Monty Python and Philosophy by Gary Hardcastle (best novels for beginners .TXT) 📗

Krishna in the Gita) to pronounce that killing is acceptable because this mortal life is only illusion anyway. Death and even human suffering is not as troubling for the transcendental thinker because this short illusory life will be infinitely outweighed by the next world—where we’re going to find perfect joy, and Jaws I, II and III, forever and ever, amen.

The Buddha finds all this buoyant brightness rather suspicious. As did Wittgenstein, who traced the source of philosophical confusions to careless uses of language, Buddha thinks that language has gone on holiday. What does it mean to be perfectly happy? In the Potthapada sutta (Digha Nikaya), Buddha retells a debate he had with some “philosophers and brahmins” who believed that “the soul is perfectly happy and healthy after death.” The Buddha says:

I asked them whether, so far as they knew it or perceived it, the human world was perfectly happy, and they answered “No.” Then I asked them: “Moreover, can you maintain that you yourselves for a whole night, or for a whole day, or even for half a night or day, have ever been perfectly happy?” And they answered: “No.” Then I said to them: “Further, do you know a way or a method, by which you can realize a state that is altogether happy?” And still to that question they answered: “No.” And then I said: “Sirs, have you ever heard the voices of heavenly beings who had realized rebirth in a perfectly happy world, saying: ‘there is a right path, a true path, which is in human capacity to follow, a path to the world of unfailing bliss, for we ourselves by following it have come to this world of bliss’?” They still answered: “No.”52

The Buddha concludes from this Socratic questioning, that, while their mouths are moving and words are coming out, these philosophers and Brahmins are really speaking a kind of nonsense. They’re like carpenters who build staircases for mansions that they’ve never seen, and for which they have no dimensions or measurements. They labor, but their misunderstanding of what they do renders their work absurd.

Why must transcendentalists so misunderstand what it is they strive for? The real point of the Buddha’s argument is metaphysical. Why can’t you be perfectly happy? Why can’t you even be happy for more than a few hours? Because happiness is inherently impermanent (anicca). Like all other feelings, happiness comes and goes, and like all other things in the world, it cannot last. Treating a moment as if it were a thing to be possessed ad infinitum is a regular human tendency. But it is regularly in error. Even for those who enjoy Vegas-style dinner theater, two or three hours may be a treat. But days and years and centuries would seem more a propos of hell than heaven.

Upon close inspection, Buddha shows, paradise crumbles. The atman, on the other hand, is a no show. The Buddha thinks that atman is nowhere to be found except in the literary inventions of Hinduism and the confusions of its followers. Buddhism, contrary to all dualistic theories, asserts that we are not made up of two metaphysically different parts, a permanent spirit and an impermanent body. Buddhism breaks with most religions, East and West, by recognizing that we are each a finite tangle of qualities, all of which eventually exhaust themselves, and none of which, conscious or other, carries on independently. All humans, according to Buddha, are composed of the five aggregates (khandas ); body (rupa), feeling (vedana), perception (sanna), dispositions or volitional tendencies (sankhara) and consciousness (vinnana). If the Buddha was standing around in the battlefield setting of the Bhagavad Gita, he would certainly chime-in and object to Krishna’s irresponsible claim that a permanent soul resides in Arjuna and his enemies. Show me this permanent entity, the Buddha would demand. Is the body permanent? Are feelings permanent? What about perceptions, or dispositions, or even consciousness? The Buddha says “If there really existed the atman, there would be also something that belonged to this atman. As however, in truth and reality, neither an atman nor anything belonging to an atman can be found, is it not really an utter fool’s doctrine to say: This is the world, this am I; after death I shall be permanent, persisting and eternal?” (Mijjhima Nikaya) Buddha examines all the elements of the human being, finds that they are all fleeting, and finds no additional permanent entity or soul amidst the tangle of human faculties. There is no ghost in the machine.

What’s So Grotesque about That?

In their rejection of transcendentalism, Buddhism and Monty Python converge in their celebrations of the grotesque. The Python crew seems to relish the disgusting facts of human biology and they take every opportunity to render them through special effects. Throughout Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, blood spurts, vomit spews, babies explode from birth canals, decapitated heads abound, and limbs putrefy. Theravada Buddhism also celebrates the revolting, treating it as a meditation focus for contemplating the lack of permanence. The transcendentalist consoles herself with the idea that this physical body may decay and perish, but an eternal soul will outlast the material melt-down—not so for the Buddha.

In an attempt to undercut human vanity and demonstrate the impermanence of all things, Buddhist scriptures are filled with nauseating details about rotting carcasses and putrid flesh. In the Anguttara Nikaya, for example, the scripture asks, “Did you never see in the world the corpse of a man or a woman, one or two or three days after death, swollen up, blue-black in color, and full of corruption? And did the thought never come to you that you also are subject to death, that you cannot escape it?” (III, 35)

When I was at a monastery in Southern Thailand, I chanced upon some reproductions of “dhamma paintings” from the mid-nineteenth century. These pictures were from a Chaiya manuscript discovered nearby, and they depicted, in detail, the “Ten Reflections