For what it’s worth, I think the Buddhist sense of the term is close enough to what people intuitively care about that I don’t think it’s dishonest to not go into the exact nuances of technical vocabulary. At least I have personally felt totally satisfied with all the suffering reduction I’ve gotten so far (though I’m probably not awakened) and I don’t feel like “suffering” being a slightly more nuanced term than I originally thought means that any of the meditation teachers would have been ripping me off in any way.
The analogy that I’d use is that of a physicist who gives a popular-science explanation of a physical phenomenon that skips all of the math that your average listener wouldn’t understand. It makes the explanation incomplete but it doesn’t make it dishonest. In the case of the physicist, trying to include all the math would just confuse the listener, just as trying to explain the exact technical distinctions tends to just confuse people without sufficient meditative experience.
Dunno, maybe I am unfair here, but it feels like peeling the layers of an onion, and what you find below them turns out to be yet another layer of onion.
I mean, the actual Buddhism (in the sense of “Buddhism of people who grew up in a traditional Buddhist country, in a religious Buddhist family”) is a belief in heaven(s) and hell(s), not much different from e.g. Christianity. Buddhist monks are supposed to have actual magic powers, etc.
Oh wait, that’s all just a metaphor, just something those silly non-Western people believe! Actually, heaven(s) and hell(s) are just states of mind. There are no actual magical powers. No literal afterlife. When Buddha said that, he was certainly joking… uhm, using metaphors so that his teaching could make sense to the stupid followers. The actual meaning of Buddhism is psychotherapy. And skills that are extraordinary but at the same time totally scientific. You can control your mind, get rid of suffering, increase your productivity.
Actually, when I say “increase your productivity”, that’s just a metaphor! What I meant was that you will become happier in a difficult to describe way. Many people don’t get more productive at all, sometimes it’s actually the other way round, but that’s okay, because they get happier.
Actually, when I say “get rid of suffering” or “happier”, that’s just a...
...
...something else. (Or maybe just a metaphor for something else? Hard to say at this point.)
.
Try doing the same kind of mental gymnastic about Christianity, and compare the results.
EDIT:
My alternative hypothesis is: Buddhist meditation does something real, but if you described it clearly (without metaphors, without hype), it would be much less impressive than if you keep it vague. The difficulty at explaining it using plain words is partially motivated by a desire to protect the speaker’s feelings of sacred mystery (i.e. high status).
Dunno, maybe I am unfair here, but it feels like peeling the layers of an onion, and what you find below them turns out to be yet another layer of onion.
I think you’re not being unfair but you’re also responding to an amalgam of things that different people have said, and yes some of those people do have bad epistemics and do make unfounded claims that are very reasonable to criticize.
I’d like to think that I’m not engaging in those kinds of onion layers, though. My position is something like, yes lots of Buddhists do believe in weird supernatural stuff, but they still seem to have developed some meditative techniques and theories about how the mind works that seem accurate. (Though they are not the only ones, as contemplatives in many different religions seem to have converged on similar claims and techniques. This seems like suggestive evidence that the techniques do something real that can be separated from the supernatural metaphysics, if religious people with drastically clashing metaphysics can still arrive at similar techniques and conclusions [while disagreeing about the metaphysical implications].)
And in my experience, following those practices does help in reducing something that’s in my opinion reasonable to round into “suffering”, at least as measured by tests such as “if my past self got to compare his mindstate at the time to my mindstate now and asked ’would you agree that future!Kaj’s mindstate has less suffering than yours”, he’d say “yes definitely, please please tell me how I could achieve the same”.
Obligatory caveat is that this is not only because of meditation, there have been a lot of other things like therapy, improvements in external circumstances, etc. etc. too, and that all of these also seem mutually synergestic, such that it’d be impossible for me to say which parts of my suffering reduction have been due to meditation specifically. But I have also had several occasions when I have e.g. just come off a retreat or finished a particularly good meditation session when I’ve had some experience like “oh wow I wouldn’t have been able to even imagine this kind of a state before and it’d be really hard if not impossible to adequately explain it to anyone who hasn’t experienced before, but it’s definitely accurate to say that I’m now suffering less than usual, even if some of the specifics of how that reduction is realized are not what I would have expected”.
Some of these are easier to explain than others, though. For instance, once I had a crush on a particular friend and whenever we hung out, I’d feel a mild tendency for my thoughts to slip into something like “man it’d be nice if we were dating”. This was a form of slight suffering (and a sense that the world ought to be different, as lsusr put it), though mild enough that ‘dissatisfaction’ might be a better word. On one occasion right after a particularly good meditation session, that dissatisfaction temporarily disappeared, such that I was genuinely just completely enjoying her presence as-is, with no need for anything to be different.
My alternative hypothesis is: Buddhist meditation does something real, but if you described it clearly (without metaphors, without hype), it would be much less impressive than if you keep it vague.
That seems wrong to me. “Buddhist meditation leads to vastly reduced suffering” is already a clear explanation. It’s only when people press for specific details of what it’s like that it becomes hard to explain to people who haven’t had the experience and thus have difficulty understanding the technical distinctions being drawn. Again kind of like the physicist explaining things to people who don’t know math: if your audience doesn’t have the ability to understand the equations, you have to fall back to metaphors to try to convey some kind of understanding, and probably the metaphors will break down if your audience keeps pressing for details that can’t be properly explained without the math.
If the distinction between the Buddhist meaning and the typical meaning of ‘suffering’ was explained[1], I don’t think I would have ended up confused enough to ask my question. The Buddhist conception of suffering was different enough to mislead me, at least.
I agree but I don’t think the Buddhist definition is what Lsusr said it is (do you?). Suffering is primarily caused by the feeling that the world ought to be different but I don’t think it’s identical. Although I do expect you can find some prominent voices saying so.
I should’ve been more exact. There are lots of Buddhist schools and teachers, and they disagree with each other on many things. So one shouldn’t talk about “the Buddhist sense” of any term. When I said “the Buddhist sense of the term”, I meant something like “the sense of the term that lsusr is using it in, which matches my own understanding from meditation practice as well as the (largely Theravada-influenced) teachers I’ve learned from”.
If you pressed me on an exact definition for suffering, I probably also wouldn’t spontaneously give exactly that definition (in fact, I did already mention to Said that it’s missing at least one important distinction). But at the same time, I do feel like it’s close enough to what the core of suffering in my experience is that when lsusr said it, I immediately went “yes sounds right to me”.
(Duncan Sabien would probably say that the definition that lsusr gave is a sazen—“a word or phrase which accurately summarizes a given concept, while also being insufficient to generate that concept in its full richness and detail, or to unambiguously distinguish it from nearby concepts”.)
Fair enough. I’m mostly on board with that, my one gripe is that the definition only sounds similar to people who are into the Buddhist stuff. “Suffering mostly comes from craving” seems to me to be one of the true but not obvious insights from Buddhism. So just equating them in the definition is kinda provoking a reaction like from Said.
For what it’s worth, I think the Buddhist sense of the term is close enough to what people intuitively care about that I don’t think it’s dishonest to not go into the exact nuances of technical vocabulary. At least I have personally felt totally satisfied with all the suffering reduction I’ve gotten so far (though I’m probably not awakened) and I don’t feel like “suffering” being a slightly more nuanced term than I originally thought means that any of the meditation teachers would have been ripping me off in any way.
The analogy that I’d use is that of a physicist who gives a popular-science explanation of a physical phenomenon that skips all of the math that your average listener wouldn’t understand. It makes the explanation incomplete but it doesn’t make it dishonest. In the case of the physicist, trying to include all the math would just confuse the listener, just as trying to explain the exact technical distinctions tends to just confuse people without sufficient meditative experience.
Dunno, maybe I am unfair here, but it feels like peeling the layers of an onion, and what you find below them turns out to be yet another layer of onion.
I mean, the actual Buddhism (in the sense of “Buddhism of people who grew up in a traditional Buddhist country, in a religious Buddhist family”) is a belief in heaven(s) and hell(s), not much different from e.g. Christianity. Buddhist monks are supposed to have actual magic powers, etc.
Oh wait, that’s all just a metaphor, just something those silly non-Western people believe! Actually, heaven(s) and hell(s) are just states of mind. There are no actual magical powers. No literal afterlife. When Buddha said that, he was certainly joking… uhm, using metaphors so that his teaching could make sense to the stupid followers. The actual meaning of Buddhism is psychotherapy. And skills that are extraordinary but at the same time totally scientific. You can control your mind, get rid of suffering, increase your productivity.
Actually, when I say “increase your productivity”, that’s just a metaphor! What I meant was that you will become happier in a difficult to describe way. Many people don’t get more productive at all, sometimes it’s actually the other way round, but that’s okay, because they get happier.
Actually, when I say “get rid of suffering” or “happier”, that’s just a...
...
...something else. (Or maybe just a metaphor for something else? Hard to say at this point.)
.
Try doing the same kind of mental gymnastic about Christianity, and compare the results.
EDIT:
My alternative hypothesis is: Buddhist meditation does something real, but if you described it clearly (without metaphors, without hype), it would be much less impressive than if you keep it vague. The difficulty at explaining it using plain words is partially motivated by a desire to protect the speaker’s feelings of sacred mystery (i.e. high status).
I think you’re not being unfair but you’re also responding to an amalgam of things that different people have said, and yes some of those people do have bad epistemics and do make unfounded claims that are very reasonable to criticize.
I’d like to think that I’m not engaging in those kinds of onion layers, though. My position is something like, yes lots of Buddhists do believe in weird supernatural stuff, but they still seem to have developed some meditative techniques and theories about how the mind works that seem accurate. (Though they are not the only ones, as contemplatives in many different religions seem to have converged on similar claims and techniques. This seems like suggestive evidence that the techniques do something real that can be separated from the supernatural metaphysics, if religious people with drastically clashing metaphysics can still arrive at similar techniques and conclusions [while disagreeing about the metaphysical implications].)
And in my experience, following those practices does help in reducing something that’s in my opinion reasonable to round into “suffering”, at least as measured by tests such as “if my past self got to compare his mindstate at the time to my mindstate now and asked ’would you agree that future!Kaj’s mindstate has less suffering than yours”, he’d say “yes definitely, please please tell me how I could achieve the same”.
Obligatory caveat is that this is not only because of meditation, there have been a lot of other things like therapy, improvements in external circumstances, etc. etc. too, and that all of these also seem mutually synergestic, such that it’d be impossible for me to say which parts of my suffering reduction have been due to meditation specifically. But I have also had several occasions when I have e.g. just come off a retreat or finished a particularly good meditation session when I’ve had some experience like “oh wow I wouldn’t have been able to even imagine this kind of a state before and it’d be really hard if not impossible to adequately explain it to anyone who hasn’t experienced before, but it’s definitely accurate to say that I’m now suffering less than usual, even if some of the specifics of how that reduction is realized are not what I would have expected”.
Some of these are easier to explain than others, though. For instance, once I had a crush on a particular friend and whenever we hung out, I’d feel a mild tendency for my thoughts to slip into something like “man it’d be nice if we were dating”. This was a form of slight suffering (and a sense that the world ought to be different, as lsusr put it), though mild enough that ‘dissatisfaction’ might be a better word. On one occasion right after a particularly good meditation session, that dissatisfaction temporarily disappeared, such that I was genuinely just completely enjoying her presence as-is, with no need for anything to be different.
That seems wrong to me. “Buddhist meditation leads to vastly reduced suffering” is already a clear explanation. It’s only when people press for specific details of what it’s like that it becomes hard to explain to people who haven’t had the experience and thus have difficulty understanding the technical distinctions being drawn. Again kind of like the physicist explaining things to people who don’t know math: if your audience doesn’t have the ability to understand the equations, you have to fall back to metaphors to try to convey some kind of understanding, and probably the metaphors will break down if your audience keeps pressing for details that can’t be properly explained without the math.
If the distinction between the Buddhist meaning and the typical meaning of ‘suffering’ was explained[1], I don’t think I would have ended up confused enough to ask my question. The Buddhist conception of suffering was different enough to mislead me, at least.
In a footnote, for example.
I agree but I don’t think the Buddhist definition is what Lsusr said it is (do you?). Suffering is primarily caused by the feeling that the world ought to be different but I don’t think it’s identical. Although I do expect you can find some prominent voices saying so.
I should’ve been more exact. There are lots of Buddhist schools and teachers, and they disagree with each other on many things. So one shouldn’t talk about “the Buddhist sense” of any term. When I said “the Buddhist sense of the term”, I meant something like “the sense of the term that lsusr is using it in, which matches my own understanding from meditation practice as well as the (largely Theravada-influenced) teachers I’ve learned from”.
If you pressed me on an exact definition for suffering, I probably also wouldn’t spontaneously give exactly that definition (in fact, I did already mention to Said that it’s missing at least one important distinction). But at the same time, I do feel like it’s close enough to what the core of suffering in my experience is that when lsusr said it, I immediately went “yes sounds right to me”.
(Duncan Sabien would probably say that the definition that lsusr gave is a sazen—“a word or phrase which accurately summarizes a given concept, while also being insufficient to generate that concept in its full richness and detail, or to unambiguously distinguish it from nearby concepts”.)
Fair enough. I’m mostly on board with that, my one gripe is that the definition only sounds similar to people who are into the Buddhist stuff. “Suffering mostly comes from craving” seems to me to be one of the true but not obvious insights from Buddhism. So just equating them in the definition is kinda provoking a reaction like from Said.