Unfixing our Fixed Views and Dogmatic Opinions
Here is the transcript of a Dharma Talk I gave at Cardiff Buddhist Centre, on 13/06/2017, entitled “Unfixing our views”. I was one of three speakers at the Young Persons Takeover of the regular Sangha night at the centre.
I’ve been making a real effort in my life to practice the Dharma, and I’d like to share with you all, an issue that I face time and time again. The issue of fixed views, and dogmatic opinions. This is something we can see in action throughout our lives, through media, our politics, religions, but also through our hobbies and interests on a smaller scale.
What do I mean when I say the word ‘views’? Views are these little nuggets of information that we fixate on. Views can join us with one another, create communities, foster friendships, define for others where we stand; however, they’re also the punch thrown at a football match, the object of division, the thing that creates the ‘us and them’ mentality. Views can open doors, but they just as readily close others.
A view is a product of our conditions, effectively a symptom of our life experience, they don’t come out of thin air. Each activity we partake in, or experience we have in life, has the chance to either create, destroy, or solidify a view. Everything we do counts in some way to all of the views we hold.
I’ll give you an example:
I enjoy reading, but I don’t particularly like crime novels. I love fantasy novels. Dragons, magic, elves, and large-scale medieval war all excite me, whereas detectives pealing over crime scenes does not.
The conditions that allowed me to arrive at this view is that I read a fantasy novel once that I really enjoyed, so I began opening the door and reading more and more fantasy until I became a relative aficionado. Conversely, I read a crime novel once that I did not enjoy, and thus, I severed an entire genre of books from my life.
The genres I read are fragmented, and often not quite logical as a result of these views. I enjoy True Crime, but not regular Crime. Even True Crime in a fictionalised form is brilliant, but I will not read a regular, fiction crime novel. Also, I’d be tempted to read Sherlock Holmes, since this can technically pass as a period piece.
As I list these ‘problems’ with my view on crime novels, I can feel the internal walls I’ve erected around my dislike of crime swelling and beginning to strengthen to withstand any potential incoming debates. I begin to justify it — saying, “crime novels are all the same,” or “I don’t find crime protagonists to be relatable.”
I’ve purposefully selected a rather trivial view of mine, to help demonstrate this principle, but even with this small example you can see how a view can become incredibly nuanced. They’re full of caveats, and fallacies. My view around crime novels is much like a leaky bucket, water spilling out of a range of holes in the view, meanwhile I pour more water in with my justifications, and continue to tell myself that this is fine, but of course, we know it is not.
The Dharma obviously wasn’t put in place solely for me to broaden my literature choices. My view of crime novels doesn’t affect my daily life, nor does it really change the actions of the day. I see posters around that advertise new crime novels, and it doesn’t affect me. You see, this view is not charged, and is not very emotionally driven.
Let’s think about other views one has: Politics? Religion? The nature of existence? These views are charged. Politics is a great one to think about, since it’s so charged, so emotionally driven that any holes in our leaky buckets, can cause us a great deal of suffering as I’m sure you can imagine. Just think of the anger, or sadness you may have felt over the course of the most recent election, and you will understand the impact of a view.
The Pali term for such a view is ditthi, which literally means ‘sight’. The scriptures tell us that ditthi is inconstant, or something that is entirely subject to change. These views are all based upon our conditions, and our conditions as we well know, are impermanent. Therefore, our views are impermanent. The view of the sports team we support is impermanent, so are the views of which genre books we like, so then are our politics, so then is our religious inclination.
Ditthi is spoken about quite extensively in the Buddhist canon. I’m currently reading through some of the volumes of the Theravadan Pali Canon, so I’ll draw upon one such example here.
In the Digha Nikaya, there is a sutta called the Brahmajala Sutta. In this sutta, The Buddha takes a range of conflicting views (62 in total) about the state of existence, and suggests that holding each of these views is wrong. This is quite a critical piece, since all the views the Buddha criticises are ones that are popularlised by the Brahmins and scholars of the era, so he is in a broad way, dismissing everything these people believe in. When explaining why each view is wrong, he says this “Outside of these views, there is none.” My interpretation of this line is that if we believe, truly believe, our view to be the only view, then we make ourselves blind to any others. This is something important to remember, insight and blindness to views just simply aren’t compatible.
The Buddha also goes on to say “Therein, bhikkhus, when those recluses and brahmins [take a specific view] — that is only the feeling of those who do not know and do not see; that is only the agitation and vacillation of those who are immersed in craving.”
There’s two points to take away from this sentence. First of all, the Buddha is saying that those who take views, aren’t capable of wisdom. Wisdom is a very important part of the dharma, right view is one of the strands of the eightfold path. Secondly, taking views is clear form of attachment. It is our desperate need to cling to a specific world view, or specific community, or even specific genre of books. In doing so, we shut out any alternative. Not only is this causing us suffering, but it is also preventing us from understanding the truth and the reality of any situation, concept, or subject.
In short, maintaining a view is an obstacle to enlightenment.
So how do we combat this; we need to open our hearts and open our minds to understand the nature of views themselves — this is not easy, it’s an entire perspective shift on the way we as humans form opinions. Once we are able to become comfortable with the notion that views are simple machinations of our conditions then it becomes much simpler to understand why someone votes Conservative, or why one believes in a creator God, or why one is able to read crime novels unhindered. Simply put, someone’s view differs from yours, because they are subject of an entirely different life experience.
To this sense, nobody’s view is inherently unskillful, but that also does not make any of these views inherently skillful. A view is flawed if it is maintained as the truth without the required wisdom.
A right view is one where we are able to see the nature of the views themselves. It’s like stepping back from the dogmatism and taking a broad understanding of how this view came to be. This very much applies to our politics, religious inclinations, our understanding of the nature of existence, as well as our hobbies and interests. A right view is influenced not by conditions, but by reality, and our ability to see reality as it actually is.
Of course, this gets ever more complicated as the view itself becomes more complicated. For my trivial example, I can just read crime novels more often, thereby challenging my tightly held view. I’ll most likely find some excellent crime novels and so this view will dissipate — this is how I can bring wisdom to this view; openness being a key driving factor to my exploration of these alternatives.
The more charged a view, the more difficult it becomes for us to bring wisdom to it — challenging your more emotionally driven views will be a struggle. However, if the Dharma were so easy, we’d all be enlightened already.
To close, I would like to invite you all, to spend some time over the next few days, just thinking about some of your more tightly held views in quiet contemplation. Best to start small, and not go straight for Politics, maybe an entertainment preference or something of that scale. Just think about how your view came to be, think about all the steps you took in life that enabled you to form and solidify this view, and just gently open yourself to the possibility, that your view does not represent reality.
