Reason and Knowledge on the Path: A Protreptic Reading of the Guide

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Descriptionངོ་སྤྲོད།

No abstract given. Here are the first relevant paragraphs:

The Guide enjoins giving only vegetables and the like at first. Later, by degrees, one acts in such a way that one is even able to give up one's own flesh!

When the understanding arises that one's own flesh is no more than a vegetable, what difficulty is there in giving away one's flesh and bones? (7.25-26)[1]

MECHANISMS OF PROTREPTIC

The Greco-Roman philosophical tradition had a genre of literature called "protreptic." Protrepsis means "turning toward," and while the genre might broadly be taken as a call to turn toward a different form of life,[2] the metaphor embedded in this term for it comes from Plato's Republic, where at issue is specifically a turning of the soul toward reality:

The power to learn is present in everyone's soul, and the instrument with which each learns is like an eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light without turning the whole body. This instrument cannot be turned around from that which is coming into being without turning the whole soul until it is able to study that which is and the brightest thing that is... education is the craft concerned with doing this very thing, this turning around, and with how the soul can most easily and effectively be made to do it. It isn't the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn't turned the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries to redirect it appropriately... the virtue of reason ... never loses its power but is either useful and beneficial or useless and harmful, depending on the way it is turned. (Republic VII.518C-519A)[3]

Insofar as talk of "turning souls" refers to souls, such a phrase may seem singularly inappropriate to a Buddhist context. But there are deeper affinities in the metaphor. The very notion of protreptic as a genre contains a sense of literature that does not just say something but does something. It does something to the audience; and what it does is transform their outlook wholesale. More specifically, protreptic aims, as Plato puts it, to turn us toward reality, or reorient us toward a comprehension of reality.
      There is a further, related affinity in the presumption that such reorientation—grasping reality aright, in a way one ordinarily does not—is a moral matter. Such transformation is no mere accumulation of facts; turning toward reality transforms one's engagement with the world. Thus, for Śāntideva,[4] all virtues are essentially and primarily mental. For instance, "The perfection of generosity is said to result from the mental attitude of relinquishing all that one has to all people, together with the fruit of that act. Therefore the perfection is the mental attitude itself" (5.10, emphasis mine).
      And similarly with śīla (discipline, or restraint):[5] "Where can fish and other creatures be taken where I might not kill them? Yet when the mental attitude to cease from worldly acts is achieved, that is agreed to be the perfection of śīla" (5.11).
      And so with anger and the rest.[6]
      Such reorientation implies a revised conception of what is possible, necessary, and appropriate, which in turn issues in feelings and actions. Actions and individual choices carry moral weight, of course—in the Buddhist idiom, they have karmic consequences. But they carry these because of the intentionality and ways of seeing that they contain, express, and perpetuate. It is our ways of seeing reality that inform our conceiving of intentions to act; and so it is through seeing reality that we transform ourselves, and the quality and nature of our actions.7 This process of coming to see reality does not, for Śāntideva at least, arise suddenly and all at once.[8] It arises rather through several more minor or local revisionings, which it is the work of the Guide and other such texts and related exercises to effect.[9] The transformation of outlook, the perspective thus attained, are the core and substance of the moral life—as epitomized in the perfection of wisdom or insight (prajñā) standing at the culmination of the path.
      While a great deal of modern moral theory attends to action, decision, and the principles underlying correct choice, by the time we reach the point of choosing an action we are already fairly well down the road of ethical formation and ethical thought. All the truly decisive elements occur upstream, as it were, where the world is characterized in a certain way and categorized, where meanings take shape and options emerge. At the point of choice among a few well-articulated options, we might say with Sartre, les jeux sont faits.[10]
      Buddhist ethical thought, reflective and hortatory, respects this fact implicitly, and Śāntideva's Guide to Bodhisattva Practice (Bodhicaryāvatāra, hereafter Guide) exemplarily so. Rather than argue for this or that ultimate ground of normativity, the Guide aims to change the categories in which we experience the world, the perspective we take on our own experiences, and to modify quite comprehensively what is "on our minds." This emphasis on transforming experience is what makes so apt Garfield's preferred characterization of Śāntideva's ethics as "phenomenological."[11] This transformation should alter what we see as possible, necessary, and reasonable regarding action and feeling, and leave choice a theoretically quite uninteresting part of the chain of explanation.
      Such protreptic texts appeal to reason and offer arguments—because after all, it is a feature of human creatures that they do also recognize and respond to these in distinctive ways. But it belongs to the very nature of the genre that such rational appeals do not swing free in some rarefied logical space (as claims like 2 + 2 = 4 seem to do). For protreptic attempts to alter what one recognizes as a reason; the "turning of the soul" consists in the recognition that what you took before to be a good reason is no reason at all, while something you had never properly seen is now appreciated as the salient rational consideration. Exactly this shifting appreciation of what counts as a reason makes the genre of protreptic an apt point of reference for a Madhyamika like Śāntideva.[12] For it allows categories and conceptualizations to be evaluated as progressively more apt, without implying commitment to any one set of categories as capturing the final and ultimate truth of the matter.
      The difficulty for any Madhyamika is how to eschew any reference (or commitment) to ultimate reality and yet retain teleological notions of progress and path. Any Buddhist thinks our ordinary ways of looking at the world are terribly flawed and the cause of persistent suffering, but without recourse to some sort of "seeing things as they actually are" (in the metaphysical sense that a Madhyamika eschews), it is difficult to evaluate any ordinary conceptions as better and worse. They cannot be rejected on account of their being wrong or false, nor can changes in ordinary views be validated on the basis of being correct or closer to correct. A protreptic understanding of how Śāntideva is working here addresses the difficulty inasmuch as protreptic arguments do not aim to—and do not need to—prove that alternative positions are just plain false (in the way that 2 + 2 = 5 is just plain false), nor need they demonstrate that the preferred outlook is the only intelligible one. The everyday outlook is superseded and replaced, not proved wrong; the opening of the mind to new things as reasons counts as an improvement primarily on moral grounds (such ways of looking make us better persons and are better at ending suffering), but also on peri-epistemological grounds such as the ability of the new ways of seeing to shed more light on more of our moral lives, or to accommodate and explain the old ways of seeing and their inferiority.
      To illustrate what it means to say that the Guide, like any protreptic text, deliberately alters what we recognize and respond to as a reason or argument, we will look closely at two such transformations: the first, working on the audience of the text through the course of chapters 2 to 4, transforms how we conceive of ourselves and our situation; the second examines the way a transformation of outlook is effected through the depiction of the mind as menagerie in chapter 5, and how this prepares the audience for understanding an argument in chapter 6 in the right way. While these two instances are significant, they are primarily offered as illustrative: tracing their workings should give us tools for approaching the Guide as protreptic and articulating much of the rational work done implicitly through choice of categories and metaphor, which determine where and how to focus the audience's attention. (Carpenter, "Reason and Knowledge on the Path," 45–48)

Notes

Translations taken from Śāntideva, The Bodhicaryāvatāra, trans. Crosby and Skilton, with occasional minor emendations.
Stowers, "Letters of Exhortation and Advice," 92.
Grube's translation, rev. Reeve as in Cooper, ed., Plato: Complete Works.
For the purposes of this essay, I use the name "Śāntideva" as indicating the author or authors combined with any unknown editors responsible for the text currently received under the name Bodhicaryāvatāra.
Often translated, as in Śāntideva, The Bodhicaryāvatāra, trans. Crosby and Skilton, as "morality."
Patience in 5.12; the famous verse at 5.13 ("where would there be leather enough to cover the entire world?") targets vīrya (zeal, resoluteness, diligence); 5.14 highlights controlling the mind in the manner of mental cultivation; and 5.15 describes the perfection of wisdom with its "no fruit comes from a dull mind that bears comparison with a sharp mind on its own."
This reverses the consequentialist interpretation of Goodman in Consequences of Compassion, which takes action to be the means of character transformation; on the view taken here, if there is to be talk of means and ends, it will be transformations of seeing or understanding that are the means of transforming action. However, the character transformation (consisting, as it does, in increasing insight into reality) is the only part of this that could claim to be good in itself; the improved actions that follow are themselves instrumentally useful so long as one is but imperfectly enlightened, and dry up altogether (in some sense) when one has attained full understanding of reality.
The question was apparently the great point of dispute at the legendary "Council of Lhasa" debate (supposed to have taken place at Samye Monastery in Tibet, in the late eighth century CE), as a consequence of which (so the legend goes) the Chan view of sudden enlightenment was banished from Tibet in favor of the position of the Indian faction (represented by Kamalaśīla) that enlightenment is gradual.
See for instance Buddhaghosa's Path of Purification, which details exercises for effecting revisions of reality in specific ways, suited to specific characters. Buddhaghosa often recounts or refers to Buddhist tales to illustrate his points—that is, to get the audience to see things as he is recommending we see them. Such tales are a vast store of literature used to shape outlook and categories for experiencing the world differently.
Not for nothing do latter-day Buddhists such as Stephen Batchelor see a common cause between existentialist and Buddhist ethics.
See Garfield, "What It Is Like to Be a Bodhisattva," and Garfield, Engaging Buddhism, ch. 9; also, this volume.
Śāntideva is working within the Mahayana tradition inaugurated by Nāgārjuna, called Madhyamaka. One hallmark of Nāgārjuna's approach is a thoroughgoing anti-essentialism and anti-foundationalism, which nevertheless makes use of ordinary claims and conceptions for advancing along the path toward enlightenment.

Citation

Carpenter, Amber. "Reason and Knowledge on the Path: A Protreptic Reading of the Guide." In Readings of Śāntideva's Guide to Bodhisattva Practice, edited by Jonathan C. Gold and Douglas S. Duckworth, 45–59. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.

Interconnections

Works related to this item

1 Chapter or part of

Gold, Jonathan C., and Douglas S. Duckworth, eds. Readings of Śāntideva's Guide to Bodhisattva Practice. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.

Books2019About this item

This book serves as a companion to the Bodhicaryāvatāra. The fifteen essays contained here illuminate the Guide's many philosophical, literary, ritual, and ethical dimensions.

1 Scholarship on

Śāntideva (ཞི་བ་ལྷ་). Bodhicaryāvatāra [बोधिचर्यावतार]. byang chub sems dpa'i spyod pa la 'jug pa [བྱང་ཆུབ་སེམས་དཔའི་སྤྱོད་པ་ལ་འཇུག་པ།]. [The Way of the Bodhisattva]. Tengyur, RKTST 3216 http://www.rkts.org/cat.php?id=3216&typ=2.

Classical WorksAbout this item

An "Introduction to Bodhisattva Practice," the Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra is a poem about the path of a bodhisattva, in ten chapters, written by the Indian Buddhist Śāntideva (fl. c. 685–763). One of the masterpieces of world literature, it is a core text of Mahāyāna Buddhism and continues to be taught, studied, and commented upon in many languages and by many traditions around the world. The main subject of the text is bodhicitta, the altruistic aspiration for enlightenment, and the path and practices of the bodhisattva, the six perfections (pāramitās). The text forms the basis of many contemporary discussions of Buddhist ethics and philosophy.