Compassion: An east‐west comparison

Compassion is an emotion that occupies a central position in Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy while it is often a neglected subject in contemporary western philosophy. This essay is a comparison between an Eastern view of compassion based upon Mahāyāna Buddhist perspectives and a western view of the same emotion. Certain principles found in Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy such as the Bodhisattva Ideal, and suffering (dukkha) to name two, are explored for the information they contain about compassion. An essay by Lawrence Blum is taken as representative of a Western view (but not exclusively) and it is analyzed for its shortcomings in light of the Buddhist view. The conclusion briefly describes the value of understanding an eastern view on compassion as a means of filling the void one finds in western medical ethics discourse which focuses so heavily, and redundantly, upon issues such as patient autonomy and paternalism.     

Buddhist Fictionalism

Questions regarding what exists are central to various forms of Buddhist philosophy, as they are to many traditions of philosophy. Interestingly, there is perhaps a clearer consensus in Buddhist thought regarding what does not exist than there may be regarding precisely what does exist, at least insofar as the doctrine of anātman (no self, absence of self) is taken to be a fundamental Buddhist doctrine. It may be noted that many forms of Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy in particular are considered to offer a quite austere ontology—a rather ‘empty’ account of what exists. Continuing in this vein of ontological austerity, here I will attempt to lay out a relatively novel approach to Buddhist ontology, viz. Buddhist fictionalism.     

Being in two minds: The divided mind in the Nyāyasūtras

In this paper I suggest that the division between manas and atman in Nyaya philosophy can be interpreted in the light of Western discussions about irrationality. In Western philosophy irrationality has been explained by postulating a divided mind. This helps to account for a generally rational mind that is nevertheless sometimes prone to irrationality. I argue that the division of the mind bears similarities to the division between manas and ātman. Looking at the arguments of the Naiyāyikas Gautama and Vātsyāyana for the existence of a permanent self, I do not find any of them convincing in the light of Buddhist criticism. However, by arguing for the division between manas and ātman, the Naiyāyikas have inadvertently provided their strongest argument for the existence of a self because they have managed to account for irrationality.     

Sellarsian Buddhism Comments on Jay Garfield, <Emphasis Type="Italic">Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy</Emphasis>

This paper critically examines Jay Garfield’s accounts of the self, consciousness, and phenomenology in his book, Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy. I argue that Garfield’s views on these topics are shaped, in problematic ways, by views he takes over from Wilfrid Sellars and applies to Buddhist philosophy.     

John Dewey and the Buddhist Philosophy of the Middle Way1

This paper argues that the central philosophical movement in the complex history of Buddhism that originated with Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha and carried on by Nāgārjuna (among other later Buddhist philosophers) shares some common themes with the pragmatic philosophy of John Dewey. These themes are the rejection of traditional metaphysics as definitive of philosophy, a return to the correct understanding of the nature of experience, and a particular view about the conduct and nature of philosophy. Dewey is used to illuminate such controversial problems in the Buddhist tradition as why the Buddha is silent about metaphysical questions, what it means to say that everything is anitya, and how we are to understand Nāgārjuna's key concepts of pratītyasamutpāda and ?únyatá.     

Suffering and the Shape of Well-Being in Buddhist Ethics

This article explores the defense Indian Buddhist texts make in support of their conceptions of lives that are good for an individual. This defense occurs, largely, through their analysis of ordinary experience as being saturated by subtle forms of suffering (du?kha). I begin by explicating the most influential of the Buddhist taxonomies of suffering: the threefold division into explicit suffering (du?kha-du?khatā), the suffering of change (vipari?āma-du?khatā), and conditioned suffering (sa?skāra-du?khatā). Next, I sketch the three theories of welfare that have been most influential in contemporary ethical theory. I then argue that Buddhist texts underdetermine which of these theories would have been accepted by ancient Indian Buddhists. Nevertheless, Buddhist ideas about suffering narrow the shape any acceptable theory of welfare may take. In my conclusion, I argue that this narrowing process itself is enough to reconstruct a philosophical defense of the forms of life endorsed in Buddhist texts.     

Naturalism and Intentionality: A Buddhist Epistemological Approach

In this paper I propose a naturalist account of the Buddhist epistemological discussion of svasa[mdot]vitti (‘self-awareness’, ‘self-cognition’) following similar attempts in the domains of phenomenology and analytic epistemology. First, I examine the extent to which work in naturalized epistemology and phenomenology, particularly in the areas of perception and intentionality, could be profitably used in unpacking the implications of the Buddhist epistemological project. Second, I argue against a foundationalist reading of the causal account of perception offered by Dignāga and Dharmakīrti. Finally, I argue that it is possible to read Dignāga's (and following him Dharmakīrti's) treatment of svasamvitti as offering something like a phenomenological account of embodied self-awareness.     

The Significance of the Buddhist 10-Membered Formula of Dependent Origination

The dynamic process of karmic activity is one of the key philosophical concepts of the Buddhist doctrine, and is traditionally explained as the operation of a chain of 12 mutually interlinked members of dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda). Textual research, however, reveals that a series of alternative chains of members of dependent origination coexisted prior to the systematization of this earlier textual material into the standardized list of 12 members. Such an alternative list consists of 10 members. This article examines the importance of this particular list of 10 members in the development of Yogācāra Buddhist philosophy. This philosophy, the basic interpretation of the mundane world of which is that the world around us only xists as the working of the human mind, i.e. the domain of perceptual consciousness (vijñāna), matured in the late fourth–early fifth century CE. This examination of the 10-fold formula of dependent origination also adds to our knowledge of the region of origin of Yogācāra philosophy, and thus on the geographical diversities within the development of Buddhist philosophy.     

The Ritual Use of Music in US Jōdo Shinshū Buddhist Communities

US Jōdo Shinshū Buddhist songs in the style of Christian hymns—what the community refers to as gāthā—are an integral part of the lived experience of North American Shin Buddhism. Rather than focusing on processes of acculturation, in the following paper I take gāthā seriously as a form of Buddhist practice, asking questions related not to their origins or legitimacy but to their function and purpose. I argue that gāthā function as a mechanism by which shifting ideas, attitudes, and practices become normative within the community. This function becomes apparent when gāthā are placed within their larger ritual context and are performed by the community as a whole. Following on Rappaport's analysis of ritual, gāthā serve as indexical expressions of canonical orientations toward Buddhist practice and teachings.     

A Buddhist Explanation of Episodic Memory: From Self to Mind

In this paper, I argue that some of the work to be done by the concept of self is done by the concept of mind in Buddhist philosophy. For the purposes of this paper, I shall focus on an account of memory and its ownership. The task of this paper is to analyse Vasubandhu’s heroic effort to defend the no-self doctrine against the Nyāya-Vai?e?ikas in order to bring to the fore the Buddhist model of mind. For this, I will discuss Vasubandhu’s theory of mind in the early Abhidharma as well as post-Abhidharma period to show the continuity in his work.     

Consciousness,Idealism, and Skepticism: Reflections on Jay Garfield’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Engaging Buddhism</Emphasis>

Jay Garfield’s Engaging Buddhism admirably shows the relevance of Indian philosophy to the interests of mainstream analytic Anglophone philosophers. Garfield deploys the Indian tradition to critique phenomenal realism, the view that there really are qualia or phenomenal properties—that there really is ‘something it’s like’ to be undergoing the experience you are undergoing right now. I argue that Garfield’s critique probably turns on a false dilemma that omits the possibility of introspection as a fallible tool for getting at a real stream of experience that may or may not be accurately reported. Garfield also argues that if we are phenomenal realists, metaphysical idealism remains a philosophical possibility, whereas if we join him in rejecting phenomenal realism then we can also justifiably reject metaphysical idealism. I accept this conditional but reverse its valence: One advantage of phenomenal realism, and also of engaging with the Indian philosophical tradition, is that it opens up wonderful possibilities, like metaphysical idealism, that mainstream analytic Anglophone philosophers tend to too swiftly dismiss.     

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.     

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.     

Buddhism and Quantum Physics

Rudyard Kipling, the famous English author of The Jungle Book, born in India, wrote one day these words: ‘Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet’. In my paper I show that Kipling was not completely right. I try to show the common ground between Buddhist philosophy and quantum physics. There is a surprising parallelism between the philosophical concept of reality articulated by Nāgārjuna and the physical concept of reality implied by quantum physics. For neither is there a fundamental core to reality; rather, reality consists of systems of interacting objects. Such concepts of reality cannot be reconciled with the substantial, subjective, holistic or instrumentalistic concepts of reality that underlie modern modes of thought.     

The Concept of Intermediate Existence in the Early Buddhist Theory of rebirth

This article investigates the concept of intermediate existence in the early Buddhist theory of rebirth. The main sources investigated for this article are the Pāli canonical and commentarial literature. My main thesis is that early Buddhist discourses contain instances that suggest a spatial-temporal gap between death and rebirth known as ‘intermediate existence’ (antarābhava), in contrast to the idea of Theravāda Buddhist theory that rebirth takes place immediately without a spatial-temporal gap. In order to prove this, I argue that the ‘one who liberates in interval’ (anarāparinibbāyī) attains Nibbāna in the intermediate existence and the concept of gandhabbā in early Buddhist discourses refers to a being in intermediate existence, not to a dying consciousness (cuti-viññāna), and there are indirect inferences to an spatiotemporal gap between death and rebirth in the early Buddhist discourses.     

Hay’s Buddhist philosophy of gestural language

The central role of gestural language in Buddhism is widely acknowledged, as in the story of the Buddha pointing at the moon, the point being the student’s seeing beyond the finger (as object) to its gesture (as act). Gesture’s role in dance is similarly central, as noted by scholars in the emerging interdisciplinary field of dance studies. Unsurprisingly, then, the intersection of these two fields is well-populated, including the formal gestures (called “mudras”) Buddhism inherited from classical Indian dance, and the masked dance of the Mani Rimdu Festival. In this investigation, I will articulate a new Buddhist philosophy of gestural language, based on a new conception of emptiness that I locate in the work of contemporary U.S. choreographer Deborah Hay, as influenced by Nāgārjuna and Zen. And this, finally, suggests that contemporary Western philosophy should incorporate this compassion as a normative dimension to its own theorizing and practice.     

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.     

An All-new Timeless Truth

Donald Lopez argues that we should reject the narrative of compatibility between Buddhism and science as any apparent compatibility is achieved through a process of propositional compromise that sacrifices Buddhism’s distinctive content. This conclusion puts tension on the project within Buddhist modernism to formulate a Buddhism that functions within or alongside modern scientific paradigms. Lopez suggests that we should abandon this project, lest Buddhism should be demythologised away to nothing. While agreeing with Lopez I argue that his conclusion only holds under a particular epistemological assumption that is at odds with the Madhyamaka-Prāsa?gika philosophy of ?ūnyatā. I will argue, therefore, that a Madhyamaka analysis of the tensions in Buddhist modernism opens up the possibility of a frictionless pluralism between Buddhism and science. This resolution can only be achieved, however, if Madhyamaka Buddhists are willing to make a clear distinction between their Buddhism and their Madhyamaka attitude towards that Buddhism.     

Modern Maṇḍala Meditation: Some Observations

In recent decades, Buddhist ma??alas have become increasingly popular. The creation of the Kālacakra (‘Wheel of Time’) ma??ala from coloured grains of sand by Tibetan monks can be seen in museums around the world. Ma??ala colouring books, part of the recent adult colouring book trend, are on display in many bookstores. Ma??alas are now perceived as ‘aids’ or ‘tools to meditation’ and designated as ‘meditation diagrams’ and ‘meditational art’. In this paper, I will discuss modern applications of (Buddhist) ma??alas in meditation practice. I will also highlight some aspects that set this modern usage apart from traditional functions of ma??alas in Buddhist tantric ritual.     

Mettābhāvanā in Traditional and Popular Buddhist Contexts

Some have referred to relatively recent forms of popular Buddhism as an ‘engaged’ Buddhism that has revived or redirected traditional Buddhist ideas and practices found in meditation texts to reflect a greater social or worldly emphasis than suggested in earlier historical moments. One of these ideas is the quadripartite framework of the ‘immeasurable states’ (aprameya/appameya) or ‘divine abidings’ (brahmavihāra), the most prominent of which in popular Buddhism is mettā (friendliness/loving-kindness). This article traces the philosophy of the ‘immeasurable states’ found in meditation texts from various Indic traditions (Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu) and then presents the ways in which these traditional ideas (especially mettā) have informed popular Buddhist movements in the twentieth century. Points of discussion include: ‘engaged’ Buddhism's relationship with traditional Buddhist ethics; arguments concerning the coalescence of monastic-centred meditation practices with popular Buddhist notions of social service; and the distinct utilization of mettā in contemporary Buddhist societies in contrast to the mobilizing impulses of comparable religious communities (Hindu and Jain) with a similar heritage of mettā discourse in South Asia.