John Dewey and the Buddhist Philosophy of the Middle Way
My reading of the philosophical tradition of Buddhism has been heavily
influenced by the lectures and writings of David Kalupahana, the “Buddhist specialist” at
the University of Hawaii for many years until his recent retirement. David devoted his
entire academic career to challenging and, in his view, correcting the received
interpretation of the history and tradition of Buddhist thought. In his view the
philosophical history of Buddhism is the story of a struggle to preserve, defend and
develop the original philosophical insights of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, against
the hegemonic Vedic philosophies of India and later against similar philosophical
tendencies within Buddhism itself.1 The defenders include reputedly the two greatest
Buddhist philosophers after Gautama, Nagarjuna and Dignaga.
In my view, if Kalupahana is right, some important aspects of the original
philosophy of Buddhism, what Nagarjuna called “The Philosophy of the Middle Way,” is
strikingly similar to the philosophy of the great American pragmatist, John Dewey.
They are similar in that they reject traditional metaphysics as definitive of philosophy,
shared more or less the same understanding of the true nature of experience, and
promoted the same “pragmatic” view of the nature and purpose of philosophy.2
See Kalupahana’s A History of Buddhist Philosophy, University of Hawaii Press, 1992.
Kalupahana wrote often about the pragmatic nature of the central philosophy of Buddhism and about its
implications. In the commentary of his translation of Nagarjuna (Nagarjuna: The Philosophy of the
Middle Way, SUNY Press, 1986), Kalupahana wrote, “If my contention that Nagarjuna’s philosophy is a
mere restatement of the empiricist and pragmatic philosophy of the Buddha [is right], the form of
Buddhism introduced into China would…be the same as the original teachings of the Buddha with no
paradigmatic changes. And this may account for the survival of Buddhism alongside of the equally
1
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1
The Origins of Metaphysics
We begin with the well-known text commonly referred to as “The Silence of the
Buddha.” In that text, Gautama refuses to respond to what are clearly metaphysical
questions: “Is the world eternal or not eternal?” “Is the soul and body identical or not
identical?” “Is the world finite or infinite?” To each question, he answers, “I do not
say.” Instead, he declares that “he is free from all theories “ (which I presume is different
from being uncommitted to a theory), and then gives the dire and puzzling, melodramatic
warning that any theory we hold with respect to these questions “is a jungle, a wilderness,
a puppet-show, a writhing and a fetter, and is coupled with misery, ruin, despair, and
agony.”3 What are we to make of the silence of the Buddha?
The answer to the riddle, I believe, is contained in another authoritative text of
Buddhism, “The Discourse to Kaccayana.” It is believed that the major work of the great
Buddhist philosopher, Nagarjuna, Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way, is based on
this discourse. In the last verse, Nagarjuna writes, “I prostrate to Gautama, who through
compassion, taught the true doctrine, which leads to the relinquishing of all views.”4
Nagarjuna is undoubtedly referring to the “Discourse to Kacccayana,” in which this
venerable elder of the village asked of Gautama, “people speak of “right view, right
view.” To what extent is there a right view?” And Gautama replies:
This world [meaning human beings] is generally inclined towards two views;
existence and non-existence [sat and asat]. To him who perceives with right
wisdom the uprising of the world as it has come to be, the notion of non-existence
in the world does not occur. To him who perceives with right wisdom the ceasing
of the world as it has come to be, the notion of existence in the world does not
pragmatic philosophy of Confucianism, whereas it failed to survive in India in the face of a very strong
idealistic tradition.” (p. 8)
3
Majjhima-nikaya i.483-8, in H.C. Warren, Buddhism in Translation, pp. 123-8
4
Nagarjuna, The Philosophy of the Middle Way, trans. By David Kalupahana, State University of New
Press, 1986.
2
occur. The world for the most part is bound by approach, grasping and
inclination. And he who does not follow that approach and grasping, that
determination of mind, that inclination and disposition, who does not cling to or
adhere to a view…such a person does not doubt, is not perplexed. His knowledge
is not other-dependent. Thus far, Kaccayana, there is “right view.” “Everything
exists,”—this is one extreme. “Everything does not exist,”—this is the second
extreme. Without approaching either extreme, I teach you a doctrine of the
middle.5
The doctrine that he then proceeds to expound is the doctrine of pratityasamutpada (the
doctrine of dependent origination): “Dependent upon ignorance arise dispositions;
dependent upon dispositions arise consciousness; dependent upon consciousness arises
the psychophysical personality, [and so forth]…However, from the utter fading away and
ceasing of ignorance, there is ceasing of dispositions, etc.” The general doctrine itself is
formulated by Gautama as follows: “When that exists, this comes to be; on the arising of
that, this arises. When that does not exist, this does not come to be; on the cessation of
that, this ceases.” What exactly is the meaning of the doctrine of dependent origination,
this doctrine of the middle, and how will understanding it free a person from trying to
find the right answer to such questions as does the soul exist or not exists, is there a first
cause or not a first cause, does life have a purpose or not, and so on? And why is this
teaching not just another view, or is there a difference, in Gautama’s mind, between a
view and a doctrine?
We must first try to understand how the world came to be bound by this
“determination of mind, inclination, and disposition” in the first place; this obsession
with what is the right view, this obsession with metaphysical questions that leaves one
“perplexed and grasping.” Gautama long ago saw that the answer lies in a fundamental
and indisputable fact about human existence, when he declares, “it remains a fact and the
5
Samutta-nikaya, in Kalupahana’s translation of Nagarjuna: The Philosophy of the Middle Way, pp. 10-11.
3
fixed and necessary constitution of being that all its constituents are anitya (transitory,
ever changing, unpredictable).”6 It is a testimony to the allure of metaphysics, the power
of the obsession, that this declaration itself has been wrongly taken to be a metaphysical
statement about the ultimate nature of reality, misinterpreted particularly by some later
Buddhist philosophers who strayed from the middle way.
I believe that John Dewey is talking about anitya, this fact of human existence, in
the chapters “Escape from Peril” from The Quest for Certainty (his Gifford Lectures) and
“Existence as Precarious and Stable” from Experience and Nature (his Carus Lectures),
and elsewhere. To say that existence is anitya is to say, in Dewey’s words, that we live
in an aleatory world. “The world,” Dewey tells us, “is a scene of risk; it is uncertain,
unstable, uncannily unstable. It’s dangers are irregular, inconstant, not to be counted
upon as to their times and seasons…Plague, famine, failure of crop, disease, death, defeat
in battle, are always around the corner, and so are abundance, strength, victory, festival
and song.”7 Because the world is neither total chaos nor totally fixed and orderly, but an
“inextricable mixture of stability and uncertainty,” human existence is like a lottery, a
gamble. Our existence is precarious to varying degrees because we are essentially
creatures living not merely in an environment, but by means of an environment. Our
living occurs not merely under certain conditions, we live within these conditions; we are
not only in the world, we are of the world.8 That we are of the world, I contend, is the
implication of Gautama’s declaration that “it remains a fact and the fixed and necessary
6
Anguttara-nikaya iii,134; in H.C. Warren, Buddhism in Translations, Harvard Oriental Series, 3, sixth
issue (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1915), Foreword
7
John Dewey, Experience and Nature, New York: Dover Publications, 1958, p. 41.
8
As Dewey says, “”Environment” is not something around and about human activities in an external sense;
it is their medium or milieu, in the sense in which a medium is inter-mediate in the execution or carrying out
of human activities, as well as the channel through which they move and the vehicle by which they go on.”
(Knowing and the Known, The Late Works 16:248)
4
constitution of being, that all its elements are lacking in an ego.”9 In other words, we are
not a substantive self (atman) that is capable of transcending the natural conditions of our
existence.
Lacking tools and other means of protection, Dewey believes that the first
response of human creatures to the predicament of being at the mercy of an aleatory
world is to seek some kind of control through supplication to the hidden powers imagined
to exist behind nature. Over time, this strategy of supplication became systematized and
socially generalized. That is to say, there arose a communal way of conceiving of life and
the world, a picture of our place in the universe and a vision of the meaning and
significance of human life.
But as traditional belief cannot continue to rely on the force of habit and custom
for justification, there was a need, as Dewey put it, “to develop a method of rational
investigation…which should place the essential elements of traditional belief upon an
unshakable basis.”10
This is the method followed by the Vedic philosophers of India
and the philosophers of ancient Greece. Thus it is that, Dewey writes,
Philosophy has arrogated to itself the office of demonstrating the existence of a
transcendent, absolute or inner reality and of revealing to man the nature and
features of this higher reality.11
[And] philosophical doctrines, which disagreed about virtually everything else,
were at one in the assumption that their distinctive concern as philosophy was to
See footnote 6. Dewey is very “Confucian” in this regard, seeing that everything that makes up the self—
beliefs, values, meanings, and so on—are socially formed. Fully aware that he is opposing the dominant
view of Western thought, he contends, “The underlying philosophy and psychology of earlier liberalism led
to a conception of individuality as something ready-made, already possessed, and needing only the removal
of certain legal restrictions to come into full play. It is not conceived as a moving thing, something that is
attained only by continuous growth. Because of this failure, the dependence in fact of individuals upon
social conditions was made little of…social arrangements and institutions were thought of as things that
operate from without, not entering in any significant way into the internal make-up of individuals.”
(Liberalism and Social Action, The Late Works, 11:30.
10
“Reconstruction in Philosophy,” The Middle Works, 12:89.
11
Ibid., 12: 92.
9
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search for the immutable and ultimate—that which is—without respect to the
temporal or spatial.12
From that time on, those who oppose this philosophical enterprise (the view of
“existence”), including the pragmatists, were labeled skeptics and relativists (the view of
“non-existence”).
The Origins of Pragmatism
But Dewey argued that human creatures actually devised two strategies for
control in an aleatory world: the strategy of supplication that mutated into classical
metaphysics and what Dewey called the strategy of science and technology. This second
mode of response involves, Dewey says, turning “the powers of nature to account” by
“changing the world through action.”13 Humans, in other words, learned to transform
conditions to better suit their needs. Along with the development of the practical arts of
tool making, agriculture, and hunting, this response gave rise to a stock of common-sense
beliefs about the world. And, most importantly, it promoted “the development of the
experimental habit of mind.”14
When Dewey contends that “just this predicament of the inextricable mixture of
stability and uncertainty gives rise to philosophy,”15 he is referring to the two different
conceptions of the nature and purpose of philosophy that emerge from the two different
strategies of coping with an aleatory world. The strategy of supplication gave rise to the
traditional conception of philosophy, as what Dewey calls, “the search for the
immutable.” The aim of this idea of philosophy, as Plato declared authoritatively, is the
knowledge of the (capitalized) One, the True, and the Good. It is concerned with the
12
Ibid., 12: 260.
“The Quest for Certainty,” The Later Works, 4:3.
14
“Reconstruction in Philosophy,” The Middle Works, 12:85-86.
15
“Existence as Precarious and Stable” in Experience and Nature, The Late Works 1:46
13
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universal and unchanging principles of knowledge, morality, and being that are supposed
to govern the changing world in which we live. Philosophy is thus conceived as a kind of
“super science” concerned with the knowledge of being, of the way things really are as
opposed to how they appear to be. And philosophers are to be the high priests of culture.
The pragmatic conception that emerged from the second strategy is based, Dewey
claims, on the crucial insight that thinking and philosophy “is no different in kind from
the [intelligent] use of natural materials and energies, say fire and tools, to refine, reorder,
and shape other natural materials.” The focus is on the problems we encounter in the
actual world. The second strategy therefore gives rise to a conception of philosophy as
critical and reflective thinking about experience with the aim, Dewey says, of
“transforming confusion, ambiguity and discrepancy into illumination, definiteness, and
consistency.”16 Dewey gives just this definition of philosophy in the syllabus for an
introduction to philosophy course he taught in 1892 at Michigan, at the beginning of his
career:
Philosophy (science) is the conscious inquiry into experience. It is the attempt of
experience to attain its own validity and fullness: the realization of the meaning of
experience. Science and philosophy can only report the actual conditions of life,
or experience. Their business is to reveal experience in its truth, its reality. They
state what is. The only distinction between science and philosophy is that the
latter reports the more generic (the wider) features of life; the former the more
detailed and specific.17
Experience and “Radical” Empiricism
I will argue that Gautama also subscribes to this second conception of philosophy,
but what is the significance of the seemingly innocuous contention that the subject matter
of philosophy is experience and its problems? It is first of all a way of saying that
16
17
Ibid., 1:18
John Dewey: The Early Works.
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philosophy must proceed in a radically empiricistic manner, following what Dewey calls
the “empirical, denotative method;” for both pragmatism and Buddhism are indeed
committed to the principle that all knowledge comes through (not from) experience.
But
to understand exactly what this means, it is essential that we recover the common,
authentic use of the term, “experience.” As Dewey says, “To know the meaning of
empiricism, we need to understand what experience is.”18
It is clear to Dewey that “traditional accounts of experience [from Hume, Locke,
and Berkeley on down] have not been empirical, but have been deductions [that is,
inferences], from unnamed premises of what experience must be…it has served ideas
forced into experience, not gathered from it;” and, we may add, mired philosophers for
generations in the so-called “problems of knowledge.”19 In particular, traditional
empiricism “starts with a reflective product as if it were primary, as if it were the
originally “given.””20 The truth is that, contrary to the tradition, experience is not the
passive reception of some kind of data, and we are not mere spectators.
It makes sense to say that philosophy is “the conscious inquiry into experience”
only because, Dewey argues,
[T]he value of the notion of experience for philosophical reflection is that it
denotes both the field, the sun and clouds and rain, seeds, and harvest, and the
man who labors, who plans, invents, uses, suffers, and enjoys. Experience
denotes what is experienced, the world of events and persons; and it denotes that
world caught up into experiencing, the career and destiny of mankind. Nature’s
place in man is no less significant than man’s place in nature. Man in nature is
man subjected; nature in man, recognized and used, is intelligence and art.21
“Experience and Education,” The Later Works, 13:11.
The Middle Works, 10:11
20
“Experience and Philosophic Method,” in Experience and Nature, John Dewey, The Later Works 19251953, 1:19
21
“Appendix 2: Experience and Philosophic Method,” The Later Works 1:384.
18
19
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Experience for Dewey is a continuous transaction with elements of our
environment. It is not to be understood in terms of what a subject, a mind, is undergoing
or in terms of the interaction between a subject and object that exist separate in their
interaction. As John Stuhr puts it so well, “experience is an activity in which subject and
object are unified and constituted as partial features and relations within this ongoing,
unanalyzed unity.”22 Of course, what we are primarily experiencing are scraped knees,
umbrellas, orders from the boss, dancing partners, fajitas, the June rains in San Antonio,
and so on. But the experience itself is not a discrete cognitive episode or a series of such
episodes, episodes of knowing, for the things that we experience are to be treated, used,
acted upon, acted with, enjoyed, or endured.23 Experience is a continuous affair of
simultaneous doings and sufferings. “It includes,” Dewey explains, “what men do and
suffer, what they strive for, love, believe and endure, and also how men act and are acted
upon, the ways in which they do and suffer, desire and enjoy, see, believe, imagine—in
short, processes of experiencing.”24
Dewey makes the crucial point that “reference to the primacy and ultimacy of the
material of ordinary experience protects us from creating artificial problems which
deflect the energy and attention of philosophers from the real problems that arise out of
actual subject matter.”25 In particular, the “material of ordinary experience” does not
consist only of discrete elements or objects, but also of continuities and connections
“Introduction by John Stuhr” in Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy, 2nd edition, ed. by John
Stuhr, Oxford University Press, 2000. p. 437.
23
I freely borrow these examples from my friend and former colleague, John P. Murphy, whose career was
cut short by cancer. These examples and a very lucid discussion of Dewey’s view of experience can be
found in his book, Pragmatism: From Peirce to Davidson (Westview Press, 1990). The book was
published posthumously and was edited by Richard Rorty, who also wrote the introduction to the book.
24
“Experience and Philosophic Method,” in Experience and Nature, John Dewey: The Later Works, 19251953, 1:17.
25
Ibid., 1: 26.
22
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inherent in the experience. Traditional empiricists obviously have not attended to the
“material of ordinary experience,” for they have generated a dualism of experience (the
procession of mental images) and “thinking” or “inference,” the latter performed by a
separate faculty of the mind. The truth is that there is no conscious experience without
inference, for inference is an operation within experience of directing behavior. This is,
in other words, “man in nature.”
Buddhist philosophers understood this and have been known to propound the socalled “theory of perception as inference.” Unfortunately the theory was taken by
opponents to be saying that what we perceive is determined by the constructs and ideas of
the mind, thus the charge that this theory leads to idealism. But this cannot be the case,
since Buddhists, like pragmatists, reject the metaphysical dualism of subject and object,
the self and the world; and by implication the distinction between the “cultural” and the
“natural,” what Donald Davidson calls the “scheme-content” dualism.
Experience is also “nature in man.” As Dewey says,
It is not experience which is experienced, but nature—stones, plants, animals,
diseases, health, temperature, electricity, and so on. Things interacting in certain
ways are experienced; they are what is experienced. Linked in certain ways with
another natural object—the human organism—they are how things are
experienced as well. Experience thus reaches down into nature. It has depth.26
The nature of experience is such that it is impossible not to be in touch with a real,
objective world, even if that world is not fixed once and for all. Dewey sums it all up in
the statement, “the chief characteristic trait of the pragmatic notion of reality [what has
been called his metaphysics of experience] is precisely that no theory of Reality in
general, uberhaupt, is possible or needed…[because] reality is a denotative term, a word
26
Ibid., 1: 12.
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used to designate indifferently everything that happens.”27 And this seems to be partly
what Gautama is getting at when he says, “If we “perceive with right wisdom the uprising
and ceasing of the world, the notions of existence or non-existence would not occur.”
Pratityasamutpada and the Pragmatic Method
Both Dewey and Gautama sought to emancipate philosophy from, in Dewey’s
words, “too intimate and exclusive attachment to traditional problems.”28 Gautama
called it an obsession. These problems, that philosophers proudly call “philosophical
problems” (like the mind-body problem, the problem of the existence of the external
world, the realism-idealism debate, and so forth) are in reality intra-theoretical problems,
problems that arise within and because of the theories that philosophers came up with
about things like experience, self, causality, to mention a few. They are academic
problems and traditional philosophical debates are “family quarrels.” They are not what
Dewey calls “the problems of men,” which really means problems that arise out of the
experience of men, out of human experience, whose solutions would have “practical
value,” the values of “transforming confusion, ambiguity and discrepancy into
illumination, definiteness, and consistency.” “Problems of men” can be, for example,
problems about the nature of the world in which we live, about the values that should
guide our lives, about the nature and possibilities of knowledge, and about the scope and
variety of human experiences.
The crucial difference between traditional philosophy and pragmatism is that the
latter fully embraces the method of radical empiricism, a method that requires the
acceptance of what Dewey calls the postulate of immediate empiricism: “postulate that
27
28
“The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy” in John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899-1924, 10:37.
Ibid., 10:5.
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things—anything, everything, in the ordinary and non-technical use of the term “thing”—
are what they are experienced as. Hence, if one wishes to describe anything truly, his
task is to tell what it is experienced as being.”29 In other words, Dewey is saying to the
philosopher, “if you wish to find out what subjective, objective, physical, mental, cosmic,
psychic, cause, substance, purpose, activity, evil, being, quality—any philosophic term,
in short—means, go to experience and see what it is experienced as.”30 Dewey
acknowledges that this method is not glamorous. “It is not spectacular,” he says, “it
permits of no offhand demonstrations of God, freedom, immortality, nor of the exclusive
reality of matter, or ideas, or consciousness, etc. But it supplies a way of telling what all
these terms means.”31 The results of empirical inquiry are “specifically experienced
meanings,” not esoteric concepts.
Nagarjuna is employing the method of radical empiricism in his book
Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way, but he calls it pratityasamutpada. He follows it
in the examination of such phenomena as motion and rest, time, self, birth and death, the
four noble truths, and of course, most famous of all, causality. In chapter one, he
engages philosophers who worried about what we are talking about when we talk about
causes, about one thing being the cause of another. They worried that there is no such
thing as a cause and effect relationship, no objective matter of fact behind our causal
discourse. Nagarjuna is famous for his criticisms of the many theories put forth to
explain what causality really is. He took apart in a brilliant manner the attempts of
various philosophers to prove the existence of such unobservable things as “necessary
conditions” and “causal powers,” and then in verse four of chapter one, he said: “power
“The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism” in John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899-1924, 3:158.
Ibid., 3:166.
31
Ibid., 3:166.
29
30
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to act does not have conditions. There is no power to act without conditions. There are
no conditions without power to act. Nor do they have the power to act.”
For example, to explain the lighting of a match, we cite the striking of the match
because “there is no power to act without conditions.” That is to say, talk about power to
act only arises in the context of the perceived causal efficacy of one or more conditions.
So we say, “the match will light if it is struck” or “whenever a match is struck it will
light.” “Whenever this occurs, that will occur.” This is all that we can mean by the idea
of cause and effect, and we arrived at this idea by experiencing the heat or burning of
fire, the sounds of animals, the breaking of glass by hard objects, and so forth. What
verse four warns about is confusing a functional property of the causal conditions with an
existing, essential property, called “power to act.” So, Nagarjuna says, we observe
conditions having the power to act, but no conditions have the power to act, because we
do not observe any power to act in the conditions.32
Therefore, the philosophical belief about causation as a hidden power in things or
as a necessary connection between events is, according to Nagarjuna, a samkalpa
(“mental fabrication”) and a prapanca (“obsession” according to Kalupahana or
“phenomenal extension” according to Frederick Streng).33 Calling it a samkalpa is to say
that there is no empirical support, nothing in our experience to even suggest causal
powers or necessary connections. Calling it a prapanca locates the source of the idea in
our desire to “go beyond” the ordinary use of the term, to leave the “home” of the notion
in our experiential world.
I present this interpretation of Nagarjuna in my paper, “Nagarjuna’s Fundamental Principle of
Pratityasamutpada,” in Philosophy East & West, Vol. 51, No. 1, January 2001. However, at that time, I
did not make the connection with pragmatism.
33
See Frederick Streng, “The Significance of Pratityasamutpada,” in Mervyn Sprung, ed., The Problem of
Two Truths in Buddhism and Vedanta (Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel, 1973), 7
32
13
It is in this context that Nagarjuna invokes his controversial notions of sunya and
sunyata, empty and emptiness. He declares that “the Victorious ones have announced
that emptiness is the relinquishing of all views,” but he is fully aware of the resilience
and attraction of the picture of philosophy that has held us captive. He realizes that even
his claim that “all this is sunya” can be misinterpreted. So, he warns that “those who are
possessed of the view of emptiness are said to be incorrigible,” and that to assume that he
is propounding a theory of reality is like grasping a snake by the wrong end.34 This is
what so many commentators have done. So it is that Nagarjuna, the faithful follower of
Gautama, has been portrayed as a nihilist, a conventionalist, a relativist, and an antirealist.
He is none of these. He is, like Gautama, a pragmatist.
Ewing Chinn
Department of Philosophy
Trinity University
San Antonio, Texas
34
David J. Kalupahana, Nagarjuna: The Philosophy of the Middle Way (State University of New York
Press, 1986) The passage, 24:11, goes like this: “A wrongly perceived emptiness ruins a person of meager
intelligence. It is like a snake that is wrongly grasped or knowledge that is wrongly cultivated.”
14