Languaging organizational space: when Whitehead meets the Buddha

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the Buddha’s philosophy of becoming in relation to that of Whitehead. It questions how we might begin to understand the spatial production of organization differently if we move beyond Western concepts of space and time. While Whitehead provides a way to comprehend a world in flux, his approach to spatial becoming tends to transform processes (verbs) into entities (nouns) by halting their becoming. In contrast, the Buddha’s perspective on becoming is not limited by the noun/verb dichotomy and does not revert to notions of permanence. This paper posits that the Buddha conceptualizes becoming as a continuous stream, while Whitehead portrays it as a series of events. The study concludes that the Buddha’s concept of the ‘specious present’—a fusion of his doctrines of ‘dependent origination’ and ‘dependently arisen’—provides novel insights into organizational space that can be of value in sharpening the conceptual underpinnings of the field.

KEYWORDS:

• Becoming
• dependent origination
• momentary existence
• specious present
• the Buddha
• Whitehead

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Dhamma, the teaching of the Buddha, is diverse (Hoffman and Mahinda 1996; Kalupahana 1986). Nevertheless, this paper does not address this diversity. Instead, its understanding of the teaching(s) is based mainly on early Buddhist discourses (see Jayatilleke 1963, 2010; Kalupahana 1975, 1979, 1986, 1995a). Furthermore, it should be noted that, in this paper, our usage of the term ‘philosophy’ does not refer to its (Greek-inspired) hegemonic meaning in the West, since the Dhamma of the Buddha fundamentally differs from ‘conceptual philosophy’ as well as ‘substantialist epistemology’. The Buddha’s radical nonsubstantialism and empiricism thus make his ‘philosophy’, which is the Dhamma, more closely resemble praxis and ethics than theoria and knowledge (Kalupahana 1995a). In this paper, we nevertheless use the terms ‘the Dhamma’ and ‘philosophy’ synonymously, for the sake of intelligibility to readers unfamiliar with the Buddha’s Dhamma.

2 In English, the Buddhist doctrine of anatta has been translated in various ways, such as non-substantiality, no-soul, and soulless (see Jayatilleke 1963; Kalupahana 1986; Rahula 1996). In this paper, we employ the terms ‘not-self’ or ‘non-self’, which commonly convey the closest meaning of the doctrine, in contrast to alternatives like ‘soulless’.

3 In the Buddha’s philosophy, or Dhamma, the term dhamma carries a wide variety of meanings, such as (mental and physical) phenomena, elements, things-events, and ontological factors. Despite an array of meanings, all dhammas are characterized by impermanence (aniccā), unsatisfactoriness (dukkha), and non-self (anatta), and are subject to dependent origination (Kalupahana 1975; Bodhi 1998).

4 However, it should be noted that in the Pāli Canon, there is no clear-cut distinction between these two kinds of truth – conventional and absolute truth – as in vohāra-desanā (conventional teaching/exposition) and parmattha-desanā (ultimate teaching/exposition) respectively, although we can see the emergence of such a distinction in medieval times (Jayatilleke 1963, 361). For example, the Anguttara Commentary records that ‘ ‘“Individual” refers to conventional speech and not to absolute speech. Two-fold is the teaching of the Buddha, the Exalted One, viz., conventional teaching and absolute teaching. Here such (sayings as refer to) a person, a being,  …  (constitutes) conventional teaching. Such (speech as refers to) the impermanent [aniccā], the sorrowful [dukka], the soulless [anatta – not-self or non-self] constituents  …  (constitute) the absolute teaching  … ’ ’ (Jayatilleke 1963, 363; quotation marks in original).

5 The Buddha's teaching is divided into three collections referred to as the Tripitaka (Three Baskets of the Doctrine): the Sutta Pitaka, the Abhidhamma Pitaka, and the Vinaya Pitaka. The Sutta Pitaka (‘the Basket of Discourses’) is divided into five nikāyas or collections, one of which is the Anguttara Nikāya (Collection of Discourses arranged in accordance with numbers). The Kathāvatthu is one of the seven treatises of the Pāli Abhidhamma Pitaka (Bodhi 1998; Nārada Mahāthera 1998).

6 The Buddha recognized existence and non-existence in a more empirical sense. Hence, he continued to use the verbal forms ‘exists’ (atthi) and ‘does not exist’ (n' atthi) to explain his view of existence, which is dependent origination (Kalupahana 1986, 14).

7 The specious present should not be equated with the notion of the instantaneous present or instantaneous moment, which is ‘the outcome of the past and the promise of the future’ (Whitehead 2015, 48). Yet, it should be noted that the Buddha did not reject time and temporality. Rather, he described time and temporality in a more empirical way, recognizing three temporal periods of past, present, and future of any phenomenon in the process of becoming (Kalupahana 1975, 1986). In terms of his theory of causality, ‘the past is the determined ( =  bhūta); the present is the moment of becoming ( =  bhava); and the future is the as yet undetermined ( =  bhavya)’ (Kalupahana 1974, 183).