School
Abhidharma
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If Buddhism says there is no self, what exactly gets reborn?
I drive a bus in Ankara and listen to philosophy lectures between stops. This week's lecture was on Buddhism, and the speaker said two things that seem to contradict each other: there is no permanent self, and there is rebirth. If there's…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies204 views -
Parfit was right: identity is not what matters in survival
I'm the resident sceptic in my university's effective altruism group, but on this one I'm a believer, and I'd like to hear the best objections. Parfit's argument in Part III of Reasons and Persons (1984), roughly: Suppose your brain is divided and…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 replies193 views -
The “false friend” warning about Hume and anattā is overstated
I've read the warnings: Hume's bundle theory is not the Buddhist doctrine of not-self, because Hume merely reports failing to find a self, while Buddhism asserts its absence and builds a practice on it. I agree with the facts. I think the…
Started by Alistair Gow4 replies158 views -
Does contemplating death dissolve the fear, or does it just stop us arguing about it?
In the Theravāda tradition we practise maraṇasati, mindfulness of death. Buddhaghosa's Path of Purification gives it a full treatment among the recollections, and there is a sutta where monks tell the Buddha how they practise it, hoping to live for a day…
Started by Ayya Kusalañāṇī6 replies250 views -
Does general anaesthesia remove experience, or only our memory of it?
I'm an internist, not an anaesthetist, but I've watched hundreds of patients go under and come back. Most say the same thing: one moment they were counting backwards, the next they were in recovery. No time passed. But there is a technique,…
Started by Omar Farouk5 replies226 views -
Hume’s bundle and the Buddha’s no-self sound identical to me. What is the real difference?
I'm a poet and a literature postgraduate in Kochi, new to formal philosophy. I've just read two things in the same week and they seemed to say the same thing. Hume, in the Treatise, looks inward for his self and reports that…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies196 views -
Is Vasubandhu’s doctrine of momentariness the same as modern stage theory?
I guide trekkers in the Annapurna region and have read about Buddhist philosophy for years, mostly in tea houses. Recently a friend showed me a chart of Western theories of persistence and pointed to one called exdurantism or stage theory: nothing strictly…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung4 replies179 views -
If there is no self, who has free will? Is there a Buddhist position at all?
I guide trekkers in the Annapurna region and read Madhyamaka in tea houses in the evenings. A Swiss client asked me last month what Buddhism says about free will. I said it depends what you mean, which was true but cowardly. Here…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung6 replies220 views -
Frank Jackson gave up on Mary. Should the rest of us?
I'm a physicist, and something about the knowledge argument has always interested me less than its history. Jackson's Mary knows every physical fact about colour vision, having lived her life in a black-and-white room. She leaves and sees a ripe tomato. If…
Started by Lars Eriksen5 replies210 views -
Does general anaesthesia switch experience off, or only the memory of it?
I'm an internist in Addis Ababa, and a patient asked me before surgery last month whether she would "be there" during the operation and simply forget it, or whether she would not be there at all. I gave the reassuring answer. Afterwards…
Started by Tsion Bekele6 replies282 views -
Reading group: the chariot in the Milindapañha, read beside Hume’s “Of personal identity”
I teach comparative philosophy in Hong Kong, and my working rule is that comparisons should be made text against text, not summary against summary. Here is a small experiment: read the most famous Buddhist passage on the self and the most famous…
Started by Kenneth Leung Chi-ho5 replies141 views -
Rebirth without anyone reborn: the lamp that lights another lamp
In comparative tables of what happens at death, the Buddhist row always reads awkwardly: rebirth, but no self that transmigrates. Continuity, not identity. Many newcomers to the Dhamma, and many philosophers, hear a contradiction. If nobody is reborn, what is the rebirth…
Started by Ayya Kusalañāṇī6 replies280 views -
If Nāgasena’s chariot argument removes the self, it removes the chariot too
The chariot argument in the Milindapañha is one of the most famous arguments about parts and wholes. King Milinda arrives by chariot. Nāgasena asks him: is the pole the chariot? The axle? The wheels? The frame? All of them together? Something apart…
Started by Arjun Iyer6 replies276 views -
Reading group: Nāgasena’s chariot and flame in the Questions of King Milinda
The Milindapañha, the Questions of King Milinda, is a dialogue between a king usually identified with the Indo-Greek ruler Menander and a monk called Nāgasena. It is a composite text that grew over centuries, so I read Nāgasena as a literary interlocutor…
Started by Ayya Kusalañāṇī6 replies159 views -
Why insight does not instantly change behaviour: an Abhidhamma account of knowing and not doing
I read the threads here about whether knowing what is right necessarily moves you, and I would like to add the account I have lived with for twelve years in robes. In the Pali discourses, the Buddha says that intention, cetanā, is…
Started by Ayya Kusalañāṇī5 replies269 views -
Heraclitus, Vasubandhu, Zhuangzi, Mulla Sadra: four routes to process, or four destinations?
It is often said that four thinkers, with no documented transmission between them, all arrived at a process view of reality: Heraclitus in Greece, Vasubandhu in India, Zhuangzi in China, and much later Mulla Sadra in Safavid Iran. The convergence is real.…
Started by Kenneth Leung Chi-ho5 replies218 views -
The Abhidharma was the most thorough reductionism ever attempted. Was it right?
Before I ordained I taught chemistry, and when I first studied the Abhidhamma I recognised something familiar: a periodic table of experience. The Abhidharma traditions analyse everything a person is into ultimate constituents, dhammas: momentary events of consciousness, mental factors, material qualities.…
Started by Ayya Kusalañāṇī4 replies118 views -
Can trained meditative introspection count as evidence? Abhidhamma and William James
I am a Theravada nun in Kandy. My study is the Abhidhamma, the systematic part of our canon that analyses experience into momentary mental events and their factors. In the classical Theravada scheme there are fifty-two mental factors (cetasika), seven of which…
Started by Ayya Kusalañāṇī4 replies182 views