From the Introduction

The history of Buddhist thought is a unique example of the interplay between creativity and reductionism, between novelty and confirmation, and it is the purpose of this book to trace the interaction between these complementary movements. Therefore this book is not just another restatement of what is considered to be Buddhist philosophy, even if references are made to the various systems that prevailed at one time or another. Actually, any intellectual system—philosophical, religious, political, or any other kind—is geared to reductionist ways of thinking and is bound to end up in the utter stagnation and rigidity of a tyrannical dogmatism. Buddhist philosophy, in this respect, is no exception. The much vaunted Madhyamaka philosophy, particularly in its Prasangika version, is the ultimate in reductionism, and its manifestation as dogmatic intolerance in Tibetan history is well known. This system has much in common with the now-defunct Western school of logical positivism and its anemic revival, "analytical" philosophy. For this reason, the Madhyamaka system has attracted the attention of academics who, because of their tacit presuppositions, unwittingly paint a one-sided picture of Buddhist thought.

Despite this reductionist quality, however, system or model building is itself a creative process, one through which we attempt to develop a generalized world view out of observations and valuations. Unfortunately, we then impose this world view on our dealings with the physical, social, and cultural-spiritual aspects of our environment, with the inevitable result that the free play of creative imagination is strangled.

The rejection of the static notion of a self (Skt. atman), which is usually claimed to mark Buddhist thought off from the rest of its Brahmanical environment, is not truly an innovative idea. Rather, it merely clarifies the distinction between that which exists "materially," as for instance the so-called atoms that the early Buddhists accepted uncritically, and that which exists "nominally," as for instance, ideas, notions, meanings. The truly innovative idea aspect of early Buddhist thought was its emphasis on mind—or, more properly, mentation (Skt. citta, Tib. sems)—and the conception of it as a feedback and "feedforward" mechanism reflecting the then-still-prevailing "thing-likeness" type of thinking as described by Carl Gustav Jung (Jung 1971/1976, 42.). Preference of the term "mentation" over the more commonly used term "mind" is due to the consideration that "mentation" does not have the markedly static, entitative connotation of the latter term. Although it took a long time for Buddhist thinkers to free themselves from the idea of the thingness of mentation, the notion of it as a process eventually had far-reaching consequences. In this new idea of mentation as a process, we can detect a shift from the syntactic level of information to a semantic level of information. The syntactic level is geared to the reconfirmation and strengthening of already-existing structures and patterns of life, while the semantic level pertains to the context of particular meanings.

To a certain extent, language with its linear arrangement of words locks us into the trap of thinking of the individual's growth as building up from the bottom. The complications resulting from this starting-point or "initial condition" have to be resolved by critical investigation, which is the path or the actual going; and the end of the process is a crowning superstructure or goal. In a static world view, this goal is intellectual, spiritual, and cultural death camouflaged by evocative linguistic devices. Whichever direction the escape entailed by such a static view may take, be it into the myth of an objective world minus man, or into the myth of subjective idealism—mentation minus world, it reflects man's quite irrational need for security, which is rooted in fear.

This idea of mentation as process has found its expression in the idea of "path" or "way." Essentially, path is a dynamic notion, and its process character became ever more evident in the course of the development of Buddhist thought. The path thus became synonymous with the unfolding of an individual's potential rather than being conceived of as merely a "way out." This latter connotation continued to dominate Buddhist thought only so long as a static world view prevailed, in which creative participation on the part of the individual was seen as minimal and where the only alternative to stagnation was escape into a "state" that remains without consequences. This ideal state was that supposed to be attained by the arhant in early Buddhism.

The emphasis on mind/mentation, not only as a dynamic factor, but as an operational system, is already present in early Buddhist thought, where it initiated a further probing into the dynamics of the system and paved the way for a new vision of reality and the human being's embeddedness in it. This does not mean that the old model was simply discarded; rather the old model was incorporated into the new one and given a new meaning. With mentation at the center of the individual's life, it was clearly seen that the granular constituents of the overall attitude a person displays toward the world and toward himself were more of the nature of distinct modes of a unitary ongoing process than discrete atomic entities. On closer inspection, this process revealed a dual character and movement. The first movement presented a continuous transformation in the direction of what is commonly referred to as "consciousness." It is instrumental in the structuring of one's world experience as it becomes predominantly geared to representational and objectifying thinking. In this manner objects exist for a subject which then "grasps," "manipulates," and "controls" them. In this respect, this renewed emphasis on mentation is not very different from other psychologies of subjective dominance. What is new in this reassessment of the operation of mentation is the recognition that the subject-object structure of thought is an emergent structure that is far from being normative for all experience.

The other movement within mentation presents, as it were, a complete reversal of this trend toward dichotomic thought patterns. Not only is the subject-object structure of thought suspended in this reversal, but the experiencer himself is "changed." He no longer apprehends himself as an isolatable entity called "subject" among other entities called "objects," which he has to struggle against and control in a vain attempt to preserve his "splendid isolation." Rather he apprehends himself as a way of being embedded in a life-world of open possibilities. In other words, the change that has come over the experiencer through this reversal of the direction that mentation ordinarily takes is a radical status transformation—the experiencer has become a person fully awake, a "buddha." We might illustrate this reversal by referring to the change from caterpillar to butterfly, in which almost everything alters and only a few significant features remain invariant.

This radical status transformation effected by the reversal of the thematizing and objectifying trend in experience (to which the term "mentation" properly belongs) is not a denotable object. Nor is it, in view of its experiential character, a subjectivistic absolutization of an ego in the manner of subjective and/or objective idealism. Rather what we are terming and describing as a transformation manifests in a gestalt or, more precisely, in a triad of gestalts, of meaning-bestowing intentionalities within Experience or experience-as-such. Here a word of caution may not be out of place. In speaking of Experience (with a capital letter) or experience-as-such, I try to emphasize the dynamic character of what in the Tibetan texts is termed sems-nyid and clearly differentiated from sems, "mind/mentation." The Sanskrit language uses citta for both mind/mentation and experience-as-such, and this has led to endless confusions.

Objectivists, like other reductionists, are unable to understand the dynamic image of the living individual as it is presented by the Yogacara thinkers through the notion of yoga, indicating the process of a person's tuning into the dynamics of life. For the objectivist, nouns, whether they refer to mentation or to a gestalt, as in the example here, stand for things that are supposed to have properties in and of themselves and stand in relationship to one another independently of any individual's understanding them. However, it is not only the Western interpreters of Buddhist thought who started from the objectivist's fallacious premise. Many Buddhists also subscribed to it, as may be inferred from the Sanskrit names applied to the rigidification of what was basically a process, such as vijnanavada, cittamatra, and vijnaptimatra. With their insistence on a "nothing but" (matra), they played into the hands of those who were held captive by their structure-oriented, objectifying thinking, and thus were largely responsible for the fact that Buddhist thought stagnated and eventually disappeared from the Indian scene. There was little left to distinguish it from the static, structure-oriented Brahmanical systems.

It was the creative approach initiated by the Yogacara thinkers that had the greatest impact on those who came into contact with it. They were not so concerned with the building blocks to which a dynamic system such as mind/mentation might be reduced, although they (or at least some of them) could not resist the temptation to add a few building blocks to the existing number. They were mainly concerned with the question of how one could understand oneself in one's psychospiritual development, how one could understand the spiritual way as a process rather than an inert link between two static states. Thus this innovative and creative approach is reflected in the presentation of the texts that go by the name of "tantra." In its technical application, this term sums up all that goes into the "weaving of life's tapestry." As the designation for a holistic process, it takes into account man's multifaceted nature and deals with him as a concrete reality rather than as a mere abstraction that screens off all other possible perspectives. Since the concrete individual, the embodied experiencer, is always sexually differentiated, his or her comprehension of the "world" involves a sexual awareness that expresses itself—as does every form of awareness—in images that cut across the physical and the psychic. These images are both "felt" images and "imaged" feelings; they do not reduce man to the merely sensual, as is claimed by the cultists of the "nothing-but." By such a preposterous claim, these reductionists merely display their distrust of, if not implacable hostility toward, imagination, which alone can open up new visions of reality and stir up resonances in people.

On the other hand, the Yogacara thinkers' process-oriented view, which emphasizes the human system's process of unfolding, fitted well into the rDzogs-chen view, which emphasizes the system's self-renewal and freedom and expresses a fundamental complementarity in the system's overall dynamics. This truly holistic view, which has found its most profound presentation in the writings of Klong-chen rab-'byams-pa (1308–1363/64) does not derive from any Indian prototype, but must be considered as a distinctly Tibetan contribution, which revitalized Buddhist thinking and redeemed it from the rigidity to which a multiplicity of "schools" of thought had reduced it. There is no Tibetan author who can compare with Klong-chen rab-'byams-pa for depth of insight and vastness of vision.

Nonetheless, there have been attempts by the rDzogs-chen interpreters themselves, and by other lesser spirits, to reduce its scope and fit it into the narrowly circumscribed limits of their particular understanding. Rather than being a specific teaching, rDzogs-chen thought touches in its dynamics upon what in modern terms we would call the "principle of evolution," "seeing" to it that the structures that evolve do so in the manner of a free play that determines its own rules as the play goes on. The play itself may be likened to a giant fluctuation preparing the meaning, a process of tuning in to the dynamics of the whole, to its movement toward its next structure. What in a static world view is the end, in a dynamic, evolutionary world view is always a new beginning.

The presentation of these and other related points, which are the subject matter of the chapters that follow, is based on the original texts, Pali, Sanskrit, or Tibetan, which I have allowed to speak for themselves through ample quotations. In constantly referring back to the original source material I have heeded Husserl's call, Wir wollen auf die 'Sache selbst' zurückgehen ("we will go, from our habitual empty talk about things, back to the things themselves"). We have also heeded Heidegger's admonition that in dealing with the thought of thinkers of the past we have to adopt a dual attitude: to examine their thoughts critically and to make them into one's own. This is done by first listening and attending not so much to "what is expressed in explicit formulations, but what is laid before our eyes as still unsaid through the formulations that are used" (Heidegger 1962, p. 182.). The implication is that one has to gain an original understanding that in itself already contains the possibility of explicating and communicating what is meant. This varies from context to context reflecting back on the situation in which man finds himself. Buddhism with its abiding concern for the human individual has always adopted a phenomenological approach rather than the abstract-theoretical one that has been favored in the Western world until recent times and has inevitably led to the dehumanization of everything human. It is a philosophy without gnosis (knowledge), a psychology without psyche (mind), and a universe without man and life. This extreme reductionism is now being more and more discredited by modern science. Modern science, unlike the humanities, which still pursue their course of dehumanization, has been forced by its own relentless probing of reality, not only to reinstate man as a participant in it and an integral aspect of its unfolding, but also to recognize that the universe is pervasively intelligent, not in the sense that it has a mind (or Mind), but that it is meaning, superthought (a neologism meaning a concept still in the making). Through the ideas of modern science runs an element of paradox that connects them, though not mechanistically, with Eastern (Buddhist, Hinduist, and Taoist) thinking, and the number of scientists who acknowledge their indebtedness to, or affinity with, Eastern thought is growing. Similarly, Buddhist thought, from its side, because of its preeminently nonreductionistic stance, is closer to the ideas of modern science than to the outdated notions of a past age through which Buddhism was originally interpreted in the West. This interpretation was based on Newtonian mechanics applied to language (as if words had an independent existence) and on a sentimental escape into wishful thinking (dubbed rational philosophy). Such ideas were simply forced upon the Buddhist texts without the slightest attempt being made to understand what the texts themselves might have to say.

My use of modern scientific terms in the chapters that follow is not an attempt on my part to show that Buddhism is somehow another form of science, but is meant as a tool to bring to light that which has remained unsaid in what has been said and thereby to show that Buddhism still has "something to say," and that this something is significant. If such scientific concepts as "dissipative structure" (developed by Ilya Prigogine in the context of nonequilibrium systems characterized by a high degree of energy exchange with the environment), "symmetry," "symmetry transformations," "symmetry break" (once restricted to geometry, but now expanded into the idea of cosmic evolution), "homology" (applicable both in biology and mathematics), and many others, have already shown their usefulness in unraveling problems in other areas than in the ones in which they originated, there is no a priori reason why they should not be able to do so also in the field of Buddhism with its, in the broadest sense of the word, evolutionary leanings.