If we take the Four Noble Truths as an example, Buddha’s first teaching, in the second one he says there are two main causes of suffering. It’s very simple: there are thousands of causes of suffering – of anything! – but he points out the two main ones: karma and delusions. And they’re both inside oneself, not outside!
They’re both inside us! This is too shocking. We argue with it, we don’t believe it, we can’t cope, it’s too difficult. They’re both inside us, two main causes, very simple.
Typically we think that religious philosophy must be believed because we assume it can’t be proved. This is not Buddha’s view at all! Every word in Buddhism is necessarily coming from the direct experience of the Buddha and anyone else who has proved it to be true since then.
So, like any good scientist, we first take the Four Noble Truths, let’s say, as our hypothesis. Of course, in the beginning it’s almost impossible because the habit of believing the external world is the cause of my happiness and my suffering is pretty deeply ingrained.
In other words, we’ve been believing 1 + 1 is 3 for so long that when you put one orange plus another orange, you will see three. You see three! You’ve made it up for so long, you see three!
Bad enough, as Lama Zopa says, having a wrong view about something, but the worst part is it appears that way because for so long have we believed it to be that way – and we have massive vested interest in keeping it that way.
We’ve got to think about it all logically. This is important to remember. Buddha’s saying don’t believe a single word I’m telling you! That’s just ignorance. We’ve first got to hypothesize the possibility of it.
This is really logical: you’ve got to start with the thought. Because the first thing we’ll think when we hear this is, “Oh, no, it can’t be true.” We don’t even begin with the thought, “The cause of my happiness and suffering is my mind.” We immediately think, “Oh, no, it can’t be possible, not possible, don’t be ridiculous, no, no, no.”
You’ve got to start with the thought. But don’t just choose any thought! Check on this person called Buddha so you’ve got the confidence to say, “Okay, I’m prepared to work on that.”
You write it down first. You have the thought first, then you prove it: that’s experience, that’s how you prove 1 + 1 is 2, it’s very clear.
We live at a conceptual level, so we have to use our conceptuality as a method to get to the direct experience which is beyond conceptual. It’s a method.
When you study Buddhist philosophy, they say there’s this nice process you go through to get to direct experience of the truth of something.
The first step is you begin with what they call “wrong view.” Acupuncture’s a good example of this. Say you’ve heard about people putting needles in – this is like 60 years ago in Santa Fe, maybe some weird wacko hippie might have put a needle in somebody, you know? They had this knowledge – “Wow, that must be so amazing” – but most people thought it was stupid. You’d hear about putting a needle in someone to heal and you’d laugh: “What a stupid load of rubbish.”
But then, say, you keep hearing about it, and you’ve got an open mind. You start with wrong view – “Don’t be ridiculous!” – but then you start to move to the next step, which is called “doubt,” but “doubt tending towards the wrong view.” You go, “Maybe it’s true? No, no, no it can’t be true!”
But you keep hearing it. Your mind’s open. And then look into it more deeply and you start to have “doubt now tending towards the right view”: “Well, maybe acupuncture, it could be right, you know?” You’ve got doubt, but you’re moving away from the fundamentalist wrong view, because you’re gradually getting some wisdom.
Going more deeply into it, you now have what they call – this is pretty intense already, you’ve got to have a lot of study of it, theoretically – you get “correct belief,” they call it. That’s already pretty profound.
And you keep studying it – I’m not even discussing putting needles in people yet. I know, of course, you would start doing that immediately, but imagine you’re not. I’m looking at this body of knowledge being coherent theoretically.
You learn the theories, you learn the theories, you learn the theories, and you keep putting it together, and the more and more you hear, the more and more you join the dots: “Oh, that makes sense, and this one.” In the beginning, it’s just a bunch of separate bits of knowledge that you can’t see the coherence of, but slowly, slowly, as you keep joining the dots – literally joining the dots, it’s a really good way to put it – it becomes coherent theoretically.
Then eventually you get to what they call – and this is a really profound realization – “inferential certainty,” which is conceptual knowledge. I think you can even pass an exam on the theories of acupuncture without putting a needle in anybody.
Then, then you start to prove it by doing it, and that’s direct experience.
Any body of knowledge, if it’s valid, must be first coherent theoretically, must be: that fits our scientific minds. Well, this is what we have to do with the Dharma. That’s exactly what they’re doing in the Tibetan monastic university system: they spend 25, 30 years studying and proving the theories of Buddha’s view of the universe, including the mind.
Of course, you combine it with practice as you go, of course you do – acupuncture the same, cooking the same. But you can still isolate the theories as a coherent body of knowledge. That makes sense to our minds!
And as the Dalai Lama says, if you keep practicing, step by step, checking the boxes as you go, and you then get to a point where you actually do prove that what Buddha says is wrong, you must reject him. That’s wisdom. That’s the kind of rigor and clarity we aim for, we wish to have – keep it on the earth, you know?