WORDS THAT BURN WHY DID THE buddha say what he did.pdf

WORDS THAT BURN: WHY DID THE

BUDDHA SAY WHAT HE DID?

Jonardon Ganeri

Before all else, that the soul be turned around as regards the fundamental

direction of its striving ... 1

(Martin Heidegger)

The Buddha’s silences

Vacchagotta, whose questions about the immortality of the soul and the

eternality of the world the Buddha famously refused to answer, 2 would

nevertheless later say that the Buddha ‘has made the Dhamma clear in many ways,

as though he were turning upright what had been overthrown, revealing what

was hidden, showing the way to one who was lost, or holding up a lamp in the

dark’. 3 In the Milinda-pa ˜ h ¯ , the Greek King Menander challenges the Buddhist

monk N ¯ gasena to explain how it could be that the Buddha was willing to remain

silent and yet also assert that he had nothing to hide; that unlike other teachers he

did not keep some things ‘in his ﬁst’:

Revered N ¯ gasena, this too was said by the Lord: ‘In regard to the Tath ¯ gata’s

teachings, ¯ nanda, there is no “teacher’s ﬁst.”’ On the other hand when the Elder

M ¯ lunkyaputta asked the Lord a question he did not answer it. This question,

revered N ¯ gasena, will have two ends on one of which it must rest: either that of

not knowing or that of keeping something secret. For if, revered N ¯ gasena, the

Lord said: ‘In regard to the Tath ¯ gata’s teachings, ¯ nanda, there is no “teacher’s

ﬁst,”’ well then, it was through not knowing that he did not answer the Elder

M ¯ lunkyaputta. But if though he knew he did not answer, well then, in the

Tath ¯ gata’s teachings there was a ‘teacher’s ﬁst.’ This too is a double-pronged

question; ‘it is put to you; it is for you to solve.’ 4

How can silence be anything other than a form of secrecy? Apparently only if the

person questioned does not know the answer. Compare Clitophon’s accusation

against Socrates: ‘[O]ne of two things must be true: either you know nothing

about it [sc. justice], or you don’t wish to share it with me’ (Clitophon 410c6 – 7).

N ¯ gasena responds that there are four sorts of question: questions that require a

deﬁnite reply, questions that require an analysis, questions that demand to be met

Contemporary Buddhism, Vol. 7, No. 1, May 2006

ISSN 1463-9947 print/1476-7953 online/06/010007-27

q 2006 Jonardon Ganeri DOI: 10.1080/14639940600877853

J. GANERI

with a counter-question, and, ﬁnally, questions that are to be set aside. The

questions to be set aside are those for which there is no cause or reason to answer,

for ‘there is no utterance or speech of the Buddhas, the Lords, that is without

reason, without cause’. N ¯ gasena’s solution, then, is that some questions do not

deserve an answer and the Buddha would not say something unless there

was a point in doing so; the point, for the Buddha, being always related to the

perlocutionary effects of his remarks on his audience. It is true that the Buddha

does not wish to share his knowledge but the motivation is not a desire to

preserve a secret, but rather the wish not to harm his questioner with the truth. 5

In so choosing to remain silent, however, does the Buddha not conceal the truth

when in his judgement his teachings will not have the transformative effect

intended for them? Clearly, the internal coherence of the Buddha’s stance on

silence requires that it is not zealotry but compassion that motivates him; his

compassion is, as it were, a presupposition for the consistency of his position. Not

every silence is a subterfuge; sometimes the silence is sincere. Lying permits of a

similar distinction: some lies are acts of manipulation, but others legitimately

protect the liar from the interrogations of one who does not have a right to the

truth. The Buddha had no need to worry about the effects of others’ words on him

but he did care about the effects his words had on others. This led him to remain

silent; in the next section, we will ask whether his compassion also led him to lie.

Vasubandhu supplements N ¯ gasena’s response with two further considera-

tions. 6 One is that the Buddha takes into account the intentions and prior beliefs

of the questioner in assessing the effect any answer may have on them. These

intentions and beliefs may be such that the questioner will misunderstand the

answer, although it be true, however it is phrased. Vasubandhu’s second addition

is to note that some questions are to be set aside, not because the Buddha does

not know the answer, but because any answer would commit him to knowledge

that is not to be had. The Buddha refused to answer the question ‘What happens

to a man after he dies?’, and it is the case neither that he knows what happens but

refuses to say, nor that he does not know what happens; rather, any answer would

commit him to knowing there is something that happens, and, for the Buddha, this

is not a fact available to be known. To put it another way, questions are implicit

arguments, and answers can only conﬁrm or deny the validity of the argument

implicit in the question but not challenge the truth of its premises. When the

person answering the question believes that one of its implicit premises is false,

the only option is to remain silent. 7

The face-value of the Buddha’s words about the self, and their true

value

A speciﬁc problem I will now seek to address concerns the problem of the

Buddha’s truthfulness: did the Buddha sometimes lie, and if so with what

justiﬁcation? The philosophical problem of the compassionate lie, and the more

general hermeneutical problem of the Buddha’s truthfulness, are ones that had to

WHY DID THE BUDDHA SAY WHAT HE DID?

be confronted by the tradition of Buddhist hermeneutics. 8 Although N ¯ g ¯ rjuna

tries, on one occasion, to deﬁne the compassionate lie out of existence, the

problem is not so easily dismissible. 9 A compassionate lie might well be morally

justiﬁed but that does not turn it into a truth. The implication of the famous

parable of the ‘burning house’ in the Lotus S ¯tra, in which a father cajoles his

children to leave the burning house with the false promise of toys, is that the

compassionate lie is a skilful way to bring about the good. 10 The parable suggests

that the Buddha’s words, although untrue, encourage people to escape the

burning house that is a person’s lustful attachment to the world. 11

This in spite of

some attempt to claim that no untruth is involved:

[The Buddha asks ´ ¯ riputra,] ‘ ´ ¯ riputra, what do you think ... was [the father]

guilty of falsehood or not?’ ´ ¯ riputra said, ‘No, this rich man simply made it

possible for his sons to escape the peril of ﬁre and preserve their lives. He did not

commit a falsehood ... because if they were able to preserve their lives, then

they had already obtained a plaything of sorts. And how much more so when,

through an expedient means, they are rescued from the burning house!’ ... The

Buddha said to ´ ¯ riputra, ‘Very good, very good. It is just as you have said.’

It is not a part of the background episteme to regard telling the truth as an

unconditional duty: there are certain, very exceptional, situations in which is

morally admissible that a particular individual may lie. The problem is not to

do with the Buddha’s virtue, any more than there is any question that the father

acted improperly. Rather, the problem is that, if the Buddha sometimes lies and

sometimes tells the truth, how are we to determine from his words what is his

actual view? If he as often says that there is a self as that there is not, what’s the

truth of the matter?

The protreptic nature of the Buddha’s reported discourse is unmistakable.

I mean by this not merely that the dialogues are hortative, encouraging the

interlocutor to take up and pursue the Buddhist way; I mean, more speciﬁcally,

that the teachings are explicitly directed towards a ‘turn’ or transformation or

reorientation in the mind of the listener (cf. pro þ trepein: to turn, direct the

course of). Commenting on the use of ‘protreptic’ in Epictetus, A. A. Long says:

The term protreptic can scarcely be translated by a single English word. It refers

to a type of exhortative or admonitory discourse, either in monologue or in

question-and-answer form, designed to make persons rethink their ethical

beliefs and convert to a fundamental change of outlook and behaviour. 12

Epictetus himself says of protreptic that:

[i]t is the ability to show people, both individuals and groups, the inconsistency

they are caught up in, and that they are focused on everything except what they

want. For they want the sources of happiness, but they are looking for them in

the wrong place. (Discourses 3.23.34 – 5)

J. GANERI

The proper grasp and reﬂective acceptance of the truths taught by the

Buddha upturns the mind of the student, leads them out of their ‘perplexity’. As a

genre, the recorded dialogues of the Buddha are closer to the meditation or

soliloquy than to the summa or disputation; their purpose is not primarily the

resolution of a disputed claim or the refutation of a rival account. 13 The Buddha’s

famous silence in the face of adversarial questioning is evidence that debate—

even truth-directed debate—was simply not the order of the game. Silence,

indeed, might hope to be transformative where entering into a debate cannot be,

if it persuades the adversary that they have misunderstood the purpose of the

discourse.

The fact that the Buddha’s dialogues are, in this sense, protreptic explains

why the Buddha is represented as stating, in his conversation with K ¯ ´yapa in the

¯ ryaratnak ¯ ˙ as ¯tra, that it would be better to leave someone with a wrong view

about the self than for the nature of his own teaching to be misunderstood. It is to

make this point that the Buddha introduces a famous medical analogy:

[The Buddha]: Better indeed, K ¯ ´ yapa, that someone holds the view that there

are persons ( pudgalad ˙˙˙ i) as ﬁrmly as if it were the Sumeru

mountain than to cling to emptiness as a view (´unyat ¯d ˙˙˙ i).

[K ¯ ´yapa]: What’s the reason for that?

[The Buddha]: Because, K ¯ ´yapa, emptiness is the halting of all constructed

views. He for whom emptiness is itself a view, however, I say is

incurable. K ¯ ´yapa, it’s like a man who is sick. The doctor should

give him some medicine. Suppose that the medicine removed all

the ailments, but itself remained in the man’s body. What do you

think, K ¯ ´yapa—would he then be free from sickness?

[K ¯ ´yapa]: Certainly not, O Lord. The man’s sickness would be even more

intense, the medicine remaining, having removed all the ailments.

[The Buddha]: The Lord said—It’s exactly in that way that emptiness is the

halting of all constructed views. He for whom emptiness is itself a

view, however, I say is incurable. 14

To someone so prone to mistake the nature of the Buddha’s teaching on

emptiness, it is better to tell them that the person exists, as indeed the Buddha did

on a number of occasions. The Buddha’s teachings are emetic, their function to

purge the student of a false conception of themselves and their place in the world.

The comparison of philosophy to a medicine is familiar to us from Epicurus:

Empty are the words of that philosopher who offers therapy for no human

suffering. For just as there is no use in medical expertise if it does not give

therapy for bodily diseases, so too there is no use in philosophy if it does not

expel the suffering of the soul. 15

With the role of philosophy in purging us of suffering, the Buddha will agree, but

his use of the medical analogy is richer in one crucial respect: he argues that the

WHY DID THE BUDDHA SAY WHAT HE DID?

medicine must expel itself as well as the disease, for otherwise the treatment will

be worse than the illness it was meant to cure. The illness is not suffering per se,

but the attachment that causes suffering, and a transfer of attachment from its

former object to philosophy will render the patient incurable, hopelessly addicted

to a powerful drug. I am not sure one could say that the Buddha understood the

mechanisms of counter-transference, but he certainly appreciated the risk of

becoming a surrogate object of attachment.

My examination will concentrate on a fascinating discussion of the problem

among the M ¯ dhyamika Buddhist philosophers in India. What we will see is that

these Buddhist philosophers understood the Buddha’s words not only as skilful

teaching aids, but also as speech acts from whose illocutionary force and

perlocutionary effects one can extract the true Buddhist doctrine. 16

¯ ryadeva on the nature of protreptic and dialectic

¯ ryadeva, the pupil of N ¯ g ¯ rjuna (c. 150 C.E.) and an important contributor

to the foundation of Madhyamaka, discusses the proper way to read or receive the

Buddha’s words in a passage that clearly picks up themes from the K ¯ ´yapa

passage we have just examined:

For an ordinary person, thinking in terms of a self is better than [trying to] think

in terms of no self. They just get to a bad state [if they try]; only someone

exceptional gets peace. [Thinking in terms of] no self is called the unrivalled door

to peace, the terror of wrong views, and the sphere of all the Buddhas. Simply

mentioning this teaching frightens ordinary people. What powerful thing

doesn’t frighten others, after all? The Tath ¯ gatas didn’t assert this teaching in

order to be argumentative. Nonetheless, it burns up anti-theses, just as ﬁre

[burns up] fuel. (C ´ 12.12 – 15) 17

The Buddha’s words aim at a transformation. Their primary purpose is neither to

refute alternative views, nor to prove the truth of the Buddha’s own. Their principal

function is protreptic and not dialectic. 18 The background to ¯ ryadeva’s remark

lies in the idea that the transformation to which the Buddha’s words are aimed is

available only to someone who is sufﬁciently open-minded, not overly wedded to

their own views or to the practice of argumentation and debate; a person who will

not be too distressed to discover that what they have believed until now is

mistaken (C ´ 12.24 – 5). Such a person is, as I have put it, receptive to the truth. 19 If

the listener’s mind is closed, however, no simple statement of the Buddha’s

teaching will open it, nor will those teachings have the desired protreptic effect.

¯ ryadeva argues that one ought not give up altogether on such a person, for they

can still be helped to lead a good and virtuous life. The way to do this is to exploit

their own attachment to self, encouraging them to live better lives and develop

their own virtue by tapping their prudential motives of self-concern. A well-

conducted life will take one to heaven—although not any further:

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