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Reading group: the chariot in the Milindapañha, read beside Hume’s “Of personal identity”

Kenneth Leung Chi-ho Fellow
· 5 replies · 141 views
Personal identityAnalyticBuddhistModern EuropeanAbhidharmaEmpiricismDavid HumeDerek ParfitNagasena#bundle-theory#milindapanha#personal-identity#reading-group
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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 Western one side by side, slowly, and see where they really meet and where they only seem to.

Texts:
– The Milindapañha (Questions of King Milinda), the opening dialogue between King Milinda and the monk Nāgasena, and the later passage on the flame. I. B. Horner's translation for the Pali Text Society is the most careful; T. W. Rhys Davids's older translation is freely available.
– Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, Book 1, Part 4, Section 6, "Of personal identity", and the passage on personal identity in the Appendix.

Plan:
1. Week 1: Nāgasena's name and the chariot.
2. Week 2: the flame and continuity: "neither the same nor another".
3. Week 3: Hume 1.4.6.
4. Week 4: Hume's Appendix, and, for those who want it, the appendix on the Buddha's view in Parfit's Reasons and Persons.

Post per week. Please quote the text you're responding to.

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5 replies

  1. Ayya Kusalañāṇī

    Fellow

    Week 1. The opening is a lovely piece of theatre. Nāgasena introduces himself and immediately says "Nāgasena" is only a designation, that no person is found there. The king is scandalised: then who keeps the precepts, who meditates, who sins? Nāgasena asks how the king came, and the king says by chariot. Is the chariot the pole? The axle? The wheels? All of them together? Something apart from them? Each is denied. Then "chariot" is just a designation for the parts in dependence on one another, and so is "Nāgasena". What I notice: the king's first worry is moral, who is responsible, not metaphysical. The text knows what is at stake.

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  2. Kavya Menon

    Fellow

    Week 2. The flame is my favourite image. A lamp burns through the night; is the flame of the first watch the same as the flame of the last? Not the same, but not another either: it is one flame in dependence on the one lamp. Nāgasena says rebirth is like that. As a poet I love that the answer is "neither", but I'm not sure I understand what it commits me to.

  3. Alistair Gow

    Contributor

    Week 3. Rereading Hume beside Nāgasena was illuminating. Hume opens by attacking the philosophers who think we are intimately conscious of a self. Then the famous introspection: he always stumbles on some particular perception. Then the bundle. Then a long argument that our belief in identity comes from the imagination smoothing over resemblance and causation. He compares the mind to a theatre, and then warns that the comparison misleads because there is no stage. The chariot and the theatre are both images offered and then partly withdrawn.

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  4. Elif Yıldız

    Fellow

    Week 4, the Appendix. This surprised me most. Hume says that on reviewing the section he finds himself in a labyrinth: he can't reconcile his principles with an account of what unites the perceptions. He admits defeat. Nāgasena never admits defeat; he has the doctrine of dependent arising to explain why the parts hang together. So here the two genuinely part ways: Hume has a problem he can't solve, and the Buddhist text has an answer, whether or not one accepts it.

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  5. Kenneth Leung Chi-ho

    Fellow

    Thank you all. My summary: the chariot and the bundle share an analytical move; the flame and the Appendix show the difference. Nāgasena has continuity through dependence and a moral reason to care; Hume has continuity he cannot account for and, by his own report, no reason to keep worrying about it after dinner. Parfit, who read the Buddhist texts and cited them, is the one Western philosopher who took the step from the analysis to "and this should change how you feel about death". That's where the two traditions come closest.

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