Nirvana and other Buddhist Felicities

·期刊原文
Nirvana and other Buddhist Felicities
By Steven Collins
Reviewed by David Loy
Philosophy East and West
Vol. 50, No. 3 (July 2000)
p. 471
Copyright 2000 by University of Hawaii Press
Hawaii, USA

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p. 471 Nirvana and other Buddhist Felicities Philosophy East and West, Vol. 50, No. 3 (July 2000)

Nirvana and other Buddhist Felicities is an original and wide-ranging study that addresses what author Steven Collins calls the Pall imaginaire, a cultural and ideological system he abstracts from premodern South Asian Buddhist civilizations. It contests the notion that nirvana (and the celibate world-renunciation that leads to it) was the only or the main goal sought by Buddhists. This involves a very different history of Buddhist ideas that looks at systematic and narrative thought together, in order to understand how the summum bonum of nirvana fitted into a wider discourse of "felicities." Integrating more worldly felicities into the picture allows overdue attention to the Buddhist heavens (usually ignored by scholars) and to the role of utopian narratives and Metteyya (Skt: Maitreya) millennialism in the agrarian societies that embraced Theravada.

The first chapters offer the best study I have read of what early Buddhist thought says about the concept of nirvana. Like his earlier book Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravada Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), Collins also looks at the imagery of nirvana, particularly the metaphor of nirvana as a city, unimportant in the earliest texts but ubiquitous later. Instead of attempting to resolve the eternalism/annihilationism debate -- an impossible task, in his view -- he shows how nirvana was part of a hierarchy of values that added a transcendental and unconditioned soteriology at the summit of a collection of more earthly felicities. These other goals and values are more susceptible to narrative imagination, as seen in the popular Jataka tales recounting the earlier lives of the Buddha. This "decenters" nirvana, but Collins "re-centers" it by arguing that nirvana, as the ineffable goal of doctrine and the "full stop (period)" of popular narratives, gives structure to the whole by providing a meaningful and satisfying resolution to the issues raised in those texts. He claims that in the resulting Pali imaginaire the various concepts, images, and narratives of good fortune cohere together into a unifying ideology, but it seems to me that this argument is only half successful. The social success of Buddhist teachings shows that they could coexist comfortably, yet this does not mean that the tensions between the ineffable goal and more earthly values (happy family life, etc.) were integrated except in a purely formal sense. The nirvanic "full stop," which concludes popular Buddhist narratives, puts an end to tensions without necessarily resolving them for the rest of us. This is illustrated in the Vessantara Jataka, perhaps the most widely known of all Pali Buddhist stories, and one that Collins analyzes at length. Prince Vessantara's Perfection of Giving leads him to give away his children as slaves, and then his wife, in a fable that highlights the aporia between ascetic and social values. I fail to see how its happy conclusion really resolves the conflicts between utopian and prudential government, or between mental detachment and family love.

This exemplifies the two inconsistent yet overlapping functions that dhamma served historically. The first provided an ethics of kamma and reciprocity that rationalized the violent role of kings and the status of elites (including the sangha). The second promulgated an absolutist ethics of context-independent values that viewed all violence, including punishment, as immoral. The tension between these two was fundamental to the role of Buddhism in these premodern societies: ideologically Buddhism allowed itself to be used to naturalize social and historical contingencies such as class, but it also challenged this appropriation. Some Buddhist texts from all periods can be found showing that all kings are bad, and others why kings are necessary. "There is no single and simple "Buddhist" view of society, ideal or actual. Society, one might better say, is a prime site for the work of Buddhist culture, an inexhaustible fund of material on which the antagonistic symbiosis between clerics and kings could draw, to express both sides of the relationship. The ideal of a peaceful, civilized society under a beneficent king could never be without its discontents" (p. 496).

The emphasis (here and elsewhere) on plurality and ambivalence is especially instructive for engaged Buddhists such as myself who often appeal to "the Buddhist perspective" for insight into our troubled times. Buddhism is not so simple, as Collins shows over and over again. I think this does not deny the relevance of Buddhism for social engagement today, but implies that we need to accept more responsibility for creative appropriation of Buddhist teachings in circumstances very different from Sakyamuni's.

This only touches on a few of the many themes addressed in this lengthy and sometimes sprawling work. It cannot be said that Collins wears his learning lightly, and the heavy weight of meticulous scholarship sometimes works against the overall argument. The prose style is polished, yet the constant references and qualifications -- the desire to put everything in, to cover all possible bases -- can be wearying. One challenge of scholarly writing is knowing what to leave out. Might this book have been twice as good if it were half as long? In either case, its arguments are interesting, and I learned a lot reading it.