The Matter of
Truth
Rita M. Gross SPRING 2013
tricycle
The heavy cost of
literalism
Years ago, at the Brooklyn
Museum, I was looking at a Tibetan statue of a multi-armed figure
when a middle-aged white couple stopped to view the statue, and as
they did, one said to the other, “What is that about? Do you
suppose they were trying to portray a freak who was born that way?”
Then, before I could say anything, they moved on. As I, or anyone
else familiar with the Indian cultural milieu, might have told
them, the multiple arms were not intended to be a photograph-like
portrait. Their intent is symbolic not literal. They symbolize the
deity’s multiple abilities and capabilities. Only if one were
completely blind to symbolism could one so completely misread the
meaning of the statue’s multiple arms, imagining that they were
intended to be an accurate physical representation of an actual
person born with many arms.
While the speculations of
that couple in Brooklyn might sound, to a Buddhist audience,
terribly naive, their error is really not that uncommon. Many
modern Buddhists understand traditional narratives and practices in
much the same way. What I mean is that for many modern Buddhists,
the symbolic meanings contained in traditional forms are approached
with an outlook steeped in the worldview of the European
Enlightenment, in which truth and value lie mainly with empirical
facts. Truth, in this case, is found as a result of impersonal,
objective observation, and it can be duplicated by anyone with
proper training under the same circumstances. There is little room
in this view of things for affirming meaning as it is communicated
through symbolic forms or for the understanding that, for some
purposes, the value of symbolic meaning can override empirical
facts or even that sometimes factual information is irrelevant to
symbolic meaning. By the literalist standard, the only reason to
sculpt a figure with multiple arms is to portray someone born with
a tragic abnormality.
One finds in Buddhist
tradition a distinction between “words” and “meaning,” which are
often very different from one another, and we would do well to
consider the traditional advice—whether we are looking at statues
or interpreting teachings—to pay attention to symbolic meaning and
not be limited to literal meaning. Traditional people recognize
that what is known through imagination, whether or not it can
observed empirically, is worthy of portrayal. We moderns, however,
though we think ourselves incomparably more sophisticated than
traditional people, have little understanding or appreciation of
symbolic experience and, having committed ourselves to an empirical
worldview, we live within its narrow confines. For us—or at least
for many of us—a multi-armed deity is just a portrayal of a
“freak.”
The same insights pertain
to narratives. One can find in traditional narratives virtually any
event one might imagine: virgin births, resurrections from the
dead, interplanetary travel, simultaneous appearance of historical
and nonhistorical characters, and so forth. But what did the
original authors of these stories intend? Did they think they were
recording factual history? I suggest that just as the sculptor of
the multi-armed statue knew what he was doing, so these traditional
authors knew what they were doing. These stories are primarily
about communicating meaning, not recording facts. Virgin births,
for example, are quite common in the stories of heroes. A virgin
birth signifies an extraordinary person, someone who will
accomplish great things with her or his life. That, and not the
claim that the normal processes of human conception and birth have
been contravened, is the main message of the story.
The modern person of a
literalist mind-set will, however, focus on the unusual conception
or birth and thus miss the story’s meaning. Not only that, but such
a person, if religiously inclined, would likely insist that it is
only by interpreting the events literally that one can be a
faithful and true practitioner of that particular tradition. Often,
they will even claim to be better practitioners than those who
focus on the meaning of the story and who discount the likelihood
that the story’s more improbable events occurred empirically. On
the other hand, another kind of literalist will reject the whole
story outright as worthless because it is pure fantasy. In both
cases, the modern literal interpreter may well be much more naive
about the main messages of such stories than are those who hear
them in a traditional manner.
Religions, Buddhism
included, are almost entirely about symbolic meaning rather than
facts. Indeed, to have religious meaning, even a fact must become a
symbol. Religious people have always known this intuitively. But in
the modern context, we face a new and particular challenge, a
different twist on the matter of truth. We modern people must
differentiate clearly and carefully between facts and symbols,
between history, which is an empirical discipline, and the
traditional stories whose purpose is primarily symbolic.
Many religious people
resist giving up literal interpretations of their most valued
stories, because they think, erroneously, that they must either
accept such stories as factual accounts or reject them entirely.
But this dualistic assumption is the most dangerous conclusion
people could draw regarding the relationship between fact and
symbol, between narrative and history. A narrative can be both true
and false at the same time—factually false yet symbolically true.
It is not at all necessary either to edit traditional narratives to
make them conform to modern sensibilities or to insist, against all
common sense, that unless they happened literally as presented they
have no truth value. We can learn to interpret traditional stories
symbolically while simultaneously holding a modern attitude of
discernment toward the events they recount.
It can be upsetting to hear
that a treasured religious story simply is not historically
accurate, but it need not be so. In our everyday lives, we
routinely approach the world with a flexible attitude, knowing that
the metaphors we use to communicate, while perhaps not literally
true, serve well to describe things. We still say, for example,
“the sun rose,” even though it has long been common knowledge that
it is not the sun that rises but the earth that turns. We know what
we say is not accurate, yet we also know what we mean when we say
it. This same flexibility toward our descriptions of the world,
which is so common a feature of everyday life that we seldom even
notice it, can be easily applied to those descriptions of the world
that we label “religious.” What is so difficult about that? Why
doesn’t such flexibility come naturally to speech about traditional
Buddhist narratives and claims?
We modern people must
differentiate clearly and carefully between facts and symbols,
between history, which is an empirical discipline, and the
traditional stories whose purpose is primarily symbolic.
One example of how such
flexibility can be applied to traditional claims concerns
traditional Buddhist “flat-earth” cosmology, which is still used in
ritual, and empirical geography. The traditional Buddhist map of
the world describes a flat earth at the center of which is Mount
Meru. Surrounding Mount Meru are four continents, each of which is
flanked by two islands, and these lands are surrounded by the great
oceans. All of this is encircled by a ring of iron mountains. In
the absence of physical exploration of the globe, such a
world-picture is not nonsense. Until it was proved that one does
not fall over the edge of the world if one continues traveling the
same direction but rather eventually comes back to one’s starting
point, most people simply assumed that the earth is flat. After
all, it looks flat, just as it looks from our vantage point as if
the sun rises above the earth’s horizon. Given that high mountains
are found to India’s north, it is also easy to see why India was
imagined to be the southern continent among the four, with a giant
mountain to its north. All these, and many others, were at one time
sensible conclusions. But once they have been proven false
empirically, it is senseless to try to hold onto such
assumptions.
The geographical
exploration of the physical world that revealed a very different
map caused consternation to Buddhists. Many Buddhists continued to
hold to the traditional view, which cost some of them their trust
in Buddhist teachings altogether. In the 18th and 19th centuries,
Christian missionaries—who no longer believed in a flat earth even
though they continued to reject more recent discoveries about the
age of that earth—in Asian Buddhist countries routinely peppered
their anti-Buddhist polemics with references to the fact that no
explorer had ever found Mount Meru anywhere on the globe. Even
while they continued to reject new European knowledge about the
earth, Christian missionaries argued that if Buddhist texts were so
wrong about the physical description of the earth, they must be
untrustworthy in other ways as well. On such bases, Buddhists were
encouraged to convert to Christianity, and some certainly did. In
this case, actually both the Christian missionaries and the
Buddhists continued to insist on a literal reading of their texts.
But for Buddhists, that literal reading destroyed their confidence
in Buddhism as a whole. Thus, we see how dangerous it can be to
cling to either-or dualism regarding traditional texts, claiming
that if they are not literally accurate in every way, then they are
false and useless.
Tibetan Buddhists continued
to accept the traditional flat-earth geography until well into the
20th century. The Buddhist teacher Ken McLeod, one of Kalu
Rinpoche’s translators, tells an instructive story of accompanying
a traditionally trained Tibetan lama to northern Canada during the
summer. They arrived in the afternoon and settled in for the night.
The next morning, the lama was troubled that during the night it
had not become dark. McLeod used apples and oranges to show him how
the sun does not set in the summer in northern regions because of
the earth’s roundness, the way it tilts on its axis, and the way it
rotates around the sun. The lama replied that he had heard the
claim that the earth is round when he came out of Tibet, but he had
dismissed it as another crazy Western idea, contrary to both common
sense and his traditional training. McLeod recounts that though the
lama was dispirited for some days, he came to accept this new
information and returned to his usual cheerful demeanor. In the
end, the lama’s experience of nights without darkness was more
powerful than his inherited beliefs about the flatness of the
earth.
Going a little further, in
his book The Universe in a Single Atom, the Dalai Lama recounts his
excitement and joy at first seeing a photograph of the earth taken
from space:
One of the most powerful
visions I have experienced was the first photograph of the earth
from outer space. The image of a blue planet floating in deep
space, glowing like the full moon on a clear night, brought home
powerfully to me the recognition that we are indeed all members of
a single family sharing one little house.
Here there are no worries
that a traditional Buddhist claim has been disproved, that the
earth is not flat, and that Mount Meru is nowhere to be found.
Instead, easily adjusting to a more complete, and, in this case,
more accurate geography, the Dalai Lama draws out ethical
implications from his new knowledge.
Flat-earth cosmology
continues even in the present day to figure into Vajrayana Buddhist
ritual. The traditional map of the world continues to have
spiritual meaning when we understand its symbolic significance to
be psychological rather than geographical. The ritual mandala
offering, done daily, utilizes the traditional map of the cosmos.
The short form of the liturgy reads:
The earth is anointed with
perfumed water and strewn with flowers.
It is adorned with Mount
Meru, the four continents, the sun and the moon.
By offering this visualized
as a Buddhafield,
May all beings enjoy that
pure realm.
Earlier generations of
Vajrayana Buddhists would have assumed that this liturgy involves
an accurate picture of the physical world. But contemporary
Buddhists who do not believe the liturgy literally continue to
recite it because of its spiritual meaning, which concerns primary
Buddhist virtues such as generosity and the wish that all beings
might prosper and be happy.
While contemporary
Buddhists seem to have little trouble distinguishing between
literal and symbolic meaning in some situations, in others this
flexibility is less often found. People seem to really hold tight
to their traditional stories, for instance, when it comes to the
various accounts of how their particular school developed. These
stories are often highly sectarian and historically inaccurate, yet
because they speak to issues of authenticity, they retain a great
deal of dogmatic power.
For example, according to
Mahayana legend, the Buddha secretly preached the Mahayana
teachings to only a select group of disciples who were ready to
hear what is said to be a higher teaching than what had come
before. As a matter of history, we know that this is simply not
accurate, yet it can be very difficult for contemporary Mahayana
Buddhists to accept this. This difficulty stems from the
traditional but no longer plausible idea that authentic Buddhist
teachings must be the direct teachings of the Buddha. If the
Mahayana teachings, or any other teachings, are not those of the
historical Buddha, it is feared that they are
inauthentic.
From a historical
perspective, Mahayana Buddhism displays many of the features of a
new religious movement. There are, for example, very few references
to the Mahayana in the texts of older Buddhist schools. That these
Buddhists rarely bothered to refute Mahayana teachings indicates
that the older schools did not perceive them to be much of a
threat. Mahayana texts, however, constantly justify themselves by
contrasting themselves, in a very positive light, with the older,
more established schools, which they label as “Hinayana”—the
inferior, cast-off yana, or vehicle. Both tendencies occur commonly
when a new religious movement is emerging. Jews, for example, did
not spend a lot of time or energy denouncing the new Jesus
movement, but the Christian New Testament is full of claims about
the inadequacy of Judaism.
Even the Mahayana account
of its own origins betrays that it is a new religious movement.
When it is claimed that the historical Buddha taught the Mahayana,
it is also claimed that those disciples who followed the earlier
teachings were greatly shocked, and the Buddha realized that his
community would not be ready to hear the Mahayana dharma until it
had a few hundred years to mature. The Buddha then hid the
teachings among the nagas, serpent-like mythical creatures, for
some 400 years, at which time they were retrieved by the great
master Nagarjuna. As it happens, legend and history correspond on
this point. Both agree that the Mahayana teachings appeared on the
human plane about 400 years after the life of Shakyamuni Buddha. To
me, this indicates that early Mahayanists may well have been fully
cognizant that their dharma was something previously unheard. In
fact, that is precisely what many Mahayana sutras claim. They claim
that the Buddha is now teaching something that he previously had
not revealed.
That the early Mahayanists
felt they must attribute their teachings to the historical Buddha
is not surprising. When people innovate within an established
tradition, they always claim direct inspiration from the teachings
of the founder. I and other Buddhist feminists, for example, often
claim that if the Buddha were alive today he would surely support
gender equity and equality. But it would be untenable to rewrite
Buddhist history to support this claim. Similarly, it is untenable,
from a historical perspective, to assert that stories told in
Mahayana scriptures were actual conversations between the
historical Buddha and a special group of disciples. We can though,
and we should appreciate them as imagined conversations between a
prototypical Buddha and his prototypical disciples on topics of
import to practitioners in a new historical situation.
Even the Dalai Lama
concedes that point. As he says:
When we examine the
Mahayana scriptures themselves, we find statements that seem
problematic in various ways. For example, the Perfection of Wisdom
sutras state that they were taught by the Buddha at Vulture Peak in
Rajagriha to a vast congregation of disciples. However, if you have
visited the site in present-day Rajgir, it is obvious that it is
impossible for more than a few people to fit onto the summit. So we
have to understand the truth of these accounts at a different
level, a level beyond the ordinary one confined by conventional
notions of space and time.
This is precisely what I
advocate. Give up on even trying to read traditional texts as
factual history. Then, as separate but intertwined projects, take
up discerning an accurate history of Buddhism, as much as you can,
but also interpret the symbolism and meaning of traditional
narratives on a level beyond ordinary space and time. But don’t
conflate and confuse the two!
Seeing the difference
between history and the stories of legend need not diminish the
latter of their meaning and value. In fact, I believe it can
enhance them. My own teacher, Jetsun Khandro Rinpoche, told me as
much, when she said that learning that many of her traditional
beliefs were not historically accurate only made her think more
deeply about their spiritual meaning. This is really the point.
When we cease to confuse history and stories, when we look at
traditional stories outside the context of literal truth and
sectarian debate, we are freer to appreciate the imaginative truths
they convey. When we fail to see the issue discerningly, such
stories are spoiled in every way. They are not accurate history,
but they are no longer good stories either. They become completely
wooden as the attempt to take them literally robs them of all their
whimsy, humor, and playfulness.