Category Archives: Buddhism

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Solipsism in Sanskrit philosophy: Preliminary thoughts—UPDATED

How do Sanskrit philosophers deal with solipsism?

Some Buddhist epistemologists just accepted it, as a necessary consequence of their idealism. The example of Ratnakīrti’s “Rejection of the existence of other continuous sequences [of causes and effects leading to the illusion of a separate mind]” comes to mind. In my opinion, Ratnakīrti has a specially strong argument in favour of his view, namely: The Buddhist epistemological school denies the ultimate mind-independent existence of external objects. But once one accepts that, and thus accepts idealism, how can one safeguard intersubjectivity? If there is no reality other than our representations, how comes we can understand each other? Would it not be much more economical to imagine that there is only one representation?

Others rejected it based on analogy (basically: I am a mind, i.e., a continuous sequence of causes and effects; other people behaving similarly must be a mind too). The first and main example of this reasoning is Dharmakīrti’s “Establishment of the existence of other continuous sequences” (santānāntarasiddhi).

The Pratyabhijñā and the Advaita Vedānta schools are ultimately forms of solipsism. In the former case, there is only Śiva’s mind, and the appearance of other minds is part of his līlā ‘playful activity’. In the latter (at least after Śaṅkara), there is only brahman, and the appearance of other minds is due to māyā. What is the different explanatory power of līlā vs māyā? That māyā’s ontology is hard to explain, whereas once one has committed to the existence of a personal God, with Their likes and dislikes, then līlā is a perfectly acceptable solution. Thus, AV is light on the Absolute’s ontology, but implies a leap of faith as for māyā, whereas the opposite is the case for the Pratyabhijñā school.

What about the realist schools? Some of them established the existence of the self based on aham-pratyaya, i.e., our own perception of ourselves as an ‘I’ (so the Mīmāṃsā school). Some thinkers within Nyāya (like Jayanta) used inference to establish the existence of the self.

Is this enough to establish the existence of other selves?

Yes, in the case of Mīmāṃsā, because other minds seem prima facie to exist and due to svataḥ prāmāṇya (intrinsic validity) such prima facie view should be held unless and until the opposite is proven.

Yes, according to Jayanta, because other selves can be inferred just like the own self is.

Realistic Vedāntic schools will rely on either the Mīmāṃsā or the Nyāya paradigm. Thus, the question at this point will rather be: What is consciousness like, if one subscribes to this or the other school?

Some schools (like Pratyabhijñā, Yoga…) claim that we can have direct access to other minds, through yogipratyakṣa or intellectual intuition. However, yogipratyakṣa is possible only to some exceptional individuals. Moreover, Pratyabhijñā thinkers like Utpaladeva think that even this is not an evidence of the existence of separate other minds.

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Sonam Kachru, Other Lives

Other Lives (2021) is a reflection on Vasubandhu’s Viṃśikā which has several virtues to recommend it:

  1. Its author merges harmonically multiple sources. Among them are Buddhist authors, not just Indian, but also Tibetan, Chinese and Japanese, but also their contemporary interpreters (from Doniger to Zimmerman), as well as Sanskrit writers (from Candragomin to Subandhu), European writers (from Musil to Sartre!), European philosophers (from Descartes to Marx and Sextus Empiricus), scientists (predominantly Darwin and other scholars of biology and evolution) and contemporary Analytic philosophers (from Dummett to Kripke).
  2. Kachru takes seriously Vasubandhu’s arguments, e.g., on causality and on perception, both of which cannot be just read as based on the interaction of two solid and mind-independent entities (epistemology might here have to do more with philosophy of action than with ontology, and not just because of the theory of karman).
  3. Kachru also takes seriously Vasubandhu’s “conceptual toolkit”, trying to understand what it means to think for a Buddhist thinker of his time and place. Note that this creates a tension with No. 2, but this is a productive tension.
  4. Kachru is a self-reflective authors, openly discussing his methodology, which he does not take for granted as the only possible one (or “the right one”).
  5. Kachru also shares interesting thoughts about his translation of the Viṃśikā, which he, meritoriously, adds to the book.

What does No. 3 mean for the analysis of the Viṃśikā? Primarily, that SK invites us to take seriously Vasubandhu’s use of his examples (primarily: dreams, pretas and life in hell). SK stresses that dreams should not be understood as the example in a Sanskrit syllogism (as they have been later used, for instance in Advaita Vedānta). Similarly, he dwells with what it means to discuss pretas and beings in hell as alternative viewpoints that relativize the privileged position of our POV on reality.

The result is that one finishes the book feeling less sure about the “solidity” of the external world. The past feels less safely past and the present’s dependence to it opens up to the possibility of a continuity between the two and, hence, of processes rather than concluded events in which entities persisting through time interact with each other. What is the alternative? One possibility, enactivism, is discussed in chapter 5 using the work of Matthew MacKenzie and Evan Thompson. SK appears to be positively impressed by their work, but sees “reasons to be cautious”. Why?
First of all,

“As MacKenzie notes, as a theoretical program, enactivism involves several claims. One of its claims plainly does not apply: perceptual experience is not itself considered a form of action (or even activity) by Vasubandhu (nor indeed, by any Buddhist philosopher in his orbit, as far as I know)” (p. 123).

Moreover,

As I read him, Vasubandhu’s way of entangling features of the environ- ment and living beings does not depend on facts in the present, nor is it derived from scrutiny of the dynamic inner workings of an organism with an eye on the way in which an organism structures its environment and itself over time. […] Vasubandhu […] does not have the resources to make the kinds of claims MacKenzie thinks Buddhists should be making” (p. 124).

You can also read an endless thread by me on this book on Twitter, here.

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Thoughts on Arindam Chakrabarti’s Realisms Interlinked — 2

Almost all the chapters I will deal with in this second post (“Part 1″ in the book) are about a defence of objects. The next bunch of chapters will be about a defence of subjects and the last one will be about “other subjects”, meaning not just “other stuff” but also literally “other subjects”, like the ‘you’.

Basic thesis:
Arindam does not keep his card hidden. He speaks of a “suicidal movement of our thought about reality” “sloping from Naïve-realism to Absolute Skepticism through Idealism”, a suicidal movement that needs to be “blocked” (p. 75). It can be blocked, Arindam says, at three levels: 1. at a very early level, like Nyāya did (and Arindam wants to do), 2. by embracing some form of idealism while rejecting skepticism, 3. by embracing skepticism at the empirical level, but accepting the possibility of a mystical insight.

Methodology:
philosophia perennis: p. 101: ” ‘Contemporary; is a slippery word. Whether in language or in thought, those who worship what is current tend to ignore the timeless universal structures of human experience, thinking, and speech”
interaction with sources: ND asked in a meeting whether Arindam could have written the book by just “omitting the footnotes”, like Jan Westerhoff did with Madhyamaka philosophy. Now, my impression is that this is ethically unfair BUT ALSO impossible for Arindam’s book, since this is not based on a single argument (so that you can “delete” the footnotes), but rather on a dialogue among positions. It emerges from a tea-time-like conversation among colleagues in which it would be impossible to say “One might say that…” unless you specified which colleague is speaking, because their being a positivist or an idealist sheds a different light on their question. See, on this point, Arindam’s own perception of his contribution (p. 114): “In the context of the insightful infightings of the contemporary Western philosophers of language and the medieval Indian thinkers, I put forward my own conclusion about the meaning and reference of “I”.” We will see an example of this way of arguing already in chapter 6.

Defence of objects:
The main purpose of the first chapters is to go against idealism. Arindam presupposes that we can talk about “idealism” in general, as an over-arching category applicable to Berkeley, Śaṅkara and Yogācāra (and many more). However, behind this general framework, his discussions are more to-the-ground and focus on one specific speaker at a time.

Chapter 6 (pp. 65–75) focuses on how other idealists defeated idealism. It starts with 4 points in favour of idealism (in its Yogācāra fashion), namely:

  • 1. mid-sized objects lead to antinomies because they have parts (this will be refuted through the assumption of samavāya, p. 87);
  • 2. an object cannot be at the same time the cause of cognition and the thing featured in it. Atoms, for instance, cause the cognition, but don’t feature in it. Chairs etc. feature in the cognition, but don’t produce it.
  • 3. the well-known sahopalambhaniyama (discussed in a previous post).
  • 4. the argument from dreams shows that it is possible to experience objects without their mind-independent existence (this will be the topic of chapter 8).

Then, Arindam moves to Śaṅkara’s refutation of the Yogācāra position. For instance, how can something inner and mental *appear as* external, if we have never encountered anything external to begin with? How could we feign the external? (This is connected with the dream argument, as we will see below). Arindam suggests that Kant would be less vulnerable to this objection, since he could say that there is a specific function of our cognitive apparatus responsible for projecting things as external.

Arindam here reads Śaṅkara (and Kant) as accusing the Yogācāra of confusing the “phenomenal with the illusory” and he reads therefore Kant as an idealist who confutes idealism through the introduction of phenomena.
Here, by the way, Arindam attacks the Yogācāra because of a lack of distinction between saṃvṛtisat `conventionally real’ AND other forms of unreality. One should have been more nuanced, he thinks, in distinguishing between 1. what is phenomenal, 2. what is absolutely impossible (triangular flavours driving furiously) and 3. what is the result of illusions, dreams and illusions error. (By the way, Arindam’s first book was on absence, so let us consider him an expert here).

Arindam uses again Kant as an idealist defeating idealism when he uses him in order to justify the possibility of permanence of objects over time, given that we perceive ourselves as changing over times, something must remain stable so as to appreciate the change. But time is the form of our inner experience, so that no permanent element can be detected inside, unless through a comparison with something outside. (Arindam himself is not completely convinced by this argument, p. 73).

Chapter 7 focuses again on the sahopalambhaniyama problem and replies that “difference […] tolerates relatedness” (p. 79). It is true that we access objects through the mind, but this does not mean that they don’t exist also independently of it. Arindam takes advantage here of a characteristic of the English language (and of many others) and insists on paying attention to the `of’ when we speak of a `cognition *of* blue’: “I cannot experience or imagine a tree unless it is made as an object of some kind of awareness, but there is as much difference between the tree and my awareness of the tree as there is between the tree and its roots and branches. Inseparability does not mean identity” (p. 90).
It is a priori impossible to demonstrate the existence of uncognised things, but the very fact that everything is knowledge-accessible, says Arindam, presupposes that it really existed prior and independently of being cognised (p. 81). As suggested in a previous post, this thesis is closely linked with the one about how cognitions are never self-aware.
This chapter also gives Arindam a chance to discuss how he sees Nyāya realism. The objective world of Nyāya is a “world for the self”, that exists to enable selves to suffer and enjoy, thus different from the Cartesian dualism (where selves don’t really interact with matter) or from the world of imperceptible quarks in contemporary physics (p. 81).

Chapter 8 is about the Dream argument: How can we recognise something as a dream unless we wake up?

Chapter 9 on the Accusative is a good chance to discuss Arindam’s use of linguistic arguments. For some decades people working on Sanskrit philosophy thought that the linguistic turn was going to be the way Sanskrit philosophy could finally be vindicated. After all, did not Sanskrit philosophers understand ahead of time that the only way to access reality is via cognitions and that cognitions are inherently linguistics? Thus, analysing language is the best approach to reality after all. This dream was somehow scattered when philosophy of language became less popular in Anglo-Analytic philosophy. Still, Arindam has already explained that following contemporary fashions is not the only thing that counts. Hence, he could nonetheless write a fascinating chapter (chapter 10) on the reference of `I’, moving from Wittgenstein to Abhinavagupta. The main problem is what is the reference of `I’ (is it the ahaṅkāra? The ātman? Is it an empty term, because the very fact that it cannot go wrong means it cannot be correct either).

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Thoughts on Realisms interlinked by Arindam Chakrabarti 1/

Author: A philosopher of two worlds, pupil of amazing scholars of Nyāya and of Analytic philosophy, completely accomplished in both worlds in a way which is hard to repeat

—Book: It puts together Arindam’s research of 27 years. Thus, it is a collection of articles, but very well edited together, possibly because they deal with a topic very much at the heart of Arindam’s global philosophical enterprise, one that I am going to discuss below.

—Target reader: A Mark Siderits, i.e., someone who is completely committed to the project of “fusion philosophy” (more on that below), who is able to roam around Sanskrit texts and is committed to Anglo-Analytic philosophy AND to its confidence in neurosciences. Thus, this target reader, unlike in Sanskrit philosophy, demolishes the idea of a stable unified subject, but believes in the world of atoms and mind-independent objects of hard sciences. This point is crucial to explain why Arindam often explains how denying the subject *will* lead to denial of the object as well, rather than explaining that denying the object will lead to denying the subject (as it would happen in Sanskrit philosophy and European one).

—Topic: Arindam is an outspoken realist. He grounds his realism in the self-evident reality of hard sciences, based on which we cannot be illusionists nor idealists. However, he also claims that one cannot be a realist about objects without being also a realist about subjects AND even about universals and relations (!). So, basically if you want to be a good scientist, you are committed to defend also a robust understanding of the subject and you can’t avoid defending also universals and relations, such as inherence. Once you open the door a little bit and allow for the idealism / not realism about universals, you WILL UNAVOIDABLY end up undermining the whole realist enterprise.

—Methodology: I spoke already about “fusion philosophy”. This is not comparative philosophy, insofar as what Arindam does is not a descriptive comparison nor a detached description of two or more comparable points of view. Rather, he has a problem he cares about (realism) and uses the best possible arguments to drive his point home. And he finds the best arguments in Nyāya and in contemporary anglo-analytic philosophy, with some addition of neuro-sciences, but also of other philosophical traditions. They are anyway all subservient to finding the truth. There is no interest in being complete or exhaustive, nor in exploring different points of view as a good thing in itself. This also explains why Arindam does surprisingly little to justify his methodology and espouses some possibly naïve terminological choices, such as speaking of “Indian vs Western philosophy”. 

—”Object”: not just atoms, but also mid-sized objects, like the ones we encounter every day, chairs etc. Here the key is its persistence through time (via re-identificability at different moments of time) of the object, which is invariably linked to the persistence through time of the subject.

—”Subject”: Which subject is Arindam defending? One that is the complex knower of Sanskrit philosophy, i.e., the unified knower who is able to perceive with different sense faculties and remember and is then able to desire and act based on what they cognised. Against Hume and the Buddhist and neuro-scientific idea that it is enough to have unrelated sensations + a superimposed sense of their unity.

—”Universals”: You cannot be a realist, says Arindam, unless you are also a realist about universals. You need universals to recognise things as tokens of a certain type. And, since Arindam is the intelligent crazy person he is, he adds a great example: A piece of music exists independently of its specific realisation. Similarly, a universal exists independently of its specific instantiations. Now, you might say that it’s hard to be a realist about universals, since these are products of our mind. No, replies Arindam basing himself on P.K. Sen. If you think that you can’t perceive universals, it means that you have a wrong theory of perception. He therefore welcomes conceptual perception and expert perception as evidences for the perceptibility of universals.

—”Properties”: This includes also universals and what Sanskrit philosophers call upādhis ‘pseudo-universals’, such as generalisations

—Indefinability of truth: Arindam defends the Nyāya precept according to which it is possible to uphold simultaneously these two things:

A. Everything that exists is *in principle* knowable

B. Not everything that is knowable is known at any point of time

Why is this important? Because if existence and knowability are invariably connected, then Dharmakīrti’s argument about the sahopalambhaniyama is doomed to failure.

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How to define valid cognition if you are Śālikanātha (analysis of various criteria)?

Śālikanātha discusses the definition of a source of knowledge (pramāṇa) at the beginning of his Pramāṇapārāyaṇa and analyses various criteria.

First of all, he discusses the criterion of avisaṃvāditva ‘non deviation’ (used by Dharmakīrti and his school) and shows how this is not enough to exclude memory (smṛti). Dharmakīrti could exclude memory because it is conceptual, but this would exclude also inference (anumāna).

Next suggestion (again from Dharmakīrti’s school): using causal efficacy (arthakriyā) as criterion. But in this way memory should again be considered a source of knowledge, since it can be causally efficacious. One could say that, unlike in memory, in the case of inference there is a connection (though indirect) with the object. But this, again, applies to memory as well!

A new attempt is to say that a source of knowledge is identified insofar as it leads to know something unknown (aprāptaprāpaka), which is a criterion typical of Kumārila. A variant thereof is to say that it causes to act people who were previously inactive (pravartakatva), but this would lead to the fact that non-conceptual cognitions (nirvikalpa) would not be sources of knowledge, given that they cannot promote any action.

Why not using aprāptaprāpaka as criterion? Because this would not apply to the case of continuous cognitions (dhārāvāhikajñāna). These are cognitions like the ones originated out of continuously looking at the same object. These count, according to Śālikanātha, as sources of knowledge, but would not be such if the criterion of aprāptaprāmāṇaka were to be the defining one.

What about dṛḍha ‘sure’ as criterion, then?
Here Śālikanātha can give voice to the Prābhākara theory of knowledge. First of all, he asks, what would dṛḍha exclude? If it excludes doubt, then this is wrong, since there is no doubtful cognition. What we call ‘doubt’ is instead the sum of two distinct cognitions (readers might want to recall the fact that for the Nyāya school, doubt is a cognition in which two alternatives are exactly equally probably).
As for erroneous cognitions (bhrānti), these also don’t need to be excluded from the definition of knowledge, because there are no erroneous cognitions. What looks like an erroneous cognitions, is at most an incomplete one. For instance, mistaking mother-of-pearl for silver means rightly recognising a shining thing on the beach + remembering silver. The latter part is not knowledge, but just because it is memory. Śālikanātha similarly treats the case of jaundice and other perceptual errors.

His conclusion is a minimal definition of knowledge: pramāṇam anubhūtiḥ “knowledge is experience”.

(cross-posted on the Indian Philosophy blog, where you can also read some interesting comments)

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How to define valid cognition (against Buddhists) if you are Śālikanātha? (Updated)

The beginning of Śālikanātha’s Pramāṇapārāyaṇa is dedicated to a discussion of how to define pramāṇa ‘instrument of valid cognition’. As it was custom since Dignāga’s innovation in the philosophical style, Śālikanātha quotes and refutes several positions.

The first ones are various Buddhist positions. Dharmakīrti’s definition connects the criterion of avisaṃvāditva literally ‘being non-controversial’ but more likely ‘being non-erroneous’ to that of arthakriyā ‘causal efficacy’. Śālikanātha refutes it on the ground of the fact that this does not exclude smṛti ‘memory’, which can also be avisaṃvādin. At this point, various Buddhist voices try to fix this possible flaw in the definition. It is not clear to me how many of them are historically attested and how many are concocted by Śālikanātha as logically possible responses. Some of them claim that smṛti is excluded because it is conceptual (vikalpa), but this is a dangerous move, since Śālikanātha can immediately reply that, based on that, also inference should be refuted, since also inference is conceptual.

A further possibility is to say that smṛti is not pramāṇa because it lacks arthakriyā. But is this really the case? One might say that the object of smṛti is always something past and that it therefore cannot lead you to attain any present object. However, this is also true, in some sense, for anumāna (remember that in the case of anumāna you usually infer the cause from its effect and that inferring the effect from the cause is not a valid anumāna). One might correct the previous point by suggesting that in anumāna the inferential reason is connected to the probandum, which can therefore be said to be attained. However, this, again, holds true also for smṛti, since also in the case of smṛti there is a connection with the object, via mnestic traces (saṃskāra). Why should this be so different from the case of anumāna?

The sequence of voices makes it difficult for one to identify the main speaker and the various uttarapakṣin, but the main thread remains clear, namely:

  • Dharmakīrti’s definition is too broad, since it does not exclude smṛti
  • Other Buddhist attempts to exclude smṛti are futile, since they would end up excluding also anumāna

So, how can smṛti be excluded? Only through the Mīmāṃsā definition of pramāṇa, namely aprāptaprāpaka ‘causing one to understand something which was not known before’.

(cross-posted on the Indian Philosophy Blog, where you can read also some interesting comments)

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Buddhist ethics by Maria Heim

Maria Heim just published a short book on Buddhist ethics, which starts with the problem of the non-existence of ethics as a separate field of philosophy within South Asian philosophy in general and in Buddhist philosophy in particular. She then moves to moral reflections within the dimension of Buddhist practice. The book includes a comparison of Buddhaghosa’s and Śāntideva’s teachings and is freely available online until January the 7th. You can download it here.

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Anubandhacatuṣṭaya

Anubandhacatuṣṭaya, i.e., the four points you need to discuss at the beginning of a treatise (its topic, the purpose, the audience and the connection) are sometimes read back into texts which lacked them (as it happens with the maṅgala read into Aṣṭ 1.1.1).

When do they start being explicitly discussed? And by which kind of authors? I know of Buddhists like Dharmottara (and Yāmari, thanks to Eli Franco) and Vedānta ones.

Within Mīmāṃsā, Kumārila at the beginning of the Ślokavārttika, pratijñā section, speaks of content (viṣaya), purpose (prayojana) and connection (sambandha). The absence of the ideal reader is no suprise, since before the end of the first millennium this is often the case.

Within Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta, Veṅkaṭanātha at the beginning of his Seśvaramīmāṃsā speaks of content, purpose, ideal reader and seemingly not of the connection, although he might be referring to it by speaking of a pravṛttiprakāra. Hence, the group of four was possibly not yet crystallised?

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Emotions in Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta philosophy: Distance and closeness

The main thing which stroke me when I started working on the theory of emotions in Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta is that emotions can be useful and are not to be avoided. In other words, unlike some Sāṅkhya-Yoga philosophers, the Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta authors do not think that one should aim at some form of ataraxìa. Why not? Because one needs emotions in order to start one’s path towards the good. Moreover, emotions are not just useful as preliminary steps, insofar as emotions are present also in the liberated state (again, unlike in the Sāṅkhya, Yoga and also Nyāya and Buddhist Theravāda schools).

This does not mean that all emotions are necessarily good. The emotions which are praised are, chronologically speaking, dejection and desperation and then confidence, love (ranging from friendship to passion and awe) and possibly compassion.

Dejection and the absolute desperation in one’s ability to improve one’s condition are absolutely needed at the start of one’s spiritual path. In fact, as long as one thinks to be able to achieve something, no matter how small, one is unconsciously doubting God’s omnipotence and locating oneself above Him. Paradoxically, one’s extreme dejection and the feeling that one will never be saved, since one is not even worthy of begging God for help, are therefore the preliminary step for God’s grace to take place. One’s feeling of extreme distance from God is therefore way closer to Him than the self-conscious confidence of a person who were to think that they are a good Vaiṣṇava.

Once God’s grace has touched one, one feels blissed and joyfully responds to God’s grace with an emotional overflow of confidence and of love. The hymns of the Āḻvārs, which have been recognised as being as authoritative as the Veda for Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta, display a vast array of love. One can love God with maternal love (vātsalya), looking at Him as if he were the young Kṛṣṇa. One could also love God with admiration, looking at Him as the ideal king Rāma, and so on. This vast array is less variegated in the reflections of the Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta philosophers, who rather focus on their feeling of reverence and awe for God. For instance, Tamil and Maṇipravāḷa texts insist on one’s being a slave (aṭiyēṉ) of God.

The interesting element here is that this feeling is not instrumental to the achievement of God’s favour. One does not present oneself as a slave in order to secure God’s favour and then be able to raise to a higher status. By contrast, one’s ideal condition, the liberated state one strives to reach is exactly permanent servitude (as described in Veṅkaṭanātha’s Rahasyatrayasāra).