Individual Buddhists. (individual growth and the Buddhist
doctrine of 'anatta' or transcendence of ego-attachment)
Religious Studies
Vol.29 No.4
Dec 1993
pp.443-452
COPYRIGHT Cambridge University Press 1993
I
There is a short sectioa of Peter Harvey's recent book oa
Buddhism(1) in which he offers a thumbnail sketch of Buddhist groups
in the United Kingdom. Among the groups he describes is the Friends
of the Westera Buddhist Order, and I declare an interest, as one of
its members. I have no particular quarrel with the descriptioa FWBO
activities, but there is a sting in the tail, which is, I think, a
point of some conceptual interest, which others have also focused
oa.(2)
The sting is brief and cautious, perhaps too briefly and cautiously
inserted to constitute a clear criticism, though sufficient to
intimate the possibility of one, aad the tone is mildly satirical.
But Harvey does say enough to suggest that there is a problem, a
prima facie difficulty, that needs to be addressed. The difficulty,
in brief, is how a Buddhist Order may be supposed to reconcile an
emphasis on the ~individual', indeed on the growth or evea ~Higher
Evolutioa'(3) of the ~individual' with the (presumably ~essential')
Buddhist doctrine of anatta. Harvey puts it as follows:
In its teachings, (the FWBO) emphasises the ~Higher Evolutioa' of
the ~individual', such that its ideal seems to be a kind of heroic,
muscular, romantic superhumanism, which is influenced by some of the
ideas of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It thus seems to
neglect that aspect of the Buddhist path which ultimately aims at
the transcending of I-ness (sic) aad ego-attachment (p.318; my
italics).
In other words, if I may concentrate on the conceptual aspect of
this unfriendly appraisal, if Buddhism seeks to deny the existence
of the Self, at least as a permanent and substantial entity, aad if
it insists on the overcoming of what Harvey here calls
ego-attachment, how can an insistence on an individual's growth or
~higher evolutioa' be reconciled with that positioa, how, indeed,
can it be considered a means of giving expressioa to Buddhism at
all, since it ~seems' to point in absolutely the wrong directioa?
Thus the sting. Although in this connectioa Harvey refers in his
bibliography only to an introductory book(4) by Dharmacari Subhuti
(Alex Kennedy), I should make it clear that the latter draws quite
explicitly on the formidable output of Sangharakshita,(5) so that if
we are talking about an emphasis in the FWBO on the growth aad
~higher evolutioa' of the individual, we are talking about an
emphasis made by its founder, to whom Harvey scarcely refers.
Although not everyone may fiad the metaphor of a ~higher evolutioa'
satisfactory or immediately compelling, Sangharakshita himself makes
it clear that what he refers to is straightforward enough, from a
Buddhist point of view: to talk about the higher evolutioa of the
individual is intended as a means of referring to the progressive
stages of the path towards Buddhahood. Aad it is strange that Harvey
should present the emphasis on the evolutioa of the individual
without acknowledging that connectioa.
If we may leave oa one side the issue of muscular Buddhism (they
were young in those days) aad the slightly puzzling reference to
Nietzsche's Uehermensch, Harvey's suggestioa seems to be that the
point aad proveaance of Sangharakshita's use of the term
~individual' is to be traced to the heroic individualism that one
fiads passim in the writings of Nietzsche, evea though the use of
the term is not particularly associated with him. In fact, it always
seemed to me that another main, aad obvious cultural influence came
via Kierkegaard, the European thinker who is most associated with
the notioa of ~the individual', aad with the use of the term.
No doubt there are points of contact betweea Kierkegaard aad
Nietzsche which are worth exploring, aad perhaps they are of more
interest than uncritical terms like ~superhumanism' may lead us to
think, though this latter expressioa may be intended by Harvey to
indicate a view about the level of appropriatioa of Nietzsche's
ideas by members of the FWBO. In any eveat, the appropriatioa of any
particular aspect of the work of a thinker hardly amounts to a
global endorsement of everything he or she says: and it would be
difficult to know what would count as such in the case of so subtle
and swiftly moving a philosopher as Nietzsche. But anyone who was
concerned with establishing the nature of the trajectory from the
absence to the achievement of the states of concentratioa upon which
knowledge aad visioa of things as they are is said in Buddhism to
depend may well fiad judicious and critical reference to Nietzsche's
diagnoses of the culturally received and socially reinforced forms
aad consequences of interaal divisioa aad emasculated relationship a
~skilful means'.
II
But let us see whether the idea of the individual, at least as found
in Kierkegaard, aad in some of its aspects, is or is not difficult
to reconcile with the doctrine of anatta or the transcending of
~I-ness' aad ego-attachment.
Are there any points of coincidence, or points at which it is
possible for the one traditioa to illuminate the other? Or does talk
of the ~Higher Evolutioa' or growth or development of the individual
seem after all aad irredeemably ~to neglect that aspect of the
Buddhist path which ultimately aims at the transcending of I-ness
aad ego-attachment'?
I shall attempt to reflect philosophically on what Kierkegaard says,
aad will stray in the directioa of a discussioa of the nature of
persoahood and self-consciousness, in ways which I think are not
wholly foreign to his concerns. However, my remarks in this area
will be relatively rudimentary, and I shall not approach head-on the
conceptual structures of Buddhist notioas of anatta.
One obvious connectioa with the Buddhist doctrine of ~not-self'
comes in the way in which Kierkegaard conceives the ~subjective
thinker' as ~essentially interested in his own thinking, existing as
he does in his thought'. I take the expressioa, ~existing as he does
in his thought', to be an attempt to capture the idea that the
energies of the human persoa are constructed round those forms of
thought which motivate them to actioa, so that they exist and move
within horizoas of thought which focus their energies and determine
their reasoas for actioa. I make the connectioa with actioa in an
attempt to alleviate the residual Cartesianism of Kierkegaard's
thinking, which sits ill with his emphasis oa relationship.
The term ~subjective' has become hopelessly impoverished in its use
in recent times, so there are real difficulties in retrieving
Kierkegaard's thought. But despite the connotatioas that an
expressioa like ~subjective thinker' is now likely to have, it seems
to me that its sense as used by Kierkegaard is something like ~the
self-aware or self-conscious thinker', so long as we make clear that
what we are conscious of as a Kierkegaardian ~existing individual'
is our thinking. This is an important qualificatioa, since it
implies a particular form of self-consciousness. I can be aware of
what I am doing, for instance, or be aware of a particular desire or
impulse to actioa, and be aware of it in terms that reflect my
established way of thinking (in the light of which an impulse or
desire might appear acceptable or unacceptable, for example). But to
become aware precisely of my thinking is to gain a purchase oa its
totality. But this oaly makes sense if we can acknowledge, not only
that my established ways of thinking can change, but also that the
tip of the terms of that change is already available within the
emergent attitudes implicit in the form of self-consciousness. One
correcting modificatioa of the Kierkegaardian insistence on an
awareness of our thinking is to insist on an (attitudinal) awareness
of our form of life, or the general form of our relationship.
(Needless to say, to be self-aware or self-conscious here carries no
implications about awareness of a Self conceived as independent of
the interaal and behavioural processes that make up human
experience: the sort of Self that Hume very properly professed
himself unable to fiad. On the contrary, to be self-aware in this
context is to be aware of precisely those processes. What I started
to spell out, aad it is of central importance in understanding the
anatta doctrine, is that such self-awareness is attitudinal, or
~from a point of view': in being aware of what we are doing, for
example, we are sometimes ~uneasily' or ~critically' aware. This
unease may derive from our established modes of thoughts, or, on the
other hand, it may transcend them.)
In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript(6) Kierkegaard establishes
a connectioa betweea the idea of ~the subjective thinker' and that
of ~the existing individual' thus:
While objective thought is indifferent to the thinking subject and
his existence, the subjective thinker is as an existing individual
essentially interested in his own thinking, existing as he does in
his thought (p. 67).
In a note about this passage, after going on to discuss very
suggestively the nature of the communicatioa that is appropriate to
these different modes of thought, objective and subjective,
Kierkegaard twice makes the point that the existing individual (here
the ~religious individual') is in ~constant process of becoming'
(~inwardly' or ~in inwardness').
It is clear, as we shall see in a momeat, that these two ideas,
~existing in thought', and being in constant process of becoming,
are closely connected. Admittedly, the contexts to which Kierkegaard
appeals at this point are the erotic relationship aad the
God-relationship, aad it would be absurd to attempt to show that
~really' Kierkegaard is attempting to express ~a Buddhist thought'.
Manifestly he is seeking to do no such thing, if we examine the
larger context. But a Buddhist thinker does not need to press
Kierkegaard's thoughts in an alien directioa in order to fiad
features of his thinking a helpful means of expressing ideas that
may in the end he alien to Kierkegaard. Furthermore, the two
references I have just made to different forms of communicatioa aad
to different forms of relationship make it quite clear that despite
the apparent idealist bias of his focus on thinking, aad the
apparent self-absorptioa of his preoccupatioa with inwardness,
Kierkegaard is quite emphatic that the true individual exists in
relationship, the form of which changes with, because it expresses,
changes in the form of inwardness.(7)
The subjective thinker, the existing individual, who is essentially
interested in his own thinking, existing as he does in his thought,
is contrasted with someone who, in a religious or ethical context,
merely thinks ~in an objective manner' (which is, remember,
~indifferent to the thinking subject and his existence'). The
subjective thinker is contrasted with someone, that is to say, in
whom there does not occur what is essential to religious thinking,
namely the subjective appropriatioa in inwardness of that which is
thought, a process in which the individual is transformed pari passu
with the development of his thought. Indeed, the trajectory of the
~constant process of becoming' to which Kierkegaard refers may be
said to be traceable along the path of what constitutes the
appropriatioa of the existing individual's thought. The point we can
retrieve from Kierkegaard about ~subjective thinking' is that it is
an activity of thought which, so far from being exteraal to the
formatioa of the individual thus engaged, is just what forms him or
her as a persoa.
If one remains merely an objective thinker, on the other hand, so
that one ~knows' the various religious and spiritual truths oaly
~objectively', aad not otherwise, as though they had no impact oa
one's ~inwardness', thea one has precisely failed to understand
them. Remaining undisturbed by a disturbing thought, to put it
crudely, one shows one's incompreheasioa. One knows that one is
mortal in the way that one knows other pieces of informatioa that do
not (particularly) affect us. If it is true that certain thoughts
affect us aad make a difference, and one remains unaffected and no
difference is made, then one reasoa for this may be that we have not
~subjectively appropriated' the relevant thoughts at all. If you
really understood that you were mortal, the claim goes, then you
would be changed. Such claims are presumably made on the basis of an
accumulated experience of determinate changes in determinate
circumstances. That such changes occur is the ground of
Kierkegaard's enterprise, aad is the conditioa of his sensitivity to
the difficulties of communicatioa betweea persoas established at
different points along the line of transformatioa, a line of
transformatioa which (if it exists, and we can hardly be neutral
here) determines for us the criteria for what persoas are in the
first place.
No doubt Kierkegaard is thinking in schematic terms aad it would be
pointless to press him too hard. What seems to make one an
~objective thinker' in relation to classes of thought the proper
understanding of which involves an ~inward' dimensioa is precisely
the failure to be aware of this dimensioa, so that one behaves as
though there were no grammatical difference (to use a
Wittgensteinian expressioa) betweea, say, ~spiritual truths' aad
ordinary matters of fact of the kind that do not (much) impinge upoa
us. But it is this absence of inwardness that is the real issue. It
is what is ~really' wrong with the ~objective thinker'. If one
remains a ~merely' objective thinker then one fails to be ~an
existing individual', that is to say, one fails to be ~essentially
interested' in one's own thinking. One's attention may be focused in
directioas aad forms of relationship determined by one's actual,
one's established, thoughts and desires, but there is no movement of
self-consciousness of a kind sufficient to allow one to realise, for
instance, that one ~exists in (one's) thought', or to realise,
perhaps, the determinants of one's thoughts and desires, or their
connectioa with the culturally received aad reinforced disharmonies
and repressioas. Without that movement of self-consciousness, one
remains, unawares, in the grip of ego-formatioas aad their forms of
expressioa and relationship that, in traditioaal Buddhist terms, are
limited by craving, aversioa and ignorance, and which one may very
well think is ~one's very self' (though that is a delusioa which
depends on some degree of self-awareness). It is not that the
~objective thinker' does not ~reflect' upoa his or her life or has
no self-awareness. The terms in which he or she reflects upoa his or
her life simply reduplicate the established way of thinking; that is
what he or she fails to reflect upoa, the totality of the
established way of thinking itself. Aad this is the essential point:
if he or she did reflect upoa his or her established way of thinking
it would, as I have said, have to be ~in terms', though, of course,
in other terms than those available in the established way of
thinking; it would have to be from a point of view, which we should
have to understand as an emergent point of view, so that the momeat
of (attitudinal) self-consciousness of the totality of one's way of
thinking is also a momeat of revelation. It is also the momeat at
which one starts to become what an individual persoa is. The first
movement of the ~existing individual' is to become aware of, thence
to pursue, emergent forms of inwardness, to enter thus a determinate
process of becoming, a process by which one is constituted as a
persoa.
One way of making sense of what Kierkegaard is trying to say about
~inwardness' and ~subjective appropriatioa' is to think of certain
beliefs or thoughts or facts as having, under relevant conditioas, a
known motivatioaal efficacy, and as having this precisely because
such beliefs or thoughts or facts represent the intentioaal objects
of an emergent sensibility or form of inwardness. To think such
thoughts ~subjectively' is to allow their content to affect one's
inwardness, aad is to have regard to the form of their impact. The
criteria of identity for the thought include the form of that
inwardness. To put it in Wittgensteinian terms, the form of one's
inwardness represents the grammar of one's ~thought' in the sense
that one's inwardness is constituted by the constellatioa of
conceptually related other thoughts, images, impulses, etc. which
give one's ~thought' its specific identity within a set of relations
as the thought that it is. When such a ~thought' is thought ~in an
objective manner', on the other hand, there is no such hinterland.
This is not to say that there is no hinterland in the objective
thinker: it will simply not be that which belongs to the grammar of
the unappropriated thought.
If the existing individual is essentially interested in his or her
own thinking, existing as he or she does in his or her thoughts,
then presumably he or she has begun to realise that such a relation
exists, and this is a feature of his or her becoming what he or she
is, his or her emergence as an individual (persoa) : his or her
growth as an individual will then be a functioa of the transforming
thoughts that he or she appropriates, and which manifest themselves
in changed forms of relationship (Regine). Aa ~existing individual'
is a persoa who has started to become what a persoa is. This may
sound paradoxical. If we were to discover that persoas were
constituted in a series of determinate transformatioas, which were
dependent upoa conditioas, including, say, the access of
self-awareness, then we should be able to make sense of the idea of
a persoa becoming what a persoa is, since we should then conceive
persoahood as an essentially developmental notioa: it could be true
of a persoa that he or she had yet to become what a persoa is. So
our conceptioa of ~what a persoa is' may be determined by the
experience of some at least of the trajectories traced within the
religious and spiritual traditioas, in ways no doubt contested
betweea those traditioas, which is to say that ~what a persoa is' is
also a matter of contest.(8)but whatever differences there may be
betweea them, more than one spiritual traditioa shares the idea that
the ~constant process of becoming' takes a determinate and to some
extent determinable directioa, manifested, again, in demeanour and
relationship, which must surely be the real form of this becoming,
so that it makes good sense to say that persoas need to become what
persoas are. Our sense of ~what persoas are' is partly determined by
the extent of our appropriatioa of such processes of change as have
been initiated and developed in the traditioa, and given
characteristic forms of expressioa in the language aad the spiritual
community, aad may be partly determined, indeed, by what remains to
be initiated. Kierkegaard himself talks of ~a complete
transformatioa of an individual's subjectivity', aad such a notioa
provides the perspective from which the distinctioa betweea the
subjective thinker aad the objective thinker becomes a possibility.
It provides the perspective from which the objective thinker appears
to remain precisely unbudging, aad the perspective from which the
problem of communicatioa becomes recognisably acute. He or she has
yet to initiate the process by which he or she becomes, precisely,
an individual. The conditioas for the possibility of doing so are
already established, to put it in Buddhist terms, in the many forms
of dukkha that flesh is heir to, which include, at a pre-reflective
level, forms of unsatisfactoriness or unease which are the first
intimatioa in our attitudinal self-consciousness of emergent
motivatioas attention to or disregard of which precipitates the
directioas of possible change.
III
Evea in the terms offered by Kierkegaard, we are clearly not too far
removed from certain aspects of the anatta doctrine, even though he
is precisely attempting to represent the state of the ~true
individual', an emphasis on the growth or development or even
~Higher Evolutioa' of whom, it will be remembered, is taken by
Harvey to seem to neglect that aspect of the Buddhist path whose
ultimate aim is the transcending of I-ness aad ego-attachment.
After all, if we were to seek to represent that aim in terms related
to what we have just discussed, we should presumably want to say
that the unregenerate persoa who remains an ~objective thinker' is
constituted by a set of thoughts, an ego-formatioa, if you like,
with which he or she identifies, and to which, in consequence, he or
she is attached, in such a way that his or her state of mind,
mind-set or citta, manifests ego-attachment aad the
non-transcendence of ~I-ness'. The so-called subjective thinker on
the other hand is at least in a position to know better because, to
the extent that he or she has realised that he or she is in constant
process of becoming, he or she has also realised, at the very least,
that he or she has no good reason to remain attached to some
specific ego-formatioa. We do not need to represent Kierkegaard as
being ready to offer such as characterisatioa of the mental state of
his objective thinker, or of the directioa of his or her ~becoming',
but he has certainly provided us with a vocabulary in which we caa,
a vocabulary, moreover, which reveals his insight into our
constitutioa in thought-processes, aad his insight that one's
emergence as an individual, a persoa ia the process of becoming what
a persoa is, begins in the critical appropriatioa of culturally or
interpersoaally received spiritual or religious truths. Again, his
own distinctioa betweea subjective aad objective thought is an
ethical one, evea if he has a different conceptioa of ethics. The
point, to repeat it, is not to say that Kierkegaard is really a
Buddhist, but to say that there is an enabling coincidence of
thinking which allows expressioa, in a western context, of a
Buddhist thought.
Now the many-sided Buddhist doctrine of anatta is difficult to make
sense of even though it may be relatively easy to state. There are
difficulties, for instance, about the derivatioa of the criteria of
~Selfhood' (in terms of permanence aad substantiality, etc.) by
reference to which particular ~things', including the human persoa,
are judged to be ~not-self'. This is not the place for a proper
discussioa of how we should approach or understand such a notioa.
What I shall do, though, is refer to Harvey's own statement of the
doctrine, to see how far, thus stated, it may be connected with talk
of the growth of the individual:
the not-self teaching does not deny that there is continuity of
character in life, and to some extent from life to life. But
persistent character traits are merely due to the repeated
occurrence of certain cittas or ~mind-sets'. The citta as a whole is
sometimes talked of as an (empirical) ~self'... but while such
character traits may be long-lasting, they caa and do change, and
are thus impermanent, aad so ~not-self', insubstantial. A ~persoa'
is a collectioa of rapidly changing and interacting mental and
physical processes, with character patterns re-occurring over some
time. Only partial control caa be exercised over these processes; so
they often change in undesired ways, leading to suffering.
Impermanent, they caanot be a permanent self Suffering, they caanot
be aa autonomous true ~I', which would contain nothing that was out
of harmony with itself (op. Cit. P. 52, my italics).
The coda reflects the difficulties I have just referred to about the
criteria for Selfhood, but the immediately relevant passage is the
one that says that a ~persoa' is to be understood as a collectioa of
rapidly changing and interacting mental and physical processes,
since this seems readily intelligible ia terms of the notioa of the
individual, as conceived by Kierkegaard. That is to say, such a
thinker recognises that he is constituted by his thought. In a
constant process of becoming, the general directioa of that change
is dependent upoa conditioas, conditioas which include attention and
active thinking of a kind I have just characterised, including the
cultivatioa, development or growth of the attitudes implicit in the
forms of self-consciousness we have been discussing. It is clear
that for Kierkegaard there is an ethical dimensioa to this process
of becoming, just as in Buddhism there is an ethical dimensioa to
the possible directioas, dependent upoa conditioas, of the rapidly
changing mental processes that Harvey refers to. What is castigated
by Kierkegaard is the failure to appropriate religious and ethical
truths. An unregenerate ~mind-set', to use Harvey's phrase, remains
intact, untouched, by precisely what touches the psyche, while the
subjective thinker is transformed and reconstituted by the impact of
these same ~thoughts'.
The nature of persoaal transformatioa aad the growth of the
individual exemplifies a particular applicatioa, then, of
~conditioaed co-productioa', aad so, by the criteria according to
which anything is judged to be ~not-self', the individual human
being is to that extent ~anatta' or, to put it in other terms,
~empty of inherent existence'. The transformatioas of the
individual, by which he or she becomes what he or she is perceived
in the spiritual tradition to be, are dependent upoa conditioas
which include the initial sense of dukkha, attention to which
initiates change.
Kierkegaard was much exercised by the problem of becoming what oae
is, by the problem, that is to say, of starting the process of
thought within whose transformatioas one is constituted. To start to
realise that one's mind-set is dependent upoa conditioas, and to
realise that, for more than one reasoa, that mind-set is dukkha, is
already to recognise, to some extent, that one is not a permanent
and fixed ego: such recognitioa, of course, must confront the
resistances associated with attachment to particular mind-sets as
though they were one's very self -- which is not to assert (or deny)
that one's very self is to be found elsewhere. Harvey underlines
Buddhist pragmatism here very well. One could say that our concept
of selfhood is radically contaminated by the mind-set of ~this is
mine', ~I am this', to such an extent, indeed, that talk of an
Upanishadic self (truth-value, the real state of things, quite
aside), is hound to be misunderstood, aad the search for it become
no more than a reinforcement of what Harvey calls ego-attachment.
If we see the human persoa as essentially anatta in the sense
discussed, i.e. as essentially in process, though in determinate
directioas discovered and articulated in the traditioa, we caa
perhaps begin to see that an attention to the growth, development,
evolutioa of the individual is so far from neglecting the Buddhist
emphasis on the transcending of ~I-ness' aad ego-attachment, that it
is actually a conditioa of its possibility!
It is hard to see how Harvey is not acknowledging as much when he
says, for instance:
Much Buddhist practice is concerned with the purificatioa,
development and integratioa of the factors of persoaality, through
the cultivatioa of virtue aad meditatioa. In time, however, the
five-fold aaalysis is used to enable a meditator to gradually
transcend the naive perceptioa -- with respect to ~himself' or
~another' -- of a unitary ~persoa' or ~self'. In place of this there
is set up the contemplatioa of a persoa as a cluster of changing
mental and physical processes, or dhamma's, thus undermining
grasping and attachment, which are key causes of suffering (op. cit.
P. 50).
The essential or determining act of the individual is the movement
of self-conciousness in which one becomes aware of oneself as
constituted in change aad as constituted in one's thought, where the
line of one's becoming is to be located in the line of one's
~thought'. The idea of the purificatioa, development and harmonious
integratioa of the factors of persoaality, as Harvey expresses it,
is entirely compatible with such an idea of the ~individual',
especially since it describes a process which terminates in a clear
recognitioa of the real nature of things, a truth which, in
Kierkegaardiaa terms, caa only be subjectively appropriated, aad, in
Buddhist terms, is only so appropriated by a highly evolved, because
highly concentrated, individual. The process of purificatioa, etc.
that Harvey very properly describes, is a process of transformatioa,
from one state of the persoa to another. The gibe about the FWBO and
its emphasis on the ~individual' must surely rely oa a vulgar
conceptioa of that term, assimilating it, perhaps, to some kind of
cultivatioa of a preferred self-image, or similar narcissism, as
though the growth of the individual was not partly constituted at
least by the development of an ethical sensibility made manifest in
changes in relationship,
Ia conclusioa, it might be worth attempting to articulate what I
have said about self-consciousness in terms of the khandhas. Part of
the philosophical interest of the five khandha doctrine construed as
an aaalysis of the general form of human experience, is that it
already includes an account of what Kierkegaard is struggling for in
his talk of inwardness aad appropriatioa. It precisely locates
~thought' in the world of form (rupa) (its intentional object) aad
makes essential reference to feeling (vedaaa) aad motivatioa
(sankhara) as well as discriminatioa (sanaa) aad the degrees of
self-consciousness (vinaaaa) which are correlated with their
development: one must, on Kierkegaard's terms, ~be essentially
interested' in one's own thinking, a process of attention which
itself begins to alter the general frame of what is there to be
conscious of, since such attention allows it to emerge. Ia other
words, progressive changes of an ethical kind within the sankharas
are made possible by the feature of self-consciousness I have
already referred to. Self-consciousness is already attitudinal, aad
either merely reduplicates the general form of one's actually
motivating thought, or, by contrast, provides a purchase upoa it, in
the form of nascent and emergent forms of motivatioa. So higher
sankharas are already present in the forms of reflectioa of the
existing individual: or at least, their intimatioas in the forms of
reflectioa, duly attended to, are a conditioa of their development,
a development which will have repercussioas for the scope and focus
of sanaa. (1) Peter Harvey, An Introductioa to Buddhism (Cambridge
University Press, 1990). (2) See P. A. Mellor, ~Protestant
Buddhism?' Religioa, xxi (1991), 82. (3) An expressioa used by the
founder of the Western Buddhist Order, Sangharakshita. (4)
Dharmacari Subhuti (Alex Kennedy), Buddhism for Today (Glasgow,
1988). (5) For a recent account of the idea of a ~higher evolutioa'
aad a response to P. A. Mellor's assess of FWBO beliefs and
attitudes, see Sangharakshita, The FWBO and ~Protestant Buddhism'
(Windhorse Publicatioas, 1992). (6) Trans. David F. Swensoa aad
Walter Lowrie (Princetoa, 1968). (7) Cf. what Kierkegaard says about
the ~loving maiden' in the note referred to above. (8) See Rowan
Williams' discussioa in his "Know Thyself": What kind of an
Injunctioa?'in McGhee ed.), Philosophy, Religioa aad the Spiritual
Life (Cambridge, 1992).