Buddhism: Ancient Meditation & Modern Misrepresentation.

say that the internet is written in pen
not in pencil it's very true you know articles I wrote five years ago 10 years ago but Buddhist philosophy people still discover them today for the first time um in theory videos I have you're on YouTube about Buddhist philosophy about veganism about politics but anything else people can anytime stumbleupon um and I sometimes get email pertaining to particular projects I did years ago sometimes those projects are very short-term short-lived then I studied a particular language etc and you know when people are googling for that stuff I may be one of the few sources they can find so it is true I gained some level of notoriety or micro fame for my challenging views on Buddhist philosophy Buddhist history butters politics textual study especially of tera vaada Buddhism whatever sable Mahayana Buddhism is even more controversial but let's not get into that in this video so got email today from a guy named John I just use first names normally when I play reply to emails unless the person tells me they want me to promote their website or something i'll just use their first name so John wrote to me says dear izel I became interested in Buddhism about a year ago and have been engaging in meditation practice since that time I very much enjoy your youtube videos particularly those that pertain to Buddhism is refreshing to hear an honest and cogent rebuttal of the drivel that Western Buddhist neophytes are forced to endure perhaps an ineluctable consequence of geography and language so anyway obviously a very sympathetic statement sympathetic to my view of the thirty states there but of course the other the other the other elephant in the room is not geography and language it's colonialism right imagine our whole engagement with Buddhism would be very different if India had conquered parts of Europe and it wasn't instead the case that Europe conquered parts of India Buddhism could have come to Europe under very different circumstances but really the European rediscovery of Buddhism the influential more recent discovery bosom because we do have centuries and centuries of contact with India and Buddhism was above all the British Empire conquering bits and pieces of India it could have come to us from the Portuguese it could have come to us from the Spanish of the Dutch but no it really was the British Empire's adventure in India um so yeah that's that's the the missing leg of the stool here geography language brute force colonialism um indeed so continuing to quote this email to me indeed I share your contempt for the North American bastardization and unabashed exploitation of Buddhism I'm currently reading Richard Gombrich is broken the social history of tear about the Buddhism it has influenced my perception of Buddhism as well as the way I think about meditation practice the only book I recommend by Richard Gombrich is his very first book precept in practice in the highlands of Sri Lanka highlands of salon that is a good book I do not recommend any of his later books sorry Richard haha I know Richard I think he's a great guy as a personality I think he's a wonderful dinner companion I think he's great company a lot of people feel the opposite other blog people feel is a good scholar but is scary to eat dinner with but maybe that's cuz you're a fraud and maybe that's because he calls you out for being a fraud one of those i like i love about richard is that he calls people over for being a fraud my kind of guy but his first book is a classic his later books i cannot recommend that is i continue to read this email i am interested in learning more about your views on meditation and the lack of benefits thereof my own uneducated perspective is that meditation was never intended as a prescription for happiness ding ding correct instead i see it as a long-term process whose objective is related to seeing truth through realizing the three characteristics so i am interrupting my reply to this email one of the crucial phrases in the pally cannon is tearing up desire by its roots so it depends on what you mean by the word happiness the outcome of meditation i'll come back to this in a minute meditation is really the wrong word to use in Buddhism but that's the word we use in English the outcome of meditation in Buddhism is tearing up desire by its roots which is to say not just destroying desire short term not just satisfying your desires but in some sense crippling your ability to feel desire so that you never again feel for example sexual desire and sexual desires in some ways the most powerful and most important example in this religious context because these are men who supposed to be living in celibacy and not just living in celibacy but they're they're not even tempted by sex now within the pally Canon there's a there's a fair bit of evidence that many of the monks were tempted by text if you include include the vidya but the idea is once you a tea attain nirvana you are tearing up desired by the roots now that is dogmatically asserted to be the highest happiness the truest happiness that you can attain in your life so that the this is philosophy sensu stricto this is this is philosophy in the clearest sense through philosophy philosophically buddhists were arguing that instead of gratifying your desires instead of going through a perpetual process akin to you know scratching an itch and then feeling an itch again you are eliminating the cycle of desire and satisfaction and yearning so it's like instead of feeling hungry and then feeling full you're eliminating both by tearing up through desire where you don't feel appetite and so you neither feel hungry nor full but this is being sent to all the desires so sexual desire but also for exact example the desire of the eye to see beautiful things the desire of the nose to smell Pleasant smells that is the principle the thing and they're arguing that is the highest happiness however from a modern Western secular perspective obviously that is not happiness that's not the kind of happiness that a business executive is looking for to balance his busy schedule at the office um you know he's balancing his divorce and his girlfriend and you know running back and forth between jobs and I don't know visiting his kids in private school you know the type of wealthy western patron for Buddhism that the whole system is set up to flatter and entice and to get the money out of that's the reality when Buddhist monks are preaching to that sort of figure they're not going to tell them that the happiness we're talking about here is completely incompatible with the life of a modern Western secular person on the contrary many many monks and this is even more obvious in Mahayana Buddhism preach that Buddhism can improve your sex life that it can help you deal with stress that I can you know help you with this kind of personal this quest for personal happiness in the midst of life of bourgeois luxury and the busy distractions of a modern executive in the workplace etc so yeah in that sense it's complete and another sense it's like well what do you mean by the word happiness anyway we continue this guy John you've only been playing the Buddhist game for one year but you're doing better than most and I think that's because you didn't become a victim of one of these cult leaders of whom there are plenty in the game um so he says my own an educated perspective is the meditation was never intended as a prescription for happiness indeed I see it as a long-term process whose objective is related to seeing truth through realizing the three characteristics as if you said that's part of the story you also have to look at desire there are there are other factors too i'm not telling this isn't a lecture on all the factors of connected to nirvana uh maybe a longer lecture to this end i've been reading ajahn Brahm I saw urgent problem is a modern person he's not an ancient figure for those you don't know I acknowledge that his teaching is often condescending and even pure aisle but I think he makes a convincing argument that Jonna is essential so Jonah is JH aana jaana okay the process is a long one lifelong I think this is at the heart of Western distaste of Eastern Buddhism quote I want on feedback and I want it now so therefore quote unquote you pastor practice is attractive to Westerners thanks to folks like Joseph Goldstein no comment they see as a shortcut to Nirvana based on what you've said in your videos I realize that you are not so enamored of the currently prolly prominent members of the Sangha so it is with some trepidation that su attributes are so I'm just going to answer that one central point that he raises he is asking me more broadly to comment but we're keeping this video short um yes fundamentally Jonna is meditation and anyone who tells you anything different is either lying to you intentionally or they're preaching out of ignorance and that is a great shame I think it is really unfortunate that in the English language we use the word meditation at all for what is supposed to happen in Buddhism for the Ana's as a translation for the jhanas and who how we gonna break down look at how we've used the word meditation in English there is a very famous book titled meditations by marcus aurelius so that is the english translation of the title of an ancient roman book from the Emperor Marcus Aurelius and it was translated in english as meditations another way to translate title that book would be thoughts to myself so private thoughts and that was translated as meditations so our concept of meditation in Marcus Aurelius in Catholicism in Western philosophy has nothing to do with Buddhism it has nothing to do with with jonna or what this this concept was and then on the other hand the vagueness of that idea of meditation has allowed people to play around with what concepts in ancient pally in ancient Chinese or theoretically in ancient Sanskrit Sanskrit is pretty useless that's another story but you know in these ancient languages what texture drawing on and what you're interpreting his meditations there was one text that i thought was outrageously bad there was a modern thesis and published as a book and endorsed by Richard Gombrich himself as a matter of fact I'm not going to name the author and it was hilarious it was speaking little bits and pieces of passages that had nothing to do with meditation and was misrepresenting them in English as if the topic being described had to do with meditation so there's a very evocative image in the pally canon of the sharpness of a knife where it's saying and this is an ancient India not modern steel not modern going to a knife shop but anyway that in ancient India you know you look at the blade of a knife you can't tell just by looking at it whether it is sharp or dull you can't tell a sharp is it's in the practice of the thing you have to use you have to cut something so you know like today you can cut a piece of paper I don't remember the giving example and we cut a cut a piece of grass or something to see whether or not the knife is truly sharp but you can't tell just by looking at a blade comparing a sharp blade to a dull blade or well honed blade to not only it's a nice image it's a nice poetic moment in a philosophical debate in Buddhism but what they're too eating actually has nothing to do with johnna and has nothing to do with meditation so today in English it's very easy for a modern translator take an image like that misrepresented turn it into some kind of sexy as he says bastardized philosophy and take so called meditation different way so the fact that meditation for one thing it starts to start with it is a totally inappropriate concept the Catholic idea of meditation is not appropriate to Buddha's at all not at all and then the ain't that sense in which it's used in ancient Greek philosophy in ancient Roman philosophy which is get a modern English translation it's not how the Greeks themselves or the Romans himself said it but how people in England in the last couple of centuries have used the word meditation in in translating those philosophies in English that also is not appropriate to Buddhism at all and then finally this is like a loose fitting set of clothes it never covers and it never it never covers what you want to cover and it never reveals what you want to reveal and the much simpler reality is johnna why does nobody want to locate why do extremely few people want to bluntly and honestly say what we mean by meditation is johnna and when we talk about John now we're talking about meditation in Buddhist philosophy because the descriptions of Jonah are very precise and very clear what it means and what that experience is supposed to be and it is in part a hallucinatory experience and that basically puts you into the corner of having to admit yes reincarnation matters yes you know transcendental experience matters yes you know these specific visions that are described as progressing through the jhanas in the text that matters that's the crucial central part of the Buddhist meditative experience all of a sudden this is something you can't easily repackage and sell to an executive or an architect who's going through his second divorce and is coming to a Buddhist temple one to donate money to the monks and looking for a but you know flexible clients doctrine that's going to make his sex life better and improve his self-esteem and maybe make him feel like more of an intellectual etc but who has no interest in renouncing his sex life renouncing all of his worldly possessions shaving his head buddhist monk he is no interest in tearing up desire by its roots he has no interest in a meditative practice the purpose of which is to destroy your ability to enjoy life now Buddhists philosophically claim that this practice it doesn't just destroy your ability to enjoy life it also destroys the sorrow and suffering which is I think easy for us to imagine if you actually feel no hunger feel no appetite then you maybe do not suffer when you eat poorly when you don't eat enough etc if you actually feel no attraction to the opposite sex or no attraction to the same sex then you don't suffer when you live in celibacy okay so philosophically we can agree with that how are you going to package that and sell that in 21st century California harder to do how are you going to package and sell something like the jhanas the experience the jhanas that sat down text where there's a very clear checklist in the ancient texts of what this experience is supposed to be whether you have it don't have it and even some very senior Buddhist monks Buddhist monks who were you know had the highest level of metals on their chest in Buddhism they tend to get really uncomfortable when you actually talk specifically about the jhanas like so have you or have you not experienced you know peace out that says there as they sat down in the text so um people keep it vague for a reason right people cling to the shadows and fog for I think some very clear reasons that's really where I mean it's sort of a new superstition that modern Buddhists have tried to create and at the same time they're in a state of denial as to what the old superstitions the old magical beliefs and Buddhism really were and if we want to move forward in an authentic and honest way and Buddhism we both have to acknowledge what ancient Buddhism was and we have to acknowledge what we as people in the modern world can and cannot believe maybe what you so we can make of it the way to honor Socrates the way to honor Aristotle is not to misrepresent their teaching as if they were more modern than they were let's appreciate what is ancient as ancient let's appreciate what is superstitious as merely superstitious and in terms of philosophy ultimately the Challenger Buddhism must be to produce a new philosophy it cannot possibly be to rehash and misrepresent an ancient philosophy in a way that's going to sell more tickets or draw more donations or convince people that they have a better sex life thanks to some phony ass bastardized version of a meditative practice that was absolutely bound to a life of celibacy