What the Buddha Thought, by Richard Gombrich. London: Equinox. 2009. Pp. Xvi + 239. Hardback: £55.00/$95.00; Paperback: £16.99/$27.95

BSRV 30.1 (2013) 129–136 Buddhist Studies Review ISSN (print) 0256-2897 doi: 10.1558/bsrv.v30i1.129 Buddhist Studies Review ISSN (online) 1747-9681

Book Reviews

What the Buddha Thought, by Richard Gombrich. London: Equinox. 2009. Pp. xvi + 239. Hardback: £55.00/$95.00; paperback: £16.99/$27.95.

Reviewed by John Taber, Department of Philosophy, University of New Mexico, [email protected] Keywords Buddhism, Upaniṣads, karma, ethics, Buddhism and philosophy What the Buddha Thought is a summary of the core teachings of early Buddhism — the author would insist, of the Buddha himself — which both distills and extends research conducted over decades. Based on Numata Lectures delivered at the School of Oriental and African Studies in autumn, 2006, it presents aspects of the Buddha’s thinking, both as regards content and method, in a broadly accessible way. It is not a monograph intended for specialists, though specialists will find much to ponder in it. This reviewer found it immensely stimulating and engaging. Despite any minor criticisms of it, explicit or implicit, in what follows there can be little doubt that this book will be of great interest to a broad range of read- ers and, like the famous book which its title honors, Walpola Rahula’s What the Buddha Taught, will be influential for years to come. As Gombrich announces with his very first sentence, ‘This book argues that the Buddha was one of the most brilliant and original thinkers of all time’. But of course he did not come up with a whole new understanding of the nature and meaning of human existence in a vacuum. Much of the time he was reacting to, or adapting, ideas already in circulation. In fact, as Gombrich convincingly shows, the Buddha often employed terms already in use but gave them new meanings, and he reinterpreted teachings or texts so that they became vehicles of his own message. One of the main points Gombrich has to make — and I think he does so most powerfully and persuasively — is that one cannot really understand what the Buddha is saying unless one appreciates these aspects of it: the allusions, bor- rowings, and puns, and the fact that the Buddha is frequently responding, in a remarkably clever or ‘skillful’ and sometimes even humorous way, to established views. Even the commentators tended to overlook this. The first four chapters are devoted to the Buddha’s view of karma and the antecedents of that view in the Vedic and Jain traditions. According to Gombrich, the idea that we are morally responsible for ourselves lies at the heart of the Buddha’s message. Often we find him resisting the suggestion that what we do doesn’t matter, either because our actions have no effects or because we cease to exist when we die or because we are predestined to experience a certain fate, and so forth. The Buddha’s main innovation was to internalize1 karma. That is,

1. My own term. Gombrich does not seem to have a name for it. Sometimes he mentions the

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2013, Unit S3, Kelham House, 3 Lancaster Street, Sheffield S3 8AF 130 Book Reviews he identified karma not with the overt performance of an action — that is essen- tially the Brahmin understanding of karma: it is virtually identical with ritual — but with the intention behind it. But the Jains, too, were at first inclined to reject the notion that one’s mental state when acting makes any difference. In early Jainism, all action, because it inevitably involves injury to the living beings that fill every square inch of space, is bad. For the Buddha, however, it is from intention that thought, speech, and bodily action derive their moral quality. Since volition or intention is ‘not wholly determined’ though ‘partially conditioned’ (p. 13) — I shall return to this below — one is responsible for one’s actions. This insight, combined with ‘the ethicization of rebirth’, that is, the theory that karma determines rebirth according to one’s deserts, depicts saṃsāra as the journey of the moral agent through different levels of existence over an infinite number of lives, ending for some in Nirvāṇa. Indeed, this was what the Buddha reported seeing in his final meditation, and it is encoded in the tradition, in the stories of the Bodhisattva’s previous births. In the fifth chapter Gombrich takes up the doctrine of ‘No Soul’. This, too, was crafted in conscious opposition to Brahmanical teachings. The rejection of a permanent self is of a piece with the rejection of being — that which is and does not change. For the Buddha, there is no being, only becoming. That all conditioned things are impermanent — which did not yet mean that everything is momentary — is evident from our experience of the world and our own existence. Consciousness, moreover, is also constantly changing. Here, the Buddha may have picked up on the Vedic idea of consciousness as a manifestation of fire, though Gombrich’s evidence for this seemed a bit tenuous. Consciousness for the Buddha is a process, always conditioned by a certain sense and its object (which, analogous to fire, it can be said to consume; for the Buddha, consciousness is ‘appetitive’ in nature). Thus, the Buddha also rejects the Upaniṣadic notion of consciousness as an eternal substance, a pure light shining without interrup- tion. Since both Brahman and ātman in the Upaniṣads are equated with being and consciousness, while being identified with each other, neither could find a place in the Buddha’s scheme. He replaced the three predicates of Brahman-ātman — sat, cit, ānanda — with his own Three Marks: impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and absence of self. This account of the teaching of ‘No Soul’ as a reaction to Brahmanism is rather different from the more standard ones that suggest that any concept of a self was unacceptable to the Buddha primarily because to take anything as a substantial self is to make it an object of attachment, or that iden- tify arguments in certain canonical passages against taking any of the khandhas as a self (because, for instance, they are constantly changing, hence unsatisfac- tory and objects of potential aversion, whereas one would not be averse to one’s own self). Other chapters take up other themes: kindness and compassion as means of liberation, Dependent Origination, fire as a metaphor in the Buddha’s thinking, and Nirvāṇa. Gombrich, refreshingly, places less emphasis on the Four Noble Truths and the topics that fall under them, suffering, desire, the Path, on which Rahula based his exposition. Even then, his discussions of the ideas he selects are too rich for me to attempt to do justice to them here. I shall confine myself Buddha’s ‘ethicizing’ karma, but it is not clear if by that he means something different from ‘ethicizing’ rebirth.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2013 Book Reviews 131 to kindness and compassion and Dependent Origination. Gombrich argues that these themes, too, play off Vedic ideas and even specific Vedic texts, though he shows this more convincingly in the case of the former than the latter. One of Gombrich’s most important discoveries, in my opinion, is that the Buddha saw the practice of love and compassion as a means of liberation, and that he presented this teaching in conscious opposition to the Upaniṣadic notion that enlightenment results strictly from gnosis, specifically, the realization of one’s identity with Brahman — which is not to say, of course, that the Buddha eschewed gnosis altogether. The Buddha, in other words, ‘ethicized’ the path to salvation as well; the cultivation of the heart, if you will, is just as, if not more, important than the cultivation of the intellect. The key text in this regard is the Tevijja Sutta, where the Buddha explains to a couple of young Brahmins the way to ‘compan- ionship with Brahma’. The word brahma in the text occurs in the masculine form, in both the singular and plural, so that it seems that the creator god Brahmā, not the metaphysical principle Brahman, is being talked about. Indeed, companion- ship with Brahmā/ās seems to be understood as attaining ‘the world of Brahmā/ ās’, that is, travelling to and residing in a certain realm after death. The Buddha also teases the Brahmins at one point about whether any Brahmin really knows the way to the sun or the moon, which strikes Gombrich as an allusion to the Path of the Gods and the Path of the Fathers described in Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad (henceforth BĀU) 6.2.15–16 and Chāndogya Upaniṣad 5.10.1–6. (In the BĀU passage those who understand the Five Fires, who go by the Path of the Gods when they die, pass into the flame, the day, the fortnight of the waxing moon, the world of the gods, the sun, and so forth and eventually arrive at ‘the worlds of Brahmā/ an [brahmalokān]’; in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad passage, however, they are led to Brahman [neut. sg.].) But the Buddha teaches them that the way to companion- ship with Brahmā/ās is not to know some secret about the sacrifice but rather to become like Brahmā by pervading all directions with kindness, compassion, sym- pathetic joy, and equanimity — the practices that in other texts are referred to as the ‘Brahma abidings’ (brahmavihāra). Although this admonition may seem to be aimed at a ‘less sophisticated’ understanding of the salvation preached in the Upaniṣads, Gombrich deftly draws attention to the fact that it could be targeting the more abstruse metaphysical teaching as well. ‘Here, the Buddhist monk is pervading the universe with his consciousness, but it is an ethicized consciousness. In enlarging his mind to be boundless (metaphorically, of course) he is emulat- ing the brahmin gnostic who identifies with universal consciousness — or rather, going one better, showing the brahmin what he really should be doing’ (p. 83). Much of Gombrich’s discussion of Tevijja Sutta is taken over from his earlier book, How Buddhism Began,2 but here it is enriched by considerably more background on Brahmanism and Vedic religion, in particular by a discussion of the Five Fire Wisdom in Chapter Three. That all things apart from Nirvāṇa are caused and governed by causal laws may have been considered the Buddha’s greatest discovery in his own day, though certainly the notion that the universe is governed by some principle of order is not missing from the Upaniṣads. The Buddha’s theory of causation of course came

2. See also Kindness and Compassion as Means to Nirvana (1997 Gonda Lecture) (Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1998). http://www.ocbs.org/lectures-a-articles- ocbsmain-121/61-kindness-and-compassion-as-means-to-nirvana-in-early-buddhism

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2013 132 Book Reviews to be codified in the Twelve-fold Chain of Dependent Origination, and Gombrich believes that this construct provides some of the most detailed evidence that ‘the Buddha’s teachings are largely formulated as a response to earlier teachings’ (p. 133). In this case, it is the cosmogony of Ṛg Veda X.129, BĀU 1.2, and 1. 4 to which the Buddha is chiefly responding. Here, Gombrich relies on an interpretation of the Twelve-fold Chain based on these and other Vedic texts worked out by J. Jurewicz.3 Avijjā/ignorance correlates with ‘neither existence nor non-existence’ of RV X.129.1; for, as Gombrich argues, avijjā could have either an ontologi- cal or an epistemic meaning depending on which verbal root √ vid it is derived from.4 Saṃkhāras refer just to the desire that is the motive for creation.5 Nāmarūpa of course is explicitly mentioned at BĀU 1.4.7. One problem with this interpretation is that in the Veda these concepts figure in an account of how the world arose, whereas the Buddha generally refrained from, and even condemned, theorizing about such matters. 6 However, Gombrich maintains that that was precisely his genius: he could take a (then oral) text about the origin of ‘the world’ in one sense and use it to explain the origin of human existence, the world in another sense — and in a way that would resonate with what Brahmin listeners were familiar with. Later he joined this part of the Chain with the final part, beginning with craving, which obviously concerns saṃsāric existence. Still, Jurewicz’s readings of Vedic passages are selective and tend more toward the imaginative than the scientific. More fundamentally, how likely is it that the Buddha could have made use of an interpretation of Vedic texts that never occurred to any Vedic scholar before J. Jurewicz? Nevertheless, neither-being-nor-nonbeing — in the Upaniṣads, however, the consensus is that it all began with being, sat — desire, consciousness, and name and form are all established Vedic ideas that the Buddha surely knew about and, practising a kind of bricolage,7 could easily have woven into his formula to make it more appealing. It is as if he were saying, ‘Look, you Brahmins! You, too, believe in a sequence of causes. Here is the only sequence that matters’. A couple of chapters (Seven and Thirteen) are concerned with methodologi- cal issues. I won’t go into these. Although Gombrich presents his views about methodology somewhat defensively, no doubt due to encountering resistance from other Buddhologists over the years, I (naively or not) find them uncontro-

3. J. Jurewicz, ‘Playing with Fire: the pratītyasamutpāda from the Perspective of Vedic Thought’, Journal of the Pāli Text Society 26 (2000): 77–103. 4. Jurewicz, ‘Playing with Fire’, p. 81, suggests that ‘neither being nor non-being’ can mean that there was, in the beginning, knowledge of neither being nor non-being, that is to say, only ignorance. 5. At least according to Gombrich, pp. 134–135. According to Jurewicz, p. 83, it refers to the ‘building up’ (abhi sam √kṛ) of a second self, though she understands this also as the wish of the self to cognize itself. 6. Which policy the Buddha apparently deviated from when telling the story of the periodic expansion and contraction of the world and the origin of the varṇas in the Aggañña Sutta. Gombrich, however, maintains that the account is intended as a satire of Brahmanical cos- mogonies (pp. 186-190). Recall, by the way, that Socrates too, in his trial, insisted that he was not one of those who are interested in ‘things in the sky and below the earth’, but was concerned exclusively with matters pertaining to how one should live. 7. Gombrich does not mention the work of Lévi-Strauss in his book, but it seems that what he describes the Buddha doing is akin to what Lévi-Strauss describes as the nature of mythologi- cal thinking in La Pensée Sauvage.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2013 Book Reviews 133 versial. Of course it is legitimate to attempt to sort out the original ideas and even words of the historical Buddha, and to understand him as a thinker of the order of Socrates, Heraclitus, or Zhuangzi. Of course we should take the Pāli Canon, ‘as a working hypothesis’, to be ‘telling us the truth’ about what the Buddha did and said; for it is indeed plausible to hold that the core of it goes back to the First Council. And of course we should not be afraid to make bold conjectures which may be later overturned, lest the field of Buddhist Studies should never advance. Gombrich says many insightful things about the Buddha’s intellectual style, especially his pragmatism. A pragmatic approach seems to govern his reflection on ethical matters. The vinaya contains what amounts to a legal-ethical system for the Saṅgha. What is striking about its formation is that it seems to have been almost completely ad hoc. The Buddha lays down a rule when a ‘situation’ arises, and then he is often concerned about how monks appear in the eyes of the lay community and what is or is not conducive to increasing the number of believ- ers. It has no single underlying ethical principle, or at least none that the Buddha ever articulated.8 ‘The vinaya is remarkable as a legal system which is not based on a priori principles but gradually built up through case law’ (p. 173). It seems a bit odd, however, as Gombrich himself points out, that the Buddha felt no need for reflection on ethical theory. ‘Very rarely does the Buddha seem to envisage that a conflict of values could create a real problem, and I know of no case in the Canon of an unresolved ethical dilemma’ (p. 170). And yet the Buddha basically trashed the dominant ethical system of his day, the varṇa-āśrama system and the cult of Vedic sacrifice. Did he see no conflict in that? In fact, we may have yet another case where the Buddha simply gave a new meaning to a Brahmanical concept, namely purity or purification. When it comes to individual morality he appears, in his own way, just as obsessed with purity as the Brahmins were, but now in the form of inner purity. The Path is designed to remove ‘defilements’ (kilesa) and impure ‘influxes’ (āsava). ‘[A] bad person’s mind is said to be dirty’ (p. 44). Thus, not only was morally relevant action internalized by the Buddha as intention (cetanā). Its result was, in part, too.9 Virtually every page of What the Buddha Thought provokes further reflection on the system of ideas propounded, explicitly or implicitly, by the Buddha. One mystery that Gombrich does not attempt to solve is precisely how the Buddha thought that freedom of will is compatible with universal causation (at least as regards things other than Nirvana); for surely he does accept freedom of will. Not only does he evidently set aside the strict fatalism10 of Makkhali Gosāla in the Sāmaññaphala Sutta, but moral responsibility, which he clearly insists on, is usually taken to imply that some actions must be able to be seen as volun- tary. If intention, cetanā, is not strictly determined by the mental and physical events that precede it, how are we to understand this? That the self, outside the nexus of causal explanation, causes it, as some modern advocates of free

8. Though in non-vinaya texts it is made clear that the roots of unwholesome actions are greed, hatred and delusion, and of wholesome ones the opposite mental states. Thanks to Prof. Har- vey for this qualification. 9. And yet one must ask, if śīla/sīla has chiefly to do just with purification, whether it is to be considered a truly moral system at all. 10. Which is not, however, the same as determinism. Basham in his famous study of the Ājīvikas confuses the two.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2013 134 Book Reviews will have proposed,11 was not an option open to the Buddha. Did he believe that cetanā is only partially determined by preceding conditions? That seems to be what Gombrich thinks.12 In that case, however, one must ask, what other factor or factors explain its occurrence; otherwise, it remains an unpredictable event outside one’s control — so that one could not be held responsible for it. Or did he believe in a version of ‘soft determinism’ or compatibilism, according to which certain events, even though causally determined, can still be viewed as volun- tary, for instance if they are caused from within, not externally? Unfortunately, the Buddha offers no explanation of his position that I know of. This may again reflect his anti-metaphysical bias, but it is also possible that, as great a thinker as the Buddha was, this is something he did not completely think through. Another question that frequently comes up when reading this volume is exactly what was the nature of the Buddha’s acquaintance with the Vedic tradition? Here and there Gombrich says that the Buddha knew or was familiar with a certain text of the Ṛg Veda or the Upaniṣads (e.g., p. 63). But what could ‘was familiar with’ mean here? Certainly, the Buddha did not formally study the Veda, for he was not a Brahmin; he was not qualified. Had he heard the Veda recited? Did he know Sanskrit? Perhaps he heard sermons based on Vedic texts given by other religious teachers, perhaps indeed the teachers he studied Yoga under shortly after his renunciation (though other Brahmin teachers are mentioned in the canon). It seems likely, in other words, that the Buddha learned what he knew about the Veda and Upaniṣads second or third hand and, especially in light of the fact that the teachings he alludes to are more like parodies of Vedic teachings, that it was simplified and watered down for popular consumption. Even though he rejects, here and there, a view we can recognize as Upaniṣadic, for instance that the self is the world (Alagaddūpama Sutta) or that salvation consists in union with Brahman (Tevijja Sutta), he seems not to have an appreciation of the most profound, most abstract teachings of the Upaniṣads, as contained for instance the dialogues of Yājñavalkya.13 Did the Buddha ‘know’, in the sense of having been taught by someone who really understood them, any of the following texts?: This self of yours who is present within but is different from the earth [from the waters, fire … breath, speech, sight, hearing, the mind, etc.], whom the earth does not know, who controls the earth from within — he is the inner controller, the immortal ... He sees, but he cannot be seen; he hears, but he cannot be heard; he thinks, but he cannot be thought of ... Besides him there is no one who sees, no one who hears, no one who thinks, no one who perceives. (BĀU 3.7.3–23) About this self, one can only say ‘not –––, not –––’. He is ungraspable, for he cannot be grasped. (3.9.26) It is by the light of the self that a person sits down, goes about, does his work, and returns. (4.3.6, Janaka and Yājñavalkya)

11. For a classic statement of this position see R. Taylor, Metaphysics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Pren- tice Hall, 1963), 33–53. 12. See p. 13: ‘[Volition] is far from random, and is partially conditioned by preceding volitions; but it is not wholly determined’. 13. Note Gombrich’s remark, p. 59, that although the Buddha had a capacity for abstraction greater than the Jains, ‘the Buddhist handling of abstraction was sometimes crude’.

[T]his Immense Being has no limit or boundary and is a single mass of perception. It arises out of and together with these beings and disappears after them — so I say, after death, there is no awareness ... For when there is duality of some kind, then the one can smell the other, taste the other, see the other ... When, however, the Whole has become one’s very self, then who is there to smell and by what means; who is there to taste and by what means ... ? By what means can one perceive him by means of whom one perceives the whole world? (2.4.13–14, Yājñavalkya and Maitreyī)14 From Gombrich’s accounting of how the Buddha reacted to Upaniṣadic and Vedic teachings, one receives the impression that the answer to this question is, no.15 And that raises a further question: If the Buddha had really been initiated into these more difficult, more sophisticated teachings, how might that have influenced his thinking? One could even put the question this way, horrifying as it may sound: What would the Buddha have thought and taught had he been born — and properly educated as — a Brahmin? I would maintain that, just as much as the Buddha’s thinking, and the attitude he had in engaging with other intellectuals, was determined by his familiarity with the Vedic tradition, it was determined by the fact that he was at the same time excluded from it. Gombrich is careful not to claim that the Buddha was a philosopher, which would go against various statements the Buddha made to the effect that he was not interested in metaphysical speculations and had abandoned soteriologically pointless views. Nevertheless, Gombrich wants to suggest, and he seems right in doing so, that the Buddha had a philosophically coherent doctrine. So as not to miss the nuance of what he writes on this, I quote him here at length. I have discussed the Buddha’s attitude to philosophy, i.e., to theorizing, at the beginning of Chapter 2 of How Buddhism Began, and so shall not repeat what is there. But on one important matter I have changed my opinion. I opened my discussion by writing: ‘One thing about which I feel rather uncertain is how interested the Buddha himself was in presenting a philosophically coherent doctrine. ... [A]re we misrepresenting him if we attribute to him an impressive edifice of argument?’ After some more work and some more thought ... I no longer feel uncertain. On the one hand, I do not think the Buddha was interested in presenting a philosophically coherent doctrine: the evidence that his concern was pragmatic, to guide his audi- ence’s actions, is overwhelming. On the other hand, I have also concluded that the evidence that he had evolved such a structure of thought and that it underpinned his pragmatic advice is no less compelling. (p. 164) But even if the claim is just that what the Buddha thought amounts to a coherent system of ideas, a system that purports to depict reality and human existence as they really are, we are still invited to examine those ideas on that basis, that is, to ask of the Buddha’s teachings the same questions we would pose about the theories of other philosophers: Are they true? And, are they adequately proven?

14. Translations from P. Olivelle, Upaniṣads (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 15. On pp. 150–151 Gombrich does suggest that Buddha may have been influenced by Upaniṣadic sayings such as Yājñavalkya’s neti neti in his cataphatic treatment of Nirvāṇa, but we need more evidence before we can draw any conclusion about this.

At the end of Chapter Eight, ‘Everything is Burning’, Gombrich mentions the Presocratic philosopher Heraclitus, one of whose fragments reads, ‘Everything flows’, as another ancient figure who advocated a theory of constant flux; moreover, Heraclitus identified fire as the element out of which everything arises and to which everything returns. Yet Heraclitus also talked about the logos, which guides all change and harmonizes opposites. Opposites are somehow united in his vision: ‘The way up is the way down’; ‘The track of writing is straight and crooked’; ‘Changing, it rests’. A picture of the world as unity-in-difference emerges from his fragments, and an appreciation of an underlying principle of order in the cosmos: ‘Listening not to me but to the logos it is wise to agree that all things are one’. It is this logos/ratio that is the beginning of a thread that runs through the thought of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and extends all the way into modern rationalism. These philosophers explored the invisible, intelligible natures or essences of things as that which things truly are, their being (ousia). (Plato: being is; it does not change. And knowledge pertains to what a thing is.) Indeed, everything seems impermanent as long as you confine yourself to sense perception (as Plato argues in his Theaetetus). But as soon as Socrates asked questions like, ‘Is impiety the same thing in all actions that are impious?’, philosophers began to wonder if there are not permanent essences of the things in this world that do not present themselves to the senses. One has to look harder for this idea in Indian philosophy, but it is there, too. To suggest that the Buddha had ‘a philosophically coherent doctrine’ is to invite not only a philosophical analysis of it but eventually a philosophical cri- tique, perhaps along the lines I have just suggested. Scholars of Buddhism and Religious Studies may be dismayed that this opens a whole new can of worms. But philosophers, I believe, will be inclined to think that the opening of this particular can of worms has long been overdue. As a characterization of the essential elements of the Buddha’s view of reality and human existence, as well as his style and method, by a scholar of insight and imagination who has devoted many years to the study of the Pāli scriptures, What the Buddha Thought is an invaluable contribution. Although scholars will not agree with all of his findings, Gombrich has shown (as others have suggested, e.g., H. Oldenberg) at the very least that Vedic and Jain materials shed a great deal of light on early Buddhist texts, and that we must continue to read the former along with the latter. In fact, lucidly and engagingly written, the book is one of the most accessible examples of historical-philological scholarship I know of. It would be the first thing I would recommend to an undergraduate or a layperson interested in Buddhism who wanted to know what it is that Buddhologists do.16 Note that a second edition of What the Buddha Thought is soon to appear, with various corrections in it, some based on points made in the review of it by Peter Harvey in the online journal DISKUS The Journal of the British Association for the Study of Religions 12 (2011): 38-48: http://www.basr.ac.uk/diskus/diskus12/Harvey.pdf

16. Many thanks to Professor Peter Harvey for correcting some misconceptions in an earlier version of this review.