How things are an introduction to buddhist metaphysics mark siderits

How Things Are: An Introduction to Buddhist Metaphysics Mark Siderits

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How Things Are

BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY FOR PHILOSOPHERS

Jan Westerhoff, University of Oxford Series Editor

Illuminating the Mind: An Introduction to Buddhist Epistemology

Jonathan Stoltz

Buddhist Ethics: A Philosophical Exploration

Jay L. Garfield

How Things Are: An Introduction to Buddhist Metaphysics

Mark Siderits

How Things Are

An Introduction to Buddhist Metaphysics

MARK SIDERITS

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Siderits, Mark, 1946– author.

Title: How things are : an introduction to Buddhist metaphysics / Mark Siderits.

Description: New York, NY, United States of America : Oxford University Press, 2022. | Series: Buddhist philosophy for philosophers | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021030120 (print) | LCCN 2021030121 (ebook) |

ISBN 9780197606919 (paperback) | ISBN 9780197606902 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197606933 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Buddhist philosophy. | Buddhism—Relations—Hinduism. | Hinduism—Relations—Buddhism. | Philosophy—Comparative. | Vasubandhu. | Dharmakīrti, active 7th century. | Nāgārjuna, active 2nd century.

Classification: LCC B162 .S533 2021 (print) | LCC B162 (ebook) | DDC 181/.043—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021030120

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021030121

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197606902.001.0001

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Paperback printed by LSC Communications, United States of America

Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America

1 Introduction

The Buddhist Metaphysical Landscape

1.1 Buddhism as Philosophy

Not long ago, most philosophers thought it unlikely that there could be much of philosophical interest in what the Buddhist tradition has to say about matters metaphysical. That situation has begun to change. This book tries to address the growing interest, among philosophers trained in the western tradition, in the metaphysical theories of Indian Buddhist thought. The present chapter introduces Buddhist metaphysical theorizing, locating it within the larger projects of Buddhist and classical Indian thought, and it details the approach that will be used in presenting Indian Buddhist philosophy, as well as the motivation behind that approach.

There are still many who are skeptical that Buddhism contains much by way of serious metaphysics. Buddhism is, after all, a religious tradition, and the business of a religion is to help people achieve what is, by its lights, the ideal state of existence. It is now fairly widely known that the doctrine of non-self is a core Buddhist teaching. And the view that there is no self might look like the sort of claim that falls within the scope of ontology. But might the teaching of non-self not instead be a Buddhist precept or faithcommitment, something that one is simply instructed to accept in order to progress toward the state of nirvāna? Is there any reason to think that this or any other Buddhist claim about the fundamental structure of reality is based on argumentation and analysis? Is there reason to think that such claims are not justified merely on the grounds that the Buddha taught them, or on the strictly pragmatic grounds that believing them will have good effects for the believer? For that matter, is there reason to think that such claims are any more than mere speculation, akin to the metaphysical claims found in what we have of pre-Socratic thought?

There are some who would counter this last doubt by insisting that Buddhists eschew metaphysical speculation as mere conceptual wrangling,

something that distracts one from the urgent task of attaining nirvāna. But as we will see soon enough, there is ample evidence against this “Buddhist pragmatist” line of interpretation. Buddhist thinkers did indeed engage in serious and sustained efforts to work out what most fundamentally exists; and their use of the tools of argumentation and conceptual analysis will demonstrate that they did so out of concern to determine how things are anyway, independently of our interests and cognitive limitations. That their projects arose in a soteriological context and with determinately soteric aims should not stand in the way of their efforts being understood as genuinely philosophical. After all, the fact that ancient Greek philosophizing was done in pursuit of finding a path to eudaimonia has not counted against reading the thought of Plato and Aristotle as serious metaphysics and epistemology. The operating assumption here will be that Buddhist thinkers developed and defended their views about the nature of reality out of the conviction that liberation from saṃsāra (the round of rebirths and the suffering that it entails) requires overcoming our ignorance about the fundamental structure of reality, and that philosophical rationality has an important role to play in dispelling that ignorance. Was this the stance of the Buddha himself? Given the state of the textual evidence, we may not be able to answer that question. But it is abundantly clear that this was the stance of the Buddhist thinkers who systematized and developed the Buddha’s teachings. They did not think that philosophical rationality alone would carry one all the way to nirvāna. But the Buddhist thinkers whose views we will examine did take the systematic and rigorous examination of core metaphysical issues to be at least a necessary component of the path to liberation. To see why this was so, we need to look briefly at the core Buddhist project as articulated in the Buddha’s teachings. And this in turn requires us to look (even more briefly) at the Indian context in which those teachings were developed. The scholarly consensus is that the Buddha (Gautama) lived and taught in the fifth century BCE. This seems to have been a time of some intellectual ferment in India. The Buddha was one of a number of wandering ascetics who sought an alternative to conventional views about the good for humans. One element behind their dissatisfaction with contemporary conceptions of the good life was the newly developed karma-rebirth ideology, according to which at death one undergoes rebirth in some sentient form (human, nonhuman animal, god, or inhabitant of one of the hells). The sort of rebirth an individual will receive is determined in accordance with the moral character of their actions in the life then ending. Moreover, while the prospect

of rebirth as a god, or even as a human of high social status, might seem appealing, it would be just one more step in the beginningless and seemingly endless cycle known as saṃsāra. Rebirth meant perpetual redeath, inspiring at best cosmic ennui. Conventionally prescribed modes of life require performance of various intentional actions, and it is intentional actions that set the stage for rebirth: at the time of death one has typically not experienced all the pleasurable and painful karmic fruits of the good and bad actions performed over the course of this life, so a new life is required to balance the ledger. Only liberation from this cycle could, it was thought, bring about real, lasting satisfaction.

A common response to the dilemma posed by karma was to see conventional views about how best to live one’s life as based on a mistaken theory of what one truly is. Bondage to the wheel of saṃsāra is, on this view, the result of misidentification: identifying with the sort of thing that might be made better off by attainment of one of the three conventionally prescribed goals—sensual pleasure, wealth and power, or honor and virtue. The obvious next step is to suppose that the true self is something quite distinct from the psychophysical elements making up the empirically observable body, senses, and mind. This line of thought led to the variety of egological theories one finds in the later Indian philosophical landscape, including such “orthodox” or Vedic schools as Sāṃkhya, Nyāya, and Advaita Vedānta, as well as the “heterodox” Jain school. The Buddha, though, rejected this approach in favor of a non-egological view. On his analysis, the cause of recurrent rebirth is not identifying with the wrong thing; our mistake lies in identification as such. The ubiquitous “I”-sense—the sense each of us has of being something with a distinctive first-person perspective—is a delusion. Having supposedly confirmed in experience that he had indeed attained liberation from saṃsāra, he proceeded to teach his findings to others.

It is a moot point whether the Buddha saw his teachings as comprising a full-fledged philosophical system. Those teachings do, however, involve both explicit and implicit commitments to a variety of metaphysical positions. There are, for instance, explicit claims to the effect that there is no self, that all existents are impermanent, and that impermanent entities originate in dependence on causes and conditions. And at least implicit in these teachings is the view that person-involving descriptions of states of affairs are always reducible to descriptions involving only thoroughly impersonal entities and events. As these teachings spread across South Asia after the death of the Buddha, efforts were made to clarify and systematize them. The beginnings

of systematic Buddhist philosophizing grew out of these efforts. First one sees attempts to adjudicate disputes over rival interpretations or classificatory schemes developed by different Buddhist communities. But because the interlocutors in these disputes are all Buddhists, their disagreements are often treated as wholly hermeneutical in character—to be settled by appeal to things supposedly said by the Buddha.1 In time the conversation expanded to include non-Buddhist disputants. And in those later debates, neither side could resort to appeal to authoritative texts: Buddhists do not recognize the Vedas as authoritative, and non-Buddhists do not ascribe evidentiary value to the alleged testimony of the Buddha found in Buddhist sūtras. The epistemological systems of classical Indian philosophy grow out of attempts to develop a common set of rules for conducting debates of this sort. And likewise for systematic metaphysics: Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike begin to work out and defend answers to questions that the founders of their systems may not have addressed.

1.2 Two Non-Buddhist Systems

Before sketching the trajectory that systematic metaphysics followed in the Buddhist tradition, I want to first introduce two non-Buddhist systems that played significant roles in that history. These are Sāṃkhya and Nyāya, both of them “orthodox,” that is, schools that accept the Vedas as authoritative texts. But these schools represent very different ways of trying to develop an egological response to the dilemma posed by the karma-rebirth ideology and the pursuit of liberation from saṃsāra. Both seek to show that the self is something that is distinct from the empirically available constituents of the psychophysical complex. This would make the error allegedly behind continued rebirth comprehensible: we take ourselves to be the sort of thing that is observable when in fact the true self is not. But the metaphysical schemes employed to develop this insight are quite different. We start with that of the older of the two schools, Sāṃkhya.

At its most basic, Sāṃkhya metaphysics is a kind of dualism, that of what are called puruṣa and prakṛti. In one respect the dualism here is a familiar one, with puruṣa standing on the side of the experiencing subject and prakṛti on

1 The Buddha’s teachings were not committed to writing until several centuries after his death, and were transmitted in a variety of different regional dialects. This may help account for some of the differences among South Asian Buddhist communities concerning the contents of those teachings.

the object side.2 This is not, however, a substance dualism. First of all, prakṛti is the general term for twenty-four kinds of stuff: one that is completely indeterminate, having no manifest properties whatsoever; and twenty-three more kinds, each of which manifests distinctive properties detectable by the external senses and the inner sense. Second, each of these kinds of stuff is wholly constituted by a combination of three elementary tropes, sattva, rajas, and tamas. These are elementary in the sense that they are not analyzable into combinations of yet simpler properties. And based on the assumption that all coming into and going out of existence involve rearrangement of parts, it is held that the three elementary tropes are eternal. Observable change is the result of rearrangement of triplets of tropes. The unmanifest form of prakṛti occurs when the three elementary tropes are in equilibrium. The nature of any one of the twenty-three manifest forms is explained by relations of dominance and subordination among the three. Change is thus to be understood in terms of the notion of evolution: one sort of stuff emerging from another due to rearrangement of the underlying constituent tropes.

In one respect this scheme looks like the sort of atomism we find in Democritus, or in the theory of elements developed by the Indian heterodox materialist school of Cārvāka. Classical atomism also explains observable change in macrophysical objects in terms of rearrangements of more basic constituents. But in that variety of atomism, the fundamental constituents are substances: atoms of earth, air, water, and fire. (Cārvāka rejects atoms as mere unobservable posits, but also explains change in terms of rearrangement of the elements.) Sāṃkhya metaphysics also has a place for atoms, but their place is to be four of the twenty-three manifest forms of prakṛti; they are not to be found at the level of fundamental constituents. Sāṃkhya thus explains change as evolution or transformation, and this leads to its theory of causation as the “existent effect” theory (satkāryavāda) or inherentism. On their account, the effect exists in unmanifest form in its cause: the fire already exists in the wood that will be its fuel. This account of causation will become a stock target of Buddhist critique. In time, though, one Buddhist school will come to embrace something similar—except that it will employ a levels distinction to answer the objections raised to the Sāṃkhya formulation.

2 The term puruṣa is what Sāṃkhya uses in place of the more common ātman. Both terms are used to denote whatever plays the role of essence of the person. When Buddhists deny that there is an ātman, their denial extends to the Sāṃkhyan puruṣa as well.

The point of Sāṃkhya’s dualism is to try to establish the existence of an experiencing subject as something utterly distinct from the psychophysical complex as given in experience. Their strategy is to argue that while the theory of prakṛti and its evolution accounts for the contents of our experience, certain facts are otherwise inexplicable if we do not posit something extra to serve as a pure witnessing subject. Two of their arguments are of some interest here. These are the argument from experience and the argument from control. Both are reductios on the supposition that nothing exists besides the twenty-four forms of prakṛti. And both employ a principle of irreflexivity, according to which an entity cannot operate on itself: a knife blade cannot cut itself, a fingertip cannot touch itself, etc. The argument from experience begins with the premise that all forms of prakṛti are possible objects of experience.3 But experience always has a subject-object structure: there is the content of the experience, and then there is that to which this content is presented. If every form of prakṛti can be an object of experience, and an entity cannot operate on itself, then no form of prakṛti can be that to which the different forms of prakṛti are presented. It is then said to follow that whatever plays the role of subject of experience is something other than prakṛti.

There are two noteworthy points here. First, what the argument purports to establish is a self not as a substance with experiencing as its essence, but as the enduring occurrence of an experience trope. A substance is necessarily complex, insofar as it consists in a substrate plus essential and contingent properties. And just as Sāṃkhya holds that any existent that is genuinely simple must be eternal, so they maintain that complex entities must be impermanent. Second, puruṣa does nothing, it merely indifferently illuminates whatever happens to occur on the prakṛti side of the puruṣa-prakṛti complex that is a person. The self is no agent but only a witness, on this account. Taking it to be both experiencer and agent is the mistake that fuels the karma-rebirth machinery and keeps us bound to saṃsāra. For it is by thinking of the “I” as being of the nature of prakṛti that one can take things like sensual pleasure or material possessions as suitable candidates for final ends in life. Liberation is achieved by coming to see mere witnessing as the true “me.”

The second, controller argument is like the first in structure. Here the relevant property shared by all forms of prakṛti is not that of being an object of

3 The unmanifest form of prakṛti is never given in sensory experience; Sāṃkhya claims that it is cognized through inference. Its constituent tropes are, however, perceived, namely when they occur in one of the evolved manifest forms.

experience, but rather the property of being subject to control. The premise is that one can evaluate and seek to change any of the forms of prakṛti. And so, once again, by the principle of irreflexivity it is concluded that there must be more to the person than the psychophysical elements. Whatever exercises control over all the forms cannot itself be such a form. There must be more to us than the constituents of the psychophysical complex.

Given what was just said about puruṣa being no more than pure sentience, however, the strategy of the controller argument may seem surprising. A controller is, after all, active, and puruṣa is said to be inactive and changeless. The Sāṃkhyan response is that the self may be said to be a controller in the same sense in which a king may be said to win a battle. The king may merely watch from a neighboring hilltop while the kingdom’s soldiers do the actual fighting. Victory (or defeat) is nonetheless attributed to the king. This is presumably because it is the kingdom’s army that fought: without a king there would be no such army. Attribution of the role of controlling to the self is said to be similarly figurative. While Sāṃkhya’s self does not issue commands or initiate movement, its presence as witness is crucial to the function of control. The prakṛti side of the person is active but insentient, and thus not itself capable of exercising intelligent control.

Peter Strawson’s distinction between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics (Strawson 1959, xiii–xv) can be used to lay out a sort of spectrum. At one end will be metaphysical schemes that are meant to merely systematize the (implicit) commitments of common sense (our “folk ontology”).4 Then there will be schemes that require significant departures from those commitments. The more significant the departures, the less descriptive and the more revisionary the metaphysics. Of course, it is notoriously difficult to pin down just what counts as common sense (which may also be a moving target). And there is unlikely to be consensus on a metric with which to measure the significance of departures from our folk ontology. Still the notion of such a spectrum can be useful in discussing metaphysical theories and schemes. Thus we can judge the scheme of Sāṃkhya to be relatively revisionary as compared with the second system we shall briefly look at, that of Nyāya. One way of reaching this judgment is to count the number

4 It can be questioned whether there actually is such a thing as a folk ontology. It might be said instead that questions of ontology only arise when we begin to seriously reflect on our cognitive and linguistic practices—when we begin to philosophize, which is arguably not a folk practice. This may well be true. If so, then by “folk ontology” is meant the ontology that results when we first set out to regiment our “natural ontological attitude,” and before the many problems that beset such a task have begun to emerge. For a sensitive discussion of this issue see Horgan and Potrč 2006: 7–14.

of categories employed in the two schemes. For Sāṃkhya there seem to be just two: that of elementary trope (the three making up prakṛti and the one an occurrence of which is a puruṣa) and that of compound substance (the 24 forms, the person as psychophysical complex plus puruṣa, etc.). Nyāya has altogether seven categories. Why so many more?

The Nyāya categories are substance, quality, motion, universal, inherence, individuator, and absence.5 Suppose you correctly judge there to be a white cow standing alone in a field swishing its tail. The state of affairs that is the correctness condition for this judgment has a number of constituents, but how many? The descriptive metaphysician takes it that we can answer this question by reading off the structure of the judgment itself. The cow is, of course, a substance, the possessor of various properties. Among those properties is the quality of white, understood as a trope occurring in this cow. Another is the action of swishing, the moving of its tail. Still another is that of being a cow. But this property is one that our cow shares with the many other substances that are cows. Its white color and its action of swishing are particulars whose occurrences are specific to this cow, but its being a cow involves a universal, cowness, that is equally present in all other cows. All three properties are alike, however, in bearing the same relation to this cow, that of inherence or being in. The white color, the swishing of the tail, and cowness all inhere in the cow. (There are also universals for qualities and actions: whiteness inhering in this and other occurrences of white color, downward motion-ness in the swishing, etc.) As for what makes it the case that the cow is alone in the field, this is the absence of other cows, something that is also located in the field. This absence has as counter-positive other cows existing elsewhere. Among those other cows there may be some that are qualitatively identical to the cow present in the field, but our cow is nonetheless distinct from them. The category of individuator is invoked to account for this fact, but what makes each cow be a distinct individual is not an individuator inhering in it. It is rather the individuators inhering in the many atoms that compose each cow. All the atoms of a given element are qualitatively identical; their mutual distinctness is explained by their each being inhered in by its own individuator. It is these that in turn account for

5 Absences were first posited by Nyāya’s sister school Vaiśeṣika, and only later included in Nyāya’s ontology. For our purposes we may ignore the doctrinal/historical differences between the two schools.

the individuation of qualitatively identical macro-substances composed of distinct atoms.

Nyāya distinguishes between two kinds of substance, eternal and noneternal. Non-eternal substances are composite, being composed ultimately of simple (and hence eternal) substances. In the case of macro-physical objects like pots, the ultimate components are atoms. Interestingly, while a given pot can survive qualitative change (as when it darkens due to ageing), it cannot survive replacement of parts; when the handle is removed and replaced by a new one, the original pot goes out of existence and a new pot comes into existence. Sorites difficulties are thereby avoided.

Included among the eternal substances are selves. These are typically associated with the body of a sentient being, but this association may be brought to an end by achieving liberation from saṃsāra. Among the qualities distinctive of selves are cognition, effort (volition), and pleasure and pain. The self thus serves as both subject of experience and agent of actions. But because no quality is deemed essential to the existence of a substance—only the continued inherence of the universal responsible for its being of its kind is considered necessary for the persistence of a particular substance—the self can exist in the absence of experience and agency.

Some Naiyāyikas held that the self is known to exist by means of perception. The idea here seems to have been that one perceives a substance by perceiving qualities or actions inhering in it. But the more common strategy for establishing the existence of a self employs inferences that appeal to its alleged role as synthesizer. Take for instance the case of seeing a mango and then grasping it. There are two separate sensory cognitions here, and they involve different sense modalities operating at distinct times: first vision and then touch. Yet we judge that we now touch what we first saw. Set aside for the moment the question why we take the object seen in the past to persist to the present moment of grasping. (Buddhists will question the assumption that there are persisting substances.) The question needing an answer here is how information from one sense-modality is integrated with information from another if there is no entity to which both report. A similar question is said to arise with respect to the occurrence of desire after seeing something associated with earlier pleasure. In general, Nyāya claims, the facts about experience and agency require that we posit a persisting self that can serve as subject of different experiences at different times, and as agent of actions whose fruits are enjoyed subsequently.

1.3 The Buddhist Soteriological Project

Both Sāṃkhya and Nyāya claim that the ideal state of liberation is attained by ceasing to identify with transitory things like the psychophysical complex or its states and possessions, such as pleasure, repute, and material things; one should instead identify with what one truly is, an eternal self. The Buddha claimed instead that the dissatisfactory state of being in saṃsāra results from identifying with anything at all. It is the “I”-sense, the sense that there is a persisting subject of experience and agent of actions, that leads not only to continued rebirth but also to existential suffering in each life. Our mortality ultimately undermines any quest for eudaimonia organized around the notion of an individual subjectivity. The first-person perspective is, the Buddha claims, illusory. What we think of as an enduring person is in fact nothing more than a causal series of impermanent, impersonal psychophysical elements. And it is ignorance of this fact that is the root cause of existential suffering.

All this is laid out in the Buddha’s core teaching of the Four Nobles’ Truths:6 that there is suffering, that suffering has a cause, that there is the cessation of suffering, and that there is a path whereby the cessation of suffering can be attained. The second of these is spelled out in terms of a chain of twelve causal links beginning with ignorance and ending in old age and death. This is usually understood to represent a sequence of three lives, so that the sequence serves to illustrate how ignorance of the facts concerning sentient existence fuels karma and rebirth. Be that as it may, a key transition in the middle of the sequence has events that culminate in desire serving as cause of something called appropriation, the attitude of considering elements in the causal series as “me” or “mine.” This, plus the fact that the links making up the sequence are described in thoroughly impersonal terms, brings home the point that deployment of a first-person perspective is understood as a remediable error. The fourth of the Four Nobles’ Truths describes the path prescribed to remedy the error and attain the cessation of suffering.

This path is said to consist of eight components, but a broader three-fold division better suits our purpose here: a division into morality, meditation, and wisdom. The first of these specifies the modes of conduct said to be best

6 This doctrine has been more commonly called the Four Noble Truths. But what are said to be noble (ārya) are not the four truths but those who realize them. In Buddhist texts, an ārya is someone who has attained liberation. The doctrine concerns what one must supposedly come to know in order to join the ranks of the āryas.

suited to progress toward cessation. Buddhists should, for instance, refrain from killing sentient beings. The second consists of techniques designed to extirpate those mental habits that perpetuate the “I”-sense: the reactive attitudes of desire and aversion, as well as core mistakes in our everyday conception of the world. Meditational practices in turn include something akin to mindfulness meditation (said to help one observe more clearly the workings of the psychophysical complex), but also exercises designed to foster such virtues as compassion and equanimity. The third of the three, the wisdom component of the path, is devoted to mastery of a correct conception of the nature of reality. This is where the philosophical practices of analysis and argumentation play a role. In this the practitioner emulates the Buddha, who gave arguments for at least some of his central teachings (such as nonself). But it is also understood that to do otherwise—to turn adherence to the central tenets of the Buddha’s teachings into a matter of faith commitment— is to risk making the realization of non-self unachievable. The faith stance of “Here I stand, I can do no other” involves at least implicit affirmation of the “I”-sense. Better that the practitioner arrive at the core convictions of the Buddhist project through means less likely to appeal to the (self-affirming) desire for a life of meaning and significance.

The three parts of the path just described are not seen as occurring in a prescribed sequence. The basic rules of morality are understood as a sort of entry-point for the lay Buddhist, since they tend to counter some of the affective habits sustaining the “defilements” of desire, aversion, and delusion. But deliberate entry onto the path (ordination as a monastic) brings with it a new and more stringent set of moral rules, adherence to which is made easier by various types of meditation. The mastery of philosophical theories also equips the meditator with the conceptual tools necessary to make sense of the altered states of consciousness produced by certain forms of meditation. At the same time, the careful observation of mental states cultivated in some types of meditational practice is said to provide empirical evidence in support of key philosophical theses. The cultivation of wisdom is but one component of Buddhist practice, and it functions in mutual interaction with the other two. It is the philosophical content of this component, though, that shall be our main concern here; in the succeeding chapters we shall have little to say about the soteriological roles of the various Buddhist metaphysical theories we present and assess.

1.4 Key Schools and Figures

Indian Buddhist metaphysics is far from monolithic. Buddhist philosophers engaged in sustained disputes not only with their non-Buddhist rivals, but with one another as well. Since it is not our aim to present a history of Indian Buddhist metaphysics, we shall not discuss these disputes in great detail.7 Our chief focus here will be on the arguments and analyses that we think will be of interest to analytic metaphysicians. Here, though, is a brief outline of the main trends of Indian Buddhist philosophy.

Its history can be divided into three major phases. The first, Early Buddhism, consists of the teachings of the Buddha and his immediate disciples. These teachings are to be found in the sūtras making up the Nikāyas of the Pāli Canon and the Āgamas found in Chinese translation.8 The second phase consists of the many schools making up what we may call the Abhidharma movement. These schools arose out of efforts to classify the many technical terms found in the early Buddhist sūtras, and to address questions of interpretation as these arose. The third phase, Mahāyāna, grows out of the appearance of new sūtras (some ostensibly the utterances of the historical Buddha, others purporting to be the teachings of other buddhas and bodhisattvas), beginning around the first century BCE. These sūtras articulate doctrines not found in the Nikāyas or Āgamas, and two major philosophical movements arose as efforts to explain and defend these novel doctrines: Madhyamaka and Yogācāra. These, it should be noted, did not supplant the older Abhidharma schools, many of which continued to flourish alongside their upstart competitors.9

The proliferation of schools and sub-schools in the Buddhist philosophical tradition grows out of a base of shared commitments. Here are some important areas of agreement among all Indian Buddhist philosophers.

Non-self: all agree that there is no entity that persists over the life (or lives) of a person; none of the empirically given parts of the person endures,

7 For details of this history see Westerhoff 2018.

8 In Pāli, the sūtras are called suttas. Throughout this work, when referring to Pāli materials we shall use the Sanskrit equivalents of any technical terms mentioned.

9 Indeed one Abhidharma school, Theravāda, remains active today in Śri Lanka, parts of Southeast Asia, and the west. (Buddhism died out in the rest of South Asia in the wake of Turkic incursions in the twelfth century.) Because Theravāda was less active in debates with rival Buddhist and nonBuddhist schools, it is more useful as a resource that helps fill in gaps in early Abhidharma history than as a source of novel philosophical theories and arguments.

and there is no sound argument for the existence of a transcendent self; all that is to be found is a causal series of impersonal, impermanent psychophysical elements.

Momentariness: no existent endures for more than an instant; this is a significant strengthening of the Buddha’s teachings, since he claimed only that all existents are impermanent (i.e., non-eternal); while there was disagreement as to whether moments have any temporal thickness, all schools accepted at least one of the arguments developed for the conclusion that everything lasts just one moment.

Mereological nihilism: there are, strictly speaking, no mereological sums; the composite objects of our folk ontology, as well as any composite objects posited by rival metaphysical theories, are at best merely nominally real.

Anti-substance: not only are there no composite objects (which are ruled out by mereological nihilism); there are also, strictly speaking, no simple substances (such as atoms or selves) either; substances, understood as the persisting bearers of properties, are seen as conceptual constructions deployed through a bundling process that serves the interest of ease of communication.

Nominalism: universals are rejected on two grounds: as permanent entities they would be devoid of causal efficacy, and causal efficacy is the hallmark of the real; and there is no plausible account of how the inherence relation might work; in time, what begins as a kind of “ostrich nominalism” gives way to a more radical nominalism driven by the realization that in the absence of universals there can be no real similarities either.

As this list makes clear, the Buddhist metaphysical enterprise stands at the revisionary end of the spectrum. Buddhist philosophers are generally unimpressed by appeals to our intuitions, or to our customary ways of talking. Theory construction is to be guided by “lightness” or parsimony, and should involve evidence available to all parties. As might be expected, the results are ontologies on the decidedly spartan side. In the following chapters we spell out some of the principal arguments for these conclusions and explore their more significant consequences. But first we must introduce some of the major players in the debates that ensued.

We may divide the Buddhist metaphysical landscape into four stances with respect to different varieties of realism: two sorts of dualist realism,

How Things Are

one external-world anti-realism, and one global anti-realism. By “dualist realism” is here meant the view that mental and physical phenomena are of distinct ontological sorts, both equally real. Buddhist dualists will not, though, espouse the more familiar sort of substance dualism. Instead their ontology will consist of two kinds of trope, external or physical, and inner or mental.10 Buddhist dualist realists divide over the question of how sensory cognition of external objects works: directly, or indirectly via representations. The Vaibhāṣika school of Abhidharma espouses a direct realist view, which they support using the doctrine for which the school is best known, its eternalism. Its representationalist rival, Sautrāntika, maintains that a sensory cognition’s veridicality consists in its bearing a form that resembles the object grasped by the sense faculty. Sautrāntika likewise rejects Vaibhāṣika’s eternalism in favor of presentism. And just as in early modern philosophy the representationalism of Descartes and Locke leads to Berkeley’s subjective idealism, so the Sautrāntika representationalist view of perception is followed by the Buddhist idealism (hence “subjectless idealism”) of the Yogācāra school of Mahāyāna. Yogācāra’s chief rival is the other school of the Mahāyāna movement, Madhyamaka. At the heart of the disagreement between Yogācāra and Mādhyamaka is how to interpret the teaching, found in many Mahāyāna sūtras, that all dharmas (ultimately real entities) are “empty” or devoid of intrinsic nature. Yogācāra takes this to mean that reality should be understood as devoid of the subject-object dichotomy that results from acquiescing in the appearance of sensory cognition to represent a distinct external world.

Madhyamaka takes the emptiness claim in a far more radical way, as rejecting the very idea of ultimately real entities. To Yogācāra, Madhyamaka’s global anti-realism seems tantamount to a self-refuting metaphysical nihilism. Madhyamaka retorts that Yogācāra’s local external-world anti-realism is a half-hearted halfway measure: if there is nothing external, then the mental realm would seem to be equally dispensable. The result is not (as Yogācāra would claim) that the world consists of ineffable particulars, but rather that the very question of how the world is anyway is of questionable intelligibility.

The reader cannot be expected to retain all relevant information from this whirlwind tour of the main schools of Buddhist metaphysics. Hence a

10 This is in line with the list of five kinds of aggregates (skandhas) of psychophysical elements that the Buddha used in his arguments for non-self. The first of these, rūpa, covers the corporeal side of sentient existence, as well as inanimate matter. The other four are collectively referred to as nāma (literally “name”). In secondary literature in English the term rūpa is often translated literally as “form”; this skandha was likely given this name on the grounds that only the physical has shape. Mental elements, by contrast, can only be named.

word of advice: bookmark this page, and return to it as needed. But while we are at it, here are a few more names that will crop up from time to time, in this case not of schools but of individual philosophers. Saṃghabhadra (fifth century CE) is a Vaibhāṣika with important things to say in defense of the school’s eternalism. Vasubandhu (c. 350–430) has a foot in two camps. As a Sautrāntika he develops that school’s definitive responses to any number of Vaibhāṣika views, and his sophisticated formulation and defense of reductionism about persons and personal identity are among the clearest articulations of that position. But he also helps found the Yogācāra school, and his later work gives some of the principal arguments in defense of that school’s idealism. Nāgārjuna (second century CE) is the author of the foundational text of the Madhyamaka school. Dignāga (c. 480–540) is founder of the hybrid Yogācāra-Sautrāntika school of Buddhist epistemology, and Dharmakīrti (c. 550–610) is his principal commentator. Best known for their development of a Buddhist theory of epistemic instruments, Dignāga and Dharmakīrti also make important contributions to the philosophy of mind.

Our aim here is to explore a variety of metaphysical theories developed in the Indian Buddhist tradition. Our interest lies chiefly in the theories themselves, and not in the history of their development. There will consequently be relatively little by way of explication of the texts in which these theories are propounded. There will be the occasional quotation of a passage from a relevant text, but more to illustrate the spirit of the Buddhist philosophical enterprise than to support an interpretation. Where there are reliable English translations of primary sources relevant to the topic at hand, references to these will be provided. There will also be references given to the Sanskrit sources, but these are provided only for the convenience of other scholars of the Buddhist tradition. The use of Sanskrit technical terms will be kept to a minimum. I shall, though, provide the Sanskrit when I first introduce the English expression I treat as its equivalent. There is no scholarly consensus on how to render many of the key terms in the Sanskrit philosophical corpus. (Indeed in the more specialized literature of philologically trained Buddhologists, important terms are often left untranslated.) By providing the Sanskrit original of my translation of a given technical term, I hope to make it possible for the non-specialist reader to continue their exploration of a topic through secondary literature that may translate those terms differently.

This work is intended chiefly for philosophers who lack specialist knowledge of the Indian Buddhist tradition. Such readers may find it somewhat disconcerting to learn that some of the interpretations of that tradition

presented here are controversial among the community of specialist scholars. For the most part I shall here avoid discussing these controversies and defending my own interpretations; that has been done elsewhere.11 Suffice it to say that the readings of the Buddhist tradition presented here are at least defensible, and that they have been arrived at through a decades-long process of trying to develop the sort of stereoscopic vision called for in the enterprise of “fusion” or “confluence” philosophy. There are those who worry that this enterprise serves the interests of a sort of intellectual neo-colonialism.12 This is an important matter. My own thoughts are developed elsewhere.13

There has been much talk in recent years about expanding the canon, incorporating works of non-Western philosophy into the curriculum, and ending the pretense that only those of European ancestry have produced work of sufficient rigor to deserve the name “philosophy.” Proponents of such expansion sometimes appeal to considerations of justice and equity. But there are also those who claim that by ignoring work done outside the European tradition, philosophers are depriving themselves of a treasure trove of intellectual riches from which they could derive enormous benefit. This claim may be exaggerated. It is true that the practice of philosophy seems to have been enriched when historically distinct philosophical traditions came into close contact. The case of medieval Spain, which witnessed a sustained dialogue among Islamic, Jewish, and Christian philosophers, is one corroborative instance. Another is classical India between the fifth and tenth centuries CE. Still it could be argued that the sheer number of well-trained philosophers who are active today virtually guarantees that fresh insights will emerge even if the canon retains its Eurocentric bias. Even if we grant that others outside the European tradition did rigorous work in metaphysics, it could be that any insights we might gain by becoming more familiar with their work would have become available in any event, given the propensity of younger philosophers to challenge orthodoxies, and given just how many such philosophers are active today.

My claim will be more modest. Much of the metaphysical theorizing we examine here will have a familiar cast to those familiar with recent discussions in analytic metaphysics. But the arguments are sometimes couched in a slightly different key, and sometimes that difference can lead to a subtle shift

11 I will, though, provide references to works that present competing views on some of the more important disputes.

12 For a recent and relatively sober articulation of this worry, see Hanner 2018.

13 The interested reader should consult Siderits 2015b.

in the tone of the results. I won’t claim that the reader will find in these pages the solution to the problem of universals, or the key to getting clear about the causal relation, or a promising new approach to the defense of presentism. What I do hope to do is instill in those who worry about such things just a (brief) touch of intellectual queasiness. When I was a child I had a toy stereoscope. Since a stereoscope presents an image slightly differently in the two eyepieces, looking through a stereoscope can at first be somewhat physically unsettling. But once the eyes adjust, one comes to see the scene presented by the image in greater depth. I hope the reader will experience something similar by the end of these investigations.

Non-Self I

The Buddhist doctrine of non-self seems, to many philosophers today, simple, straightforward, and clearly correct. Simple it is not, however. This and the next chapter explore its formulation, defense, and some of its consequences. Two chapters are called for because the doctrine of non-self is not merely the denial of a self as conceived by Nyāya, Sāṃkhya, or Descartes. This chapter discusses that denial. But the next chapter examines the ontological status of something else, the person.

The distinction between self and person may be understood in the following way. Buddhists are concerned to discover whether the “I”-sense is veridical or illusory. Their question may be answered by investigating the two basic possibilities concerning the referent of “I”: that it is the self, understood as a simple or impartite persisting substance; and that it is the person, understood as a whole or a composite entity consisting of all or some of the psychophysical elements that occur in the existence of a sentient being. To anticipate the outcome of their investigation: “I” cannot denote a self, since there is no such thing; it does, however, denote a person, understood as something conventionally but not ultimately real. These two claims together make up what may be called Buddhist reductionism about persons. We will return to what such a reductionism amounts to after, in this chapter, examining the denial of a self, and in the next, discussing the relegation of persons to the ontological status of back-benchers.

2.1 Early Buddhist Denial of Self

The Buddha gave two arguments for his denial that there is a self: the argument from impermanence, and the argument from control. Both are based on the assumption that the empirically available constituents of persons consist of no more than what are found in the five groups of psychophysical elements (corporeality and four sorts of mental element). Here the notion of empirical availability may require some explanation. It is essentially what is

also found in classical British empiricism: the notion of amenability to being directly cognized or perceived by means of either the five external senses or the “inner sense” (manas).1 The idea is thus that the corporeal constituents of the person are perceived by means of the external senses, while the mental elements are perceived by the inner sense. The exhaustiveness claim is the claim that the five groups of psychophysical elements constitute a complete classification of the kinds of things one perceives when one perceives a person.

The physicalist will of course question the claim that what one cognizes when one “looks within” is anything other than material phenomena. But we will put that question to one side for now. Still it is true that the notion of an inner sense with its own distinctive objects represents something of a grab-bag in Buddhist psychology, and the ontology that results raises at least as many puzzles as it resolves. First, the inner sense is tasked not only with cognizing mental states but also with deploying concepts. Second, its objects are a varied lot. Some, such as feelings of pleasure, pain, and indifference, fit naturally under the rubric of objects of introspection. Others, though, such as perceptual identifications (saṃjñā), look more like functionally defined events—in this case whatever performs the operation of categorizing a percept (e.g., classifying a visual datum as falling under the concept blue). The third of the four groups of mental elements, mental forces (saṃskāra), exhibits a puzzling process-product ambiguity. And the last of the four, consciousness (vijñāna), will give rise to no end of difficulties in the later tradition. Early texts treat this as a sort of bare awareness or registry, leading to the question of whether there can be such a thing as objectless consciousness. The more pressing issue, though, will be how consciousness could itself be directly cognized. (We discuss the resulting controversy in Chapter 9.) Because the Buddha made crucial use of the doctrine of the five groups of psychophysical elements, it had a privileged status among later Buddhist philosophers. In time, though, it would be quietly set to one side as a merely useful pedagogical device.

The argument for non-self from impermanence (MN 109, Mahāpuṇṇama Sutta) has a very simple structure:

1 As was pointed out in the preceding chapter, some later Buddhist dualists espoused a representationalist view of perception like that of the classical British empiricists. There is, however, no evidence that early Buddhism held anything other than a direct realist view of sense perception.

A self would be permanent.

Each of the five kinds of psychophysical element is impermanent. Therefore there is no self.

If one adds the exhaustiveness claim as an implicit premise, the argument is valid, but are the premises true? In the Indian context, “permanent” generally means “eternal.” This might make one wonder about the first premise: surely one need not build into an account of the self that it existed before one’s birth and will exist after one’s death. In the background, though, is the assumption that there is rebirth, which is routinely described as beginningless.2 We can neutralize this assumption by specifying that by “permanent” is meant only that the entity in question persists as long as the person in question continues to exist. Understood in this way the first premise is clearly true. If the self is the essence of the person, then it must exist as long as the person does, since it is what grounds diachronic personal identity.

As for the second premise, the Buddha is in basic agreement with Hume concerning the four psychological groups (or whatever turn out to play the role of mental elements): when we look within, what we find are only “different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement” (Treatise I.6.3). Perhaps the most common challenge to this claim is that while other mental elements might come and go, consciousness (assuming it to be empirically available) persists. The Buddha’s response is that consciousness originates in dependence on contact between a sense-faculty and a suitable object. Reverting to the example of seeing and then grasping the mango, the awareness that takes the mango’s color as object originates in dependence on vision, while the awareness of its smoothness originates in dependence on the sense of touch. These being distinct sense faculties, it follows that the resultant consciousnesses are likewise distinct events.

The claim that the first of the five groups, the bodily constituents of sentient existence, is impermanent is easily shown to be true if we assume rebirth. Absent that assumption, though, it may seem problematic: surely we have the same body from birth until death? Two doctrines that were developed later in the tradition might be used to address this. The first is the doctrine of

2 Indian cosmologies commonly include the idea of a world-cycle: the present universe came into existence from the remnants of a prior cosmos, and its eventual collapse will yield the constituents of a successor cosmos. The start of a new universe is often said to be triggered by karmic residues left by unliberated sentient beings at the end of its immediate predecessor.

momentariness (to be discussed in Chapter 4), according to which nothing exists for longer than a moment. The second is mereological nihilism (also discussed in Chapter 4), according to which there are strictly speaking no bodies, only groups of atoms arranged body-wise.3 This might be a better fit, historically, for an early Buddhist defense of the one-life impermanence of the body; while the Buddha did not argue for mereological nihilism, there is evidence that he may have accepted it. The argument would then be that since no atom remains in the body throughout the entire life of a person, no atom could count as the self. All being replaceable, none could be the essence of the person whose body it is.

The second early Buddhist argument for non-self is the argument from control (Cūḷasaccakasutta MN 35). This is strikingly like one of the Sāṃkhya arguments for the existence of a self, discussed in the preceding chapter. The argument proceeds from the understanding of the self as an agent, plus the assumption that, as agent, the self would be the persisting entity that evaluates states of the person. From the premise,

It is possible to dislike and wish to change each of the five groups of psychophysical elements as these pertain to the person,

it is concluded that there is no self. The argument appeals to the irreflexivity principle. The idea is that nothing could be a self-evaluator, so any state of the person that appeared in the evaluated slot could not be the entity that plays the role of evaluator agent. It will naturally be asked what then might play that role. Since we are here confining our attention to empirically available candidates, and all of these may appear on the side of object of evaluation, it would seem to follow that the phenomenon of control requires the posit of a transcendent agent-self. What this overlooks, however, is the possibility that what we think of as agency is performed by a shifting coalition of psychophysical elements. The model is a certain sort of political system. One member of the Party might be disciplined by the Central Committee, and then later be sufficiently rehabilitated that they themselves join the Central Committee, and in turn discipline a former member in retaliation.4 Since the

3 By “atom” will be meant not what goes by that name in current physics, but the philosopher’s atom: a genuinely impartite occurrence of one of the basic kinds of stuffs that make up macrophysical objects. Classical Indian philosophers generally took there to be four such kinds: earth, air, water, and fire.

4 It is possible to glimpse something like this strategy at work behind the scenes in Buddhaghosa’s example of the tree that bears fruit (VM 17.168–72). If we understand “tree” to be a convenient

performance of agency might be like this, the objection to the argument from control fails.

2.2

Abhidharma Treatment of Non-Self

Early Buddhist arguments for non-self were limited to surveys of the empirically available constituents of persons. This restriction was questioned by Indian self-theorists, who took the same data used in the Buddhist arguments to show instead that there must be a transcendent self. In a discussion that neatly captures much of Abhidharma thinking in response to this challenge (AKBh 461 (Pruden 1990, 1313–14), AKBh 471–78 (Pruden 1990, 1339–55)), Vasubandhu agrees that an argument based entirely on the results of sense perception may be insufficient. There are, he concedes, cases where imperceptible entities are known to exist only by means of inference. His example is the sense faculties, which are understood to be things that are never directly perceived.5 The reasoning whereby they are posited takes the form of an abductive inference: what best explains the presence of auditory cognition in some subjects and the absence of auditory cognition in otherwise identical others is the presence and absence, respectively, of an additional condition besides sound, proximity, intact ears, etc.: namely, a power of hearing located in the sense organ.6 Vasubandhu claims, however, that no such inference is available to establish the existence of a self.

In support of this claim he examines a number of considerations cited by the self-theorist in support of the existence of a self. The first such argument is from memory: the ability to recognize an object perceived earlier requires the posit of an enduring cognizer to serve as subject of both the original experience and its recollection. Vasubandhu responds that the phenomenon

designator for a casual series of tree parts, then at the time when the persimmon fruit first appears we might use the term to designate all the parts, including the leaves, but not the fruit, which we treat as object of the tree’s action of bearing. But later, when the leaves start to fall, we would use “tree” to designate all the parts, this time including the fruit, but not the leaves, which are now thought of as object of the tree’s action of dropping.

5 Presumably the original motivation behind Ābhidharmikas’ deeming the sense faculties imperceptible was to avoid violating the principle of irreflexivity; vision could not see itself, etc.

6 The ontological status of powers is a matter of some controversy in Abhidharma (see Chapter 4). There is also a dispute between Buddhist epistemologists and the orthodox Mīmāṃsā school over whether abductive inference is a valid epistemic instrument. Interestingly, the Buddhist position is that it is not, in which case it is unclear how the inference to the existence of the sense faculties can succeed. For discussion see Siderits 2020a.

is more parsimoniously explained using causal connections among earlier and later mental states: under the right conditions a perception will cause a memory trace that in turn may later be triggered to cause a copy of the original experience. Such an account is also said to answer the objection that memory requires that there be owners—that since we only remember our own experiences, an experience and its memory must have a common owner. Vasubandhu examines what the ownership or possession relation might amount to in this case, and concludes that it represents nothing more than a useful way of conceptualizing the multiplicity of causal relations holding among the experience, the memory, and the intervening psychophysical elements in a causally connected series. The inference of an owner-self fails because the phenomenon is more parsimoniously explained in terms of a series of causally connected elements.

An inference from agency is similarly dispatched. The ego-theorist claims that the karma-rebirth process is inexplicable unless one supposes there to be a self to serve as both agent of action and reaper of karmic fruit. Otherwise, it is claimed, karmic fruition would simply be unjust, since the reaper of the pleasant or painful fruit is not the doer of the good or bad deed. For not only have the action and all its attendant mental states ceased to exist at the time of fruition, but in the rebirth case, so also have the body and all other psychophysical elements associated with the doing of the deed. Abhidharma theorists developed a number of responses to this (common) objection (see MMK 17.1–20). Vasubandhu’s preferred answer is the karmic seeds hypothesis: performance of an intentional action generates a seed or mental disposition, which in turn produces a similar successor, until such time as attendant conditions result in the final successor seed’s ripening, giving rise to an experience of pleasure or pain. This fruit’s belonging to the “right” person, namely the person who performed the action, just consists in its occurring later in the continuous causal series of psychophysical elements containing such seeds and that has the action as an earlier element. Once again, the appeal to causal connections renders otiose the posit of a persisting self.

The self-theorist may concede that none of the empirically available psychophysical elements endures as long as the person does. Still they may claim that there is phenomenological evidence for the existence of something that endures. We do, they will say, have the sense that consciousness persists as a continuous presence over any number of distinct mental episodes. I see a mango, recall an earlier experience of tasting mango, feel desire for this mango, ask the price, reflect on the answer, etc. There is no

sense of interruption between these discrete episodes; the progression feels seamless. So even if the Buddhist is right that each involves a distinct occurrence of consciousness (being the product of a distinct sense-object contact event), it still seems as though there must be some one thing, the subject of consciousness, that persists behind them all. It will be objected that this felt continuity is at least interrupted in periods of dreamless sleep. Some Indian self-theorists went so far as to respond that the self as subject of experience is present even then. As evidence they pointed to the feeling of being refreshed one allegedly has on awakening from deep, uninterrupted sleep. They take this to show that the state of deep sleep is enjoyed. But let us leave this aside and focus on the more plausible appeal to phenomenology. Does this carry any weight?

Vasubandhu has an interesting response to the argument from the felt continuity of awareness. While he might appeal to momentariness to question the evidentiary value of the phenomenal feel, he does not. Instead he likens the intuition that the conscious subject endures to the sense that a fire is moving. Consider a forest fire that is said to move from the site of a lightning strike where it began to the outskirts of a town it now threatens. What does its moving consist in? First there were the flames consuming the tree that was ignited by the lightning strike. Then the radiation emanating from those flames ignited a neighboring shrub. Those flames in turn caused a nearby tree to burn. And so on. If we take a fire to consist in its constituent flames, we see that the individual flames are not what move from site of origin to present location. What we have in this case is actually a causal series of flames. What move are not the individual flames, each of which is confined to the location of the fuel on which it depends. What move are the locations of the distinct flames making up the fire over time. It is our failure to note the fine details of what actually occurs that leads to the illusion of a single big thing moving from one place to another. Vasubandhu thinks the sense of a continuous subject of experience is equally illusory and for a similar reason. Our inability to detect a temporal gap between contiguous mental events may be the result of our limited discriminatory powers (as with the phi phenomenon),7 or it may be an artifact of the way our cognitive machinery functions (as with the stable visual image produced by the multiple saccades of which we are unaware). In any event this sense of felt continuity in the stream of consciousness

7 See Dennett 1991, 114–15. The Buddhist analog is the case of the whirling firebrand that is seen as a circle of fire.

will not bear the justificatory load the self-theorist wants to put on it. There are simpler explanations of the phenomenon, ones that do not require the positing of an unobservable entity.

The substance-dualist self-theorist also faces a difficulty in explaining the relation between their self, understood as a substance, and its modes, such as cognitions, desires and hedonic states. The self-theorist commonly accuses the rival non-self- theory of having the absurd consequence that mental events float about untethered. Vasubandhu wonders, though, just what the self-theorist’s tethering might amount to. We saw in Chapter 1 that Nyāya posits the relation of inherence as the glue that holds substance and qualities together: red color inheres in the pot, and in just the same way, cognitions, desires and the like inhere in the self. What, though, does this inherence amount to? The standard explanation is that the substance plays the role of locus of its modes, serving to hold them all together. This might be understood in terms of the notion of a receptacle, as in the example of a dish that holds a number of jujube fruits together. Here, though, it is two substances standing in relation. While the self-theorist’s self is a substance, the cognitions and other mental states supposedly inhering in it are not substances but tropes. More relevant might be Vasubandhu’s other example, the color of the wall. We can understand this as a matter of the wall standing as the ground that holds the occurrence of a color-trope in a particular location. The question is whether we can plausibly think of this as the relation that also holds between self and mental modes. Vasubandhu says we cannot. Descartes famously held that thinking substance lacks spatial location. This position will lead to puzzles over mind-body interaction; but it also makes the colored-wall model inapplicable. Nyāya takes a different stance: they say the self is omnipresent. Since their self does have spatial properties, it would seem eligible to serve as a locus like the wall. The problem is that now the selftheorist is unable to explain why a feeling of pleasure occurs here rather than there (or everywhere).

Vasubandhu’s response to these difficulties is instructive. He gives a straightforwardly bundle-theoretic response to the challenge of holding mental modes together. The intuitions behind the objection that non-self leaves mental events floating about untethered stem from our failure to recognize that substances are no more than cognitive shortcuts and so should have no place in a serious ontology. We shall have more to say about this when we examine Buddhist mereological nihilism and its consequences (Chapter 4).

2.3 Transition: Could the Self Be Illusory?

Here is one last argument for the existence of a self. The non-self-theorist claims that the “I”-sense is deceptive, and that the self is an illusion. But in order for this to be true, it would have to be the case that there is something that is deceived by this illusion. The Buddhist response to this argument is simple and straightforward: the subject of the illusion is the person—something merely conventionally but not ultimately real. This view about persons will be the subject of the next chapter. But this response presents an opportunity to pause and take stock.

Much confusion about Buddhist non-self has resulted from a failure to appreciate the distinction Buddhists draw between “self” and “person.” The failure is understandable given ways in which the term “self” is used in other contexts. In psychology, for instance, “self” is used to refer to the sentient organism as a whole. (The “self” of the reflexive pronoun “myself” is often used in the same way.) So what the psychologist calls a self is just what the Buddhist calls a person, and not the self. In ordinary usage, “self” may have a somewhat more restricted meaning. When people talk of one’s self as something that one might discover, find, or lose, what they generally have in mind is some set of core convictions or dispositions, and not the totality of psychophysical elements. This comes somewhat closer to the Indian philosophers’ notion of the self as the essence of the person. But an essence is generally understood to be the feature of an entity that grounds that entity’s diachronic identity. And if the self is understood as a set of core dispositions, then insofar as there is always room for replacement of individual members of this set over time, the possibility of indeterminacy of identity arises. Indeed the self-as-essence approach seems prone to conflating the diachronic identity question with the characterization question: “What is this person most fundamentally like?” Narrative self-constitution views are one popular approach to answering the characterization question. But it is Dennett’s idea of the self as center of narrative gravity that enables us to see how the Indian philosophers may have arrived at the notion of the self as something simple and unanalyzable. For if we were to overlook the fact that a center of gravity is no more than a useful way of making certain calculations, we might then take the self to be the single point from which the narrative issues and that through relation to which the features of that narrative derive value.8

8 For discussion of some possible sources of the idea that the self must be a single featureless point, see my 2015c, 71–75.

What this diversity of uses of “self” suggests is that we want the referent of “I” to be both a one and a many. Each alternative presents its own challenges. A difficulty for the “many” option is that it fails to explain how prudential reasoning is possible. Suppose that “I” refers to all the mental states of the utterer, past, present, and future.9 (Suppose also that any difficulties arising from the temporal gappiness of this collection have been dealt with.) Suppose I am now deliberating as to whether to do A or B, neither of which will affect others, and that it is objectively better that I do A. This should give me a prudential reason to choose A, but who is this “I” for whom there is such a reason? The outcome of my deliberation will be the formation, at tn, of an intention (an effective volition) to do the one or the other. The series containing at t n the intention to do A and not B, and the series containing at tn the intention to do B and not A, are distinct entities. Prudential reasons are reasons for the one person deliberating, but here there are two distinct candidates for bearer of the relevant reasons. It is one series for whom things go better due to the choice to do A. It is another series for whom things go worse due to the choice to do B. If the “I” is a many, which of these two series is it?10

We may think we can supply a single candidate deliberator by having “I” refer not to the many mental states making up a series but to the subject of those states. The deliberator is that which gets to decide which of the two series represents how things actually go. Here, though, is where Vasubandhu’s point about the inherence relation comes in. Absent an adequate analysis of that relation (or of the relation of ownership), this genuinely singular self comes untethered from any states that might count as giving it reasons to choose one way or the other.11 As we shall soon see, Buddhist reductionism offers a way to have “I” refer to a one that bears meaningful connections to the many. This is only made possible, though, by relegating the referent of “I” to the person as an ontological back-bencher, something only conventionally real. The present point is that this chapter’s examination of the notion of the self was necessary for our investigation. In recent discussions of diachronic personal identity, the idea of a simple self that can be found in

9 Here we assume eternalism. The presentist alternative presents another difficulty: prudential reasoning requires that there be a future person whose welfare one is deliberating about. The presentist denies that there is any such thing. We discuss the dispute between Buddhist eternalists and Buddhist presentists in Chapter 7.

10 Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing me to clarify the point being made in this example.

11 This is why, for the Indian self-theorist, the liberated state is devoid of empirical content. For these theorists the error that perpetuates saṃsāra is precisely the belief that the self is the sort of thing that can be made better or worse through action.