Enlightened Buddhists Shouldn’t be Compassionate
Innocuous epiphanies and the false front of Buddhist morality
Defending Buddhism against Pope John Paul II’s charge that nirvana is “a state of perfect indifference with regard to the world,” the American Buddhist monk Bhikkhu Bodhi wrote,
The Pali word that the Pope interprets as “indifference” is presumably upekkha. The real meaning of this word is equanimity, not indifference in the sense of unconcern for others. As a spiritual virtue, upekkha means equanimity in the face of the fluctuations of worldly fortune. It is evenness of mind, unshakeable freedom of mind, a state of inner equipoise that cannot be upset by gain and loss, honor and dishonor, praise and blame, pleasure and pain. Upekkha is freedom from all points of self-reference; it is indifference only to the demands of the ego-self with its craving for pleasure and position, not to the well-being of one’s fellow human beings. True equanimity is the pinnacle of the four social attitudes that the Buddhist texts call the “divine abodes”: boundless loving-kindness, compassion, altruistic joy, and equanimity. The last does not override and negate the preceding three, but perfects and consummates them. [my emphasis]
The arhat, or awakened one, isn’t supposed to be indifferent towards everything. On the contrary, the arhat is supposed to exhibit four sublime states: loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity.
As Buddhanet says, ‘Equanimity is a perfect, unshakable balance of mind, rooted in insight. But in its perfection and unshakable nature equanimity is not dull, heartless and frigid. Its perfection is not due to an emotional “emptiness”, but to a “fullness” of understanding, to its being complete in itself.’
Specifically, given the Buddha’s teaching of no-self (anatta), meaning that the personal self is as empty of substance or unity as anything else that’s supposed to conform to a simplifying concept,
To establish equanimity as an unshakable state of mind, one has to give up all possessive thoughts of “mine”, beginning with little things from which it is easy to detach oneself, and gradually working up to possessions and aims to which one’s whole heart clings. One also has to give up the counterpart to such thoughts, all egoistic thoughts of “self”, beginning with a small section of one’s personality, with qualities of minor importance, with small weaknesses one clearly sees, and gradually working up to those emotions and aversions which one regards as the centre of one’s being. Thus detachment should be practised.
In short, ‘To the degree we forsake thoughts of “mine” or “self” equanimity will enter our hearts. For how can anything we realize to be foreign and void of a self cause us agitation due to lust, hatred or grief?’
The paradox of Buddhist selflessness
There’s a mystery here, though, which is why someone who’s stable and composed — due to the subduing of egoistic presumptions — would be expected to have perfected those other three sublime virtues.
If the arhat realizes he or she has no self, surely the arhat understands that no one else has a self. Wouldn’t showing loving-kindness to someone, then, be as foolish as being polite towards a robot or an AI? What’s the point of feeling compassion for someone who doesn’t exist? If all events come and go in a deterministic system (a net of “dependently originating” events, as Buddhists say), why fixate on a part of that net to feel joy in response to that joyous part? Or is joy supposed to be the fitting emotional response to an understanding of the totality of natural events, to the universe as a whole?
Bodhi seems to draw an arbitrary distinction when he says that upekkha or equanimity “is indifference only to the demands of the ego-self with its craving for pleasure and position, not to the well-being of one’s fellow human beings.” If the arhat is indifferent towards egoistic motivations, why is this enlightened being interested in selfless motivations? That is, what are the Buddhist motives or reasons for developing selfless virtues, given the basics of Buddhism?
Consider, for instance, the last stage before Buddhist enlightenment, the fine-tuning of concentration in meditation, known as samadhi. As Britannica puts it, samadhi in Indian philosophies is
the highest state of mental concentration that people can achieve while still bound to the body and which unites them with the highest reality. Samadhi is a state of profound and utterly absorptive contemplation of the Absolute that is undisturbed by desire, anger, or any other ego-generated thought or emotion. It is a state of joyful calm, or even of rapture and beatitude, in which one maintains one’s full mental alertness and acuity.
The word in Sanskrit means the bringing or holding together of something, as through an act of intense concentration. The nearly enlightened mind abandons the illusions of ego to contemplate a bundle of mental states’ position in the grand totality of things. Thus, the mind recognizes its union with the deepest reality and is no longer troubled by the self-centered grasping that causes disappointments.
If egoism causes unspiritual suffering, as in the kind that depends on a lack of enlightenment, on an exaggerated sense of our importance as seemingly embodied, autonomous primates, is there such a thing as spiritual suffering?
Not according to these Eastern traditions that can prescribe enlightenment precisely because this endpoint of mental development is supposed to be favourable. If instead the ultimate recognition and perspective were horrifying, Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, and the like could hardly attract practitioners.
What follows in these ancient philosophical religions (in contrast to the more theological Western ones) is that the enlightened sage would be free from the foolish suffering that’s caused by egoism since enlightenment is supposed to be liberation from that narrow-mindedness.
For instance, if I’m disappointed that I arrived late to a meeting, due to traffic, that disappointment would follow from a foolishly restrictive view of my identity, one that isolates me and traps me in unrealistic expectations, instead of highlighting my position in the cosmic totality.
A sage who has experienced samadhi, however, would suffer no such disappointment. This sage might arrive late for a meeting too, but would be pleased by the traffic or would feel compassion for others stuck in that way because the sage wouldn’t be fixated on the worldly virtue of punctuality, or wouldn’t feel the stress of having to arrive on time to enrich herself by excelling in business.
That is, the Buddhist sage’s mindset wouldn’t be driven by exclusive motives of self-interest since this sage would have liberated herself from commonplace disappointments by having outgrown the mental attachments to self-centered impulses and presumptions, these being the ones that established her “ego” or civilized sense of self. Instead of viewing herself as an embodied human, the sage would identify with something like nature at large, with the cosmic web of dependently arising events.
But it doesn’t follow as a matter of logic that because the sage is free of foolish suffering, due to her loss of egoistic attachments, her enlightened state of mind is bound to be loving, blissful, or contented. Perhaps she experiences those happy states in any case, but that could be an accident of how the human brain copes with the trauma of an enlightened perspective, given the religious training that adjusts the adept’s expectations. Similarly, the content of near-death experiences might be determined largely by cultural upbringing which shapes the person’s anticipations.
The threat of Buddhist nihilism
Indeed, it’s rather plausible that any enlightened perspective on our existential condition entails noble suffering. Once you leave behind the personal perspective, and adopt the cosmos’s perspective, as it were, you ought to share the cosmos’s indifference and impersonality that run contrary to joy, awe, and contentment. Nature at large feels none of those things. Nature has no values, so it’s nihilistic. Its avatars in enlightened sages ought to lack them too.
Yet however enlightened the mindset, the sage must work with the human brain that evolved to be self-centered. Hence, unconsciously, at least, the sage must contend with cognitive dissonance in the clash between the nihilism entailed by the cosmic perspective, and the parochiality of her evolved self-interest.
You can imagine that an outright nihilist would be contented, too, in merely impersonally observing the necessity of whatever happens, including wars, natural disasters, and rapes. All events would be included in the grand totality, including the ones that are abhorrent from the unenlightened, all-too-personal perspective. So, the nihilist who shares nature’s indifference to its contents wouldn’t discriminate between them, as she passively observes how the world flows by her. She’d know as Baruch Spinoza did when he set out his pantheistic view of natural determinism, that all things have their pride of place in the awe-inspiring totality.
But the nihilist would have to be exactly as content with negative events as with positive ones since only the discriminatory promptings of egoism would generate a preference for one over the other. Nature is neutral towards its evolved and eliminated constructs, and the sage who adopts nature’s perspective, as it were, should be just as neutral.
Whence the Buddhist compassion, joy, or bliss, then, in addition to nihilistic (metaphysically neutral) contentment? Well, we can imagine a nihilist might end up crying so much that the crying would turn into laughter. As I said, that would be how the human brain deals with the trauma of its spiritual bypassing of its evolved and encultured sense of self. That is, this enlightened selflessness or contentment would be a kind of insanity that might find its place in some elite subculture, rather like how feudalism and capitalism elevate the savagery of aristocrats and the sociopathy of corporate executives.
The question, then, is whether there’s a Buddhist reason to think upekkhu should act alongside the social virtues.
Any such reason should be distinguished from mere mental conditioning — a matter of causality rather than philosophical justification — since if you practice enough, you can train your mind to enter one or another state. Like Pavlov’s dog, we can train ourselves to react selflessly or selfishly, depending on the circumstances. We can build up virtues or vices with a certain regimen. So, there’s no doubt that Buddhists can train themselves to be selfless.
What I’m asking here, though, is whether selfless virtues make sense, given the Buddhist picture of reality.
Politically, as Leo Strauss would emphasize, there’s a reason for Buddhists to be winsome since that’s how you attract followers and avoid scaring off the public. If your basic teachings entail nihilism, you might want to hide that fact to preserve your religion’s social standing. So, you’d say, instead, that arhats are nothing to worry about, that they’re heroically moral and upstanding citizens, that the cosmic truth sets them free.
But those would be philosophically respectable reasons only if you adopt Strauss’s neoconservative view of the paramountcy of social obligations. The deeper question is about the most fitting emotional accompaniment to an enlightened perspective on life’s relation to nature. What attitude would we expect from an arhat, slavish subservience towards others or a seemingly insane flightiness, an indifference towards parochial, moral, or social patterns to match nature’s cosmic emphasis on larger matters?
Enlightenment and the menace of transhumanism
Supposing that someone thinks about people in the way the cosmos would if it could think at all, why would this enlightened being deem people to be especially deserving of attention, let alone love and compassion? Why would the enlightened Buddhist train herself to adopt slave morality, other than for political purposes, to hide the nihilistic implications of Eastern wisdom from the unenlightened public?
Buddhanet says the four sublime virtues or “abodes” are
said to be excellent or sublime because they are the right or ideal way of conduct towards living beings. They provide, in fact, the answer to all situations arising from social contact. They are the great removers of tension, the great peacemakers in social conflict, and the great healers of wounds suffered in the struggle of existence. They level social barriers, build harmonious communities, awaken slumbering magnanimity long forgotten, revive joy and hope long abandoned, and promote human brotherhood against the forces of egotism.
That’s reasonable but surely only from a human standpoint, and what does mere humanity have to do with enlightenment? As egotists, we care about keeping the social peace because such compromises are needed in a civilized setting. If everyone drove on different sides of the road, no one would be able to achieve his or her goals in a city. Egotists compromise, following society’s conventions, to improve their chance of getting what they want since without society, they’d be on their own in the wild.
So indeed, loving-kindness, compassion, and joy are bound to be welcome character traits in society. Yet nature at large is indifferent towards society’s humanistic preoccupations. If the arhat outgrows egoism, hasn’t she thereby outgrown respect for society’s conventions and expectations too? Why are social conventions that presuppose patriotic nationalism — that is, the collective’s substantiality — any less foolish than the delusions of egoism?
Indeed, why isn’t the wildness of an undomesticated animal the highest mark of enlightenment since such an animal already channels nature’s essential wildness? After all, it’s not as if the forces, elements, and initial conditions of nature’s evolution are remotely moralistic. Kindness, compassion, and joy are human affectations, alongside egoism, or at least they’re natural spasms that have evolved along with their opposites. Nature doesn’t discriminate between morality and immorality but exhibits both tendencies in a wild series of trials and errors that amounts to social life’s evolution on this planet.
If the arhat outgrows egoism, hasn’t she outgrown humanity, too? Shouldn’t her sights be set on the cosmos in its all its stunning inhumanity? And wouldn’t that transhuman implication of Eastern programs of enlightenment have to be hidden on cynical, political grounds, to fool the public into thinking that enlightenment is innocuous?