Distinguishing Worldly Views from Buddhist Views
We’re always coming from somewhere. No action or belief just appears out of the blue, spontaneously coming from nowhere. Every single perspective has features and contours, patterns and rules, history and habits that it orients around and lives through. What both Buddhist and Integral approaches do is emphasize the importance of locating one’s view. This is both a wise and skillful thing to do. Buddhism strongly orients us around liberative views that free us from suffering entirely.The Integral approach gives us maps to locate perspectives, teasing apart the various characteristics of views — especially non-liberative or so-called “worldly” views. This process helps us better understand where someone else is coming from, as well as where we’re coming from, so we can improve our chances of coming together more lovingly, peacefully, and with more care and mutual understanding. An Integral approach to Buddhism utilizes a wide variety of tools to locate these views and perspectives which I’m asserting could be of immense help in bringing immediate and lasting happiness to all beings.
Let’s look at a few major types of views. In Garland of Views, Guru Padmasambhava — an enlightened Buddhist master who brought Buddhism from India to Tibet in the 8th century — taught that there are four “worldly,” non-liberative views.
(1) Materialism (“Flat View;” phyal ba)
(2) Hedonism (“Rejecting View;” rgyang ’phen pa)
(3) Nihilism (“Dead-End View;” mur thug pa)
(4) Eternalism (“Holding-On View;” mu stegs pa)
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Each of these views is defined by how much they include cause and effect.
Someone holding a materialistic “flat view” isn’t really interested in cause and effect. Life just is what it is and there’s no need to look much further than that. For this view, “What came first: the chicken or the egg?” just isn’t an interesting question.
The “rejecting view” of hedonism looks a little more closely at cause and effect, but mostly rejects what it doesn’t immediately experience. It basically follows what other people say and lives only for this life, optimizing pleasurable experiences, unconcerned with questions of what might have happened before or what comes next.
The “dead-end” view of extreme nihilism doesn’t believe in cause and effect that goes beyond their immediate senses. “Bad things happen to good people. Good things happen to bad people. The sky is blue just because it is. No one made gravity. There are no ultimate hidden forces behind the scenes. The complexity of life is what it is for no apparent reason. In the final analysis, it’s just that way: random without any deeper meaning.”
The final worldly view of “eternalism” looks more closely at life but ends up holding onto aspects of experience that fit their belief system while dismissing the rest. This view might hold onto a permanent cause such as a god, ego, or soul, or a fixed result like a permanent afterlife, often believing that causes can be different than results. For example, you can do bad things, say a few specific words, and somehow magically achieve good results. Yet even though some results might be seen as uncaused, on the upside many times eternalist views believe that virtuous causes do lead to virtuous results. This type of eternalism tends to be more helpful than the nihilist views that believe everything ultimately leads to some version of nothingness, so why bother being nice?
Guru Padmasambhava goes into great detail about each of these four worldly views. He wasn’t just creating “strawmen” positions that are easy to refute but falsely characterize someone’s actual view. Guru Rinpoche was distilling an infinite spectrum of non-liberative views into four distinct perspectives, or four orienting generalizations. Each of these four worldly views offers different ways of responding to causes, conditions, and effects — or relative truth — but none of them are liberative. While some worldly views pay more attention to cause and effect than others, they all operate within an endless cycle of samsaric suffering without offering a way out. The Buddha taught that the only way to become permanently liberated from the suffering of grasping onto conditioned existence is to fully understand both cause and effect, and then work to completely remove all the causes of suffering. This is what a liberative, non-worldly view offers. It is the foundation of every single one of the Buddha’s teachings.
An Integral View of Tibetan Buddhism: Preserving Lineage Wisdom in the 21st Century (pgs 90-91)
