants who ride on the back of the great ‘astrochelonian’ A’Tuin: a space-travelling turtle ‘a thousand miles long’, who ‘...[came] from a universe where things are less as they are and more like people imagine them to be’. Such a world ‘...which exists only because the Gods enjoy a joke, must be a place where magic can survive’[iv]. By setting his novels in these strange metaphysical circumstances, Pratchett both circumscribes and liberates his extraordinarily fertile imagination. Liberates, because anything is possible in a work of magical fiction; circumscribes, because of the inevitable similarities that unite his fictional metaphysics with the everyday, reliable metaphysics that makes possible the Empire of the Grasses: we can only imagine on the basis of what is already known. For example, our world also travels through space in time; we are unsurprised by day and night, wind and rain, poverty and despotism; even elephants and turtles are not entirely strange to us. Therefore, Discworld is only partially fictional. It must be so, firstly, because utter fiction is literally unimaginable: we need to live this-wise in order to imagine otherwise, secondly, Pratchett deliberately makes his Discworld quite like, yet quite unlike, the ordinary world, precisely in order to allow himself a platform from which to satirize human pretensions. As such, he provides escapist entertainment and wry political commentary, while doing no particular harm.

In Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,[v] Jorge Luis Borges imagines a creeping alteration to the ordinary world-order. To begin with, his arcane, bibliophiliac, serendipitous research unearths a ‘fictional description of a non-existent country’ (Uqbar). This amounts to a deliberate attempt to undermine our factual knowledge of the world by the insertion of what’s now called ‘fake news’. However, matters get murkier when he chances upon traces of a secret society that collaborates in the creation of an encyclopaedia that describes our world otherwise, under quite different metaphysical possibilities: ‘a vast methodical fragment of an unknown planet’s entire history...with its theological and metaphysical controversy’. Lurking on the margins of our society, this secret society cooperates in the imagining of Tlön, a ‘congenitally idealist’ world, where thought ‘...is a perfect synonym for the cosmos’, where ‘the universe as a series of mental processes, which do not develop in space but successively over time’, where ‘...complete idealism invalidates all science’, and where the priority of acts over things entails that languages only consist of verbs, adverbs and adjectives, lacking all nouns. On completing their encyclopaedia, the secret society turn to the imagination of a revised, more detailed version (the Orbis Tertius) composed in one of the languages of Tlön. With the discovery of the entire first encyclopaedia, and the unearthing of symbolic objects that seem to be derived, paradoxically, from this objectless world, the story begins to be believed: the languages and history of humanity begins to be replaced by the arcane explanations of Tlön.

In Borges’ story, the Empire of the Grasses is in process of being altogether overcome by the Empire of the Imagination: fantasy is being accepted in replacement of fact. As Borges suggests, ‘any symmetry with a semblance of order – dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism – [is] sufficient to entrance the minds of men’. Therein lies the danger inherent in all fiction: to be overly enchanted by the stories we tell, is to risk losing contact with the physical and biological certainties that support us within the ordinary, stable metaphysics of space and time.

Buddhism practice is not much more than going out with an open mind into the Empire of the Grasses. But it is pure fantasy to suggest that all Buddhist explanation (Pāli: Dhamma, Sanskrit Dharma) is, therefore, true: in other words, that the Dharma is an accurate representation of the way things really are in the world. Language can’t do that. By definition, Buddhist explanations are works of the human imagination: ‘veridical fictions’, or ‘fallible veracities’. Being relatively short on story-lines, the Buddhist Dharma is not sufficiently fictional to compete with the entertainment-value of Hollywood, Bollywood or the hybrid satirical stories of authors like Terry Pratchett. But still the Dharma carries the risks attached to all  fiction: of losing touch with this world, of falling into fantasy, of becoming grist to the mill of rogue storytellers who are more concerned with their own gratification and status in society, than with showing the way for their followers to tread softly amongst the grasses.

[i] The phrase ‘Empire of the Imagination’ was used by Annette Gordon Reed in a lecture on Thomas Jefferson and the American dream, at Chalke Valley History Festival on 27/6/18. Elsewhere, it has also been used to refer to Tennyson, to H. Rider Haggard’s heroine Ayesha, and to Gary Gygax, author of ‘Dungeons and Dragons’. I think the meaning is similar in all these cases: one way or another the work of the creative industries falls within the Empire of the Imagination.

[ii][ii] Woodward, H., 2009, ‘Bianhong, Mastermind of Borobudur?’, in Pacific World, Third Series, No. 11, pp. 25-60.

[iii] Teller, P., 2004, ‘How We Dapple the World’, in Philosophy of Science, 71, 4, pp. 425-447.

[iv] Pratchett, T., 1987, Equal Rites, (London, Corgi) pp.7-8.

[v] Borges, J-L., 2000 [1964], Labyrinths, (London, Penguin Classics) pp. 27-43.

2017 - 2018 Accounts

Bowerchalke Buddhist Meditation Group - June 2017 - May 2018 Accounts               

Outgoings £                                     Income £

Room Hire   410                         Donations  348.43

Total (loss = Facilitator’s donation): £- 67.57

Compare:

2016 – 2017                                          - 4.8

2015 – 2016                                         + 34.32

2014 – 2015                                         - 134.19

Attendance statistics

Mean attendance per Tuesday session  2.2

Compare:

2016 – 2017                                                  3.34        

2015 – 2016                                                  4.26

2014 – 2015                                                  5.19    

Comment

The group’s decline continued during 2017 – 2018, but has been arrested so far into 2018, following the closure of the Wednesday morning sessions.

Mean attendance in the first five months of 2018 stands at 3.0, with a surplus of £81.84                                     

4/2/18

What’s it like to attend a meditation retreat?

Of course, the most accurate, but rather dismissive answer to this question would be: ‘go and find out for yourself’. A more polite response would be to point to a little book of just 97 pages by the English novelist and Italian translator Tim Parks:

Parks, Tim, 2010, Calm (extracts from Teach Us To Sit Still) (London, Vintage/Penguin Random House).

This man has both the linguistic skilful means, and the temerity, to describe what such a retreat was like for himself: some painful times and some embarrassing moments that were, it seems, fairly unavoidable precursors to worthwhile understanding.

I recommend this book. Read it in order to be forewarned of the rigors and benefits of a long(ish) meditation retreat, or to glimpse into the mind of this interesting guy, or to glimpse the teaching style of John Coleman, an early western vipassanā instructor who died in 2012.

17/1/18

The end of Wednesdays

Attendance at the Wednesday morning meditations having shrunk to zero over 2017, the common-sense decision has been made to cancel these sessions. It may take a week or two to delete all advertisements for them on all platforms and in all documents.

But be of good cheer - the 6-7pm Tuesday evening meditation sessions will restart in March (at the conclusion of the Mindfulness Course which is currently filling that slot).

15/12/17

‘The Stone’

For anyone who is not an outright hedonist, for anyone who has any feelings about what goes on in the world, it is easy to sink into despair. Global warming, the Syrian and Saudi-Yemeni-Iranian conflicts, genocide of the Rohingya by nationalist Buddhists in Myanmar, autocracy in North Korea and failed civil society in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and South Sudan; these are just highlights of the current crop of international outrages for which every one of us carries some proportion of collective responsibility, however attenuated. For an antidote to despair in an imperfect world (although no simple solution), take a look at this ‘The Stone’ article on the New York Times website:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/opinion/purity-is-overrated.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FBuddhism&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=collection 

5/12/17

Book Review

Fumio Sasaki, 2017, Goodbye Things: On Minimalist Living, (Penguin, Random House).

I had two goes at reading this book.

I liked the minimalist lifestyle, but something about this book was irritating. All very well for a young, single, tech-savvy person to out-source their clutter to fast-food outlets, silicon valleys and recycling dumps - much harder for an old DIY bloke who doesn’t live alone, has  stuff that recollects a long life-trajectory, and does have offspring. And it doesn’t help that I got rid of a mountain of things during the last house-move, only to find, almost immediately, that it all had to be re-acquired.

My initial negative reaction was a disappointment to the person who lent me the book, so I made a less-blinkered second attempt. This time, behind the annoying (and slightly self-refuting) obsession with new technology, it became apparent that Sasaki was actualising a comprehensive philosophy of life. It is good to share. It is true that new things are only briefly satisfying. We can indeed get by with a fraction of what we buy. We do use physical objects to signify our self-importance. We are in servitude to the maintenance of our chattels.

The book is full of handy motivating tips on how to downsize. Some are obvious: less stuff equals fewer chores, cleaner private and public space, and a less degraded world. Some are at least questionable: does having fewer things automatically lead to contentment? Up to a point, but does having a tidier house necessarily equate to a tidier mind, or is there more psychological work to do once the extraneous physical stuff has been recycled?

There is more work to do, but that’s no reason not to make a start. And the basic motivation behind minimalism is evidently Buddhist. As Sasaki says, minimalism is a route to ‘liberation from greed’. There is a Zen taste here, if de-cluttering physical space can indeed be a step along the way to de-cluttering head-space of pointless wants and desires. As Sasaki says: not to want anything is ‘a fantastic feeling’.

7/11/17

Bowerchalke Buddhist Meditation gives way to an 8-Week MBSR Course in the New Year.

One of our regular meditators, Jean Carnochan, is currently studying on Bangor University’s teacher training course in MSBR (Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction). She has now reached the stage where she is expected to lead an 8-week MSBR Course. Because we’re interested to see what that is like, we have decided to suspend the Tuesday evening  6-7pm Bowerchalke Buddhist Meditation sessions from Tuesday 9th January until Tuesday 6th March 2018, so that Jean can run her course  in Bowerchalke Village Hall at those times. We are looking forward to the challenge, the opportunity, and to her teaching.

For more information, go to:  Mybreathingspace.net  -  or contact Jean on 07833723822 – or email jean@mybreathingspace.net

24/10/17

November/December Disruption

Keep an eye on the website calendar for notice of cancelled meditation sessions in November and December 2017, as the result of work being done on Bowerchalke Village Hall.

28/7/17

Bowerchalke Buddhist Meditation Group - Brief Accounts June 2016 - May 2017

Expenditure: £534 (Room Hire)

Income:  £529.20  (Donations)

Balance: £ minus 4.80

Comment: All organisations need to balance income and expenditure: we manage that. Any deficit is covered by myself as facilitator.

Attendance Statistics

Mean attendance per session: 2.79  (2015-2016: 2.93) (2014-2015: 3.64)

Mean attendance on Tuesday evenings: 3.34 (2015-2016: 4.26) (2014-2015: 5.19)

Mean attendance on Wednesday mornings: 1.17 (2015-2016: 1.44) (2014-2015: 1.61)

Comment: Over the three years of the group’s existence, there has been a gradual decline in attendance as people lose motivation or move away. That is to be expected, for meditation is not an easy practice and the benefits are not immediate, obvious or certain. If the decline continues it may become difficult to continue offering social reinforcement for meditation practice at this location. But, of course, the possibility of meditation (close and continuing attention to immediate experience) will always be available, at all times, in all places.

12/5/17

Buddhist quasi-idealism

According to Sue Hamilton[i], early Buddhists held a ‘quasi-idealist’ view of the world. In other words, they did not go so far as to doubt the existence of external ‘things’ produced by cause and effect, out there beyond the range of the human senses, yet they understood that, for embodied, sentient beings, the world was limited to all the information that the senses could possibly provide. To restate the early Buddhist position: for sentient beings, including human persons, the world is limited to what it is like to receive news from the senses, and from the mind. This quasi-idealist view stands in marked contrast to the ‘realist’ belief that sensory information provides a reliable, perfectly accurate representation of what the external world is like.

For the realist, sky is blue and grass is green, whether or not there is anyone around to re-create these colours within the realm of their sensory imagination. For the quasi-idealist, sensory information may indeed be motivated by contact with some sort of external world, but sensory qualities (such as blue and green) are created imaginatively by the bodily faculties working in conjunction with the mind.

A succinct expression of early Buddhist quasi-idealism can be found in the Pāli Canon, in the Sabba Sutta:

The All[ii]

The Blessed One said, "What is the All? Simply the eye & forms, ear & sounds, nose & aromas, tongue & flavors, body & tactile sensations, intellect & ideas. This, monks, is called the All. Anyone who would say, 'Repudiating this All, I will describe another,' if questioned on what exactly might be the grounds for his statement, would be unable to explain, and furthermore, would be put to grief. Why? Because it lies beyond range."

Some people might be puzzled or bored by the notion of quasi-idealism. Why on earth would anyone want to make such a subtle distinction? The answer, I think, is that to realise that each person creates a world of their own is to begin to understand the uniqueness, poignancy and significance of every human life.  One should even say, of every sentient life, since the world-making power of the senses also occurs in animals.

Last Saturday (6/5/17), the Guardian newspaper published a poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, which does not actually mention quasi-idealism, yet brings forth the qualities of uniqueness, poignancy and significance bestowed on life by virtue of that obscure philosophical category:

There are no boring people in this world[iii]

There are no boring people in this world.

Each fate is like the history of the planet.

And no two planets are alike at all.

Each is distinct – you simply can’t compare it.

If someone lived without attracting notice

And made a friend of their obscurity –

Then their uniqueness was precisely this.

Their very plainness made them interesting.

Each person has a world that’s all their own.

Each of these worlds must have its finest moment

And each must have its hour of bitter torment –

And yet, to us, both hours remain unknown.

When people die, they do not die alone.

They die along with their first kiss, first combat.

They take away their first day in the snow ...

All gone, all gone – there’s no way to stop it.

There may be much that’s fated to remain,

But something, something leaves us all the same.

The rules are cruel, the game nightmarish –

It isn’t people but whole worlds that perish.

[i]  Hamilton, S., 1999, ‘The External World’: its status and relevance in the Pali Nikayas, Religion, 29,

  pp.73-90.

  Hamilton, S., 2000, Early Buddhism, a new approach: the ‘I’ of the Beholder, (Richmond, Curzon).

[ii]  Access to Insight. Sn35: 23 Sabba Sutta:  ‘The All’. Trans: Thanissaro Bhikku

   http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn35/sn35.023.than.html

   Accessed 7/5/17

[iii]  Yevtushenko, Y., 6/5/17, There are no boring people in this world, trans: Boris Dralyuk (London,

   Guardian Newspaper).

30/3/17

Remembering the Buddha, remembering Marjorie Pickthall

Contemporary Buddhist advocacy of meditation on the present moment, above all other practices, seems to be paradoxical, given the traditional practice of remembering the exemplary life and teaching of the Buddha (buddhānusmṛti). This apparent inconsistency between focussing on the present and focussing on a past example may be resolved in two ways.

The first way, from a  Chan/Zen/Sōn perspective, is to truly live within the present moment; that is, rather than just recollecting explanations of the Buddha’s awakened state of mind, to actually enable the Buddha’s awakened state of mind to take place once again, in the form of an experience within oneself. But there is an element of fudge in this exclusive focus on momentary experience for without Buddhist history, without the guiding parameters of Buddhist teaching, and without the concept-wrapping of ‘Enlightenment’ or ‘Awakening’ (Nirvana), that ideal of a perfected state of mind could never be indicated, never initially understood and never transmitted from one generation to the next. Without recollecting the Buddha, there would eventually be a radical forgetting of the purpose and practice of meditation. Such a falling out of information from the minds of women and men is the very antithesis of practice, if practice is the preservation of a skill through faithful repetition.

I hope what follows is not too much of a segue from one example to another, but outwith Buddhism, yet close to home at Bowerchalke, Marjorie Pickthall stands as a textbook case of the way in which particular attitudes to life gradually become unusual, then altogether lost, when past lives are no longer remembered.

The Bowerchalke resident and dystopian novelist William Golding is well remembered around here, whereas the Canadian poet, Marjorie Pickthall, who lived in Bowerchalke between 1912 and 1920, seems to have been entirely forgotten. Maybe she deserves that neglect, for it could be argued that, like the Buddha, Golding spoke to his era and will be long remembered for the quality of what he had to say, whereas Pickthall’s poetry, novels and plays were somehow out of time, marking the downfall of romantic sentiment, in the face of the rise of modernism and the age of the brute machine.

But do we really want that sort of radical forgetting? Is it not possible to appreciate what both Golding and Pickthall have to say: in other words, to combine a critical, cautious, dystopian attitude with a more sentimental, romantic, emotional attitude towards markedly different aspects of reality? Aren’t we normally capable of just that variety of response?

If the Buddha and William Golding are worthy of remembrance for what they had to say, then perhaps we should periodically remind ourselves of other, less notable, exemplars like Marjorie Pickthall, lest we lose something meaningful and useful in the course of forgetting.

So, secondly, the paradox of the difference between present momentariness and remembrance of things past is resolved by the understanding that recollection itself is a momentary affair. Once remembered, nothing is preserved unless and until it is recollected once again. It is by practice of remembrance that skills and traditions are preserved, but they are only preserved by being made anew.

Having used her as an example, let’s recollect what is known about Marjorie Pickthall.

Born in 1883, Pickthall moved to Canada at the age of seven, returning to Britain in 1912, after the death of her mother. It seems that she divided her time between London, where she worked in the meteorological service during the First World War, and Bowerchalke, where she attempted to establish a market garden business with another forgotten woman who was called ‘Long-John’. During her time here Marjorie lived at ‘Chalke Cottage’ (although it is not clear which house that was), and produced at least two novels: Little Hearts and The Bridge, as well as some short stories, poetry influenced by the surrounding countryside, and a verse-drama: The Woodcarver’s Wife. She returned to Canada in 1920, to meet an untimely death, aged 38, from complications of surgery.

Here below is a telling extract from her biography, followed by some examples of her poetry. Readers must decide for themselves, whether they can cut through Pickthall’s sentimental artifice to access her genuine feeling for the natural world and her underlying obsession with mortality. Naturally, I’m interested in her poem on Kwannon, the transsexual East-Asian form of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara. And Stars could very well be deployed in the campaign by Cranbourne Chase AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty) to have this region designated under the Government’s ‘Dark Skies’ initiative.

She lived for only a short time, and dwelt all her days in the realm of the spirit. In such a world there was no frontier. Within the same poem one might expect to meet Armorel or Mary the Mother, Adonis or the Light of the World. Her poetry is saturated with religious sentiment and often reveals swift spiritual insights. Some have suggested that the apparent confusion of symbol and creed in her work anticipated the religious and intellectual fuzziness of our own time. Certainly she was not orthodox, either Protestant or Catholic, and her faith has no consistent theological or philosophical foundations. But it is also true that religion was the deepest thing in her experience, and she spoke about it as naturally as she did the weather. It was valid and real for her, and transcended the bewildering divisions of creeds in the only way she knew, that is, the way of the true artist, and as such provided a meeting ground for all.

Lorne Pierce, 1957, ‘Introduction’, Selected Poems of Marjorie Pickthall, (Toronto, McLelland).

The Coloured Hours

A cloud in the sky

And a star, bright and lonely,

To remember them by.

Gold hours have laughter,

Red hours have song

Drawn from lost fountains

Of beauty and wrong.

But the white hours, - O, tender

As rose-flakes they lie,

With youth’s fallen splendour

To remember them by.

The Woodcarver’s Wife, (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart: 1922)

Stars

Now in the West the slender moon lies low,

And now Orion glimmers through the trees,

Clearing the earth with even pace and slow,

And now the stately-moving Pleiades,

In that soft infinite darkness overhead

Hang jewel-wise upon a silver thread.

And all the lonelier stars that have their place,

Calm lamps within the distant southern sky,

And planet-dust upon the edge of space,

Look down upon the fretful world, and I

Look up to outer vastness unafraid

And see the stars which sang when earth was made.

Little Songs: A Book of Poems (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1925)

Daisy Time

See, the grass is full of stars,

Fallen in their brightness;

Hearts they have of shining gold,

Rays of shining whiteness.

Buttercups have honeyed hearts,

Bees they love the clover,

But I love the daisies' dance

All the meadow over.

Blow, O blow, you happy winds,

Singing summer's praises,

Up the field and down the field

A-dancing with the daisies.

Little Songs: a Book of Poems (Toronto:McLelland and Stewart, 1925)

Thoughts

I gave my thoughts a golden peach,

A silver citron tree;

They clustered dumbly out of reach

And would not sing for me.

I built my thoughts a roof of rush,

A little byre beside;

They left my music to the thrush

And flew at eveningtide.

I went my way and would not care

If they should come and go;

A thousand birds seemed up in air,

My thoughts were singing so.

Little Songs: A Book of Poems (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1925)

Quiet

Come not the earliest petal here, but only

Wind, cloud, and star,

Lovely and far,

Make it less lonely

Few are the feet that seek her here, but sleeping

Thoughts sweet as flowers

Linger for hours,

Things winged, yet weeping.

Here in the immortal empire of the grasses,

Time, like one wrong

Note in a song,

With their bloom, passes.

The Woodcarver’s Wife, (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart: 1922)

Kwannon

Kwannon, the Japanese goddess of mercy, is represented with many hands, typifying generosity and kindness. In one of those hands she is supposed to hold an axe, wherewith she severs the threads of human lives.

I am the ancient one, the many-handed,

The merciful am I.                                      

Here where the black pine bends above the sea

They bring their gifts to me –

Spoil of the foreshore where the corals lie,

Fishes of ivory, and amber stranded,

And carven beads

Green as the fretted fringes of the weeds.

Age after age, I watch the long sails pass.

Age after age, I see them come once more

Home, as the grey-winged pigeon to the grass,

The white crane to the shore.

Goddess am I of heaven and this small town

Above the beaches brown.

And here the children bring me cakes and flowers,

And all the strange sea-creatures they find,

For “She”, they say, “the Merciful, is ours,

And she”, they say, “is kind.”

Camphor and sandalwood for burning

They bring to me alone,

Shells that are veiled like irises, and those

Curved like the clear bright petals of a rose.

Wherefore an hundredfold again returning

I render them their own—

Full-freighted nets that flash among the foam,

Laughter and love, and gentle eyes at home,

Cool of the night, and the soft air that swells

My silver temple bells.

Winds of the spring, the little flowers that shine

Where the young barley slopes to meet the pine,

Gold of the charlock, guerdon of the rain,

I give to them again.

Yet though the fishing boats return full-laden

Out of the broad blue east,

Under the brown roofs pain is their handmaiden,

And mourning is their feast.

Yea, though my many hands are raised to bless,

I am not strong to give them happiness.

Sorrow comes swiftly as the swallow flying

O, little lives, that are so quickly done!

Peace is my raiment, mercy is my breath,

I am the gentle one.

When they are tired of sorrow and of sighing

I give them death.

The Lamp of Poor Souls and Other Poems (Toronto, S.B. Grundy).

Finis

Give me a few more hours to pass

With the mellow flower of the elm-bough falling,

And then no more than the lonely grass

And the birds calling.

Give me a few more days to keep

With a little love and a little sorrow,

And then the dawn in the skies of sleep

And a clear to-morrow.

Give me a few more years to fill

With a little work and a little lending,

And then the night on a starry hill

And the road's ending.

Little Songs: A Book of Poems (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1925)

I am grateful to the following sources (accessed 29/3/17):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjorie_Pickthall

The Canadian Poetry Press http://www.canadianpoetry.ca/georgian_and_edwardian/Pickthall/Woodcarvers_Wife/index.htm

(General editor: D.M.R. Bentley, associate editor: R.J. Shroyer)

University of Toronto Libraries, Representative Poetry Online  https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/ 

(RPO poem editor: Ian Lancashire)

2/2/17

A timely warning

Not everyone’s cup of tea: the Radio 4 discussion programme, ‘In Our Time’, in which Melvyn Bragg goads a few academics into illuminating their choice subject for a lay audience. Some time ago, when Melvyn was full of cold and in a grumpy mood, the show made such a mess of explaining Zen Buddhism that they really ought to try again.

But today (9.00-9.30am, 2/2/17) Melvin and the invited academics (Lyndsey Stonebridge, Frisbee Sheffield and Robert Eaglestone) were on good form. I thoroughly recommend downloading the podcast from the BBC Radio 4 website. The programme excelled itself with a cogent antidote to these depressing times, overburdened as they are by the reactionary nationalism of Assad, Putin, Erdogan, Wilders, Le Pen, Farage, ‘Brexit’ and Trump. The topic was Hannah Arendt, the most useful of twentieth century philosophers. She not only bears witness to the calamitous events of her age, but more than anyone else she analyses and explains the rise of totalitarianism (Fascism), its evil consequences, why it can flourish, and how it might be prevented.

Reading Arendt on The Human Condition and On Thinking affected me greatly, but so far I’ve missed her more representative work on political ethics. Thanks to Melvyn’s programme, we all have a timely reminder that Arendt’s understanding of the past is a good guide to threats that might still overwhelm us in the future.

1/1/17

This entry is a continuation of the previous (25/7/16) post.

From theory to practice: applying the metaphor of the Middle Way (between Self and Other) to an ethical example: vegetarianism.[i]

Any sort of technical guidance, even the metaphorical guidance of the Middle Way, is only useful if it works in practice to help the resolution of particular cases. So let’s take the example of vegetarianism.

In order to live, it is necessary for human persons to eat, but not necessarily to eat the meat of other animals. On one hand, the majority of people would not be harmed, might even benefit, from the high fibre, low protein, low fat diet typical of vegetarianism. On the other hand, meat eating is harmful to animals whenever their natural behaviours and natural lifespan are artificially truncated in order to provide food for human consumption, and whenever suffering arises because of poor standards of animal husbandry or inhumane slaughterhouse practice. On either side of the equation, it seems that the interests of both the (human-animal) ‘Self’ and the (wholly-animal) ‘Other’ are best served by vegetarianism: an attitude towards eating that benefits both sides. It seems, then, that a simple application of the Middle Way works well: the metaphor helps to recast the ethical issue of meat-eating versus vegetarianism as an avoidance of harm and a maximisation of benefit on either side.

Yet, the very simplicity of this application of the Middle Way metaphor suggests that it is incomplete. After all, this is an ex-plan-ation: a laying-out of the topic of vegetarianism within metaphorical space, allowing all relevant issues to be identified separately, yet judged in relation to each other. If the main ethical issue seems clear, this is because of the absence of subsidiary factors that obscure the issue. That is unfortunate, for it is impractical to restrict ethical discussion to moral responsibility in a social vacuum, without paying attention to the particulars of any given situation.[ii] Beforehand, there are a variety of conditioning or causal influences in play; afterwards, a variety of intended and unintended consequences must also be taken into account. The key question, for the Middle Way ex-plan-ation, is whether those influences and consequences arise from the side of the self, or from the otherness of the world.

Over long evolution, humans have been omnivorous. That behaviour is embedded in most societies, because it maximises the chance of survival for any particular group. So this is an influence from the ‘otherness’ of the world: past experience of food scarcity promotes the use of all available food resources. As societies seek to cope with present circumstances in the light of past experience, the choice and treatment of food becomes an ordinary yet significant feature of any stable culture. As Wittgenstein remarked in On Belief, the ordinary, reliable features of the everyday are the ‘hinge’ on which life turns: rather being treated as beliefs that are open to question, such features become certainties that are immune from doubt. Thus, meat-eating is resilient to change because it is a cultural ‘meme’: a significant contribution to social cohesion over time.

But there are pressing reasons for change. From side of the ‘self’, on the current medical evidence a low-meat or no-meat-diet is probably a healthier option.  From the side of the ‘other’, there is fairly incontrovertible evidence that vegetarianism is a more efficient way of using the earth’s resources. There is far less wasted nutrition when crops are used directly for human consumption, rather than used indirectly as feedstuff for domestic animals.

That is an internationalist perspective on the matter, informed by the projected growth in world population and by the ’green’ revolution in agricultural productivity. But the clarity of that argument becomes obscure when examined from a local perspective. Viewed locally, it is apparent that some areas of the planet are unsuitable for either intensive horticulture or arable farming. On steppes and steep hillsides, soil types and gradients tend to favour either livestock grazing alone, or integrated systems of arable tillage and grazing. Such small-scale farming helps to maintain soil fertility by manuring and by crop rotation, producing sufficient food to satisfy local demand: the co-efficient production of meat and vegetables is mutually supportive process, ideally suited to marginal land. But in practice, in a world of globalised international commodity markets, small-scale farming struggles economically, unable to resist expensive technology and the use of agrichemicals, increasingly indebted, or dependent on state subsidy. It is difficult to imagine how to change from the current system of agriculture to one that supports vegetarianism without wasting the under-productivity of marginal land.

The population statistics for vegetarianism are unreliable, from a high of 28% in India, down to about 1% - 3% in most developed nations. But there are higher estimates for many places, up to 4% in Russia 5% in France, 6% in the U.S., 8% in Germany, 11% in the UK and Australia. These figures (from a disputed article in Wikipedia[iii]) are unlikely to be accurate, but they do point to an upward trend in the West, which may not be mirrored as affluence spreads East (Buddhist Taiwan is an outlier at 13%, but Japan and China remain low as 4-5%). Although many meat-avoiders and meat-reducers may go unrecorded, it is clear that a large majority of the earth’s human population remain stubbornly omnivorous.

Buddhism began with the invention of city-states. Both were by-products of iron-age technology, settled agriculture, and the development of long-distance trade on and around the Indian Gangetic plain. With the dawn of Mahayana Buddhism at the beginning of the Common Era (BC to AD) there arose the ideal of a ‘Pure Land’ where life could be relatively free from suffering: a warm land, flat rather than mountainous, with jewels growing on trees. Such a stress-free environment was seen as conducive to progress towards enlightenment.

For the affluent, cities superficially resemble Pure Lands. They are air-conditioned, transporting, micro-worlds where, without physical effort, wealth metaphorically grows on trees of commerce, affording unfettered access to pre-packaged foodstuff that bears no relation to its means of production.  As a paradoxical result, the decline of ruralism and the rise of modern city-dwelling are affecting both the increase in vegetarianism and the resilience of meat-eating. Cities attract the rural poor with dreams of affluence that, once satisfied, increases consumer demand for a high-protein, high-status meat-based diet. But cities also divorce the production from the consumption of food, diminishing personal emotional investment in the agricultural process. In this urban social setting, vegetarianism by choice rather than by necessity becomes a viable ethical option, floating free from rural agricultural practices.

These days, there can be a more nuanced view of what might be entailed by the Pure Land ideal: a world in which animals also have rights, and the human species, as the intelligent top predator, values duty towards other species over benefit to be extracted from the world. Whether that ethical stance entails vegetarianism remains an individual decision. After all, there is a special autonomy about deciding what to put, or not to put, into one’s own mouth.

Maybe the Middle Way ex-plan-ation, laying out what issues spring from the self and what from the otherness of the world, can indeed help individuals decide whether to eat meat, avoid meat or eschew meat altogether. However, that decision requires more than just rational consideration of a spatial diagram. There has to be close attention to one’s own psychological motivations, especially those that tend to make one argument, or one ethical stance, intuitively more attractive than another.

The concept of the Middle Way offers a tool, rather than a solution; a way of navigating the complexity surrounding ethical choice. Of course, this tool is meant to be used beforehand, as an aid to decision-making, rather than afterwards, as a justification: there ought to be some careful consideration and discrimination between the relevant harms and benefits on either side. But, in the end, what one eats is such a personal matter that the decision is likely to be completed by means of intuition, irrespective of practical analysis using guiding metaphors. That’s the way the mind works: some of our most important decisions are taken below the level of consciousness.

[i] For a unique view of the concept of the Middle Way, see the work of Robert Ellis:

 https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Ellis13

http://www.middlewaysociety.org/

[ii] For a historical and situational view of Buddhist ethics in the case of vegetarianism, see: Batchelor, Stephen, 2015, After Buddhism: rethinking the dharma for a secular age, (New Haven, Yale) pp. 222-224.

[iii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country

25/7/16

 Methods of ethical judgement in Buddhism

I have always struggled to understand how the keynote Buddhist concept of the ‘Middle Way’ can function as effective guidance in the making of ethical judgements. Here’s why:

1. The Middle Way concept is just a metaphor, comparing choice between actual paths in the landscape to choice between possible actions. As such, it is a rhetorical tool for the purpose of persuasion, and more needs to be said to make it effective as a guide. The quality carried across from the source of the metaphor (an appropriate choice of routes) to its target (an appropriate choice of behaviour) is that methodical avoidance of extremes is a useful way of choosing ethical over unethical behaviour. But the metaphor, in itself, contains no method for determining what’s ethically extreme on either side. Furthermore, the metaphor contains no method for ruling out the possibility that either extreme might be the most appropriate choice of action.

2. Buddhist tradition usually illustrates extremes on either side of the Middle Way in two ways: firstly, as the desire for eternity (to live forever) on one side and desire for annihilation (to cease to exist) on the other; and in the second way: hedonism on one side and asceticism on the other. Both these descriptions of extremes are limit cases in psychologically-motivated attitudes; in the first description emphasizing a psychological response towards the continuity of existence over time, and in the second description emphasizing a psychological response towards the quality of existence over time.

3. The Buddhist tradition tends to conflate these two descriptions, assuming, without much in the way of explanation, that desire for eternal life motivates hedonism, and desire for annihilation motivates asceticism. But these causal connections don’t necessarily follow, nor is either extreme necessarily unethical in all possible situations. For my own part: I do not desire immortality, am not particularly hedonistic, am not suicidal and I am not attracted to pain or deprivation.

It could reasonably be argued that the hedonist label is just the ascetic’s disapproval of the epicurean enjoyment of life, and the asceticist label is just the hedonist’s disapproval of self-restraint. It could reasonably be argued that there is no harm in indulgence when the living is easy and no shame in suicide when life becomes utterly unbearable, for example under extreme suffering inflicted externally by dictatorship or internally by serious illness. Either way, the Buddhist notion that all our intentions are motivated by graduations of desire for eternity or annihilation is a bit like Freud’s view of the central significance of unconscious sexual desire: interesting in theory but impossible to demonstrate in practice. The traditional limiting extremes in the Buddhist metaphor of the Middle Way leave a lot to be desired.

But all's not lost. The Middle Way metaphor could still provide guidance for judgement, with the adoption of extremes that are more relevant to ethical decision-making. Notice that, underlying both hedonism and asceticism, there is an obsessive concern for oneself: for personal individuality. Hedonism and asceticism seem to be different versions of a single motivation for unethical behaviour: that of self-obsession. Therefore, (self-) hedonism and (self-) asceticism ought to be located together on the same side of the Middle Way metaphor, making room on the other extreme for the opposite concept of otherness or the other.  Now the Middle Way can be seen as a balancing act between the needs of the individual and what is best for the rest of the world.

As an ethical vector, the distinction between self and other seems more western than eastern, having been highlighted so notably in the writings of Durkheim, Jaspers and Sartre; all three of whom considered human personality to be Janus-faced: both for oneself and for others. I am not sure if this distinction, and the ethical ideal of a ‘Middle Way’ between the requirements of either side, is ever clearly and explicitly stated in the Buddhist tradition. But it ought to be from here on.

/4/16

A Sŏn Buddhist Meditation Retreat, held at Gaia House on 9-16/4/16, led by Stephen and Martine Batchelor.

For seven days, fifty people meditated in the light of the condensed koan or hwadu ‘what is this?’ Such a fundamental question is designed to reveal ‘the point beyond which speech exhausts itself’. Therefore, the appropriate technique is to open up one’s mind (and body) to the experience indicated by the question, rather than seeking after an expressible answer.

I was eventually able to extinguish the search for an answer by the conscious mind, but couldn’t control the unconscious parts of my brain, which were prone to upload Haiku into consciousness at any time, day or night. These productions, it seems, were affected by the intensity of prolonged meditation on the perplexing question of what it is like to be here now. I can’t usually write Haiku, but that may change, if attention to the hwadu carries over into daily life. After a bit of polishing, here they are:

5/4/16

Bowerchalke and the Gaia Hypothesis

The Gaia Hypothesis is just a theory: a suggestion that the earth’s atmosphere has long been sustained in a self-rectifying state of balance (homeostasis), as a by-product of the evolution of all little and large life-forms (the ‘biosphere’). It is a distinct, although related, matter that pollution from the industrial revolution is destabilising that sensitive balance.

Far from being a work of the imagination, Lovelock’s theory is scientific, motivated by observation of the marked contrast between the Earth’s atmosphere and the depleted atmospheres of planets like Mars, and supported by a wealth of empirical measurements of atmospheric chemical concentrations.  Some the earliest of these measurements (of haze and CFC-11), were made by Lovelock in his garden at ‘Clovers’ in Bowerchalke. When combined with a worldwide accumulation of information, these measurements gave rise to a new, although contested, explanation of the way in which the reactive chemical constituents of the atmosphere have settled down, over long timescales, into a relatively steady state.

Scientific hypotheses are usually expressed in language that is too specialized and/or dull to ever catch the popular imagination and become part of the zeitgeist. Lovelock’s hypothesis is an exception, for three reasons. Firstly, there is something inherently attractive about the idea that life creates the conditions for its own flourishing. Secondly, the theory provided the background for early warnings of potentially-disastrous climate change. Thirdly, it has a memorable name. While James Lovelock and Lyn Margulis are responsible for the hypothesis, it was Lovelock’s walking and drinking companion, that other notable Bowerchalke resident, William Golding, who suggested that the theory be named after Gaia, the Greek goddess of the earth. Naming a scientific theory after a metaphysical personification may have been something of a mixed blessing, given the furore stirred up in the scientific community.

At Bowerchalke, Lovelock not only observed changes to atmospheric homeostasis, but changes to social homeostasis.  On first visiting in the 1930s, he identified an unspoilt, romantic, rural idyll, but by the 1960s, that sunny vision was eclipsed by a chemical haze blown across from industrial sites across the Channel. By the time he finally moved away in the 1980s, he felt that the industrialisation of agriculture, the gentrification of retirement, and the rise in rural/urban commuting had destroyed the harmonious balance of Wiltshire village life.

It was gorgeous country...on the edge of Cranborne Chase, which was rolling...unspoilt woodlands that went off in all directions... and the village itself was extremely pleasant... there were about four or five farms, not all that big, the largest would be about 600 acres, I reckon, that worked out of the village. And the people of the village were farm workers mainly, or farmers...there was a village shop (and) a post office. There was even a village dentist, retired, and in the next village down, Broadchalke, there was a ...GP...a garage...a butcher’s shop, and then there was a baker’s shop in Bowerchalke. So it was very much a country, old fashioned community...and it was a lovely life. All that lasted until about the...awful Sixties. And then it fell apart...The first thing that happened was agribusiness farming...you can see it all over Wiltshire. It suddenly changed, almost within a year, from gorgeous, beautiful countryside, to an awful lot of it becoming completely devastated.

It’s now an exurb of wealthy retired people, very gentrified...To be sure, I was living there, as an outsider, and so was Bill Golding, but we were different, in that, we sent our children to the village school. We were not...the typical middle-class outsiders that use the village as a place to commute to and from...we were very much part of it. I was, for example, on the parish council for a period... There was enormous concern about the destruction of the mining communities a generation, perhaps, later [but] no sympathy at all for the country folk who were driven into council houses in Salisbury and places around (Lovelock 2010: 122-168).

In sum, during his time at Bowerchalke, between the 1930s and the 1980s, Lovelock observed the twentieth century upheavals in rural life, which are so well documented in Akenfield and Return to Akenfield. However, and with respect, there is some contrast between the exemplary objectivity of Lovelock’s atmospheric measurements and the inevitable subjectivity of his social commentary. That is not so much a criticism as a reminder that all non-instrumental observation, memory and testimony, however accurate, remains inherently subjective, because affected by emotional responses to change.

Looking back in 2016, with a longer perspective, Bowerchalke presents a more complex picture. Justice no longer places heads on stakes, as it did in this valley in Saxon times. The inhabitants are no longer feudal serfs of the nunnery at Wilton, or tenants of the Earls of Pembroke. The drift from the land was under way well before the 1930’s, as a result of the Industrial Revolution, including the inventions of the threshing machine and steam traction power; as a result of the Great Depression of the 1880s, the arrival of public motor transport in 1911, upheavals created by the First World War, the sale of the Pembroke Estate in 1918, and of the repeal of the Corn Production Acts (Sawyer 2004: 147-152). Bowerchalke may have felt like a rural idyll in the 1930s, but that view of social homeostasis was an illusion on the face of pre-existing change, which had been accelerating ever since the beginnings of modernity, with the creation of the very ideas of science and engineering.

Lovelock can reasonably argue, with respect to agriculture and rural social life, that the consequences of change reached a peak in the 1970s, but there has been some respite since that time. There are indeed quite a few big fields, but existing hedges are being maintained and replanted rather than ripped out. Alongside arable farming, there has been diversification into beef, dairy and sheep, biomass cover for shooting, ‘set aside’ for wildlife conservation, the deciduous woodland is being well-maintained, and the unimproved grasslands on the steep faces of the downs are mostly open to public access, with some areas designated as Sites of Special Scientific Interest. The upshot, to my amateur eye, is that wildlife diversity is holding its own, as indicated by healthy populations of top predators such as buzzard, kite, kestrel, fox and badger. Although nature around Bowerchalke these days is not as bountiful as in similar countryside around eighteenth-century Selborne (White 1962), there are reasons to be cheerful.

Alongside the reduced farming community, it is true that much of the population consists of retired incomers, like myself, and those who work in Salisbury or even London.  Because of the discrepancy on the cost of houses, the morning commute is two-way, as office workers leaving the valley overlap with tradespersons coming the other way. Village social life no longer unites around agriculture, but it continues. In the course of being born, raised, paired-off, growing old and passing away, people entertain and care for each other in diverse ways. Although there is no doctor, shop, pub, cafe or school, all of these things are accessible within three miles, at Broadchalke. There is a thriving cricket team, a strong church community, and the village hall is a hive of activity, with a Saturday market and cafe, a retired person’s day centre, an occasional pop-up pub, charity events, exercise classes and arts events. And, of course, a small Buddhist meditation group, which could hardly have been imagined in the 1930s.

Reflecting on Bowerchalke, the Gaia Hypothesis and the ideal of homeostasis, brings to mind Batchelor’s distinction between stable place and shifting ground (2015: 60-62). There are downsides to overconfidence in one’s own place in society and in the world, when constant change is the actual ground of one’s being: the natural world, geography, bodily-health, social and political relationships, and even the quality of the air one breathes, are all undergoing subtle variation over timescales from the inestimably slow to the alarmingly quick. But there is still good reason and sufficient time to value, care for, share and enjoy all these things.

Batchelor, S., 2015, After Buddhism: rethinking the dharma for a secular age, (New Haven, Yale University Press).

Blythe, R., 2005 [1969], Akenfield, (London, Penguin).

Lovelock, J.E. and Margulis, L., 1974, ‘Atmospheric homeostasis by and for the biosphere: the Gaia hypothesis, Tellus, XXVI, 1-2.

Lovelock, J.E. and the British Library Board, 7/4/2010, ‘James Lovelock interviewed by Paul Merchant’, National Life Stories: an oral history of British science, (London, The British Library) C1379/15 Track 5.

Sawyer, R., 2004 [1989], Collett’s Farthing Newspaper: the Bowerchalke Village Newspaper 1878-1924, (Salisbury, Hobnob Press).

Taylor, C., 2003, Return to Akenfield, (London, Granta).

White, G, 1962 [1789], The Natural History of Selborne, (London, The Folio Society)

26/2/16

Liberal Buddhism and Politics

This blog has become infrequent over the last few months, as I have been struggling for something sensible to say, from a liberal Buddhist point of view, about the worst thing going on in the world these days: the international clash of civilizations that is focussed around internecine warfare in Syria and Iraq. I tried tracing the network of conditions that have contributed to that conflict, in the light of the most relevant Buddhist teachings: on compassion (karuna), on loving kindness (metta), on greed, hatred and delusion (Pali: lobha, dosa and moha) and on causation (idappaccayatā or patticca sammuppāda). But I failed.

It proved difficult, but not impossible, to tease out the religious, ideological and geopolitical secondary causes, over the last few hundred years, which have created the conditions for conflict in the broadly Islamic regions of the Near and Middle East. It was easier to identify primary responsibility for acts of violence that are patently unethical and illegal, because they fall outside the Geneva Conventions on warfare: force should be proportional, medical facilities should not be bombed, wounded combatants should be cared for, prisoners should not be mistreated, civilians should not be deliberately targeted or collaterally harmed, and property should not be destroyed without military necessity.

Laying out the network of secondary and primary causes, as a way of apportioning blame, only made manifest the general downfall of politics, diplomacy and humanity in and around Syria. With the exception of distant China, none of the great powers (United States, Russia, Britain, France and the U.N.), none of the regional powers (Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel) and none of the implicated ideologies (colonialism, globalised consumer capitalism, fundamentalist Sunni and Shia Islam, and Ba’ath socialism) are free from blame.

However, the uncomfortable task of identifying past and present responsibility for conflict doesn’t automatically produce a solution.  I’ve had to accept that raking through past causes is no substitute for sufficient knowledge, or sufficient wisdom, to generate a practical, workable solution to the Syrian (or any other) conflict. I failed (along with many commentators) to the bridge the great divide between principle and practice: the yawning chasm between ethical conventions and their practical application during warfare. There seems no way to rub noses in the psychological analysis of greed, hatred and delusion, and no purchase for pious exhortations to loving-kindness and compassion.  Almost by definition, there is no automatic hearing for these considerations within the hard pragmatism of international real politik.

Despite my regrettable failure, I do not accept the view that Buddhists ought to ignore politics in favour of meditative self-examination. There are enough hours in a day, and days in a life, to meditatively examine one’s conscience as a citizen of the beautiful blue planet, and to make up one’s own mind about the major political dilemmas of the time. That is what it means to be a liberal Buddhist, ascribing to both the western Enlightenment ideal of sisters and brothers living in peace, equality and freedom under the rule of law, and the Mahāyāna Buddhist ideal of life in a ‘Pure Land’ where the path towards personal perfection becomes possible for everyone. These are not separate ideals: as aspirations towards social harmony they are sufficiently similar to be the same in effect.

The only difference between traditional Buddhist, and western liberal, political ideals is the route to social harmony. Buddhism traditionally envisages that harmony will be inaugurated by the benevolent rule of a universal king (cakkavattin). Western liberalism is the outright rejection of any such autocracy, in favour of ‘the consent of the governed’. The cakkavattin model of autocracy was culturally specific, and is now out of date. The liberal ideal retains universal relevance, simply because it is grounded in common humanity. But beyond universal suffrage, I am not sure (as with other ethical conventions), if there are any systematic methods for the practical application of liberal values across all cultures. So it is not surprising that there is no practical liberal Buddhist solution to the conflict in the Islamic world. But there has to be some sort of liberal Islamic solution. It is for the people of that region to work their way towards that solution, without self-serving interference from the great powers, for there can be no lasting peace without ‘the consent of the governed’.

31/1/16

Winter Blues

Buddhism makes a radical assertion: that the truth will set you free. Not so much the truth of statements, as an intuitive understanding of ‘the way things really are’ (yathā-bhūtam) in your life. In the case of winter blues, that means noticing the feeling and accepting that this is what’s happening, thereby opening the possibility of changing that mood.

Unlike northern Britain, 20015/2016 has been a fairly mild winter in Wiltshire: overcast, dull and wet, with not many frosts. Beyond the range of city lights, this sort of winter seems interminable.  Day after day, no sun is seen, and damp cold seeps into old bones. It is easy to be defeated by such a season, declining into the ‘slough of despond’. Apart from a dose of sunshine, I can think of three ways of warding off the winter blues: keeping busy, partying on down, and practising meditation in daily life.

Most people wait for wealth, or retirement, before they have much choice between keeping busy and doing nothing. But being busy won’t cure the winter blues, if it’s just a way of getting through the day while ignoring underlying malaise. And partying, however enjoyable, is a special, hysterical way of keeping busy. The problem is that most forms of business involve cunning: there is purpose, strategic calculation and procedure according to plan. This way of keeping busy is about making the world fit with an imaginary scenario, rather than making the mind fit with the way things are in the world.

There are ways of being busy where cunning and purposive planning fades into the background: simple, repetitive, skill-based tasks in which the body knows what it’s doing without too much higher cognitive input: spinning, weaving, knitting, log-sawing, walking, running, playing a musical instrument. Different lists for different people, some indoor, some outdoor, but these are all bodily tasks, keeping the mind in touch with the world through continuous sensory feedback and motor control. Through this continuity with the way things are in the world, the mind is pacified.  

Simple bodily business is a form of meditation, so long as it is done with a fully attentive mind. A local fellow explained that he wouldn’t be coming to the meditation group, as he ‘gets his meditation by walking his dog on the downs’. I can’t argue with that. Formal sitting meditation may be so very far from some people’s cultural comfort-zone that meditation in daily life may be the only viable option, whether practised deliberately or happening all-unbeknownst. Just so long as it blows away those winter blues.

7/10/15

Commentaries on the handbook have been moved.

Most of the blogs so far have taken the form of commentaries on the Introduction to the Bowerchalke Meditation Handbook. They have now been combined into a single text and relocated to the ‘Meditation Handbook’ section of this website.

In the interest of illustrating the generalisations of Buddhist explanation with the particulars of experience, future blogs will cover a greater variety of topics, although the task, of expanding the handbook by means of commentary, will continue.

12.6.15

A Digression on Deer

All the creatures are blithe trespassers, oblivious of our pretensions to the ownership of land. Yet every human being goes about within a circle of isolation, shunned by most other species. For those of us who are herbivores, or constrained omnivores, or not actually intending to catch lunch, that’s regrettable.

Deer (Cervidae) are the largest wild animals in Britain; wonderful to behold, as numerous as cattle, yet so wary of people that outside deer parks, such as Richmond and Fountains Abbey, they usually sense our coming and slip away unseen.  Part of their charm, honed over centuries as quarry, lies in this swift, bounding elusiveness. By escaping, they symbolise the innocence that humankind lost by taking up the chase.

As an ancient teaching, Buddhism inevitably makes use of rural metaphors, and in the Suttas and the Jātaka Tales, deer symbolise harmony and compassion. Above Tibetan monasteries, deer appear as supporters on either side of the eight-spoke wheel (Skt: dharmacakra), as a reminder that the ‘first turning’ of the Buddha’s teaching (Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta) was heard in the deer park at Sarnath. That these were probably Chitral (Axis axis) rather than Red, Roe or Fallow is beside the point: that in the East as in the West, deer evoke affection and respect.

Bowerchalke lies within Cranborne Chase, the former hunting ground of kings. They’ve long gone, allowing Fallow and Roe deer to roam freely throughout the remaining tracts of woodland. Apart from some relatively humane culling in the interest of forestry regeneration, this would be a golden age for deer, were it not for the invention of the motor vehicle. Lacking any inkling of the Highway Code, they tend to bolt the wrong way at the wrong time.

Having avoided kamikaze pigeons, pheasants, partridges, owls, rabbits, etc., I blamed ‘roadkill’ on others until the day I ran into a (Roe?) deer down the road into Wilton. No warning, a big bang, a streak of ginger fur, and then it was gone. Perhaps it survived, but it surely suffered, and I share responsibility for that, having driven incautiously down a wooded road. This was one of those cause-and-effect moments that cannot be wished away, leaving a sense of before-and-after, a dented bonnet and a dented conscience.

Uccello, P, c.1470, The Hunt in the Forest (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

Chalmers, R, (trans), 1895, The Jātaka, Vol. 1, no. 12.

Rouse, W.H.D., 1901, (trans.), The Jātaka, Vol. 4, no. 482 & 483.

Prior, R, 1993, Deer Watch, (Swan Hill Press).

1st May

What’s the point?

Within a few constraints, the writing to be found here will spring from the contents of the meditation handbook. The first constraint is a need to make common sense, in the face of the reasonable argument that there is not much point in any inherently-public explanation of what must always remain private: the inherently-introspective experience of meditation. The second constraint is the need to be critical. There is no point in recycling traditional or contemporary Buddhist ideas without some critical assessment of their truth-value. The third constraint is the need to make space for other voices. Since there is not much point in only one perspective, anyone who meditates at Bowerchalke, regularly or occasionally, is welcome to post onto this occasional blog.

These constraints are not all that onerous. Experience comes before explanation, or there would be nothing at all to discuss. Some experiences are indeed beyond words, but most experiences are amenable to explanation, and the others can at least be described metaphorically. Talking is only problematic when it gets in the way of doing.

There has been a tendency to avoid critical thinking in Buddhism, as if were disrespectful of past masters or of the apophatic negations found in the Prajñā-Parāmitā texts. But Buddhism does not wholly reject reasoning, and without some critique Buddhism cannot be reinterpreted to make sense in changing times. Two Japanese Sōtō Zen monks, Matsumoto Shirō and Hakamaya Noriaki, have shown the way to critical thinking in Buddhist discourse.

The point is that explanation, critical thinking and dialogue about meditation ought to be an encouragement, rather than an obstacle, to practice ‘on the cushion’ and in everyday life.