Author's note: I was very pleased to be invited by SBN several years ago to share my thoughts on how one might come to be at once both a secular Buddhist and a Buddhist monk. This essay is my response--an initial response, but a lengthy one! SBN will be publishing it in three installments. This is the first, comprising an introduction which offers a sense of the piece as a whole along with the first of its three main sections. Parts II, III, and a conclusion will appear in coming weeks.

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How does a secular Buddhist monk approach the dharma?^[1] And what makes one a secular Buddhist monk anyway—and an intermittent one at that? These questions have the same answer: one pursues a set of principles like the ones below. And by turns, one lets them go.

The principles below are provisional. I’m calling them ‘principles’ but they function more as self-instructions or reminders, phrases I whisper to myself as I navigate the choices and judgments that the dharma (in all senses mentioned in n.1) presents. I discover, amend, and discard them as I proceed. For this and other reasons, what you’re reading is a work in progress—a draft—likely to be revised or replaced before too long.

The principles below both reflect and constitute my approach to the dharma (all senses). Insofar as dharma (the Buddha’s teachings) is itself a kind of approach to dharma (all phenomena; how to live), these principles represent a bootstrap process. They both grow out of and guide my personal, idiosyncratic dharma journey to and through secular Buddhist monkhood.

I offer some of these principles in imperative form, some as declarative statements. I thought I might number and order them hierarchically, but they have proven too unruly. In the end I arranged them roughly—general to specific, epistemological to ethical—in three groups, but the groups overlap and at times intermingle:

• I. General Dharma Principles—for approaching the dharma in its sense of ‘all phenomena’ or ‘nature’ (including the human world);
• II. Dharma-Specific General Principles—for understanding a subset of dharmas (phenomena) that merits special attention from Buddhist dharma practitioners: Buddhist texts, teachings, and practices;
• III. Dharma Principles For Approaching the Dharma—for guidance in approaching the dharmas of the second group (Buddhist texts, teachings, practices) in contemporary contexts of study and practice.

‘You’ in these principles is always me, Bhikkhu Santi. But we all seem to need—or simply, to have, to operate with—such givens and guidelines, if (again) intermittently. They’re our assumptions, examined or not. We’re capable of bringing them forward and developing them as they develop us. Chosen and held wisely, such principles can lead us through and beyond whatever rigid certainties, identities, and outlooks they may themselves encompass. May these self-sayings be useful to you in the course of your version of this process, though you may never visit the monk segment of the dharma path that I’ve been following.

1. Truth first.

What you believe most likely to be true, go with that.

No lying to yourself about how things are, or how you think they are. No fooling yourself. No believing out of solidarity with others, or to comfort yourself or placate others, or out of fear or hope.

In other words, truthfulness first. Truth and truthfulness are intertwined.

By ‘truth’, I mean, ‘what is the case’. Ordinary language philosophy, rather than some ideal definition of what a word should mean or really means, is most useful here. Most of us regularly use truth to mean something like what is the case, and I’m using it here in this way too. We can leave aside philosophical debate over the nature of truth. Whether a given coherence, evidentiary, pragmatic, or correspondence theory of truth is true is itself a question of what is the case.^[2] You know what truth means well enough. We all have a sense, if not an identical or precise sense, of the difference between true and false. ‘Truthfulness’ means being true to, and honest about, what is the case.

This principle, truth first, is foundational to reason,^[3] and therefore, to honest inquiry and discussion, which is to say, truth-seeking inquiry and discussion. (It’s foundational in that truth-seeking inquiry and discussion are what lead us, via reasoning, towards truth.) It’s circular to say truthfulness is essential to truth-seeking inquiry and discussion. But it’s necessary, because there are other kinds.

There is, for instance, certainty-seeking (security-seeking, confirmation-seeking), affirmation-seeking, consolation-seeking, and money-, power-, sensual pleasure-, love-, status-, or other goal-seeking inquiry and discussion. These other kinds may entail substituting rationalizing for reasoning. (A current and useful term of art for rationalizing is motivated reasoning.) Whether wittingly, unwittingly, or half-wittingly, rationalization proceeds not towards what is the case, but towards what is wanted apart from truth.

So, no fundamentalism. No goodthink. No manipulative rhetoric.

In coming to any understanding, it’s useful to ask, what is my intention? Why do I believe this? Be honest with yourself, however uncertain the understanding of the truth that you’re coming to in a given instance. Set the intention for honesty frequently.

2. The truth is uncertain.

Things may seem otherwise than they are. You can feel more or less certain about what is the case than the case merits, and you can overlook your intentions, even as they affect how things seem. All this makes (1) difficult.

It’s not that appearances are trying to mislead you (though someone may be). Rather, it’s that you can misinterpret what you see.^[4] And what you see is always and only what appears.^[5]

Hesitate to take ‘see for yourself’ as the last word.^[6]

Human beings are suggestible. I am suggestible.

No domain of experience is more conducive to the power of suggestion than inner experience. Especially where maps of the inner terrain of spiritual development are concerned, the power of suggestion exerts a potent influence. If we examine the map closely enough, and look inwards hard enough, many of us will eventually find the features indicated on any given map.

We may succeed in fitting what we experience (for instance, during meditation) to a favored map of the spiritual terrain. However uncertain or even dubious the correspondence between the experience and the map, we’re prone to concluding that the map is the territory.

The map is not the territory. We have the capacity to believe that we have reached a given spiritual destination even when we have not, even when there is no such place, or the place is otherwise than what we’ve been promised.^[7]

3. Intuition can be wrong.

We frequently subordinate reason to gut feeling, or simply forgo reasoned reflection altogether. We take strong intuition (a feeling of certainty about something) as a reliable source of truth. It can be a source of truth, but also of error, even lies.^[8]

Feeling is the voice of intuition, so intuitions (feelings about what is true or right) are especially resistant to (the feeling of) doubt. It feels wrong to doubt our intuition. It’s counterintuitive.

4. Fallibilism is the best explanation.

How do we know if something is true?

Verificationists seek certainty, arguing for this or that method of arriving at justified true beliefs.

Skeptics abandon the possibility of certainty, but along with it, the possibility of reliable knowledge.

It’s true (probably) that we can’t know the truth with certainty. However, the degree of uncertainty with which we know things varies. Some things are almost entirely uncertain, others only negligibly so — almost certain, if not perfectly so (see 8).

Our feelings about the truth (including feelings like certainty or doubt) concern our knowledge of the truth. They don’t directly affect the truth of whatever is the case, which is true however we feel about it.

Our explanations of things, which represent our understanding of the truth about them, may be better or worse, but they cannot be proven true with absolute certainty. However, they can be proven false. We can improve our explanations by replacing falsified ones with new explanations that we come up with by means of our creative and critical intelligence, then testing the new ones for falsity. The better an explanation withstands our tests, and the more it explains, the more certain we can be about it, if never completely certain. Thus, we can come to understand things better. We can learn.

This is fallibilism.^[9] It’s an updated version, from one angle, of the canonical Buddha’s majjhena desanā, the ‘teaching by the middle’. (Or as I like to call it, his other middle way, the epistemological counterpart to the majjhimā patipadā, his foremost formulation of the path of dharma.) It’s the way of understanding that lies between absolute uncertainty and absolute certainty.

5. Go with the best explanation.

Accept the best available explanation as your working theory, the closest  approximation to truth available to you. Go with that.

‘Go with that’ means trust your theory—rely on it—with the degree of confidence that it merits. No zeal of absolute certainty, but no nihilistic doubt either.

Abandon less plausible explanations if more plausible ones are available. Less plausible explanations include those that Occam’s razor pares away, that can explain anything or that can be easily modified to do so, that can’t be falsified, and/or that are self-refuting (see 6).

Ask, ‘is there a more plausible explanation than the one I’m entertaining?’

6. No contradictions.

One encounters the view in spiritual circles that we should ‘embrace paradox’ in the sense of accepting the existence of real paradoxes in nature (as opposed to logical or semantic paradoxes, which we can recognize as a distinct category, and leave aside here). Don’t buy into this. It’s extremely unlikely.

Assume that the contradictions characteristic of paradoxes indicate areas of confusion, misunderstanding, misinterpretation, missing knowledge, or ill-conceived assumptions or premises. Assume that paradoxes are not instantiated in reality.

Understand the ‘problem of explosion’ in philosophy as it applies to reality. If one self-contradictory statement is true, every statement—contradictory or otherwise—must also be true. And if that one self-contradictory statement describes what really is the case in nature, then anything that one can say is the case in nature really would be the case. This is the problem of explosion as it applies to reality.

Be especially dismissive of ‘quantum nonsense’, the tendency of spiritual teachers to invoke quantum mechanics to license paradoxes, contradictions, or in general, poor thinking. They don’t understand what they’re talking about.^[10]

Defenders of contradiction and paradox in Eastern thought sometimes dismiss objections (and objectors) as hegemonistic, Eurocentric, and imagination/soul-blinkered. Some gesture at ‘paraconsistent logic’ for support, but this is a misappropriation and misapplication of that idea. They are the hegemonizers, insisting on reframing the very paradoxical Eastern teachings they purport to accept in their own Western, discursive terms. They do so out of excessive literalism (27), insistence on consistency (n.11), and neglect of cultural differences in expressive style (23). Rather than shed light on Eastern spiritual teachings in their own terms, such critics patronize Eastern teachings by taking them literally, ascribing to them an exoticized, soft-minded dialetheism.

Regard paradoxes as opportunities to explore premises and assumptions, as expressions of our current limits of knowledge, or as poems, riddles, or koans. As reflections of complexity. As occasions for non-binary thinking.

7. No arguments from authority.

What’s true is not true because the Buddha said so. Or because tradition says so. Or because a teacher you respect, or any authority figure, says so.

We oughtn’t to seek verification of knowledge in its origins (or at all; see 4). We should take truth—however imperfectly known — as our authority, rather than authority as our truth (to paraphrase Lucretia Mott).

In practice, we rely on tradition. Tradition supplies much of what we know. But tradition is a resource, not an authority. We can and should test everything that it teaches against our own experience and reasoning as our understanding develops.^[11]

8. Beware the absolutist/perfectionist impulse.

We have an innate tendency towards absolutism and perfectionism. It’s a byproduct of our human powers of imagination and abstract thought as employed in our processes of suffering. Since we can imagine better (abstracting it from the particular goods that we experience), we tend to become dissatisfied with good. To the extent that we do imagine better, and to the extent that our desire fixes on what we imagine, actual goods do not seem good enough.

Moreover, our abstractions of actual goods, our imagined betters, are themselves actual—actual imaginings, concepts, in our minds. We can and do abstract from them as well, imagining better and better. This process of abstraction (and reification) ends, if we pursue it to the end, only and always with best, an abstract ideal apart from anything actual. We regard such ideals as absolute. We consider them perfect. However, since these bests are not real, they are unattainable. If we allow our desire to fixate on one, it can’t be fulfilled.^[12]

If one fixates on an ideal body type, to take a common example, one can never be satisfied with one’s actual body.

If one fixates on an ideal relationship, one cannot be satisfied with any actual lover.

If one fixates on perfect consciousness, one can never be fulfilled by any actual state of consciousness.

The same applies to employment, one’s own performance in any area, other people in general—really, any experience.

Absolutism pushes abstract ideas towards their ultimate (perfect) extension. We’re familiar with it in social thought. A faith community cannot be pure until all nonbelief is extirpated. An equalitarian society cannot be just until all distinctions of status are eradicated. The current, imperfect order must be overthrown for the ideal one to emerge.

Absolutist/perfectionist thinking shows up everywhere. We see it in spiritual circles—though it’s often subconscious—in propositions like the following: 

If a good teacher is one who makes few mistakes and senses intuitively how to approach a student, a perfect teacher must be inerrant and able to read students’ minds.

If a good text conveys a lot of truth about life in a way we can understand, a sacred text must convey all of the truth worth knowing, and must do so literally and transparently.

If personal, individual consciousness is good to have, having as much consciousness as possible is better, and the ultimate state of consciousness must be infinite, eternal, and universal. 

If a quieter mind, with fewer but more deeply considered thoughts, is good, a silent mind with no thoughts must be best.

If a good god is personally fair, powerful, wise, and far-seeing, the supreme god (God) must be singular, impersonal, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent.

9. Anything can be handled ‘skillfully’ or ‘unskillfully’.

In certain English-speaking, convert- or crypto-Buddhist spiritual circles, the English terms ‘skillful’ and ‘unskillful’ serve as shorthand for a pair of Pali terms, kusala and akusala. These terms cover—and blend—a broad moral-to-pragmatic spectrum of meanings. Kusala means skillful but also virtuous, wholesome, beneficial, and good. Akusala means unskillful, unwholesome, evil, detrimental, and bad.

The awkwardness of calling things skillful or unskillful—as is common in these circles (drugs and alcohol are unskillful, medicine skillful; daggers unskillful, scalpels skillful; clinging unskillful, holding skillful; getting rid of unskillful, letting go skillful)—reveals a misperception. In plain English, we tend to see things -- objects, substances, actions, processes, ideas, feelings -- as good or bad, and people as skillful or unskillful. But good and bad, if less obviously than skill or lack of skill, do not inhere in things. Rather, they inhere—like skillfulness or unskillfulness—in the people engaging with them. Good and bad, virtue and evil, skillful and unskillful, all arise in our relationships to things, not in things themselves. This is a corollary of the overlapping Buddhist ideas of anattā (‘no-self’) and suññatā (‘emptiness’).

Even the most useful, benign, and respected of things can be used to evil effect. The dharma (texts and teachings of the Buddha) can be employed as a source of guidance and insight, or as a cudgel to dominate, divide, and exclude. It can be used to enforce hierarchy, to assert superiority, to aggrandize ego, and in general, to further aims born of greed, hatred, and delusion. When the dharma is thus handled unskillfully, though, it’s no longer the dharma (way of things; how to live; see 11).

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^[1] Well, I’ve already set out enough abstractions here—dharma, secular, Buddhist, and monk —to keep us talking past one another indefinitely. Let’s reserve judgment about what such terms “really mean” (itself far from a self-defining category). Here’s what I mean by them. (Others use these terms in various ways; please ask them what they mean if they’re assuming it’s obvious when it’s not; see n.2).

Dharma (Pali, dhamma; Sanskrit dharma; English loanword, ‘dharma’): sacred and semi-sacred texts of Buddhism and their contents; the spiritual teachings, including ethical teachings, ascribed to the Buddha; spiritual teachings in general, from any source; the way things are (in the sense of ‘the laws of nature’) and the ways people should be (in the sense of ethics); and nature and natural phenomena, but often specifically interior subjective phenomena such as ideas and understandings, states of mind, and feelings. (On the significance and function of the polysemous character of dharma, see 11 and 12.)

Secular: a subject of modernity, as opposed to a subject of traditional culture exclusively. Also, in referring to people, more or less WEIRD—to borrow Joseph Heinrich’s acronym for the distinctive psychology of those of us shaped by Western, Industrialized, Educated, Rich, and Democratic societies. WEIRD societies instill in their members varying degrees of what Heinrich calls the individualism complex, a set of psychological characteristics which on the whole (though not necessarily in a given individual) departs sharply from the psychology of the traditional cultures from which the dharma emerged.

Note that ‘secular’ as I’m using it is not the opposite of ‘religious’. Rather, it means something like ‘of the mindset of the times’ and ‘shaped by our modern psychology and sensibilities’. I recognize that for many, secular does mean as opposed to religious, but I challenge that simple binary.

Note too that “secular” as I’m using it does not mean “worldly” in its sense as the opposite of “spiritual.” A secular person can be spiritual. In the context of renunciation (my context), “worldly” and “the world” refer not to the mindset of a particular time or place, but to the life-orientation that renunciatory monasticism aims to counter. I am a renunciant (as defined under “Monk,” below). To see how this squares with a secular perspective, read on.

Buddhist: associated with the teachings of the Buddha and the traditions and cultures that identify with them. Buddhist monastic ordination is inseparable from Buddhism, however independently a monk may pursue the dharma. Some secularists and SBNR-types insist, ‘I’m a follower of the dharma, not a Buddhist,’ but this severs Buddhist perspectives and understandings from the traditions and cultures that gave rise to them, immiserating them. And it’s unnecessarily divisive. In any case, I’m unwilling to cede the term Buddhist to gatekeepers who—contrary to the dharma—would exclude anyone they judge to fall short of their criteria for membership.

Monk: a fully-ordained male- or female-identifying Buddhist monastic. That is, I’m using the term here in a gender-inclusive way to avoid the gendered and Christian associations of the ‘monk/nun’ binary. In this usage, I’m following a particular woman monk whom I think is right on this issue—but let’s stay flexible, out of respect for those woman Buddhist monks who prefer ‘nun’.

While monastic is roughly synonymous with monk for many, I use monastic to include, along with fully-ordained monks, those who have taken preliminary ordinations as postulants or novices but have not yet taken the higher ordination. ‘Renunciant’ is a broader term for anyone—ordained or otherwise—who renounces the world to dedicate their lives to spiritual practice. Ideally, Buddhist monasticism serves as a means for living as a renunciant.

^[2] These positions on the nature of truth all reflect meanings of the word ‘truth’ in the various uses people put it to. As Wittgenstein writes in his Philosophical Investigations, ‘the meaning of a word is its use in the language.’ Recognizing what Wittgenstein calls the ‘family resemblance’ among the usages of a word, we need not contest the word’s meaning when we discuss its relationship to other meanings or to reality.

^[3] Stephen Pinker covers similar ground in Enlightenment Now, but his emphasis is on reason and rationality, rather than the affect and ethics of truthfulness. Both he and I rely on Thomas Nagel’s The Last Word on this topic.

^[4] Note too that the distinction and discrepancy between appearance and reality has been a recurring topic in philosophy since the pre-Socratics. The canonical Buddha also addresses it in many ways.

^[5] The notion of ‘direct seeing’—of seeing (what appears) beyond appearances—is an accident of language, an oxymoron. From time immemorial, this idea, and the kinds of attention it generates, have been a common source of distraction in meditation.

^[6] In the meditative realm, recognize that you always and only see what appears, which may not correspond to anything real.

^[7] Introspection reveals only a map—our imagination of what lies within. (The maps provided by the various meditative traditions, in this sense, are maps of maps.) Recognizing this is key to peaceful meditation.

^[8] Read Thinking Fast And Slow by Daniel Kahneman if you have any, well, doubt about this.

^[9] Most of this conception of fallibilism is Karl Popper’s, as lucidly explained in his Conjectures and Refutations. Modern versions of fallibilism descend from Charles Sanders Pierce.

^[10] No one understands quantum mechanics, according to the physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman. In Feynman’s view, the mathematical descriptions that comprise quantum theory don’t provide useful concepts and analogies for thinking intuitively about the world. He’s not saying, of course, that no one understands the mathematical descriptions themselves. People like him do understand them, but as mathematical descriptions, not as fonts of insight into spiritual life.

^[11] These ideas about tradition are Popper’s. Ibid.

^[12] Actually, best (the absolute, the perfect) isn’t only unattainable, it’s unimaginable, since imagination can only form actual imaginings, reified abstractions of abstractions of actuals. We imagine our ultimate ideals (such as the ‘Transcendentals’—truth, beauty, goodness, justice, unity—or in the Brahmanical thought-world, transcendental consciousness) to be so much better than the actual as to be more real than the real, to be the only true reality. This is idealism.

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Bhikkhu Santi is a monk in the Thai forest tradition, a meditation-centered branch of Theravada Buddhism. He teaches meditation and writes on the intersections of Buddhism, modernity, personal life, and other spiritual themes. Bhikkhu Santi recently appeared in a public conversation with Stephen Batchelor, entitled ‘Secular Buddhism and the Timeless’, co-sponsored by SBN and posted here. Currently based in Western Massachusetts, Bhikkhu Santi lives on freewill offerings with no fixed abode. More at FindingSanti.org.