Here, after much too long, is the long-promised continuation of my review of Paul Griffiths’ On Being Mindless: Buddhist Meditation and the Mind-Body Problem. No, this isn’t the complete review; I’ve drafted a conclusion, but need to consult the text again on a couple of points. (That’s one difficulty involved in writing about a book you’ve returned to the library.) I’ll try to get to it soon.
On Being Mindless is a valuable yet a disappointing book. Its virtues are closely related to its flaws, chief of which is that the title promises more than the book delivers. Instead of a reference to the broad spectrum of Buddhist meditation practices, the book would be more accurately subtitled nirodhasamapatti and the mind-body problem.
Nirodhasamapatti, which Griffiths translates as “attainment of cessation”, denotes a psychological/soteriological state which plays a very specific role in Buddhist doctrine. By narrowly confining his attention to controversies in the Buddhist tradition concerning this state, Griffiths achieves an admirable thoroughness of discussion and is able to offer definite and clearly supported conclusions. Those who want a wide-ranging investigation of how the full range of Buddhist meditation techniques and the light they might shed upon the mind-body problem will be disappointed, though.
What is the “attainment of cessation”? Here’s a discussion from Theravada scholar David Kalupahana’s Buddhist Philosophy: A Historical Analysis:
The highest meditative attainment reached by the Buddha was sannavedayitanirodha (cessation of perception and feeling), sometimes called nirodhasamapatti (state of cessation.) . . .
Cessation is not the same as nirvana, but the two are related:
[There is] a common denominator between nibbana and sannavedayitanirodha. As in nibbana, there is no craving in sannavedayitanirodha, for in the absence of any perception or feeling there can be no craving. Nibbana signifies the absolute end of craving, not because he does not experience . . . feelings, but because he is unmoved by them. On the other hand the person who has attained sannavedayitanirodha need not even make an effort to remain unmoved because, while in that state, he does not come into contact with, and thus is not aware of, the outside world. In the former state a person has knowledge of the nature of phassa and therefore remains unmoved. In the latter he does not seek such knowledge nor any feeling of it. . . .
While there is this similarity between the two states, there is the significant difference that an arahant in his waking consciousness is fully aware of what goes on before him, while one who has attained sannavedayitanirodha will not be aware of anything, since the activities of his senses are temporarily suspended.
Griffiths shares and endorses Kalupahanas entirely negative conception of nirodhasamapatti, describing it as follows:
Perhaps the closest analogy in Western psychological parlance to this condition would be some kind of profound cataleptic trance, the kind of condition manifested by some psychotic patients and by long-term coma patients. In these cases also no responses to stimuli occur, and it seems reasonable to assume that sensation and perception are not occurring; certainly, in the more extreme examples of catalepsy, speech does not occur and there is no initiation of any kind of action, no volition. On these levels, then, cataleptic trance bears some analogy to the Buddhist condition of cessation. However, it seems that the attainment of cessation is even more radical in its rejection of mental activity than are the dominant Western models for the understanding of catalepsy. For the Buddhist the attainment of cessation suggests not only that there is no reaction to stimuli and no initiation of action, but also that there is no internal mental life of any kind.
In OBM, Griffiths is not concerned with the soteriological status of this state or its relation to nibbana. Rather, his discussion focuses almost entirely on set of controversies that arise concerning the ability of meditators to re-enter ordinary waking consciousness out of the state of cessation, and the implications of the positions espoused in those controversies for the Buddhist view of the causal relations between and among mental and physical events.
The body of OBM consists of four chapters. In the first three chapters Griffiths examines the controversies surrounding cessation in several Buddhists schools and authors: the Theravada, chiefly in the writings of Buddhaghosa; the Vaibhasika (Sautrantika) school, chiefly inthe Abhidharmakosa; and the Yogacara school. For each, he summarizes the relevant texts, and extracts the doctrinal controversies to be found therein, with numerous astute observations on how problems of interpretation, both among traditional commentators and the contemporary reader, bear upon those controversies. These are perhaps the most valuable parts of the book, at least for a reader like me, with an interest in, but limited knowledge of, the development of the technicalities of Buddhist doctrine through the commentarial history. Each chapter concludes with a formal analysis of the philosophical controversy that Griffiths has identified in the textual tradition, along with some remarks on the philosophical problems involved.
(continued here)
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[...] For the past several months, a copy of Paul Griffiths’ On Being Mindless: Buddhist Meditation and the Mind-Body Problem has been sitting on my desk, and a half-written review thereof has been fermenting on my harddrive. I hope to bring that review into the light of day reasonably soon; as a first step towards that goal, I’d like to reproduce a fairly lengthy passage from the Introduction of the book. It’s a manifesto of sorts, and one with which I wholeheartedly concur. The philosophizing found in this work both rests upon and illustrates an important general thesis about rationality. Briefly stated, this thesis is that philosophy is a trans-cultural human activity, which in all essentials operates within the same conventions and by the same norms in all cultures. These are, broadly speaking, the conventions and norms which demarcate what in the West has sometimes been called ‘rationality.’ This is not an uncontroversial view; it is probably true that the current intellectual orthodoxy in the Western academic disciplines of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history (especially history of religions) and literary criticism is opposed to it. The development of a sociology of knowledge, superficial understandings (and misunderstandings) of the late Wittgenstein and the classical Quine, the pervasive adherence to varieties of relativism in the work of important anthropological theorists, the fuss in philosophy of science over the early Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis and Feyerabend’s fulminations against method, and the vogue for deconstructionist readings of any and all genres of text – all these have combined to create an intellectual climate in which it is problematic even to suggest that rational discourse may be a phenomenon which operates by recognizably similar rules and with effectively identical goals cross-culturally, and is thus a tool available in a relatively straightforward manner for cross-cultural communication and assessment. [...]
[...] (previous installment here) [...]
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