A Buddhist Take on Gilbert Ryle’s Theory of Mind

Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949/2002. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press) is generally considered a landmark in the quest to refute Cartesian dualism. The work contains many inspirational ideas and mainly posits behavioral disposition as the referent of mind in order to refute mind–body dualism. In this article, I show that the Buddhist theory of ‘non-self’ is also at odds with the belief that a substantial soul exists distinct from the physical body and further point out similarities between the Buddhist outlook and Ryle’s ideas in three parts. First, I illustrate that Ryle’s ‘category mistake’ has certain points in common with the Buddhist refutation of ‘self’. Within the Buddhist framework, referents such as ‘mind’ and ‘self’ are merely imputed terms. The presumed existence of an independent substance such as a ‘soul’, when considered in isolation from the expedient usage of the term ‘mind’, can therefore also be viewed as a ‘category mistake’. Second, attempting to solve the questions of ‘what mind is’ and ‘how mind operates’ are two entirely different approaches to the study of mind. I argue that it is necessary to focus on ‘knowing-how’ rather than ‘knowing-that’, if we are to gain a more comprehensive understanding of mind and avoid any kind of category mistake such as those that follow from isolating the physical properties of brain or drawing inferences from a mystical soul. Third, I aim to show why investigating mind from the perspective of ‘dispositions’ of behavior is a valid approach. The Buddhist concept of karma-vāsanā elucidates the habitual tendency to act or not act in various situations. Based on this theory, I argue that the workings of the human mind bears strong links to the formation of karma and as such have important axiological implications that cannot be ignored. I conclude by pointing out that Ryle’s insightful ideas could in certain ways be complemented by the Buddhist theory of mind. In my view, his philosophy is not only a mediator between Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology, but could perhaps also be seen as a mediator between traditional Eastern systems of thought and contemporary philosophies of mind.     

Vasubandhu's Idealism: An encounter between philosophy and religion

According to idealism the world, as we perceive it, is in effect a creation of the mind. There are many different forms of idealism and this paper investigates one form of idealism that was advocated by the 4th century Buddhist Yogācārin Vasubandhu and one not unfamiliar in the west, especially in the works of George Berkeley. This paper suggests that when idealism, as a metaphysical theory, is set within a soteriological framework, as is the case with Vasubandhu, it serves to bridge the philosophical endeavour with the religious quest as outlined in Buddhist thought. Idealism is a theory about the borders between mind and matter, and specifically about the demolition of matter. This demolition, in the hands of Vasubandhu, manages to redefine the framework of speculation by incorporating the soteriological within it and thus constructing a viable bridge between philosophy and religion.     

No-Self and the phenomenology of agency

The Buddhists philosophers put forward a revisionary metaphysics which lacks a “self” in order to provide an intellectually and morally preferred picture of the world. The first task in the paper is to answer the question: what is the “self” that the Buddhists are denying? To answer this question, I look at the Abhidharma arguments (as presented in Chapter 9 of Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmako?a-bhāsya) for the No-Self doctrine and then work back to an interpretation of the self that is the target of such a doctrine. I argue that Buddhists are not just denying the diachronically unified, extended, narrative self but also minimal selfhood insofar as it associated with sense of ownership and sense of agency. The view is deeply counterintuitive and the Buddhists are acutely aware of this fact. Accordingly, the Abhidharma-Buddhist writings are replete with attempts to explain the phenomenology of experience in a no-self world. The second part of the paper reconstructs the Buddhist explanation using resources from contemporary discussions about the sense (or lack thereof) of agency.     

Vasubandhu's treatise on the three natures translated from the Tibetan edition with a commentary[1]

Trisvabhāvanirde?a (Treatise on the Three Natures) is Vasubandhu's most mature and explicit exposition of the Yogcācāra doctrine of the three natures and their relation to the Buddhist idealism Vasubandhu articulates. Nonetheless there are no extent commentaries on this important short test. The present work provides an introduction to the text, its context and principal philosophical theses; a new translation of the text itself; and a close, verse‐by‐verse commentary on the text explaining the structure of Yogacara/Cittamatra idealism and comparing it to Western versions of transcendental idealism. In particular, I show how the doctrine of the three natures is used to make idealism coherent in a Buddhist context and how it sheds light on the structure and evolution of transcendental idealism in Europe.     

Toward an Anatomy of Mourning: Discipline,Devotion and Liberation in a Freudian-Buddhist Framework

In this essay I first articulate what I take to be an influential and for the most part persuasive model in the western psychoanalytic tradition that is a response to tragic loss, namely, the one that we find in Freud’s little essay entitled ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917). I then use a well-known Buddhist folk tale about the plight of a young woman named Kisagotami to underscore central elements from Buddhist psychology on the subject of suffering that is a consequence of the loss of a young mother’s only child. Fortified by both traditions, I gather together the ingredients for a cross-cultural mental model that serves to explain and to justify as healthy a specific kind of response to a specific form of suffering, namely, the loss of ones’ loved one. I arrive at this model by asking a number of specific questions of both traditions. For instance, what constitutes a non-pathological response to this kind of suffering? What state of mind represents the cessation of such suffering? Is preoccupation with the dead beloved a way of escaping the fact that the person is dead? Is this a form of ignorance that needs to be removed? Is it a form of moral deficiency? Might certain forms and contexts of ignorance, in effect, put one on a path to enlightenment?     

Moral Agency and the Paradox of Self-Interested Concern for the Future in Vasubandhu’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Abhidharmakośabhāṣya</Emphasis>

It is a common view in modern scholarship on Buddhist ethics that attachment to the self constitutes a hindrance to ethics, whereas rejecting this type of attachment is a necessary condition for acting morally. The present article argues that in Vasubandhu’s theory of agency, as formulated in the Abhidharmako?abhā?ya (Treasury of Metaphysics with Self-Commentary), a cognitive and psychological identification with a conventional, persisting self is a requisite for exercising moral agency. As such, this identification is essential for embracing the ethics of Buddhism and its way of life. The article delineates the method that Vasubandhu employs to account for the notion of a selfless moral agent, with particular emphasis on his strategies for dealing with one central aspect of agency, self-interested concern for the future.     

From Etymology to Ontology: Vasubandhu and Candrakīrti on Various Interpretations of Pratītyasamutpāda

The main body of this article presents Vasubandhu’s and Candrakīrti’s discussion on the etymology of pratītyasamutpāda and its meaning(s) as it appears in the Bhā?ya to Abhidharmako?a 3.28ab and Prasannapadā 4.5–9.27, respectively. Both authors put forward and critically examine various Buddhist grammatical analyses and interpretations of the term. Many passages in the indicated sections parallel or nearly parallel to each other suggest that Buddhist discussions on pratītyasamutpāda were held in a very specified manner during the mature phase of Buddhist philosophy in India. In the conclusion of the article, an attempt is made to discern the reason for Buddhists’ mutually competing analyses of the term, showing that their seemingly objectively conducted discussions (i.e. argumentations) regarding pratītyasamutpāda are actually rooted in their ontological (doxic) presumptions. Thus, for example, the nearly identical etymological analyses of the term (and of the meaning of the word-formation) provided by Vaibhā?ika and Candrakīrti resulted in a completely different understanding of the ‘doctrinal’ meaning (artha) of the term. This situation seems to corroborate certain views of some ancient Indian (Buddhist included) philosophers of language, according to whom there is no internal or ‘inborn’ connection between words or word-formation and their meanings, the latter being purely mental (and hence non-verbal) and dependent on the speaker’s intention (vivak?ā).     

The ethical implications of Sengzhao’s concept of the Sage

This paper is an exploration of the ethical significance of Sengzhao’s concept of the sage as exhibited through a Buddhist practitioner’s expanded understanding and cognition of reality. From a philosophical point of view, I aim to show that the ethical significance of his concept of the sage comprises a shift first from ontology to epistemology, and then from epistemology to ethics. I firstly define Sengzhao’s concept of the sage and present a preliminary account of this concept before elaborating on its philosophical aspects. Next, I attempt to illustrate how ethical implications can be derived from Sengzhao’s ethical shift, and lastly, I shed light on the value and significance of this philosophical standpoint within Buddhist philosophy.     

Rethinking mind-body dualism: a Buddhist take on the mind-body problem

This paper is an effort to present the mind-body problem from a Buddhist point of view. Firstly, I show that the Buddhist distinction between mind and body is not absolute, but instead merely employed as a communicative tool to aid the understanding of human beings in a holistic light. Since Buddhism acknowledges a mind-body distinction only on a conventional level, it would not be fair to claim that the tradition necessarily advocates mind-body dualism. Secondly, I briefly discuss a response to Cartesian dualism from a Buddhist perspective and suggest that in this particular regard, the Buddhist approach may be likened to the ‘category mistake’ argument formulated by Gilbert Ryle. The fact that the Buddhist view does not accord with Cartesian dualism, however, does not imply that a monistic approach to the mind-body problem such as behaviourism, physicalism or biological naturalism is necessarily assumed. The Buddhist position could perhaps be best described as a middle way approach of ‘neither-duality-nor-identity’. Thirdly, I remain sceptical about the reductionist approach of accounting for mind merely on the level of brain or behaviour. In overlooking crucial ethical and axiological implications of mind, I argue that such an approach necessarily fails to impart a complete picture of mind. The Buddhist soteriological approach furthermore reveals certain law-like connections between mental attitudes and suffering which are for the most part overlooked in mainstream metaphysical explorations into the relation between mind and body. I thus endeavour to show why exploration into the link between mental phenomena, spiritual cultivation and the accumulation of karma is imperative to any comprehensive inquiry into the human mind.     

Sartre and Spinoza on the nature of mind

What surfaces first when one examines the philosophy of mind of Sartre and Spinoza are the differences between them. For Spinoza a human mind is a mode of the divine mind. That view is a far cry from Sartre’s view of human consciousness as a desire never achieved: the desire to be god, to be the foundation of one’s own existence. How could two philosophers, one a determinist and the other who grounds human freedom in the nature of consciousness itself, be seen as having any commonalities worth exploring? How could the noted user of the deductive method and one of the most important phenomenologists of the twentieth century share any philosophical ground at all? I will argue in this paper that despite the very real differences between their two philosophies, there are striking similarities between Sartre’s view of consciousness and Spinoza’s view of the mind. They become apparent when one examines each one’s analysis of the nature of mind and its relationship to itself, the body, and the world. Both are heir to a kind of Aristotelian naturalism. This commonality between them derives from their mutual rejection of Descartes’ substance dualism. I first explore the consequences of that rejection on how each one conceives of the relationship between the mind and its objects. Next I examine their view of the mind’s relation to itself and finally I look at how each one understood the mind’s relationship to the body and the world. The examination of their two views reveals how much they anticipate and support theories of mind defended by contemporary analytic philosophers of mind.     

Why did Bodhidharma go to the east? Buddhism’s struggle with the mind in the world

This question—why did Bodhidharma come from the West?— is ubiquitous in Chinese Ch’an Buddhist literature. Though some see it as an arbitrary question intended merely as an opener to obscure puzzles, I think it represents a genuine intellectual puzzle: Why did Bodhidharma come from theWest—that is, fromIndia? Why couldn’tChina with its rich literary and philosophical tradition have given rise to Buddhism? We will approach that question, but I prefer to do so backwards. I want to ask instead, “why was it so fortuitous for the development of Buddhist philosophy that Bodhidharma wentEast? I will argue that by doing so he gave a trajectory to Buddhist thought about the mind and knowledge that allows certain issues that are obscure in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, despite their centrality to the Buddhist critique of Indian orthodoxy, to come into sharper relief, and hence to complete a project begun, but not completable, in that Indo-European context.     

A kantian reading of aesthetic freedom and complete human nature nourished through art in a classical Chinese artistic context

In this paper, I will show that classical Chinese artists adopted either Daoist or Chan Buddhist meditation to cultivate their mind to be in accord with the Dao, and that their view of the detached mental state as an ideal mental state for art appears to fit in with Kant’s notion of aesthetic freedom. Even though it might be claimed that sensibilities are stressed over rationality in the classical Chinese artistic tradition, I suggest that the detached mental state cultivated through Daoist or Chan Buddhist meditation and experienced in artistic practice helps artists restore a balanced human nature. By projecting Schiller’s account of the play drive, and the account of aesthetic freedom he developed from Kant’s ideas, into the classical Chinese artistic context, I attempt to explain the balanced nature realised through artistic play by classical Chinese artists and point out the differences behind the parallels between these two approaches.     

Kenosis,Dynamic Śūnyatā and Weak Thought: Abe Masao and Gianni Vattimo

The verb κεν?ω (kenos) means ‘to empty’ and St. Paul uses the word ?κ?νωσεν (ekenosen) writing that ‘Jesus made himself nothing’ and ‘emptied himself’. ?ūnyatā is a Buddhist concept most commonly translated as emptiness, nothingness, or nonsubstantiality. An important kenosis–?ūnyatā discussion was sparked by Abe Masao’s paper ‘Kenotic God and Dynamic ?ūnyatā’ (in 1984). I confront the kenosis–?ūnyatā theme with Vattimo’s kenosis-based philosophy of religion. For Vattimo, kenosis refers to ‘secularization’: when strong structures such as the essence and the fulfilment of the Christian message are weakened. Parallels between Abe’s and Vattimo’s thought will be demonstrated with regard to themes current in East–West comparative philosophy: reality and emptiness, the overcoming of metaphysics, the position of the Self, the human and the divine, and the relationship between science and religion. The latter point is particularly timely because since the 1990s religious fundamentalism has pushed forward a curious ‘religion as science’ hypothesis. Both thinkers’ relationship with the idea of Nothingness will also be explored. Finally, Abe’s interpretation of ?ūnyatā will be presented as a form of ‘weak thought’. Both Abe and Vattimo design a religious attitude based on negativity without falling into the trap of anti-religious nihilism. Abe’s negation of the subject, which leads to a pluralism of beings, can very well be compared with Vattimo’s paradoxical ‘credere di credere’ (to believe to believe), through which Vattimo describes the attitude of an ego that has lost its own subjectivity. The person who does not believe but only ‘believes to believe’ is a sort of non-ego. I show that a ‘half-theistic’ way of thinking God based on kenosis can work in the service of plurality because it deconstructs the principle of reality based on faith and ‘fullness’.     

Reinventing Buddhist Practices to Meet the Challenge of Climate Change

A number of thinkers have argued that ethicists have gone about responding to climate change in the wrong way, i.e., by ‘greening’ their religious worldviews and hoping for conversion. Instead, we should be examining existing moral reform projects that can be learning experiences. In response, this article looks at three forms of Buddhist practice from below: ‘tree ordination’ by Thai ‘ecology monks,’ Joanna Macy’s ‘work that reconnects,’ and Gary Snyder’s practice of reinhabitation. Each of these practices is both promising and inadequate in meeting the moral challenge of climate change. For each of these ecological practices I will: (1) describe the practice in its social context; (2) indicate its Buddhist roots; (3) present what I see as the efficacy of the practice and its inadequacies; and (4) offer one way in which this practice might evolve towards greater efficacy.     

How Nonsectarian is ‘Nonsectarian’?: Jorge Ferrer's Pluralist Alternative to Tibetan Buddhist Inclusivism

This paper queries the logic of the structure of hierarchical philosophical systems. Following the Indian tradition of siddhānta, Tibetan Buddhist traditions articulate a hierarchy of philosophical views. The ‘Middle Way’ philosophy or Madhyamaka—the view that holds that the ultimate truth is emptiness—is, in general, held to be the highest view in the systematic depictions of philosophies in Tibet, and is contrasted with realist schools of thought, Buddhist and non-Buddhist. But why should an antirealist or nominalist position be said to be ‘better’ than a realist position? What is the criterion for this claim and is it, or can it, be more than a criterion that is tradition-specific for only Tibetan Buddhists? In this paper, I will look at the criteria to evaluate Buddhist philosophical traditions, particularly as articulated in what came to be referred as the ‘nonsectarian’ (ris med) tradition. I draw from the recent work of Jorge Ferrer to query the assumptions of the hierarchical structures of ‘nonsectarian’ traditions and attempt to articulate an evaluative criteria for a nonsectarian stance that are not based solely on metaphysical or tradition-specific claims.     

Thinking Developmentally: Perspectives Following Loewald and Klein

In this article, I explore two perspectives on development that are central to how I think and work as an analyst, one drawn from the work of Hans Loewald and one from Melanie Klein. Loewald turned the usual psychoanalytic way of thinking, rooted in the past, on its head when he theorized that development proceeds by internalization of the parent’s future vision of the child and, by corollary, the analyst’s future vision of the patient. Using a vignette from Klein’s work with 10-year-old Richard, I show how the analyst’s image of the patient’s potential can facilitate growth and development. Melanie Klein also introduced a radical reordering of traditional psychoanalytic theory when she theorized that the mind develops and is structured as positions, not as successive phases. For Klein, the mind is organized in groupings of anxieties, defenses, and object-relations that are in a continuous state of oscillation throughout life independent of chronological age. Through a clinical vignette, I illustrate how one understands a patient differently when development is seen as occuring in momentary shifts between different levels of the personality rather than as stages over time.     

Delving into psychoanalytic texts: the notion of the reading third

In this article I introduce the notion of the reading third, which evolves during the reading process. The idea came to my mind while studying Wolfgang Iser’s theory of the reading process, and already knowing about Thomas Ogden’s concept of the analytic third: What is experienced, shaped and understood while reading a text? The notion of the reading third is based on psychoanalytic theory and method like just Ogden’s concept, and on the aesthetic response theory of Iser. Elaborating the reading third, I combine two modes of reading: one understanding and interpreting, and one floating and experiencing mode. To these modes I add two different understandings of truth. The first mode is connected to a traditional, objective and visible truth. The latter mode relies on Wilfred Bion’s concept of O, a special kind of evasive, ephemeral truth. The reading third takes and loses form as one reads, accentuating reading as a highly creative activity, where each reading elicits different understandings, experiences and truths. I give examples of such a way of reading psychoanalytic texts like those of Bion and a work of fiction, Henry James’ short novel The Turn of the Screw.     

Buddhist idealism and the problem of other minds

This essay is concerned with Indian Yogācāra philosophers’ treatment of the problem of other minds in the face of a threatened collapse into solipsism suggested by Vasubandhu’s epistemological argument for idealism. I discuss the attempts of Dharmakīrti and Ratnakīrti to address this issue, concluding that Dharmakīrti is best seen as addressing the epistemological problem of other minds and Ratnakīrti as addressing the conceptual problem of other minds.     

Buddhist Conceptual Rhyming and T.S.Eliot's Crisis of Connection in TheWaste Land and ‘Burnt Norton’

In this essay, I elaborate a reading of the Buddhist allusions throughout T.S. Eliot's poetry as being not confessions of Buddhist faith or merely syncretic experiments, but rather ‘conceptual rhymes’ with the crisis of personal connection that preoccupies Eliot across multiple texts. In the Buddhist concepts of pratītya-samutpāda, ?ūnyatā, sa?sāra, and the pretas, Eliot finds thematic resonances with his own emotional and psychological concerns and so alludes to these concepts in ‘The Fire Sermon’ section of The Waste Land and ‘Burnt Norton’ of Four Quartets as part of his characteristic poetic collage. By examining the connection between Eliot's personal poetic practice and the cross-cultural traditions upon which he drew, my argument intervenes in a long-standing debate regarding the meaning of Asian religio-philosophical influences in the poet's key texts. Moreover, by close reading the third movement of ‘Burnt Norton’ for Buddhist allusions, I attempt to refocus scrutiny of Buddhism in Eliot from the oft-discussed ‘Fire Sermon’ section of The Waste Land to Eliot's later Four Quartets, which remains under-examined for its Buddhist influences by scholars who instead attend to the latter text's more pronounced Vedic references.     

From Freudian narcissism to the Buddhist notion of anatman,via Jung's idea of identity

Starting from the question the youthful Carl Gustav pondered as he sat on ‘his’ stone – ‘Am I he who sits on the stone, or am I the stone on which he sits?’ – the author has attempted to show that, for Jung, the idea of identity is founded on a wilful non‐determination. This stance results in ethical and methodological repercussions that differentiate it both from the Freudian project and from Hindu and Buddhist thought, while at the same time having much in common with them. The paper refers to the notions of emergence and (Varela et al. 1992) enaction 2 2 According to the Wikipedia entry, the introduction of the term ‘enaction’ is attributed to Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch (1992), who proposed the name to ‘emphasize the growing conviction that cognition is not the representation of a pre‐given world by a pre‐given mind but is rather the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs’.
and argues that the concept of the archetype, especially in relation to the self, merits a re‐evaluation in light of the new scientific paradigm.