Philo and Buddha on Sense and Language

The Buddha expressed grave doubts about what he called "the senses' evidence," with their tendency to encourage, among other things, an undeservedly low opinion of our fellow human beings. Here, similarly, is Philo's depiction of the senses- or, as he called them collectively, "sense": Its standards of judgment," he wrote, are "spurious and corrupt and steeped in false opinion," and "equipped to ensnare and deceive and ravish truth away from it's place in the heart of nature." And Philo, like the Buddha, understood that part of this corruption of pure cognition came from egoistic biases; he railed especially against the corrupting role of "envy."

Philo also shared the Eastern mystic's suspicion of language, the conviction that speech, in its crudeness, is powerless to capture the true texture of reality and is therefore an impediment to apprehending the divine. He condemns speech for its "self-exaltation and self-pride," marveling at its "audacity, that it should attempt the impossible task to use shadows to point me to substances."

Philo believed, like the Buddha, that the situation called for radical surgery. If you want to get closer to the divine, the path to follow, Philo wrote, was "not that way of thinking which abides in the prison of the body of its own free will, but that which released from its fetters into liberty has come forth outside the prison walls, and if we may so say, left behind its own self." And it was hard to do this with anything much short of monastic solitude. For you must first separate yourself from the "body and its interminable cravings"; your soul must "rid itself, as I have said, of that neighbor of our rational element, the irrational, which like torrent in five divisions pours through the channels of all the senses and rouses the violence of the passions." The "reasoning faculty" must "sever and banish from itself that which has the appearance of being closest to it, the word of utterance." The object of the game is "that the logos or thought within the mind may be left behind by itself alone, destitute of body, destitute of sense-perception, destitute of utterance in audible speech; for when it has been thus left  it will live a life in harmony with such solitude." Only then can the logos that lies within us all give "its glad homage to the Sole Existence" -- that is, to God (here rendered by Philo in abstract language akin to such modern theological terms as "ultimate reality" and "the ground of being").

~Robert Wright, The Evolution of God