Introduction to “Pyrrho’s Way: The Ancient Greek Version of Buddhism”
To study Pyrrhonism is to study belief.
To study belief is to cease to believe.
To cease to believe is eudaimonia.
Chapter 1
…[Pyrrho] even went as far as the Gymnosophists, in India, and the Magi. Owing to which circumstance, he seems to have taken a noble line in philosophy….
Diogenes Laertius, Life of Pyrrho
…whatever Greeks acquire from foreigners is finally turned by them into something nobler….
Plato (or more likely his student, Philip of Opus), Epinomis
Pyrrho’s Journey to the East
Even in antiquity Westerners looked to India for wisdom. We know the Neoplatonist philosopher, Plotinus, tried to go there but had to turn back. Some people even claim — on scant evidence — that Jesus went there. But there’s only one Westerner from antiquity whom we know not only went to India, but who brought back something that profoundly influences Western thought to this day. His name was Pyrrho. He was a priest at the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, and a philosopher in the tradition of Democritus. Pyrrho successfully made the trip because he was a member of Alexander the Great’s court during Alexander’s conquest of everything from Greece to India. Alexander had assigned the several philosophers in his court to learn everything they could about the philosophies of his newly conquered lands. Pyrrho spent a year and a half in India (327–325 BCE) doing exactly that.
Pyrrho carried with him to India two problems. In the decades following Democritus’ death (circa 370 BCE), two key elements of Democritean philosophy had come under attack, first by Plato, and then forcefully and persuasively by Aristotle.
Democritus had outlined a philosophical system for achieving a happy and fulfilling life, based on strategies for eliminating unpleasant and unhelpful mental states and cultivating positive ones such that the resulting peace of mind would lead to a life of virtue. Aristotle countered with a detailed system based on the virtue ethics conceived of by Socrates: that acting in accordance with virtue leads to peace of mind — the inverse of Democritus’ formula.
The other problem was worse. Aristotle had persuasively argued that Democritus was wrong about the fundamental nature of knowledge, again starting with ideas conceived of by Socrates. Since the validity of any philosophical system rests upon its epistemology, Aristotle’s attack was an existential threat to the entirety of Democritean philosophy.
The Greeks had for long noted a distinction between appearance and reality, based on observations such as how when an oar is put into water it appears bent, and how square towers seen from a distance look round. As appearances were known to deceive, the great epistemological question was about how much they could be relied upon to lead us to the truth about reality. Democritus built upon the views of earlier Greek philosophers, particularly Heraclitus, Xenophanes, and Parmenides, all of whom argued that obtaining the truth about reality was either impossible or highly limited. Aristotle rejected this. In his Metaphysics he declared that Democritus and these earlier philosophers were wrong, and he laid out his theory about how truth was accessible.
In India Pyrrho found a unified solution to both of these problems. He brought it back to Greece and built a new school of philosophy on it: Pyrrhonism, which flourished along with other schools of pagan philosophy until they were exterminated as part of the Christianization of the Roman Empire.
In the 19th Century, when Buddhist texts were starting to become available in European languages, scholars began noticing uncanny similarities between Pyrrhonism and Buddhism. Nietzsche even called Pyrrho “a Buddha.” But it would not be until the early 21st Century that it was finally proven by Christopher I. Beckwith, a philologist specializing in the ancient languages used on the Silk Road connecting trade between the ancient civilizations of the East and the West that the solution Pyrrho found involved repurposing key ideas from Buddhism.
Among the Buddhist ideas that identifiably influenced Pyrrho were nirvana, enlightenment, the Three Marks of Existence, the Three Poisons and their Antidotes, and the idea that the root cause of our mental suffering is delusion — all of which he reshaped to make them compatible with Greek thought and useful against Aristotle. On top of this Buddhist philosophical foundation, Pyrrho built an innovative technology. For reasons we can only speculate about, he did not bring back to Greece the Buddhist technology of meditation. Instead, he took techniques that already existed in Greek thought — principally from Democritus, Protagoras, Gorgias, and the Megarians — synthesizing them and repurposing them to achieve ends that meditation achieves, all the way to the point of there being a Pyrrhonist version of kensho (enlightenment experience).
Around all of this — due to the fact that the schools of philosophy of ancient Greece criticized each other — subsequent Pyrrhonists built a thick shell of philosophical armor around Pyrrho’s nucleus of Buddhist ideas. They repositioned Pyrrhonism as an anti-philosophy philosophy, much as how some people view Zen Buddhism to be.
Nearly all of Western philosophy serves the end of building up of the ego. Look at how clever we humans are for figuring all this stuff out! We are like gods! Pyrrhonism, like Buddhism, is an assault on the ego. To be successful in that assault, Pyrrhonism was built to breach the philosophical conceits of the Western ego. Pyrrhonism turns rationality onto itself, using the same tools we use to build up our sense of who we are and what our world is to dismantle those constructions, leaving each of us with what is known in the metaphorical language of Zen as our original face: the face we had before our parents were born. As a consequence, Pyrrhonism has induced viscerally negative reactions from other philosophers, from antiquity to modernity. Pyrrhonists so riled the Stoic philosopher Epictetus that he thought they should be tortured. One modern so-called “expert” in Pyrrhonism, Professor Jonathan Barnes, called them “quacks” and advertisers of falsehoods. Between these two are countless more who have misunderstood, mischaracterized, and maligned Pyrrhonism.
Unlike Buddhism, Pyrrhonism doesn’t come in a warm and fuzzy wrapper. It’s not a religion. Its approach isn’t mystical. Meditation is not one of its techniques. It’s not joined at the hip with an ethics of compassion. Pyrrhonism is a philosophy. Its approach for producing peace of mind is as coldly technical as the assembly instructions for a Japanese bicycle. Its message about the nature of ethics acts like an acid, not a balm.
These are features, not bugs. Pyrrho did something wise and innovative. He reformulated the active ingredients of Buddhism for improved effectiveness in the conditions of the rationalistic Western mind. Pyrrhonism works on minds that are as fully conditioned to adhering to the law of non-contradiction as they are to the law of gravity. Instead of using meditation to launch the mind beyond the sphere of the mundane, producing an experience that grants a new perspective, Pyrrhonism pours rationality onto the ground we think we’re standing upon, dissolving it until the ground beneath us disappears, producing a similar experience.
But how do you say “enlightenment” in ancient Greek?
Chapter 2
…philosophy begins in wonder.
Socrates, Theaetetus
Philosophy does not begin in wonder. It begins in anxiety, with the disquieting suspicion that things are not how they should be and are not what they seem.
Hans Abendroth, The Zero and the One
Eudaimonia
To make Buddhist ideas fit into Greek thinking, one of the first things Pyrrho had to address was the issue of religion. In India the roles of philosopher and saint were merged, philosophy and religion were fused, and innovations in both were tolerated. While the situation in Greece had once been similar, this had since changed. Three hundred years earlier the philosopher Thales helped formulate the Delphic Maxims. These maxims functioned as a simple philosophy of life. They were promulgated as the dictates of the god Apollo and spread throughout the Greek-speaking world. Two hundred years earlier the Pythagoreans also mixed religion and philosophy, innovating in both. Then an event happened that would cleave forever religion and philosophy in Greek and subsequent Western thought: the sentencing of Socrates to death on charges of introducing new gods.
Pyrrho knew he could not make Pyrrhonism religious in the way Buddhism was. Perhaps this was one of the motivations behind his innovations. He knew that any talk of holiness or mystical states or any implications of his philosophy on the gods was a non-starter. This constraint likely spurred him to employ what in Buddhism is called upaya — praiseworthy application of skillful means — for enlightening his fellow Greeks using tools he had at hand.
The first thing where Pyrrho would have had to apply upaya was the Buddhist concept of enlightenment. As the Greeks didn’t have a concept quite like enlightenment, Pyrrho would have to use a concept they would understand. In Greek the most similar concept is “eudaimonia.” Like how the Buddha saw greed, anger, and delusion as the barriers to enlightenment, the Greeks saw unpleasant and unhealthy emotions, such as anger, envy, and anxiety as the barriers to eudaimonia. “Eudaimonia” is typically translated into English as “happiness.” This is an unsatisfactory translation, but English has no single word that encompasses the idea. Perhaps better translations would be “flourishing” or “blessedness.” Eudaimonia is about a happy, flourishing, meaningful life achieved through wisdom. It is a practical concept, devoid of the spiritual attributes of enlightenment. For Pyrrho’s purposes, this made the term well-suited for his objectives.
Besides this, eudaimonia was nearly universally agreed upon as the goal of life. Aristotle had claimed that it was self-evidently the goal. All of the Hellenistic philosophies of life share this goal, giving them a vibrancy and relevancy to human existence that religions have. They are not philosophy as dry, academic hair-splitting about things normal people are not interested in. Their chief concerns are wisdom, character development, and the best way to live. They are philosophies one practices, much like how one practices Buddhism.
Religion and philosophy were not the only things intertwined in antiquity and the era that came before it. Medicine was mixed in as well. In pre-literate tribal societies the role of holy man, wise man, and medicine man were wound together in the person of the shaman. This connection would continue more loosely with the Hellenistic philosophies. Doctors commonly studied philosophy and philosophical schools would have connections with schools of medicine. People saw philosophy as a cure for the ills of the soul, and medical metaphors were commonly used to describe how a philosophy helped practitioners attain eudaimonia. For example, Epictetus described Stoicism as “a surgery. You are not to go out of it with pleasure, but with pain; for you do not come there in health.” Remember, ancient surgery was without anesthesia. The Stoic cure was advertised as a painful but heroic intervention to induce eudaimonia. The Epicurean approach, on the other hand, was the tetrapharmakos — literally the “four-part remedy.” It’s a collection of recommendations for achieving eudaimonia described as a recipe for a drug.
Pyrrhonism also uses a medical metaphor. This is particularly appropriate because, of all of the Hellenistic philosophies, Pyrrhonism was the one most closely associated with medicine. Many of the great Pyrrhonist teachers were doctors, and Pyrrhonism was so closely allied with the Empiric school of medicine that for all practical purposes Pyrrhonism served as the theoretical branch and the Empirics as the applied branch of the same school of thought.
The good news is that Pyrrhonism’s prescription for eudaimonia is not nearly so unpleasant as surgery without anesthesia. The recovery is much faster, and it comes without scars or possible surgical errors. Like the tetrapharmakos, it’s a drug, which makes it easier to take.
But let’s not forget about efficacy. Consider whether the tetrapharmakos will be effective for your condition. Its ingredients are:
1 Don’t fear god.
2 Don’t worry about death.
3 What is good is easy to get.
4 What is terrible is easy to endure.
If this concoction produces eudaimonia for you — and historically a large number of people claim it did for them — that’s wonderful. But I suspect that few readers of this book will find these ingredients impressive; although in its defense I need to point out that it gives useful advice that many people need to hear, particularly with ingredient #3. Most people profoundly misunderstand what will make them happy. They go chasing after hard-to-get things that won’t make them happy and ignore easy-to-get things that will. I’ve sampled a range of lifestyles from living in the austere conditions of a Japanese Rinzai Zen monastery to being a C-level executive at a publicly traded company. I was happier in the monastery.[1]
The Pyrrhonist prescription is not a typical kind of drug. It’s a purgative. It works like how one treats food poisoning, by inducing vomiting to get rid of the poison. The poison Pyrrhonism purges is delusion — the delusion that causes suffering. The experience of this purgative is like that of other purgatives. When the effect kicks in, it’s not pleasant, but you soon rid yourself of what is ailing you and you recover.
[1] Eshin Nishimura gives a lovely account about how the happiest days of his life were at the same monastery, in Unsui: A Diary of Zen Monastic Life
Chapter 3
Science and mathematics were to be removed from the hands of the merchants and the artisans. This tendency found its most effective advocate in a follower of Pythagoras named Plato. … He (Plato) believed that ideas were far more real than the natural world. He advised the astronomers not to waste their time observing the stars and planets. It was better, he believed, just to think about them. Plato expressed hostility to observation and experiment. He taught contempt for the real world and disdain for the practical application of scientific knowledge. Plato’s followers succeeded in extinguishing the light of science and experiment that had been kindled by Democritus and the other Ionians.
Carl Sagan
The mythos is insane. That’s what he believed. The mythos that says the forms of this world are real but the Quality of this world is unreal, that is insane! And in Aristotle and the ancient Greeks he believed he had found the villains who had so shaped the mythos as to cause us to accept this insanity as reality.
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Allegory of the Cave
One of the founding myths of Western thinking is Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, which appears in his famous book, Republic. Plato has his character, Socrates, describe a group of prisoners who have lived all of their lives chained to the wall of a cave, facing a blank wall. The prisoners watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them. The standards of knowledge that prevail in the cave are based on the abilities to describe what passes by, to remember and record the images, and to predict what images would come next. One day a prisoner breaks his bonds and leaves the cave. By seeing the sun and the natural world above the ground he discovers that reality was not what he thought it was. He feels elation. A wonderful thing has happened to him. He has discovered true knowledge. Socrates says that if the prisoner returns to the cave to tell his fellow prisoners about his discovery, his eyes would have become accustomed to the sunlight, impairing his ability to see in the dark light of the cave. If that prisoner then were to describe his observations of the world above and his opinions of the shadows, the other prisoners would ridicule him.
This myth appears to be deeply embedded in how people think, not only about knowledge, but also what gets called “enlightenment.” Pyrrhonism aims to disabuse people of this myth.
The myth stands on a foundation of common experience. We’ve all had ah-ha moments where we have come to understand something we did not previously understand. This myth exploits that experience, but it moves the goalposts in both directions. In this myth, Plato creates the idea that what we experience through our senses is not real. Reality is something else, something behind the appearances: the world outside the cave. Plato proposes that the purpose of philosophy (or spiritual training) is to release the human mind from the bonds of the illusory appearances to get to the reality that lies beyond. The result of getting to that reality will be eudaimonia.
Plato, ever the aristocrat that he was, uses the allegory of the cave to divide people into the elite who know — the philosophers — and the ignorant masses. Yet we have no proof that anyone has ever left the cave. The only ways we could have such a proof is if we were to leave the caves ourselves. Plato is perpetrating a con. What we see in the cave is as real as things get for us — which is not to affirm that they are accurate representations of reality. The claims of knowledge that come from beyond the cave cannot be tested for accuracy and are at least as likely to be delusions as truth. Plato, however, paints a flattering picture for this inverted view. It is inverted, because it is not the people in the cave who are held in bondage, but those who think they have left the cave. They think they see things that are not there, and they lose the ability to see things that are there. Even in Plato’s story, Socrates has to concede that leaving the cave causes vision impairment in the cave, as the effects of thinking you know things from outside the cave produced obvious impairments.
Pyrrhonism transforms the experience of living in the cave similarly to how Buddhism does it. In Buddhism samsara (the common mundane view of existence) and nirvana (the enlighted view of existence) are recognized as being the same thing. What changes is the interpretation. With this change in interpretation, the person is changed. Hakuin’s Song of Zazen puts it this way:
All beings by nature are Buddha,
As ice by nature is water.
Apart from water there is no ice;
Apart from beings, no Buddha.
How sad that people ignore the near
And search for truth afar:
Like someone in the midst of water
Crying out in thirst…
The mind flows like water until it gets frozen with delusion. People think they have to search for truth outside the cave to attain eudaimonia, yet what they desire is at hand. They search like someone in the midst of water, crying out in thirst. All they need to do is melt the ice.
Pyrrhonism seeks to disabuse people of delusive thinking about what is beyond the cave, and to reorient their attention back to what is going on in the cave. In Buddhism this can be described as a process of bringing attention to the present moment and letting go of attachments. Pyrrhonism uses a different technique for achieving similar ends. Instead of orienting mind to the present moment it restores the standards of wisdom of the cave. Instead of training the mind to let go of attachments it trains the mind to dissolve the rationale for attachments.
Chapter 4
I discovered that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered, but that when I didn’t believe them, I didn’t suffer, and that this is true for every human being. Freedom is as simple as that. I found that suffering is optional. I found a joy within me that has never disappeared, not for a single moment. That joy is in everyone, always.
Byron Katie
If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts happiness follows him like his never-departing shadow.
Shakyamuni Buddha
Dukkha
The Buddha famously declared “life entails dukkha.” The term “dukkha” is typically translated into English as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” No single English word conveys the full meaning of the term. While people disagree about how to translate “dukkha” they don’t disagree with the Buddha’s proclamation.
Dukkha comes in two varieties. One is the physical pain associated with conditions unfavorable for our bodies, such as hunger, cold, and disease. The other is the mental pain that comes from how we think about things. Great advances have been made in addressing physical suffering, but for mental suffering it appears we have not advanced much — if any — beyond the wisdom of the ancients. In antiquity many approaches were developed for dealing with this second kind of dukkha. Buddhism is just one of those approaches; the Hellenistic philosophies are among the others.
Buddhism is still new to the West. The most recent religion to have converted such a sizable number of Western adherents was Christianity. It took 200 years for Christianity to become a sizable movement, 300 years have sizable areas where it was in the majority, and 600 years to become the majority religion nearly everywhere in the Roman Empire. Buddhism started attracting its first Western converts in the early 20th Century. Organized groups of Western converts first began appearing in the 1960s.
I started practicing Zen in 1991. My observation is that how Buddhism is taught in the West is not working well enough for any but a small minority of people to stick with it. Every long-time member of a Buddhist practice group has observed that far more people read about Buddhism than ever try to practice it, that few people who try practicing Buddhism stick with it for long, and most of those eventually leave. I’ve stayed with two practice groups long enough to see 100% turnover of the other participants.
My suggestion in this regard is that Pyrrhonism should be recognized as a previous and successful effort to bring the core message of Buddhism to the West and that Pyrrhonism has upaya to teach the current generation of Western Buddhists. I have immersed myself in Pyrrhonist practice for the past six years. I am writing to testify that it works like the ancient Pyrrhonists claim it does. It works towards the same ends that many Buddhist practices works towards, albeit using a different method. I am also writing to testify that much of what the Western academic literature has to say about Pyrrhonism is about as accurate about Pyrrhonism as descriptions of bicycling would be if they were written by someone who has never ridden a bicycle, never seen one being ridden, never spoken to someone who has ridden one, and who has decided that they can figure it out based on the analyzing the contents of a bicycle assembly manual. As the Zen teacher Taisen Deshimaru said, “If you have a glass full of liquid you can discourse forever on its qualities, discuss whether it is cold, warm, whether it is really and truly composed of H2O, or even mineral water, or sake. Meditation is drinking it!” No modern Westerner has ever published a report of drinking Pyrrhonism. I suspect that in a few decades some of the existing academic descriptions of Pyrrhonism will look as misguided as some 19th Century Western texts describing Buddhism look now, with their odd interpretation of sunyata as being worshiping of “The Void.”
My story about drinking Pyrrhonism begins at a time when I felt my Zen practice was stuck. This is not unusual. While I cannot say I’ve conducted a poll about the matter, based on the things I’ve heard from others over the years I’m sure this is not only common, but it may well be ubiquitous among long-term practitioners. What I did while feeling stuck was — without abandoning Zen — to explore the Hellenistic philosophies starting with Stoicism. Beginning in the 2000s a revival movement began forming for Stoicism. Already innumerable new books are now on the market about how to practice Stoicism. These and the many articles about the movement drew my attention. After reading several of the first modern books on Stoicism I switched to reading the ancient texts. There’s not that much to read. Almost everything we know about Stoicism comes from a modest number of surviving ancient texts, mostly from the Stoic authors Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Musonius Rufus, plus a few fragments from other Stoics. This can be fleshed out some more with a few other ancient authors who were not Stoics but who wrote about Stoicism, mostly Cicero, Diogenes Laertius, and Plutarch.
Interestingly, some of the better-known modern Stoic authors such as William Irvine and Massimo Pigliucci report that they seriously considered Buddhism before deciding to follow Stoicism. These days Stoicism and Buddhism are frequently compared. There’s even now an entire book devoted to this subject. I predict that in the coming years Stoicism will increasingly become a serious competitor to Buddhism. For Westerners, Stoicism feels both readily graspable, due to its emphasis on rationality, and culturally familiar, due to the fact that many key thinkers of the early Christian church were influenced by Stoicism and built upon Stoic ideas to interpret Christian doctrine.
While I found Stoicism to be interesting and useful, and I would recommend to anyone that they should learn about Stoicism, I found myself coming to the conclusion that its cure for dukkha was partial at best and brought with it a new set of problems. Epictetus was right to compare Stoicism with surgery. I’ve had several surgeries in my life. While most of them worked, some produced new problems and all of them left scars. And that’s with modern techniques, not the ancient techniques the Stoics used as a basis of comparison.
Cicero, Diogenes Laertius, and Plutarch wrote about other Hellenistic philosophies, too. To some degree an interest in any Hellenistic philosophy entails an interest in them all because they all tend to criticize each other and to define themselves in contrast with one another. Any substantial interest in one of them leads to them all. So, I read on to the others until I finally came to Pyrrhonism, which is best known to us in the writings of the ancient Pyrrhonist philosopher, Sextus Empiricus, and for which no modern how-to guide existed.
I was barely into Sextus’ most important surviving work, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, when I felt an epiphany: I was reading the works of a Western Zen Master who was expressing Buddhist ideas in the rational and precise language of Greek philosophy instead of the metaphorical and paradoxical language of the Buddhists. At the time I had no idea that there was a connection between Pyrrhonism and Buddhism. The publication of the proof of that connection was still years in the future. Despite Sextus’ cautious, complex, and legalistic writing style, and the obscurity of the antiquarian examples he provided as illustrations, for me it was the clearest “Buddhist” text I’d ever encountered. Even more interesting was the fact that Sextus offered a set of practices wholly unlike those of Buddhism. Maybe those would work better for me than mediation did. Maybe they would get me unstuck. As I started practicing the Pyrrhonist methods for relieving dukkha, I found that they worked better, faster, and more reliably than anything I ever learned from Buddhism. Without this suffering, I became not only happier, I became a clearer thinker.
After some time of practicing Pyrrhonism, I started noticing correspondences between what I understood from Pyrrhonism and issues brought up by the writer who first aroused my curiosity about Zen: Robert Pirsig. I noticed that the Pyrrhonists criticized Aristotle for much of the same reasons Pirsig had. Instead of importing Buddhist meditation into Greece, Pyrrho substituted techniques created by the Sophists — the same Sophists that Pirsig suspected were the real teachers of wisdom. I recalled a passage in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance where Pirsig — or more specifically “Phaedrus,” his name for his personality before he was subjected to the electroconvulsive therapy that wiped out most of his memory — described what caused him to give up on Eastern philosophy:
…Phaedrus never got involved in meditation because it made no sense to him. In his entire time in India “sense” was always logical consistency and he couldn’t find any honest way to abandon this belief. That, I think, was creditable on his part.
But one day in the classroom the professor of philosophy was blithely expounding on the illusory nature of the world for what seemed the fiftieth time and Phaedrus raised his hand and asked coldly if it was believed that the atomic bombs that had dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were illusory. The professor smiled and said yes. That was the end of the exchange.
Within the traditions of Indian philosophy that answer may have been correct, but for Phaedrus and for anyone else who reads newspapers regularly and is concerned with such things as mass destruction of human beings that answer was hopelessly inadequate. He left the classroom, left India and gave up.
Half a century has passed since Pirsig gave up, but every day in Buddhist centers across the West other people give up too, and for much the same reasons — reasons which Pyrrhonism can address.
When Pirsig was writing Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, few scholars had written anything about Pyrrhonism. Unless Pirsig had chosen the approach that I had — to read across all of the Hellenistic philosophies directly from ancient sources — he would have had little chance to encounter Pyrrhonism. The approach Pirsig chose was to look for criticisms of Aristotle. While it’s true that Pyrrho criticized Aristotle, at the time Pirsig was writing, Pyrrho’s criticism was shrouded in obscurity, surviving only as a quote buried in a 4th Century Christian text. It took until the early 21st Century for anyone with enough understanding of both ancient Greek and Pali to detect that the three Greek words Pyrrho used in that criticism were the best equivalents available in his language for expressing the three Pali words that describe the Buddhist Three Marks of Existence: anatta, anicca, dukkha.
No wonder I had that reaction to reading Sextus Empiricus! Sextus really was expressing Buddhist ideas! And if Sextus could express those ideas clearly using the vocabulary of Pyrrhonism, perhaps that vocabulary could be substituted for confusing Buddhist ways of saying things.
From my earliest days of Zen practice I have had an instinctive attraction to the Xinxin Ming, a poem attributed to the Third Zen Patriarch, Jianzhi Sengcan — not that I particularly understood it, but I had a gut sense that it addressed the dukkha that ailed me. My attraction to this poem was so strong that I even had it recited at my Zen Buddhist wedding. When I emailed it to my non-Buddhist friend, Cliff, who was to recite it, Cliff responded that he thought the text I had sent him must have gotten corrupted because it made no sense. Cliff has a Ph.D. in English from Yale. The text is that hard to understand.
Even the title of the poem perplexes translators. “Xin” has a variety of meanings, and using the term twice in a row adds to the confusion. The result has been large variations on how to translate it, with different translations implying such different understandings that at least some of them must be terribly misleading.
· Inscribed on the Believing Mind
· Verses on the Faith Mind
· Inscription on Faith in Mind
· Inscription on Trust in the Mind
· Have Faith in Your Mind
· The Mind of Absolute Trust
· Trusting in Mind
· Affirming Faith in Mind
· Faith in Mind
· Trust in Mind
· Faith in Heart-and-Mind
· Faith Mind Sutra
You may be familiar with the most popular translation of its often-quoted first lines:
The Great Way is not difficult
for those who do not pick and choose.
When preferences are cast aside
the Way stands clear and undisguised.
But even slight distinctions made
set earth and heaven far apart.
With my knowledge of Pyrrhonism I started seeing parts of the Xinxin Ming where words could be swapped out with Pyrrhonist terms. Each time I did that, the poem made more sense, and as it made more sense I saw more words that could be replaced, until the entire poem could be restated as Pyrrhonist. I found that this trick worked not only with the Xinxin Ming, but with many other Buddhist texts. Some Zen koans also became less enigmatic to me when I reconsidered them as Pyrrhonist case studies.
Classical Chinese is not nearly as precise as ancient Greek or modern English, as its small number of ideographs must convey a wide range of meanings which are differentiated among several words in languages such as ancient Greek and modern English, and even more differentiated within the technical philosophical vocabularies of those languages. You’ve already seen one example of how the ambiguity of Classical Chinese makes it difficult to translate just the three words of “xin xin ming” into English. The most outstanding example of this difficulty I’ve encountered can be found in The Zen Teachings of Huang Po, a Zen text that has much in common with Pyrrhonism. Expressing what I see as Pyrrhonist ideas in Classical Chinese produces baffling statements such as this one from that text, whose ideographs are literally rendered as:
Dharma original Dharma not Dharma, not Dharma Dharma also Dharma, now transmit Dharma not Dharma Dharma, Dharma Dharma how can be Dharma.
One translator, John Blofeld, gives that sentence this meaning: “the fundamental doctrine of the Dharma is that there are no Dharmas, yet this doctrine of no-Dharma is in itself a Dharma; and now that the no-Dharma doctrine has been transmitted, how can the doctrine of the Dharma be a Dharma?” Another translator, John R. McRae, gives it this meaning: “The Dharma is fundamentally the Dharma as non-Dharma; the non-Dharma is the Dharma and still the Dharma. In the present conferral of the non-Dharma, how can the Dharma ever have been the Dharma?”
Huang Po himself acknowledges how difficult it is to understand that statement. Following it he says:
Whoever understands the meaning of this deserves to be called a monk, one skilled at ‘Dharma-practice.’ If you do not believe this, you must explain the following story. “The Elder Wei Ming climbed to the summit of the Ta Yu Mountain to visit the Sixth Patriarch. The latter asked him why he had come. Was it for the robe or was it for the Dharma?[1] The Elder Wei Ming answered that he had not come for the robe, only for the Dharma; whereupon the Sixth Patriarch said “Perhaps you will concentrate your thoughts for a moment and avoid thinking in terms of good and evil.” Ming did as he was told, and the Sixth Patriarch continued: “While you are not thinking of good and not thinking of evil, just at this very moment, return to what you were before your father and mother were born.” Even as these words were spoken, Ming arrived at a sudden tacit understanding.
Since what Huang Po is trying to express is so difficult to do in the words available to him in Classical Chinese, he needs to resort to allegories and other methods of expression so that the reader can achieve the necessary tacit understanding. Such tacit understanding comes onto one as an epiphany, as it did for Wei Ming in this story, and as it did for me. Eastern texts that had perplexed me for years suddenly started making sense by substituting confusing Buddhist wordings with how a Pyrrhonist would say them. It seems to me that this tacit understanding Huang Po refers to is the same as the explicit understanding that Sextus Empiricus conveys using the clearer and more precise terminology of Pyrrhonism.
Looking at what Huang Po said, I see a statement that can be conveyed straightforwardly in English: “The teachings of the original Buddhadharma are not dogmatic. This non-dogmatic doctrine is also the Buddhadharma. I now transmit this teaching of non-dogmatic dharma. How can dogmatic doctrines be reality?” For those acculturated, like most Westerners are, to the idea that the law of non-contradiction must be adhered to, Blofeld’s and McRae’s translations do not make sense, but because the ancient Pyrrhonists figured out how to convey Buddhist ideas without contradictory or paradoxical language, my rendering makes sense.
This same approach can be applied to clear up a great deal of confusing Buddhist texts. For example, let’s look at those first two lines of the Xinxin Ming again.
The Great Way is not difficult
for those who do not pick and choose.
What does it mean to not pick and choose? How can one take any sort of action in life without making any decisions? How could the author even have chosen to write the poem or to have chosen the words to use in it if he did not pick and choose? I’ve asked Zen teachers these questions and have received answers that made no sense to me. The books about this poem I’ve read don’t make sense either.
That pretty much sums up my feeling of stuckness. I was sick and tired of what I’ve come to call “zensplaining”: the propensity of Buddhist teachings to be packaged with paradoxes and convolutions. This, by the way, is not a criticism of the koan tradition — that method of Zen teaching involving enigmatic questions such as “everyone knows the sound of two hands clapping. What is the sound of one hand?” These are gateways to seeing things differently. My complaint is like Pirsig’s complaint about the answer he got when he asked about the bombing of Hiroshima. Apparently in the traditions of Buddhist teaching these kinds of answers are correct, but these answers fail to satisfy modern Western questioners like me. Dissatisfied questioners take their questions elsewhere.
Pyrrhonism, however, has been refined by the fire of centuries of dialog with other Hellenistic philosophies — from around 325 BCE to beyond 200CE — such that it can offer answers that are free of convolutions and paradoxes. Pyrrhonism makes a distinction between two different types of things that could be called “picking and choosing.” It’s not an obvious distinction, and it is apparently one impossible to express in Classical Chinese. Even in English it’s difficult to express because the grammatical structure of the language drapes the distinction in camouflage. While the distinction takes some effort to understand — like the effort needed for understanding the transformation of equations in algebra — once you see it, the answers become straightforward.
The next section of this book — Book II — outlines the fundamental concepts of Pyrrhonism and the Pyrrhonist methods for addressing dukkha. Book III discusses how Pyrrhonism fits into Hellenistic philosophy and compares Pyrrhonism with a selection of similar philosophies. Its chapter comparing Pyrrhonism with Buddhism details the ideas from Buddhist philosophy Pyrrho borrowed. Its chapter on Taoism demonstrates how the paradoxical Taoist concept of wu wei can also be explained non-paradoxically using Pyrrhonist terminology. Book IV expands on topics introduced earlier in the book. Among other topics in that section we will pick up the Xinxin Ming again, along with a couple of other famous Buddhist texts, reading them like they were Pyrrhonist texts.
[1] The transmission from the Fifth to the Sixth Patriarch was disputed. The robe was a symbol of that transmission. Those who disputed the transmission wanted to take the robe away from the Sixth Patriarch.
Buy the book to continue reading.
