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Lesson 2.6: Scythian Shadows
7 Plays8 days ago
What if peace of mind comes not from knowing the truth, but from letting go of the need to know?
Topics discussed:
- The historical roots of Pyrrhonian skepticism in Greek, Scythian, and Buddhist traditions
- Pyrrho’s radical doubt and the practice of suspending judgment to attain ataraxia (calmness of mind)
- Sextus Empiricus and the evolution of skepticism as a therapeutic philosophical lifestyle
- The problem of criterion and the skeptic’s critique of all claims to truth
- Parallels between ancient skepticism and modern practices of emotional distancing, mindfulness, and cognitive reframing
For more information, visit theluxuryofvirtue.com.
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Transcript
Aristotle and Macedonian Politics
00:00:02
Speaker
When we last left off, we had been looking at the ethics of Aristotle. Perhaps these were some of the ideas that he was teaching at the Lyceum. I want to begin today by covering Aristotle's last days because in a roundabout sort of way, the end of Aristotle's biography leads us to the next topic in the course.
00:00:28
Speaker
And to discuss Aristotle's last days, well, we once again have to turn to what's going on in the Macedonian court. One thing that I didn't mention when I was first reviewing Aristotle's biography is that Philip was assassinated in 336 BCE. That's actually one year before Aristotle goes back to Athens and starts teaching.
The Rise of Alexander the Great
00:00:53
Speaker
And so now let me mention that very briefly. Philip was, of course, the king of Macedon who had amassed an empire, essentially forcing all the Greek city-states to be united under his throne.
00:01:07
Speaker
And so he had a lot of enemies. And for that reason, his assassination is shrouded in mystery. ah His court was, to be honest, a nest of intrigue. It could have been a lot of people, right? It could have been a scorned ex-boyfriend.
00:01:20
Speaker
It could have been his wife, Queen Olympias, which is Alexander's mom. Maybe she was trying to get her son to the throne already. Who knows, right? But Philip is assassinated.
00:01:32
Speaker
And while the body is still warm... Alexander is proclaimed king. Well, upon hearing that Philip is dead, several Greek city-states, who you will recall didn't want to be a part of the Macedonian Empire, they all rebel.
00:01:51
Speaker
They say, well, it was Philip that conquered us, Philip is dead, so I guess that means we're free now. Well, Alexander, of course, couldn't let that happen. And so the very first thing that Alexander does is reconquers all these rebellious Greek city-states.
00:02:08
Speaker
That gets done very quickly. By 335 BCE, that's all done a year after Philip is assassinated. And this is when Aristotle starts teaching in Athens, right? So there had to be ah reconquest, and then Aristotle makes it into Athens, and then soon after that, that's when the Lyceum opens.
00:02:28
Speaker
It is at this point that Alexander decides to complete his father's dying wishes, right? His father wanted to get revenge against the Persians for their invasions, the Persian invasions of the Greek city-states that had happened over a century prior to that point, right? so So Alexander wants to complete Philip's mission and so he's going to go after the Persians, avenge the past invasions of the Persians.
The Conquests of Alexander
00:02:58
Speaker
And this is exactly what he does at the same time that Aristotle is teaching in Athens. After a couple of years, Alexander defeats the Persians in 331 BCE.
00:03:10
Speaker
And now he gets the title of King of Kings. You'll recall that this is what the Persian kings call themselves. And once Alexander gets a taste for conquest, well, he decides to take his army even further east.
00:03:26
Speaker
And so this, of course, is when Alexander great gets the epithet, the great, because he conquered a whole lot of territory. He conquered the whole of the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, Egypt and the Levant, Mesopotamia, the Iranian plateau, and the lands immediately, I guess, to the north and south of the Hindu Kush.
00:03:49
Speaker
If it's easier for you to think about this in terms of modern countries, here is the list. Let me take a long breath here. Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and parts of India.
00:04:08
Speaker
That, of course, is a lot of territory and he would have kept going. The only thing that stopped him was a near-mutiny. That is, his own soldiers, after over a decade on campaign, said, that's it.
00:04:23
Speaker
No more. Right? So that is essentially the only reason why he stopped. And that was after 13 years on campaign, apparently having never lost a battle.
Alexander's Death and Legacy
00:04:38
Speaker
And now comes another mysterious death. Alexander dies 323 and people don't really know and people don't really know why he died.
00:04:49
Speaker
There's all kinds of theories. Some people say alcoholism. have a book here by John Maxwell O'Brien called The Hidden Enemy, where he explains that theory.
00:05:00
Speaker
But other people say malaria. Some people say there was a rare neurological disorder at play. So one suggestion is called Guillain-Barre syndrome. And I actually know someone who has symptoms of this syndrome today.
00:05:13
Speaker
ah So it is actually kind of a scary disease. Other people, of course, say assassination. Who knows? There's all kinds of possibilities when it comes to the Macedonian court.
00:05:24
Speaker
And so I won't go further into that. But what we can say is that Alexander, had he not died... was probably far from done. He was still a young man, only 32 years old, and apparently he was planning to eventually take his army, a new army, one assumes, west, right? So he would go back to Greece and eventually go conquer Rome, Carthage, and the Iberian Peninsula, what today is Spain and Portugal.
00:05:55
Speaker
Another couple of factoids about Alexander, apparently, according to legend at least, he dies on the same day that Diogenes the dog dies. That's interesting because Diogenes and Alexander had had a couple of run-ins with each other in the past.
00:06:10
Speaker
In any case, after Alexander dies, just like when Philip dies, several city-states decide to rebel against Macedonian rule.
00:06:21
Speaker
And this includes Athens which brings us back to Aristotle. Things were getting politically hot for Aristotle yet again and he is charged with impiety.
00:06:35
Speaker
This by the way is the same charge that got lobbed against Socrates couple of decades prior. And so we know how that story ends. So Aristotle fled and he lived the rest of his life in exile in Chalces.
00:06:53
Speaker
He had been teaching in Athens also for around 13 years since 335 BCE. He does not live much longer though. He dies only a year after leaving Athens.
00:07:06
Speaker
The year of his death is typically thought to be 322 BCE. Now the reason why I'm telling you this story is, well for one we have to finish up Aristotle's tale, but the main reason is that we are embarking in a new age at this point.
The Hellenistic Age and its Influence
00:07:26
Speaker
once alexander dies that usually according to historians marks the beginning of the hellenistic age what is the hellenistic age well alexander dies of course and he had conquered a large portion of the known world But there was no one with the personality and vigor to sort of keep that whole territory under their power.
00:07:53
Speaker
And so what ends up happening is that Alexander's empire begins to fragment. And the bulk of the empire divides up into three Macedonian successor states. What that means is that the big chunk of land that Alexander conquered gets split up between three people in his court.
00:08:13
Speaker
Now, this wasn't a clean process. There was a whole lot of infighting But in the end, three successor states are left and they are all run by Macedonians, right? So in other words, now we have a massive region governed by Greeks, right? By Macedonians.
00:08:33
Speaker
And so we have once again another period where the Greek language spreads because it is now the language of governance and status for a territory that is massive, right? I mean, it was, as we mentioned earlier,
00:08:50
Speaker
Some 11, 12 countries, something like that. Just so you have an idea as to where these kingdoms were located, let me give you some of the names here. The Antigonid kingdom is in Macedon. So the Antigonids ruled what today we would call Greece and some other regions right around there.
00:09:07
Speaker
Then there's the Ptolemaic Kingdom in Egypt. Ptolemy and his descendants run this region for a couple of hundred years and he sets up his capital in Alexandria.
00:09:20
Speaker
And then there's the Seleucid Empire. Now the Seleucid Empire is a vast realm in western and central Asia. It's so big in fact that there's actually two capitals, Antioch which is in modern day Syria,
00:09:33
Speaker
and mesopotamia in iraq so these three kingdoms the antigonid the ptolemaic and the seleucid are the three successor states to alexander's empire out of one empire came three as i mentioned earlier the greek language is spreading again and you can kind of tell why if the greeks are in charge while the positions of power require that you know Greek. And so if you are a conquered people and you know you want upward social mobility, what do you do?
00:10:08
Speaker
You learn the language so you can have an easier time interacting with the people in power. Same thing that happens today when someone immigrates to a new country, they typically learn the language because that facilitates a little bit of upward social mobility. and so that's kind of what's going on here.
00:10:26
Speaker
And the reason why this is important to our story is because as Greek language spread, so did Greek culture. In fact, many of the cities that were run by the Hellenistic kingdoms openly competed for intellectuals and playwrights and poets.
00:10:45
Speaker
from the Greek mainland. In other words, they wanted to open up new theaters and they wanted Greek playwrights to write plays for the theaters and they wanted poets around and they wanted philosophers around.
00:10:57
Speaker
They saw themselves not only as a military empire but also as a cultural empire. Now they weren't forcing people to become Greeks, but as I mentioned earlier, it was just basically a good idea because it'll help you move up in society.
00:11:14
Speaker
And so because immigration was not really controlled, several cities in the Hellenistic world became intellectual hubs, perhaps most notably Alexandria.
00:11:27
Speaker
And so in short, we are now in the Hellenistic Age. This is typically set to begin in 323 BCE e when Alexander dies. And it typically is set to end in 30 BCE, roughly 300 years later.
00:11:44
Speaker
i won't tell you how it ends yet. We'll get to that story eventually. But for the next 300 years, we will be in the Hellenistic age. And by the way, if I ever refer to the Hellenistic world, well, that basically just means those lands ruled by Alexander at the time of his death, right? So the Hellenistic world, the Hellenistic kingdoms, that's all this land that Alexander conquered.
Introduction to Pyronian Skepticism
00:12:09
Speaker
And this brings us to the main topic of the day. Just as Greek language and ideas were spreading, and it was easier for people to move between different cities and these Hellenistic kingdoms, so it was that ideas from outside of Greece made it to mainland Greece.
00:12:35
Speaker
Case in point, there was a man named Pyro, and he accompanied Alexander the Great on campaign, and he made it all the way to India.
00:12:47
Speaker
There, Pyro made contact with early Buddhists and he brought these ideas to Athens.
00:13:20
Speaker
These ideas that Pyro introduced to the Athenians, they began a movement that typically is referred to as Pyronian skepticism.
00:13:31
Speaker
Sometimes it's only called Pyronism. And that is the main topic of today's lesson. Let's begin with maybe a distinction. Typically, when someone says the word skepticism, they are referring to a certain view, the view that knowledge is impossible.
00:13:51
Speaker
That's sort of a conventional skepticism, one that you know some people are still kind of discuss today in philosophy classrooms, but that's not exactly what we're looking at.
00:14:03
Speaker
we're looking at specifically the Pyronian tradition. So out of all the different kinds of skepticism, there is this Pyronian brand, and this is skepticism as a way of life.
00:14:16
Speaker
And so in this tradition, there are some major figures. Pyro, we've already discussed, is the founder, Just so you know some of the context for Pyro, he was born around 360 BCE. e This is right around when Philip becomes king.
00:14:34
Speaker
And he dies right around 270 BCE. This is a about 50 years after Alexander dies. Pyro does have some students and the movement is around for a bit, but then it kind of peters out.
00:14:49
Speaker
And then in the first century BCE, e it comes back. In other words, sometime between 91 and BCE, ah man named anesiddemus brings it back.
00:15:04
Speaker
So Anasidemus was actually a member of Plato's academy. You'll recall that Plato began his academy in the 4th century BCE and it was still kicking in the 1st century BCE, a couple of hundred years later.
00:15:20
Speaker
So Anasidemus was a member of this school but he wasn't very happy with it. The academy, I should note, had turned skeptical. They were pushing some kind of skepticism.
00:15:32
Speaker
But Anacidemus didn't like that brand of skepticism. He thought it was a little soft, actually. So he leaves the academy and starts his own school. And the type of skepticism that he taught was in the spirit of Pyro.
00:15:48
Speaker
So he brings back the Pyronian tradition. He resurrects it from the dead, so to speak. And so the Pyronian tradition gets a new lease on life and it has been restored and it actually lasts well into the common era.
00:16:03
Speaker
The next important figure in the Pyronian tradition is around in the second century CE. His name is Sextus Empiricus. He was born around 160 CE and dies around 210 CE.
00:16:20
Speaker
And Sextus is a member of the Pyronian tradition that Anasidemus resurrected. And by this point, we have a very sophisticated form of skepticism.
00:16:34
Speaker
By the time that Sextus is around, Being a Pyronian skeptic meant becoming excellent at producing suspension of judgment. Suspension of judgment. What does that mean?
00:16:48
Speaker
Essentially, skeptics were very, very skilled at looking at an issue and arguing for all sides on that topic.
00:17:00
Speaker
Moreover, they can get all sides to be of equal strength. And what happens when you generate arguments of equal power on all sides of an issue is that it becomes apparent to you that there is no position that can be said to be true.
00:17:17
Speaker
And so, according to the skeptics, what that does is produces, here is the Greek word, ataraxia. This is typically translated as undisturbedness, a calmness of mind, equanimity.
00:17:34
Speaker
And according to the Pyronians, that's what you want. That's the good life. And so this is the view that we will examine today, Pyronian skepticism.
00:17:48
Speaker
So just like I do in each lesson, what I want to do is make this view somewhat appealing to you. So I'm going to begin discussing Pyrrhonian skepticism by giving you a fairly detailed origin story.
00:18:04
Speaker
And I'm hoping that we'll sort of put the view in the proper context so you can give it an honest evaluation. So you can really think to yourself, well, is this any good?
00:18:15
Speaker
And so let's begin here with its origin story. And I'm going to begin with a group of people called the Scythians. Who are these Scythians? Well, they are a society semi-nomadic people.
00:18:33
Speaker
horse-riding archer warriors. Let me try that again. They were an ethnic group who had some pastoralist nomadic ways about them. They wouldn't always stay in the same place.
00:18:47
Speaker
And so they lived all over the central Eurasian steppe. Those are the grasslands of central Eurasia. And they spent a whole lot of time on horses basically from the time that they were babies.
00:19:03
Speaker
And not long after that, they were given a bow and arrow. So they were incredibly gifted horse archers. They had such an impressive military prowess about them, in fact, that the Persian Empire used Scythians as the backbone of their army.
00:19:27
Speaker
Basically, wherever Persia went, some Scythians showed up along with them. And that's because they were so frighteningly effective as a cavalry.
00:19:38
Speaker
You can just imagine ah group of people that were extremely talented at riding horses And they were extremely talented at shooting arrows at you even when they were on the move.
00:19:53
Speaker
And so they were, of course, very formidable warriors. couple of other details about the Scythians. They had a bunch of tattoos. can go online and check out some Scythian tattoos.
00:20:05
Speaker
They loved music and dancing. And they would essentially hotbox themselves. I think that's what you call it. What would I know? That means they would richly ritually inhale hemp seed smoke in their little yurts.
00:20:23
Speaker
So if you want to picture something kind of like a teepee, in case you don't know what a yurt is, and they would go in there and they would inhale hemp seed smoke, right, which has some psychoactive effects. They would basically get high in their yurts.
00:20:41
Speaker
One more fun fact about the Scythians, their language is descendant of Proto-Indo-European. Now if you have a long memory, you'll recall that the Mycenaean civilization had used a language that was also descendant of Proto-Indo-European.
00:21:02
Speaker
So what's so important about these Scythians, these nomadic horse archers? Well, to tell you that, let me tell you a little bit about one Scythian in particular. His name was Anacharsus, and he was around in the days of Pythagoras, right? The 500s BCE.
00:21:21
Speaker
He was the brother of a Scythian king, but he was half Scythian and half Greek. So I guess they were half brothers. And he made quite a splash in Greece.
00:21:32
Speaker
He was, in fact, counted as one of the seven sages of antiquity. In other words, people had the sort of respect for him that they had for someone like Thales of Miletus.
00:21:43
Speaker
You'll recall that Thales was the first Milesian philosopher that we covered back in Unit 1. And so Anarcharsis definitely had some philosophical status about him.
00:21:55
Speaker
But what sort of philosophy was he advocating? Well, here I'm going to discuss an argument that is attributed to Anikarsis.
00:22:07
Speaker
It's called the problem of criterion. And I'm going to present it to you by quoting a line from ah book by Christopher Beckwith called The Greek Buddha, by the way.
00:22:19
Speaker
and then after I give you the quote, I'll try to explain it a little bit further myself. But here is the problem of criterion in the way that Christopher Beckwith summarizes it. Quote,
00:22:31
Speaker
In order to have absolutely correct true knowledge about anything, it is necessary to have a criterion that distinguishes perfectly between true and false ideas.
00:22:43
Speaker
In order to know if the chosen criterion is correct, we need to use another criterion. But it too has the same problem. It demands yet another criterion.
00:22:56
Speaker
And so on add infinitum. It is therefore impossible to have a criterion of truth." end quote Let me try to summarize it in my own language now for you, hopefully help you understand it.
00:23:14
Speaker
What Anna Karsis was basically saying is that, let's just say that you want to know what's true and what's false. Well, what you need is some tool, some method by which you can figure out what's true and what's false.
00:23:29
Speaker
But how do you know what the right method is Well, I suppose if you already know what's true and false, you can just check your method against it, but we don't know what's true and what's false.
00:23:41
Speaker
So we need to check that our method for checking what's true and what's false actually works. And so how do you do that? Well, you need some other method to check that your method actually works.
00:23:55
Speaker
But how do you know that other method is going to be good for calibrating your method? That means you need a method to check the method that's going to help you check your method. And that goes on forever.
00:24:08
Speaker
In other words, if you don't already know what's true and what's false, you have no chance at ever discovering a method by which you can tell what's true and what's false.
00:24:23
Speaker
You wouldn't even know what to look for, which means it is impossible to have a method for distinguishing between true and false.
00:24:35
Speaker
that is a skeptical message through and through right that is basically saying you can't know the difference between true and false an interesting point about this argument the problem of criterion is that we can actually see similarities between it and an argument found in the chuang zoo which is one of the foundational texts of taoism in other words There was some Scythian in Greece making arguments that sounded a lot like some views that were being taught in China.
00:25:12
Speaker
What does this mean? Well, Christopher Beckwith uses all kinds of evidence, linguistic evidence, archaeological evidence, to make the following case.
00:25:24
Speaker
It is the Scythians who had skeptical tendencies going back at least to the 6th century BCE. e And the Scythians made contact with both the West, the Greeks, and the East, the Chinese.
00:25:44
Speaker
So the roots of skepticism lie in Scythian philosophy. That is the first thread of the skeptical origin story.
00:25:57
Speaker
Let me move on to the next thread, the Buddhist connection. You might be wondering what does Buddhism have to do with the Scythians and skepticism?
00:26:09
Speaker
Well, let me tell you about a nickname that the Buddha had This nickname explicitly identified him as a foreigner. the people called the Buddha the Sage of the Scythians.
00:26:24
Speaker
In other words, Siddhartha Gautama, the founding Buddha, was a Scythian. So here I am once again borrowing from Christopher Beckwith's book, The Greek Buddha.
00:26:39
Speaker
And Beckwith provides us with a timeline as to how a Scythian philosophy got into both the West and the East. So let me me tell you a little bit of the story. Let me back up a little bit.
00:26:55
Speaker
According to Beckwith, the story all starts with Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism is the religion of the Persians. This is a strongly monotheistic faith, right? There is a creator God. His name is Ahura Mazda.
00:27:13
Speaker
There's ideas of absolute truth with a capital T versus the lie with a capital L. There's also this idea that throughout our lives we accumulate the good and bad deeds that we do.
00:27:28
Speaker
You might have heard this view referred to as karma. That's exactly the sort of thing that the Zoroastrians are in this time period we're teaching. And of course, depending on your karma, that would determine whether you are rewarded after death, right? so here is an early notion of heaven.
00:27:47
Speaker
So this is Zoroastrianism, again the religion of the Persians. And this form of early Zoroastrianism made its way into India at some point.
00:27:59
Speaker
And we actually know when It was in 519 BCE when the Achaemenid king of kings, the Persian king Darius, invaded several Central Asian countries.
00:28:13
Speaker
This, by the way, is the same Darius that led the first invasion of Greece. Remember the one that ended with a Persian defeat at the Battle of Marathon? That same Darius was very, very busy. He goes to invade Greece.
00:28:27
Speaker
He then invades Central Asia. and he takes his religion with him. So the conquest by Darius introduced this new religion to India.
00:28:41
Speaker
But along with the Persians always come the Scythians. So now the Persians were in charge of some parts of India and eventually Siddhartha Gautama shows up, that is, the Buddha.
00:28:56
Speaker
And he makes, just like Anacarsis in Greece, quite a splash. Why were the Buddha's teachings so noteworthy? Well, because they challenged early Zoroastrianism.
00:29:11
Speaker
so let me kind of put it for you in a nutshell. The Persians conquer some parts of India and bring along their religion. And then along comes this Scythian that argues against it.
00:29:25
Speaker
By the way, it's totally not surprising that a Scythian skeptic like the Buddha would argue against a religion like Zoroastrianism. Just think about it.
00:29:36
Speaker
Zoroastrian priests were talking about possessing some kind of metaphysical knowledge about what happens after death. and they're talking about knowing the absolute truth with a capital T and all that, a Scythian would say, i don't know about this absolute truth business, right? So it's pretty obvious why ah skeptic would argue against Zoroastrianism.
00:29:59
Speaker
And so a movement begins around the teachings of the Buddha. So early Buddhism is a product of the Buddha's rejection of the basic principles of early Zoroastrianism.
00:30:15
Speaker
Let me do a quick sidebar here. I'm saying early a lot. That's because religions change over time. It's sort of not polite to say. People like to think that religions are, you know, from their inception, they are a complete doctrine, right? But many, many different ideas in Buddhism didn't actually develop into the Middle Ages. The same could be said for Christianity and Islam, and even for Judaism, it's a very old religion, but it took time to become the Judaism that we know today.
00:30:49
Speaker
And so all these religions that I'm talking about, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism, these are early versions of them. So maybe I can just give you this kind of summary.
00:31:02
Speaker
Early Buddhism is product of the rejection of Zoroastrianism and there's also early Brahmanism which is one of the many layers of Hinduism.
00:31:13
Speaker
But early Brahmanism is the acceptance of basic Zoroastrian principles. although they are sort of adapted into an indian framework so let me kind of put it to you like this early zoroastrianism comes into india some people like the buddha reject it and so you get early buddhism other people like the brahmanists accept it and so you get early brahmanism and so that's how the game of empire and religion works right
00:31:44
Speaker
As I discuss in my philosophy of religion course, understanding military history is sort of key to understanding the history of many religions.
00:31:57
Speaker
But let me clip that right there. um
00:32:03
Speaker
So what do we know so far? We know the Scythians were skeptical and we know that one Scythian in particular, the Buddha, challenged Zoroastrian beliefs in India, spawning movement that would eventually be labeled Buddhism.
00:32:20
Speaker
What does that mean for us who are studying Greece? Well, finally, let's come back to the Greek connection.
Pyro's Philosophical Journey
00:32:30
Speaker
Pyro accompanies Alexander the Great during his campaigns, and he is in Bactria and Gandhara and Sindh from 330 to 325 BCE.
00:32:44
Speaker
In other words, he is in India. And during that time period, five, six years, he makes contact with early Buddhists. He learns from them, 323 BCE, makes it back to Greece.
00:32:58
Speaker
he makes it back to greece And once he made it back to Greece, what did Pyro teach? Well, he taught about the causes of pathi, passion, suffering, and the way to be apathia, without passion, suffering, and thus to achieve ataraxia, undisturbedness, calm.
00:33:28
Speaker
Pyro, in other words, is the Greek Buddha. He was teaching a form of philosophical therapy, a way to help you reduce your stress, your anxiety, by living a life of detachment.
00:33:46
Speaker
The way you currently live causes suffering. But there is a way to live without suffering, without passion, and then you'll have equanimity, calmness of mind.
00:34:02
Speaker
Let me get into another sidebar here because a lot of people think that talk therapy begins with Freud, Sigmund Freud in the 20th century.
00:34:13
Speaker
Not so. You can actually see methods for talking ourselves out of anxiety as far back as as we can now see pyro, but maybe even further back still.
00:34:27
Speaker
As we saw in the lesson on Socrates and Xenophon, Socrates believed that his elenchus, his Socratic questioning, was a method for getting rid of false beliefs.
00:34:40
Speaker
And why would we want to get rid of false beliefs? Because they lead you to behave poorly. And so this is one way of talking ourselves out of bad beliefs.
00:34:52
Speaker
Maybe we can even say that Democritus... was advocating a form of talk therapy. If you'll recall, he counseled us to compare ourselves to the less fortunate, not so that we can make fun of them and say, oh, look how much better we are than them, but to foster an attitude of gratitude within yourself.
00:35:14
Speaker
In other words, by thinking about people who are less well off through no fault of their own, right? you can see how incredibly fortunate you are.
00:35:26
Speaker
And so these are early forms of talk therapy and we will continue to see this in the philosophical schools. Eventually when we cover the Stoics you'll definitely see a form of talk therapy there.
00:35:40
Speaker
While I'm off on a tangent let me just do one more sidebar here. I don't know what this sidebar three I think. In the lesson where we covered Heraclitus, I took some liberties in my interpretation and i I looked at his views through a very Buddhist lens.
00:35:57
Speaker
And I didn't really explain why, i just said, hey, look take this with a grain of salt. Now I'm able to really justify why I did that. Heraclitus, I think, was influenced by Scythian philosophy.
00:36:09
Speaker
In fact, in some of his fragments, he actually mentions Scythian bows. We know that he knew about the Scythians. Moreover, he lived in Ephesus, which is a city that Persia eventually conquered. And of course, wherever Persians go, Scythians come along.
00:36:32
Speaker
So, we even have reason to think that there were Scythians in Heraclitus' hometown. Moreover, we know that the army was an Ephesus because the Persians used Ephesus as a launching point for their invasion of Greece.
00:36:53
Speaker
And so that's why used a very Buddhist lens in interpreting Heraclitus because I just see Buddhism as an extension of Scythian philosophy.
00:37:05
Speaker
just happens to be one that is much more well understood. and so... That's why we get some fragments from Heraclitus that sound a lot like the Dao De Jing, right? In my humble opinion, the Dao De Jing and Taoism, Heraclitus' philosophy, Pyronian skepticism, and early Buddhism, these all have roots in Scythian philosophy.
00:38:01
Speaker
In any case, that is the origin story of Pyronian skepticism. It has roots in Scythian philosophy, a skeptical philosophy that made it first to India, where it became early Buddhism, and then eventually to Greece, where it became Pyronian skepticism.
00:38:21
Speaker
With the origin story out of the way, let's start to get into some of these major figures of Pyronian skepticism. We'll focus on two, Pyro and Sextus Empiricus.
00:38:34
Speaker
We'll spend most of our time on Sextus because we have so many of his writings, but let me just briefly mention a little bit about Pyro. Pyro didn't write anything, but we do know that once he came back from Greece, he was a changed man.
00:38:52
Speaker
and he had many students, at least one of them, wrote down what Pyro taught and his name was Timon. And so we're gonna look now at some of Timon's reports about Pyro's teaching.
00:39:06
Speaker
I have here a long quote and I'm gonna skip a lot of the Greek. There's a lot of Greek in here. so I'm gonna skip that part and I'm gonna try to pause during this quote so I can sort of explain some parts to you.
00:39:20
Speaker
Quote, as for matters, questions, and topics, they are all undifferentiated by a logical differentia, and unstable, unbalanced, not measurable, and unjudged, unfixed, undecidable. Let me pause already. and What Pyro is saying, through Timon of course,
00:39:48
Speaker
is that whenever there is an issue that is controversial, where there is disagreement on something, it's gonna turn out that this is not a good source for deciding what's true and what's false.
00:40:04
Speaker
So whenever you have a thought or a judgment on some controversial matter, something that isn't but you don't know with 100% certainty to be true, which is basically everything,
00:40:16
Speaker
there's two problems with First of all, there is no necessity to it, right? It's not like that thought comes with a post-it note that says, hey man, this is absolutely true.
00:40:27
Speaker
That's what is meant by undifferentiated by a logical differentia. It's not logically true. It doesn't have to be true. And so that's the first thing. Whenever you have a thought, it doesn't have to be true.
00:40:41
Speaker
Moreover, it's unstable and unbalanced, right? Maybe not even measurable. So what he means by this is that many thoughts They're just not going to last that long.
00:40:52
Speaker
Maybe you think one way, one minute, and then a little bit later you think differently about it. So there's something kind of out of balance or out of whack about many of our thoughts.
00:41:02
Speaker
Moreover, some of them are unfixed or maybe even undecidable. In other words, they're neither true nor false. They're not the kind of thing that you can be sure about. And so that's the first thing that Pyro begins by expressing.
00:41:17
Speaker
Let me continue here with a quote. Therefore, neither our sense perceptions nor our views, theories, beliefs tell us the truth or lie.
00:41:29
Speaker
So we certainly should not rely on them to do it. Okay, so that means that what we see and what we think, we shouldn't rely on it as being the absolute truth.
00:41:41
Speaker
Sometimes what we see is, you know, biased. Sometimes what we think is not true. Thoughts are so very unreliable, is what Pyro is saying.
00:41:53
Speaker
You can't believe everything you think. Continuing here, rather we should become without views, uninclined toward this side or that, and unwavering in our refusal to choose, saying about every single one that it no more is than it is not, or it both is and is not, or it neither is nor is not.
00:42:22
Speaker
End quote. So what Pyro is saying is that when you have a thought, when you make a judgment, don't cling to it.
00:42:35
Speaker
Just let it slip on by. Ultimately, you should try to be without views. Don't want this or that. Don't be inclined towards anything. Rather, you should strive for detachment.
00:42:49
Speaker
Maybe a better way to put it is don't strive at all. You want a life of a non-striving. And so whenever you get a thought, what you should do is say about every one of those thoughts, it no more is than it is not.
00:43:06
Speaker
Or it both is and is not. Or it neither is nor is not. In other words, it's no more true than it's false.
00:43:16
Speaker
Or it's both true and false. Or it's neither true nor false.
00:43:24
Speaker
So let just make a couple of side comments here help you understand this. But let's start with a talk therapy aspect of it right yeah All day long, our mind is making judgments.
00:43:38
Speaker
It's just nonstop, right? You have that inner voice, right? That chatterbox, it's always talking. And what it does it is it makes judgments. It makes claims. It makes opinions, hypotheses, right?
00:43:52
Speaker
And if you let it, you'll let this inner voice sort of judge its way into pretending it knows what's true and false. It knows what's best for you. So what we have to do is, according to Pyro, meditate on how the mind works and how beliefs are formed and block those beliefs through this formula that he gives us.
00:44:16
Speaker
So let me put it in a very, very pithy way. You can't believe every thought you have. In fact, you shouldn't believe any thought you have.
00:44:28
Speaker
The thoughts that arise naturally are just going to be unstable, unbalanced, sometimes undecidable. And none of them are necessarily true.
00:44:39
Speaker
So become uninclined. That's the message that Pyro is sending. It sounds a lot like some forms of Buddhism. Let me say one other thing here.
00:44:52
Speaker
As I mentioned in the lesson on Plato, there are various spiritual practices that the philosophical schools would teach their students.
Skeptical Practices and Principles
00:45:01
Speaker
One of them was memorization and meditation practice.
00:45:06
Speaker
This is when you memorize the doctrines of the school and then you meditate on how they apply to your life. Well, that's exactly what this last little bit of the quote I read you is. Let me read it for you again.
00:45:21
Speaker
Saying about every single one that it no more is than it is not, or it both is and is not, or it neither is nor is not. That's called the Tetralemma formula.
00:45:35
Speaker
You're supposed to not only memorize that, but apply it in your mind to your mind all day long. right Whenever you see that a belief is forming, that you're starting to accept the belief, recite it to yourself and catch yourself. Basically, don't let that belief be accepted.
00:45:56
Speaker
So that would be the skeptics approach to memorization and meditation practice. We'll get more on this a little bit later. One more thing that I want you to mention though, is that the goal here is therapeutic.
00:46:12
Speaker
Pyrrho's teachings are not about metaphysics. They're not about epistemology. How do you know what's true? How do you know what's false? He's trying to get you to stop suffering.
00:46:23
Speaker
And his approach is to say, well, you know, your thoughts are causing your suffering. So stop clinging to your thoughts. Stop clinging to your judgments, to your opinions.
00:46:35
Speaker
Let them go and then you will be letting go of the source of anxiety and stress. Let me add another sidebar here. What is sidebar four?
00:46:47
Speaker
But the Buddha taught the exact same thing. The Buddha didn't bother with metaphysics. There's actually a famous story where he was questioned on some of the metaphysical implications of his teachings.
00:47:02
Speaker
And apparently the Buddha just stayed quiet. And that was his way of saying, that doesn't matter. You don't get it. I'm trying to teach you how to not suffer. And you're over here trying to form new beliefs about metaphysics. Forget all that.
00:47:17
Speaker
That's noise. Let go of your judgments. Stop your attachment to things. And then you'll feel peace.
00:47:30
Speaker
So a lot of similarities between early Buddhism and early Pyronism. But as I said, religions and traditions evolve over time.
00:47:43
Speaker
And so when we get to later Pyronian skepticism, it doesn't quite look like later Buddhism, right? So these these two traditions, even though they have a common root, begin to diverge and just kind of have a different feel about them afterward.
00:47:58
Speaker
The goal is still the same though. The goal is still therapeutic. It's still a form of talk therapy at heart, but they look a little bit different, right? Like siblings that grow apart over time. And so we can really see this in the work of Sextus Empiricus.
00:48:13
Speaker
By the time that we get to Sextus, skepticism is an ability, right? The ability to produce suspension of judgment and thereby tranquility. So it is now skill, a skill that more or less defines a way of life.
00:48:31
Speaker
And what's really interesting about the kind of skepticism that sexist practices is that it seems to be a sort of all-inclusive type of skepticism.
00:48:42
Speaker
What I mean by this is that it kind of seems like Pyro was focusing primarily on thoughts that might cause you stress and anxiety. But by the time of sexist, skepticism is an all or nothing kind of thing. you're You're supposed to suspend judgment on everything.
00:49:02
Speaker
Everything. You're basically supposed to have no beliefs because if you do have beliefs about everything, they might potentially be a source of anxiety and stress.
00:49:14
Speaker
And so you make yourself invulnerable to these kinds of psychological turmoil by having no beliefs at all. In fact, Sexus even claims to suspend judgment about what I sometimes call norms of rationality.
00:49:32
Speaker
We're talking here about logical laws, mathematical theorems, that kind of stuff. Even on those, Sexus says, I don't know if they're actually true or not. I use them, but that doesn't mean that I believe that they're actually true.
00:49:46
Speaker
So even about mathematics and logic, the Pyronian skeptics suspend judgment, right? So this is a very radical form of skepticism. So let's talk about skepticism as a way of life for Sextus.
00:50:02
Speaker
How does one become a skeptic? According to Sextus, it's not that you choose skepticism. It's more that skepticism chooses you.
00:50:12
Speaker
and Check this out. and This is what he says. Sexist says that people enter into philosophical debate in order to figure out what's true, right? Like a lot of people during this time period, people got into philosophy to be happy, right? To figure out what true happiness is and to get it somehow.
00:50:33
Speaker
And so there's all these different schools and they're arguing about how to get to happiness. But hopefully you'll find the right one and then you'll finally get some peace of mind. You'll start working towards happiness.
00:50:45
Speaker
but People, as they begin to dabble with philosophical debates, all they discover is equipolant dispute. Equipolant dispute. What is that? That's basically when there's equally powerful arguments on all sides of an issue.
00:51:04
Speaker
right So you go to the marketplace and you see all these different philosophers arguing and you find all their arguments as equally persuasive. and you try to figure out, okay, which one's actually the best one?
00:51:18
Speaker
And you keep trying and you keep trying and you keep investigating. But that's the only conclusion you ever get to. Each side provides equally powerful arguments. And so being unable to decide, suddenly it strikes you.
00:51:34
Speaker
The effect of witnessing these equally powerful arguments is that your mind naturally suspends judgment. And once you suspend judgment, once you say to yourself, I don't know, that's what leads tranquility.
00:51:52
Speaker
And actually, I shouldn't even say you say to yourself, I don't know. You just feel the tranquility. You just give up striving and instead feel undisturbedness.
00:52:04
Speaker
And so that's how you become a skeptic. Now, here is an important question. Does that mean that the skeptics think ataraxia is eudaimonia? Is that the highest good? Is that the, you know, the point of life?
00:52:18
Speaker
Well, the skeptic would say no, because they don't have beliefs. They can't say, oh yeah, ataraxia is the highest good in life, because that would be a belief.
00:52:30
Speaker
All they can say is that it ah appears to them that it is the highest good in life. They might say something like, you know, skepticism and ataraxia are just what I find myself attracted to at the moment.
00:52:44
Speaker
They won't say it's good for everyone. They won't say it's good for me forever. They'll just say, it feels like right now, this is what I'm supposed to do. So for the skeptics, it sort of appearances all the way down. It ah appears to me like this. It appears to me like that. That's all they'll say. That's as far as they'll take it.
00:53:04
Speaker
And that goes for every ethical term you can think of. If you ask a skeptic what's virtue, they'll say something like, well, it appears to me that it's an ability to produce suspension of judgment and thus ataraxia.
00:53:18
Speaker
All you ever get from a skeptic is the report of an appearance. One interesting sidebar here, I don't even know what number sidebar I'm on now, but for the skeptics, attaining virtue is not permanent, right? this Ability to produce suspension of judgment.
00:53:37
Speaker
It's something that you actually have to perpetually work towards improving. So this is a little bit like Xenophon. Xenophon talked about gaining self-control and self-mastery.
00:53:49
Speaker
But he thought you out you had to always work on it, continually improve on it. The skeptics say the same thing. You have to keep improving your skill at generating equipollant arguments, arguing for both sides of an issue.
00:54:04
Speaker
And so basically this means that philosophical argumentation is a part of your daily life. You should always be working on it. Which brings me to what the skeptic's daily life is like.
00:54:17
Speaker
So I have here a book by Richard Bett. It's called How to Be a Pyronian. And there's lots of good essays there that you know talk about how to be a good skeptic. Let me just kind of try to summarize it for you here.
00:54:30
Speaker
First and foremost, as I've already mentioned, there's a lot of philosophy. Sextus actually describes the skeptic in the following way. He says, a skeptic is like a vigorous debater who doesn't want to win but to force all contests to a stalemate.
00:54:48
Speaker
So basically, you gotta get really good at arguing both sides of an issue and that means you're constantly investigating all sides of every single issue, all different kinds of arguments for these positions, how persuasive they are. I mean, you're basically living the life of an intellectual.
00:55:09
Speaker
I should also add that there's an element of humor in there, right? It's not dry academic work. many skeptical figures in the history of skepticism have used humor to make their points. So it's not necessarily boring. I should just want to say that real quick.
00:55:29
Speaker
So that's one part of being a skeptic. What about the rest of your life? I mean, is that all there is to it? Well, according to Richard Bette, Skeptics are generally indistinguishable from the average citizen. That's because skeptics just follow custom and convention and their natural inclinations and desires, right? What I mean by this is that for a skeptic, if they're hungry, they eat.
00:55:57
Speaker
And if they're thirsty, and they drink. And if they want to have sex, this is what Richard Bette mentions, by the way, Then they find a willing partner and they have sex and they realize they need money.
00:56:13
Speaker
So they find a job that seems suitable to them and they figure out what appears to them to be what they need to know to fulfill that job. And so they learn those skills.
00:56:25
Speaker
Basically, they go throughout their life just like any other average citizen. They wake up, they go to work, they come home, they have some fun.
00:56:39
Speaker
The only difference between a skeptic and a regular person is that the skeptic has found a way to not have any beliefs, but you can still go about your daily life with appearances.
00:56:55
Speaker
It appears to me that I need money. It appears to me that this job is suitable to me. It appears to me that these skills will get me good at this job. And so you just do all those things.
00:57:07
Speaker
But in your mind, there is something special about you. You have no attachments because you have no beliefs. And that's what it's like to be a skeptic.
00:57:19
Speaker
I should mention one other aspect of the skeptics' daily life. I'm referring here to the method of argumentation that the Pyronians practiced.
00:57:31
Speaker
This method is called the Pyronian modes, And it's basically a standardized form of argument designed to induce suspension of judgment.
00:57:42
Speaker
So I won't get into these methods very much, but there's a pattern of arguments that you're supposed to follow. So whenever you hear an argument for a certain position,
00:57:54
Speaker
Sextus Empiricus gives us five types of arguments that you're supposed to launch at that person to refute them. So the reason why i won't get into this right now is because fleshing this out requires, in my experience, several weeks because you have to essentially cover arguments in detail.
00:58:15
Speaker
But if you're interested in this, this is exactly what I do in my Philosophy 101 course. I actually use the skeptical method to go over many different philosophical questions.
00:58:27
Speaker
And so if you're interested in the Pyronian modes, the method of argumentation practiced by the Pyronians, then I suggest you check out my Philosophy 101 course where we actually take the whole semester to learn how to do that.
00:58:41
Speaker
And if the skeptics are right, at the end of the semester, you will feel undisturbedness, calmness of mind.
00:59:17
Speaker
The last thing I want to cover in this lesson is the following question. How does suspension of judgment create ataraxia? Remember, I want to make this view appealing to you. I want to make all the different schools of thought somewhat appealing to you because I find something valuable in all of them.
00:59:38
Speaker
and I hope you have too, but maybe this is the one tradition that's the hardest to get into for some people. I wanna talk about how it it is that suspending judgment gives you a little bit of relief from anxiety and stress, and perhaps even little bit of peace of mind.
01:00:00
Speaker
I have two explanations here, and let me begin with the more philosophical one. I'm going to pull this from a book by Julia Annas. It's called The Morality of Happiness.
01:00:12
Speaker
By the way, this has been a resource for me for this unit, a very valuable resource. And so let me give you what she says about how suspension of judgment creates ataraxia. So here's a quote.
01:00:26
Speaker
Texas talks about some subsidiary sources of anxiety. If one thinks that money is a good thing, then one will have continual anxieties about keeping one's own, fending off others' attempt to take it, and so on.
01:00:43
Speaker
But what he mainly has in mind is the thought that simply thinking a thing good is in itself a source of intensity and anxiety. If I believe that money is a good thing, then it will matter to me that I get some, and so on.
01:00:59
Speaker
If I cease to believe that it is a good thing, then it can't matter to me anymore. I might of course still want some, but I can't have the same intensity of attitude to it that I had before.
01:01:13
Speaker
Okay, so Julia Annas here is interpreting sextus and saying, if you have beliefs about, for example, that money is good, it creates anxiety and it sort of just riles you up in a way that is unnecessary.
01:01:31
Speaker
You can still want money and it can even appear to you that you need money. but by not having the belief money is good, then you're already relieving some of the anxiety that many people feel.
01:01:47
Speaker
So I hear a lot of objections to this. And let me say that the kind of objection that I'm gonna give you, just kind of you know that this kind of person just doesn't get it yet. So let me and me try to work you through this kind of reasoning.
01:02:04
Speaker
Someone might say, well, you need money. Right, of course. Yeah, sexist is not saying that you don't need money. But what he is saying is something like this.
01:02:17
Speaker
Both people that believe that money is a good and hence obsess over the value of money and skeptics need money, right? So both skeptics and non-skeptics need money.
01:02:30
Speaker
But obsessing over the value of money, it doesn't help you get Moreover, obsessing over money might actually leave you unhappy even when you get it.
01:02:44
Speaker
Just think of someone like bent over their desk, working at all hours of the day, ignoring their family, right? If you believe that money is a good, it naturally is an intensifier of feelings.
01:02:58
Speaker
And if some of those feelings are negative, anxiety and stress. But a skeptic, on the other hand, can to suspend judgment on you know whether or not money is a good, but it can still appear to her that she needs money.
01:03:15
Speaker
And so she will still go work somewhere. And so without the anxiety and intense feelings caused by obsessing over money, by believing that it is a good, ah skeptic can be, maybe paradoxically,
01:03:29
Speaker
better able to get it and better able to enjoy it when they get it.
01:03:37
Speaker
Of course, for the skeptic, getting money is not the goal. the goal is eliminating worries and concerns and anxiety.
01:03:47
Speaker
And the method is, you know, generating arguments on both sides of an issue so that your beliefs just kind of melt away. So that is a very philosophical way of defending this notion that suspension of judgment creates ataraxia.
01:04:06
Speaker
I have another way, in case you're not yet persuaded, that's more psychological in its tenor. So let me try this other one
The Pursuit of Ataraxia
01:04:14
Speaker
too. Let me first tell you about something that gets called chatter.
01:04:20
Speaker
So by the way, I'm getting this from a book called Chatter by a psychologist named Ethan Cross. And so let me tell you about chatter first. So we all have that inner voice. Actually, I shouldn't say all of us. I know some people have a condition where they don't have an inner voice, which is kind of wild out to me. I have an inner voice. I'm guessing you do as well.
01:04:43
Speaker
Most people have an inner voice. And you know if you are psychologically healthy, or at least in in ideal conditions, your inner voice basically is ah a narrator for you.
01:04:57
Speaker
So it's telling you what's going on right now and you have thoughts and that's your inner voice. But sometimes your inner voice can sort of enter into a vicious vortex of like self-criticism and worry, right?
01:05:15
Speaker
So what I'm talking about here ah sometimes when you're sort of in a bad mood or you just did something that you feel stupid about, that inner voice becomes an inner critic, a super judgmental, kind of really mean a-hole, right?
01:05:35
Speaker
And by having this voice in your head constantly berating you, that just generates more negative emotion, which actually makes the inner critic even louder.
01:05:50
Speaker
So it creates more chatter, right? That's what this is, it's chatter. And so this is ah bad situation to be in And it is something that a lot of people labor to get out of. right That's why they go to therapy, right?
01:06:07
Speaker
To get rid of that inner critic. This is especially chronic if you have low self-esteem. You're essentially always judging yourself negatively.
01:06:19
Speaker
And so chatter is a problem that psychologists have been studying so they can help you get rid of it. And I'm happy to report there are some methods to get rid of chatter.
01:06:31
Speaker
So let me tell you a couple of those right now. um One of them is that you can take the perspective of a fly on the wall, literally. You adopt the perspective of an observer. Maybe try to picture yourself from above, like a fly on a wall, right?
01:06:51
Speaker
Apparently, this helps you alleviate a little bit of the chatter. And let me try to explain why. Sometimes maybe you've noticed you're actually better at giving advice to others than to yourself.
01:07:04
Speaker
That's actually the same idea as here. If you picture yourself as being another person, then you might actually be better able to provide advice to yourself, right? So if you're a fly on the wall looking at yourself, it might be easier to talk your way through some of your thoughts and concerns that you're having.
01:07:23
Speaker
that's one method, become a fly on the wall. Here is another method, kind of interesting. You can use second and third person language. So if I'm speaking to myself, if I'm trying to talk myself down from one of these chatter vortexes,
01:07:40
Speaker
I might talk to myself in the third person. I might say something like, Garcia is in a situation right now where he could either put more work on himself or hurt someone's feelings.
01:07:54
Speaker
Let's think about what he should do. Remember this is myself talking to myself, but I'm using my own last name to refer to myself and i'm i'm saying he instead of So this is third and second personal language and this also helps reduce chatter.
01:08:13
Speaker
One more method you can journal about whatever it is that's you know making you criticize yourself a lot. These methods all work to reduce chatter. So, what do all these methods have in common?
01:08:28
Speaker
Well, according to Ethan Cross, they create emotional distance. And by creating this distance, we reduce the anxiety brought on by the chatter.
01:08:41
Speaker
You can finally quiet down your chatterbox, stop all the negative thoughts, or at least tone them down significantly.
01:08:53
Speaker
Well, this is exactly what the skeptics are doing. They're creating emotional distance.
01:09:02
Speaker
Except that for the skeptics, the goal is to create emotional distance from every possible belief and judgment and opinion and political view and religious tenet, whatever.
01:09:17
Speaker
And that's because every single one of these might at some point be a source of stress and anxiety and hence chatter. So what the skeptics are seeking to do is to make you invulnerable to this kind of thing, to make it so that there's nothing that can give you the psychological turmoil, at least not from within.
01:09:40
Speaker
Your own thoughts, in other words, can't be used against you if you're a skeptic. Now, there's two ways of looking at this. Here's the first way.
01:09:52
Speaker
This is absolutely crazy. It's insane to get rid of every single belief just so that you don't have the potential to one day be hurt by one of these beliefs.
01:10:05
Speaker
Okay, maybe that's true.
01:10:09
Speaker
This is definitely... not the norm in Western society, right? Pyronian skepticism has not survived to the modern day. There isn't like a Pyronian society, or maybe there is actually, but it's definitely not a mainstream idea. Okay, I understand.
01:10:28
Speaker
But let me give you a different perspective on this. Let me give you another take on Pyronian skepticism. And for that, let me remind you of the origin story that I lovingly laid out for you, right? The one that links Pyronian skepticism to Buddhism.
01:10:45
Speaker
You can, of course, just reject this idea of getting rid of all your beliefs. Sure. But in another context, for example, in the Buddhist context, this isn't so crazy.
01:10:59
Speaker
In fact, there is a word for someone who's been able to pull that off. It's called enlightenment. And it's generally associated with peace of mind.
01:11:12
Speaker
When you put it like that, it's a lot easier to see that there might be some value in the Pyronian way of life.
01:11:22
Speaker
In other words, framing it in its original Buddhist context helps us to see that a least some people have found some real value in this way of living.
01:11:34
Speaker
So what I want to do here is actually leave you with a quote from a Zen master. Zen, by the way, is a form of Buddhism. And the Zen master in question is Thich Nhat Hanh, who, by the way, died only in 2022, right? So this is very contemporary. And I want you to see that there's still a strain of skepticism in Zen Buddhist thought.
01:12:02
Speaker
Let me give you a little bit of context here. This is from the book, Eyes of Compassion, Living with Thich Nhat Hanh by Jim Forrest. And what's going on here is that Thich Nhat Hanh is giving like a seminar or something like that.
01:12:21
Speaker
And he's asked what it means to seek the Buddha and what to do when you find him. He begins by giving a very common answer to this question, something about killing the Buddha.
01:12:34
Speaker
And so that's not original to Thich Nhat Hanh. It's sort of like a Buddhist inside joke. But let me give you here now the quote and and see if you can recognize a little bit of that skepticism in there.
01:12:50
Speaker
So again, he's asked, what does it mean to seek the Buddha and what do you do when you find him? Quote, I am a Zen master, and as you know, Zen masters always reply incomprehensibly.
01:13:06
Speaker
So I will say that you only find the Buddha by killing the Buddha whenever you find him. Then he laughed and said, But I am a nice Zen master, so I will tell you that the Buddha is truth, and the only thing that keeps you from finding truth is your conviction that you have already found it.
01:13:27
Speaker
So whenever you find truth, you must recognize it as a lie. Kill it and go on in the search for truth. Becoming a vodhisattva, which means someone who is fully awake, is not reached via methods or ideologies or study or fasting.
01:13:49
Speaker
Memorizing all the sutras is helpful but will not force open the door. You can sit a thousand hours on a meditation cushion and still be stranded.
01:14:02
Speaker
A diet restricted to green leaves will not assure your entrance into the pure land.
01:14:09
Speaker
If you think you have encountered the Buddha, it is more likely that it is only a concept of the Buddha, an idol, an illusion.
01:14:23
Speaker
To encounter the true Buddha, we have to kill that illusion.