Customer Reviews

Early Buddhism: A New Approach: The I of the Beholder (Routledge Critical Studies in Buddhism)

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This is a fantastic book that explores from a scholarly perspective the fundamental teachings of early Buddhism: anatta, anicca, dukkha, nibbana, skandhas, and dependent-origination.

What is so good about this book, is that Dr. Hamilton is able to pull together all the different threads of early Buddhist thought in to a coherent whole, illuminating the inter relationships between the teachings and ending up providing very profound conclusions on the nature of human beings, the limits of cognition and the possibilty of inner transformation.

Any individual who has a real interest in Buddhism should read it. This is a book that provides a treasure of insights on how some of the most fundamental Buddhist metaphors (especially "loka" or the world) have been lost to the detriment of understanding the message of the Buddha.

With Joanna Jurewicz's discovery of the Vedic allusions pertaining to dependent origination, the arguments made by Dr. Hamilton are given even more cogency and I can safely say that this book ushers in a new, profounder understanding on the teaching of the Buddha.

I do have one warning though. This is a scholarly book and is in no way a book for "beginners". Unless the reader is quite knowledgable of Buddhism and is fairly familiar with the texts in the Pali Canon, he or she may struggle with portions of the material.

Besides that, it is a great book and anyone with a serious interest in Buddhism should have this book on their shelf.

This book is a huge help for people interested in studying early Pali Buddhism.

Sue Hamilton is both sympathetic toward the subject and does not take difficult points, perhaps resulting from previous misinterpretation, as dogma. Her interpretation and analysis is from the point of view of the Buddha's primary and only goal of helping others reach liberation.

The writing is clever and engaging.

... a truly excellent work!!!

This book is brilliant -- challenging and deeply thoughtful and thought-provoking. Hamilton is an excellent scholar and researcher, of early Buddhist and Indian thought, and of Pali, the language in which the earliest buddhist teachings were written.

What has impressed me most about this book is Hamilton's own very deep thinking on this subject -- how and why did the Buddha say the things he did in the ways he did (as presented in the early Buddhist canon)? Hamilton clears up some fuzzy thinking on a few topics -- chiefly anatta, not-self, and creates a rich, coherent picture of what the Buddha knew and wanted us to know.

This is a fascinating, challenging, and deeply rewarding book. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Sue Hamilton claims the Buddha has been misunderstood. She doesn't point fingers and she's not out to cast aspersion. She simply wants you to know there's more to the Dhamma than you might think. She works with some of the most common questions in Buddhism, such as, How can we experience the absence of self? How can we know something that is beyond knowing? How do we live with no desire?

Her investigations begin with the concept of anatta, or no-self. In trying to understand how this might be experienced, she looks to what a self is said to be - the khandhas, traditionally referred to as the five heaps, or five aggregates - matter, sensations, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. Traditionally, they are thought of as the sum of human experience, as mind and matter, four mental aspects plus form. The division doesn't seem particularly intuitive and to those of us practicing meditation not something suggestive of our meditative experience. Hamilton's search through the Pali texts was inconclusive and unrevealing. The Buddha said little about the khandhas, particularly individual khandhas.

So Hamilton went back to the Buddha's enlightenment experience, the one from which everything began and to which the teachings are meant to guide us. The Buddha summarized this experience in the Four Noble Truths, central to which is dukkha, or unsatisfactoriness. Hamilton claims there's more to dukkha than has been typically taught, that "dukkha is not descriptive of the world _in which_ we have our experience: it is not descriptive of everything we _perceive out there_ and then react to. Rather, it _is_ our experience." There is, in other words, no pre-enlightenment experience that is not dukkha.

And what is dukkha? Hamilton's idea, she says, is the "linchpin" of her thesis. She quotes SN V 421, V 1 10: "In short, it is the five khandhas that are dukkha." Seen in this light, the khandhas are not things from which a human is made, but represent human experience, where pre-enlightenment humans are represented by dukkha. The khandhas are a kind of "experiencing apparatus," our "cognitive lens." To be liberated is to free the self from the khandhas, from the "the causal matrix of continuity."

Regarding the self, Hamilton goes on to argue that the Buddha never categorically stated, `What I teach is that there is no self at all.' Indeed the idea of a self is essential to the cognitive process (thus the title of the book). There is no knowledge, in fact no experience, without an objectifying self, a self that cuts up and gives names to bits of the data stream entering via the senses. As such, objectivity does not exist without a subject to initiate the process; the two are in a state of mutual dependence.

So what no-self was the Buddha talking about in the idea of anatta? Hamilton argues against the common formulation of the absence of a self, that if the process of knowing is to be understood it is only through a self that engages in objectifying. This is not to be confused, however, with the idea of a permanent independent self, a subject of great concern to the Buddha's original audience. The reason there are so many suttas in which the Buddha talks about a self is because this is the very question students and petitioners demanded he address, the overriding philosophical and religious concern of the day.

There remains the problem of how an objectifying self is to know nirvana, an experience beyond the Buddhist category of knowing. In what sense can nirvana or enlightenment be known? Hamilton believes the seeming paradox of a transintellectual truth can be reconciled by understanding that what is known is the process and limits of logic. It is not an escape from the system itself. The experience of the absence of objectification is acquired not by stepping out of the system, but by "extending the frame of reference." And this goes to the very core of the Buddha's intention - to teach the process of knowing. Once that is known, we know what can be known, what cannot, and how to live accordingly.

Some have interpreted this to mean living without desire. But Hamilton notes that the desire to live, to maintain bodily health, to teach, to help others - such desires are adventitious and arise freely, unconstrained and without affective consequence. For one that has passed over, what ceases are "the cravings _that fuel continuity_," those consuming desires that cause us to act destructively toward ourselves and others, those desires that arise due to ignorance of the process of knowing.

"The I of the Beholder" is not for beginners, but will certainly reward those with the patience to work through the text. The depth of Hamilton's thought is impressive, as is the obvious effort she put into clarifying her ideas. I came away from the book feeling I had gained new perspectives. I have not been successful in finding any information about the author nor any new work from her since the publication of this book and would greatly appreciate any leads readers of this review might be able to pass on.

Thank you, Ms Hamilton, for stimulating my thinking.

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I have had this book at home for about 6 months now. I have recently started it, after finishing 2 books by R. Gombrich, along with some other material.

Frankly, at the moment, I am having a considerable amount of difficulty just wading through Hamilton's circuitous and ungainly sentences. How many commas, subclauses, hyphenated bits, etc. can she cram into one passively voiced sentence? It seems there are no limits. When I was in college, writing papers for a degree in History, I used to use oodles of commas. However, I discovered that this was due to a combination of muddy thinking, to some degree, and an unwillingness to chop up sentences and make points one at a time. Also, I thought complex sentences were impressive! Fortunately, Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style" cured me of that bad habit - mostly!! At the very least, some variety is needed. Long, painfully circuitous, passive-voiced sentence, short, declarative sentence. Nice! So this is among my first reactions to the book. As it turns out, even she seems to get lost in her sentences -

"According to this view, what we call human beings are in fact just the five khandhas operating together, and not only is none of the khandhas in itself one's soul but there is nothing other than the khandhas that is one's soul either."

I have read this sentence a dozen times. I cannot find a clear meaning here - she comes very close to stating both that the khandhas are and are not the soul. I expect that she does not mean that. The problem seems to be in using "there is nothing other than...". It might be more clear this way: "...in itself one's soul - and there is nothing else that can be called a soul either".

Don't get me started on "not only is none of..." This is just not good writing and/or very poor editing. Clarity and flow is lost which makes reading a burden, for me anyway. I have to spend so much time/focus on simply parsing her sentences that it is hard to keep the structure of her ideas clear.

I also take issue with her when, in the Introduction she states that she will use simple words. She then goes ahead and uses, for example, Latin, in more painful sentences:

"Or, put differently, as the objective correlate of the sensus communis, they might be referred to as the mundus sensibilis. Mind, the sensus communis, thus 'senses' the 'sensibility' of incoming knowables, the mundus sensibilis."

Uh, OK, got that. Seriously, I do think I know what she is stating here, but why, oh why, oh why, must she state it in such a turgid fashion?? Or, to quote Hamilton herself, albeit out of context:

"...can this be said simply and clearly in English...??"

Oh, how I wish it were so!

Hamilton has what seems to be an interesting relationship to Buddhist study and practice, in my opinion.

"I have over the years found myself perplexed by some of the Buddhist teachings... Though not a Buddhist myself, I share with many others an immediate interest in them. But... I found aspects of them... either meaningless or apparently internally incoherent. So I found myself either unable to grasp the point of one of the teachings taken in the context of the others... And for teachings that seemed to centre on the human being, much of what they apparently said seemed counter-experiential, at least to this human being... one is not expected to make leaps of faith about the teachings: one is meant to be able to check them for oneself." {page 7}

But, one is not supposed to "check" merely as an outsider, intellectually, no matter how deep, insightful [and obtuse, er, scholarly ;)] one's intellect is - in my opinion. One is meant to put the teachings into PRACTICE - typically, but not exclusively, "on the cushion" - in order to be able to verify them. Rather than looking for "some more obvious level of coherence" it might be good to check all this knowing at the door and just meditate. Mahasi Sayadaw taught a very nice way to do that, as do others! ;) This may ease her "feeling of perplexity".

I guess what it comes down to is I that I don't really understand how someone can study Buddhism without engaging it experientially. There seems to be this idea that establishing oneself as NOT being a Buddhist is important - maybe someday I will understand that better. While it is not a good analogy, it seems to be something like an extremely erudite and knowledgeable scholar of the tango who has however, never put on a pair of dance shoes.

And, I do not know Sue Hamilton personally, so for all I know she has tons of sitting under her belt and tremendous personal/experiential insight. I just don't get that from what she wrote in the Introduction - who knows, maybe it doesn't matter anyway. Regardless, I shall apologize in advance! :)

Bottom line, this book has several good recommendations on Amazon and is referenced by other authors of excellent reputation. So far it is a bit of disappointment to me for the two reasons above. I fear that it may be somewhat the work of the intellect, no matter how fine an intellect that may be. And, more importantly for me, the writing is difficult to get through. I definitely want to finish it though. As I am reading I keep thinking that I will have to read it a second time for the ideas after a first time for the content. And that is OK. The depth of her thinking and dedication to the material certainly merits a second read.

Finally, in this review I do not intend to imply that what Hamilton has to say is of little value. It seems to be a very interesting and powerful perspective to me, so far. It is the difficulty of the writing that makes it a somewhat frustrating read at the moment.

With Metta!!

For any who came to the book without enough background I'm afraid will understand wrong aspects of fundamental importance. This book end telling us that there IS a self. There is a thinker. And the reasons are> there is evident, no? who will think if there is no a thinker? This is a bad written review, I'm not English speaker, but, please, take this book very, very careful! Is objetable in his theoretic posture. I'm sorry, I'm not the appropriate expositor, but I need to advert to the potential readers that this is not an orthodox book.