Parables of Many-Sided Truth

 

       A traveling salesman lost on a backroad saw a country store ahead. He pulled his car up beside an old man and a dog on a bench in front and, just to be safe, asked, "Does your dog bite?" 

        "Nope," said the old man.

When the salesman got out, the dog lunged, tearing off half his pants leg as he jumped back and slammed the car door.

"I thought you said your dog didn't bite."

"Ain't my dog," said the old man.

This is a variation on the ancient parable of the blind men who describe an elephant in contradictory but accurate terms because they are touching different parts. Truth depends on context. The old man's answers are perfectly true--even more true, logically speaking, if he never owned a dog. In that case, he can say with complete certainty that no dog he owns bites. Your dog is an empty set, incapable of bites. 

           Of course, a more considerate old man might have answered "Ain't my dog" initially, realizing that the salesman wasn't inquiring about a non-existent dog (or even, hypothetically, about a toothless beagle on the old man's sofa back home). We know what the salesman meant and suspect that the old man did too. That's the joke. The salesman was inquiring about a dog connected in an obvious way to the old man, his dog just as I say my wife without claiming to be her owner or master.

In social situations, this kind of misunderstanding suggests malice or stupidity, but in philosophy, theology, psychology, and politics, people routinely discuss of empty sets or sets without clear limits, so that statements about them affirm nothing useful. "Your dog" is (depending on context) both an empty and a full set, a clear and unclear term, ambiguous because your is both singular and plural and grammatical possession desinates many different, even contradictory, relationships.

I discussed earlier how Jain doctrine of Anekantavada, or "many-sidedness," answers all general questions with a qualified yes, an acknowledgement that in some yet-unconceived sense almost anything may be true. Until all conceivable qualifiers are made explicit, nothing can be absolutely excluded, and, even then, language may be inadequate to the situation. This insight nullifies dogmatic wording but isn't to be confused with skepticism, which parks an unqualified no as it waits for proof. 

           Even if language cannot answer unqualified questions--cannot give absolute truth--its categories work well in simple qualified circumstances. "DO NOT TOUCH!" printed on a live electrical box may save lives, but we can't elevate no-touching to doctrine. According to "many-sidedness," word-forms that pass for universals are all like this. Enlightened seers may intuit absolute reality, but their intuitions are inexpressible. No word-strings perfectly embody what is. The experience of truth is like the taste of food; its can be known, but not put into explicit words.

Expanding on the teachings of Mahavira, their immediate founder, Jain philosophers parsed all the types of qualifications in the theory of syadvada, "conditioned predication." They identified seven ways that knowledge claims can be qualified, from in some ways it is and in some ways it is not to it is indescribable. Stack these seven onto the four aspects of time, space, substance and mode and seven viewpoints--universal, genre, use, time, name, etymology, and concrete traits, all expressed in Sanskrit terms such as Rijusutra-naya--and we end up with a mind-numbing maze of categories. Mind numbing may even be the point of all this, to break the analytical mind. Certainly, it numbed my mind.

          Statements need to be qualified, but so do their qualifiers, throwing us into infinite regress like a three-year-old who keeps asking, "Why?" Still, as far as we can manage, it may help to recognize the conditionality of truth, to recognize that literal opposites may both have positive truth values even if we can't verbalize the conditions under which they do.

Aristotle based his logic with the law of non-contradiction and the law of excluded middle, which state (1) that a statement cannot be both true and false under the same conditions and (2) that, of any two contradictories, only one can be true. A theological application of this is that, if God is good, then he cannot be evil, which leads to the pesky Problem of Evil. These logical principles are indeed self-evident in categorical thought and language, and Aristotle's system remains authoritative, but the principles work only work when terms describe the same thing in the same sense at the same time and in the same respect. That's a lot of sames. In other words, all variables must be equalized. We often deal with terms that are either undefinable or loosely defined, perhaps because they are analogical or because they refer to sense data that is subjectivity mapped.

Is this room warm or cool? You and I, dressed differently and with different metabolisms, may disagree, and thermometer measurement will not help unless we agree on a target temperature and accurate thermometer--a set of conditions that a third person may reject--especially if the room has a special purpose such as to preserve meat or to dry tobacco. A room can be both warm and cold at the same time, arguably in different senses, but, since the terms have no single master meanings, in practice they may be simultaneously true even though they are opposites. Are tomatoes fruits or a vegetables? Are tomatillos a type of green tomato?

          Categories really go fuzzy when we come to religious experiences. Bertrand Russel saw no difference between a drunk's seeing imaginary bugs and an ascetic's seeing God, but the ascetic would disagree. It seems that transcendence of logical categories, a mindset where Aristotle's laws are under erasure, is essential to religious experience. Thomas Aquinas' theology, the most rigorous logical systematizing of Christianity, left room for logically contradictory "mysteries" such as the Trinity, and the post-Calvinist system of Friedrich Schleiermacher reconstructs Christianity on the basis of the believer's intuition.

Buddhist commentaries often preface discourses by breaking logic--a ceremonial running of bulls through Aristotle's china shop--such as this passage from the Korean sage Wonhyo (617-686), which A. Charles Muller describes as "an exercise in inconceivability": "Thus it is neither large nor small, neither in a hurry nor taking its time; neither moving nor still, neither one nor many. Not large, it can become an atom, leaving nothing behind. Not small, it can contain all space, with room left over" (Muller, p. 543). A prolific commentator on Buddhist scriptures, Wonhyo is revered for his syncretistic readings of conflicting Buddhist schools, readings that find commonalities in them without obscuring their differences. He was able to express a coherent communality while identifying qualifiers that caused different views. Wonhyo's approach implements Jain many-sidedness, the idea that no statement is true or false until all of its qualifiers have been understood.

The story of Wonhyo's awakening parallels the Old Man's Dog and the Blind Men and the Elephant. Korean Buddhism was a confusing welter of teachings from China, and, as a young monk, Wonhyo decided to settle his confusion by studying under a Chinese master. He reached a seaport to start his journey on a dark, rainy night and found a cave to take shelter in. Thirsty, groping in the dark, he drank from what seemed to be gourds of water. The next morning, after a pleasant night, he discovered that he had slept in a tomb recently plundered by robbers and littered with human remains. The supposed gourds were skulls. One account describes Wonhyo vomiting and running from the tomb. Muller's milder version says that the voyage was delayed and that Wonhyo, forced to spend another night in the tomb, was "plagued by ghosts and nightmares." 

In any case, Wonhyo concluded that "because of the arising of thought, various phenomena arise; when thought ceases, a cave and a grave are not two." This awakening--this awareness that thought conditions perception--was all Wonhyo needed to resolve his doubts about conflicting teachings. He canceled his trip and returned to the secular life: "Since there are no dharmas outside of the mind, why should I seek them somewhere?" (Muller, p. 539)

After this insight Wonhyo became a Korean folk hero, pursuing an eccentric lifestyle. When he died on the road at 70, he not only had written 80 commentaries, but spread Buddhism from village to village with his songs, playing his lute in taverns and brothels. He was married for a time to a princess, and their son became a great scholar. Wonhyo's insight in the tomb, however eccentric, is central to Buddhism. 

Thich Nhat Hanh, explaining Right View, the first branch of the Noble Eightfold Path, quotes the Buddha: "Where there is perception, there is deception" (pp. 52-53). Any perception is an interaction between object and subject, the perceived and the perceiver, a view and a point of view, so entangled that the two cannot be separated. There is no out there independent of an in here. Our own colors blend with the world's hues. Nhat Hanh explains, "Relatively speaking, there are right views and there are wrong views. But if we look more deeply, we see that all views are wrong views. No view can ever be the truth. It is just from one point: that is why it is called a 'point of view.' If we go to another point, we will see things differently and realize that our first view was not entirely right. Buddhism is not a collection of views. It is a practice to help us eliminate wrong views. The quality of our views can always be improved. From the viewpoint of ultimate reality, Right View is the absence of all views" (p. 56).

This rephrasing of the fable of the blind men and the elephant, helps to clarify one of my favorite stories from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Writings (1957). 

Hogen, a Chinese master, gave four traveling monks permission to camp outside his small rural temple and overhead them arguing about subjectivity and objectivity. 

He approached them and said, "There is a big stone. Do you consider it to be inside or outside of your mind?" 

One of the monks replied, "From the Buddhist viewpoint everything is an objectification of mind, so I would say that the stone is inside my mind." 

The Zen teacher observed, "Your head must feel very heavy if you are carrying a stone like that in your mind" (p. 87).

I know it is perilous to comment on this kind of story, but my best construction is that the traveling monk's error is not his particular answer, but his confidence in a particular answer.

References

Muller, "Wonhyu" in John Powers, ed, The Buddhist World, 2016, http://www.acmuller.net/kor-bud/2015-11-wonhyo-buddhist-world.pdf

Nhat Hanh, Thich. The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation. Harmony, 2015.

Reps, Paul, and Nyogen Senzaki. Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Writings. Tuttle, 1998.