Wisdom as a Way of Life, by Steven Collins (part 2)

Part Two PRACTICES OF SELF

2.1. MY INTENTIONS IN WRITING THIS CHAP TER; HADOT AND FOUCAULT ON THE DESIRABILIT Y OF COMPARISON This second section1 derives from two intentions of mine. First, as I have said repeatedly, the actual percentage of relevantly educated people who read or listened to Pali texts in Pali, of both narrative and systematic kinds, must have been in any premodern Theravæda civilization demographically infinitesimally small. The percentage of people who not only read about, as did monks and some educated laity in court cultures, but also actually engaged in practices of self assiduously and as a full-time lifestyle must been even smaller, confined to the monastic order, celibates in homosocial institutions. But as I have also said, the number of people in the contemporary anglophone world who not only read, say, the works of David Hume or James Joyce but also actively try to understand them intellectually and historically is likewise a tiny percentage. But in the intellectual historiography of the “West” these two authors are indispensable. I have insisted that the diversity expressed in Pali narrative thought (stories) is more central to the tradition than the unity

86 Y Part Two: Pr actices of Self

envisioned by systematic thought, especially as simplified in modern textbooks and introductions. Nevertheless, writing in the academic tradition of intellectual history, as I take myself now to be doing, it is impossible to ignore Buddhist ideas and the practices of self that were prescribed by them or juxtaposed to them. Nineteenth-century scholars, as well as many now, have not only thought and think that their expertise in the language(s) necessary— difficult as this is to attain, requiring many years of study—gives them, as it obviously does, authority in linguistic matters, but also have thought that that kind of expertise made and makes it possible for them to write about philosophy, sociology (of both the macro- and micro- kinds), historiography of more than the positivist-empirical kind, and other things with some comparable kind of intellectual authority.

Sometimes their attempts to do so seem, to me anyway, of spectacular naïveté.

In this book I claim no such authority, although I have tried over the years to familiarize myself to some extent with those disciplines, and I have tried in this book to enter into those fields of study in an exploratory way. It is for readers to decide whether what has resulted has any persuasiveness or interest. So, to repeat, demographically tiny but civilizationally of great importance, practices of self and the texts in which they are described and prescribed remain of signal importance to the intellectual history of the Pali tradition. In writing about them in this section, I found the conceptual intricacy of sections 2.3 through 2.3.2 in itself fascinating and rewarding to reflect on.

Readers who do not share this view may pass directly to 2.3.3, where the point of it all is summarized. In 2.4 and thereafter, I hope that my exploration of practices of self will be more interesting, or at least more true to the tradition, than the simplified version of Buddhist “meditation” usually now presented, where

Part Two: Pr actices of Self Z 87

the two forms, samatha/samædhi, calming/concentration, and vipassanæ (insight) are seen as the only possibilities, complementary or opposed to each other as one or another author may think.

The second reason for writing this chapter, indeed for writing the entire book, is to provide some comparative material to the work of Pierre Hadot on—to use the standard slogans— “spiritual exercises” and “philosophy as a way of life,” and to that of Michel Foucault on “practices/technologies of self ” and “subjectivity and truth.”2 As I shall demonstrate in a moment, this is not an idiosyncratic quirk of my own, but something they both wanted and looked for. One of the problems with their wonderfully inspiring work is their lack of attention to the social and institutional context of the ideas they were writing about. In the Theravæda case, on a micro level, which I have not at all attempted, this would look at, among other things, the institutions of the monastic order, what I have called celibate homosocial institutions, from social, economic, geographical, architectural, and other perspectives, as well as at the variety of kinds and sizes of them. In the ancient Greek case it seems, according to Philip Mitsis, that there were scarcely any institutions in the physical sense.3 When we speak of “Stoicism” or “Epicureanism,” he says, we are speaking in the same intellectual way we speak of Wittgensteinianism or the tradition of Ayn Rand. Hadot makes some occasional and vague references to institutions of education. I have attempted, perhaps rashly, to provide a much larger context—the civilizational—in which to set Pali narrative and systematic texts produced by an educated monastic elite and intended for others of that kind, as well as for well-educated people in royal courts (of which, admittedly, I have provided no serious empirical study).

Hadot, along with others such as Martha Nussbaum, have insisted that philosophy in the ancient world was a therapeutic

88 Y Part Two: Pr actices of Self

way of life, a set of spiritual exercises in which the goal was not merely the acquisition of knowledge about the world but the transformation of the knowing subject.4 There are very many obvious parallels with Buddhism, as others have pointed out. The Buddha as healer cures the disease of suffering by the therapy, inter alia, of detachment. One should remember here that the word spirituel in French does not mean quite the same thing as the English word “spiritual.” The word for “mind,” for example, is esprit, and so in some contexts at least one might translate exercises spirituels as “mental exercises.” Hadot’s work is entirely confined to the Hellenistic and early Roman Imperial epochs, but he did, in his later work, suggest the need for comparative studies: Despite my hesitations about the use of comparative studies in philosophy, I wanted to end this chapter by emphasizing the extent to which the description, inspired by Buddhism, that Michel Hulin [a contemporary French philosopher] has given of the existential roots of the mystical experience, seemed to me close to the characteristics of the ideal of the Ancient Sage, so striking did the resemblances between the two spiritual searches appear to me to be. . . . I think, indeed, that these [Hellenistic and early Roman Imperial] models correspond to permanent, fundamental attitudes which all human beings find necessary when they set about searching for wisdom. . . . I was for a long time hostile to comparative philosophy because I thought it could give rise to confusions and arbitrary parallels. Now, however, as I read the works of my colleagues [here he cites some contemporary French philosophers] it seems to me that there really are thoughtprovoking analogies between the philosophical attitudes of antiquity and those of the Orient. . . . Perhaps we should say that the choices of life we have described—those of Socrates, Pyrrho,

Part Two: Pr actices of Self Z 89 Epicurus, the Stoics, the Cynics and the Skeptics—correspond to constant, universal models which are found in forms specific to every civilization, throughout the various cultural zones of humanity. This is why I mentioned earlier a Buddhist text, as well as some considerations by Michel Hulin, who was inspired by Buddhism: because l thought they could give us a better understanding of the Greek sage.5

Foucault, in a lecture originally given in English at the University of Vermont in 1982, says first that he agrees with Habermas that there are in all societies the three techniques of production, signification, and domination, and he adds: But . . . I have come gradually to realize that there is in all societies, I think, in all societies whatever they are, another type of technique: techniques which permit individuals to effect, by themselves, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, on their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own conduct, and this as a way to transform themselves, to modify themselves, and to attain a certain state of perfection, of happiness, of purity, of supernatural power, and so on. Let’s call this kind of techniques a “technique” or “technology of self.” 6

In a remarkable interview in Japan in 1978 with a Japanese specialist in French theater and literature, published as “The Theatre of Philosophy” (“La scène de la philosophie”), he suggested a comparative project: In the history which I am trying to make of techniques of power in the West, techniques which concern bodies, individuals, conduct, the souls of individuals, I have been led to accord

90 Y Part Two: Pr actices of Self a very important place to Christian disciplines, to Christianity as formative of Western individuality and subjectivity, and, to tell the truth, I would very much like to be able to compare these Christian techniques to Buddhist or Far Eastern spiritual techniques; to compare techniques which up to a certain point are close to one another; after all, Western monasticism and Christian monasticism were influenced by, copied from Buddhist monasticism, but with a completely different effect, since the principles of Buddhist spirituality must tend towards a disindividualization, to a desubjectification, to pushing individuality truly to its limits or beyond its limits, with the aim of an emancipation from the subject. My project would be first to get to know a little about that, and to see how, through apparently very similar techniques of asceticism, of meditation, through this overall resemblance one arrives at entirely different results.7

Foucault’s phrase “Buddhist or Far Eastern spiritual techniques” is now, in the circumstances of a globalized world and increased knowledge of it, rather quaint, and either annoying or charming depending on one’s level of charity. Perhaps he used it because the interview took place in Japan. I find the remarks about “a disindividualization, to a desubjectification . . . pushing individuality truly to its limits or beyond its limits, with the aim of an emancipation from the subject” a little vague, or at least difficult to interpret as they are. I will attempt to offer here, as I and many others have done elsewhere, something a little more precise in 2.3 and 2.4.13 below.

I hope that these citations from Hadot’s and Foucault’s work will attest that the comparative project I am here aiming at, however inadequate it may be, is something of which they would have approved.

Part Two: Pr actices of Self Z 91

2.2. AN ISSUE OF TRANSLATION: “ THE SELF ”?

I want to interject in this section and the next some remarks about translation. I do not want to insist that my own choice of translation is necessarily correct and always to be used, but I do want to raise some issues that may not be familiar to those who do not read Foucault in French. Translations standardly refer to “the self,” with the definite article “the.” In ordinary English, one never uses such a phrase—“I hurt the self on the knee.” It is only used in philosophical or other complex discourses. In fact Foucault overwhelmingly uses not du soi, which contains the definite article and would be translated as “of the self,” but “de soi,” which does not contain the definite article and which I have translated here as “of self.” This is, I admit, equally distant from ordinary usage. Sometimes the French can be translated better by a quite different phrase in English: thus volume 3 of his History of Sexuality in French, “Le souci de soi,” is always translated and referred to as “The Care of the Self,” as if it were “Le souci du soi,” but “Le souci de soi” would be much better simply as “Caring for Oneself.”8 This reflexive use of the word “self ” does not imply any metaphysical or otherwise transempirical concept.

It is no more metaphysical than “I hurt myself on the knee” or “I’ll do it myself.” This distinction between ordinary language and metaphysical versions of “self ” is vital, I think, to any comparative endeavor in this domain, and certainly with Buddhism, which teaches, as is well known, that there is ultimately no such thing as a permanent unchangeable self beyond experience, where everything is changing, including oneself.

Pali texts, like those in any other language, contain necessarily and ubiquitously reflexive uses of the word “self,” and any

92 Y Part Two: Pr actices of Self

stories would be impossible without persons, characters—what I have called, following narrative theorists, narrative actants.

The Buddhist distinction between ordinary language uses of words like “self ” and “person” and the specialist idea of the nonexistence of such things is standardly referred to in secondary sources as the distinction between conventional and ultimate truth. I discuss this in 2.3.1 and 2.3.2, where I will offer a detailed linguistic and conceptual analysis of the distinction and what I think are more accurate translations. Without such a distinction in interpretation, Pali literature as a whole would be entirely incoherent. Theravæda systematic “ultimate truth” could not possibly be a civilizational phenomenon, just the preserve of a few very odd people who could not speak a language comprehensible to anyone else, as Pali texts themselves clearly recognize. In fact, they could not speak a language at all, just recite lists of lexical items to one another. Theravæda civilization is not based on a lesser truth, but on a truth (just as true, in its own way, as is “ultimate truth”) that is, as I shall translate it—consensual.

2.2.1. Caveat Lector Again: Some Misleading but Symptomatic Mistranslations It is very unfortunate that the available translations of Hadot and Foucault, though generally admirable and correct, are also unreliable in a number of places, sometimes important ones. Here are two examples where the translation gives the opposite of the original. They are both examples of what are called “false friends”: words in French and English that look the same but in fact have different meanings.

The first is from Hadot. In the first quotation from his work in the previous section I gave one sentence as “it seems to me . . .

“Steven Collins’s previous books have all been field-changing works. Wisdom as a Way of Life is no exception. This powerful work provides original and stimulating ways of understanding Pali texts while creating a bridge between scholars of the Pali world and intellectual historians working elsewhere.”

—ANNE M. BLACKBURN, AUTHOR OF LOCATIONS OF BUDDHISM: COLONIALISM AND MODERNITY IN SRI LANKA

“Collins’s last book is a gift. He makes the case that the Pali literature associated most often with Theravāda Buddhism is a treasure trove of insight into the human condition and how we might meaningfully navigate it. After reading it, I find it impossible to experience anything having to do with Theravāda Buddhism—its rituals, its texts, its art—in quite the same way again.”

—NANCY EBERHARDT, AUTHOR OF IMAGINING THE COURSE OF LIFE: SELF-TRANSFORMATION IN A SHAN BUDDHIST COMMUNITY

“Collins asks us to recognize our shared humanity with those who held such different notions about the nature of the world and experience—that like ours, Theravāda Buddhist cultures and societies were filled with laughter, anger, love, birth, and death.

This book is a fitting realization of his vision. In bringing this forth, Justin McDaniel deserves our deeply felt gratitude.”

—THOMAS BORCHERT, EDITOR OF EDUCATING MONKS: MINORITY BUDDHISM ON CHINA’S SOUTHWEST BORDER

STEVEN COLLINS (1951–2018) was Chester D. Tripp Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where he was affiliated with the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations and with the Divinity School. Among his many works are Nirvana and Other Buddhist Felicities: Utopias of the Pali Imaginaire (1998) and, as editor, Readings of the Vessantara Jātaka (Columbia, 2016).

JUSTIN McDANIEL is professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

DAN ARNOLD is associate professor of philosophy of religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

CHARLES HALLISEY is Yehan Numata Senior Lecturer on Buddhist Literatures at Harvard Divinity School.

Cover design: Milenda Nan Ok Lee

Cover image: Photo by Justin McDaniel PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS | NEW YORK cup.columbia.edu