BUDDHIST GENERAL SEMANTICS A New Approach to Buddhist Religion and Its Philosophy By Rev. Khai Thien ISBN: 0-595-30679-9 ISBN: eBook - 0-595-75507-0 TABLE OF CONTENTS ·        Acknowledgments ·        Introduction ·        A Map Towards General Semantics CHAPTER I The Prerequisites For Intensive Comprehension I.              Coming and Seeing II.            Face to Face III.         Particular and Universal Relationship IV.         Internal and External Reality V.           From Symbol to Reality CHAPTER II Formation of Thought in Buddhist Psychology I.              The Foundation of Thought II.            Logical Thought III.         Abstract Thought IV.         Orientation of Thought CHAPTER III The World of Mind And Its Connection To Human Semantics I.            The Inner Mechanism of Mind II.          Characteristics of the Internal and External Worlds III.       The Process of Becoming IV.       The Doctrine of Non-self CHAPTER IV Buddhist Philosophy on the Issues of Human Ethics I.               Man and the Structure of Twelve factors II.             Philosophy of Cause and Effect III.          Karma—Certainty and Possibility IV.          Buddhist Analysis of Personality CHAPTER V Life And Experience in Buddhism I.               Definitions of Buddhism II.             Buddhist Religion III.          Life And Experience in Buddhist Religion IV.          Applying Buddhism V.            Human Semantics in Buddhist Philosophy CHAPTERVI Buddhist General Semantics I.              Methods of Practicing Buddhist Semantics II.            Symbol of Particular Digitization In Buddhist Semantics III.         Disciplines of Zen semantics IV.         Conclusion 1.      Appendix 1 2.      Appendix 2 CHAPTERVII Summary ·        Bibliography ·        Index ·        Biography of author    PREFACE One of the frustrating quandaries confronting North American Buddhists and those interested in Buddhism here is how to translate Buddhist ideas and ideals and Buddhist actions into our own local idiom, our own modes of understanding, thought, and action.  This is not just about finding suitable translations for words like dharma or sunyata.  It is, rather, about finding suitable examples, metaphors, similes, and indigenous systems of thought and philosophies of action, such that, when properly explained, the Buddha's teachings come alive, become relevant, real, and, most importantly, perhaps, possible.   The world we have made today, is, after all, not an easy one for religious ideas—ideas lacking in militancy or anger.  They don't always do very well.  They can get lost in the chaos, shouted down, drowned out.  Furthermore, Buddhism has the added burden of being remote or exotic in the minds of many Americans.  This is, perhaps, not so much a product of its foreign, Asian origins, as of its unfamiliar language and a long list of often poorly explained notions.  American seekers have a tendency to encounter Buddhism, cry "Cool!" but then walk away.      Khai Thien, a.k.a Thich Tam Thien, however, offers some new ideas on making Buddhism relevant and meaningful, despite the hardships of the age.  Khai Thien is new to America, but his work at Chua Viet Nam in Los Angeles is already well known both in the Vietnamese community and among other Buddhists in Los Angeles.  And he has been a wonderful friend to me.  He is not only knowledgeable and wise, but kind and helpful as well—the fullness of a bodhisattva's virtues!   And here, in this book, we can see that his thoughts on Buddhism in the modern world are relevant and necessary.  In his Buddhist General Semantics, Khai Thien has given us an intriguing picture of how Buddhism and contemporary normative explorations of living the good life from non-Buddhist sources can complement one another.  As he writes, in his conclusion, the basis of this complementary relationship is that "…both general semantics and Buddhism focus on the search for truth and self-realization, self-discovery, and self-awareness…." His goal is to place Buddhism under the lens of general semantics and thereby find new ways for understanding the Buddha's teachings. But he wants to shake us up, not cast us adrift in a sea of unfamiliar Buddhist terms, Sanskrit and Pali phrases.  He wants to connect our Buddhist thoughts and our Buddhist words to our everyday acts, to how we actually live in the world. To that end, Khai Thien grounds his discussion in the everyday, the familiar—orange juice and advertisements and contemporary psychology.  With a little help—some finger pointing and some explanations—and a little concentration, we can see that Buddhism was not really ever so very exotic or remote.             Khai Thien's work here is both a good general introduction to some basic (and not so basic) tenets of Buddhism, as well as a prescriptive view on how Buddhism can work in the modern world, how being a Buddhist can work in the modern world.  His discussion is not easy or simple.  Neither is it simplistic.  He lays out a complicated and intricate picture of Buddhism with work on general semantics.  But he always finds ways of making what he says connect with out own lives.  Khai Thien has over twenty years of experience as a Buddhist monk and teacher in Vietnam.  Now, in a new Buddhist world, he takes pains to make those teachings practical, connect them to, as he writes, "the living reactions of human beings."  I am particularly drawn, in closing, to his discussion of silence in the last chapter.  Silence is not something we are accustomed to dealing with here in America—or anywhere, I imagine.  We know of silence as absence, as a lack of activity.  It is the silence, as Thay Khai Thien write, of the battlefield after the fight is over, of the cessation of movement.  But there is another kind of silence, that of mental concentration, of striving for something, fully focused on the task, at one with ones thoughts and actions.   "Such a noble silence must be the first and foremost discipline for us to get in touch with our sanity and depart for our spiritual journey as well," he writes.    To that end, I welcome this book and all of Khai Thien's work in America.   Douglas M. Padgett Indiana University   Introduction It is not surprising to find that the goals of both Semantics and Zen are very similar. Both are vitally concerned with development of full human potentialities. Randy Berkman   Involved in Buddhology for more than twenty years, I have always looked for a new method to explain the perplexing mechanism of Buddhist philosophy that has been the greatest difficulty for people who wish to get in touch with the nature of the Buddha’s teachings. That same complexity often leads to misunderstanding and confusion in defining what Buddhism is and determining whether it is a religion or a philosophy. Even though we now have sufficient and credible documents of both the history and philosophy of Buddhism, the controversy about that issue remains unsolved, because the debates almost always start from different interpretations of those who insist on dealing with the teachings only through their theory, philosophy, history, or religious forms. Such treatment limits the active life of Buddhism since it produces a view of the different parts instead of the whole. People who study Buddhism that way will only partly know what Buddhism really is, regardless of how they perceive the meanings of the teachings or on which sources they base them. From the beginning of its history, Buddhism is neither a religion, a philosophy, or a science but rather the way Prince Siddhartha showed us how he dealt with the truth of human suffering and happiness. The success of his way, his Enlightenment, made him a Buddha, a man of enlightenment[1] ; and the word Buddhism is the general term for the Buddha, His teachings, and His followers, especially monks and nuns. For this reason, so-called Buddhist philosophy or Buddhist religion is always limited and cannot reflect the whole life of Buddhism as it really is, a totality, not a part of a whole. I would like, therefore, to suggest a new approach to Buddhism through the study of General Semantics. The best way to approach Buddhism is to look at it through the prism of general semantics, because the study of general semantics not only requires us to examine an object through the correlative relationship of causes and effects but also demands intensive research in which we have to deal with events, impacts, evaluations, and acts. In other words, it is the perfect methodology for researching, interpreting, and perceiving the true meaning of what we think and seek. Furthermore, the relationships of any phenomenon always need universal observation through categorical pairs, i.e. the relation of cause and effect, of good and evil, of nature and form, inside and outside, before and after, etc. Particularly in human affairs, a proper statement always has to deal with different pairs of categories: body and mind, space and time, thought and act, mentality and physics, country and people, tradition and modernity. Without alluding to those, we cannot make anything necessary to human life possible. If our research ignores those elements, the results will be utterly in vain. As defined by Alfred Korzybski (1879-1950), “General semantics is the study of the relations between language, ‘thought’ and behavior: between how we talk, therefore how we think, and therefore how we act.”[2] Likewise, a Buddhist has to put himself into that relation, to conform his thought, speech, and behavior to the stream of Buddhism in order to understand what life is all about. There is no way to achieve an intense comprehension of Buddhism without knowing the vital relation between language, thought, and action in all the Buddha’s sermons. For example, you will never know what orange juice is if you don’t taste it, think about it, and describe or figure it out in both thought and language. You will never know about orange juice if you just imagine it, watch it, or hear about it on television. The combination of language, thought, and action is the most important fundamental principle in the task of those who wish to enter the real life of Buddhism and profit from it. People are often deceived by language, however, not because of meaning but because of its symbolic function. S.I. Hayakawa said, “Of all forms of symbolism, language is the most highly developed, most subtle, and most complicated.”[3] For example, whenever we talk about heaven, we think of a place which cannot be found in this world, since heaven is supposedly a place of absolute happiness and eternal peace—the place of no ending, no suffering, and no fear, the land of hope. Then we imagine there are sun and moon, mountains and oceans, houses and cars, people and animals in heaven, all controlled by God. That is about all the heaven we can imagine. Such a subjective conception of heaven, however, is only the product of human imagination. The truth is, we know nothing of the true heaven while we are still in this world and live with fear and hope. Any interpretation or explanation of heaven based on the human mind is untrue, because we have never been there. General semantics suggests that the word is not the thing, as a map is not a real territory. [4] From this point of view, the world we speak of is not the world that really is or the world by itself, because our consciousness cannot transcend time and space. The notion of human values together with the notion of time and space, however, form the most universal principle and the most popular fundamentals for all scientific study and for society. That is why semanticists concentrate on the relationship of language, thought and behavior in their search for the true values of human perspectives. An object, visible or invisible—such as an apple in one’s mind and a real apple in one’s hand—is evaluated not only by itself, the object of consciousness, but also by a man, the subject of consciousness, who touches it, feels it, thinks of it, and eats it. As a result, an object’s true values are defined by the values of itself and the relative values between it and others, the values we assign to it according as our assumptions, feelings, tastes, and experiences. In this case, time, space and conceptions are the most important aspects in any evaluation. Bruce I. Kodish said: The notion of time-binding provides the basis upon which the system of general semantics has been built. Time-binding consists of the characteristic human ability to use language and other symbols to transmit information across time. This allows for the formation of cultures and the ability to study cultures. It gives each individual the potential to profit from his or her own experiences and other people’s experiences. Through time-binding each generation potentially can start where the last generation left off.[5] A phrase closely related to general semantics is “Finger pointing to the Moon.” The phrase originated with Bodhidharma[6] and has been repeated throughout fifteen hundred years in Mahayana Buddhist tradition. The phrase is an extraordinary definition of Buddhist epistemology in particular and of Buddhist studies in general, because it sets forth a very clear map for those who wish to enter the world of Buddhism, both extensively and intensively. The phrase is an example of dharma. The Buddha’s teachings are the finger, and the purpose of the dharma is the moon, which displays the qualities of truth, conventional truth, and absolute truth, the two sides of reality. People often, however, confuse one with the other, the point that must be illuminated through general semantics. In grammatical structure, the finger, the conventional truth, is the subject, the moon, the absolute truth, is the object; and pointing is a participle that defines the act of the subject, the finger. Logically, the finger cannot explain or describe itself, but it refers to something different from itself, another object, the moon. Furthermore, the finger cannot describe the moon exactly. It can only direct our attention to the moon. We may conclude that the finger is not the moon; the finger’s function is to point to the moon; and though the finger cannot define the moon, that does not mean the moon does not exist. The crucial point is that even though the moon exists, it will not be seen if the finger does not do its job of pointing. Consequently, the correlative and mutual relationship between the finger and the moon becomes unseparated and conditioned to form a pair of philosophical categories existing together at the same time. People often confuse the finger, the conventional truth, however, with the moon, the absolute truth, especially in the case of religions. Instead of following the finger’s guidance directly to the moon, the innocent followed the way of “finger pointing to fingers pointing to the moon.” That error was not only a big problem in the dawn of religious history but is also a great challenge for us today. At the moment of leaving the world, the Buddha said, “Light the Lamp within by yourself and you light the Dharma Lamp. Everyone has the Lamp within. The Lamp within oneself is one's only Dharma Lamp. If you do not light the Lamp within, there will not be light without. Everyone has a Buddha within, everyone is a future Buddha.” Also, Jesus said, "The kingdom of God is within you!"[7] But most people now love to look for the kingdom of God in churches, in the Bible, and from priests. That is a serious mistake that has existed century after century. Before going any further, we should make clear that all the teachings (sutras) of the Buddha or any religious founder are only means, not the end. They have been given to us as lessons to practice and follow. Lessons cannot automatically and immediately save us from suffering unless we do what they say and follow them. Like a map and a territory, the map is not the territory. Standing on a map is absolutely not standing on the territory. Likewise, a finger should point straight to the moon; its function is lost if it points to itself or to other fingers. Truly, we need both the finger and the moon, both map and territory, and both conventional truth and absolute truth. We need to see both sides of the any question. In the teaching of Dependent Origination (Paticcasamuppàda)[8], the Buddha said, “When A exists, B exists; when A does not exist, B does not exist.” A and B here represent the cause and effect of everything in the world of phenomena, as well as in humanity more specifically. Let’s take an example from the experience of death, a matter that concerns everyone. Though a man hides under any kind of robe, religious or non-religious, his fear of dying is still an embodiment of his desire of immortality, a forcing germination that always seeks a sacred existence not yet named, a secret buried in the depths of his soul. Most people think of death as the final event of life when the heart stops beating and the blood stops flowing. The causes leading to death, however, are independent, and one may be more crucial than another. We cannot count how many kinds of death there are, but we do know that death does not belong to the heart alone. Countless reasons come into play. The breaking of a bone in the human body may lead to death; the rupture a tiny vein or a failure in the nervous system may lead to death; a tiny shred of cancer in the chest may also lead to death. In How We Die, Sherwin B. Nuland writes: It is a process in which every tissue of the body partakes, each by its own means and at its own pace. The operative word here is process, not act, moment, or any other term connoting a flyspeck of time when the spirit departs. In previous generations, the end of the faltering heartbeat was taken to indicate the end of life, as though the abrupt silence beyond it intoned a soundless signal of finality. It was a specified instant, recordable in the chronicle of life and marking a full stop after its concluding word.[9] No single event ends a person’s life, but an entire system of events, together with the major event, both inside and outside the body, may put an end to life. That is why the Buddha said, “When A exists, B exists; when A does not exist, B does not exist.” This doctrine of dependent origination is a fundamental of Buddhist epistemology, ontology and axiology, established from the day Prince Siddhartha became the first Buddha in the world and effective throughout the whole history of Buddhism, so far as we have seen. Generally speaking, the methodology of general semantics provides one of the best avenues of approach to a proper evaluation of the subject we are researching. Particularly, the method is the most effective for working with certain aspects of human affairs, such as ethics, morality, psychology, and so on. I propose to employ general semantics to the study of the Buddhist religion with the hope that its techniques will help us gain an intensive comprehension and knowledge of Buddhist doctrine. For every issue contains the burning questions that help clarify it and lead its practitioners in their search for understanding. What burning questions clarify the field of religion? Why and how do general semantics become important in the clarification of religious issues, especially the issues of Buddhism? My suggestion is that the discipline of entering the world of religion requires not only a deep and intense knowledge of the religion but also an earnest desire to experience it profoundly. To get in touch with its real values, we have to involve all aspects of our semantics, including thinking, feeling, and acting with both verbal and non-verbal levels of experience. As an applied epistemology, focused on practical, personal, everyday activity, general semantics is a theory of value grounded on reality, on certain principles, and particularly on individual experience. Such an affirmation gives us a hint of how general semantics will enlighten and lead us to knowledge of what Buddhism is all about. This book then will discuss the basic theories of Buddhist epistemology, ontology, and axiology in the techniques of general semantics.[10] Footnotes: 1 As the Buddha said, “ the Buddhahood is available in anyone, regardless of sex, race, age, or color.” [2] As printed in the General semantics Bulletin Number 50, 1983. Reprinted and revised with permission from Self and Society: European Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Vol. XI, No. 3, 1983, pp. 159-166. [3] Language in Thought and Action, S.I.Hayakawa, Fifth Edition, p.16 [4] S.I. Hayakawa and Alan R. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action, fifth edition, Harcourt College Publisher, 1991, USA [5]Bruce I. Kodish, Ph.D. © 1997,Originally Presented At Making Medical Ethics Decisions: General semantics and Secular Humanist Perspectives, Williams Club of New York City, Saturday, March 23, 1996 [6] Bodhidharma is the 28th Buddhist Patriarch who was born in India and moved to China to propagate the Buddha’s teachings. [7] See http://www.csis.hku.hk/~bruce/ [8] This is one of the most important teachings in Buddhism. [9] Susan Presby Kodish, Ph.D. Bruce I. Kodish, Ph.D. Presented at the Colloquium on Exploring Life Applications of Fuzzy Logic, November 5, 1994. [10] See Appendix 1&2 in Chapter VI   Back to Buddhist Study