With this reduction
ad absurdum
, the Pythons vividly suggest that the ultimate culmination of transcendentalism is ridiculous and hardly worth striving for. Much like Palin’s and Cleese’s heartless school administrators and Palin’s sacred-sperm counting father, the sketch reveals how the appeal of transcendentalism collapses under its own weight. Far from being desirable, the fruits of transcendentalism seem not only cloying (Las Vegas-style) but dangerous and dehumanizing. This was exactly what the historical Buddha said about the reigning Hindu philosophy of his time. Much as the Pythons urge in
Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
, the Buddha argues repeatedly that belief in a soul or a God or anything eternal and otherworldly actually
interferes with
our more
immediate and pressing responsibilities to each other as human beings.
Remember from the
Gita
(but also see the earlier
Upanishads
) that Hindu orthodoxy maintained a transcendentally mandated social caste system (wherein a cosmic class hierarchy manifested itself in all subsequent generations of this earthly realm); a transcendental divine soul (atman); and a transcendental God (Brahman) who would be the ultimate blissful repository of enlightened souls. The Buddha (Siddattha Gotama, 563-483 B.C.E.) didn’t like any of these standard Hindu ideas and explicitly argued against them throughout his original scriptures. These are known as the
Tipitika
scriptures, written in the language Pali. One of these scriptures, the
Agganna sutta
, criticizes the traditional caste story that Brahmins were born of God’s mouth while the subservient caste, the Sudras (including the lowest Untouchables) were born from his lowly feet. Buddha counters this longstanding prejudice, and deflates the mystification, by pointing out that all the Brahmins, warriors, craftsmen, and servants that he knows were all born the exact same way—from their mother’s wombs! In addition, the Buddha noted that since virtue and vice are easily witnessed in all the castes (not just the Brahmin priestly class), there is no real ground for saying that one caste is inherently better than another. Open your eyes, he suggests, and you will find Brahmin scoundrels as well as Untouchable saints. A more earthly law of value, of observable ethical goodness, should therefore trump the old transcendentalist hierarchy.
Yet the Buddha saved most of his logical acumen for a career-long attack on the Hindu idea of the soul. He aimed not to be some nihilistic kill-joy, however, but to break the romantic obsession with eternal unseen realities which Indian culture had embraced—the kind of romanticism which, in scriptural form, led Hindu Gods (like Krishna in the
Gita
) to pronounce that killing is acceptable because this mortal life is only illusion anyway. Death and even human suffering is not as troubling for the transcendental thinker because this short illusory life will be infinitely outweighed by the next world—where we’re going to find perfect joy, and
Jaws I
,
II
and
III
, forever and ever, amen.
The Buddha finds all this buoyant brightness rather suspicious. As did Wittgenstein, who traced the source of philosophical confusions to careless uses of language, Buddha thinks that language
has gone on holiday. What does it mean to be perfectly happy? In the
Potthapada sutta
(
Digha Nikaya
), Buddha retells a debate he had with some “philosophers and brahmins” who believed that “the soul is perfectly happy and healthy after death.” The Buddha says:
I asked them whether, so far as they knew it or perceived it, the human world was perfectly happy, and they answered “No.” Then I asked them: “Moreover, can you maintain that you yourselves for a whole night, or for a whole day, or even for half a night or day, have ever been perfectly happy?” And they answered: “No.” Then I said to them: “Further, do you know a way or a method, by which you can realize a state that is altogether happy?” And still to that question they answered: “No.” And then I said: “Sirs, have you ever heard the voices of heavenly beings who had realized rebirth in a perfectly happy world, saying: ‘there is a right path, a true path, which is in human capacity to follow, a path to the world of unfailing bliss, for we ourselves by following it have come to this world of bliss’?” They still answered: “No.”
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The Buddha concludes from this Socratic questioning, that, while their mouths are moving and words are coming out, these philosophers and Brahmins are really speaking a kind of nonsense. They’re like carpenters who build staircases for mansions that they’ve never seen, and for which they have no dimensions or measurements. They labor, but their misunderstanding of what they do renders their work absurd.
Why must transcendentalists so misunderstand what it is they strive for? The real point of the Buddha’s argument is metaphysical. Why can’t you be perfectly happy? Why can’t you even be happy for more than a few hours? Because happiness is inherently impermanent (
anicca
). Like all other feelings, happiness comes and goes, and like all other things in the world, it cannot last. Treating a moment as if it were a thing to be possessed
ad infinitum
is a regular human tendency. But it is regularly in error. Even for those who enjoy Vegas-style dinner theater, two or three hours
may be a treat. But days and years and centuries would seem more
a propos
of hell than heaven.
Upon close inspection, Buddha shows, paradise crumbles. The atman, on the other hand, is a no show. The Buddha thinks that atman is nowhere to be found except in the literary inventions of Hinduism and the confusions of its followers. Buddhism, contrary to all dualistic theories, asserts that we are not made up of two metaphysically different parts, a permanent spirit and an impermanent body. Buddhism breaks with most religions, East and West, by recognizing that we are each a finite tangle of qualities, all of which eventually exhaust themselves, and none of which, conscious or other, carries on independently. All humans, according to Buddha, are composed of the five aggregates (
khandas
); body (
rupa
), feeling (
vedana
), perception (
sanna
), dispositions or volitional tendencies (
sankhara
) and consciousness (
vinnana
). If the Buddha was standing around in the battlefield setting of the
Bhagavad Gita
, he would certainly chime-in and object to Krishna’s irresponsible claim that a permanent soul resides in Arjuna and his enemies. Show me this permanent entity, the Buddha would demand. Is the body permanent? Are feelings permanent? What about perceptions, or dispositions, or even consciousness? The Buddha says “If there really existed the atman, there would be also something that belonged to this atman. As however, in truth and reality, neither an atman nor anything belonging to an atman can be found, is it not really an utter fool’s doctrine to say: This is the world, this am I; after death I shall be permanent, persisting and eternal?” (
Mijjhima Nikaya
) Buddha examines all the elements of the human being, finds that they are all fleeting, and finds no additional permanent entity or soul amidst the tangle of human faculties. There is no ghost in the machine.
What’s So Grotesque about That?
In their rejection of transcendentalism, Buddhism and Monty Python converge in their celebrations of the grotesque. The Python crew seems to relish the disgusting facts of human biology and they take every opportunity to render them through special effects. Throughout
Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
, blood spurts, vomit spews, babies explode from birth canals, decapitated
heads abound, and limbs putrefy. Theravada Buddhism also celebrates the revolting, treating it as a meditation focus for contemplating the lack of permanence. The transcendentalist consoles herself with the idea that this physical body may decay and perish, but an eternal soul will outlast the material melt-down—not so for the Buddha.
In an attempt to undercut human vanity and demonstrate the impermanence of all things, Buddhist scriptures are filled with nauseating details about rotting carcasses and putrid flesh. In the
Anguttara Nikaya
, for example, the scripture asks, “Did you never see in the world the corpse of a man or a woman, one or two or three days after death, swollen up, blue-black in color, and full of corruption? And did the thought never come to you that you also are subject to death, that you cannot escape it?” (III, 35)
When I was at a monastery in Southern Thailand, I chanced upon some reproductions of “dhamma paintings” from the mid-nineteenth century. These pictures were from a Chaiya manuscript discovered nearby, and they depicted, in detail, the “Ten Reflections on Foulness” (
asubha kammatthana
). The paintings illustrate the various uses of corpses as objects for contemplating impermanence. Following the great Theravadan philosopher Buddhaghosa’s
Visuddhimagga
text (“Path of Purification”), the artist rendered decaying corpses in rather comprehensive stages of dismemberment and putrification. According to Buddhaghosa, staring at a bloated corpse will be particularly useful to me if I’m feeling overly attached and arrogant about the shape and morphology of my body. If instead I’m feeling snobby or bigoted about my skin’s color or complexion, I should focus on the livid corpse that ranges from green to blue-black in color. Or, if I mistakenly feel that my body is my own, I am to rectify this error by meditating on a worm-infested corpse (
puluvaka
). As Buddhaghosa explains, “The body is shared by many and creatures live in dependence on (all parts and organs) and feed (on them). And there they are born, grow old, and die, evacuate and pass water; and the body is their maternity home, their hospital, their charnel ground, their privy and their urinal.” Buddhist “mindfulness” (meditational awareness) about the body is being aware of its transience, its brevity, its fugacity. The physical body is slowly macerating, and to try to hold onto it or recompose it is a pipe-dream.
The single issue that invited comment from film reviewers when
Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
was released was its wallow in the grotesque. One exclaimed that the film’s “ramshackle bouts of surreal physical comedy—a clotted mass of frenzied bodies, debris, mud, and gore—induce feelings of revolt and despair.”
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In light of the film’s critique of transcendentalism, however, this reviewer got it just backward. Far from despairing, the Pythons aimed to smash the deceptive veneer of puritanical snobbery that devalues the flesh and overvalues the invisible spirit. Like Buddhism, Python asks us to “say yes” to our true nature, filled as it is with impermanence and unpleasantness. At first this may seem jarring and disturbing, but in the long run it is preferable to self-deception through figmentary transcendent reality.
Buddha’s rejection of a permanent transcendental soul is known as the
anatta
, or “no-self ” doctrine (and the companion doctrine that rejects the idea of a permanent God is called
paticca samuppada
, or “dependent arising,” because it denies the need for any transcendent uncaused cause). The most important Buddhist critique of the transcendental soul finds place in
Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
. It is the idea that belief in unseen, eternal, and divine realities ultimately distracts us from our own humanity. Transcendentalism dehumanizes us by feeding selfish craving. If we embrace a worldview that pivots on the idea that we will attain immortality, then we are going to be overly concerned with our soul’s protection and its future fate. We become more concerned with saving our own souls than valuing and attending to the needs of those around us. Simply put, belief in a soul and a heaven of blissful happiness actually makes you less ethical in this life.
The rejection of souls, heaven, and God, does not lead, as so many critics contend, to bleak egoistic nihilism. Many transcendentalists foretell a gloomy picture without the security of otherworldly meaning, predicting rampant hedonism (pure pleasure seeking) or nihilistic apathy. The Buddha disagrees and thinks that these life patterns are to be avoided as much as otherworldly dogmatism. The extremes, excesses, and general sufferings of the hedonist strategy and the nihilist strategy are revealed in the film.
Terry’s Jones’s Mr. Creosote, for instance, is the giant embodiment of the crass pursuit of sensual gratification. After gorging himself on multiple servings of food and wine at a fancy French restaurant, his unchecked desire for the pleasures of chocolate puts him over the edge. Though he claims he can eat no more, Cleese easily seduces him with a single, small, “vaffer-thin” chocolate mint. Mr. Creosote then begins to inflate and he soon explodes, showering the restaurant in his blood and entrails. Obviously, such hedonism and self-gratification is not an appropriate fall-back for those who reject transcendental metaphysics and ethics. Nor is it appropriate to give oneself over to despair or indifference. The folly of that is illustrated in the movie’s gruesome portrayal of a liver transplant. After Graham Chapman starts the bloody business of removing this poor chap’s liver in his dining room, his partner, Cleese, chats up the man’s wife (Terry Jones in drag) in the kitchen. Cleese asks if she too would give up her liver, but she replies, “No . . . I don’t want to die.” Cleese perseveres and introduces her to Eric Idle, who steps out of her refrigerator and commences a musical tour of the sublime immensity of the universe and the tiny insignificance of her life:
Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That’s orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it’s reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see,
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the Milky Way.
The Universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that’s the fastest speed
there is.
So remember when you’re feeling very small and insecure
How amazingly unlikely is your birth
And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space
Because there’s bugger all down here on earth.