A general issue with the intense versions of Buddhist practices is that very often they are aimed at detaching / deconstructing / destroying / disavowing various elements of one’s mind / agency / values. Often these are important elements, and don’t necessarily automatically stay intact / regenerate themselves. This can have various good consequences, but also obviously by default has a bunch of bad consequences. Maybe there are good ways to do that (for example, by giving these elements space and other resources needed to reconfigure / regrow / reinterface / etc., in an appropriate dovetail with deconstruction). But my overwhelming impression, admittedly in most cases from shallow exposure, is that these practitioners either do not understand what they are doing, or think that this is a good thing to do, which it very obviously isn’t (similar to how suicide is very obviously not a good thing to do, with similar exceptions). (In defense of my conclusions even given shallow exposure: when I have tried engaging a bit more deeply, the background assumptions seem to be blatant, explicit, and strongly conditioning everything else; and the fruit of the tree seems often bad, ~never super impressive, and only mildly good when done in a non-standard, non-pressured, a la carte way.) Spiritual and social pressure towards these practices seems to be very often carried by unspoken assumptions of the obvious desirability of these things, preying on people’s desire for relief / escape / growth / evolution / self-understanding / calmness / etc.
(Not accusing you in particular of any of that, and I haven’t engaged with your work; it’s plausible to me you’re doing a thing that works well for you, and that others have similar results. But I do want to point at intense versions, including probably “Westernized versions of Buddhism that have had the supernatural stuff stripped out of them”.)
A general issue with the intense versions of Buddhist practices is that very often they are aimed at detaching / deconstructing / destroying / disavowing various elements of one’s mind / agency / values. Often these are important elements, and don’t necessarily automatically stay intact / regenerate themselves. This can have various good consequences, but also obviously by default has a bunch of bad consequences.
I think this is already latent in the entire concept of “liberation from suffering”. Pain is the signal of your body being damaged, to remove it is to invite the decay of accumulated unnoticed and unavoided damage. There’s a nearby thing that is good, which is to remove excessive pain which does not actually serve its purpose.
Likewise, suffering is the signal of your soul being damaged, and success inherently invites the decay of accumulated unnoticed and unavoided damage to your mind / agency / values and other parts of your soul. There’s again a nearby good thing, but it does not seem that Buddhism is aware of or aiming for it.
This is a known risk that comes up in the discussions of many Buddhist communities; “spiritual bypassing” is the standard term.
I think that suffering is a signal of internal conflict and that something is subtly (or not-so-subtly) going wrong in the mind’s internal processing; your soul being damaged, as you put it. Done well, Buddhist practices eliminate suffering not by interfering with that signal but paying attention to it such that the mind comes to see what exactly it’s doing to hurt itself and stops doing so.
So it’s less about “you stop suffering because you stop noticing when your soul is getting damaged” and more “you stop suffering because your soul stops damaging itself”.
But the mind is messy and refactoring fundamental parts of its operation can go wrong, and even if things go right there are phases where you may go backwards before you go forward again, and sometimes a person can get stuck in such a phase. So bad outcomes are certainly possible.
There will always be damage to your soul from living in the world (for at least as long as we are ordinary humans, and probably much beyond then). This is the primary purpose of suffering. The frame that suffering is always due to self-caused damage is part of the toxicity.
I agree that there are techniques that have bad effects if used in the wrong or careless ways, as well as schools/teachers who might even endorse some of those wrong ways.
My experience, and the experience of various people I know who’ve done similar practices, is that the kinds of things that get destroyed are mostly just ones that are messing up the mind. And that many of the practices are essentially about enhancing the information that’s going into the brain’s existing processes for learning and reorganizing itself from feedback signals, so that it can better refactor and optimize its own activity.
This can certainly lead to some desires or values being changed or reprioritized. But the way I view it is that it’s less about deep values changing, and more about improved information processing changing things that were actually suboptimal or needlessly greedy strategies for trying to fulfill the deep values.
A shallow example would be the experience of many advanced meditators who end up drinking less alcohol as the experience of it becomes less pleasant. A practice like body scanning might train the brain to better process sensory information from different parts of the body, so that the negative effects of alcohol on the body are felt more strongly, so the brain starts downweighting the desire to drink in response to those feedback signals.
I think there are certainly some schools within Buddhism that fit the sutric description, but Chapman’s description of schools of Buddhism outside his own tends to feel a little strawmannish and tribalish to me.
I do agree that some, perhaps very significant, degree of renunciation is involved in advanced practice, but at least none of the teachers I follow have a “you should renounce the world because the world is bad and sensual pleasures are horrible” undertone to it. (For what it’s worth, Claude also flags those bits of Chapman’s “sutra vs. tantra” comparison table as ideologically motivated.)
My own interpretation is that many things are worth renouncing simply because they do not actually make you better off in the long term, and because there are states of mind that you can try to cultivate that feel better both for you and others. E.g. being filled with an experience of love toward all existence and that feeling drawing you to help others out of a genuine delight for their well-being feels ultimately more satisfying than spending the evening browsing Facebook.
Yeah, I wouldn’t expect his position to be popular, because he’s basically saying that in order to improve its marketability western Buddhism has discarded the “vibe” of total renunciation, while essentially maintaining the system of practices that had been developed with renunciative ends in mind. I don’t suppose that there’s an objective way to resolve this until substantial studies of the effects of these practices are conducted.
At least some things seem objectively checkable, e.g. Claude’s criticism of the elements of this page that say sutra considers pleasure bad and the body disgusting cites various existing Buddhist writings saying the opposite, and holds that these are practices sometimes given to correct specific problems, not general vibes or cosmology:
The ascetic strand is real, but it’s a prescription rather than a cosmology.
Aśubha-bhāvanā, the thirty-two parts of the body, the nine charnel-ground contemplations — these are all in the Pali canon, and they’re as unpleasant as advertised. But in their canonical setting they’re an antidote (Skt. pratipakṣa), prescribed for a specific ailment. The standard Theravāda pedagogy pairs temperament with technique: someone of lustful temperament gets the repulsiveness practices, someone of hating temperament gets mettā, and giving them the wrong one makes things worse. That’s a clinical logic, not a metaphysical one. The corresponding Abhidharma analysis of the world doesn’t say phenomena are corrupt; it says they’re conditioned, impermanent, and not-self. “Corrupt” imports a moral valence — a fallenness — that the Pali material doesn’t quite carry, which is telling given that the table’s ethics row explicitly reaches for Christianity as the comparison.
There’s also a striking bit of internal self-correction. The Vinaya (Pārājika 3) records that after the Buddha taught corpse contemplation to a group of monks and went into seclusion, a number of them became so disgusted with their bodies that they killed themselves or had themselves killed. On returning he replaced the instruction with ānāpānasati. Whatever the historicity, the tradition preserved a story in which the ascetic technique is explicitly marked as overdosable.
On pleasure specifically, the texts are more discriminating than “bad.”
There’s a formula that recurs constantly in the Nikāyas: for any object, the Buddha claims to understand its assāda (gratification), its ādīnava (danger), and the nissaraṇa (escape). The gratification is affirmed as real. The critique isn’t that sensual pleasure is illusory or wicked; it’s that it’s unreliable, self-renewing, and binding — you don’t get out by the door you came in.
And then the jhānas explicitly rehabilitate a class of pleasure. In the standard autobiographical passage, the Bodhisatta recalls the absorption he fell into as a child under the rose-apple tree and asks himself why he should be afraid of that pleasure — a pleasure with nothing to do with sensuality or unwholesome states — and concludes he shouldn’t be. Pīti and sukha are path factors, not fetters. The operative distinction is between kāma-sukha and nekkhamma-sukha, sensual versus renunciate happiness, not between pleasure and its absence. A tradition that considered pleasure simply bad would not have built its central meditative architecture out of graded degrees of bliss.
In Mahāyāna sūtra the shift is much larger.
Here the ascetic material is retained but demoted to neyārtha — provisional teaching, given to particular people in particular states. The Vimalakīrtinirdeśa has the Buddha touch the ground with his toe to reveal that this world already is a pure land and that the defect was in the seeing, not the seen. Nāgārjuna’s identification of the limit of saṃsāra with the limit of nirvāṇa is in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, not a tantra. The Lotus’s upāya framework makes the whole renunciate presentation a stage of instruction rather than a description of reality. Tathāgatagarbha literature locates the buddha in the being as it stands. None of this needs tantra to arrive.
Two qualifications, in fairness to Chapman.
First, some sutric traditions really do fit his column. Classical Pure Land runs on precisely the contrast between this defiled world and the pure one elsewhere; the Japanese term edo, “the defiled land,” is not a caricature of anything. That’s a major, populous, unambiguously sutric tradition whose whole affective register is world-weariness.
Second, my counter-examples from East Asia are partly compromised as evidence. Tendai hongaku thought — original enlightenment, the affirmation of phenomena as already the absolute — developed in a Japanese milieu saturated with mikkyō, and Tiantai/Tendai institutionally absorbed esoteric practice. So when Zen or Tendai sounds world-affirming, a defender of the table could reasonably say that’s tantric influence leaking into a nominally sutric container rather than sutrayāna generating the view on its own. I think Vimalakīrti and Nāgārjuna are cleaner cases, since they predate the tantras outright.
So the corrected version of the row would be something like: sutric traditions contain a large body of world-renouncing and body-disgust practice, deployed as a targeted corrective and grounded in impermanence rather than in the world’s inherent badness, alongside — in Mahāyāna especially — a countervailing set of teachings that locate awakening in the world as it is. Which is a much less quotable table cell, and a lot less useful if what you’re building is an argument that the other side has nothing you need.
A general issue with the intense versions of Buddhist practices is that very often they are aimed at detaching / deconstructing / destroying / disavowing various elements of one’s mind / agency / values. Often these are important elements, and don’t necessarily automatically stay intact / regenerate themselves. This can have various good consequences, but also obviously by default has a bunch of bad consequences. Maybe there are good ways to do that (for example, by giving these elements space and other resources needed to reconfigure / regrow / reinterface / etc., in an appropriate dovetail with deconstruction). But my overwhelming impression, admittedly in most cases from shallow exposure, is that these practitioners either do not understand what they are doing, or think that this is a good thing to do, which it very obviously isn’t (similar to how suicide is very obviously not a good thing to do, with similar exceptions). (In defense of my conclusions even given shallow exposure: when I have tried engaging a bit more deeply, the background assumptions seem to be blatant, explicit, and strongly conditioning everything else; and the fruit of the tree seems often bad, ~never super impressive, and only mildly good when done in a non-standard, non-pressured, a la carte way.) Spiritual and social pressure towards these practices seems to be very often carried by unspoken assumptions of the obvious desirability of these things, preying on people’s desire for relief / escape / growth / evolution / self-understanding / calmness / etc.
(Not accusing you in particular of any of that, and I haven’t engaged with your work; it’s plausible to me you’re doing a thing that works well for you, and that others have similar results. But I do want to point at intense versions, including probably “Westernized versions of Buddhism that have had the supernatural stuff stripped out of them”.)
I think this is already latent in the entire concept of “liberation from suffering”. Pain is the signal of your body being damaged, to remove it is to invite the decay of accumulated unnoticed and unavoided damage. There’s a nearby thing that is good, which is to remove excessive pain which does not actually serve its purpose.
Likewise, suffering is the signal of your soul being damaged, and success inherently invites the decay of accumulated unnoticed and unavoided damage to your mind / agency / values and other parts of your soul. There’s again a nearby good thing, but it does not seem that Buddhism is aware of or aiming for it.
This is a known risk that comes up in the discussions of many Buddhist communities; “spiritual bypassing” is the standard term.
I think that suffering is a signal of internal conflict and that something is subtly (or not-so-subtly) going wrong in the mind’s internal processing; your soul being damaged, as you put it. Done well, Buddhist practices eliminate suffering not by interfering with that signal but paying attention to it such that the mind comes to see what exactly it’s doing to hurt itself and stops doing so.
So it’s less about “you stop suffering because you stop noticing when your soul is getting damaged” and more “you stop suffering because your soul stops damaging itself”.
But the mind is messy and refactoring fundamental parts of its operation can go wrong, and even if things go right there are phases where you may go backwards before you go forward again, and sometimes a person can get stuck in such a phase. So bad outcomes are certainly possible.
There will always be damage to your soul from living in the world (for at least as long as we are ordinary humans, and probably much beyond then). This is the primary purpose of suffering. The frame that suffering is always due to self-caused damage is part of the toxicity.
Can you define “damage to the soul” more specifically?
I agree that there are techniques that have bad effects if used in the wrong or careless ways, as well as schools/teachers who might even endorse some of those wrong ways.
My experience, and the experience of various people I know who’ve done similar practices, is that the kinds of things that get destroyed are mostly just ones that are messing up the mind. And that many of the practices are essentially about enhancing the information that’s going into the brain’s existing processes for learning and reorganizing itself from feedback signals, so that it can better refactor and optimize its own activity.
This can certainly lead to some desires or values being changed or reprioritized. But the way I view it is that it’s less about deep values changing, and more about improved information processing changing things that were actually suboptimal or needlessly greedy strategies for trying to fulfill the deep values.
A shallow example would be the experience of many advanced meditators who end up drinking less alcohol as the experience of it becomes less pleasant. A practice like body scanning might train the brain to better process sensory information from different parts of the body, so that the negative effects of alcohol on the body are felt more strongly, so the brain starts downweighting the desire to drink in response to those feedback signals.
Hmm. Do you disagree with Chapman that western Buddhism is largely Sutra-derived, and the ultimate goal of Sutra is renunciation of worldly concerns (the stuff that’s considered indispensable in the west)?
I think there are certainly some schools within Buddhism that fit the sutric description, but Chapman’s description of schools of Buddhism outside his own tends to feel a little strawmannish and tribalish to me.
I do agree that some, perhaps very significant, degree of renunciation is involved in advanced practice, but at least none of the teachers I follow have a “you should renounce the world because the world is bad and sensual pleasures are horrible” undertone to it. (For what it’s worth, Claude also flags those bits of Chapman’s “sutra vs. tantra” comparison table as ideologically motivated.)
My own interpretation is that many things are worth renouncing simply because they do not actually make you better off in the long term, and because there are states of mind that you can try to cultivate that feel better both for you and others. E.g. being filled with an experience of love toward all existence and that feeling drawing you to help others out of a genuine delight for their well-being feels ultimately more satisfying than spending the evening browsing Facebook.
Yeah, I wouldn’t expect his position to be popular, because he’s basically saying that in order to improve its marketability western Buddhism has discarded the “vibe” of total renunciation, while essentially maintaining the system of practices that had been developed with renunciative ends in mind. I don’t suppose that there’s an objective way to resolve this until substantial studies of the effects of these practices are conducted.
At least some things seem objectively checkable, e.g. Claude’s criticism of the elements of this page that say sutra considers pleasure bad and the body disgusting cites various existing Buddhist writings saying the opposite, and holds that these are practices sometimes given to correct specific problems, not general vibes or cosmology:
The ascetic strand is real, but it’s a prescription rather than a cosmology.
Aśubha-bhāvanā, the thirty-two parts of the body, the nine charnel-ground contemplations — these are all in the Pali canon, and they’re as unpleasant as advertised. But in their canonical setting they’re an antidote (Skt. pratipakṣa), prescribed for a specific ailment. The standard Theravāda pedagogy pairs temperament with technique: someone of lustful temperament gets the repulsiveness practices, someone of hating temperament gets mettā, and giving them the wrong one makes things worse. That’s a clinical logic, not a metaphysical one. The corresponding Abhidharma analysis of the world doesn’t say phenomena are corrupt; it says they’re conditioned, impermanent, and not-self. “Corrupt” imports a moral valence — a fallenness — that the Pali material doesn’t quite carry, which is telling given that the table’s ethics row explicitly reaches for Christianity as the comparison.
There’s also a striking bit of internal self-correction. The Vinaya (Pārājika 3) records that after the Buddha taught corpse contemplation to a group of monks and went into seclusion, a number of them became so disgusted with their bodies that they killed themselves or had themselves killed. On returning he replaced the instruction with ānāpānasati. Whatever the historicity, the tradition preserved a story in which the ascetic technique is explicitly marked as overdosable.
On pleasure specifically, the texts are more discriminating than “bad.”
There’s a formula that recurs constantly in the Nikāyas: for any object, the Buddha claims to understand its assāda (gratification), its ādīnava (danger), and the nissaraṇa (escape). The gratification is affirmed as real. The critique isn’t that sensual pleasure is illusory or wicked; it’s that it’s unreliable, self-renewing, and binding — you don’t get out by the door you came in.
And then the jhānas explicitly rehabilitate a class of pleasure. In the standard autobiographical passage, the Bodhisatta recalls the absorption he fell into as a child under the rose-apple tree and asks himself why he should be afraid of that pleasure — a pleasure with nothing to do with sensuality or unwholesome states — and concludes he shouldn’t be. Pīti and sukha are path factors, not fetters. The operative distinction is between kāma-sukha and nekkhamma-sukha, sensual versus renunciate happiness, not between pleasure and its absence. A tradition that considered pleasure simply bad would not have built its central meditative architecture out of graded degrees of bliss.
In Mahāyāna sūtra the shift is much larger.
Here the ascetic material is retained but demoted to neyārtha — provisional teaching, given to particular people in particular states. The Vimalakīrtinirdeśa has the Buddha touch the ground with his toe to reveal that this world already is a pure land and that the defect was in the seeing, not the seen. Nāgārjuna’s identification of the limit of saṃsāra with the limit of nirvāṇa is in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, not a tantra. The Lotus’s upāya framework makes the whole renunciate presentation a stage of instruction rather than a description of reality. Tathāgatagarbha literature locates the buddha in the being as it stands. None of this needs tantra to arrive.
Two qualifications, in fairness to Chapman.
First, some sutric traditions really do fit his column. Classical Pure Land runs on precisely the contrast between this defiled world and the pure one elsewhere; the Japanese term edo, “the defiled land,” is not a caricature of anything. That’s a major, populous, unambiguously sutric tradition whose whole affective register is world-weariness.
Second, my counter-examples from East Asia are partly compromised as evidence. Tendai hongaku thought — original enlightenment, the affirmation of phenomena as already the absolute — developed in a Japanese milieu saturated with mikkyō, and Tiantai/Tendai institutionally absorbed esoteric practice. So when Zen or Tendai sounds world-affirming, a defender of the table could reasonably say that’s tantric influence leaking into a nominally sutric container rather than sutrayāna generating the view on its own. I think Vimalakīrti and Nāgārjuna are cleaner cases, since they predate the tantras outright.
So the corrected version of the row would be something like: sutric traditions contain a large body of world-renouncing and body-disgust practice, deployed as a targeted corrective and grounded in impermanence rather than in the world’s inherent badness, alongside — in Mahāyāna especially — a countervailing set of teachings that locate awakening in the world as it is. Which is a much less quotable table cell, and a lot less useful if what you’re building is an argument that the other side has nothing you need.