The context of this talk is that of the three, frequently interwoven Levels of Discourse
which have, it seems to me, to be constantly borne in mind when reading the great sutras, and of which, among other things, I spoke in a talk entitled Buddhism, Paradox and Reality that I gave here at Shogyoji in 2018.

Without such an understanding, key works for the comprehension of Buddhism can all too easily become, for non-specialists at least, and even possibly for some specialists, a confusing thicket of words.

Fortunately, although I was unaware at the time of the existence of the diagram devised by Professor Sensho Murakami (1851-1929) and reworked by Professor Toshihiko Izutsu (1914-1993), my talk coincides with it in many ways, and at no point is in conflict with it, providing the wording on the upper left is either seen as merely being comment or moved down slightly.

Of the three, rather than two levels of discourse of which I then spoke,

The First or Higher Level is that of the Uncreated.

Since we can only communicate in words, which belong to The Second Level, there is nothing factual that can be entered under this Heading. 
                    
What is said about it in the Sutras and elsewhere is therefore entered into Section (b) of "The Second Level of Discourse".

The Second or Lower Level is that of the Created.

This comes in two parts;

It is the level of sentient beings, and that of words, through which thoughts or ideas can be communicated.

It is the Level of organisation and logic, and depends on the making of distinctions.

It relies on defining the meaning of the words employed and on a consistent use of 	the categories which they are used to create.

It is the Level of Sutras intended to open a  path towards  the inexpressible 'First or Higher Level of Discourse', the existence of which is often implied by the careful juxtaposition of particular categories and distinctions.

This is what is said about the 'First or Higher Level' in the Sutras and elsewhere.
		
It is the Level of the inconceivable and inexpressible, and by definition lies beyond the reach of conceptual thought, of ideas or categories of any kind, and cannot be encapsulated in words.
		
It is the Level of the Dharma, the eternal law of the cosmos, and of the dharmakāya, the truth body of the Buddha, which is identical with ultimate reality.

It is that of the unity of all that is and is not, in which there are no distinctions of any kind.	

The Third Level is that of Mystery and Paradox.

This is the level of attempts to use words  to  escape  the  confines  of  the First Two Levels.

It is the level of faith, which is not amenable to logical proof.

It lies outside the limits of  everyday logic and makes use of  'koans', of contradictions in terms and paradoxical statements and the like. 

Statements at this Third Level are, in themselves, not open to effective elucidation and can only be taken or left as they are.

It is the realm of feelings and intuitions that are not readily expressible in words.

It is, nevertheless, the Level in which paradoxes or contradictions in terms, particularly when piled up one after another, can be used in ways that imply the existence of the 'First or Higher Level'.

Turning back to the Murakami/Izutsu diagram, it is indeed clear, that the blank upper half cannot be given a name, since that would introduce a distinction into a realm in which there are no such things.

The same is true of what I have referred to as 'The First or Higher Level of Discourse'.

This immediately forces us to collide head-on with the very problem which faced the writers of the sutras when they first attempted to write down the essential content of the preceding centuries of purely mouth to mouth, person to person, oral transmission.

For centuries, millennia even, indeed throughout recorded history, philosophers, pre-scientists and scientists alike have been striving to come to a deeper understanding of the world in which we live and inventing new words with which to express and communicate that understanding.

Unfortunately, the result is the creation of ever greater complexity, a complexity which, for the last half century or so has been increasing at an exponential rate, and it is likely that the process began far back in the millions of years of our prehistory.

Many of the most important and commonly used words have, over time, acquired a host of different chronologically or geographically dependent meanings, which may also vary in the light of the particular purposes for which they are being employed.

In any serious discussion it is therefore vital to say in which of the various possible senses the key words are being used, and in this case they will normally be those given at the start of the relevant entries in the Oxford English Dictionary.

From the very beginnings of recorded history to the present day, historians of every persuasion have been compelled to make daisy chains of what are called facts that flow in an easily identified, unbroken line from one to the other.

Until very recently it was almost universally accepted that one particular kind of hominid in Africa developed the characteristics which came to be known as being human, but it is now becoming more and more evident that many different species of hominids in widely separated parts of the world were involved in that particular evolutionary process.

To Buddhists it will come as no surprise that their non-scientific precursors of a millennium and a half ago had a word for it, or rather they had two; they already had a clear perception that all organic life was the outcome of interdependent origination.

As someone who has spent a considerable part of a fairly long life as a professional historian, when faced with the billions on billions of interconnected events that take place in every minute of every hour of every day of every year, I find the word or concept of history especially interesting, and cannot help going back to the Avatamsaka Sutra, which says that in the Sixth Practice “enlightening beings formulate this thought” that

“ — in all the worlds there only exists verbal expression, and verbal expression has no basis in facts. Furthermore, facts have no basis in words.”
                                                                               
Thomas Cleary, 'Avatamsaka' p.462.

Indeed, as I have said many times before, paradoxical statements lie at the very heart of the Nirvana and Avatamsaka and other great Sutras, not to mention the brief and succinct, three-quarter page, Heart Sutra.

The latter’s central theme is positively pounded home in the six times reiterated statement that

“Form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form; emptiness does not differ from form, form does not differ from emptiness; whatever is form, that is emptiness, whatever is emptiness, that is form, …..”

Then, a little later on for the further benefit of Sāriputra, Shakyamuni Buddha's great disciple, just exactly what this means is set out in great detail.

“Therefore, Sāriputra, in emptiness there is no form, nor feeling, nor perception, nor impulse, nor consciousness; No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind; No forms, sounds, smells, tastes, touchables or objects of mind; no sight-organ element, and so forth, until we come to: no mind-consciousness element; There is no ignorance, no extinction of ignorance, and so forth, until we come to: there is no decay and death, no extinction of decay and death. There is no suffering, no origination, no stopping, no path. There is no cognition, no attainment and non-attainment.”

This situation largely arises from the unfortunate fact that for the writers of the sutras the First or Higher Level of Discourse was of necessity largely concerned with negative statements; and describing or defining things in terms of what they are not is never easy.

The dharmakāya or truth body of the Buddha, which is identical with ultimate reality, is said to be inconceivable, and inexpressible and cannot be encapsulated in words.

But as human beings, compelled as we are, whenever we try to make use of words, to remain in The Second or Lower Level of Discourse, or to the lower half of the Murakami/Izutsu Diagram, we are curious, naturally contradictory animals, and if you tell us that something is impossible we immediately try to do it, and in everyday life quite often succeed.

When told that, at this level, something is inexpressible, we straight away want to start talking about it, but the sort of trouble that then ensues is easy to demonstrate.

If one hears of the unity of all that is and is not, and is then told that the omnipresent Dharmakāya Buddha, or truth body, is indivisible, one immediately realises that Other Power is not something used by or emanating from the Buddha, but is the Buddha, which is nonsense, and leads on to the even more nonsensical conclusion that self-power is also the Buddha.

This is certainly not what was intended, and is just one illustration of the sort of thing that happens as soon as one tries to express the inexpressible.

One simply hits a brick wall or digs oneself into a very deep pit, or whatever other metaphor one might prefer to use.

In this context, it is interesting to note that when St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), the great, Roman Catholic medieval theologian and contemporary of Shinran Shonin (1173-1263), wrote what was called in its original Latin the Summa Theologiae, or Summary of Theology, it contained, together with much else, five detailed proofs of the existence of God, in which his logic and his destruction of often very fairly stated objections, are both of them impeccable once an initial premise is accepted.

Nevertheless, since the latter could be concerned with a mystery central to catholic belief, such as that of a triune God, he declared in the end that faith was still required.

Shinran Shonin, on the other hand, likewise implicitly acknowledging that mystery lies at the heart of every religion, went, in his own way, to the other extreme, eschewing all learning, including his own, together with logic and every kind of human endeavour or self-power, to insist on an absolute faith in the infinite compassion of the Buddha as being the sole, direct and effective means of reaching the Pure Land.

In so doing, he not only risked his own life, but set himself and his followers apart from the mainstream of preceding and contemporary monastic Buddhism, which was based on the belief that aeons of birth and rebirth and ceaseless self-discipline were needed before Nirvana, or nothingness, could be attained and the otherwise endless cycle of suffering be brought to a close.

As Shinran noted in one of his letters, it would indeed be some 5,670,000,000 years before Bodhisattva Maitreya, the next in line of succession to Shakyamuni Buddha, would achieve supreme enlightenment and himself become a Buddha.

When faced with the seemingly insoluble problem of the inexpressible First Level of Discourse, that of ultimate reality, the writers of the sutras often resorted not only to paradox but to koans or contradictions in terms as a means of indicating the existence of an ineffable something that, by definition, lay beyond the reach of words.

In the Nirvana Sutra, Volume I, Fascicle III, Chapter Two begins by saying that "the body of a tathāgata is a permanently abiding body, an indestructible body, an adamantine body”; and then embarks on a long series of self-contradictory statements concerning its major characteristics.

It immediately sets the cat among the pigeons by saying

"The tathāgata body is a body and is not a body”.
“It is not and it is.”
“It does not come into existence and it does not go out of existence.”
"It is not being and is not nonbeing.”
“It is neither definite nor indefinite.”
“He is without nature and abides in that nature.”

and, quite early on, turns in the direction of what I have termed The First or Higher Level of Discourse in saying

"It is inconceivable and will always be inconceivable.”

However, as was adumbrated in the 2018 talk, it is when one turns to the Avatamasaka Sutra, and gets as far as Book 39, entitled Entry into the Realm of Reality, the final section of Thomas Cleary’s monumental, 1,518 page translation, and even then only on reaching p.1,153, verse 2, which reads

 “Buddha is not finite or infinite; 
  The great sage has transcended finitude and infinity.”

that two things are finally made absolutely clear.

The first is that such amazing catalogues of paradoxes as occur in the Nirvana Sutra are indeed intended to show that any and all Second Level words or concepts are irrelevant, and to indicate that above them there exists an inexpressible First or Higher Level of Discourse.

The second is that the problem of the seemingly inherent negativity of that First or Higher Level of Discourse is finally resolved by one word in that single couplet of that amazing sutra, and in one great bound one escapes to a world that is totally positive.

The word that works the transformation is one that frequently occurs in the Avatamsaka Sutra.

That word is ‘transcend’, or more precisely in this particular case ‘transcended’, which is defined as “to be or go beyond the range or limits of (a field of activity or conceptual sphere)”, and carries with it the noun ‘transcendence’, which means “existence or experience beyond the normal or physical level”, and both of them point in the direction of The First or Higher Level of Discourse and are completely and totally positive, having no negative connotations of any kind.

Both are naturally in harmony with the general tone of the sutra and are completely at home in the context of the upper half of the Murakami/Izutsu diagram.

What is more, the use of the word transcendence obviates the need to make use of such inherently negative terms as negation.

It was only after writing the 2018 talk that I realised the full extent to which the words that we thought that, as sentient beings, we were employing, had instead become our masters and were using us to generate yet more words.

It scarcely needs saying that we create and use words to communicate with each other and to help us to understand and control the world in which we live, but it can come as a bit of a shock to realise the extent to which the vocabulary, which is handed down to us in whatever language we happen to speak, in its turn defines the range and quality of the thoughts we are able to think.

In fact, what we see as being the world in which we live is, to a surprising extent, a fiction created by the very words or symbols which at any one time we have invented and have at our disposal to help us.

Indeed, it seems at times that the relationships between cause and effect are closer to being circular or reciprocating than rectilinear.

We have only to look at our fellow animals and the worlds in which they live, to realise that the faculties that evolution has endowed us with, and the languages which we use are, even with the help of our ever increasing stream of electronic or other aids, no more than a selection, one small part of an incomprehensible whole.

Even today the explicit negativity, and implicit negation, of the First or Higher Level of Discourse, that of the uncreated, still live on, and we forget the comet’s tail of inescapable meanings and associations with which they are linked.

Such linkages need not even reside or reveal themselves in our conscious minds.

We need only to look at the rampant racialism by which we are surrounded, to see how often its most insidious, most dangerous, sometimes even explosive existence, lies hidden deep down in our subconscious minds.

For instance, in English, the primary meaning of negation is "the contradiction or denial of something ".

Contradiction, moreover, is not merely associated with, does not just imply argument, as argument is already an essential element of its primary meaning.

Denial is likewise closely connected to argument and conflict, and these two primary meanings are therefore, in themselves, very frequently used in a pejorative sense.

Because both of them carry associations with controversy and conflict, as in 'climate change denial’, they can come to be seen as being negative, not positive, and thence to being not good, being bad, and so on.

It therefore seems to me that any such words are, as far as is possible, best avoided in the present context and, in this particular case, should be replaced by transcendence.

Ever since about the age of fifteen, when I first learned of it, I have been a regular user of what has come to be known as Ockham’s razor.

William of Ockham (c.1300-c.1349), was an English philosopher who came up with a rule or maxim which says, in straightforward medieval Latin, words to the effect that, when faced with a problem, one should first make quite sure that no simple solution exists before adopting a complex one.

For an ignorant person like me, Ockham’s razor turns out to be surprisingly useful when faced with the problems inherent in trying to cope with English translations of the sutras, while always bearing in mind how important it is in translations of ancient texts not to associate them with anachronistic modern concepts and usages.

To give just one example of what can so easily happen, I read some time ago, in a very profound and illuminating discussion centred on the Pure Land, that "Amida Buddha, which in Sanskrit is a-mitābha/a-mitāyus Buddha, “a” means “not”, "mitā" means “to be measured”, "ābha" means “light” and "āyus" “life”. In other words, the name of this Buddha means that the “light|” and "life|" that constitute his essential nature can be neither measured nor substantialised".

To learn from this splendid translation and elucidation of what the name Amida actually means was an eye-opener to me and, I suspect, not only to me, but the rather close association with the added modern term ‘substantialisation’ put forward in the immediately succeeding sentence, seemed to me to lean towards taking ‘life’ to mean the Buddha’s life as a whole, for which no system of measurement can possibly exist, and made me a little uneasy.

This subsequently intensified when I found that in Muller’s translation of the Smaller Sukhāvatīvyūha, it says in section 8 “….., for what reason is that Tathāgata called Amitāyus? The length of life (āyus), O Sāriputra of that Tathāgata ……. is immeasurable (amitā)”, while Gomez, in section 15, gives it as “ Why is that Tathāgata called Amitāyus or ’Measureless Life-span ? ”

Applying Ockham’s razor to the matter of light, and taking the simplest interpretation, the passage is quite straightforward, since even in the days when it was written, “light" could, in a not very precise manner, be measured or assessed in terms of its relative brightness or dimness.

The simplest, and certainly the commonest interpretation of ‘life’ in such a context, using ‘measurement’ in the same straightforward, and potentially though not actually practicable, manner as before, is not a reference to the Buddha’s life as a whole, but to his lifespan or longevity.

This is a topic endlessly discussed in the sutras, and applies not just to Amida Buddha, but to Buddhas in general and, in spite of attributed durations of millions and even billions of years in some cases, is often given in terms of some very precise figure, while in others it is simply said to be immeasurable.

If this particular application of Ockham’s razor seems more like an amputation than a cut, it is interesting to note that in the Sutras Amida is often referred to as the 'Buddha of immeasurable or unimpeded light' without mentioning life in any form, let alone one that is wider than that suggested here.

T’an-luan (476-542), for example, in the Heading of Chapter 2 in his Commentary on Vasubandhu's Discourse on the Pure Land, which, in Hisao Inagaki’s translation, is a direct translation of Stanza 1 in Vasubandhu’s original text, the Buddha is simply referred as “the Tathagata of Unhindered Light Shining throughout the Ten Directions” without mention of any other designation.

In this connection, it is important to remember that Vasubandhu was not Chinese, but an Indian philosopher who became dissatisfied with the early Theravada teachings, in which he was deeply involved, and turned to the Mahāyāna.

More importantly still, in the Second Mindful Practice in this same Chapter in T’an Luan’s Commentary, the boundless light is coupled with a reference to the Smaller Sutra, which says specifically that “The life-span of the Buddha and that of those born in his Pure Land is boundless, unfathomable, and immeasurable.”

If the interpretation of the meaning of ‘life’ in the Sanskrit version of Amida Buddha’s name is accepted as simply referring to longevity, it immediately obviates the need to carry over a connection with the modern technical term ‘substantialisation’ which means “to give (something) substance or actual existence,” and which is used to such effect in other wholly appropriate contexts.

The ease with which one can fail to realise to the full what it is that one has just said is well illustrated, at least in my own case, in my 2018 talk when, after discussing the whole series of paradoxical statements in the Nirvana Sutra about The Adamantine Body of the Buddha and his transcendent nature, I only mentioned in passing that “Reality, and by this I mean ultimate reality ……. is quite simply other.”

Other is, in fact, a word which can be used as an adjective or as a pronoun and is defined as "a thing that is different from or distinct from one already mentioned or known about”.

Moreover, it is the essential, defining element of 'otherness’, which is simply "the quality or fact of being different” and has no negative or positive connotations, and no connection with any particular category of things.

There is also no implication of any kind as to what it might actually be.

All the pages that are devoted, in translations of the splendid language of the sutras, to characterising a Buddha in terms of what a Buddha is not, can, some two and a half thousand years later, be boiled down, for practical purposes, to that one word, ‘otherness’.

The term is completely comprehensive as far as its usage is concerned, at the same time as being entirely non-specific, and that, in the context of ultimate reality, which belongs to the First or Higher Level of Discourse and is inconceivable, incomprehensible and inexpressible, is entirely appropriate.

It simply says that whatever it is, or whatever kind or quality of thing it may be that comes into your mind, a Buddha differs from it, as it does from anything else you could ever conceive.

‘Otherness’ should therefore, I suggest, be used of the Buddha when, as sentient beings, we enter into the Second Level of Discourse, that of thoughts and ideas and words.

It goes without saying that anything that has a couple of thousand years of history behind it is usually very resistant to change, but fortunately, as far as that is concerned, the widespread translation of Buddhist texts into everyday English is, in historical terms, a relatively recent affair and often not too reliable.

Moreover, in English translations of Shin Buddhist texts in particular, the word ‘other’, the defining component of ‘otherness’, is already thoroughly familiar.

In The Collected Works of Shinran, it occurs explicitly some 70 times in the term 'Other Power', an emanation of Amida Buddha which, in total contrast to the abject futility of self-power, is the sole effective means by which shinjin, or absolute faith in his Primal Vow, is attained and entry into his Pure Land instantaneously assured.

Self-power on the other hand covers all the conceivable things that sentient beings can or could do, and means that no matter what they might be, from religious observances and rituals to good works, or self-denial, or the most extreme self-mortification, will do nothing to help them to get to the Pure Land, let alone be assured of eventual entry, in the absence of the working of Other Power.

Over and above its explicit occurrence, in implicit terms this endlessly repeated contrast, which first appears rather suddenly at the very end of T'an-luan’s Commentary, is the central, passionate theme of everything that Shinran taught, or spoke or wrote about.

The difference between Other Power and self-power is not just a simple contrast, such as that between male and female, large and small, strong and weak, liquid and solid, good and bad, easy and difficult, or any other similar comparisons which one may care to make.

The reason for that, however, is simple indeed.

The pairs of contrasts listed above all refer to the Second or Lower Level of Discourse, that of sentient beings and their activities, which is largely based on the making of distinctions that were, of course, recorded as being abhorrent above all else to Shakyamuni Buddha.

Other Power, on the other hand essentially refers to, or points towards, the First or Higher Level of Discourse, that of the unity all that is and is not; of the inconceivable and the inexpressible, although it cannot, as a concept expressed in words, be any part of it.

What the power of Other Power is in terms of the actual mechanism by which it acts on human beings and can be eternally omnipresent, cannot possibly be explained.

The ‘other’ is not like anything else at all.

Its meaning in this particular context is exactly that of the ‘other' that I have been talking about, and of the ‘otherness' that, it seems to me, should be taken as a primary characteristic of the Buddha whenever such things are discussed.

Such usages are already a central, though not always fully recognised element of Shin Buddhist faith, and possess, as I have attempted to show, quite a lot of advantages.

They should therefore, together with transcendence, at the very least be seriously considered.

But I would like, in this, my final talk, to end as usual, with a poem which, in this case, moves outside what is now to me, the familiar world of Nagarjuna, to touch once again, as I did in talks given long ago, the ever changing relationship between early Buddhist thought and modern science.

It goes like this -:

If time
is indeed,

in terms
of science,

no more 
than a human 
concept,

a fiction,

then everything 
is,

with no now
no before
no after.


But there 
cannot  be

a time 
before time

or a time 
after time, 

since both 
of them 

are
themselves
times.


That only 
leaves

otherness.