Thursday, December 31, 2009

Does Saddha Mean Faith?

Sheer ignorance, gullibility, credulity, belief, faith, trust, confidence, certainty, knowledge--set out like that, the words seem to form a sort of spectrum with faith (most disputed of all the shades) somewhere in the middle.

Perhaps it is that very middle aspect of faith which makes it so liable to distortions in opposite directions; for not only is it in the middle in that sense, and not only is it an essential mediating relation between subject and object, but also it stands in between lack of knowledge and the need to know. So some see it only as pure limpid spontaneity of Truth and the noblest Human Faculty, for which no price is too high to pay, while others deride it as a wretched, even worthless, substitute for knowledge. Many try a hand at defining it, arriving at oddly diverse conclusions.

Bewildered from time to time in this way by his betters, some ordinary man (whose knowledge is limited and who wants to believe something) may ask, “But what does the word ‘faith’ mean? What are we talking about?” At once the extremists chip in again: “Faith is the Noblest Attribute of Man,” “Faith is a drug for fools,” “It must be cherished for ever,” “It wants chucking out good and proper,” they cry. Then the ordinary man, looking for a compromise, mostly uses his native faith in order, ostrich-like, to hide his head in a dune of euphemisms, saying perhaps something about “needing confidence.” But “You can’t always trust your own ears,” he mutters incredulously to himself.

Others less procrustean may say (driving wedges between words) “To believe only in possibilities is not faith,” (Sir Thomas Browne after Tertullian), or (making specious definitions of the faculty itself), “Belief, like any other moving body, follows the path of least resistance,” (Samuel Butler), or (attempting to define its object), “The essential characteristic of a materialist doctrine is ‘belief in something not dependent on our knowledge of it,’” (W.W. Carington, quoting Prof. J.B.S. Haldane, in Mind, Matter and Meaning), or else (painting word-pictures), “I’ve caught belief like a disease; I’ve fallen into belief like I fell in love,” (Graham Greene), and so on. Fanned by these doldrum gusts, the ordinary man drifts this way and that; he doubts here, puts his faith there, and sometimes he is right and often wrong.

Now a dispassionate glance into matters of the heart is notoriously difficult. But, if the effort is made, it can be perceived that exclamations about “Noblest Attributes” and “wretched substitutes” are just evocative haranguings, ways of trying to push people into thinking as one does oneself, or as one thinks they ought to think (as the case may be), perhaps with the best of motives. They appear as an aspect of human behaviour telling quite a lot about the speaker’s personal attitude, but precious little about faith considered as a component of experience: whether it is, for example, good or bad in itself or unavoidable. Tending covertly as they do to the extremes of rationalism or irrationalism, none of them (not even the subtle ones) examine experience or even attempt an inquiry into why the ordinary man does not just gullibly do as he is told. Why does he not? Is it because, when pushed too far, his common sense tells him that he can’t?

Let us look a little closer. Let us consider for a moment the question of action (of doing, or even saying or thinking, something). An ordinary man sees the past as decided (“What’s done can’t be undone.”), but the future as semi-foreseeable though undecided (“You can never be sure how it will turn out.”). So when he acts purposively, intending to do what he does (which always happens now), he seems to do so guided by what he remembers of the past and by some measure of faith (or expectation) that his present acts will not have a too inappropriate result in the rather uncertain future. Still he can never be quite sure: doubts haunt him constantly.

That indeed is the pattern of the ordinary human situation: a state of being committed in a changing scene, of (moral) certainty about a definite-seeming past, of present knowledge of acts by restricted free choice which there is no escaping, and of guessing at a more or less indefinite future potentiality, which one hopes (with a grain of justification) to influence because one believes that things will go on happening roughly as they have done. That too is the pattern which makes life valuable and tolerable for the gambler. And who never gambles in his heart?

On that basis, if such a very rough sketch is provisionally accepted, faith (or call it what you will—give a dog a bad name and hang it, but a rose by any other name is just as sweet) as a chancy expectation of results is, it seems, inevitably present in some form in every act done; there would be no doing anything without it. While one has knowledge of what one is doing now, even if it is only that one is sitting still and doubting, faith alone can cope with the unknown future (as it is apprehended) and decide why one does what one does. Such humdrum faith as that neither needs any special advertising as “noble” nor can it be “chucked out.” It is simply a commonplace necessity.

So it is that parents send children to school in the faith that what is taught there will help the children to make a living. Those same children, when adults, delegate some of their influence by vote to governments in the faith that society will thus cater better for their needs. Through faith in the order of Nature those same adults, when old, sense death edging nearer: an impending ambivalent catastrophe that as surely blots out from their certainty all form of the future as it seems an inescapable plunge into it.

Faith is left a free hand here though men have a general intellectual certainty that their physical death will take place (regardless of any considerations of immortality). Other people’s bodies are seen to die, but, it is pointed out by Freud, the Unconscious, while accepting that, absolutely rejects its own mortality. Though material bodies only too publicly die and disintegrate, at the same time no materialist theory is capable of proving (in any sense of that word) that physical death is the end, or physical birth the beginning, of conscious activity. Hence the ambivalence of the catastrophe. Hence too the fact that faith is forced willy-nilly to exercise a free hand here.

Faith normally manifests itself as one of three particular types of belief, that is, it must absolutely take on one of them so long as there is ignorance and action. It is, (1) a dogma asserting that something of them will survive the catastrophe, or (2) a dogma asserting that nothing of them at all will survive, or (3) radical agnosticism denying that any knowledge beforehand is possible. Depending on which of the types of belief people assume (and one of the three apparently must be assumed) their behaviour will vary. Any act whatsoever, then, involves (where there is ignorance) one of these three assumptions indirectly or directly. To be born is to die, and to live as the ordinary man does is to act; to be in space-time is to be unsure of a future one is sure to encounter.

The reservation “where there is ignorance” has been made, for ignorance, as we shall see, has an organic relation with faith (which is what the ignorant have to rely on in the acts they are obliged to perform). Will anyone deny that the ordinary man is constantly bothered by immediate ignorance (about the weather tomorrow; the contents of an examination paper; what the person he is talking to is thinking; the price of goods next week; whether his memory can be trusted or not; what will happen to him), or that he is ever without some measure of it, let alone ignorance of what is going on beyond his horizons, and may burst into his world? Then since he cannot avoid doing things (“But what are we going to do, if something happens?”), he has to take risks, to supplement by faith his lack of certain knowledge, to act as if the weather will be such and such tomorrow, and this kind we may call first-degree ignorance, which goes with simple faith. “Take what you will, but pay the price,” says Emerson.

But the ordinary man is also subject to desires, needs, fear, and pain. Because he attaches importance to the results of his acts, the lack of certainty inherent in faith is often odious to him (for all that he may like a gamble now and then). Whenever facts do not prohibit his doing so, his desires prompt him to treat the faith, by which he acts, as if it were knowledge (“It’s a dead cert!”), and he may well quite honestly forget that he does not know. His defence against fear and pain is forgetting (a mode of ignorance, which, at its deepest, takes the form of death). But if he cannot quite forget, if his forgetting mechanism fails him, he may dope himself with self-deception, refusing both to question his faith and to test its object. This we may call second-degree ignorance, which loses sight not only of the limits of knowledge but of truth as well. With that, his faith has become bad faith. “If bad faith is possible at all,” says a modern writer, “it is because it is an immediate and constant threat to every human project; it is because consciousness hides within its very being a permanent risk of bad faith.” Bad faith, however, is not a lie, since the essence of a lie implies that the liar is completely aware of the truth which he dissembles. “One no longer lies when one deceives oneself.” Bad faith, in short, both refuses to face all one knows and vetoes any investigation into whether the faith is well placed or not. “O take the cash and let the credit go,” says Omar Khayyam’s translator. (And if the cash runs out, they’ll sure let us live on tie!)

At any time an ordinary man may become fed up with the consequences of misplacing his own faith or by seeing the silly things other people sometimes do out of faith. Blaming the faith instead of the misplacing of it, he may decide to throw it overboard altogether (away with all bath water and babies too), and become a Cynic or a Rationalist. But has he not merely deceived himself once more in fancying it can be jettisoned like that, for he still has ignorance and still has to act? Even despair is no more than a mode of bad faith: faith that the situation is irremediable with refusal to seek an escape. The self-gulling goes on, and so does the risk of disappointment, anger and frustration. If he is healthy, young, and lucky, perhaps he can forget about it and begin all over again. Forgetting is a very useful kind of ignorance: it wipes the bad sums off our slates.

What is the answer, then? Must one either leave the baby unbathed or bottle the bath water? Surely not. The first thing to be done is to reduce ignorance to the “first degree,” to become aware that one is ignorant and how one is ignorant, facing up to it courageously and remembering it, regardless of hopes and fears. That is enough for the Goal, isn’t it? What more can be done? After all, faith has been shown to be a practical necessity for the ordinary man. Without it indeed all profitable and unprofitable action, as well as all possibility of remedying suffering, must be paralysed. And how richly it ennobles! It is the source of all inspiration. The rapturous leap of faith at Great Moments exhilarates, uplifts, and transfigures. Faith attends all good things. Faith that the very ground will receive one’s foot prevents the vertiginous sensation of falling into a chasm every time one steps forward. Faith is Life, and it must be good in itself. How can it be otherwise? If the right dogma can be found, is not that the answer, the realistic answer? Why cry for the moon?

True, faith is a practical necessity for the ordinary man. That is indeed what we have been trying to show. But how can the Right Dogma ever be found, and can it be absolutely trusted without a grain of bad faith as we have described it? And is faith then to be the goal, in which case is ignorance to remain with us for ever more? Examination of what both the theists and the atheist materialists have offered as dogma from the dawn of history down to the present day, a long time and a wide choice, is far from encouraging (consoling, doubtless but utterly inconclusive). The rather arid alternative seems to be Radical Agnosticism, which is what is usually meant by the phrase “no faith”; no faith, that is, in the heaven the theists offer only after death, or in the substance of matter here and now which the materialists admit can inherently never be known at all and doesn’t matter after death anyway.

Why bother, though? Perhaps the world is not such a bad place after all. They say there is plenty of good in it if you look, so forget about the unpleasant side of it. Agnosticism tomorrow, then, and dogma today. “Gather ye roses while ye may,” as luck may be on our side.

Dogma or agnosticism. But before we choose, before we risk our faith going bad on us, let us take one more look.

(Editor’s Note: The following handwritten paragraph was found among the late author’s papers, together with this essay and carrying the note “above at the end of Pt. 1.” Since the insertion of it would have necessitated adjustments in the given manuscript, it was preferable to reproduce this paragraph separately. Its fitting place would be before the second last paragraph of the above text.)

Then if neither dogma nor agnosticism will do, why not be satisfied with some form of the critical humanism of 18th to 19th century Europe? Criticism has been incalculably productive, and we owe to it all the material advances we enjoy today. It is criticism that has allowed science a free hand to question and experiment. Granted that Criticism (as Inquiry) merits all that praise and far more. But that is as a means. If Criticism is to be made the goal, the summum bonnum, against what can it be tested? A fundamental weakness always remains in the position of the critic: if he discloses his own standpoint, that standpoint is open to criticism from some other. That is why it is rare that the academic scholar, who employs the so-called “higher criticism” can afford to state his own position in positive terms. When the English Prime Minister Disraeli was asked what his religion was, it is said that he replied “My religion is that of all wise men.” “But what is that, Mr. Disraeli?” “Wise men never say.” Criticism requires that the critic be uncommitted, that he is, or pretends he is, outside what he criticises. The professional critic’s very being depends on dialectics, the food that keeps him alive is other people’s standpoints. As a means this may be invaluable; as an end it can never amount to more than an ordered form of agnosticism.
Part II

To “Gather ye roses while ye may,” would be fine if there were “roses, roses all the way.” But will our simple faith really stretch that far? Hardly.

Soon after the Buddha had attained enlightenment he surveyed the world with the new vision he had achieved. He did not see only roses. He uttered this exclamation: “This world is racked by exposure to the contact [of pain]. Even what the world calls self is in fact ill; for no matter upon what it bases its conceit [of self], the fact is ever other than these [which the conceit conceives]. To be is to become: but the world has committed itself to being, delights only in being; yet wherein it delights brings fear, and what it fears is pain. Now this Life Divine is lived to abandon pain” (Ud 3.10). He was not alone in this estimation of the world: “Here, bhikkhus, some clansman goes forth out of faith [saddha] from the home life into homelessness [considering] ‘I am a victim of birth, ageing and death… I am exposed to pain. Surely an end to this whole aggregate mass of suffering is described?” (MN 29).

Now in this situation how does the Buddha show the function of faith? “One who has faith [saddha] succeeds, Mahanama, not one who has no faith” (AN 11:12).

Here the question at once intrudes: Is the translation of “saddha” by “faith” justified? Let us try it out and see, for the contexts in which it appears will be the test. We shall be strictly consistent in our renderings. The Buddha speaks of five Faculties, or human potentialities, through whose means an ignorant ordinary man may emerge from ignorance to right understanding, and so from suffering to its cessation. They are faith (saddha), energy, mindfulness, concentration, and understanding (as “mother wit” to start with). If they can be maintained in being against opposition, they are called Powers (SN 48:43). Managed by reasoned attention (yoniso manasikara, awareness of the organic structure of experience), and carefully balanced, they build each other up. Maintained in being and cultivated, they merge into the Deathless (SN 48:57).

The Buddha speaks of faith as one of the Seven Noble Treasures (AN 7:4), one of the Seven True Ideas (DN 33), one of the Five Factors of Endeavour (MN 8), as an Idea “on the side of enlightenment” (SN 48:51), as a Fount of Great Merit (Anguttara tika 41), as one of the Three Forms of Growth (Anguttara tika 48), which “brings five advantages” (Anguttara Pañcaka 38).

And then, “Where is the faith faculty to be met with? Among the four Factors of Stream-entry.” (SN 48:8). “A Stream-enterer [of whom more below] has absolute confidence [pasada] in the Enlightened One, in the True Idea [the Dhamma], and in the Community, and he has the virtue beloved of Noble Ones” (SN 55:1). Four other factors of Stream-entry are frequenting True Men, hearing the True Idea, reasoned attention, and the putting into practice of ideas that are in accordance with the True Idea (SN 55:5).

“What is the faith faculty? Here a noble disciple who has faith places his faith in a Tathagata thus: ‘This Blessed One is such since he is accomplished and fully enlightened, perfect in true knowledge and conduct, sublime, knower of worlds, incomparable leader of men to be tamed, enlightened, blessed.’” (SN 48:9) “If these five faculties are absolutely perfected, they make an Accomplished One [Arahant]; if a little weaker, a Non-returner; if a little weaker still, a Once-returner; if a little weaker still, a Stream-enterer; if a little weaker still, One Mature in Faith or One Mature in the True Idea” (SN 48:12). “Those who have not known, seen, found, realized, touched with understanding, may go by faith in others that [these five faculties] when maintained in being and developed merge in the Deathless … but on knowing, seeing, finding, realizing, and touching with understanding, there is no more doubt or uncertainty that when maintained in being and developed they merge in the Deathless” (SN 48:44).

But then, does not the Buddha say in the Kalama Sutta, “Come, Kalamas, [do] not [be satisfied] with hearsay-learning or with tradition or with legendary lore or with what has come down in scripture or with conjecture or with logical inference or with weighing evidence or with choice of a view after pondering it or with someone else’s ability or with the thought ‘The monk is our teacher”’? Is not that an injunction to have nothing to do with faith, to “throw away your books,” as Marcus Aurelius says, and listen to no one at all?

If that statement of the Buddha’s is taken as a general instruction to disregard instruction, it is then impossible to carry out. For then one could only carry it out by not carrying it out (a well-known logical dilemma). But that is not what is intended, as is shown by the rest of the passage: “ … or with the thought ‘The monk is our teacher.’ When you know in yourselves ‘Certain ideas are unprofitable, liable to censure, condemned by the wise, being adopted and put into effect, they lead to harm and suffering,’ then you should abandon them … When you know in yourselves ‘Certain ideas are profitable, not liable to censure, commended by the wise, being adopted and put into effect, they lead to welfare and happiness,’ then you should abide in the practice of them” (Anguttara tika 65).

The ordinary man is affected by ignorance, and he cannot dispense with simple faith, though in good faith he may grossly misplace it, or dissipate it, and be said to have no faith (asaddha). But if he places it honestly and reasonably, he is called faithful (saddha). In the Buddha’s words, “A bhikkhu who possesses understanding founds his faith in accordance with that understanding” (SN 48:45), to which words may be added also those of the venerable Sariputta: “There are two conditions for the arising of right view: another’s speech and reasoned attention” (MN 43). From this it emerges that an ordinary man has need of a germ of “mother wit” in order to know where to place his faith and a germ of unsquandered faith in order to believe he can develop his understanding. That is the starting position.

Faith thus begins to appear as a fusion of two elements: confidence (pasada), and what the confidence is placed in. Faith as confidence is elsewhere described as a clearing of the mind, like water cleared of suspended mud by a water-clearing nut, or as a launching out (pakkhandana), like a boat’s launching out from the near bank to cross a flood to the further bank, or as a hand that resolutely grasps. (A grain of “mother wit” is needed to recognize the nut, to avoid launching out into a flood that has no other shore, to refrain from grasping a red-hot poker as a stick to lean on). Just as “Seeing is the meaning of the understanding as a faculty,” so also “Decision [adhimokkha] is the meaning of faith as a faculty.” (Patisambhida Ñanakatha). When faith is aided by concentration, “The mind launches out [to its object] and acquires confidence, steadiness and decision” (MN 122).

Choice of a bad object will debauch faith by the disappointment and frustration it entails. Craving and desire can corrupt it into bad faith by the self-deception that it is not necessary to investigate and test the object, and then, as well as error, there is disregard of truth. In one of his great discourses on faith the Buddha says, “Bharadvaja, there are five ideas which ripen in two ways [expectedly and unexpectedly] here and now. What are the five? They are faith, preference, hearsay-learning, weighing evidence, and choice of a view after pondering it [compare the Kalama Sutta quoted above]. Now [in the case of faith] something may have faith well placed in it [susadahita] and yet it may be hollow, empty and false; and again, something may have no faith placed in it, and yet it may be factual, true and no other than it seems. In such circumstances it is not yet proper for a wise man to make the conclusion without reserve ‘Only this is true, anything else is wrong.’ … If a man has faith, then in such circumstances as these he preserves truth when he says, ‘My faith is thus’; but then too he still does not, on that account alone, make the conclusion without reserve, ‘Only this is true, anything else is wrong.’ He preserves truth in that way too” (MN 95). The other four cases are similarly treated, after which it is shown how “preserving of truth” can be developed successively into “discovery of truth” (path of Stream-entry) and “arrival at truth” (fruit of the path of Stream-entry). The element of confidence has then become absolute because its object has been sufficiently tested by actual experience for the principal claims to be found justified. Another discourse concludes by showing how the value of rightly placed faith serves (as the means rather than the end) in the progress from ignorance to liberation: “Bhikkhus, I say that true knowledge and deliverance have a condition, are not without a condition. What is their condition? The seven Factors of Enlightenment [Mindfulness, interest in the True Idea, energy, happiness, tranquillity, concentration, and onlooking equanimity]. … What is the condition for these? The four foundations of mindfulness [contemplation of the body, of feelings, of cognizance, and of ideas] … What is the condition for these? The three kinds of good conduct [of body, speech and mind] … What is the condition for these? Mindfulness and full awareness … What is the condition for these? Reasoned attention … What is the condition for that? Faith … What is the condition for that? Hearing the True Idea [the true object of faith, the saddhamma] … What is the condition for that? Frequenting the company of True Men [sappurisa]” (AN 10:62).

This shows plainly the need for a reliable guide. How is he to be found? One should be an Inquirer (vimamsaka) and make the Tathagata the object of research and tests in order to judge whether confidence in him is rightly placed. The Buddha says “Now bhikkhus, if others should ask a bhikkhu [who is an inquirer] ‘What are the evidences and certainties owing to which the venerable one says “The Blessed One is fully enlightened, the True Idea is well proclaimed, the Community has entered upon the good way”?’ then, answering rightly, he would answer thus: ‘Here, friends, I approached that Blessed One for the sake of hearing the True Idea [Dhamma]. The teacher showed me the True Idea at each successively higher [level], at each superior [stage], with the dark and bright counterparts. According as he did so, by arriving at direct knowledge here of a certain idea [namely, one of the four paths] among the ideas, [taught] in the True Idea, I reached my goal: then I had confidence [passaddhi] in the teacher thus: “The Blessed One is fully enlightened, the True Idea is well proclaimed, the Community has entered on the good way.”’ When anyone’s faith in a Tathagata is planted and rooted and established with these evidences, these phrases and these syllables, then his faith is called supported by evidence, rooted in vision, sound, and invincible by Monk or Divine or Mara or Divinity or anyone in the world” (MN 47).

Faith as the indispensable means, but not the goal, transparent in itself, is debased or ennobled by the mode of its employment and by its goal. As understanding grows, it approximates to knowledge, while the risk of its degenerating into bad faith diminishes with the diminishing of craving.

But there are still two problems. First, it was argued earlier that faith involves not knowing the future. So if faith becomes knowledge, does that not imply that the future can all be known and is therefore predetermined? Second, with craving unabated would not knowledge of everything be unbearable; would it not be Hell itself? How does craving diminish?

The key to these two locks on the gate of liberation lies in the Contemplation of Impermanence. Let us take the second problem first. It is part of the constraint imposed by ignorance and craving together that an ordinary man is led to speculate on time and permanence, and to ask such questions as, “What was I?” “What shall I be?” “What am I?” (MN 2), unanswerable questions to which philosophers go on furnishing many an unquestionable answer, disproving each other as they do. But progress towards liberation from ignorance transforms and transfigures the world. One who is liberated asks no more questions (akathamkathi). The Buddha tells his listeners, “Bhikkhus, material form [and likewise feeling, perception, determinations, and consciousness] are impermanent, changing and altering. Whoever decides about, and places his faith in, these ideas in this way is called Mature in Faith. He has alighted upon the certainty of rightness. He has alighted upon the plane of true men and left behind the plane of ordinary men. He can no more perform action capable of causing his rebirth in the animal world or in the realm of ghosts and he cannot complete his time in this life without realizing the fruition of Stream-entry” (SN 25:10). Such faith decides in advance that nothing arisen can reveal any permanence at all, however brief. Since all subsequent evidence supports the decision, if that evidence is not forgotten, craving is progressively stultified in the impossibility of finding any arisen thing worth craving for, and is progressively displaced by the joy of liberation. The first problem, though, that of time, is properly a matter for insight (vipassana) and can only be dealt with here by hints and pointers because of lack of space. As has already been said, the ignorant man questions, but one who is liberated does not. The Buddha tells his listeners, “Let not a man trace back a past or wonder what the future holds … Instead with insight let him see each idea [1] presently arisen” (MN 131). He includes the Contemplation of Impermanence under the Four Foundations of Mindfulness: “He trains thus: ‘I shall breathe in … breathe out contemplating impermanence”’ (MN 10).

Now it is in the very nature of ignorance to perceive the bare conditions for consciousness in terms of things, persons and hypostases, and to project upon these percepts a varying degree of permanence, a misperception which it is the task of true vision and mindfulness to correct. During the period of transition, while understanding that “to be is to be otherwise” is still immature and helped out by faith in the impermanence of everything that is, the faith must be tested and the outcome of the tests remembered. This needs concentration and energy.

“When one gives attention to impermanence, the faith faculty is outstanding.” And in the cases of attention to pain and not-self the faculties of concentration and understanding are outstanding respectively. These are called the “Three Gate-Ways to Liberation,” which “lead to the outlet from the world” (Patisambhida Vimokkhakatha). When the Stream-entry path is reached, a new, supramundane faculty, the I-shall-come-to-know-the-unknown faculty (anaññataññassamitindriya) appears, to be subsequently followed by the new and supramundane final-knowledge and final-knower faculties (aññindriya, aññatavindriya). These are gained in this life with the attainment of Arahantship.

Meanwhile, however, “The characteristic of impermanence does not become apparent [as universal] because, when the constant rise and fall of determinations [2] [things] is not given attention, it is concealed by continuity (Visuddhimagga Ch. 21). In fact the Buddha said, “There is no matter or feeling, perception, determinations, or consciousness whatever that is permanent … not inseparable from the idea of change [3] … ” Taking a small piece of cow dung in his hand, the Blessed One said, “If there were even that much … that were permanent … not inseparable from the idea of change [4] … the living of the Life Divine [5] could not be described as for the exhaustion of suffering. It is because there is not … that it is so described” (SN 22:96).

Now that statement can be taken to imply that if time were an absolutely independent objective reality, there would be no liberation.

Permanence and impermanence on the one hand, and time on the other, are but two modes of the same view. The appearance of the three new supramundane faculties signals profound changes in the apprehension of permanence and impermanence, that is, of time, and consequently in actual experience itself.

To question the objectivity of time is not new even to Western philosophy. While objective reality of time and space still remains one of the assumptions made by scientists for which they have no proof, Immanuel Kant argued irrefutably for the pure subjectivity of both. But almost a millennium and a half before him, Acariya Buddhaghosa wrote, “What is called ‘time’ is conceived in terms of such and such dhammas … But that [time] should be understood as only a mere conceptual description, since it is nonexistent as to any individual essence of its own.” (Atthasalini. Space is analogously treated elsewhere). A century or two later it was observed that “Nibbana [extinction] is not like other dhammas. In fact because of its extreme profundity it cannot be made the object of consciousness by one who has not yet reached it. That is why it has to be reached by change-of-lineage cognizance [gotrabhu], which has profundity surpassing the three periods of time” (Mulatika). When the seen, heard, sensed and cognized (see Ud 1.10), are misperceived to be (this that I see … that I think about, is that man, so-and-so, that thing of mine, to have temporal endurance and reality, it is because the three periods of time, these three modes by which we subjectively process our raw world in perceiving it, have been projected outwards by ignorance on the raw world and misapprehended along with that as objectively real. That is how we in our ignorance come to perceive things and persons and action.

These fragments are merely pointers. The contemplation of impermanence, which, when fully and unreservedly developed, necessitates the contemplations of suffering (pain) and not-self, involves the whole field of insight. (There is no space to deal with it here.) However, the inquiry has already led us away from the apparent either-or choice between faith in dogma-as-the-goal or agnosticism. By establishing a structural interdependence between faith and ignorance, it has opened up a new line. In the pursuit of that line it has uncovered an unexpected association between faith and the temporal mirage of permanence and impermanence. And so it has been possible to sketch a practical outline of the way to end here and now this whole aggregate mass of suffering. The adventure is waiting to be tested.

“Fruitful as the act of giving is … yet it is still more fruitful to go with confident heart for refuge to the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha, and undertake the five precepts of virtue … Fruitful as that is … yet it is still more fruitful to maintain loving-kindness in being in the heart for only as long as the milking of a cow … Fruitful as that is … yet it is still more fruitful to maintain perception of impermanence in being for only as long as the snapping of a finger” (AN 9:20).

But does saddha really mean faith? Let the reader judge for himself.