Tradition
Buddhist
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If perception is free of concepts, as Dignāga says, how do I ever see a cup as a cup?
I've been reading an introduction to Buddhist epistemology on the train, and I'm stuck on Dignāga's definition of perception (pratyakṣa) as "free from conceptual construction". As I understand it, the object of perception is the bare particular, and anything general, like "cup",…
Started by Pieter van Dijkhuizen1 reply -
Every cell in my body is replaced every seven years, so am I even the same person?
At Sunday lunch my uncle reminded me that I borrowed 20,000 shillings from him when I was fifteen. I said, as a joke, that every cell in my body has been replaced since then, so the boy who borrowed it is gone…
Started by Baraka Mwakyusa4 replies -
Outcomes rightly change how much we blame someone, even when luck decided them
Two drivers leave the same wedding equally drunk and drive equally badly. One gets home. The other hits a child who ran into the road. In every court I have covered, the second driver faces something far heavier than the first, and…
Started by Sana Rizvi5 replies -
What does dependent origination actually claim? My daughter asked and I had no answer
My daughter is fourteen. Last week, stuck in traffic near Borella, she asked me what paṭicca samuppāda means. I have heard the word at the temple my whole life. I said "it means everything is connected", and she said that sounds like…
Started by Nuwan Perera4 replies -
Translating śūnyatā into Vietnamese: why “không” keeps sliding into “nothing”
I translate philosophy into Vietnamese, and I have run into a problem that the English-language warnings about emptiness don't quite cover. The Sino-Vietnamese word for emptiness is không (空). In the Heart Sutra, which many Vietnamese Buddhists chant, form is emptiness and…
Started by Vũ Quốc BảoReply first (no replies yet) -
Advaita says the Self is not the doer. Is that an answer to the free will problem, or a way of leaving it?
I want to put my own tradition's answer on the free will question to the test, because I suspect it is either very deep or a polite evasion, and I can't decide which. The karmic traditions in India share a puzzle. Acts…
Started by Arjun IyerReply first (no replies yet) -
Dōgen’s “being-time”: is time something things have, or something they are?
Dōgen (1200–1253), founder of the Sōtō Zen school in Japan, wrote a short and very strange essay in 1240 called "Uji", usually translated "Being-Time", which became part of his Shōbōgenzō. Its central claim is that time is not a container things exist…
Started by Reza Tehrani2 replies -
Emptiness is not nothingness: common misreadings of śūnyatā
I keep seeing "emptiness" in Buddhist philosophy explained as "nothing exists" or "everything is an illusion". That's exactly the view Nāgārjuna rejects as nihilism. For Madhyamaka, things are empty of intrinsic nature (svabhāva). They exist, but only dependently: on causes and conditions,…
Started by Meera Kulkarni3 replies -
If Buddhism says there is no self, what exactly gets reborn?
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 no self, what is reborn? Who carries the karma? If I do something…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
Is fana in Sufism the same as nirvana in Buddhism?
My grandmother used to read Sufi poetry about fana, the annihilation of the self in God. Now I've started reading about Buddhism and nirvana, which also seems to involve the end of the self. Are these basically the same experience described in…
Started by Elif Yıldız4 replies -
If a machine might have interests, what do we owe it before we know?
Of course the thing that has eaten my semester is the one I was most sceptical about: whether anything is owed to AI systems that might have interests. Here's my difficulty. On the question of whether there is something it is like…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 replies -
Parfit was right: identity is not what matters in survival
I'm the resident sceptic in my effective altruism group, but on this one I'm a believer, so bring your best objections. Parfit's argument in Part III of Reasons and Persons (1984), roughly: Suppose your brain is divided and each half placed in…
Started by Ethan Mercer6 replies -
Reading group: Nagarjuna, Mulamadhyamakakarika chapter 1 (on conditions)
The Mūlamadhyamakakārikā opens with an examination of causal conditions (pratyaya). The first verse says that nothing arises from itself, from something else, from both, or without a cause. The chapter then examines the four types of condition recognised by the Abhidharma schools:…
Started by Meera Kulkarni4 replies -
There is no self: the Buddhist and Humean bundle views are basically right
Hume, in the Treatise (Book 1, Part 4, Section 6), says that when he looks within he never catches "himself", only some particular perception: heat, cold, love, pain. The self is a bundle of perceptions in constant flux. The Buddhist doctrine of…
Started by Priya Raghavan7 replies -
I have grown cocoa for thirty years and never seen chocolate made. How do I know that is where it goes?
Last week my son sent me an article that said most of what any of us knows, we know only because somebody told us. I laughed, then I thought about it while I was splitting pods. I have grown cocoa for thirty…
Started by Akosua Mensah5 replies -
Nagarjuna’s tetralemma is not a rejection of logic
The catuṣkoṭi, or tetralemma, considers four options for any proposition: it is, it is not, both, neither. In the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, Nāgārjuna often rejects all four. For example, the Buddha after death neither exists, nor doesn't exist, nor both, nor neither. Some readers…
Started by Meera Kulkarni4 replies -
Is the flame on my burner a thing, or something that keeps happening?
I run a kitchen in Dubai, twenty-two cooks, nine countries, and on a slow afternoon I was staring at a gas flame. It keeps the same shape and colour for hours, but nothing in it stays: the gas comes in, burns, and…
Started by Joel D'Souza5 replies -
Camus and the Buddhists: two ways of refusing the question of life’s meaning
I translate French philosophy into Vietnamese, and I'm finishing a new translation of The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). It opens with the famous sentence that there is only one really serious philosophical problem, suicide: judging whether life is worth living. And it…
Started by Vũ Quốc Bảo5 replies -
Predictive processing and the Buddhist idea of constructed perception
In cognitive science, the predictive processing framework (Andy Clark's Surfing Uncertainty, 2016; Jakob Hohwy's The Predictive Mind, 2013) says the brain is constantly generating predictions about incoming sensory signals, and what we perceive is largely the brain's best guess, corrected by prediction…
Started by Priya Raghavan4 replies -
Guo Xiang said things are ‘self-so’. Does that mean uncaused, or caused by everything?
After my question about non-being, a friend at the park told me to read Guo Xiang, who wrote the commentary on the Zhuangzi that shaped every later edition. (There is an old story that he took much of it from an earlier…
Started by Liu Mingqiao5 replies -
One night at the delivery bed, tested against five traditions’ answers to what makes an act right
Three weeks ago a mother I was sitting with delivered a baby who was clearly unwell. The doctor had been called and was twenty minutes away. The mother, exhausted, held my hand and asked: “Is my baby all right?” I did not…
Started by Farhana Akter5 replies -
Kūkai and Bhartṛhari: when a word is part of what is real rather than a label for it
Last spring I visited Kōyasan, the mountain monastery Kūkai founded, and sat in on the morning chanting. I don't understand Sanskrit and barely understand the Sino-Japanese readings, but it was obvious the monks didn't treat the syllables as labels for something else.…
Started by Rin Matsuda5 replies -
Why do scholars keep saying “duty” is a bad translation of dharma?
I am translating some Malayalam devotional poems into English, and I've hit a word I can't carry across. The word dharma comes up constantly, and every English version I look at uses “duty” or “righteousness”. Then a lecturer in a comparative philosophy…
Started by Kavya Menon5 replies -
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 replies -
Cārvāka and Epicurus, two ancient materialists at a deathbed
A question from the bedside. Epicurus helped me think about death without flinching: in the Letter to Menoeceus he says death is nothing to us, because where death is, we are not, and where we are, death is not. I've never repeated…
Started by Nadia Haddad5 replies -
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 Nirmala Jayasekara6 replies -
When Nāgārjuna says he has no thesis, isn’t that a thesis?
One idea in Nāgārjuna keeps catching on me like a boot on a root. Nāgārjuna says (I think in a work called the Vigrahavyāvartanī) that if he had a thesis, the fault the opponent points out would apply to him, but since…
Started by Nima Tsering Gurung4 replies -
Does general anaesthesia remove experience, or only our memory of it?
I work in hospital administration in Cairo, not medicine, but over the years I've heard a great many patients describe going under and coming back. Most say the same thing: one moment they were counting backwards, the next they were in recovery.…
Started by Omar Ragab5 replies -
Zhaozhou’s dog, Dōgen, and a robotics engineer: does a robot have buddha-nature?
A small puzzle from my temple that connects to the threads here about machines. The first case of the Gateless Gate collection is the famous one: a monk asks Zhaozhou whether a dog has buddha-nature, and Zhaozhou answers "Mu" (in Chinese, wu).…
Started by Aiko Tanabe5 replies -
If many-sidedness is true only from a standpoint, then Jain anekāntavāda undermines itself
Here is the classic challenge, which I want to press as hard as I can before I hear the answer. Anekāntavāda says reality is many-sided, and every claim holds only from some standpoint. Now take that claim itself. Either it holds absolutely,…
Started by Oskar Nyberg5 replies