The Sanskrit philosophical school called Vaiśeṣika is the one most directly dealing with ontology. Its fundamental text is the Vaiśeṣikasūtra, which is commented upon by Prāśastapada in the Pādarthadharmasaṅgraha (from now one PDhS) (the following is a summary of Padārthadharmasaṅgraha ad 8.7).

The school distinguishes substances and qualities. The first group includes four types of atoms (earth, water, fire, air) and then aether, time, space, ātmans and internal organs (manas). The latter are needed as a separate category, because they are point-sized and therefore not made of atoms, unlike the external sense faculties.
Among the 17 qualities, it recognises parimāṇa or dimension'. This encompasses at first two possibilities, namely atomic (aṇu), or extended (mahat). The former covers partless entities that have allegedly no spatial dimension, like points in Euclidean geometry and atoms themselves. These are considered to be without extension and permanent through time (nitya). The latter is subdivided into mahat and paramahat. The first covers all objects one encounters in normal life, from triads of atoms (imagined to be of the size of a particle of dust, the first level of atomic structure to be extended) to the biggest mountain. These entities have parts and extension and have an origin and an end in time. The second subdivision covers special substances, listed as ākāśaaether’, space, time and ātmans, which need to be imagined to be present at each location. Such entities are also imagined to be nitya, that is permanent through time. In other words, they are present at each location of time and space.
The above also implies that entities considered to be permanent through time can only be either atomic or all-pervasive.

However, space, time, aether and selves (ātman) are present at all locations in different ways.

About aether, to begin with, texts like Jayanta’s Nyāyamañjarī say that it needs to be accepted as a fifth substance in order to justify the diffusion of sound across multiple media. Texts of the Vaiśeṣika school, and of the allied school of Nyāya specify that aether does not occupy all locations, but rather is in contact with each individual atom):

[The aether’s] all-pervasiveness consists in the fact that it is in contact with each corporal (mūrta) substance.
(sarvamūrtadravyasaṃyogitvam vibhutvam (Tarkasaṃgrahadīpikā ad 14).)

This means that aether does not pervade atoms, but is in contact (saṃyoga) with each one of them.

This point is already explicit in the allied school of Nyāya, the Nyāyabhāṣya, and is needed because of the point-sized nature of atoms. If these were pervaded by aether, then they would have parts, and thus not be permanent. These undesired consequences are examined in the following:

This is impossible, because of the penetration through aether || NS 4.2.18 ||

It is impossible for an atom [to be] partless and permanent. Why? Because of the penetration through ether, that is, because an atom, if it were permeated, that is `penetrated’ by aether, within and outside, then, because of this penetration it would have parts, and due to having parts it would be impermanent.

Or, the aether is not all-located} || 4.2.19 ||

Alternatively, we don’t accept that. There is no aether within the atoms and therefore aether ends up not being all-located

(ākāśavyatibhedāt tadanupapattiḥ || 4.2.18 ||
tasyāṇor niravayasya nityasyānupapattiḥ. kasmāt. ākāśavyatibhedāt. antarbahiścāṇur ākāśena samāviṣṭo vyatibhinno vyatibhedāt sāvayavaḥ sāvayavatvād anitya iti.
ākāśāsarvagatatvaṃ vā || 4.2.19 ||
athaitan neṣyate paramāṇor antar nāsty ākāśam ity asarvagatatvaṃ prasajyeta iti.)

Aether is postulated as a substrate of sound (which can move through solids, liquids and air, thus proving that it has neither earth, nor water, nor air as substrate). Thus, it needs to be unitary (multiple aethers would not explain the propagation of sound, sound would stop at the end of the respective aether) and it needs to be present at all locations (for the same reason). More in detail: Only because of the unitary nature of aether is it possible for sound to travel between different loci. Otherwise, one would have to posit some mechanism to explain how the sound encountered in one aether travels to another one. Instead, the simpler solution is to posit that aether is necessarily both single (eka) and present at all locations (vibhu).

As for ātman, the self is by definition permanent (otherwise, no afterlife nor cycle of rebirths would be possible). It cannot be atomic, though, because the ātman is the principle of awareness and people become aware of things potentially everywhere. The fact that they don’t become perceptually aware of things being, e.g., behind a wall, by contrast, is only due to the fact that the ātman needs to be in touch (via the internal sense organ, manas, which is believed to be atomic and to move quickly from one to the other sense-faculty) to the sense faculties (indriya) in order for perceptual awareness to take place. Yogins are able to perceive things their bodies are not in contact with because their ātmans are omnipresent, like our ātman, and are able, unlike our ātman, to connect with other bodies’ sense faculties.
Within Sanskrit philosophy, Jaina philosophers suggested that the ātman is co-extensive with the body, since it can experience whatever the body can experience. Vaiśeṣika and other non-Jaina authors disagree, because this would lead to the absurd consequence of an ātman changing in size through one’s life.

A further element to be taken into account with regard to theories of location, and in particular while adjudicating whether they are about occupation or non-occupation is materiality.
Occupation of space seems to occur only from the level of atomic triads up to big, but not all-located, objects. Atoms are said to be mūrta and mūrta is usually translated as `material’, but taken in isolations, atom do not have parts and are only point-sized. In this sense, their being mūrta refers more about their being fundamental for material entities, rather than being material if taken in isolation. The distinction is theoretically relevant, but less evident at the pragmatic level, given that atoms are never found in isolation. Being mūrta is attributed to atoms of the four elements (not to aether) as well as to the inner sense organ (Nyāyakośa, s.v.), but not to ātman neither to aether.

We concluded today a great workshop on Maṇḍana’s Vidhiviveka and these are my first comments on what we could establish. My deepest gratitude goes to all participants. (For more on the workshop, read here: https://philosophy.utoronto.ca/event/workshop-maṇḍana-on-ritual-duties/)

Structure:
vv. 2.1–2.6: Maṇḍana’s siddhānta on iṣṭābhyupāyatā (chapter 11 in Elliot Stern’s forthcoming edition)

v. 2.7: summary of chapter 11, opening the new topic (chapter 12)

v. 2.8: yathāśakti provision applies to nitya sacrifices, sarvāṅgopasaṃhāra in kāmya ones (chapter 13)

v. 2.9: time needs to be the distinguishing factor between nitya/namimittika and kāmya rituals. For the former, kāla is included in nimitta, that ensures avaśyakartavyatā (chapter 14)

Summary of Chapters 13–14:
Chapter 13 tries to find a suitable candidate as phala for nitya sacrifices. The Prābhākara opponent insists on akaraṇe pratyavāya, whereas the siddhāntin (or quasi-siddhāntin) prefers pāpakṣaya. A first proposal in this sense, however, is refuted, because it would lead to just vāstava nityatva, and this would not guarantee the application of the yathāśakti provision. This can only be guaranteed by the ought-implies-can metarule and thus by a śābda nityatva, prescribed as such by the Veda. Hence, Maṇḍana wants both levels.

The akaraṇe-pratyavāya alternative is discussed at length. A preliminary possibility saying that akaraṇe there is pratyavāya, and that the sacrifice, being duḥkha, leads in an ānuṣaṅgika way to the production of pāpakṣaya.
This is finally refuted because there is no Vedic text justifying this view (it would be just inflicting whimsical pain to oneself).

At this point, the discussion becomes more technical. The acceptance of the yathāśakti provision implies that one contracts (saṅkoca) the meaning of either the mention of the adhikāra (so that only a samartha adhikārin is meant) or of the various aṅgavidhis. Which one is better? The constant risk to be avoided is that the same view could be applied to nitya and kāmya rituals, thus ending up in their being non-different.

The opponent suggests the application of Kāmsyabhojinyāya and of bādha based on bhūyastva in order to get to the result that the single adhikāraśruti should be contracted and not the many aṅgavidhis. By contrast, Maṇḍana (atha matam, p, 671 in ES’ edition, 17.5.2023) thinks that the aṅgavidhis are restricted, bc otherwise two unwanted consequences would follow (vaicitrya-risk in the prayoga) and because a single śruti is not evidence, since words are used in context (naitat sāram, p. 672).

Thus, this solution is putting much wait on yāvajjīvam-śruti, whereas chapter 14 will put in the context of naimittika sacrifices.

In this chapter, the new risk is adhikārātikrānti and the additional hurdle are naimittika sacrifices, which are not performed every day, but are otherwise identical to the nitya ones. To the atha matam and naitat sāram positions mentioned above something else is added, namely the definition of nimitta as not being a viśeṣaṇa of the adhikārin (this is what the Prābhākara opponent argues for), but just a nimitta. Time (kāla) also belongs to the nimitta in the case of nitya and naimittika sacrifices, although it is an aṅga for kāmya ones and can hence be a distinguishing factor (v. 2.9).

One point we did not have the time to discuss: Vācaspati (on 13.5) discusses a tantra vs prasaṅga approach and concludes that the first one should be preferred. What two things are centrally performed via tantra? Vācaspati clearly says that one is a kāmya and the other one is a nitya ritual (e.g. ubhayor api kāmyanityayoḥ karmaṇoḥ […] tantram anuṣṭhānam" ortasmān na kāmye ‘nuṣṭhīyamāne prāsaṅgikatvaṃ nityasya”, p. 660), but what are these referring to? A suggestion: There is a nitya sacrifice corresponding to the śābda nityatva, and a kāmya sacrifice corresponding to the vāstava nityatva and the two are performed at the same time.

Defenders of cross-cultural mystical experience are right to note that in many widely varying cultures, respected sages have referred to the experience of an ultimate nonduality: a perception that everything, including oneself, is ultimately one. But one might also then rightly ask: which ultimate nonduality?

Nondualism may be the world’s most widespread philosophy, but it can mean different things – not merely different things in different places, but different things in the same place. Members of the Indian Vedānta tradition frequently proclaimed that everything is “one, without a second”, in the words of the Upaniṣads they followed. But they disagreed as to what that meant. Śaṅkara founded the Advaita Vedānta tradition – a-dvaita literally meaning non-dual – which argued that only the one, ultimate truth (sat, braḥman) was real, and all multiplicity and plurality was an illusion. His opponent Rāmānuja agreed that everything is “one, without a second” – but in his Viśiṣṭādvaita (qualified nondual) school, that meant something quite different. All the many things and people we see around us – what Chinese metaphysicians called the “ten thousand things” – are parts of that ultimate one, and they are real, not illusory.

I was reminded of this point in the great comments on my previous post about cross-cultural mysticism. I had cited W.T. Stace as an influential advocate of the view that mysticism is cross-cultural, and noted how Robert Forman’s book defended Stace by pointing to contentless experiences of void, from the Yoga Sūtras to Hasidism, that “blot out” sense perception. Seth Segall made the important point that in Stace’s own work not all mystical experiences are contentless in this way. Leaving aside the “hot” or “visionary” experiences (like St. Teresa and the angel) which Stace does not count as mystical experiences – even among what Stace counts as genuine mystical experiences, he makes a key distinction between introvertive and extrovertive mystical experiences. This isn’t just a distinction between the interpretations applied to the experiences, but between the experiences themselves. The contentless “Pure Consciousness Events” described in Forman’s book, where distinctions fade into void, are introvertive; experiences of merging with a unified natural world, like Teresa saying “it was granted to me in one instant how all things are seen and contained in God”, are extrovertive.

And here’s where I find this all really interesting: that introvertive/extrovertive distinction, between different types of experiences, corresponds to the metaphysical difference between Śaṅkara and Rāmānuja! Neither Śaṅkara nor Rāmānuja cites experience, mystical or otherwise, as the source of their philosophy. Both claim to be deriving it from the Upaniṣads (and other texts like the Bhagavad Gītā), and they each defend their view (of the scriptures and of reality) with logical arguments. Yet even so, the distinction Stace observed in descriptions of mystical experiences turns out to correspond pretty closely to the distinction between their philosophies.

In Śaṅkara’s philosophy, as in an introvertive experience, the many things of the world, including oneself, all fall away; what remains is the one reality alone. In Rāmānuja’s philosophy, as in an extrovertive experience, the things of the world, including oneself, remain, but they are all unified together: they continue to have a real existence, but as connected members of a larger unity.

All this is a major caveat for perennialist-leaning ideas: even if you were to argue that mystical experience pointed to a cross-culturally recognized nondualism, you would still have to specify which nondualism. The smartass response is to say “all the nondualisms are one”, but that’s not really satisfactory, not even to the nondualists themselves. Rāmānuja attacked Śaṅkara’s view, and while Śaṅkara lived centuries before Rāmānuja, he attacked other thinkers who had views like Rāmānuja’s.

Some mystically inclined thinkers take a moderate or intermediate position that compromises between an absolute nondual view and the view of common sense or received tradition. Such was the approach of Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindī, the Indian Sufi who reconciled Sufi experiences of mystical oneness with Qur’anic orthodoxy by proclaiming “not ‘All is Him’ but ‘All is from Him'”. It’s tempting to view Rāmānuja’s approach to Śaṅkara as similar, tempering an absolute mysticism with a common-sense view of the world as real: Śaṅkara’s mystical excesses take him way out there and Rāmānuja pulls him back. But such an approach doesn’t really work. It’s flummoxed not only by the fact that Śaṅkara claimed no mystical grounding for his philosophy, but also by the existence of extrovertive mysticism: the many who have felt an experience of oneness with the grass and trees would not have been drawn by that experience to Śaṅkara’s view, but directly to Rāmānuja’s. (I have previously suggested that Rāmānuja is indeed moderating Śaṅkara’s overall approach – but with respect to Śaṅkara’s possible autism rather than to mysticism.)

None of this is intended as a refutation of mystical views of reality, or even necessarily of perennialism. It seems to me that both introvertive and extrovertive experiences are found across a wide range of cultures, often accompanied by a sense of certainty, and are worth taking seriously for that reason. But we then need to take both seriously: if the world is one, then are our many differing perceptions illusory or real? Here, I think, it helps that both illusionist and realist forms of nondual philosophy – experientially based or otherwise – also occur in multiple places. The debates between them might help us sort out what reality – if any – the experiences are pointing to.

Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom.

Pawel Odyniec, who is among the foremost experts on Vedānta and on K.C. Bhattacharya, organised a conference that looks extremely thought-provoking on May 22nd–24th. Please read more about the participants (among which Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, James Madaio, Jessica Frazier, Karl-Stephan Bouthilette…) and the program, and how to register at the link below:
https://konferens.ht.lu.se/spiritual-exercises

Lancaster University is hiring a lecturer in philosophy (full time, indefinite position), to start on August the 1st 2023 or as soon as possible thereafter.

The post is “open to all those working in all areas of Philosophy, though we would particularly welcome applicants whose work addresses topics in either (a) feminist philosophy or (b) history of philosophy, including areas of the history of philosophy which consider the contributions of marginalised groups and comparative philosophy that engages with more than one tradition.”

More details: https://hr-jobs.lancs.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx?id=9897&forced=1

Maṇḍana’s theory of commands centers around his attempt to reduce them to statements of instrumentality. Commanding to X to do Y would amount to say that Y is the instrument to realise a goal of X. Maṇḍana establishes (in his eyes) this point in the first part of the siddhānta within one of his masterpieces, the Vidhiviveka ‘Discrimination about Commands’. This consists in some verses and a very extended autocommentary thereon. The first part of the Vidhiviveka covers objectors, the second one (the siddhānta) opens with six verses and commentary explaining this view.

However, Maṇḍana then has to harmonize this point with the pre-existing Mīmāṃsā account of duties distinguishing between three sets of sacrifices, namely:

1. —nitya karman ‘fixed sacrifice’, to be performed regularly (typically each day), no matter what, but where a performance yathāśakti ‘as much as one can’ is acceptable.
2. —naimittika karman ‘occasional sacrifice’, to be performed whenever the occasion arises (e.g., an eclypse or the birth of a son). As in the above case, yathāśakti performance is acceptable.
3. -kāmya karman ‘elective sacrifice’, to be performed only if one wants their results and which needs to be performed exactly as prescribed (yathāvidhi or yathānyāya), no relaxing of the norms allowed.

Once a sacrifice has been undertaken, even if it is kāmya, its completion becomes compulsory and the way of such completion remains yathāvidhi in the case of kāmya sacrifices.
How can this difference be kept if all commands are nothing but statements about instrumentality? Would not a statement about instrumentality correspond only to the kāmya category?

Maṇḍana dedicates to this problem the next verses and commentary of his Vidhiviveka, where he examines several possibilities. The main constraints, are, again, keeping the distinction between nitya/naimittika sacrifices on the one hand and kāmya sacrifices on the other hand, as well as the distinction between yathāśakti and yathāvidhi modes of performance. He therefore explores multiple possible understanding of śakti ‘ability’, phala ‘result’ and adhikāra ‘eligibility, especially in conversation with Prābhākara Mīmāṃsā interlocutors insisting on how all sacrifices are compulsory and how the mentions of result found in conjunction with kāmya rituals is only a way to identify the adhikārin ‘eligible person’ for their performance. For instance, which kind of result could make it possible for a command about a nitya karman to lead one to perform the sacrifice every single day? Are there really results that are always desired? And even if such a result could be found, why would one need to keep a distinction in the yathāśakti and yathānyāya performance? If all sacrifices are instruments to realise a certain result, why would some of them need an accurate performance and other not so? The situation is further complicated by the presence of elective sacrifices prescribed to people ‘who desire heaven’ (svargakāma). In which sense are they different from nitya sacrifices, that also lead to heaven?

Unfortunately, the Vidhiviveka is characterised by a terse style, to say the least. Maṇḍana was probably so much into the topic that at times he seems to take important intermediate passages for granted and just leaves the reader wonder. Fortunately, a more generous commentator, Vācaspati, solves most of the doubt and adds further interesting discussions in his Nyāyakaṇikā.
Last, Sanskritists and philosophers of duty have a duty of gratitude to Elliot Stern, who created the first critical edition of the text, including also its previously unpublished commentaries.

Curious to know more? We will discuss chapters 12–14 of the Vidhiviveka in this workshop: https://philosophy.utoronto.ca/event/workshop-maṇḍana-on-ritual-duties/

Philosophy East and West needs reviewers for the books listed below. Interested reviewers should send a copy of their CV, a representative book review (or other piece of academic writing), and a short statement about their expertise on the book’s matter to c.malcolm.keating@gmail.com. (Anyone interested in reviewing a book not listed is also encouraged to email with the same information. Reviewers should have a Ph.D. in a relevant scholarly field or be a Ph.D. student.)

Kataoka, Kei and John Taber, Meaning and Non-existence: Kumārila’s Refutation of Dignāga’s Theory of Exclusion. The Apohavāda Chapter of Kumārila’s Ślokavārttika; Critical Edition and Annotated Translation

https://verlag.oeaw.ac.at/en/product/meaning-and-non-existence-kum-rila-s-refutation-of-dign-ga-s-theory-of-exclusion/99200526

Maharaj, Ayon, ed. The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Vedanta

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/bloomsbury-research-handbook-of-vedanta-9781350063242/

O’Brien-Kop, Karen. Philosophy of the Yogasutra. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/philosophy-of-the-yogasutra-9781350286184/

Sarbacker, Stuart Ray. Tracing the Path of Yoga: The History and Philosophy of Indian Mind-Body Discipline. https://sunypress.edu/Books/T/Tracing-the-Path-of-Yoga

Uskakov, Alexander. Philosophy of the Brahmasutra

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/philosophy-of-the-brahmasutra-9781350150003/

I recently received a note from Prof. Nirmalya Chakraborty (Rabindra Bharati University) about an exciting new digital library. It includes three categories: Navya-Nyāya Scholarship in Nabadwip, Philosophers of Modern India, and Twentieth Century Paṇḍitas of Kolkata. You can find the site here: https://darshanmanisha.org

You can learn more about the project from the following announcement.

It was only two weeks ago, it was only a day after the fact, that I, along with many others, learned of the death of a giant in modern philosophy.  Equally significant for his illumination of the thought of Edmund Husserl and of debates in the classical Indian tradition, that giant was Jintendranath Mohanty (1928-2023). I, along with several generations of people in these fields, in India and the United States, had the unmatched privilege and good fortune of being his student. I have written and done conference presentations about my learning experience from Mohanty and about his works in other venues, and so the editors of The Indian Philosophy Blog have asked me to write a remembrance of him here.

The conventional, and easy, thing to do in response to this call would be for me to recite the narrative of his development in philosophy and about his major works. I could therefore tread through his boyhood life in Cuttack, Orissa and the many consequential people who were members of his family and circle of relationships. Recounting his college days would follow, finding him debating the relative merits of Gandhi and Marx and barely escaping a tumult of violence surrounding his dorm building in Calcutta in 1947. Then would ensue the impressive story of his MA studies in Calcutta, where he worked in earnest with the traditional Vedānta and Nyāya pandits Yogendranatha Tirtha Vedāntatirtha and Ananta Kumar Tarkatirtha, and then his Ph.D. program in Göttingen where he studied philosophy with Joseph König, mathematics with Carl Siegel and Vedic Sanskrit with C.F.v.Weizäcker. Then would come the amazing tale of his return to India, where, before fully entering academic life, he followed the “Land Gift” (Bhoodān) movement of Vinoba Bhave across the country for a year. His career as a University professor began in Calcutta in 1955, where, between his hire and departure for the University of Oklahoma in 1970, his first three books, Nicolai Hartmann and A.N. Whitehead: A Study in Recent Platonism (1957), Gangeśa’s Theory of Truth (1966) and Edmund Husserl’s Theory of Meaning (1969) firmly established his importance in both modern Western philosophy and classical Indian thought. For the coming decades, his journey would take him from Oklahoma to the New School for Social Research, Temple University and Emory University, where he continued to bring forth landmark publications in both areas.  His world-leading authority on Husserl was reinforced through studies such as The Concept of Intentionality in Husserl’s Phenomenology (1972), Husserl and Frege (1982) and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Analytic Account (1989), and his brilliant distillation of the relevance of debates in Indian thought could be followed in Reason and Tradition in Indian Thought (1992), Essays in Indian Philosophy (1993)and Explorations in Indian Philosophy (2001). He capped his career upon his retirement, even faced with the burden of failing vision, with his monumental Philosophy of Edmund Husserl (2008), where he detailed his lifelong conviction that Husserl’s thought, rather than being marked by a series of transformations, was the unfolding of a fundamental continuity. I do not know of anyone, nor do I know anyone who knows anyone, who has made such a deep and lasting impact in two traditions of philosophy, not to mention who brought them together in his intercultural reflections so thoroughly.

But I knew J.N. Mohanty, primarily and almost exclusively, as a student. My more “personal” interactions with him were quite brief and fleeting, but my experience in his classrooms and of his force as a philosopher in published works and professional venues is one of those things that changes one…forever. In light of this limited personal knowledge but enduringly philosophically transformative encounters I had with Professor Mohanty, I think this brief memorial will be better spent sharing some of my clearest and most cherished memories of him.

I first arrived at Temple University in Philadelphia, where Mohanty had already been teaching for some years, in the summer of 1993. I was then little more than a kid from the plains of North Dakota, barely cognizant of, but fascinated by, the larger world around me. I had however already decided that I wanted to write a dissertation on the degree to which Schopenhauer’s limited acquaintance with Indian thought had influenced his system. Shortly after my arrival, a housemate advised me to introduce myself to Mohanty, which I did when the fall semester started. One of the few people I’d met in the area by then who was shorter than I, but sporting his beige coat, bright eyes and pleasant smile, he greeted me politely, listened to my interests and said: “well, I am thinking about retiring but I’d be interested in your project if I’m still around by the time you finish it.” He would, of course, continue working at Temple and Emory for fifteen years after saying this. I decided during my first semester to take his biannual graduate seminar on Hegel’s Phenomenology.

The course was spellbinding. Mohanty would sit in front of the room, with a translation of the text before him but never opened, and he proceeded, for two and a half hours, to give a completely organized, systematically developed and surpassingly brilliant lecture every session. The lectures were mixed with brief moments of humor and pithy revelations of almost shocking lucidity. Once, while talking in the introductory lecture on Hegel’s notion of Geist, Mohanty recalled what his former colleague at the New School, the renowned Hegel scholar Gustav Müller, used to say about it. “In an unabridged German dictionary,” Mohanty paraphrased Müller, “there are ninety-two alternative definitions of Geist…and in Hegel it means all of them.” Following would be incredible insights. “Kant seemed to make of knowledge only a sensuous and severely limited matter. But Hegel shows us that testimony and history too must be fundamental sources of knowledge. If they were not, then reading this book, Hegel’s Phenomenology, would have no cognitive value.” “Kant was the kind of philosopher who greatly respected limits. But, even though in some ways Hegel misses Kant, Hegel points out quite rightly here that even to think a limit is to think beyond it.” To one student who, toward the beginning of the seminar, balked that philosophy tended to reinforce his original convictions, Mohanty gently smiled and retorted: “that’s not good. That kind of reinforcement reduces philosophy from reflection to dogmatics.” In the midst of all this, Mohanty would occasionally subject Hegel to alternately direct and impish criticism, but these were always qualified by deep appreciation. “That Hegel did not know enough about Indian philosophy to take its full significance into account allows us to dismiss his assessments of it. They were just wrong. But does that mean that the Hegelian system itself cannot go on, as long as it takes into account Indian rationality, Chinese rationality, African rationality, and the rationalities of other traditions?” In the middle of recounting the story of Hegel’s composition of the Phenomenology while still teaching at a Gymnasium, Mohanty noted that biographical details of his life suggested that Hegel was basically a good guy, because, at the end of his first year of employment, he refused a raise and suggested the school use the extra money to fix its WCs. And, in my favorite anecdote from the class, during the first week a student looked at the syllabus and asked him why we were reading all of the Phenomenology accept the final chapter, Mohanty grinned and quipped: “we will leave that chapter for someone who has Absolute Knowledge”

This first class that I had with Mohanty was both enormously enriching and deeply intimidating to me. While I took my undergraduate studies and independent reading to have given me a strong grounding in philosophy, which I often carried around with a youthful arrogance that hid the terrible insecurities of what we now call “Imposter Syndrome,” I was not, could not be like that, with him. Listening to Mohanty alerted me simultaneously to what it really meant to be a genius and how incredibly far away I was from even being able to carry a one-on-one conversation with him. Scared of ever being wrong and being exposed for it in the classroom, I tended to keep quiet while taking copious notes. I had no idea what I would write for a seminar paper in the class. He mentioned at some point while reading through the first chapter that Hegel’s position on the universality of indexicals could be fruitfully compared to the views of Frege, Husserl and Russell. That is the paper I wrote, investing weeks on the composition. It was left as an Incomplete for over a year. In the early spring of 1995, during my first year of exchange research in Tübingen, Germany, I happened to see Mohanty walking through the streets of the city’s Altstadt, as he was scheduled to give a talk there. “Ah!” he exclaimed, pointing at me and smiling widely. He asked how I was doing in Germany and we chatted a bit. I nervously brought up the matter of the still Incomplete grade. “Oh, of course,” he replied, “but I don’t have it with me,” and we laughted. In the early fall, I learned he had given me a B+. “As a first effort on a most difficult subject,” he wrote simply on the back, “this is a good attempt.” I did not really know whether to be disappointed about the grade or overjoyed with the comment—or puzzled about the difference between them. But, from that point on, from both participating in his seminars and reading his works, I was quite simply in awe of Mohanty…and I still am. I was usually very slow to speak in his presence, a stance that the other people who know me perhaps wish I would adopt with them more often.

I either took for credit or audited the rest of Mohanty’s two-year cycle of courses, on Kant’s first Critique, on Husserl and Heidegger and on Indian Philosophy. What better guide could one have to the Critique of Pure Reason than a man who, while writing his own dissertation at Göttingen some forty years earlier on all three of Kant’s Critiques, had compiled his own German glossary and index of Kant’s technical terminology? What better instructor could one have on 20^th century phenomenology than one of the few owners of his own set of keys to the Husserl Archives? And what better elucidator could one hope for of classical Indian texts than someone who had done his own private translations of the commentary Bhāmati and closely examined, from a phenomenological perspectives, each of Gangeśa’s more than two-dozen candidate conceptions of pramā? Mohanty would light-heartedly joke about the incredible legacy he had already made for himself in both modern Western and classical Indian thought. “My books indirectly reveal Frege’s problem of reference. I find that, in libraries, my books on Western philosophy are listed under the name of ‘J.N. Mohanty.’ But my books on Indian philosophy are listed under the name of “Jitendra Nath Mohanty.’ I am sort of like ‘The Morning Star’ and ‘The Evening Star.’” After that, my housemate at the time and colleague took, just between the two of us, to howlingly but affectionately referring to him as “Professor Evening Star.”   

During his seminar on Indian Philosophy, it came time for me to seek out committee members who would evaluate my preliminary examinations and dissertation proposal in writing and through oral defense, and Professor Mohanty was an obvious choice. It was a foregone conclusion that, should he accept, he would also be a member of my eventual dissertation committee itself. I was almost wracked with nerves when entering his office to ask him for this favor. I had to wait to knock because I heard him on the phone talking to someone in his native language of Oriya. A short consultation followed, and he graciously agreed. But I could tell upon leaving the office that either my project or my nerves unsettled him some, as he let out a long sigh before I could leave the small annex where his office was located. But by the end of the term, my spirits had again lifted, as my paper for the class on Nāgārjuna’s Vigrahavyāvartani earned a mark of “A” from him. That very paper was to become my first conference presentation as a Ph.D. student at the World Congress of Philosophy, held in Philadelphia, in 1998.

Mohanty’s comments during both my prelim and final dissertation defenses, in 1997 and 1999 respectively, were, as usual, penetrating…and even supportive. In one exchange, when I expressed skepticism in my dissertation defense regarding Schopenhauer’s notion of a “double-knowledge” of self, Mohanty said: “but why not probe it more instead of criticizing it? He is saying that we have, at least in one sense, a non-objective knowledge of our bodies. Is that not right?” When the discussion turned among the committee members to a more general critique of Schopenhauer’s questionable position as a self-appointed “spokesman” for Indian philosophy to his 19^th century German audience, pressing me on what I thought were mixed legacies of Schopenhauer’s appropriation of Indian ideas, it was Mohanty who jumped to my defense, and the defense of what was now our shared discipline. “No, I think you are right,” looking first at me and then turning to the room. He insisted, echoing what he had written years before in several essays and in Reason and Tradition: “It’s too easy for skeptics to question someone’s ability to understand another tradition who was not raised in that tradition. But,” he continued, pointing his thumb at his own chest, “what about this philosopher? What about, not just abstract and systematic presumptions, but about the concrete person who works to gain a concrete understanding of other traditions? Should they not be assessed not only as a symptom of a certain historical and interpretive age, but also as an individual case? What have they taken the effort to learn, and how should their views be assessed on that basis?” After the defense was over, it was somewhat customary for committee members to return their hard copies of the manuscript to the Ph.D. candidate so that their marked notes could provide the basis for a final revision by the student. “But,” my advisor informed me, “Professor Mohanty would like to keep his copy. Is that alright with you?”

I did not see Professor Mohanty often after that. A few chance meetings at conferences and a review of his book at a Society of Asian and Comparative Philosophy meeting in California in 2008 were only brief opportunties to engage with him as his health worsened and he eventually retired from teaching. The last time I saw him was at an annual national APA meeting in 2006, in a hotel hallway after a forum we both attended. He greeted me and my former roommate, on whose Ph.D. committee Mohanty also served, and caught up briefly. Another acquaintance of his interrupted, and Mohanty introduced us, pointing first to my friend and then to me, saying proudly, “this is my student, and this is my student.” And that moment brings home to me what an incomparable privilege and gift it was to be, then and now, the student of Jitendranath Mohanty. Though we were not “friends” in any real sense, to say that I will miss him is to be incapable of saying enough. And the descriptive powers of reference will always be inadequate to reckon how much my thinking was trained, informed  and nurtured by his thinking.

In my view the most interesting thing about TikTok is the proliferation of subcultural communities that flourish on it – WitchTok, BimboTok, KinkTok, NunTok. The most unfortunate thing about TikTok, conversely – well, aside from the alarming power it gives the Chinese government – is that there is no real way to find these cultures on the platform, you just hear about them on the news. This week, I happened to hear in that way about one such subculture of particular interest to me – and that is MonkTok.

In Cambodia, that is, younger Buddhist monks are now making videos on TikTok and getting famous for them, drawing up to half a million followers. From what little I know about this phenomenon – basically drawn from one article this week – I have mixed feelings about this.

The monks interviewed by the article say they’re doing it to spread the dharma, the Buddha’s teaching. I am, of course, all for spreading the dharma! Getting more people into Buddhism is, in itself, a good thing.

Where I get a bit more nervous is with the means that the monks use: singing, dancing, posing with cash. These are things that, according to the vinaya (monastic code), monks aren’t supposed to do. And I think that there’s reason for that.

I love singing and dancing, and I have little patience for ascetic texts that tell ordinary people, householders, to avoid such activities – which is why I have such a deep dislike for the Sigālovāda Sutta and its injunction against theatre. But monks are a bit of a different story.

The point of being a monk, as far as I can see, is to voluntarily subject oneself to a much more stringent set of rules and restrictions than ordinary people face. Some of those restrictions are just there to maintain the good reputation of the saṅgha (monastic order) – a rationale frequently cited in the Pali texts – but that rationale obscures the more important question of why there should even be a saṅgha in the first place. And that, as far as I can tell, has to do with being more committed to Buddhist practice than laypeople are – voluntarily foregoing both the joys and concerns of household life, from sex and dancing to money-making, in order to focus one’s wandering mind most fully on the quest to liberate and be liberated from suffering. When I went on a ten-day Goenka vipassanā retreat in 2005, I learned more from its monastic restrictions than I did from the meditation sessions themselves.

So, the question then follows, if you’re not going to follow those extra restrictions, should you even be a monk at all? Should you be encouraged, or even required, to leave the order?

The vinaya’s answer to the latter questions is a pretty clear yes, with a full legal code on what should happen to rule-breakers, from public confession of minor violations to expulsion for major ones. In practice, we know that most living monastic traditions don’t actually follow the vinaya all that strictly. (Most notably, the vinaya says monks aren’t supposed to touch money, but in practice they do all the time.)

So too, people’s actual reasons for becoming a monk are not always what they’re supposed to be in the texts either. In Thailand, there’s a social expectation that every young man join the monkhood once temporarily, for one rainy season (three months or so); men who don’t do this are often considered unmarriageable. I’m not sure whether Cambodia now follows the same custom: their traditions are similar and closely related, but things may have taken a different turn after the Khmer Rouge’s horrific repression.

Still, insofar as people are joining an institution devoted to asceticism, it seems reasonable to require a certain amount of asceticism from them. The reason former monks are considered more marriageable in Thailand, as I understand it, is that they’ve learned better to restrain their desires – or at least that’s the theory. Being a monk is supposed to be pleasurable in many ways, but it’s not supposed to be fun. And I would be particularly worried to see young monks parlay their rains retreat into a career as a social-media influencer: that seems rather the opposite of what they’re supposed to be there for.

I don’t know enough about the situation to have a firm opinion or definite answers; I’ve just read the one article. So I don’t want to make any firm pronouncements here about whether this is a good thing. As with so many cases, the devil is in the details. Maybe MonkTok really is a sincere promotion of the dharma, and maybe that’s worth it. It does seem to me that senior monks would do well to at least question the junior monks’ TikTok presence, and perhaps place controls on it if they’re not satisfied that the practice is for the best.

Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom.

Do the inhabitants of Vaikuṇṭha have desires (or only God’s ones)? Veṅkaṭanātha’s Nyāyasiddhāñjana 174–6 seems to suggest that they can will:

In the same way, Ananta and Garuḍa and the other (permanently liberated souls) and the liberated souls assume this or that form based on their will.

(tathā anantagaruḍādīnāṃ muktānāñ ca icchākṛtatattadrūpam).

But their will, is it an individual will or the same will repeated for each of them? Possibly the latter. Let me explain by elaborating on a different topic, namely that of tedium in heaven.

Christopher M. Brown (Brown 2021) suggests that “our experience of boredom in this life is in fact reflective either of the timeboundedness of the goods that are central to human experience in this life […] or the nature of time as we experience it in this life” (p. 420). This is probably true, which tells us that the experience of superhuman beings in heaven is radically incomparable with ours. Can it be nonetheless desirable?

Brown does not address this concern directly, but tries to make examples of goods that could be experienced in heaven and that we can conceive as being goods, thus implicitly suggesting that heaven can be desirable. For instance, he speaks of the natural human desire for knowledge of creatures is perfected in the greatest way logically possible" (p. 421). But is knowledge desirable per se? Don't we prefer to gain knowledge? Don't we enjoy the process of learning and discovering? Thus, the example of knowledge does not make sense as a case of a pleasure human beings can analogically relate to. Rather, it is a case of participating in God's nature. And happiness in heaven isexcessive” according to Brown, who is here quoting Thomas Aquinas (who, in turn, seems to be pointing to something similar to what Veṅkaṭanātha had in mind). But if this all applies, people in Vaikuṇṭha or heaven are necessarily very different than people on earth (who had specific desires and limited knowledge). In which sense could they be said to retain their “personality”? And if this is not retained, how desirable can heaven be, for us, who are attached to our personalities? Brown addresses this concern indirectly (pp. 424–425) by suggesting that there can be radical changes in one’s personality while retaining one’s numerical identity with oneself (as in the case of Augustine’s conversion or in the case of people surviving a suicidal attempt and desiring to live). Brown then goes on interpreting Thomas as saying that grace does not destroy human nature, but perfects it, preserving personal identity through the transformation. At the end of the process, human beings (who cooperate with the action of grace) in heaven will be a deified nature and deified rational powers of intellect and will. Brown thinks that ordinary human beings can have a foreshadow of this experience through contemplation, that leads to a sort of timeless experience. A further evidence of this possibility is the life of saints, who seem to have experienced this sort of experiences within their earthly life. In other words, if many of us think that heaven (or Vaikuṇṭha) is unappealing, this might mean just that we are unprepared for it. Fortunately, this unpreparedness can be addressed (through a further rebirth or through purgatory). Should not it be possible to continue improving even in Heaven/Vaikuṇṭha? That would surely be an antidote to boredom, but it appears to clash with the idea of heaven/Vaikuṇṭha being a perfect world, a kingdom of ends.

As for Vaikuṇṭha and the risk of getting boring, possible solutions are:

1. Being in nityakaiṅkārya `perpetual service to God’ is your nature and this is intrinsically appeasing, so, there is no way it can ever get boring.

2. You share sābhogya `same experience’ with God, so there is dynamism implied (since you continue having interesting experiences).

Joining this with Brown’s discussion of tedium, the solution to the problem of boredom can consist in any of the following ones:

a. Ability to help others (including God Himself, as in 1. above)

b. Loss of identity (as implied by 2. above)

c. Gradual transformation of identity (as in Brown)

b. and c. are very relevant for us here. Even if people can retain their numerical identity with their lives on earth, are they still qualitatively distinguishable from each other? Are their thoughts distinguishable? Them not having distinguishable thoughts offers a neat explanation of their being perfect devotees and is completely compatible with omniscience. The risk of tedium would be eliminated through the fact that such perfect beings would have no independent desires and thus no independent feelings, including no boredom.

Summing up, one possibility is (with hypothesis b.) that boredom is impossible because there is no one experiencing it (but is it really something one can aspire to? and, more relevant, this cancels the possibility of service, which is clearly a building block of Vaikuṇṭha according to Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta authors).

A different possibility needs retaining the variety of personalities even among liberated souls: the infinite variety of sensations (as in 1.). Would not they themselves become boring? No, if they are shared with dear people (hence the importance of a community in Vaikuṇṭha) and if one serves (since serving is one’s true destiny and since one is never bored of helping). Hence, again, the importance of a community and hence explained the insistence on other people welcoming one to Vaikuṇṭha. One will oneself soon be part of that group.

Readers of the Indian Philosophy Blog may be interested to learn about a new article in the latest issue of the Journal of World Philosophies: “Pramāṇavāda and the Crisis of Skepticism in the Modern Public Sphere” by Amy Donahue (Kennesaw State University). The journal is open-access, and you can download the article here.

Here’s the abstract:

There is widespread and warranted skepticism about the usefulness of inclusive and epistemically rigorous public debate in societies that are modeled on the Habermasian public sphere, and this skepticism challenges the democratic form of government worldwide. To address structural weaknesses of Habermasian public spheres, such as susceptibility to mass manipulation through “ready-to-think” messages and tendencies to privilege and subordinate perspectives arbitrarily, interdisciplinary scholars should attend to traditions of knowledge and public debate that are not rooted in western colonial/modern genealogies, such as the Sanskritic traditions of pramāṇavāda and vāda. Attention to vāda, pramāṇavāda, and other traditions like them can inspire new forms of social discussion, media, and digital humanities, which, in turn, can help to place trust in democracy on foundations that are more stable than mere (anxious) optimism.

I enjoyed reading the article, and I found it extremely thought-provoking. I hope readers of this blog will check it out. Also, be sure to look for the forthcoming online debate platform that Donahue mentions on p. 5! Maybe we’ll make an announcement on the blog when it’s ready. Or reach out to Dr. Donahue if you’re interested in collaborating.

Here are a few of my questions for further discussion:

1. Since pramāṇavāda was an elite discourse in historical South Asian societies and it requires some educational training (as Donahue notes on p. 4 and p. 5), can it do the work Donahue asks it to do?
2. Are jalpa and vitaṇḍā so bad? While most Naiyāyikas have denigrated them as illegitimate as Donahue notes (p. 6), a few have distinguished “tricky” and “honest” forms of vitaṇḍā (Matilal 1998, 3). And then there’s Śrī Harṣa’s debate at the beginning of the Khaṇḍanakhaṇḍakhādya with a Naiyāyika opponent about whether one must accept the means of knowledge (pramāṇas) in order to enter into a debate about the pramāṇas (he mentions that one understands the discourse of the Madhyamakas and Cārvākas, perhaps thinking of Nāgārjuna and Jayarāśi; I will have more to say about the Cārvākas in an upcoming conference presentation—see information below). Matilal has also argued that vitaṇḍā can make sense as resulting in a “commitmentless denial” similar to an “illocutionary negation” (Matilal 1998, 50-56). In terms of a modern public sphere, could vitaṇḍā be a useful tactic for, say, pointing out the inherent contradictions of various harmful dogmatisms? Or maybe the deepest benefit of the vāda-jalpa-vitaṇḍā framework is a bit of self-awareness about which form of debate one is using?
3. Is vāda necessarily more prone to discrediting false beliefs than a Habermasian public sphere or the type of marketplace of ideas in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty? (p. 11) My point is most definitely not that we have nothing to learn from Indian logic and debate. Far from it! But I wonder how effective vāda can be. After all, you don’t find much philosophical agreement in the classical Indian tradition, which is precisely why I find it so interesting!
4. Is the archive (p. 12) essentially part of vāda, or is it a cultural artifact of the Indian and Tibetan tradition of commentaries? Was there something similar in Hellenistic, Roman, Islamic, and Byzantine traditions, which were also heavily commentarial?

My questions here are meant to be taken in the spirit of vāda to keep the conversation going. I hope others will read Donahue’s thought-provoking article and join this worthwhile conversation.

Also, if you will be attending the upcoming Central APA Conference in Denver, Colorado, USA on Feb. 22, 2023, you will have the chance to discuss these and other issues in person! 

Wed. Feb. 22, 2023, 1-4pm

2022 Invited Symposium: Vāda: Indian Logic and Public Debate 

Chair: Jarrod Brown (Berea College)

Speakers: 

Amy Donahue (Kennesaw State University) “Vāda Project: A Non-Centric Method for Countering Disinformation”

Arindam Chakrabarti (University of Hawai’i at Manoa) “Does the Question Arise? Questioning the Meaning of Questions and the Definability of Doubt”

Ethan Mills (University of Tennessee at Chattanooga)  “Cārvāka Skepticism about Inference: Historical and Contemporary Examples” 

(More information about the conference here, including a draft program that includes several other panels on Indian philosophy.)

Works Cited

Donahue, Amy. 2022. “Pramāṇavāda and the Crisis of Skepticism in the Public Sphere.” Journal of World Philosophies 7 (Winter 2022): 1-14.

Matilal, Bimal Krishna.  1998.  The Character of Logic in India.  Edited by Jonardon Ganeri and Heeraman Tiwari.  Albany: SUNY Press.

In Part One, I discussed Sonam Kachru’s criticisms (Kachru 2021) of some of my earlier work on Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses (Mills 2017).

I ended the previous post with a question: what if we were to listen carefully to Vasubandhu in his own terms, and learn from what he has to say?

This attitude toward the text can challenge understandings of Western categories. Whereas most pragmatists, phenomenologists, and a certain type of analytic philosopher diagnose external-world skepticism as a metaphysical failure to appreciate the entanglement of mind and world, I think Vasubandhu suggests that entangled though mind and world may be (and it’s hard to imagine them being more entangled than in Mahāyāna Buddhist non-dualism!), the cognitive failure of regular human experience is a failure to appreciate how fundamentally mistaken we are in our regular cognitive lives—in light of the fact this very entanglement.

It may be that Vasubandhu shows us something about skeptical inquiries into perception, broadly construed: such epistemological inquiries do not rely on any particular metaphysical framework. (I personally have long thought the anti-skeptical strategy of trying to reduce the epistemological problem of skepticism about the external world to a metaphysical problem of mind and world is a huge mistake, but that’s somewhat besides Vasubandhu’s point as he seems to be doing something more like working out the epistemological consequences of the metaphysics of non-dualism).

I think some contemporary interpreters fail to understand how thoroughly revisionary and revolutionary Vasubandhu’s philosophy is; whereas most contemporary anti-skeptical strategies seek to preserve regular human experience against a philosophical abstraction, Vasubandhu wants to challenge the dogmatic attachment inherent in the regular human experience of thinking our way of seeing things is the right way or the only way (a point I think Kachru and others could make better without appeals to contemporary anti-skeptical strategies!).

So, am I saying, after all this, that Vasubandhu really is a skeptic, just not as we know it? (“We” here means, I guess, 21^st century academics writing in English). Maybe. I don’t know.

My own attempts in the past to argue for skeptical interpretations of classical Indian philosophers (e.g., Mills 2018) have often met with resistance precisely because most contemporary philosophers have a (dare I say it?) dogmatic attachment to a specific version of external-world skepticism inculcated in them by contemporary interpretations of Descartes and in contemporary analytic epistemology (this modern view of skepticism is in my opinion also deeply at odds with ancient “Western” skepticisms like Pyrrhonism and Academic skepticism).

At this point I’m willing to cede the label “skepticism.” I no longer care whether Vasubandhu or any other classical Indian philosopher is a “skeptic,” partly due to the unwillingness of my academic colleagues to rethink their own definition of skepticism as a category, but mostly because whatever Vasubandhu and others are doing is philosophically interesting no matter what Western categories we apply to them.

It’s time to stop pretending that classical Indian philosophers have to be subjected to the procrustean bed of Western categories to be interesting or worthy of study or respect in the discipline. I study Indian philosophy because it’s philosophically interesting in its own terms, not because it can glom on to whatever’s popular in mainstream analytic or continental philosophy this month.

While I’ve moved more in the direction of the type of textual work that prevails in Indology or Area Studies, I’m not quite there, either (I never make things easy for myself!). While understanding texts in their historical context is important, at times this approach can leave one a bit too limited by linguistic history or the traditions of interpretation that came before and after a text, leaving little room for innovative philosophical understandings of individual texts (European Indology has its own problematic Orientalist history to contend with as well).

Vasubandhu was obviously responding to the Buddhist traditions before him and he has been taken up in certain ways by centuries of Buddhist and non-Buddhist scholars that have come after him, but I also think Vasubandhu has something unique to say that is not captured by Buddhism in general or even Yogācāra in general. At least if we bother to listen to him carefully.

Nor am I denying that all interpretation today takes place in a postcolonial political context or that each reader doesn’t bring their own preconceptions (in a Gadamerian sense) to the text (my own philosophical preconceptions have been shaped by Buddhism as much as anything else; I learned about the Four Noble Truths long before I learned about semantic realism). I’m not saying we should assume we 21^st century scholars have a transparent insight into the one true nature of a text for all times. Such would be hopelessly naïve, and in any case goes against the very spirit of what Vasubandhu is telling us about normal human experience!

Going forward, maybe I’ll say Vasubandhu was working out the epistemology of non-dualism, or maybe we can just call it early Yogācāra and let it speak for itself (even if later Yogācāra philosophers do come close to the Western category of “idealism,” I think reducing Vasubandhu to “idealism” is just as problematic as reducing him to “skepticism” or “phenomenalism” or “phenomenology”). I don’t know where I will go next, but I will keep trying to think with Vasubandhu as best I can.

Helpful though comparative philosophy can be at times, sometimes it can be yet another problematic causal factor in our experience of ancient texts. I thank Sonam Kachru for his part in inciting me to think more deeply about my own previous scholarly experience of Vasubandhu and other classical Indian philosophers, moving instead toward listening carefully to what these texts have to say for themselves.

……………………………………….

Works Cited

Kachru, Sonam. 2021. Other Lives: Mind and World in Indian Buddhism. New York: Columbia University Press.

Mills, Ethan. 2017. “External-World Skepticism in Classical India: The Case of Vasubandhu.” International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 7 (3): 147-172.

——. 2018.  Three Pillars of Skepticism in Classical India: Nāgārjuna, Jayarāśi, and Śrī Harṣa. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

 Deadline: 1 February 2023

We invite proposals for papers to be given at an online conference on varieties of ineffability in ancient philosophy (spanning ancient Chinese, Graeco-Roman and Indian thought), on 18th-21st September 2023. The conference is expected to take place in the afternoon (British Summer Time) over the course of the four days.

Confirmed participants:
​
Lea Cantor (Oxford)
Amber Carpenter (Yale-NUS)
Ursula Coope (Oxford)
Nilanjan Das (Toronto)
Chris Fraser (Toronto)
Dirk Meyer (Oxford)
Adrian Moore (Oxford)
Parimal Patil (Harvard) 
​Shaul Tor (KCL)

This conference will examine notions of philosophical ineffability in ancient Chinese, Graeco-Roman and Indian texts, dating up to the 9th century CE. By philosophical ineffability we mean the idea that the object of one’s philosophical inquiry, or some aspects of that inquiry itself, are wholly or to some extent beyond the reach of articulation through words. The conference will seek to explore the variety of reasons (sometimes congruent) that might lead a philosopher to adopt some version of an ineffability attitude (e.g. a particular conception of the limits of one’s capacities for knowledge, thought or linguistic expression; a particular ontological stance; secrecy in relation to the uninitiated; a conception of silence as somehow spiritually formative; reverential inhibitions, etc.) as well as the variety of reactions a philosopher might then have in the light of their ineffability attitude (e.g. a qualified or non-committal approach towards the status of one’s own speech; an appeal to metaphors, analogies or periphrasis; some version of the via negativa; silence, etc.). We are interested in how these sorts of motivations and reactions might relate to one another, as well as to wider cultural models on which they sometimes draw. Our aim is not to attempt or approximate comprehensive coverage, nor to offer a survey. Instead, the conference will seek to explore case-studies stemming from the three traditions that, in conjunction, will show something of the variety and richness of the phenomenon of ineffability in ancient philosophy. We welcome both papers that take a fresh look at famous examples and papers that examine cases that are less often discussed. It is hoped that the consideration of a diverse range of ineffability attitudes, as well as the adoption of a comparative, cross-cultural perspective, will throw into sharp relief different patterns of philosophical preoccupations and strategies, and indeed will offer one particular and productive angle from which to think about the scope and orientation of some central aspects of ancient philosophy.

CfA Eligibility & submission guidelines 

We invite abstracts of 300-500 words from researchers at all levels (abstracts from graduate students and ECRs are particularly welcome),  suitable for 30- to 35-minute presentations.

We welcome abstracts which address the themes of the conference in relation to one or more of the following ancient traditions: Chinese, Graeco-Roman and Indian. Comparative, cross-cultural and/or ‘connected’ approaches are welcome, but not necessary.
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Please submit abstracts as an email attachment to ineffabilitiesconference[at]gmail.com by 1 February 2023. Abstracts should be submitted as .pdf files and should not exceed 500 words.

Please write ‘Conference Abstract Submission’ in the subject line of your email and include your name, departmental affiliation (if relevant), email address, and the title of your paper (as well as the year in which your PhD was awarded in the case of ECRs) in your email. Abstracts should be prepared for blind review, so please ensure that your abstract is free from any identifying personal details (i.e. including title and abstract, but no information about author or institutional affiliation).

Decisions will be communicated by 15 February 2023. 

Organizers

Lea Cantor (Oxford)
Ursula Coope (Oxford)
Nilanjan Das (Toronto)
Shaul Tor (KCL) 

Contact

For more information and updates, please visit our conference website. If you wish to be kept informed about the conference (and how to attend), please register your interest here.  

For any inquiries, please contact one of the conference organizers directly.

In this duology of posts I’m going to respond to Sonam Kachru’s friendly criticism of my own work on Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses (Vimśikākārikā). But instead of the usual academic practice of arguing against Kachru’s criticisms, I’m going to suggest that Kachru may be right. Or maybe half-right. In any case, his work has helped my own thinking move toward a new insight: I have come to suspect that I made some mistakes in my own earlier work—and maybe these errors are iterations of deeper mistakes that often occur under the banner of “comparative philosophy.”

In this first post, I’ll discuss my own previous work and Kachru’s criticisms of it, and in part two I’ll say more about what I think all this has to do with comparative philosophy and how we 21^st century scholars approach classical Indian texts like the Twenty Verses.

In my 2017 article, “External-World Skepticism in Classical India: The Case of Vasubandhu,” I laid out the debate about whether Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses should be understood as advocating a form of metaphysical idealism or a kind of epistemological phenomenalism, and I came to the (appropriately cagey) conclusion that in either case, Vasubandhu might be read as providing an invitation to consider something like the issue of external-world skepticism.

In his excellent 2021 study of Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses, Other Lives: Mind and World in Indian Buddhism, Sonam Kachru develops a novel account of the text that moves away from the contemporary debate about whether Vasubandhu is defending a form of idealism. Even though I myself have been quite engrossed in this debate in the past, I now think Kachru has a superb point.

His main criticism of my 2017 article is that I argued that Vasubandhu’s claim is that we are aware of something like a “phenomenal object” (Kachru 2021, 44), and indeed at that time I was translating viṣaya as “sense-object” in a phenomenalist sense similar to Bruce Hall (1986). Kachru also does not see the opening statement as a formal anumāna: “This world is just cognition-only, because of the appearance of non-existent objects” (Viṃśikakārikā 1, my translation). Instead, dreams are employed as one of many kinds of experience for human and non-human life-forms.

(While I maybe overstated my case in the 2017 article, I don’t actually think much rests on whether Vasubandhu is presenting a formal anumāna, and I will set aside that issue here. But I would quickly note that the anumāna could be non-fallacious if one takes seriously what some have called the Phenomenal Principle, according to which we are directly aware of the same thing in both veridical and erroneous cognitions—on this interpretation, Vasubandhu’s point is that there is a core similarity between veridical and erroneous experience, and not the “howler” that we should infer “all cognitions are erroneous” because “some cognitions are erroneous”).

Although Kachru criticizes my earlier article, I found myself quite convinced by a lot of his book, far more convinced than I would have thought! Like Kachru, I see Vasubandhu’s fundamental message to be that we should aim for “a certain way of being open to the world” (Kachru 2021, 161) in a way that normal human experience is not. This makes sense when you consider that, in line with Vasubandhu’s Buddhist motivations, our normally closed-minded experience is one major cause of suffering.

This also makes sense of Vasubandhu’s comments about the non-dual experience of the Buddhas at the end of the text in Viṃśikakārikā 21-22 (this is also why I do not think Vasubandhu could be making any arguments meant to clinch the case for metaphysical idealism; in a moment of epistemic humility, he admits he has done the best he can in a dualistic framework, while only the Buddhas know the whole truth).

While my 2017 article was filled with all the typical academic hedges and caveats, I did claim that Vasubandhu, whether taken as a metaphysical idealist or epistemological phenomenalist, gives an invitation to consider the problem of external-world skepticism (Mills 2017, 162-164). And reading Kachru has convinced me that I was wrong to try to push Vasubandhu into a type of phenomenalism about the direct objects of cognition akin to the types of Western phenomenalism developed in recent centuries.

Although I still think Vasubandhu would have a dim view of what one might call direct realism (of either classical Indian or contemporary Western varieties), Kachru’s book gives me a way to make sense of what I see as the general thrust of Vasubandhu’s arguments (“don’t take your experience too seriously”) without contorting Vasubandhu’s philosophical brilliance to fit the preoccupations of Western philosophers from the 17^th-21^st centuries.

But more fundamentally, I think my earlier project was misguided.

One could, I suppose, wonder what Vasubandhu would say about external-world skepticism as it is understood in contemporary Western philosophy, just as one could wonder what he would say about Berkeleyan or Hegelian idealism. But reading Kachru’s book (especially his careful attention to Buddhist cosmology) made me wonder why we would do so. Why, after all, when Vasubandhu has so many fascinating things of his own to say?

Vasubandhu’s problems are not those of early modern Europe, American pragmatism, phenomenology, or contemporary analytic philosophy. Nor do these Western problems comprise the entire conceptual space of all possible philosophical problems; it would be hubristic racism to suggest that white Europeans alone invented all possible philosophical problems! There is no good reason to let Western philosophy set all possible agendas for all other traditions.

Vasubandhu has his own issues and insights. If we were to learn from them, we might find a philosophical challenge much more interesting that the project of slotting Vasubandhu into pre-existing Western categories.

In fact, my only real criticism of Kachru’s book is that he is occasionally a bit too interested in pairing Vasubandhu with contemporary philosophers immersed in phenomenology, pragmatism, and anti-skeptical analytic epistemology.

But what if we were to listen carefully to Vasubandhu in his own terms, and learn from what he has to say? I’ll explore some possible answers to this question in part two.

……………………………………….

Works Cited

Hall, Bruce Cameron. 1986. “The Meaning of Vijñapti in Vasubandhu’s Concept of Mind.”  Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 9 (1):  7-23.

Kachru, Sonam. 2021. Other Lives: Mind and World in Indian Buddhism. New York: Columbia University Press.

Mills, Ethan. 2017. “External-World Skepticism in Classical India: The Case of Vasubandhu.” International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 7 (3): 147-172.

How do Sanskrit philosophers deal with solipsism?

Some Buddhist epistemologists just accepted it, as a necessary consequence of their idealism. The example of Ratnakīrti’s “Rejection of the existence of other continuous sequences [of causes and effects leading to the illusion of a separate mind]” comes to mind. In my opinion, Ratnakīrti has a specially strong argument in favour of his view, namely: The Buddhist epistemological school denies the ultimate mind-independent existence of external objects. But once one accepts that, and thus accepts idealism, how can one safeguard intersubjectivity? If there is no reality other than our representations, how comes we can understand each other? Would it not be much more economical to imagine that there is only one representation?

Others rejected it based on analogy (basically: I am a mind, i.e., a continuous sequence of causes and effects; other people behaving similarly must be a mind too). The first and main example of this reasoning is Dharmakīrti’s “Establishment of the existence of other continuous sequences” (santānāntarasiddhi).

The Pratyabhijñā and the Advaita Vedānta schools are ultimately forms of solipsism. In the former case, there is only Śiva’s mind, and the appearance of other minds is part of his līlā ‘playful activity’. In the latter (at least after Śaṅkara), there is only brahman, and the appearance of other minds is due to māyā. What is the different explanatory power of līlā vs māyā? That māyā’s ontology is hard to explain, whereas once one has committed to the existence of a personal God, with Their likes and dislikes, then līlā is a perfectly acceptable solution. Thus, AV is light on the Absolute’s ontology, but implies a leap of faith as for māyā, whereas the opposite is the case for the Pratyabhijñā school.

What about the realist schools? Some of them established the existence of the self based on aham-pratyaya, i.e., our own perception of ourselves as an ‘I’ (so the Mīmāṃsā school). Some thinkers within Nyāya (like Jayanta) used inference to establish the existence of the self.

Is this enough to establish the existence of other selves?

Yes, in the case of Mīmāṃsā, because other minds seem prima facie to exist and due to svataḥ prāmāṇya (intrinsic validity) such prima facie view should be held unless and until the opposite is proven.

Yes, according to Jayanta, because other selves can be inferred just like the own self is.

Realistic Vedāntic schools will rely on either the Mīmāṃsā or the Nyāya paradigm. Thus, the question at this point will rather be: What is consciousness like, if one subscribes to this or the other school?

Some schools (like Pratyabhijñā, Yoga…) claim that we can have direct access to other minds, through yogipratyakṣa or intellectual intuition. However, yogipratyakṣa is possible only to some exceptional individuals. Moreover, Pratyabhijñā thinkers like Utpaladeva think that even this is not an evidence of the existence of separate other minds.

Tomorrow the United States celebrates a holiday in honour of Martin Luther King, Jr. Boston University, where I work, is always eager to remind everyone that King got his doctorate there. They are not always as eager to remind you that King studied at the School of Theology – and clearly learned his lessons there well, for he was not merely a great activist but a great philosopher.

I have come to know King’s thought through the courses I have taught in BU’s philosophy department – even though the courses were on Indian philosophy. I have nevertheless included King on the syllabus for that class, with guest speakers introducing him to the students, because I wanted to show students the contemporary relevance of Indian philosophy. Specifically, King drew a great deal of his ideas from Gandhi – who was a philosopher-activist like King, and in turn drew on earlier Indian thought like Jainism and the Bhagavad Gītā. It seems to me on reflection, though, that the student surpassed the pupil: that what King said and wrote with Gandhi’s influence was profounder and more valuable than Gandhi’s own thought was in itself.

The core idea that King drew from Gandhi, of course, was nonviolence – which Gandhi used to translate the Jain vow of ahiṃsā. Ahiṃsā more literally means “non-harm”, which is not exactly the same thing. Gandhi’s major achievement is to turn ahiṃsā into the idea of nonviolent action: changing unjust social conditions by means of peaceful mass protests that call attention to them. This idea was not in traditional Jainism, which like its sister tradition of Buddhism, was not politically active; nor was it in the Gītā, a more political text whose explicitly stated message is the opposite of nonviolence. But Gandhi put it to powerful effect, drawing enormous sympathy for the cause of Indian independence, which eventually became successful.

King learned from Gandhi and used the same tactics, similarly successful, to end the official régime of racial segregation in the American South. In their activism – deploying nonviolent resistance to end an unjust situation – they were very similar. Where they really differed was in their political thought. King had philosophical training where Gandhi didn’t – and it shows.

Gandhi pushed his theory of nonviolence much further than King, into a sort of anarcho-libertarianism that considered state action an unacceptable form of violence. He proclaimed that “I shall be no party to dispossessing the propertied classes of their private property without just cause” – and providing food and livelihood to the poor and hungry did not count, for him, as just cause. Instead he encouraged a voluntary redistribution, where “the rich should regard themselves as trustees for the whole of society rather than as owners of the wealth they might possess.” Gandhi’s followers, like Vinoba Bhave, made a sincere effort to convince the rich to share their land and wealth with the poor – but it didn’t work. A few noble souls were convinced, but not enough to make any meaningful dent in the poverty of the villages where it was tried. And on a more fundamental level, Gandhi never seemed to object to the state violence involved in keeping property in its current hands, through laws against theft.

King had a much more realistic view. Like Gandhi, he believed that guarding power was bad for the powerful: segregation harmed the white man’s own soul. But from his other great influence Reinhold Niebuhr – coiner of the Serenity Prayer – King learned to reject a “false optimism”. Niebuhr, drawing in turn on Augustine, knew that the darkness in human nature runs deep. Voluntary changes of heart benefit everyone and they are to be celebrated. But they are not sufficient to bring about social change. Thus King’s Poor People’s Campaign demanded a more standard form of social democracy, where the government would tax the rich to fund housing and income for the poor.

I greatly admire King’s political vision because it forms an admirable synthesis of two crucial political currents. I think that James Doull is right to bemoan a politics of “division” in which the interests of different human groups and individuals are fundamentally set against each other, with no larger picture of a common good. Such a division got much worse in the decades after Doull’s death: my Facebook feed in the mid-2010s (pre-Trump) was full of feminist advice not to say that patriarchy hurts men too (even though it absolutely does), because the fight against patriarchy should only be for women and not men. Such views of intrinsic antagonism set in motion what Hobbes called a war of all against all – and in a war of all against all, all will lose.

Doull regularly criticized Marx as one responsible for promoting that division. But Marx, I think, saw what Doull and Gandhi did not: that power structures tend to be captured and serve the interests of the powerful. Public shaming can end such obvious injustices as colonialism and segregation – but even there, it does so through a change in the state and its apparatus of coercion. Moreover the powerful are often blinded to the unjust operations of their power. One can see that blinding just by reading Doull’s own heroes, Aristotle and Hegel: one cannot imagine Aristotle writing of “natural slaves”, or Hegel writing that slavery “causes the increase of human feeling among the Negroes”, had they ever been slaves themselves. Appeals to the common good can all too easily become appeals to the good of the powerful.

And I cannot name any thinker from any era who navigated this problem better than Martin Luther King. King refused the naïveté that trusted the rich to give up their land voluntarily. And yet he never stopped believing in the common good. Segregation did hurt white people as it hurt black people; it’s just all too difficult for white people to see that. When the powerful wield power unjustly, one must take some of that power from them by force – but in a way that ultimately makes a better world for everyone.

Happy Martin Luther King Day.

Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom.

I wanted to reflect a bit more on my debate with Charles Goodman at Princeton this November. (If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the video of the debate and our handouts.) I don’t think either of us would consider the debate conclusive. Indeed, following the debate, our conversations that afternoon indicated that the issues we were really concerned about lay elsewhere.

A brief summary of where the debate itself went: the Charles calls Śāntideva a utilitarian because Śāntideva is a universalist consequentialist; that means that he is concerned with bringing about the best overall consequences for all beings. I dispute that “utilitarian” is the right term because I think it has misleading connotations: Charles agreed in the debate that his equation of Śāntideva and Peter Singer doesn’t work, and I think that calling Śāntideva “utilitarian” leads to similar misinterpretations, even though (as Charles noted) analytic philosophers often deploy the term in that way.

As for eudaimonism: Charles repeatedly defines eudaimonism as asserting “a very close connection between virtuous actions and the agent’s own well-being”, or something similar to that. I think it’s inarguable that there is such a close connection for Śāntideva in practice: virtuous actions always, or at least nearly always, do in fact improve the agent’s well-being. Charles clarified during the debate, though, that he did not mean a close connection in practice but a close conceptual connection: that is, on his account of eudaimonism, virtuous actions are defined in terms of the agent’s well-being, as they are for Aristotle and are not for Śāntideva. I agreed that by that standard Śāntideva would not be a eudaimonist.

There is probably more that could be said on the use of both these terms at issue, utilitarianism and eudaimonism. But Charles and I agreed that there’s not that much value in trying to say it. He and I agree on a large number of matters; we picked the topic of utilitarianism and eudaimonism as a point of disagreement in our interpretations of Śāntideva. But the helpful thing we saw in the debate was that our bigger disagreement runs in a more interesting and important direction – a constructive direction. That is: we actually disagree very little, if at all, about what Śāntideva thinks. We disagree on the words we use to characterize him, but much more importantly, we disagree on whether he’s right, about one particular issue.

That issue is an argument that Charles refers to as the Ownerless Suffering Argument. The Ownerless Suffering Argument is probably Śāntideva’s most famous argument, the one excerpted in introductory ethics texts: in a nutshell, Śāntideva argues that because the self is unreal, it makes no sense for us to treat ourselves, or those dear to us, better than any other sentient beings in our actions. In Charles’s terms, the view that Śāntideva argues for is agent-neutral: all people, all moral agents, should have the exact same aim as all the other moral agents, namely the well-being of all sentient beings. We shouldn’t be partial to our friends or families or neighbours, let alone ourselves.

I agree with Charles that Śāntideva holds this view. Contra Charles, I also believe that Śāntideva is wrong. I don’t think this argument works.

And when the disagreement moves to this terrain, we are no longer dealing with small questions of terminology. At issue now, among many other things, is what kind of Buddhists we each are. Charles, I think, is committed to Śāntideva’s Mahāyāna as interpreted by the Tibetans. But while I’ve drawn more from Śāntideva than from any other Buddhist author, and still pray to Mañjuśrī, I learned my own Buddhism in a Theravāda place, and at heart I’m still a Theravādin. I take very seriously the Dhammapāda’s advice that one should not neglect one’s own welfare for the sake of another.

Now I’ve also noted that Śāntideva’s view is not necessarily as far from the Dhammapāda’s as it might look. And Śāntideva makes an entirely different argument for altruism, one that I largely accept. This is that beautiful paradox in Bodhicaryāvatāra VIII.129: “All those in the world who are suffering are so because of a desire for their own happiness. All those in the world who are happy are so because of a desire for the happiness of others.” Egocentrism, in practice, is self-defeating: cultivating other-regarding virtues of generosity and gentleness and honesty improves one’s own well-being.

I suspect that, overall, Charles and I are likely to agree on Śāntideva’s paradox too. in the debate (just after the one-hour mark), on one aspect of the question of whether egocentrism harms one’s well-being, he said “I think that might be true, I think there might be some evidence for that, but that’s an empirical question for the psychologists to talk about.” That quote may identify another source of disagreement between us, a methodological one: with John Doris, I refuse to identify philosophy as an a priori field of inquiry; I think any philosophy that refuses to talk about empirical questions isn’t worthy of the name philosophy. Aristotle was wrong about a great many empirical questions, of course, but he would never have dreamed of excluding such questions from his purview. There is no room for NOMA in my philosophy: many of the most important philosophical claims are subject to empirical confirmation or refutation, including this one. Having said that, I think Charles and I (and Śāntideva!) would likely agree that the weight of evidence does point to egocentrism harming the agent’s well-being, so that in itself is not where our great disagreement lies.

However, important substantive disagreement remains. When one’s focus is turned to the way other-regarding virtue helps one’s own flourishing, it likely leads to partiality: one pays more concern to one’s friends and family and neighbours and colleagues than to strangers one doesn’t know. That partial view, which I accept, is not agent-neutral. An agent-neutral view like Śāntideva’s regards everybody equally, which is one of the reasons he praises the monk’s life so highly: it is difficult if not impossible to live an agent-neutral life when one runs a family household.

It is on that point of agent-neutrality where there is agreement between Śāntideva and the otherwise very different philosopher Peter Singer. Charles noted in our followup conversation that he agrees with Singer’s claim that “if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.” It seems to me that Singer’s philosophy and life are a reductio ad absurdum of this statement: by Singer’s own standard, Singer himself is a murderer. For Śāntideva, unlike for Singer, that sort of universal altruism is not an obligation – but it is still the best course of action to take. One should be giving money to starving children halfway around the world, not buying toys for one’s own children. For Śāntideva the monk, it would not be so hard to live up to that philosophy; for a father like Charles, I think, it is a bigger challenge. (It is relevant here that the Buddha named his son with the word for “fetter”.)

You may have noticed – I am sure Charles has – that I have not actually refuted the Ownerless Suffering Argument itself here (as, say, Paul Williams attempts to do). That’s by design: this post is not intended to establish my view against Charles’s. For one other point of agreement that he and I reached in our post-debate discussions was that we should have a followup debate on this very topic. Where and when are to be determined – but I hope this post sets the context.

Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom.

This November, Charles Goodman and I had a wonderful debate at Princeton’s Center for Culture, Society and Religion, on the interpretation of Śāntideva’s ethics: Charles claims that Śāntideva is a utilitarian, I claim that he is a eudaimonist. You can now watch the video of the debate on the Center’s website; I hope you enjoy!

Charles and I refer a lot in the debate to the handouts we created; I’m attaching them here.

The Faculty of Philosophy is seeking to appoint an Associate Professor (or Professor) in Indian Philosophy, in association with a Tutorial Fellowship at Lady Margaret Hall. This post is available from 1 September 2023, or as soon as possible thereafter. This is a permanent appointment (subject to an initial probation).
Further particulars for the post, and information on how to apply, are available here.
The closing date for applications is 12 noon on Monday 16 January 2023