The View from Outside the World

by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

A common attitude among many Western Buddhists is that the Buddha expressed the insights of his awakening in the context of the worldview of his time—one that featured kamma, rebirth, heavens, hells, and the unconditioned realm of nibbāna. Having started out with that understanding of the world, he taught his followers to desire a happiness that was possible within their shared view. We at present, however, have arrived at a radically different view of the world, so we have to pick and choose among the Buddha’s teachings, accepting those that fit into the reality of our worldview and rejecting those that don’t. If we were to try to force his worldview on our minds, we’re told, it would be an act of cultural or intellectual dishonesty. We wouldn’t be true to what we know about how the world really works and the limitations it imposes on us.

Now, there are many worldviews that vie for the title of “the” distinctive view of our modern or post-modern world, but the most assertive ones all agree on one thing: that we as human beings are thoroughly conditioned—by the laws of physics, biology, psychology, the assumptions of our culture, or all four—so there’s no way that we could experience anything unconditioned. This means that the classical understanding of nibbāna as an unconditioned happiness has to be struck from Buddhism as it enters our world. In its place, we have to be realistic: to tame our desires in line with reality as we understand it, and to content ourselves with whatever happiness we can find in the conditioned realm.

The problem with this attitude is that it has everything backwards. Instead of starting with a worldview and then taming his desires to be realistic within that view, the Buddha worked the other way around. He started with an audacious, ideal desire: to see if a deathless, unconditioned happiness was possible. In the course of pursuing this desire, he discovered that he had to take, as working hypotheses, a handful of beliefs about the nature of action and the world in which he was acting, for a path to the deathless to be possible. Then, on the night of his awakening, he found that, yes, there was a path of action that led to the unconditioned happiness he had desired. For the rest of his life, he taught others to share the same desire, and to adopt, on a provisional basis, whatever assumptions about the world and the power of human action were required to make the path to that happiness a reality.

So instead of starting with a worldview and taming his desires to fit into that view, the Buddha started with the best possible desire—for the deathless—and, once he had found that the deathless was possible, he taught a sketch of a worldview that could work in service of achieving that desire.

Now, this might sound like wishful thinking—making up a worldview in service of your desires—but as the Buddha said, all phenomena are rooted in desire (AN 10:58). This applies to worldviews as much as to anything else. After all, how do people arrive at worldviews to begin with? By using their desires to push against the world, to see where the world yields and where it pushes back. From the results of pushing here and there, we generalize about what’s possible and impossible within the context of the world.

And that’s exactly what the Buddha did. He didn’t make anything up. He just pushed on the world in a radical and persistent way. We know from the story of his quest for awakening that the world pushed back very strongly on his early attempts, in a way that would have defeated anyone less determined on the deathless. But through being heedful, ardent, and resolute—those were the words he used to describe his attitude—he was ultimately able to learn how the world gave way to his desire for the unconditioned. That’s how he got outside of the world, going beyond all desires and the phenomena they engendered.

This means that his teachings were determined, not by a worldview, but by an experience of how the deathless could be found.

This also means that just as the desire for the deathless was the determining factor in his quest, it was also the determining factor in how and what he taught. This can be shown both in how he dealt with other worldviews of his time and in how he advocated a worldview of his own.

In terms of other worldviews, we first have to note the simple fact that there was no single worldview that all his listeners adhered to. Some people of the time believed in rebirth; others didn’t. Even those who did, didn’t all agree that kamma, or action, played a role in determining how you were reborn, or even if kamma was real (DN 1; DN 2). There wasn’t even any agreement on what “you” were to begin with, or whether you even existed (MN 2). And just as we have our modern materialist, determinist, and post-modern there-is-no-objective-truth teachers, similar teachers existed in the Buddha’s time as well. The concept of the deathless was very much alive at the time, but more as a question than as a common belief: Did a deathless realm exist, and if so, how could it be found? No one had arrived at a convincing answer.

In addressing the people of his time, the Buddha strictly avoided getting into many of the discussions of the world that were the hot issues of the day, such as whether the world was finite or infinite, eternal or not (MN 72). He also discouraged his listeners from getting involved in cosmic speculation as a whole. Talk about the origin of the world he lumped in with gossip of the street and of the well as “animal talk” (AN 10:69). As he said, the nature of the world is so complex that it’s inconceivable; trying to figure it out would lead to nothing but madness (AN 4:77). Instead of providing a map of the entire world, he saw that the world was on fire, so he showed the way to the fire escape, focusing all his attention on the question of suffering and its end. This was his radically new approach to the problem of how the deathless could be found.

The only times he got involved in discussions about the nature of the world were over the issue of kamma: Any doctrines that taught inaction—the principle that actions were illusory or powerless to have any effect—he rejected, on the grounds that they would make a path of practice for the end of suffering impossible. Here again, we see how, in his eyes, the truth of his experience of the deathless overrode any arguments that could have been advanced in favor of such teachings.

A prime example is the case of the sectarians who taught that your present experience of pleasure or pain was the result of past actions. This doctrine, too, the Buddha labeled a doctrine of inaction in that it denied any present responsibility for actions that you were doing here and now. There would be no reason to think that standards of what should or shouldn’t be done would have any meaning, or that you could choose to follow a path of action to the deathless. In the Buddha’s terms, you’d be left bewildered and unprotected (AN 3:62).

Which means that he judged worldviews according to how well they accommodated the fact that he had actually realized his desire in finding the deathless.

As for the worldview the Buddha did recommend, we should note at the outset that when he introduced the four noble truths about suffering and its end to his first disciples, he didn’t preface his remarks with an explanation of the world. Instead, he started by saying that the deathless had been attained, and that if his listeners followed his teachings, they could attain it, too (MN 26). In other words, he started by affirming that their desire for the deathless was realistic, and he would show how it could be fulfilled. That was the assumption on which everything else rested.

Now, in the course of explaining suffering and its causes, there were certain features of the world that, over the years, he had to explain as well. These derived from the three knowledges he gained on the night of his awakening (MN 4).

• His knowledge of previous lives showed that death was not the end of suffering, and that if the process of rebirth wasn’t stopped, the suffering of birth, aging, and death would continue without end.

• His knowledge of how beings are reborn after death in line with their actions showed that the universe as a whole had no overarching purpose. Instead, it was driven by the intentional actions of individual beings, which in turn were guided by their views. He also saw that those actions could lead to rebirth on a wide range of levels, from the very high to the very low. None of those rebirths, however, were permanent. They all ended in death, followed by repeated rebirth.

• His third knowledge showed him the views about suffering and its end that could guide the actions that would lead to freedom from the otherwise ceaseless, meaningless round.

That was it.

It’s worth emphasizing that the Buddha’s descriptions of the world were really quite sketchy. How the world got started, he didn’t say. How far it extended in space, he didn’t say. Occasionally he’d give a few detailed accounts of particular heavens and hells, largely just to show that those realms fell under the sway of kamma, and that the inhabitants of the heavens could be ignorant and heedless, and so shouldn’t be trusted, much less worshiped (DN 11; MN 37). However, those accounts didn’t amount to a complete map. The complete maps we now have of the Buddhist cosmos came from later generations. The Buddha himself was interested in providing his listeners with just a handful of leaves compared to the forest of leaves he had discovered through his awakening (SN 56:31). He gave no more information about the world than his listeners needed to know for putting an end to suffering and for nurturing a sense that a deathless happiness was desirable and within the reach of human action.

Even the doctrine of kamma, which was the main linchpin of his picture of the world, was never laid out in full. As he noted, if you tried to comprehend the full complexity of kamma, it would drive you crazy. All you need to know about kamma boils down to four things:

(1) that skillful intentions tend to lead to good results, and unskillful intentions to bad;

(2) that past actions provide the raw material for shaping the present moment, but that your present intentions are potentially free to shape that material into an actual experience of the present;

(3) that you can learn to take even bad raw materials and shape them in such a way that you don’t have to suffer from them (AN 3:101); and

(4) that if you abandon all intentions in the present, the present moment disbands and you can experience the deathless (SN 12:2; MN 26).

Just this much is enough to affirm the power of action to bring suffering to an end.

However, given that the path is ultimately abandoned on reaching the deathless—in the same way that you get off a chariot that has delivered you to your destination (MN 24)—even the Buddha’s sketch of a worldview gets put aside on reaching awakening and going beyond the world. But in putting it aside, the Buddha didn’t throw it away. He used it to teach others so that they could get on the chariot and drive it to the right destination, too.

So when we look carefully at how the Buddha regarded worldviews in general—as subservient to the desire to find the way to the deathless and to teach that way to others—we can see that he didn’t submit to the worldviews of his time when they provided no room for an unconditioned happiness. This means that it’s hard to imagine him submitting to the worldviews of our time when they want to squeeze the Dhamma into a box and lop off the parts that don’t fit—especially when those parts include the whole point of his message.

It’s much easier to envision him searching out the people who insist that we’re incapable of experiencing an unconditioned happiness, and chastising them for leaving their listeners trapped in their culture, bewildered and unprotected in the face of suffering. If they were to insist on the truth of their worldviews, he might respond that they hadn’t yet pushed back strongly enough against the world with the right desires or in the right way.