name and form and religion

I’ve been reading Alan Watts again. And this morning I was directed by @JacquesR to this almost totally excellent piece by Greta Christina, about the “myths” about religion that atheists are wrongly accused of believing and spreading.

I agree with Christina on almost everything, the exceptions being her tone (I always wish these pieces were written more gently — especially when you’re talking about talking about nuance in religion, the reader needs to be calm in order to understand) and her objection to objections that the world “religion” includes things to which atheists’ criticisms don’t apply.

On that last point, Christina writes:

I suppose that, every time I critique religion, I could instead type the entire phrase, “belief in supernatural entities or forces with some effect on the natural world.” You know why I don’t? Because I’m a good writer. I’m trying to be concise. And instead of using a thirteen-word noun phrase, I’m using the word “religion,” the way that it’s used and understood by the overwhelming majority of people who use it.

Christina acknowledges that the word “religion” doesn’t exactly fit what she means, but says that’s OK because the “overwhelming majority” believe that it does. If that’s not a fallacy, I don’t know what is. Christina’s piece is clarifying some nuances and misunderstandings in religious debate, but she is — explicitly, at least — refusing to make space for this particular nuance or misunderstanding. She wouldn’t need a thirteen-word noun phrase: that’s just histrionics. She could easily type “theistic religion” or ‘belief in the supernatural” and be done with it.

Anyway, Christina says religion is:

a word whose definition is basically agreed on by almost everybody

She says that, for her and almost all atheists, religion means “belief in supernatural entities or forces with some effect on the natural world”. (Great. So say: “belief in the supernatural” and live up to your capacity for nuance.)

But if that’s the case, we’re in serious trouble. It’s not troublesome because this definition excludes religions like Zen Buddhism (although that’s certainly part of it). It’s troublesome because the debate about religion continues to miss the point of religion.

The purpose of having a religion is not to believe in a particular notion. The purpose of having a religion is to practise it. And the purpose of practising it is to [and it's here that words become particularly troublesome, but this will have to suffice:] cultivate a felt understanding of reality that transcends conventional abstractions.

At this stage, a lot of atheists will think “here comes the nonsense”. Transcend conventional abstractions? And enter the world of unintelligible goo? Well, let me honour my own call for calm, gentle, nuanced argument and make the case for this idea. As usual, any religious jargon will come from Eastern religions — but all contemplative traditions have terminology that could make the same points as I’ll make here.

Transcending conventional abstractions is liberation from the ideas that, ordinarily, we cannot help but take to be the world. (Buddhism is a way of liberation, as are all religions when they are practised.) Collectively, these ideas are called maya in Hinduism and Buddhism, which is ordinarily understood as “the illusion that veils the one underlying reality” (Watts, The Way of Zen, p. 38). A way of liberation is a progressive disentanglement from these beliefs, notions, and abstractions — not discarding them, but seeing them for what they are.

Disentanglement is necessary because entanglement is frustrating (often painful, occasionally agonising). Here I’m going to quote Alan Watts at length, because he says it better than I can (ibid, p. 39 onwards. Text bolded by me.):

Now classification is precisely maya. The word is derived from the Saksrit root matr-, “to measure, form, build, or lay out a plan,” the root from which we obtain such Greco-Latin words as “meter, matrix, material and matter”. The fundamental process of measurement is division, whether by drawing a line with the finger, by marking off or by enclosing circles with the span of the hand or dividers, or by sorting grain or liquids into measures (cups). Thus the Saksrit root dva- from which we get the word “divide” is also the root of the Latin duo (two) and the English “dual.”

To say, then, that the world of facts and events is maya is to say that facts and events are terms of measurement rather than realities of nature. We must, however, expand the concept of measurement to include setting bounds of all kinds, whether by descriptive classification or selective screening. It will thus be easy to see that facts and events are as abstract as lines of latitude or as feet and inches. Consider for a moment that it is impossible to isolate a single fact, all by itself. Facts come in pairs at the very least, for a single body is inconceivable apart from a space in which it hangs. Definition, setting bounds, delineation — these are always acts of division and thus of duality, for as soon as a boundary is defined it has two sides.

…

The doctrine of maya is therefore a doctrine of relativity. It is saying that things, facts and events are delineated, not by nature, but by human description, and that the way in which we describe (or divide) them is relative to our varying points of view.

…

Certainly the world of nature abounds with surfaces and lines, with areas of density and vacuity, which we employ in marking out the boundaries of events and things. But here again, the maya doctrine asserts that these forms (rupa) have no “own-being” or “self-nature” (svabhava): they do not exist in their own right, but only in relation to one another, as a solid cannot be distinguished save in relation to a space. In this sense, the solid and the space, the sound and the silence, the existent and the nonexistent, the figure and the ground are inseparable, interdependent, or “mutually arising”, and it is only by maya or conventional division that they may be considered apart from one another.

…

To serve their purpose, names and terms must of necessity be fixed and definite like all other units of measurement. But their use is — up to a point — so satisfactory that man is always in danger of confusing his measures with the world so measured, of identifying money with wealth, fixed convention with fluid reality. But to the degree that he identifies himself and his life with these rigid and hollow frames of definition, he condemns himself to the perpetual frustration of one trying to catch water in a sieve.

…

Maya is, then, usually equated with nama-rupa or “name and form”, with the mind’s attempt to grasp the fluid forms of nature in its mesh of fixed classes. But when it is understood that form is ultimately void — in the special sense of ungraspable and immeasurable — the world of form is immediately seen as Brahman instead of maya. The formal world becomes the real world in the moment when it is no longer clutched, in the moment when its changeful fluidity is no longer resisted. Hence it is the very transitoriness of the world which is the sign of its divinity, of its actual identity with the indivisible and immeasurable infinity of Brahman.

…

In sum, then, the maya doctrine points out, firstly, the impossibility of grasping the actual world in the mind’s net of words and concepts, and, secondly, the fluid character of those very forms which thought attempts to define. The world of facts and events is altogether nama, abstract names, and rupa, fluid form. It escapes both the comprehension of the philosopher and the grasp of the pleasure-seeker like water from a clutching fist. There is even something deceptive in the idea of Brahman as the eternal reality underlying the flux… for in so far as these are concepts they are as incapable of grasping the real as any other.

It is precisely this realisation of the total elusiveness of the world which lies at the root of Buddhism.

Phew!

So Mahayana Buddhism developed many skilful means of disentangling oneself from the mesh of conventional abstractions, entanglement in which is futility and frustration. Christianity, at least insofar as it is practised and not merely believed in (and the extent to which belief is itself practice is a topic for another post), is also a way of liberation. Ditto the contemplative arms of Islam, Judaism, [insert religion here]. That is the proper purpose of religion, and that’s why I think religion is important.

(Interestingly, it also means that “religion”, like all concepts, fails to capture its referent, the phenomenon it’s trying to designate. But that’s OK with me.)

Sadly, for the time being, the issue of disentanglement from name-and-form hasn’t been raised in the God Wars — perhaps because it requires more careful explication than the internet age can provide, and because it can’t easily be expressed in sound-bites that don’t sound like worthless nonsense (e.g. “transcend conceptual abstractions”).

Nevertheless, it represents a middle ground to which both atheists and believers could readily move. Atheists are keen that believers should stop cleaving so passionately to their unprovable theses (because a lot of bad shit happens as a result) so they could very well add the “nama-rupa” doctrine to their already formidable arsenal of arguments against religious belief. And believers (one would hope) are keen to attain religious insight, which lies precisely beyond concepts and not within their mesh. Therefore, if they can let go of the self-identity that’s become invested simply in opposing the other camp, people from both camps might recognise the value of this idea, to their mutual benefit, and to the partial cessation of the fruitless screeching of the God Wars.