Cause, effect, cause, effect, cause and effect: I have lived much of my life wrapped up in thoughts of cause, effect, and how that sometimes quarrelsome, sometimes loving couple affect our lives, and the accompanying riddle of determinism, oh, how many cross-eyed coffees I drank, staring past the walls of a campus café, trying to see the true nature of reality; I suppose it is this same search that has driven me to the East, and to these inward and outward explorations. Reinforced in yesterdays lecture was something I first encountered in Kitaro Nishida, the man who has been a companion to me over these few months, when he said that the true features of a personal reality are triune, with no separation between knowledge, feeling and volition; the true nature of action is only independent, self-sufficient pure activity. These distinctions only arise when we separate them with the construction of thoughts.
Construction is the operative word here: it is a sort of building upon reality, these thoughts that I think, and that you receive right now; true reality is a unified presence, something we cannot describe. One’s most profound intuitions, deepest loves and significant experiences are all inherently prelinguistic, they occur without thought, without subsequent grasping speech. All external language is translation: art, in all of its forms, is essentially an attempt to bridge this gap of private experience.
When I was in love in Prague I remember staring out of a bus window, arguing with myself, trying to figure out if that then-defining love was fate or chance, indeed, we tend so much to separate things into binary sets, to exclude the middle, in accord with the logician’s law, but this logic is far too precise to carry currency in the curious chaos of loving life. Indeed, it is probably a mixture of the two. Korean culture has wonderful words for describing this, words I am sure I have shared before, but I must share again: seokmyung and omyoung: both of these words translate as fate or destiny in a given dictionary, but they mean so much more: seokmyung denotes a certain randomness, as well as control, omyoung implies that which is beyond your control, according to one student of mine, the dates of your birth, death, and marriage. This captures the true nature of life much better than determinism or libertarianism, the two main camps I encountered in the philosophy department, although there is a third, compatibilism. I have always found compatibility to be a good thing, in software, love, and the rest of life.
I have headed west since Korea, to China, and now to Nepal, and I am encountering Tibetan Buddhism, a tradition of penetrating wisdom: so much of what I hear in our lessons feels deeply true, sits with confidence in my heart (and some of it I am ignorant regarding, some of it I have no clue!), and I seek to listen, to reflect, to meditate, to learn.
Here, too, there is a focus on logic, the institute’s name, Rigpe Dorje, translates as logic and reasoning.
(Ah, I have been too hard on the Greeks. Let me write it clearly, once: I love you Plato!)
Here we talk about karma, the Buddhist law of cause and effect, of every action, being inherently moral, giving rise to a reaction. This complies with Newton, of course, that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, but let us gain a reminder from Nishida: Newton’s theory is a scientific explanation, one that accounts for the external physical, but not the interior of intellect, volition, and feeling, as Nishida states, the true nature of reality is a unity of all of these, and we cannot stop at intellect and will: so, let us extend the English observation to include to the Japanese: that every action, inherently being a union of the physical, the intellectual, the volitional, and moral, has a reaction, one that manifests also in these unified fields. This leaves us somewhere in the middle, possibly near Tibet.
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