I’m not denying that a mind can be disciplined or trained to have a radically different kind of experience, although whether anyone is ever fully enlightened in the Buddhist sense is questionable since there’s no neutral buzzer that goes off to register when that happens. All we have are some people’s say-so when someone allegedly becomes a Buddha. Is it like becoming a saint in Catholicism? Is it largely a political decision to honour someone after the fact? This is relevant because if a so-called Buddha does act with compassion, that could be because of the person’s residual egoistic motivations that technically make the person unenlightened.
Anyway, I’m dealing here with the philosophy of Buddhism, with the question of how Eastern conceptions of enlightenment should be interpreted. Training in Buddhism might lead to a Buddhist way of thinking, just as training to be a Christian by attending a Church might change the person’s attitude towards that religion. The philosophical questions about either would remain, and although personal experience could be relevant to understanding either religion, so would independent examination of the relevant arguments and evidence. I’m dealing mostly with the latter, and since I’m not denying the possibility of a personal transformation, my lack of experience of being a Buddhist or a Buddha doesn’t disqualify my case.
My question is whether there’s a coherent philosophical conception of a Buddha, or of enlightenment in the Eastern sense. A Buddhist could retreat to mysticism and mystery, and say that this enlightenment is ineffable, so the attempt at philosophical understanding is futile. But my experience is that Buddhists don’t want to lean too much on that response to philosophical criticisms. After all, there are countless Buddhist explanatory texts and rejoinders. Why bother with them if enlightenment is ineffable? Yes, Buddhists say that the state of nirvana is hard to describe, that it transcends our ordinary conceptual models, and Zen emphasizes the limits of reason. But I’m focusing just on the basics of early Buddhism. What does compassion have to do with nirvana and the loss of ego. Why expect that the two go together in a way that doesn’t falsify basic Buddhist teachings?
Sure, a Buddhist can say that only Buddhist experience shows how they go together, but that would begin to look suspicious. This suspicion applies to any religion’s assurance that all things are made clear once you sign up and go through the initiation. Maybe that assurance is BS, and you become trapped in a flawed worldview, like in a cult. That’s the problem with appealing to mystery: the appeal is consistent with doing something fishy.
