William James and the Medecine Buddha: The Middle · PDF fileWilliam James and the Medecine...

William James and the Medecine Buddha The Middle Way of Pragmatism

Beginning my studies the first step pleasd me much The mere fact consciousness these forms the power of motion The least insect or animal the senses eyesight love

Walt Whitman Beginning My Studies (1867)

I pause to consider if it really be A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books

Song ofMyself

It is a curious fact of history that the psychology practiced in India two thousand years ago was more like the psychology taught at Harvard in the 1890s under James than the psychology taught today in academic universishyties is like the psychology taught in America one hundred years ago

Eugene Taylor

I

Sometime during his tour of America in 1902-1904 Anagarika Dhannapala attended a

lecture by William James at Harvard Dharmapala was the Sinhalese Buddhist who had been

one of the most popular speakers at the World Parliament of Religions held during the 1893

Chicago Columbian Exposition He had been working in association with Colonel Olcott and

Madame Blavatsky to renew Buddhism in the modern world and from their point of view

spread the theosophical light in the Occident Professor James upon recognizing the saffronshy

robed Dharmapala in the class invited him up to speak Take my chair he said You are

better equipped to lecture on psychology than 1 After Dhannapala had given a short talk on

Buddhist doctrines James turned to his students and remarked This will be the psychology

everybody will be studying twenty-five years from now1

This anecdote assuming its reliability is most suggestive for anyone who has thought

about the resemblances between James and Buddhism It arouses again all the questions and

surmises of possible influence At first glance it could be taken to imply that James was fashy

miliar enough with Buddhism by 1902 to express such sanguine appreciation Or it may be

an example of his famous chann and ready intellectual sympathies rather than an indication

of the state of his knowledge James may have been welcoming the celebrated Dhannapala

ISangharakshita Anagarika Dharmapala A Biographical Sketch (Kandy Buddhist Publication Society 1964) 78 quoted in Rick Fields How the Swans Came to the Lake (Boulder 1978) 134-134 This is a lively and readable narrative history of Buddhism in America

with his characteristic generosity He is often criticized for allowing sympathies and enthusishy

asm to do duty for understanding Did James perceive the similarities and affinities with his

own psychology Was he being pluralistic and open to a new variety of psychology intrinsishy

cally interesting in its own right or just a gracious host I think the answer by 1902 was

probably all three Note that he describes what Dharmapala said as a psychology

The resemblances between James and Buddhism are by now well-known to those

working in the fields of cross-cultural psychology and comparative philosophy There are

two main points of confluence the psychological analysis of conscious experience as the

primary reality-the stream of consciousness or cittasamtana and the stress on the purely

practical and therapeutic sense of philosophical questions They share a functional vitalistic

and organismic view of thought the methodological principle of subjecting all conceptual

problems to the test of experience and the motive in philosophic speculation of enlarging

human happiness and freedom

Both James and the Buddha reached their unorthodox positions by a break with the

dominant trends of thought of the day and flourished in times of social ferment and change

receptive to new departures in critical thinking-the sixth-century Sakyan republic and

Americas new experiment in democracy They found themselves in opposition to supernatshy

uralism and absolutism on one side and materialism and nihilism on the other James whole

intellectual biography could be read as his rebellion against the disease syndromes of

damned absolutism and brass instrument psychology and the despair and depression

they bred Both were men of profound humanity grace and compassion who arrived at

their viewpoints through personal experience of suffering-Siddhartha through his legshy

endary discovery of the miseries of life and their cause through clinging to a world of solidishy

fied things persons and opinions and James through plumbing his own soul-sickness and

melancholia

James first trained as a doctor and became like the Lord Buddha an empiric physician of

the mind treating the psychological causes of human suffering For both philosophic and

religious views are medicines to be prescribed to the ill in measured and effective doses or

food for the healthy-minded They are true in the same measure

If theological idea prove to have a value in concrete life they will be true for pragmatism in the sense of being good for so much For how much more they are true will depend entirely on their relations to other truths that also have to be acknowledged2

2What Pragmatism Means Writings of William James A Comprehensive Edition ed John J McDermott (Random House 1967) 387

They are to be administered as upaya skillful means since ideas are cures for metaphysical

diseases not answers The eight-fold path and the psychological analysis of the conditional

relations of consciousness in Early Buddhism are a thorough-going moral pragmatism aimed

at the attainment of true cognition vijja serenity samatha and deliverance vimutti through

purifying the stream of the personality For James likewise the end of thinking morality

and religion is the Sentiment of Rationality-the release from striving craving aspiration

and dis-ease that consists in

a strong feeling of ease peace rest the transition from a state of puzzle and perplexity to rational comprehension full of lively relief and pleashysure

When enjoying plenary freedom either in the way of motion or of thought we are in a sort of anaesthetic state

feeling the sufficiency of the present moment of its absoluteness 3

The truth and value of ideas are in their ministry to this equanimity As the Buddha says

they are provisional and tentative

If a person has faith Bharadvaja he preserves truth when he says My faith is thus but he does not yet come to the definite conclusion Only this is true anything else is wrong

If a person approves of something if he receives an oral tradition if he reaches a conclusion based on reasoned cogitation if he gains a reflective acceptance of a view he preserves truth when he says My reflective acshyceptance of a view is thus but he does not yet come to the definite conshyclusion Only this is true anything else is wrong4

Truth therefore is to be found in its practical and beneficent moral effects the test is

empirical experience and in this sense both might be said to be verificationists and to share

a moral-utility theory of truth The Lord Buddha says I preach you a dhamma comparable

to a raft for the sake of crossing over and not for the sake of clinging to its For James

likewise the significance of philosophic and religious ideas lies entirely as Peirce would say

in what conceivable effects what difference they conceivably could have on our concrete exshy

perience if they are taken to be true They must be evaluated by their practical consequences

for attaining our end-for the Tathagata liberation for James adaptive success for both

spiritual ease and moral invigoration-and not clung to dogmatically By their fruits ye shall

know them For the decisive factor in our experience of the world is our moral intent In the

Atthasalini Buddhaghosa expounds the part moral consciousness plays in the world of

3The Sentiment of Rationality Writings of William James 317-318 4Canki Sutta 95 ii 171-172 The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha A New Translation of the Majjhima Nikaya tr Bhikkhu Nanamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi (Wisdom Publications Boston 1995) 5Alagaddupama Sutta 23 i 135

sense6 When moral consciousness in the realm of sense arises then only is there conshy

tact For James too the point of contact with things is our motivation and conation

In the Subha Sutta 99 (ii 206) the Buddha calls practices prescribed for accomplishing

the good the equipment of the mind James echoes this when he remarks Theories thus beshy

come instruments not answers to enigmas in which we can rest7 The Lord Buddha was

primarily concerned with the effect of his teachings on his disciples life and conduct

Throughout the Nikayas he consistently states that one should reject all beliefs that are not

conducive to ones welfare and happiness8 Consequently the truth-value of a statement may

at times be subsidiary to its usefulness or benefit in deciding whether or not to utter it In the

Abhayarajakumara Sutta 58 (i 396) truth-value usefulness and pleasantness are relativized

and adjusted to the situation The Tathagata will never utter the false and unbeneficial but he

will know the right time to speak what is true beneficial and agreeable and the right time to

speak the true beneficial and disagreeable The motive for right speech is compassion In

practice this means that the true is the morally advantageous and this seems to be the upshot

of James notorious definition in What Pragmatism Means the true is the name of

whatever proves to be good in the way of belief and good too for definite assignable reashy

sons

The Buddha tended to avoid positive assertion about questions of ontology and cosshy

mology and tried to steer his raft between the extremes of annihilationism and eternalism

James saw both sides of a question to a fault and regularly tried to balance the tensions All

subjects objects percepts concepts reified dualities and hierarchies and our views about

them the whole play of namarupa are to be deconstructed into transactions and psyshy

chophysical processes the skandhas and regarded as functional and provisional discriminashy

tions in the stream of pure experience as productions of vikalpa the discriminating selecshy

tively-attending mind No view is wrong per se but partial indeterminate and dialectical

Thus the notion of a permanent substantial ego is not so much rejected as blown out into a

subtle phenomenological analysis of the paticcasamuppada the synergy and co-emergence

of person and world The essence of the self is pure knowing vinnana not Purusa not a

soul or mind outside or above nature The person becomes a pattern of behaving a habitus

as Bourdieu would say Things and selves arise interdependently through seamless interrelashy

tionship in Indras Net the open field of experience or the Jamesian pluriverse

6The Expositor Buddhaghosas Commentary on the Dhammasangani The First Book of the Abhidhamma Pitaka vol I Pali Text Society Translation Series no 8 tr Maung Tin ed Mrs Rhys Davids (London) 142 7nWhat Pragmatism Means Writings of William James 380 8See for instance the discourse on inquiry in the Kalama Sutta

There are several studies of these resemblances between Jamesian psychology pragmashy

tism and Buddhist doctrines9bull What is needed now is an inquiry into James life and times

and his intellectual milieux to delineate how he found the way to his own majjhima patipada

For James approach was always like the Buddhas to go beyond dualities and find the

middle way He thereby arrived independently at a viewpoint congruent in many respects

with Buddhist teachings or as a Buddhist might say a lotus of the dharma arose in late

nineteenth-century America 10

There is no need to look for Asian imports Nineteenth-century American culture was a

well-spring of indigenous streams of thought and experience sufficient to produce aborigishy

nallya Jamesian psychology and pragmatism James was a unique hybridization of his exshy

traordinary family background and the peculiarities of his personal development-his spirishy

tual crises his struggle with depression his artistic aspirations and his training as a physishy

cian-together with his cultural ambiance-Transcendentalism Swedenborgianism Newshy

World utopianism and religious experimentation American democratic optimism and faith

British empiricism the new German psychophysics French psychopathology and psychiashy

try Spiritualism mind-cure and the Society for Psychical Research 1I The result is a culshy

tural matrix different in detail and color from the Buddhas but similar in certain important

respects A contextualization of James that situates his thought in his personal and social exshy

perience brings into view how James evolved a mode of thought so conformable to the

Buddhas through sharing a comparable conjuncture of problems and solutions-finding the

middle way between idealism and materialism between sensationalism and rationalism

9DC Mathur The Historical Buddha (Gotama) Hume and James on the Self Comparisons and Evaluations Philosophy East and West (Honolulu 1978) 28 254-69 Kamala Kumari Notion of Truth in Buddhism and Pragmatism (Delhi 1987) David Kalupahana The Principles of Buddhist Psychology (SUNY 1987) Miranda Shaw William James and Yogacara Philosophy A Comparative Inquiry Philosophy East and West (Honolulu July 1987) 37 223-44 A comparison of James and Yogacara may seem far-fetched unless you reject as Ms Shaw does and Mr Kalupahana the common and erroneous view of Yogacaran cittamatra as merely a subjective idealism James experience only view was likewise misshytaken as a kind of idealism by some of his contemporary critics such as AO Lovejoy Shaw equates the conshycept of arthakriya useful action in the Madhyantavibhaga-sastra or Treatise on Discrimination between the Middle and Extreme to pragmatic workability lontis is hardly an original view Most recent scholarship on this question assumes the independent arising if you will of Jamesian and Buddhist psychology Ms Shaw concludes These similar philosophical systems arose in different cultural contexts in response to entirely different intellectual milieux In conversation Mr Kalupahana likewise confirms this interpretation but believes the cultural contexts were not so different in certain broad respects llJames approach to psychology via introspectionism and a theory of consciousness was out of favor during the long regime of behaviorism Like Freud his stress on consciousness ran into rough critical waters There has been however a reappraisal of James in recent years with the resurgence of interest in consciousness the popularity of humanistic and transpersonal therapies and the rediscovery of his seminal richness and receptivshyity to the religious dimensions of the personality

seeking liberation from dogmatic and oppressive traditions and stressing the practical and

ethical

Such a study must also parenthetically be respectful of the important divergences as

well James concern with the life of the householder the social relations and involvements

of the self his strong commitment to social activism and the heroic engagement of our moral

energies with the evils of the world and his view of life as an adventure with all its risks and

failures to be taken with pluck and will James the meliorist would undoubtedly agree with

the Dharnmapada that the purpose of action is to accomplish the good or as he himself says

that act must be the best act which makes for the best whole but he would regard the life

of the arahant or bhikkhu as only one way to go about this and perhaps not always the most

requisite 12 But it should be said for both James and the Buddha the intersubjective symshy

bolic dimension of the self and its social generation remained undertheorized the spiritual

welfare of the individual is the chief concern The symbolic interactionism of G H Mead

and the Chicago School extends and supplements James in this direction of the social 13

II

What did James know of Buddhism and when did he know it It seems fairly clear to

me that James arrived at his distinctive positions quite independently of any direct knowledge

of Buddhist psychology and philosophy There is no evidence that in his formative years

James was in the least aware of Buddhism outside of the vague notions of Eastern wisdom

then prevalent in the West The curious thing about James is that although there are many

circumstantial indications he knew or had the opportunity to know quite a bit about

Buddhism there is no evidence of it in his writings except for several references in the

Varieties 14 Moreover this knowledge until quite late in his life remained largely a comshy

pendium of the conventional and second-hand notions percolated to him from his

Transcendentalist legacy Boston Brahmins interesting in things eastern and perusings of

Orientalia The deficiencies of knowledge derived from such sources will be immediately

obvious By 1902 and the Varieties ofReligious Experience he had matured his own thought

and may have come to notice certain resonances However given the state of Oriental scholshy

arship in his day the precise presentations of Buddhist psychological doctrines that would

IZThe Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life Writings of William James 623 13Van Meter Ames Zen and American Thought (University of Hawaii Press 1962) also discusses among other things this social and semiotic inseparability of selves 14William James Varieties ofReligious Experience A Study in Human Nature (New York Random House 1902) 391-393

have demonstrated the subtler convergences were unavailable to him So the answer to the

question is very little and late When James confesses his ignorance of Buddhism in the

Varieties this is actually the sign that he is beginning to get a clearer picture 15

There are three other factors to be considered as explanations of James minimal reshy

sponse to Buddhism and why it is registered so little in his writing

First as remarked above there was the nature of the scholarship available to him

Buddhism was increasingly in the air in the fin-de-siecle West but it was of a questionable

description based on poor translations and inadequate conceptual frameworks tending to a

nihilistic conception of nirvana confusion with Hindu ideas of reincarnation or pallid

Christianization16 For instance there had been the popular success of Sir Edwin Arnolds

The Light of Asia It gave a fair outline of Buddhist teachings presented in tastefully

Victorian garb as a weak-tea kind of sweetly reasonable ethical Christianity a la Renan and

Strauss James never entirely escaped the influence of this New England transcendentalish

abendlandisch potpourri of Hindooism Until well into the twentieth century except for a

few cognoscenti if anything at all was known of Buddhism it was the Jesus-like saga of

Siddhartha Prince of India 17

Later on however better information came his way Max Mueller and Paul Carus

were doing ground-breaking scholarship that was beginning to demarcate Buddhism from

Hinduism and dispel the annihilationist interpretation Cams was a friend of James Pierce

Dharmapala and Suzuki and the author of a History ofBuddhism and the influential Gospel

ofBuddha But a cursory leafing through the latter volume makes it clear why James would

never penetrate to the psychological essence of Buddhism on the basis such treatments still

presented as it is in the form of parables sermons and episodes from the life of the Buddha

in a mythic setting of Maras devas and a miraculous birth on the model of the New

Testament Vivekananda was another of the luminaries of the World Parliament of Religions

James subsequently met and heard speak in an apparently impressing way in 1896 on yogic

psychology DT Suzuki lived and worked with Cams as a translator and was probably inshy

troduced by him to the writings of James Yet if James ever actually met Suzuki his master

Soen Shaku or any of the other Zen Rinzai Jodo Shinshu Nichiren Tendai or Shingon

representatives in the Japanese delegation to the Parliament is anyones guess IS James

15Varieties 512 16Much of the following draws on the excellent and thorough study Carl T Jackson The Oriental Religions and American Thought Nineteenth-Century Explorations Contributions in American Studies Number 55 (Greenwood Press 1981) 17Tbe pioneering account of the Transcendentalists vague imbibing of the mystic lore of the East is Arthur Christy The Orient in American Transcendentalism A Study of Emerson Thoreau and Alcott (New York 1932) For the reception of The Ught ofAsia see pp 248-259 18The dusty old 1890s-flavored documentary reports of the Parliament are most reliably and fully John

owned and annotated a miscellany of books in his private library dealing with Indian

thought volumes by Sister Nevidita Vivekananda and other swamis the Bhagavad-Gita

Warrens Buddhism in Translation Rananthans Spirit of the East as Contrasted with the

Spirit of the West Sugimas Hindu Logic and Koeppens Die Religion des Buddha He atshy

tended monthly meetings of the History of Religion Club in Cambridge He was neighbors

with the Sanskritist Charles Lanman who kept him abreast of the latest work One could go

on listing all the exposures James had to information about Buddhism the point being that

none of it ever sufficiently sorted out the distinctive psychological and philosophical docshy

trines of Buddhism Even if James had seen or heard of Abhidhammic texts he may not have

understood what they were It is unclear to me what James could have made of their arid inshy

ventories of the elements of consciousness even if he had known of them The conceptual

frames for translation and interpretation were not yet in place to render these abstruse aspects

intelligible to Westerners One should not underestimate the hermeneutical blocks even for a

mind as sensitive as that of James 19

Second my suspicion is that Eastern wisdom traditions still lay in the shadow of pervashy

sive Orientalist prejudice Despite the enthusiasm of an intellectual fringe in New England

such things were popularly regarded as the domain of superstition darkness and degenerashy

tion in need of Christian salvation These views only became more pronounced as the censhy

tury wore on to the acme of colonial imperialism Boston Buddhists poets and second-genshy

eration Transcendentalists might dabble in eastern wisdom but there was scant respect to be

found elsewhere for the cultural heritage of Indians or Chinese during the heroic era of

Western domination James as an anti-imperialist in his political outlook was as open to the

influence of non-western cultures as any man could be at that time but no one can comshy

pletely step outside the cultural filters of their time A wholesale embrace of fuzzy Eastern

ideas was not a respectable option for James it had yet to attain a sufficient degree of intelshy

lectual credibility to lift it to a level that merited detailed comprehension or adoption on a par

with Western thought except by a few specialist scholars adventurers and eccentric theoshy

sophical types It would have been a disreputable kind of intellectually going native I dont

want to push this consideration too far but the flow of influence in James day was overshy

whelmingly from West to East and Eastern ideas were to remain exotic curios for all but a

Henry Barrows ed The Worlds Parliament of Religions 2 vols (Chicago 1893) and Neeleys History of the Parliament of Religions and Religious Congresses at the Worlds Columbian Exposition Walter R Houghton ed (Chicago 1894) 19All these fascinating details of James acquaintances and books are found in Eugene Taylor Psychology of Religion and Asian Studies The William James Legacy Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 101 (1978) and Swami Vivekananda and William James Asian Psychology at Harvard in the 1890s Prabuddha Bharata or Awakened India 91 (Sept 1986) 374-385

few for the immediate future This was changing by the 1890s the World Parliament of

Religions was the turning point as the stream of influence began to flow with increasing

force in reverse Xl

Third we must consider that James may have been all too acquainted with the mullishy

gatawny of Indian thought and found much of it uncongenial if not repugnant21 It was calshy

culated to arouse all his dread of absolutism determinism and the bloc universe Peirce

spoke of the monstrous mysticism of the Indians and James would in his more toughshy

minded moods have undoubtedly concurred James strenuous temperament and his distaste

for monistic idealism and anything smacking of it was very often at odds with his openshy

mindedness Only by the time of the composition of the Varieties did James begin to have

any inklings of the distinguishing marks of Buddhism Heretofore he had not clearly disenshy

tangled it from Vedantic monism Hindu fatalism karmic determinism Schopenhauerian

pessimism and Transcendentalist sublimities to all of which he had a constitutional avershy

sion The metaphysical luxuriousness of the Indians and the sweeping grotesque monumenshy

tality of Germanic idealism offended his sense of human scale and the everyday For the

young James Buddhism was probably regarded in the same vein as a religion of suffering

annihilation and detachment This was certainly the prevalent notion it began to improve

after assorted swamis yogis and roshis began making counter-missions to the West in the

1890s and more authentic accounts were propagated James was always an exponent of

healthy-mindedness and vital strenuous living with coming to terms with life and had

little patience with those whom he regarded as wanting to lie down supinely and let the jugshy

gernaut of the Hegelian or Indian cosmos ride over them No dewdrop slipping into the

shining sea for him James was all for attachment and commitment not detachment and

withdrawl Of course it has to be said that his tonic of healthy-mindedness was prescribed

first of all for himself His own experience of soul-sickness and vastation made James tolshy

erant and understanding of the benefit in a good dose of Idealism for some people Living

with the Swedenborgianism of Henry James Sr left William with a deep and enduring symshy

pathy for the tender-minded and those in need of the Ideal-cure 22

To sum up before 1890 it can be concluded that James knew little of Indian metashy

physics and was predisposed to regard unfavorably whatever he may have known

20See Jackson 243-261 21This is the observation of Dale Riepe A Note on William James and Indian Philosophy Philosophy and Phenomenological Research vol 28 June 1968587-91 22My primary sources for James life are the monumental intellectual biography by his student Ralph Barton Perry The Thought and Character oWilliam James as revealed in his unpublished correspondence and notes together with published writings (Boston Little Brown and Co 1935) and the very readable Gay Wilson Allen William James A Biography (London 1967)

Throughout the 1890 s he was prepared by changing cultural contacts and exchanges and his

work on the unconscious the paranonnal and religion to respond more positively to the

finer doctrinal points of Buddhism if the state of Buddhology had been such as to provide

them By 1902 and the publication of the Varieties he could venture references to the

dhyanas and express modest agreement in the Postscript It has been conjectured that he may

have been lead to a revision by recently reading publications by the Pali Text Society or

hearing Rhys Davids lecture on Buddhist psychology in the Suttas23 That this directly influshy

enced his thinking-out of Radical Empiricism is doubtful however much it may have asshy

sisted him to disengage Buddhist concepts from the substantialist notions acquired from

Vivekananda et al

III

When we look at the references to Buddhism in the Varieties of Religious Experience

we find that they are a mix of conventional notions and incipient accuracy This book was

James effort to find a rational quasi-scientific place for the spiritual life that rescued it from

the dismissal of reductive materialist scientism and the irrationalist occult Spiritualism so

rampant in the second half of the nineteenth-century as a degenerated and curiously materialshy

ized response to the breakdown of Christian faith under the impact of science Again the

middle way His interest in psychical research and the paranonnal was contributory to this

project and his world-religions approach was in line with his belief that there are many paths

to the mountain top

In Lecture II Circumscription of the Topic James presents his pluralistically roomy

and quasi-existentialist definition of religion The feelings acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine

This definition allows him to include non-theistic systems of thought such as Buddhism and

Emersonianism He compares atheistic Buddhism to Emersons transcendentalist idealism

which also seems to let God evaporate into abstract ideality and proposes in His place the

23See Kalupahana 10-11 Rhys Davids had gotten beyond the transmigration-of-souls view of karma and was one of the first to have a subtler understanding of the concepts of anatta and anicca but he wavered in his opinion of the ontological significance of nibbana as extinction of the self or freedom and characteristically tended to take refuge in his view of Buddhism as a sane system of philosophical ethics and in its manly optimism a very Jamesian virtue See for instance his Early Buddhism (London 1908) and Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by Some Points in the History ofIndian Buddhism The Hibbert Lectures 1881 (New York 1882) In any case there is a good probability that Rhys Davids was the source of the non-substantialist non-supernatural non-transcendentalistic concept of the Buddhist doctrine of Karma with which James acknowledges his agreement in the Postscript

immanent divinity in things and the moral order of the universe You can feel the chill with

which James describes the transcendentalist cult recalling his fathers ambivalence for

the sage of Concords cold sUblimity He then goes on to oppose once again Buddhistic

pessimism to Emersonian optimism

In Lecture XV The Value of Saintliness in his discussion of asceticism he cites the

Buddha

And the Buddha in pointing out what he called the middle way to his disciples told them to abstain from both extremes excessive mortificashytion being as unreal and unworthy as mere desire and pleasure The only perfect life he said is that inner wisdom which makes one thing as inshydifferent to us as another and thus leads to rest to peace and to Nirvana

J ames then proceeds to contrast this sane and commonsensical rejection of the extremes

of austerity and hedonism to the ascetic self-torture of the Catholic saints and Hindu fakirs

In a somewhat Nietzschian way he sees them as self-overcomers who in heroic confrontation

with the evil cruelty and suffering of the world have pushed themselves to the limits of hushy

man endurance They have violently rent apart the film separating the potential forms of conshy

sciousness from normal waking consciousness They are his virtue of strenuosity in exshy

tremis and he must admire them despite Protestant squeamishness about self-mortification

Here he is in his fair-minded mode and professes to regard them as not always pathological

but as sublime specimens no less necessary to the psychic economy of man and completion

of the world than optimistic liberal Protestants and mild Buddhists as one respond to the

tragic mystery of existence James applies his inclusive tolerance to the entire range of relishy

gious expression because in our Fathers house there are many mansions He sees the

Buddhas middle way as an example of ascetic temperance but he evinces no conception of

it as having any practical or empirical application outside of the religious sphere or any exshy

tensive parallel to the pragmatism and radical empiricism he was germinating by 1902

In Lecture XVI on Mysticism James describes quite accurately the concentrations or

dhyanas ascending from the realm of form to the formless following the account he found in

Koeppen But his purpose here is comparative mysticism and he presents this as another exshy

ample of the methodical cultivation of states of superconsciousness He does distinguish it

from Hindu samadhi but classes it together with other ecstatic forms of contemplation Alshy

Ghazzali and the Sufis Sts Theresa and Loyola Paul Dionysius the Neoplatonists the

esoteric Christian mystics like Eckhart and Behmen Vedantists Tolstoi the expansive

healthy-mindedness of Whitman ism and Buckes Cosmic Consciousness His evenmindedshy

ness and sympathy save him from falling into the common misconception that meditation inshy

volves trances hallucinations or other pathological states of mind Buddhist meditation itshy

self is not sensu stricto some form of supramundane ecstatic mysticism but a discipline that

aids us to see things as they really are To be sure James had gone well beyond the

Christian soul yet there always remained a certain vague weight of Puritan soulfulness and

pietism in his concern for the spiritual welfare of persons No-selflessness and sunyata reshy

mained beyond his horizon although in the chapter on The Consciousness of Self in the

Principles of Psychology of 1890 he had gotten away from the self as an entity dually set

over against the world and in the first essay of The Essays in Radical Empiricism of 1904

Does Consciousness Exist had begun to question even the existence of thoughts and

mental states and approach the pure behaviorism of Dewey and the mu-shin and mu-nen of

Zen

James never seems to have become acquainted with Chan or Zen and the naturalistic

and taoist transformations Indian Buddhism later underwent in China and Japan The pure

naturalism of Dewey and Mead approximates more closely to its practical down-to-earth

spirit The absence of references to Far Eastern reJigion in the Varieties is conspicuous24 I

think the reason must be traced to the resistance of those cultures to Western penetration

conversely the great volume of information about Indian religion was due to the establishshy

ment of the British Raj and the work of cultural colonialism appropriation and understandshy

ing that had gone on since William Jones variously sympathetic or hostile but all in a

sense colonial produce James own anti-imperialist politics is the other side of the liberalshy

minded and synoptic method of the Varieties which puts Buddhism Mohammedanism and

Christianity on a level

In the Postscript we come to the by far most interesting reference to Buddhism

I am ignorant of Buddhism and speak under correction and merely in order the better to describe my general point of view but as I apprehend the Buddhistic doctrine of Karma I agree in principle with that All sushypernaturalists admit that facts are under the judgment of higher law but for Buddhism as I interpret it and for religion generally so far as it reshymains unweakened by transcendentalistic metaphysics the word judgment here means no such bare academic verdict or platonic appreciashytion as it means in Vedantic or modem absolutist systems it carries on the contrary execution with it is in rebus as wel1 as post rem and opershyates causally as partial factor in the total fact The universe becomes a gnosticism pure and simple on any other terms But this view that judgshyment and execution go together is that of the crasser supernaturalist way of thinking so the present volume must on the whole be classed with the other expressions of that creed

24Save for an oblique one in the case of Horace Fletcher who is presented as an example of conversion to the religion of healthy-mindedness In his book Menticulture the A-B-C of True Living 1899 Fletcher speaks of the Japanese as getting rid of anger and worry through Buddhist discipline The book is itself an exshyample of the very American quick-n-easy way to self-improvement and the how-to-do-it-yourself guide to spiritual and material prosperity James in a certain sense was only a more intellectual1y respectable formulation of this American way of doing things That was the view of some astute foreign observers like Bertrand Russell

James has attained a greater degree of clarity about the Buddhist notion of karma and

discerns an attunement to his own thinking he demarcates it from Vedantic conflations

modern absolutism and transcendentalistic metaphysics James is defending here what he

called piecemeal or self-deprecatingly crasser supernaturalism This concept is an imshy

portant plank in the kind of practical religion he advocates The problem he feels with the

refined universalistic supernaturalism we find in popular or scholastic Christianity

Platonism Advaita or the modern absolutism of Hegel Royce and Bradley is that the

world of facts and personal experience is crushed sublated subsumed obliterated under the

dominion of a higher law fate or unity The Ideal becomes an oppressive superstructure

that has no transaction with our everyday lives In short it is James old foe the bloc unishy

verse weighing down and suffocating everything His main brief against monism is its deleshy

terious moral consequences rendering evil unreal inescapable or both and thus quashing

the free moral agency of the individual As Riepe remarks With his sensitive doctrinal nose

lowered in the pragmatic corn stubble of the pheasant hunt James has now discovered in

Buddhism a kind of ally to the activism he espouses against the block universe2j

For the Buddha the moral agent is central to a world where the good is actualizable The

moral law is not imposed from above but works in and through things themselves it is inshy

stinct in them as their very principle of manifestation It carries execution in rebus in things

and operates causally as a partial factor with the total fact Phenomenal dhamma are the moral

dhamma The moral is not supernatural but matter-of-fact it is the causality of things just as

they are and renders them malleable and ameliorable our moral and ethical choices become

decisive in creating the world we experience

For James as well morality is causal and recursive The world is woven out of the

threads of will and habit and is at home with our choices and decisions The present moment

is open and optional selves and their actualities and possibilities are loosely strung discrete

plural and they arise moment by moment as in the Buddhas row-of-candles metaphor for

the self A universalisticjuridical conception of morality leaves no room for prospecting in

golden Californias for new ways and means for new opinions to come into existence

through expanding and pushing out our frontiers Morality is not absolutely determinant and

necessary but an on-going constructive relationship with the world It is a cooperative venshy

ture not the dictate of a King of Heaven or the mechanism of the Absolute The dethroning

of the Absolute is the necessary first step to clear space for the rise of the moral republic and

the principled voluntarism that make the middle way of meliorism feasible

250p cit 587

Pragmatism for James preeminently meant liberation from the permanent unchanging

All the creation of a space where not Man but individual men could breathe freely and conshy

duct their lives rationally and humanely Ifphilosophy is not merely a reflection of history it

is at least an epicycle or tangent to its unfolding In that sense you might say that William

James was the fullest translation into philosophic ideology of the dream of American democshy

racy with its spirit of rebellion against the conservative absolutisms and rigid hierarchies of

the old world with its civic God-a friendly cooperative tolerant republican seeking the

good together with us in mutual fellowship by means of progressive experimental pieceshy

meal reform and good 01 American know-how a God of the prairies who helps those who

help themselves-and with its faith in the native capacities of free men for self-constitution

because they have within themselves all the grandeur the vastness the inexhaustibility of

nature James contained in himself the divisions of nineteenth-century America the fresh

tender-minded hopes of the Transcendentalists a New World-sized optimism and liberal

faith in self-reliant man and the tough-minded strenuosity and flexibility needed to face a

century of bloody civil war brutal industrialization and the conquest of a continent

IV

James was most intimately acquainted with the idealistic monism which was his lifeshy

long bogey through the Transcendentalist metaphysics of his extraordinary father Henry

James Sr It is difficult to overestimate the influence of James Sr on his life and intellectual

trajectory and a look at their relationship is very illuminating He wrote to his father All

my intellectual life I derive from you and though we have often seemed at odds in the exshy

pression thereof Im sure theres a harmony somewhere and that our strivings will comshy

bine26 Henry James Sr friend of Emerson Thoreau and others in the first

Transcendentalist generation is an interesting and appealing figure in his own right apart

from his two famous sons27 There can be no doubt that James ambivalent conflicted reshy

sponses to idealism his characteristic mix of revolt and sympathy are tied up with filial

piety oedipal struggle and those discussions around the James dinner table his reactions to

the paternal idealism set the type for so much of his later thinking James life-work can be

said to have been to find a credible place for religious faith vis-a-vis science and to defend

his beloved fathers right to believe in his eccentric amalgam of Transcendentalism

Sandemanianism Swedenborgianism and Fourierism One can see the complex effects

26Letters of William James ed Henry James Jr (Boston 1920) 2 vol 219 27There is a sensitive sketch of the elder James in Zen and American Thought 106-118

James Srs desire to transcend the vanities of the self and the sufferings of the ego in the

impersonality of the social must have had on James Both his father and he were reacting

against the Transcendentalists exclusive concern with private transcendence and their unshy

concern with the social and moral their sublime lack of conscience and the sense of sin

while he was reacting against his fathers solution the monistic abolition of selfhood in the

All Henry James Sr was a paradoxical man who combined monistic idealism with the most

tender-hearted care for plural persons James rejected the first and exalted the second His

solution was not to abolish the self but open it out into a field of action Monistic idealism

and materialism both negated the self this was unacceptable not to say horrifying to

William He preserves a pluralism of individuals as loci of moral agency yet seen as selfless

selves and harmonizes the spiritual dimension of these selves with the impersonality of the

sciences reducing man to empty form Form is emptiness emptiness is form

The sense of sin and evil seems to have been a James family trait It was a major preocshy

cupation of Henry James Sr with his vastations or terrible experiences of emptiness and

is a recurrent theme in the form of unnamable fears and horrors running through the novels

and stories of Henry James eg The Tum of the Screw And there is Williams famous

description of his own spiritual crisis in the guise of a case history in Lectures VI and vn of

the Varieties on the sick soul Michael Weinstein contends that William circumvented the exshy

istentialist conclusions his experience of nothingness might have led him through his own

lebensphilosophie-to believe in the Will-to-Believe and pluralism28 These were his remeshy

dies for existential dread and the nausea of the abyss of nothingness he repudiated all that as

the bad infinity of monism and abstract absolutism Instead of the over-soul he opts for overshy

belief The Will-to-Believe is his justification of our right to believe whatever enhances our

life happiness and vigor Consequently his cure for ontological wonder-sickness as he

calls it in the Sentiment of Rationality is a vitalism with interesting affffiities to Nietzsche

But James trumps nothingness with the optimism of the Will-to-Believe instead of an amoral

and tragic Will-to-Power our beliefs have a positive truth in them and are not sheer illusions

The thing to do is to cultivate the feeling of moral freedom pull oneself up by the bootstraps

and struggle manfully for the victory of a worthy mission and in this way open ourselves to

the influx of animal spirits and moral energies available to the life-positive Radical continshy

gency becomes the pluralists opportunity For William decency and humanity are real and

achievable things This is the whole point the world can be made a better place it is not a

281n his very interesting study The Wilderness and the City American Classical Philosophy as a Moral Quest (University of Massachusetts Press 1982)

meaningless futile recurrence or relentless game of power The pursuit of happiness is the

truth

As a young man William suffered from what was then termed neurasthenia this culmishy

nated in his spiritual crisis of 1870 His experience of nothingness led him ever after to asshy

sociate transcendental idealism with the horror of monistic nothingness as something to be

fought off not embraced as Buddhists do as the creative plenum His reading of Charles

Renouviers writing on free-will gave him his life raft he resolved My first act of free will

shall be to believe in free will to voluntarily cultivate the feeling of moral freedom and to

care little for speculation29 Williams resolution of free-will against nothingness however

was not at all Sartrean pluralist optimism banishes despair and meaninglessness as

backwash from the false and unreal abstractions of absolutist speculation The universe is

not an alien void for man we are at home in it

Two other currents of the nineteenth-century that impinged on William and shaped his

outlook bear mentioning the mind-cure movement and the search for life-after-death in both

its popular form of Spiritualism and scientificated form of Psychical Research His youthful

neurasthenia led him to look into the claims of faith-healing naturopathy seances readings

and the other esoterica then abounding In fact the mid-century saw the first New Age

movement with the whole melange of Eastern mysticism theosophical syncretism pseudoshy

sciences trances clairvoyance automatic-writing astrology mesmerism angels spirits

natural medicine and the proliferation of mind and body therapies of every imaginable type

James always kept a open-minded interest in exceptional mental states and fringe phenomshy

ena and in the 1890s he tried to integrate all this with the work of the French psychiatrists

Breuer Charcot Binet Janet and Freud on the unconscious

The basic idea behind mind-cure was that sickness was a form of wrong beliefK) This

is in a nutshell what both the Buddha and James were saying Again James peering into the

subliminal his desire to reinstate the vague and his psychological pragmatism can partly

be seen as the intellectual reclamation of something happening in the popular culture at large

This seems to have been true of the Buddha to some extent

James thought is in line his times concern to salvage spirit from materialist science

Materialism and idealism are the poles betwixt which he found his middle way The need to

repair the split between spiritUality and materialism to mediate their extreme expression in

the forms of absolutism and reductionism was the impetus that moved him into the vicinity

of the Buddha Pragmatism was the means he found to heal this split between the psychic

290pbull cit Gay Allen Wilson 165 168 300pbull cit Eugene Taylor Psychology of Religion and Asian Studies The William James Legacy 71-72

and the physical James brought the spiritual back down to earth from the supernal and loshy

cated it again in he muscular contractions and innervations to which Newtonian science was

reducing the mind and body it had a real utility as our adaptive moral energies His reconcilshy

iation of the tender-mindedness and selfless philanthropy of Henry James Sr with the

tough-mindedness of the modern and the selflessness that physics and chemistry reveals in

us ends in matching the Buddhist fusion of compassion and realism

with his characteristic generosity He is often criticized for allowing sympathies and enthusishy

asm to do duty for understanding Did James perceive the similarities and affinities with his

own psychology Was he being pluralistic and open to a new variety of psychology intrinsishy

cally interesting in its own right or just a gracious host I think the answer by 1902 was

probably all three Note that he describes what Dharmapala said as a psychology

The resemblances between James and Buddhism are by now well-known to those

working in the fields of cross-cultural psychology and comparative philosophy There are

two main points of confluence the psychological analysis of conscious experience as the

primary reality-the stream of consciousness or cittasamtana and the stress on the purely

practical and therapeutic sense of philosophical questions They share a functional vitalistic

and organismic view of thought the methodological principle of subjecting all conceptual

problems to the test of experience and the motive in philosophic speculation of enlarging

human happiness and freedom

Both James and the Buddha reached their unorthodox positions by a break with the

dominant trends of thought of the day and flourished in times of social ferment and change

receptive to new departures in critical thinking-the sixth-century Sakyan republic and

Americas new experiment in democracy They found themselves in opposition to supernatshy

uralism and absolutism on one side and materialism and nihilism on the other James whole

intellectual biography could be read as his rebellion against the disease syndromes of

damned absolutism and brass instrument psychology and the despair and depression

they bred Both were men of profound humanity grace and compassion who arrived at

their viewpoints through personal experience of suffering-Siddhartha through his legshy

endary discovery of the miseries of life and their cause through clinging to a world of solidishy

fied things persons and opinions and James through plumbing his own soul-sickness and

melancholia

James first trained as a doctor and became like the Lord Buddha an empiric physician of

the mind treating the psychological causes of human suffering For both philosophic and

religious views are medicines to be prescribed to the ill in measured and effective doses or

food for the healthy-minded They are true in the same measure

If theological idea prove to have a value in concrete life they will be true for pragmatism in the sense of being good for so much For how much more they are true will depend entirely on their relations to other truths that also have to be acknowledged2

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