The Problem of the Inefficacy of Knowledge in Early Buddhist Soteriology

Abstract

arly Buddhism has been described as a “gnostic soteriology”1 in that it sees the chief cause of life’s unsatisfactoriness to be ignorance of certain metaphysical truths, and that once this ignorance is eliminated through awareness of the true nature of reality, the suffering that is rooted in ignorance goes away with it. In what follows, I will describe a significant problem that early Buddhism faces, as does any gnostic soteriology, and propose a solution to the problem. This is a quasi-analytic study of early Buddhist epistemology in that it applies some of the standard ideas about knowledge that have guided analytic epistemology for some time to a specific problem that confronts the early Buddhist attempt to claim that knowing some truths about reality will transform us in some significant way. When speaking of “early Buddhism” in what follows, I intend those teachings contained in the Pali canon, which the Theravada tradition has sought to preserve. Historically Buddhism quickly moves away from the Theravada focus on nirvana and into the various schools of the “Great Vehicle” of the Mahayana Tradition. My characterization of Buddhism as a gnostic soteriology refers only to a form of Buddhism that may be limited to the earliest part of the movement and the conservative wing (Theravada) that has sought to preserve its earliest form ever since. I begin with a fuller explanation of what Buddhism as a gnostic soteriology implies, and the rather large problem that such a system faces. By definition, a soteriology is a system of thought that has as its goal the salvation or deliverance of its adherents. A soteriology is gnostic when it claims that the primary vehicle through which this salvation is accomplished is knowledge of some truth or set of truths. Thus in soteriological systems of the gnostic variety knowledge of some truth or truths is purported to have transforming power of some kind. The “truths” these systems enjoin their followers to know are diverse, but they often revolve around some metaphysical claims that run contrary to our commonsense views about reality.