The term ‘agnostic’ was coined by Thomas Huxley in the 1880s as a joke. As the member of a small philosophical circle, he felt out of place with people who could so easily identify themselves with a particular persuasion. So he decided to call himself ‘Agnostic’ in order that he too, as he said, ‘could have a tail like all the other foxes.’ ‘It came into my head,’ he recalled, ‘as suggestively antithetical to the "Gnostic" of Church History who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant.’ ¹ He nonetheless came to see it as demanding as any moral, philosophical or religious creed. But instead of a creed, he saw it as a method realized through ‘the vigorous application of a single principle,’ positively expressed as: ‘follow your reason as far as it will take you,’ and negatively as: ‘do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable.’ ² He called it the ‘agnostic faith.’

          Whatever Huxley’s motives in coining the term, it caught on. Within less than twenty years it was being applied to Buddhism by Ananda Metteyya (Allan Bennett), the first Englishman to take the vows of a Buddhist monk. Bennett had ordained in Burma in 1901 and set out to promote the Dharma in the West via Buddhism: An Illustrated Review, a magazine he edited in Rangoon. The October 1905 issue quotes from a letter he wrote to the 1904 Free Thought Congress (a celebration of the pro-scientific/anti-religious position inspired in large measure by Huxley): ‘The position of Buddhism on these vital problems,’ writes Bennett, ‘is exactly coincidental, in its fundamental ideas, with the modern agnostic philosophy of the West...’ ³ The idea is further developed in the same issue in an article ‘Buddhism an Agnostic Religion’ by Professore Alessandro Costa.

          A key source for Bennett’s and Costa’s view of the agnostic nature of Buddhism would doubtless have been this famous passage from the Culamalunkya Sutta in the Majjhima Nikaya:

Suppose, Malunkyaputta, a man were wounded by an arrow thickly smeared with poison, and his friends and companions brought a surgeon to treat him. The man would say: ‘I will not let the surgeon pull out the arrow until I know the name and clan of the man who wounded me; whether the bow that wounded me was a long bow or a crossbow; whether the arrow that wounded me was hoof-tipped or curved or barbed.’

          All this would still not be known to that man and meanwhile he would die. So too, Malunkyaputta, if anyone should say: ‘I will not lead the noble life under the Buddha until the Buddha declares to me whether the world is eternal or not eternal, finite or infinite; whether the soul is the same as or different from the body; whether or not an awakened one continues or ceases to exist after death,’ that would still remain undeclared by the Buddha and meanwhile that person would die. ⁴

          Over the course of its history, though, Buddhism has tended to lose its agnostic dimension through becoming institutionalized as a religion with dogmatic belief systems. Periodically (as with Zen and Tantra) this process has been challenged and even reversed, but in traditional Asian societies this never lasted long. The power of organized religion has swiftly reasserted itself - usually by subsuming rebellious ideas into the canons of a revised orthodoxy.

          Consequently, as the Dharma emigrates westward, it is treated as a religion -- albeit an ‘eastern’ one. The very term ‘Buddhism’ (an invention of Western scholars for which there is no exact equivalent in Asia) suggests that it is a creed to be lined up alongside other creeds. This perception of Buddhism as a religion obscures and distorts the encounter of the Dharma with secular, agnostic culture. Yet could it be that the Dharma might in fact have more in common with Godless secularism than with the bastions of religion? Might agnosticism serve as a more fertile common ground for dialogue than any attempt to make Buddhist sense of Allah?

          Today the force of the term ‘agnosticism’ has been lost. It has come to legitimate an avoidance of the existential questions posed by birth and death. Just as the modern agnostic tradition has tended to lose its confidence and lapse into scepticism, so has Buddhism tended to lose its critical edge and lapse into religiosity. What each has lost, however, the other may be able to help restore. In its encounter with secular culture, the Dharma may recover its agnostic imperative, while agnosticism may be helped to recover its soul.

          So what would be the features of an ‘agnostic Buddhist?’ Such a person would not regard the Dharma as a source of ‘answers’ to questions of where we came from, where we are going, what happens after death. He or she would seek such knowledge in the appropriate domains: astrophysics, evolutionary biology, neuro-science etc. An agnostic Buddhist would therefore not be a ‘believer’ with claims to revealed information about supernatural or paranormal phenomena, and in this sense would not be ‘religious.’ An agnostic Buddhist would look to the Dharma for metaphors of existential confrontation rather than metaphors of existential consolation. He or she would start by facing up to the primacy of anguish and uncertainty (dukkha), then proceed to apply a set of practices to understand the human dilemma and work towards a resolution. An agnostic Buddhist would eschew atheism as much as theism, and would be as reluctant to regard the universe as devoid of meaning as endowed with meaning. (For to deny either God or meaning is surely just the antithesis of affirming them.) Yet such an agnostic stance would not be based on disinterest. It would be founded on a passionate recognition that I do not know. It would confront the enormity of having been born instead of reaching for the consolation of a belief. It would strip away, layer by layer, the views that conceal the mystery of being here at all.

          This process of stripping away consolatory illusions by holding true to agnosis (not-knowing) leads to what could be called ‘deep agnosticism.’ A Zen koan (case 41 of the Gateless Gate) illustrates this well. It reads:

Bodhidharma sat facing the wall. The second patriarch, standing in the snow, cut off his arm and said: ‘Your disciple’s mind is not yet at peace. I beg you, Master, give it rest.’ Bodhidharma said, ‘Bring me your mind and I will put it to rest.’ The patriarch replied, ‘I have searched for the mind but have never been able to find it.’ Bodhidharma said, ‘I have finished putting it to rest for you.’ ⁵

This deep agnosticism is further evident in such formal Ch’an concepts as wu-hsin (no-mind) and wu-nien (no-thought) (as well as the popularized ‘Don’t Know Mind’ of the Korean Son Master Seung Sahn). It also reflects the Sixth Ch’an Patriarch Hui-neng’s initial insight as a young boy when, after receiving payment for some firewood, he chanced across a man reciting the Diamond Sutra. According to tradition, it was upon hearing the words ‘must produce a mind that stays in no place’ ⁶ that Hui-neng was suddenly awakened

          As one of the best known texts of the Perfection of Wisdom (Prajnaparamita) literature of Mahayana Buddhism, the Diamond Sutra takes as its central theme the idea of emptiness (sunyata). ‘Emptiness’ is a deliberately unappetizing term used to undercut yearnings for religious, psychological or metaphysical consolation. Although a noun, it does not in any way denote a thing or state. It is not something one ‘realizes’ in a moment of mystical insight that ‘breaks through’ to a transcendent reality concealed behind yet mysteriously underpinning the empirical world. Nor do things ‘arise’ from emptiness and ‘dissolve’ back into it as though it were some kind of formless, cosmic stuff.

          So what is emptiness? According to the 2nd century CE philosopher Nagarjuna: ‘Whatever is contingently emergent is said to be emptiness.’ ⁷ Emptiness is the simple negation of any intrinsic, non-contingent identity in either oneself or anything else. Although the restless mind of Bodhidharma’s disciple appeared to exist in and of itself and be tormented by an anguish fused with its own self-identity, by enquiring deeply into its nature, he found nothing he could put his finger on and say, ‘this is it!’ Emptiness is the infinite unfindability of things. But this does not mean that nothing exists; it only implies that the deeper one delves into the heart of things, the more their utter contingency becomes apparent. Rather than being confined as fixed essences, things are released as changing, processual events configured by an unprecedented and unrepeatable matrix of causes, conditions, components as well as conceptual and linguistic conventions.

          Nagarjuna continues: ‘Emptiness is contingently configured; it is the central path.’ ⁸ So emptiness is as contingent as anything else; it has no privileged ontological status. Even more surprising is Nagarjuna’s equating of emptiness with that key metaphor of the Buddhist enlightenment project: the central path. In 1397, while in a hermitage in the hills north of Lhasa, the Tibetan philosopher Tsongkhapa commented on this passage. ‘Emptiness,’ he explains, ‘has relinquished the extremes of Being and Nothing. Thus it is both the centre itself and the central path. Emptiness is the track on which the centered person moves.’ ⁹

          Track? The Tibetan word Tsongkhapa uses for ‘track’ is shul, a somewhat obscure term defined by the dictionary as rjes, which means an ‘impression,’ i.e. a mark which remains after that which made it has passed by--a footprint, for example. In other contexts, shul is used to describe the scarred hollow in the ground where a house once stood; the channel worn through rock where a river runs in flood; the indentation in the grass where an animal slept last night. All these are shul: the impression of something that used to be there.

          A path is a shul because of its essentially negative nature: it is an impression in the ground left by the regular tread of feet, a passage which is clear of obstruction. So we can translate shul as ‘track,’ which in English too means a path as well as an impression left by an animal or a person. To experience the ‘track-like’ nature of emptiness would be like recovering a path that had been lost, or stumbling into a clearing in the forest, where suddenly you can move freely and see clearly. To know emptiness is to experience the shocking absence of what normally determines the sense of who we are. It may only last a moment, before the habits of a lifetime reassert themselves and close in once more. But for that moment, one witnesses oneself and the world as immediate, vivid, open and vulnerable.

          This free and open space is the very centre of Dharma practice. As Tsongkhapa says, it is both the centre and the central path. It is both wilderness and track. A life centered in awareness of emptiness is a way of being in this changing, shocking, painful, joyous, frustrating, awesome, stubborn and ambiguous reality. Emptiness is a way of being that leads not beyond this reality but into its heart. Rather than a state of transcendent, mystical absorption, it is a dynamic, processual experience: the track on which the centered person moves.

          As a negation, emptiness can offer no definitive, positive revelation of Reality. As this awareness becomes stiller and clearer, things become not only more vivid but also more baffling. The more deeply we know something in this way, the more deeply we don’t know it. The ultimate ambiguity of experience is that it is simultaneously knowable and unknowable. No matter how well one may know something, at the same time one has to confess ‘I don’t really know what this is.’ One has to let go of the insistence to pin things down in a categorical way. One is invited to encounter their mystery.

          Such unknowing is the tap root of deep agnosticism. When even the concept of emptiness is suspended, the mind has nowhere to rest. And we are free to begin a radically other kind of questioning: a perplexity which is already present within unknowing itself. When we find ourselves baffled and puzzled by things, they present themselves as questions. Habitual assumptions and descriptions suddenly fail and one hears one’s stammering voice cry out: ‘What is this?’ Or simply: ‘What?’ or ‘Why?’ Or perhaps no words at all, just ‘?’ Such perplexity is neither frustrated nor merely curious about a specific detail of experience. It is an intense, focused questioning into what is unfolding at any given moment. It is the engine that drives one into the heart of what is unknown.

          This perplexed questioning is another way of understanding the centre and the central path. In refusing to be drawn into the answers of ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ ‘it is this,’ or ‘it is that,’ it lets go of the polarities of affirmation and negation, something and nothing. Like life itself, it just keeps going, free from the need to hold to any fixed position -- including those of Buddhism. It prevents awareness from becoming a passive, routinized stance, which may accord with a belief system but renders experience numb and opaque. Perplexity keeps awareness on its toes. It reveals experience as transparent, radiant and unimpeded. To give Tsongkhapa a Zen twist: Perplexity is the track on which the centered person moves.

1. From T.H. Huxley’s essay ‘Agnosticism’ (1889) included in Science and the Christian Tradition. London: Macmillan, 1904, p. 239. [Back to text]

2. Huxley, op cit., 245-6 [Back to text]

3. Buddhism: An Illustrated Review, Vol II, no.1, Rangoon, October 1905, p. 86. [Back to text]

4. Abridged from the Culamalunkya Sutta (Majjhima Nikaya 63). Tr. Nanamoli Thera and Bhikkhu Bodhi. The Middle Length Sayings of the Buddha. Boston: Wisdom, 1995, pp.534-6. [Back to text]

5. Yamada, Koun. Gateless Gate. Los Angeles, 1979, p. 208. [Back to text]

6. Yampolsky, Philip B. The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 94. [Back to text]

7. Nagarjuna. Mulamadhyamakakarika XXIV:18 a-b. My own translation from the Tibetan: /rten cing ‘brel bar ‘byung ba gang/ /de ni stong pa nyid du bshad. [Back to text]

8. Nagarjuna. Mulamadhyamakakarika XXIV:18 c-d. My own translation from the Tibetan: /de ni brten nas gdags pa ste/ /de nyid dbu ma’i lam yin no. [Back to text]