Prof. R. D. Ranade, was a Mystic Philosopher, devoutly called ‘Gurudev’ by his disciples and followers. Born on July 3, 1886, at Jamkhandi village in Karnataka State of South India, Ramachandra Dattatray Ranade had theistic beliefs since childhood. In the year 1901, on the auspicious day of Vaikuṇtha Chaturthi, he got initiated by his Sadguru (Spiritual teacher) Sri Bhausaheb Maharaj Umadikar of the Nimbargi sect in Karnataka. The peculiarity of this sect is that a Sadguru, a self-realized being grants a Sabeej-Mantra (the divine name) to his disciples to meditate upon. The word ‘Sabeej’ literally meaning a budding seed, is very indicative when it comes to the generation of mystical experiences. Nimbargi Sampradaya (sect) is also called a ‘Swaroop-Sampradaya’ since the ‘Vision of the ‘Self’ is the raison d’être of man’s life.

One can make out from Prof. Ranade writing that his was not merely an armchair philosophy but a life-lived practice. In the preface of A Constructive Survey of Upanishadic Philosophy, he writes, ‘it would be a problem for the Philosophy of the Immediate Future to place Mysticism on a truly philosophical basis.’ Thus, the term ‘Rational Mysticism’ was brought in the stream of contemporary thought by him, which is not a contradiction in terms but a truism.[1]. This knowledge is possible when all the pramāṇas merge into the pramāṇa of ‘experience.’ That is why Rational Mysticism is the ‘experience acceptable to reason’ as Prof. Ranade calls it. He emphasized two things namely, the loving contemplation on the name of God imparted to the disciple without letting a single breathe go in vein and the divine grace which fructify into Self-illumination of every God-aspirant. The grace of the Sadguru directly comes from God as all Saints and Mystics tell us. The book A Constructive Survey of Upanishadic Philosophy stands like an evidence of last 6000 years which Prof. Ranade gives to support his philosophy of God-realization. A verse from Kathopaniśad says that “In every inhale and exhale one should remember God.”

ūrdhvaṃ prāṇam unnayati apānaṃ pratyag asyati /
madhye vāmanam āsīnaṃ viśve devā upāsate // (Kaṭhopaniṣad, 5.3.2)

Meaning:- ‘Between the upgoing breathe and the downcoming breathe there is a beautiful or dwarfish God, whom all the Gods adore.’

What are exactly spiritual experiences?
William James and his popular book Variety of Religious Experiences, wielded great influence on Prof. Ranade and he reconciled the phenomenal and noumenal elements of human experience, showing Man simultaneously to be a denizen of two worlds-one human and one divine. This became the core concept of his books Pathway to God in Hindi and Kannada literature. In the latter, he generously talks about yogic, biological, neurological, and psychological processes behind the experiences of morphic, phonic, photic, chromatic or colorist, motor, tactile, flavourist, odourist nature and those of conversation as well; which occur separately or collectively depending upon the temperament of God aspirant.

In a Presidential Address delivered at the 13th session of the Indian Philosophical Congress held at Nagpur in Dec. 1937, Prof. Ranade emphasized ‘how the recent discoveries in modern Physics, Biology, Neurology and so forth tend to prove that the spirit is the only reality, and how western thought can be brought in harmony with the conclusions of the great Indian sages and Philosophers.'[2]

I have considered a passage from this brief extract where Prof. Ranade explained that the mystical experiences of some Indian saints have a biological basis too, based on Hans Driesch’s experiments in embryology:

Prof. Ranade’s other remarkable contribution to Philosophy is the word that he coined as ‘Spiriton’ from this principle. This ‘Spiriton’ corresponds to the term ‘Biṇdulé’ (bin-duh- lay) used frequently by Maharashtrian saints:

“Roux had disbelieved in the autonomy of life based on his experiment consisting in the destruction of one of the two cleavage-cells of a frog’s egg immediately after the first cleavage had been completed, because, he said, in such cases, the remaining cell develops only the left or the right side of the embryo. Driesch approaches this problem by a different method, based on his experiments on the sea-urchin’s egg, where the remaining cleavage-cell develops not half of the embryo but a complete embryo of half the size…From his experiments, Driesch concluded that life is an autonomous principle, which he calls the “entelechy.” Disarrange a part of a sea-urchin’s egg, and it will tight itself…take only a fragment and it will develop a complete embryo…Driesch suggests that in the case of the higher animals, and especially in man, it may be called a “psychoid.” (Ranade, 2013)

Morphic Experiences:

Prof. Ranade particularly selected devotional songs of Indian Saints in his Pathway series. For him, Saint Tukārāma was a photic as well as an audible mystic like all other great mystics in the world [3], Tilāituké hé Bindulé, téné tribhuvana koṇdātaleé | Meaning, one tiny spiritual atom encompasses the entire universe

Prof. Ranade advocated that to be able to identify ‘Biṇdulé’ visually is a kind of morphic experience, that marks the commencement of one’s spiritual life. It is the cause of the creation of the universe. This vision of ‘Biṇdulé’ is closely associated with the mental state of the Seer. The spiritual object will be steady and continuous if the seer is firm in devotion. Yogic scholars and practitioners significantly talk on Prānāyāma and Trahātaka as ways to focus a mind on a certain object. Prof. Ranade states that ‘you must look at either tip or top of the nose (Nāsikagra Dṛiṣti) to visualize the Bindu, but immediately he asserts that one need not necessarily fix his vision upon either of this, yet Biṇdulé and spiritual forms are experienced. The vision must be directed to the spiritual object but not physiologically. He believes that keeping the vision fixed at the nose tip intends to draw the mind away from the sensory perception. In his words, ‘any kind of poise of the brain and the eyes, in which you can concentrate your attention, is Mudra.’[4] Mystical experiences are sui generis and cannot be given by Asanas alone.

That is why Prof. Ranade highlights that only keeping one’s position steady and stationary is advisable while sitting for meditation. In the beginning, a God aspirant or sādhaka may need to fix his vision at the nose tip but progressively as the form of the vision gets steady in front of his eyes, he can side with these physiological ends. In Pathway to God in Kannada Literature he further adds to it that the Biṇdulé will be seen wherever he casts his sight.

A seer gets a microscopic vision of Spiritons when he looks at his nose tip and the same spiritons are enlarged like a telescopic view when seen in an open sky. Prof. Ranade affirms that the ‘black spot’ or ‘Biṇdulé is visible on dark background as well. Physicists consider ‘darkness’ as the ‘excess of light’. This reminds us of Plato, saying that, light is the shadow of God.

There are various kinds experiences that Prof. Ranade talks about; some which will be discussed subsequently.

[1] Ranade, R. D. (2003, Fourth Edition) A Constructive Survey of Upanishadic Philosophy, Preface.
[2] Ranade, R. D. (2013) Philosophical and other essays, Pg. 113.
[3] Ranade, R. D. (2015, Second Edition) Pathway to God in Marathi Literature, Page.393. [4] Ranade, R. D. (2003). Pathway to God in Kannada Literature, Pg. 107.

[Minor edits in the Sanskrit by EF]

If you are travelling with a child or someone who requires assistance, secure your oxygen mask on first, and then assist the other person.

Anyone who has flown on a commercial airline has heard this instruction; anyone who flies frequently has heard it so often that it becomes background noise, though relatively few of us have ever had the chance to put it into practice. If the plane cabin depressurizes and the oxygen masks drop, one has only seconds before running out of oxygen oneself; if one tries to put the oxygen mask on a child first, hypoxia may inhibit one’s ability to put the mask on the child correctly, to say nothing of the risk to oneself. One can best save both people by attending to oneself first – running against any parent’s natural instinct to protect his own child.

I’m not the first to see this advice as a metaphor for other forms of ethical conduct in relationships: “the oxygen-mask principle”. Often we can take care of others most effectively by taking care of ourselves. What I also see, though, is that this principle is deeply Buddhist.

The Dhammapāda, one of the oldest and most beloved Buddhist texts, gives us something very similar to the oxygen-mask principle in its twelfth chapter: “One should first establish oneself in what is proper; then only should one instruct others. Thus the wise man will not be reproached.” (v. 158) Take care of yourself first.

The Dhammapāda is not a Mahāyāna text, and the closing verse of that chapter does present a striking contrast to much Mahāyāna advice: “Let one not neglect one’s own welfare (attha) for the sake of another, however great. Clearly understanding one’s own welfare, let one be intent upon the good.” (v. 166) One cannot imagine Śāntideva enthusiastic about that advice, with his exhortations of giving everything, including one’s accumulated goodness, to others. That all is consistent with the basic World Religions 101 explanation that Theravāda Buddhism is about seeking one’s own liberation, and Mahāyāna about seeking others’.

And yet Śāntideva’s own advice is not so far from that of the Dhammapāda. As Richard Mahoney noted, Śāntideva’s Śikṣā Samuccaya is structured around the 4×3 grid identified in its fourth root verse (kārikā). That is, it is about three kinds of things – one’s person (ātmabhāva), possessions or “enjoyments” (bhogas) and goodness or good karma (puṇya) – and doing four kinds of things with each of these. One gives them or gives them up (utsarga) – but one also protects, purifies and enhances them. The eventual goal is to take one’s self or one’s body, one’s possessions, and one’s good karma, and give them to others in order to benefit them – but first, one needs to protect, purify and enhance all of them. The first chapter focuses on giving, but the remaining eighteen chapters focus on these latter processes: ways that one protects oneself and makes oneself better, in order that one might eventually be of use to benefit others. These chapters discuss topics from meditations on patient endurance to medicines for sickness. The focus on these more self-oriented aspects of the bodhisattva’s career is so strong that other scholars of the Śikṣā (Cecil Bendall and Barbra Clayton) describe it only in terms of them, leaving the giving part out entirely.

All of this suggests to me that, though I don’t think he agrees entirely with the Dhammapāda’s perspective, Śāntideva too endorses the oxygen-mask principle. One must protect oneself, or one cannot protect others. This point might be made clearest in chapter VIII of the Bodhicaryāvatāra, which contain Śāntideva’s famous arguments for and meditations on altruism. Yet Śāntideva opens even that chapter with advice to seclude oneself in the forest, noting that “one should flee far from a fool” (VIII.15). The contrast of these passages with the later praise of altruism is striking, but important: if one lets oneself get too influenced by fools and their way of thinking, one will lose one’s own progress in a way that means one cannot benefit others.

So, I think, the Dhammapāda and Śāntideva agree on the oxygen-mask principle – and I think they are right to do so. Its lesson is driven home painfully and memorably in Grace and Grit, Ken Wilber’s memoir of his wife Treya’s cancer treatment and eventual death. (I just found out that it is apparently now a movie, though one I haven’t seen and can’t vouch for.) Knowing the extreme suffering that Treya is going through, he gives her everything: they live in a house with multiple spare rooms and he lets her have all of them, doing his work in the living room – which she then proceeds to occupy and make noise in. When he protests, she refuses to move – and all his bottled-up resentment comes out so hard that he hits her. He would have been better able to take care of her if he had set some boundaries to take care of himself. He was so eager to put the oxygen mask on the one who depended on him that he failed to secure his own mask first, in a way that was bad for both. (As for me, I read Grace and Grit and thought I had learned that lesson long before I went through a far too similar experience, but looking back on how things went for me and my wife, I don’t think I actually did. Another unfortunate reminder of how understanding something in theory is very different from applying it in practice.)

Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom.

The Sigālovāda Sutta might be my least favourite sutta in the Pali Canon.

There is relatively little that the Pali texts say on “ethics” in a modern Western sense of interpersonal action-guiding; much of the specific instructions on action are found in vinaya, legal texts for the conduct of monks. The Sigālovāda is relatively unusual in providing guidance for action to lay householders. For that reason, a number of secondary writers on Buddhist ethics regard it as as a valuable guide for Buddhist ethical conduct.

I do not.

I recognize that the Sigālovāda is in the scriptures and therefore should not just be wished away: for those of us who have faith in a tradition, it is important to wrestle with what we find most unappealing, because that can be what we learn the most from. Yet that faith should not be blind; we should not simply swallow the tradition’s words whole irrespective of what we have learned in other areas of life. To act in that latter way is to be a fundamentalist, in a way that I think does justice to both the self-identified and the pejorative senses of that word. I think it is important to keep some distance from the scriptures that portray an unscientific worldview (this is where Bultmann is helpful), and likewise from those that recommend inferior treatment for women or for queer or trans people. In my view, the Sigālovāda is in a similar category of works not to be taken as direct advice without heavy reinterpretation.

I say this because the Sigālovāda’s recommended lifestyle seems to me like a vicious mean. The Sigālovāda’s householder is not a monk, and therefore deprives himself of the deep and intense opportunities for self-cultivation that are available to a monk. That much seems reasonable: most of us see value in pursuits of life that are not monastic, and so there’s appeal in pursuing a kammatic Buddhism that recognizes the non-monastic life as valuable.

The problem with the Sigālovāda is that it strips that life, the household life, of a great deal of its value! I look at the life described there and I think: what does this life have to recommend itself over being a monk? Some of the sutta’s prohibitions are understandable: on gambling, for example. And while I don’t follow its prohibition on alcohol, that prohibition is found in plenty of other places. But the Sigālovāda also tells one not to sleep even until sunrise, let alone afterwards. And most alarmingly, it also includes a prohibition on “frequenting theatrical shows”.

There are, young householder, these six evil consequences in frequenting theatrical shows. He is ever thinking: where is there dancing? where is there singing? where is there music? where is there recitation? where is there playing with cymbals? where is there pot-blowing?

The reasoning here is understandable: if you take pleasure in singing and dancing and music, you will want to do more of it, and that will preoccupy your thoughts in a way that can lead to craving. That is perhaps in the nature of any pleasure: whatever enjoyable thing one does, the pleasure typically leads one to want more of it. So, given that suffering comes from craving, there is some reason to treat pleasures and enjoyments as suspect.

I understand and even sympathize with that chain of reasoning. But, if one is going to follow it through to its conclusion, it seems to me that one needs to renounce and become a monk. If one really is going to avoid worldly pleasures – not even drinking and gambling, but simple music and theatre – on the grounds that they lead to more craving, then what benefits in the household life are even left? (The Sigālovāda itself does not cast particular suspicion on the satisfactions of having children, but there are other places in the Canon that do: most notably, when the Buddha had a son, he named him Rāhula, “fetter”.) It seems to me that one should fish or cut bait, so to speak. If one is really ready to treat all pleasures as suspect, one should become a monk; if one is not willing to go all that way, one needs a life that makes room for pleasures like dancing and theatre.

H.L. Seneviratne, in his excellent The Work of Kings, notes how monks in colonial Sri Lanka elevated the Sigālovāda Sutta to a higher status in the canon than it had previously had. They performed a similar elevation on the Five Precepts, one that is visible in our modern tendency to include the Five Precepts in most introductions to Buddhism even though they are encountered less frequently in the suttas than the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path. These elevations occurred for a very specific reason: these monks were Victorian men who had absorbed the ideals of their Victorian English colonial occupiers. And the austere moral discipline of the Sigālovāda, with its sustained attacks on “idleness”, fit the work-obsessed Victorian worldview like a glove. One could even argue that the Sigālovāda’s attacks on the theatre allowed the monks to one-up Victorian prudery, taking it one step further than the English Victorians themselves would go. The brilliance of the Sigālovāda in this context was that it did not go the next step beyond that, and advocate traditional Buddhist monasticism! That would not do, for monks, in addition to reeking of popery, are not productive, not industrious. As Thomas Tweed noted (and as I discuss at more length in my Disengaged Buddhism article), the Victorians considered the world’s Buddhist places to be “asleep”, lacking “energy”, for their citizens did not allowing the emerging global capitalism to make sufficient use of their labour power. By Victorian standards, the Sigālovāda’s mean was the virtuous one: between the indolence of the idle gambler on one hand, and the indolence of the unproductive monk on the other.

Fortunately, however, we are now over a century away from the Victorian era. We are able to ask: what was all that hard work for? We can note with Hägglund that selling our labour power is in the realm of necessity rather than the realm of freedom; industriousness is a means, not an end. So what are the ends? The removal of suffering is a worthy end in and of itself, and if it is the only end that we seek, then the right option is monasticism. But if we do seek other ends – as I think is a good idea – then those other ends should include aesthetic pleasures like those of music and theatre.

Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom.

This post is part of a series discussing Arindam Chakrabarti’s Realisms Interlinked. The previous posts are available here, here and here.

The last chapter (chapter 16) of the second part is a discussion of the Nyāya theories for the existence of the self and it includes also discussions about the no-ownership theory (mental states don’t need to be *of someone*) and against physicalism (pp. 189–191). I especially enjoyed the discussion about the inner sense faculty (manas, already discussed in chapter 13) and its role as a connector among sense faculties. How else could we compare different sense data, given that sense faculties do not have autonomous agency and cannot communicate with each other? However, this seems to be a lot of burden placed on the shoulders of manas.  It seems straightforward to accept a sense-faculty for inner sensations, but how can one justify its extension to other functions? manas seems to grow to incorporate also what Sāṅkhya authors would have called a buddhi ‘intellect’. Can it do so and remain a sense-faculty? Can it really be responsible, e.g., for anuvyavasāya and *still* remain a sense-faculty?

Next, the third part (“Other subjects”) starts. In this third part, the book’s title (“Realisms interlinked”) increasingly looses its cogency and the book is more and more about “objects, subjects and other subjects”, including also less closely connected topics, such as the brilliant article on the ontology of shadows and Arindam’s theory of śabdapramāṇa —but Arindam waves them together nicely, e.g., by discussing how śabdapramāṇa is part of our acknowledging the existence of epistemic others, i.e., others we can learn from.

To be honest, I enjoyed the first part, but I enjoy even more this latter part, since it is more experimental and draws from more sources (whereas the first part was closer to keeping the Anglo-Analytic and Nyāya paradigms). For instance, the wonderful chapter 18, on the vocative reminded me of Martin Buber’s masterpiece, “I and Thou” and how relating to one by addressing them is different than discussing about them. The latter way to speak reifies them, the former means entering into a relation. Thus, whereas it is contradictory to say “I am now talking to God. I do not know whether They exist”, it is not meaningless to address God asking for faith, because addressing is not about existence, but about relation. 

As hinted at above, Arindam follows different philosophical inspirations in this part, starting with Abhinavagupta, whom, as discussed in a previous post, is also responsible for his moving beyond realism. We had already seen this influence at play, for instance in chapter 12, and within the third part again in chapter 17, while discussing how it is possible to know about the existence of others. The whole chapter discusses the arguments by analogy in Dharmakīrti and its critique by Strawson, which Arindam labels as “devastating”. Why so? The argument by analogy is, according to Arindam’s reading of Strawson, an induction. But how weak is an induction, if it is based on a single case? Moreover, according to Strawson, there is strictly speaking not even a single case the induction can be based on. In fact, predicates such as “happy” or “depressed” are completely different if they are experienced from within and attributed from the outside to other alleged subjects. And in which sense is a predicate a predicate if it is not predicable of others? Thus, for predicates to be predicates, they need to be applicable to more than one person, even if in one case through direct access and in the other through behaviour-observation. At this point, Abhinavagupta is ready to step in. But before getting to his solution as understood by Arindam, let me pause a little longer on why following Abhinavagupta.

Why would Arindam be ready to sacrifice direct realism and follow Abhinavagupta on this dangerous path? Because Arindam likes intelligent thinkers, but also because Abhinava allows for a rich conception of the ātman, which is dynamically evolving (against the permanent self of Nyāya and Vedānta), and can therefore be an agent and a knower of intentional contents (the Sāṅkhya and Advaita Vedānta subject could be aware, but of no contents, the Nyāya subject had knowledge as an additional quality). 

Thus, while holding Abhinavagupta’s hand, Arindam ends up coming out of the plains of naïve realism and ends up in transcendental idealism or panpsychism. And here comes the solution for the problem of the existence of other subjects. In Arindam’s words:

“Post-Cartesian Western thought finds the problem of the Other Mind challenging and the very presence of the Other existentially constraining and self-annihilating. Abhinavagupta, on the other hand, finds the You to be a foundational middle-reality between the pure Self and the apparent non-Self, in contrast and continuity with which the Self discovers its own playful knower-hood” (p. 202).

Next come chapters 19 and 20, which discuss the epistemology of testimony. Arindam is here preaching to the convert when it comes to me, but let me repeat that unless we accept testimony, we have no way to ensure knowledge of basic facts, like our name and date of birth. Arindam also convincingly shows that testimony cannot be reduced to inference (pp. 217–8). Can the Nyāya theory of śabdapramāṇa, which is based on descriptive language, work also in the case of prescriptive language. As a Mīmāṃsaka, I am biased against it, but also Arindam’s reconstruction seems to allow for some doubts (“You are a person who is qualified by the agency to do X” does not seem tantamount to “do X!” —the prescriptive character appears to be just missing).

A last word on chapter 21, which is one of the best pieces of writing by Arindam in general and which allows me to go back to a point I discussed in the second post of this series, namely Arindam’s way of doing philosophy through a dialogue with other authors. In chapter 21 Arindam mentions a sentence by Wittgenstein. The interesting point is that the sentence looks trivially true. It says: “In paintings darkness *can* also be depicted as black”. No source is given, and I don’t know Wittgenstein good enough to be able to identify and reproduce the original German and check whether there is any additional shade of meaning, but as it stands, the sentence looks banal. However, Arindam is able to go deeper and disagree with the ontological theory about shade it presupposes. The key point that became clear to me only at this point is that Arindam is a great philosopher because (or also because) he is a great interpreter. He is able to let sentences by Nyāya philosophers (or by Leonardo, Turner or Goethe) disquiet him, and then keeps on thinking about them until he can identify what they implicitly presuppose, spell it out, and continue thinking philosophically about them until he can elaborate a theory that answers all the objections he has contemplated and taken seriously.

As I was answering a question at the Daily Nous blog about book reviews, it struck me that a quick announcement here encouraging potential reviewers (and authors) to be in touch with me might be a good idea.

I’ve taken over the South Asian Philosophy book review editor position from Matt Dasti (since last year), and I am always looking for reviewers. Below is a summary of our book review process, as well as a list of books for which I’m currently seeking reviewers. If you are interested in reviewing, please email me at c.malcolm.keating@gmail.com, along with a CV and brief explanation as to why you’re a suitable reviewer. If you have a new/forthcoming book, email me after confirming it fits the journal’s scope.

Book Reviews in Philosophy East & West

PEW publishes book reviews as an online supplement with the print edition. They are typically 2,000 words long, though, depending on the book, this can be flexible, in consultation with the book review editor. For important books which merit a roundtable, in consultation with the book review editor and journal editor, we can extend the review length and invite replies. Below is a summary of the book review process, from initial commission to publication.

Initial Commission

The book review editor solicits a reviewer for the book based on appropriate areas of expertise. In consultation with the reviewer, they set a submission deadline and target length.

Book Copies

The publisher will, at the book review editor’s request, send review copies to the reviewer. These may be print or e-book copies, depending on reviewer preference and publisher availability. Increasingly, publishers prefer to send e-book versions rather than hard copies.

Review Writing

The structure of the review itself is at the discretion of the reviewer. However, excellent book reviews typically include a synopsis for the reader, brief discussion of the philosophical and scholarly conversation that the book is intervening in, along with evaluative comments. Unless a longer, thesis-driven review has been agreed-upon with the editors, book reviews should not present the reviewer’s own position about a topic, but limit themselves to evaluating the book’s merits and demerits with respect to the aims that it sets out.

1. A chastening administers discipline over anything from flaws in book structure to diacritical errors.
2. A review-splaining solely demonstrates the reviewer’s own intellectual superiority and above-average intelligence.
3. A revised proposal describes in overwhelming detail the book on the subject which the reviewer would have written, if they were given the chance.
4. An homage skips over discussion of the book; it just gushes over the enjoyment of reading it.
5. A good review succinctly represents the book, independent of evaluation. It also offers a point of view to engage with the book critically.[1]

Manuscript Guidelines

All articles and features are printed in English. If a contribution is written in another language, the original and an English translation are requested. If a contribution is submitted by an author for which English is not a native language, the manuscript must be edited by a native speaker before submission.

The system of transliteration of foreign terms and names should be consistent within each article and should conform to generally accepted practice.

Manuscripts should be prepared according to the specifications of the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Authors are responsible for the accuracy of all quotations and for supplying complete references. All copy, including block quotations, end notes, and reference lists, must be double-spaced, and in Times New Roman font. All footnotes must be converted to endnotes.

More details about manuscript preparation: https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/pew/

Submission to Book Review Editor and Revisions

Once the review is complete, it should be sent to your book review editor as a Word document for editing and review, accompanied by a PDF (to ensure no diacritical or Asian language errors are introduced). The editor will review the submission for content and style. They will return it to you with suggested changes. At any point in the process, the editor may reject the review for not meeting PEW standards.

After incorporating revisions, send the revised document to the editor, who will vet it again. Once editor and reviewer are satisfied, the review will then go to Editorial for preparation.

Submission to Editorial

When the book review is in final form, the reviewer should send it, along with a headshot of the author in high resolution, in a *.jpg format, to pew@hawaii.edu, cc-ing the book review editor. Send the review in PDF and Word format to ensure no errors are introduced in diacritics or Asian languages.

[1] Adapted from Roger Shiner/ Philosophy in Review’s adaptation of Susan Swan, “Nine ways of looking at a critic,” Toronto Globe and Mail 30th November 1996. E23. https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/pir/about/submissions

I find myself repeatedly returning to the question I asked earlier this year: “Is the problem in our heads?” That is: for Buddhists, especially classical ones, is the fundamental human problem located in our minds, or in the world? I have found that my thinking on this question has already changed even just since my posts on the topic last month.

In those posts, I defended to Patrick O’Donnell my claim that in classical Buddhist texts the causes of suffering are primarily mental. As I’ve thought on the question a bit further, I have come to realize that that is not quite right – though even so, the revision does not lead to the ethical consequences that Patrick or Ron Purser would hope for.

For my book project I’ve been exploring Śāntideva’s key concept of daurmanasya – etymologically “bad-mindedness”, probably best translated “frustration”. Śāntideva warns us that this frustration is the root cause of dveṣa (hostility or anger), which is in many respects the most serious problem of all and leads to untold suffering. About it, he asks the memorable question:

If there is a remedy, then what’s the point of frustration?

But if there’s no remedy, then what’s the point of frustration?

BCA VI.10

But Śāntideva doesn’t stop there. He also tells us where frustration itself comes from. It is born from the causing of what is undesired and the destruction of what is desired (aniṣṭakaraṇāj jātam iṣṭasya ca vighātanāt, BCA VI.7). What we’re seeing there is an interaction between two phenomena: an external (worldly) event and our mental desires. And he spells out the connection more clearly in the Śikṣā Samuccaya:

The destruction of what is desired, and intense attachment (abhiṣvaṅga) to happiness: from these two comes frustration. From it, anger and faint-heartedness. 

ŚS 179

In these passages the problem is in two places, or perhaps more accurately at the intersection of two places: where mind meets world. There is the worldly event, and there are the desires that it goes against – and our intense attachment, our craving. The frustration comes when the world bumps up against our desires.

That is to say that Patrick O’Donnell was right in a sense: it is not just mind that is causing us to suffer, it is also world. (And thus Sallie King is not quite right to say “the problem is in our minds, not in the world.”) If the world never destroyed what we desire and never caused what we do not desire, then we could avoid suffering without changing our minds.

The problem, of course, is that the world doesn’t work that way and never will. This is Aśvaghoṣa’s point when he dramatizes the bodhisattva, the Buddha-to-be, leaving his father’s palace. King Śuddhodana has promised his son every pleasure, has done everything in his power to grant his son’s desires. The king also tells his son that it is his dharma, his duty, to rule. But the young Siddhārtha replies:

I will not enter the penance grove, O King, if you will be the surety for me in four things. My life shall not be subject to death. Sickness shall not rob me of my health. Old age shall not strike down my youth. And misfortune shall never plunder my wealth.

Buddhacarita V.34-5 (Olivelle translation)

The request is hardly made in good faith. The bodhisattva knows the king cannot promise him any of these. And that is the point. The world ultimately frustrates our deepest desires through sickness, old age and death, in a way that neither an absolute king nor a social democracy can stop. Any alleviation of suffering that comes from fixing the world is minor at best. The world and the mind do meet to cause suffering together. But the difference between the two is that the world cannot be fixed, no matter how much power one has at one’s disposal. The mind can.

It is at that point that I think Sallie King remains right about the classical texts and Purser and O’Donnell wrong. Mind and world interact to cause our suffering, but according to the classical texts, fixing the world does not fix the suffering. Only fixing the mind does that. And so Śāntideva’s next line in the Śikṣā, after the one quoted, proposes the solution: “Nonattachment (anabhiṣvaṅga) toward happiness; non-resistance (avaimukhya) toward suffering.” (ŚS 179) So Aśvaghoṣa’s Buddha is not moved by the multiple entreaties, and rejects kingship for the monkhood. There is little to be gained by changing the world to bring it more in line with our desires. On this point, I think King is right and I stand by my previous claim: the solution, according to the classical Buddhist texts, is in our minds.

Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom.

This week I continue my response to Patrick O’Donnell’s comments disputing my claim that in classical Indian Buddhism “the causes of suffering are primarily mental”. The discussion last time was abstract and theoretical, but it has practical consequences – which bring us back to Engaged and Disengaged Buddhism. Patrick has an interesting discussion here which I think is unfortunately confused by terminological problems. He says:

If the problem is in our heads, what about the story of the poisoned arrow? One removes the arrow without inquiring into who shot it, why, etc. Of course we may inquire into such things later, after the fact (the metaphysics and psychology if you will).

The thing is, the Shorter Māluṅkya Sutta’s story of the poisoned arrow is not a warning against seeking an understanding of “metaphysics”, let alone of psychology. The “questions that tend not to edification” in that sutta are largely cosmological questions: about the eternality or finitude of the cosmos, whether a Tathagata exists after death. The unedifying questions are described as “positions that are undeclared, set aside, discarded by the Blessed One” – which psychological questions pretty clearly are not. The craving and ignorance in our heads are the poisoned arrow that we have to get out first, before we can worry about the cosmological questions of who shot it.

Patrick continues:

Perhaps I am stubborn, but I continue to believe only one/third of the Eightfold Path concerns primarily what is “in our heads,” I do not think acting ethically and wisely is about what is (primarily or solely) in our heads, and thus it is mistaken to single out what is in our heads…

Here I think we may have some translation difficulties. Paññā/prajñā is most commonly rendered “wisdom”, but it is not phronēsis, wisdom about how one acts in the world. Discussions of paññā have to do with the nature of reality (including paṭicca samuppāda) and with seeing that nature correctly (yathābhūtadassana). It is not merely assent to propositions, for it affects the mind in other ways: one who sees things correctly is not attached to them. But neither is it about finding the right thing to do in a situation; it is not about acting wisely (though that might follow from it). In my dissertation I rendered Śāntideva’s prajñā as “metaphysical insight” because that is what he is talking about when he talks about prajñā, and as far as I can tell the same is true for Buddhaghosa and other Pali authors. The proper perception that constitutes paññā is something that is indeed in our heads, and therefore it is at least two-thirds of the path that are mental.

I also don’t think “ethics” or “acting ethically” is a good translation of sīla. I view ethics as concerned with how human beings should live as a whole, not merely how we should act, such that mental cultivation falls under its purview as well (I sometimes describe my work as “ethics of emotion”). But even if we take the analytical view that “ethics” is about how we should act, sīla in the Pali texts is not about “acting ethically” in the sense that modern Westerners understand that term, where it has to do with active benefit to others. It is nearly always phrased in terms of abstention: what one should not do. (The Five Precepts are the most famous formulation of the content of sīla, but other longer formulations are similarly concerned with abstention.) In a sense it is not about action at all, but about inaction, refraining from action. In the fifth chapter of Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra, this restraint of one’s action is practised primarily with the intent of controlling the mind, and I have not seen anything different in the Pali texts: the primary purpose of sīla throughout these texts is indeed to alleviate the mental causes of suffering.

Finally, Patrick continues:

and so I believe engaged Buddhists are on the right track, at least in some respects, for if we contribute to the welfare, well-being and eudaimonia of others who are poor, disadvantage, excluded, what have you, if we materially improve the circumstances and conditions of their lives, we enhance their opportunities for happiness and reduce at least some of the causes of suffering. We might even say that this is a necessary yet not sufficient condition for relieving such suffering that is primarily psychological or existential (in other words, enhancement of well-being and welfare enhances the possibility that one can address other and more obdurate forms of suffering), for as Gandhi said, when people are starving you give them bread, you can talk about other matters after their hunger has been satisfied.

I know of nowhere in Pali literature where any advice to this effect is to be found, and there’s a reason for that. It is the sort of view that is often associated with altruistic Mahāyāna texts, but strikingly, it is often not even found there. The view that Patrick describes here is basically the one Stephen Jenkins attributes to Śāntideva in his “Do bodhisattvas relieve poverty?”, in which “material goods have priority as a prerequisite for moral well-being”. For, Jenkins correctly notes, Śāntideva’s bodhisattva does give gifts to the poor.

But in response to Jenkins I showed, in my “The compassionate gift of vice”, that that is not how Śāntideva understands those acts of giving. The material gifts do not have priority; they are not a necessary condition for relieving suffering. Rather, they are a way of getting the recipient to listen to the bodhisattva’s teaching, compared to bait on a fish hook – and analogous to the way Śāntideva says bodhisattvas intentionally become prostitutes to draw men to them. For that reason, while Śāntideva’s bodhisattva indeed gives to the poor, he also gives to the rich! Even Śāntideva’s altruism is about getting other people to improve their minds – because, as he says, “all fears and immeasurable sufferings come from the mind alone.”

I’ll close by noting that I have recently come to feel more persuaded by Jenkins’s view constructively: it probably is the case that some suffering is genuinely caused by material deprivation, and that it is harder to be virtuous on an empty stomach. I just don’t think that that’s the view found even in the altruistic Śāntideva, let alone anywhere in the Pali Canon. There, the causes of suffering are, indeed, mental.

Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom.

The Sāṅkhya reached its acme before Mīmāṃsā and its position is therefore attacked as a useful departure point for deontic discussions, especially around the case of the śyena in Mīmāṃsā texts (in the following, I will refer to its representation in Veṅkaṭanātha’s TMK).

Interestingly, although the school accepted the authority of the Vedas, Sāṅkhya authors did not insist on their being necessarily consistent and instead highlighted that the prohibition to perform violence should not be overturned, not even in case of sacrificial violence. Accordingly, they understand the sequence:

• 1. One should not perform violence on any living being
• 2. If one desires to harm one’s enemy, they should sacrifice bewitching with the śyena

as implying that 1. invalidates 2. Interestingly, Sāṅkhya authors are ready to go as far as stating that this applies also to the following sequence:

• 1. One should not perform violence on any living being
• 3. One should sacrifice an animal within the agnīṣomīya sacrifice

Whereas all Mīmāṃsā authors agree that 2. should not be fulfilled (but out of different reasons than the one put forward by Sāṅkhya authors), no one among them would agree in extending this position to 3.

Sāṅkhya authors are therefore presupposing that Vedic commands do not necessarily form a consistent whole and, more importantly, that prohibitions are \emph{unrestricted in their application} (see TMK 5.78). This is connected to a point we will see developed by Maṇḍana, namely the incommensurability of the bad. Transgressing a prohibition involves accumulating pāpa, i.e., bad karman, and this bad output cannot be compensated by any good result one might gather. Prescriptions contrasting with prohibitions are automatically suspended, since prohibitions are unrestricted and always prevail. Only prescriptions not contrasting with prohibitions are valid.

The Indian Philosophy Blog is planning to update the Philosophical Rasika Report, last compiled in 2017, for North America and Europe. We are also hoping to add a South Asia list, as well as other international programs.

If you work in Indian Philosophy and have been hired at a PhD-granting program since 2017 or are part of a PhD-granting program who has hired someone working in Indian Philosophy, I invite you to help us with this project by emailing the point person below. (You may also email to let us know about retirements and other changes.)

North America, Andrew Nicholson, andrew.nicholson@stonybrook.edu
Europe, Elisa Freschi, elisa.freschi@gmail.com
South Asia & beyond, Malcolm Keating, c.malcolm.keating@gmail.com

Thanks in advance for your assistance in keeping this resource up to date.

What makes a text a “commentary”? The question is naive enough to allow a complicated answer.

In Sanskrit intellectual history there is not a single word for “commentary” and several words focus on different aspects (bhāṣya' for an extensive commentary spelling out aphorisms (MBh, ŚBh, ŚrīBh…),vyākhya’ or vyākhyāna' literally meaningexplanation’ and often used as a synonym of bhāṣya when writing a subcommentary thereon, vārttika' originally for a concise commentary in aphoristic form (Kātyayana's V), later for texts encompassing such form (NV), or written in verses (ŚV) or encompassing verses (PV, TV),ṭīkā’ for a subcommentary (Bṛ, NVVTṬ…), `ṭīppaṇī’ for a commentary on only specific points here and there and so on, please read more in Preisendanz 2008 and Ganeri 2010). These plurality of words suggests (like the proverbial case of the many words for ‘snow’ in the Inuits’ language) a long familiarity with the practice of commenting, seen as entailing many different approaches to a text (or texts). (Btw: I am not at all claiming that this is unique to the Sanskrit world, don’t start telling me about many Latin words from glossa onwards).

Typically, these texts tend to focus either on the single text they are commenting on or on it together with the one this was, in turn, a commentary thereon (for instance, Vācaspati’s commentary on the NV, taking into account also the NBh and the NS). Another characteristic of such commentaries is that they will explicitly refer to texts of opposing schools, whereas they will just silently reuse texts of their own school, since they feel them as part of their own history, immediately recognisable to themselves and their audience.

Which kinds of texts would one comment upon?
1. In the standard case in philosophy, texts of one’s own school; but also
2. Authoritative (usually religious) texts that did not belong to one’s own tradition, but that one wanted to gain for one’s own tradition (for instance, Abhinavagupta’s commentary on the Paratriṃśikā).

What is the role of commentary in Sanskrit philosophy? It is the standard way of writing philosophy. There was a small number of aphoristic texts which did not present them as commentaries (but which often evoke other views and quote other authors), and starting possibly with Maṇḍana (8th c.) some monographs were written on specific topics, however, the practice of commentaries remained the standard and most common way of doing philosophy, enabling one to write about many topics. A common misunderstanding to be erased is therefore the equation of commentaries with non-original and pedantic work. This was most of the time not the case with philosophical commentaries.

However, the circumstances change with time (as to be expected) and if we look at commentaries post 13th c. the situation looks different.
I will focus on especially two aspects:

1. 1. the relation between text and commentary
2. 2. the relation between commentary and its sources

Concerning 1., many commentaries become increasingly not just about a single text (or a sequence of texts), but interact more with a network of texts (as I have discussed elsewhere in the case of Veṅkaṭanātha’s Seśvaramīmāṃsā, see Freschi 2018).
A very noteworthy case is that of the relation between the Advaitasiddhi and the Nyāyāmṛta. The latter is a very influential text of the Dvaita Vedānta school by Vyāsatīrtha, in some sense we could say that it is the text through which the Dvaita Vedānta becomes part of the mainstream philosophical discourse. How could this happen? Because Vyāsatīrtha took up Madhva’s (the founder of Dvaita Vedānta) central theses, but stripped them of Madhva’s idiosyncratic style and “repackaged” them in the powerful argumentative style of Navya Nyāya. Form is not only a matter of style when it comes to philosophical discourse and this change meant that Madhva’s core ideas and intuitions were now formulated in a strongly inferential form and made a really compelling case for their validity.

At this point, the Advaita Vedānta school could not continue to ignore Dvaita Vedānta. An Advaita Vedānta champion, Madhusūdana, took up the challenge and wrote a detailed response to the Nyāyāmṛta in the form of a detailed commentary (almost line-by-line) to it. This was not the kind of appropriation commentary I discussed above but rather a close rejoinder. At the same time, Madhusūdana needed to invoke his own set of authorities to join the discussion, thus contributing to the network-isaiton of the commentary.

Concerning 2., something I noticed in Veṅkaṭanātha’s commentaries is that they (against what I described above and in Freschi 2014) quote and mention people of Veṅkaṭanātha’s school and silently reuse opponents. Why so? It seems that quotations and reuse have shifted into a way to give prestige and authority to one’s position as part of the school, in a way that the reuse of opponents’ names and direct quotes would not be able to do.

Patrick O’Donnell makes several interesting comments disputing my claim that for most classical Indian Buddhists “the causes of suffering are primarily mental.” I think they’re worth responding to at length, so I’ll take two posts to do so: this week on the theoretical (metaphysical and psychological) claims about the causation of suffering, next week on their practical implications.

In the original post I say the idea is from “the Disengaged Buddhists”, but will refrain from that phrasing in this particular post because it probably begs the question currently at issue. I do think that the idea is subscribed to by the Buddhists whom I refer to in my article as disengaged, and that it is a key reason for their disengagement. These include Śāntideva, Aśvaghoṣa, and – perhaps most importantly for the present discussion – the authors of most if not all of the Pali Canon.

Let me first make a methodological point: for now, at least, I will be speaking exegetically and not constructively. That is, I am aiming to clarify the viewpoint of these classical Buddhist thinkers on the question of suffering’s causes, not to state my own position, since I do disagree with them on a number of questions (including in the original post). In this post (and most of next) I am concerned with what they think about suffering (dukkha), not with what I think.

Patrick begins by saying “I have always understood the so-called roots of suffering in Buddhism two be twofold: inordinate desire (hence craving) and ignorance.” It seems to me that that is already just to say that the causes of suffering are mental right there: as I pointed out and I don’t think Patrick disputed, inordinate desire and ignorance are both mental. This point is in line with the Second Noble Truth, which identifies the origin (samudaya) of dukkha in taṇhā, craving (or inordinate desire if you wish), and makes no mention of any other origin. It is also in line with the opening verse of the Dhammapāda, which proclaims from the beginning that

phenomena (dhammas) are preceded by mind (manas), led by mind, made of mind. If one speaks or acts with an impure mind, suffering follows them as the wheel follows the ox’s foot.

In case one didn’t get the point, the second verse repeats:

phenomena are preceded by mind, led by mind, made of mind. If one speaks or acts with a pure mind, happiness follows them like a shadow that does not leave.

Patrick clearly knows the Pali texts well enough to be aware of all this. How then can he claim, as he does, that it is “egregiously mistaken to prioritize, stress, or focus on ‘the mental'”? He notes, and I grant, that “changes in our material conditions and experiences can have effects on our mental and emotional outlook and dispositions…” But in response to that I argue: “One could then specify that the mental causes of suffering in turn have their own non-mental causes, and that seems plausible to me – but it wouldn’t change the fact that the causes of suffering themselves are mental, whatever might cause those causes.”

It is in Patrick’s response to this where I think the argument gets particularly interesting. Here his comment is worth quoting at length:

Dependent origination is about the causes of suffering: they are variable, multiple, and interdependent, that is why it is misleading to simply assert that the causes are mental; everything is connected, is it not? This is actually a topic I have come across both in the law (especially criminal and tort law) and in philosophy of science and science generally. It is extremely difficult to select out particular causes as more significant than others (even if, by way of shorthand or convenience, we do so)…
We can, conventionally, say that smoking causes lung cancer, but of course there are other causes of lung cancer and it may be that genetics, lifestyle choices, circumstances and conditions into which one is born and raise that one has little control over, etc., etc., could be said to be part of the larger network of causes that may lead to (as contributory causes) to lung cancer in one who smokes.

The “conventionally” usage is interesting in its allusion to the two truths or ways of speaking, conventional (sammuti/vohāra) and ultimate (paramattha). Just as speaking of a person is merely a convenient designation to refer to what is more accurately a set of aggregates, I think Patrick is saying, so likewise, saying that suffering is caused by craving is merely a convenient designation to refer to a more complex set of causes identified by the scheme of dependent origination (paṭicca samuppāda).

The problem with that approach, I think, is this: nowhere in any Pali text that I am aware of is there any indication that the Four Noble Truths – including the Second – are merely conventional. The Four Truths are not in the personal language that usually characterizes the conventional (“my suffering comes from craving”); they are in the same impersonal phrasing as the abhidhamma. As far as I can tell, the Truths are always considered nītattha, of clear meaning, rather than neyyattha, requiring interpretation. That the origin of suffering is in craving is no mere simplification; it is no more of a conventional or provisional statement than is any statement of dependent origination. So the fact that every causal element is connected does not supersede the fact that suffering is caused by the mental factor of craving (and perhaps ignorance along with it). If Patrick can find me anything in the first millennium of Pali Buddhism that really says the Four Truths are a mere shorthand or convenient designation, or less fundamental than dependent origination, then I’ll be both impressed and startled, for that would indeed overturn a great deal of my understanding of the tradition. As far as I know, nobody seriously claims the Truths are merely conventional until Nāgārjuna comes along – but he says that dependent origination is merely conventional too!

So I don’t think it is misleading to assert that, according to the suttas and other Pali texts, the causes of suffering are mental. They are, and that’s one of the most important ideas in the canon. The truth that suffering’s origin is craving does not invalidate the truth of dependent origination – but just as much, the truth of dependent origination does not invalidate the truth that suffering’s origin is craving. A reading of dependent origination that says “suffering’s origin isn’t really craving, that’s just a shorthand for more complex causes” is a misreading.

Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom.

Almost all the chapters I will deal with in this second post (“Part 1” in the book) are about a defence of objects. The next bunch of chapters will be about a defence of subjects and the last one will be about other subjects", meaning not justother stuff” but also literally “other subjects”, like the ‘you’.

Basic thesis:
Arindam does not keep his card hidden. He speaks of a suicidal movement of our thought about reality''sloping from Naïve-realism to Absolute Skepticism through Idealism”, a suicidal movement that needs to be “blocked” (p. 75). It can be blocked, Arindam says, at three levels: 1. at a very early level, like Nyāya did (and Arindam wants to do), 2. by embracing some form of idealism while rejecting skepticism, 3. by embracing skepticism at the empirical level, but accepting the possibility of a mystical insight.

Methodology:
philosophia perennis: p. 101: ” ‘Contemporary; is a slippery word. Whether in language or in thought, those who worship what is current tend to ignore the timeless universal structures of human experience, thinking, and speech”
interaction with sources: ND asked in a meeting whether Arindam could have written the book by just “omitting the footnotes”, like Jan Westerhoff did with Madhyamaka philosophy. Now, my impression is that this is ethically unfair BUT ALSO impossible for Arindam’s book, since this is not based on a single argument (so that you can “delete” the footnotes), but rather on a dialogue among positions. It emerges from a tea-time-like conversation among colleagues in which it would be impossible to say “One might say that…” unless you specified which colleague is speaking, because their being a positivist or an idealist sheds a different light on their question. See, on this point, Arindam’s own perception of his contribution (p. 114): “In the context of the insightful infightings of the contemporary Western philosophers of language and the medieval Indian thinkers, I put forward my own conclusion about the meaning and reference of “I”.” We will see an example of this way of arguing already in chapter 6.

Defence of objects:
The main purpose of the first chapters is to go against idealism. Arindam presupposes that we can talk about “idealism” in general, as an over-arching category applicable to Berkeley, Śaṅkara and Yogācāra (and many more). However, behind this general framework, his discussions are more to-the-ground and focus on one specific speaker at a time.

Chapter 6 (pp. 65–75) focuses on how other idealists defeated idealism. It starts with 4 points in favour of idealism (in its Yogācāra fashion), namely:

• 1. mid-sized objects lead to antinomies because they have parts (this will be refuted through the assumption of samavāya, p. 87);
• 2. an object cannot be at the same time the cause of cognition and the thing featured in it. Atoms, for instance, cause the cognition, but don’t feature in it. Chairs etc. feature in the cognition, but don’t produce it.
• 3. the well-known sahopalambhaniyama (discussed in a previous post).
• 4. the argument from dreams shows that it is possible to experience objects without their mind-independent existence (this will be the topic of chapter 8).

Then, Arindam moves to Śaṅkara’s refutation of the Yogācāra position. For instance, how can something inner and mental appear as external, if we have never encountered anything external to begin with? How could we feign the external? (This is connected with the dream argument, as we will see below). Arindam suggests that Kant would be less vulnerable to this objection, since he could say that there is a specific function of our cognitive apparatus responsible for projecting things as external.

Arindam here reads Śaṅkara (and Kant) as accusing the Yogācāra of confusing the “phenomenal with the illusory” and he reads therefore Kant as an idealist who confutes idealism through the introduction of phenomena.
Here, by the way, Arindam attacks the Yogācāra because of a lack of distinction between saṃvṛtisat `conventionally real’ AND other forms of unreality. One should have been more nuanced, he thinks, in distinguishing between 1. what is phenomenal, 2. what is absolutely impossible (triangular flavours driving furiously) and 3. what is the result of illusions, dreams and illusions error. (By the way, Arindam’s first book was on absence, so let us consider him an expert here).

Arindam uses again Kant as an idealist defeating idealism when he uses him in order to justify the possibility of permanence of objects over time, given that we perceive ourselves as changing over times, something must remain stable so as to appreciate the change. But time is the form of our inner experience, so that no permanent element can be detected inside, unless through a comparison with something outside. (Arindam himself is not completely convinced by this argument, p. 73).

Chapter 7 focuses again on the sahopalambhaniyama problem and replies that difference […] tolerates relatedness" (p. 79). It is true that we access objects through the mind, but this does not mean that they don't exist also independently of it. Arindam takes advantage here of a characteristic of the English language (and of many others) and insists on paying attention to the `of' when we speak of a `cognition *of* blue':I cannot experience or imagine a tree unless it is made as an object of some kind of awareness, but there is as much difference between the tree and my awareness of the tree as there is between the tree and its roots and branches. Inseparability does not mean identity” (p. 90).
It is a priori impossible to demonstrate the existence of uncognised things, but the very fact that everything is knowledge-accessible, says Arindam, presupposes that it really existed prior and independently of being cognised (p. 81). As suggested in a previous post, this thesis is closely linked with the one about how cognitions are never self-aware.
This chapter also gives Arindam a chance to discuss how he sees Nyāya realism. The objective world of Nyāya is a “world for the self”, that exists to enable selves to suffer and enjoy, thus different from the Cartesian dualism (where selves don’t really interact with matter) or from the world of imperceptible quarks in contemporary physics (p. 81).

Chapter 8 is about the Dream argument: How can we recognise something as a dream unless we wake up?

Chapter 9 on the Accusative is a good chance to discuss Arindam’s use of linguistic arguments. For some decades people working on Sanskrit philosophy thought that the linguistic turn was going to be the way Sanskrit philosophy could finally be vindicated. After all, did not Sanskrit philosophers understand ahead of time that the only way to access reality is via cognitions and that cognitions are inherently linguistics? Thus, analysing language is the best approach to reality after all. This dream was somehow scattered when philosophy of language became less popular in Anglo-Analytic philosophy. Still, Arindam has already explained that following contemporary fashions is not the only thing that counts. Hence, he could nonetheless write a fascinating chapter (chapter 10) on the reference of I', moving from Wittgenstein to Abhinavagupta. The main problem is what is the reference ofI’ (is it the ahaṅkāra? The ātman? Is it an empty term, because the very fact that it cannot go wrong means it cannot be correct either).

Readers of this blog are most likely aware of the huge COVID crisis unfolding in India at the moment.

I recently discovered this crowdsourced list of organizations working in India that are seeking donations from those of us outside India. Please consider donating if you can.

Readers in India, I hope you will remain safe during this difficult time.

I’m seeking a possible reviewer for the volume Controversial Reasoning in Indian Philosophy by Malcolm Keating (Bloomsbury, 2020), to be published in Philosophy East and West.

If there are any readers who are interested, please email me (mdasti(AT)bridgew(DOT)edu). If we don’t know each other already, kindly include your vita with academic credentials. Please do not offer in the comments below. Many thanks!

EDIT: I’ve accepted an offer.

A key idea that I’ve stressed from the Disengaged Buddhists is that the causes of suffering are primarily mental – especially the “three poisons” or “unwholesome roots” of craving (rāga), aversion or hostility (dveṣa/dosa) and delusion (moha) – and that therefore changes in material conditions of life will do relatively little to solve them. Engaged Buddhists reject this latter idea, since they take changing the material conditions as essential. What has struck me recently, though, is that they reject the idea in ways that are different, and sometimes even opposite – each of which still, surprisingly to me in some ways, seems to accept that rāga, dveṣa and moha are indeed where the key problems of human existence lie. I see this point especially in comparing the different views expressed by Ron Purser and Sallie King.

Recall from my discussion of Purser’s book: Purser agrees that Buddhist mindfulness seeks to eradicate “greed, ill will and delusion” (McMindfulness 20), but then objects to “a fundamental tenet of neoliberal mindfulness, that the source of people’s problems is found in their heads”, as opposed to the “systemic, institutional and structural causes” of suffering and stress. (38) Purser advocates that people instead turn their focus outwards, beyond their heads, to the “the conditions that cause us to suffer… from a political point of view.” (249)

King, meanwhile, responds to apparently disengaged texts like the Ādittapariyāya Sutta (Fire Sermon), which claims that ” the instructed noble disciple experiences revulsion towards the eye, towards forms… towards the ear… towards the mind….” and notes in response that it still focuses its critique on the three poisons, which she agrees are mental. I quoted this passage of King’s last time in a different context:

> If these three poisons are indeed the root of the problem, then the problem is in our minds, not in the world. We can free ourselves of duḥkha by practicing Buddhism in such a way that we rid ourselves of this craving, hatred, and delusion. This has nothing whatsoever to do with leaving the world and everything to do with transforming ourselves, here and now. (Socially Engaged Buddhism 43; emphasis in original)

Notice the contrast and disagreement between the two about where the problem lies! Is the problem in our minds, or not? I think there’s a really interesting comparison to be made between Purser’s and King’s approaches here. We can elucidate it by spelling out a deductive compound syllogism that I think underlies much of the Disengaged Buddhist view:

1. The fundamental problem that we need to solve consists roughly of rāga, dveṣa and moha (however we might translate these terms).
2. If the fundamental problem is rāga, dveṣa and moha, then the fundamental problem is in our minds, not in the world.
3. Therefore the fundamental problem is in our minds, not in the world.
4. If the fundamental problem is in our minds and not in the world, then solving the fundamental problem requires fixing our minds rather than fixing the world.
5. Therefore we should fix our minds rather than fix the world.

Now notice: Purser and King both appear to accept premise 1, that these three poisons – however one translates them – are the key problem in Buddhism, and they appear to accept this premise as their own constructive view. Neither of them accept the conclusion, 5; they both want an engaged Buddhist view that does focus on fixing the world. But they reject different parts of the intervening premises. King accepts 2 and 3 – “the problem is in our minds, not in the world”; it appears that she must therefore reject 4, in order to continue rejecting 5. But Purser specifically rejects 3, the claim that accepts, “that the source of people’s problems is found in their heads”, as a tenet of “neoliberal mindfulness”. This appears to be because he accepts premise 4, as King does not: he realizes that if the problem is with our minds, then the minds are what really need fixing, and this ancient Buddhist idea is too “neoliberal” for him. So it would appear that he must also reject premise 2, the premise that King accepts. It is an odd rejection to me, because I’m not sure how one could get to the idea that rāga, dveṣa and moha are not primarily “in our heads”, but it does seem implicit in what Purser has written.

My point here ties to a broader point underlying the Disengaged Buddhism article. The point of that article was not to reject Engaged Buddhism but to be clearer about our innovations, what it is in traditional Buddhism that we accept and do not accept. Here, neither Purser nor King spell out their rejections of the middle premises in the syllogism, and as a result, they do not explain their reasons for rejecting those premises. I think that such explanations would be just the sort of thing that an intellectually sophisticated Engaged Buddhism needs.

And where do I stand on the question at hand myself? Well, unlike Purser and King I do accept both premise 2 and premise 4: if the fundamental human problem is the three mental poisons, then the problem is in our minds, and if the problem is in our minds, then solving the problem requires fixing our minds. I also think that premise 1 is impeccably Buddhist and pervades most classical Buddhist thought, at least in South Asia from Thailand to Tibet. But I don’t fully accept premise 1 myself – and therefore I don’t fully accept 3 or 5, though I’d accept them all partially. Unlike many classical Buddhists, I accept worthy goals in life beyond the removal of suffering, and for that reason I don’t think the three poisons are the fundamental human problem. We have a lot of other problems – isolation from love and community, finding our authentic selves, and, yes, taking care of basic needs like food and medicine, without which we cannot even get to solving our mental problems. To the extent that activism is a good human activity, I think it is so above all in dealing with those other problems; it is much less helpful in dealing with the classically Buddhist problems of craving, hostility and delusion, each of which I suspect political engagement may tend to exacerbate.

Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom.

Author: A philosopher of two worlds, pupil of amazing scholars of Nyāya and of Analytic philosophy, completely accomplished in both worlds in a way which is hard to repeat

—Book: It puts together Arindam’s research of 27 years. Thus, it is a collection of articles, but very well edited together, possibly because they deal with a topic very much at the heart of Arindam’s global philosophical enterprise, one that I am going to discuss below.

—Target reader: A Mark Siderits, i.e., someone who is completely committed to the project of “fusion philosophy” (more on that below), who is able to roam around Sanskrit texts and is committed to Anglo-Analytic philosophy AND to its confidence in neurosciences. Thus, this target reader, unlike in Sanskrit philosophy, demolishes the idea of a stable unified subject, but believes in the world of atoms and mind-independent objects of hard sciences. This point is crucial to explain why Arindam often explains how denying the subject *will* lead to denial of the object as well, rather than explaining that denying the object will lead to denying the subject (as it would happen in Sanskrit philosophy and European one).

—Topic: Arindam is an outspoken realist. He grounds his realism in the self-evident reality of hard sciences, based on which we cannot be illusionists nor idealists. However, he also claims that one cannot be a realist about objects without being also a realist about subjects AND even about universals and relations (!). So, basically if you want to be a good scientist, you are committed to defend also a robust understanding of the subject and you can’t avoid defending also universals and relations, such as inherence. Once you open the door a little bit and allow for the idealism / not realism about universals, you WILL UNAVOIDABLY end up undermining the whole realist enterprise.

—Methodology: I spoke already about “fusion philosophy”. This is not comparative philosophy, insofar as what Arindam does is not a descriptive comparison nor a detached description of two or more comparable points of view. Rather, he has a problem he cares about (realism) and uses the best possible arguments to drive his point home. And he finds the best arguments in Nyāya and in contemporary anglo-analytic philosophy, with some addition of neuro-sciences, but also of other philosophical traditions. They are anyway all subservient to finding the truth. There is no interest in being complete or exhaustive, nor in exploring different points of view as a good thing in itself. This also explains why Arindam does surprisingly little to justify his methodology and espouses some possibly naïve terminological choices, such as speaking of “Indian vs Western philosophy”. 

—”Object”: not just atoms, but also mid-sized objects, like the ones we encounter every day, chairs etc.

—”Subject”: Which subject is Arindam defending? One that is the complex knower of Sanskrit philosophy, i.e., the unified knower who is able to perceive with different sense faculties and remember and is then able to desire and act based on what they cognised. Against Hume and the Buddhist and neuro-scientific idea that it is enough to have unrelated sensations + a superimposed sense of their unity.

—”Universals”: You cannot be a realist, says Arindam, unless you are also a realist about universals. You need universals to recognise things as tokens of a certain type. And, since Arindam is the intelligent crazy person he is, he adds a great example: A piece of music exists independently of its specific realisation. Similarly, a universal exists independently of its specific instantiations.

—”Properties”: This includes also universals

—Indefinability of truth: Arindam defends the Nyāya precept according to which it is possible to uphold simultaneously these two things:

A. Everything that exists is *in principle* knowable

B. Not everything that is knowable is known at any point of time

Why is this important? Because if existence and knowability are invariably connected, then Dharmakīrti’s argument about the sahopalambhaniyama is doomed to failure.

The key goal of my dissertation was to understand Śāntideva’s thought as it was and how it could be applied in a contemporary context. Now, for my book, I want to actually apply Śāntideva’s thought, which requires asking where he is right and where he is wrong. And that, it turns out, changes my understanding of some of the dissertation’s key concepts – especially the one in its title.

The dissertation is entitled “Ethical revaluation in the thought of Śāntideva”. In its third chapter, I describe “ethical revaluation” as a consequence of Śāntideva’s ideals of nonattachment (aparigraha) and patient endurance (kṣānti). I explain the idea of ethical revaluation as follows:

one revalues objects in a way that reflects the object’s real effect on one’s flourishing. Such a revaluation needs to be a qualitative and not merely quantitative change; but it is more than even that, in that one changes one’s view of what might be called the “direction” or “sign” of the object’s effect. That is, one is not merely saying that the object is less (or more) good for us than we had thought, but that what we thought was good for us is actually bad or at least neutral. (122)

Specifically, in Śāntideva’s ethical revaluation, one revalues (normally positive) possessions and human relationships as negative, because they are sources of attachment, and the (normally negative) wrongdoing of others as positive, because that wrongdoing is a ground for patient endurance. One changes the sign of the valuation.

It’s striking to me to come back to these passages now, thirteen years later, because I see how different my thinking on these concepts is. Especially: I would want to weaken the connection between nonattachment and patient endurance on one hand, and ethical revaluation on the other. Because now I accept nonattachment and patient endurance – to some extent – but I reject ethical revaluation as it is described above.

Let me unpack all this a bit more. I see now that a reason I was drawn to Śāntideva as a dissertation topic is that I find his ideals of nonattachment and patient endurance valuable and worthy. We human beings do, I think, get too attached to externals beyond our control – what Śāntideva calls bāhya bhāvas – and I agree with Śāntideva that “the mind does not get tranquility or obtain joy and happiness, nor go to sleep or to steadiness, when the dart of anger is lodged in the heart.” (BCA VI.3) So I think it is worth cultivating a state of patient endurance such that, as the dissertation says, “one remains calm and even happy in the face of various undesired events — pains, frustrations, wrongs — that one might face” (129): a state that requires keeping at least some distance from those externals.

But there is only so far I’m willing to go with the point. The idea of changing the sign of externals’ effect – the sign in an arithmetical sense, positive vs. negative – is a dramatic and radical one. Śāntideva tells us that having possessions – which, for him, include personal relationships as well as material goods – is bad, because they make us attached to them. But this claim only makes sense if (as I think Śāntideva would agree) they do not actually contribute independently to our flourishing, or that contribution is so small that it is outweighed by the attachment they produce. And I do not think this is the case.

I’ve outlined my reasoning for this view before. I think Śāntideva would agree with Aśvaghoṣa that we should not delight in the objects of the world because they are impermanent and cause suffering. But I do not think this is sufficient reason to reject them. The reduction of suffering is only one of the values we human beings come to ethical inquiry with, and I don’t think it is sufficient to always override other values and aims – joy, love, justice, self-expression. I think Śāntideva’s non-Buddhist opponents were wise to treat mokṣa, the liberation from suffering, as only one of the human aims, the puruṣārthas. But I don’t think that it is a rejection of Buddhism to think this way, since I do suspect that some great classical Buddhist thinkers, like the author of the Mahāvaṃsa, at least tacitly agree with me on this point.

Writing my article on disengaged Buddhism helped me see this point, as I responded to the two engaged Buddhist authors who have paid disengaged Buddhism meaningful attention: Sallie King and Hsiao-Lan Hu. King and Hu both advocate what Hu calls a “this-worldly Buddhism”. King notes that if, as many classical texts say, the “three poisons” of craving, anger and delusion

are indeed the root of the problem, then the problem is in our minds, not in the world. We can free ourselves of duḥkha by practicing Buddhism in such a way that we rid ourselves of this craving, hatred, and delusion. This has nothing whatsoever to do with leaving the world and everything to do with transforming ourselves, here and now. (Socially Engaged Buddhism 43; emphasis in original)

I point out in the article that the arguments of the disengaged Buddhists are quite compatible with such a this-worldly position: this transformation in ourselves, here and now, is very different from a transformation in social structures. Still, in practice, what classical disengaged Buddhists like Śāntideva and Aśvaghoṣa advocate often is a withdrawal from the world to some extent. Śāntideva’s bodhisattva does remain in the world to help get others out of their mental suffering, but while in the world, he is not of it; he puts no value on relationships of love, indeed considers them negative.

I reject their rejection of the world. I think there are many worldly goals and goods that have value independent of the reduction of suffering. Does that mean I then accept political engagement too? Well, that’s more complicated. I absolutely think the disengaged Buddhists have a point, that political engagement can increase our suffering. And I think that that view is entirely compatible with a this-worldly life. But it may also be the case that some other values outweigh the reduction of suffering and make political engagement worthwhile. Whether that is the case for any given person may depend on the particulars of that person’s nature as well as her circumstances.

Cross-posted at Love of All Wisdom.

Monima Chadha asked me to make a post looking for help in tracking down the origins of the classical parable about the elephant and the blind men. Please post any leads for her below. Thanks!

Dear readers,

For my final blog post as guest host for March 2021, I’ll begin by putting the concept of the apūrva on the table, and then I’ll shift into my interpretation of Śālikanātha’s new model of the archetypal Vedic command. I should note that not everyone in the field agrees with my new interpretation of what apūrva means in Prābhākara Mīmāṃsā; that is cool, I’m happy to debate further.

First, to the concept of the apūrva. Mīmāṃsā begins with an investigation into the authority of the Veda via The Chapter on Reason, and only subsequently investigates the meaning of the Veda through hermeneutic principles. This means that with the Veda’s authority first established, our investigation into what the Veda tells us about extra-worldly matters must take everything the Veda communicates as truths that cannot subsequently be cancelled (but the onus is on us as interpreters to figure out exactly what the Veda communicates). For Śabara and Kumārila, the archetypal Vedic injunction: svargakāmo yajeta communicates sacrifice as the means to heaven, as for them this sentence has the semantic structure: yāgena svargam bhāvayet (‘one should bring heaven into being via sacrifice’). That is, with the Veda’s authority already established via The Chapter on Reason, this cause-n-effect relationship must be true. However, Śabara and Kumārila need a solution to the latency problem, i.e., to the issue that sacrifice and heaven defies our normative expectations of cause-n-effect relationships as immediate. To explain: if I shoot one billiard ball into another, they don’t stay connected motionless for several seconds and then the second billiard ball moves, rather the second billiard ball begins to move instantly upon contact with the first ball. However, heaven is not experienced instantly upon the performance of sacrifice: how can what the Veda tells us, that sacrifice produces heaven, be true? Their answer to this latency problem is the apūrva, literally: ‘the un-precedented (a-pūrva).’ The sacrifice produces an apūrva, a trans-temporally stable potency, which in turn produces heaven at a much later time. Thus, for Śabara and Kumārila the apūrva is necessarily postulated based on what the Veda tells us about sacrifice as the means to heaven, even though the language of the Veda is not explicit on the apūrva.

With the concept of the apūrva tabled, let us now turn to my interpretation of Śālikanātha’s new theory (i.e., unattested in Prabhākara’s Bṛhatī). In the Vākyārthamātṛā II, Śālikanātha presents his view on the apūrva as a direct engagement with Kumārila (in Subrahmanya Sastri’s 1961 edition, this is pp. 439-40). How can I be certain Śālikanātha is engaging Kumārila specifically? Let me explain:

Kumārila’s view is on a continuum with Śabara’s in that Kumārila accepts the apūrva as the solution to the latency problem. However, Kumārila faces a real post-Śabara Mīmāṃsā-internal interlocutor who denies the apūrva’s existence on the grounds that there is no epistemological instrument to cognize it (see Cummins 2021, pp. 314-5 and notes 114-6). Kumārila’s answer to his real interlocutor on the epistemological instrument behind how we understand the apūrva is necessary linguistic presumption (śrutārthāpatti): we postulate a term in the text which is not actually there to communicate this term-referent (i.e., the apūrva), based on the otherwise impossibility of sacrifice as a means to heaven (which we, as Mīmāṃsakas, accept as a truth based on the Veda’s infallible authority). Thus, yāgena svargam bhāvayet ≈ yāgena apūrveṇa svargam bhāvayet. Kumārila ad MS 2.1.5 is where we first find necessary linguistic presumption (śrutārthāpatti) as the epistemological instrument behind the apūrva.

In the Vākyārthamātṛkā II (Subrahmanya Sastri’s 1961 edition, pp. 439-40), Śālikanātha says: ‘no, the apūrva is not understood through necessary presumption (arthāpatti), it is understood through the language itself’ as per the Prābhākara theory of linguistic signification that terms directly signify their referents as co-construed (anvitābhidhāna). In Cummins 2021 pp. 315-6, I provide a translation and discussion of the relevant passage where Śālikanātha’s prima facie interlocutor says the apūrva is understood through necessary presumption (arthāpatti). Thus, it is beyond doubt here that Śālikanātha’s prima facie interlocutor is a version of Kumārila when the concept of the apūrva rears its head here in Prābhākara Mīmāṃsā, since Kumārila is the only person to hold this specific position that necessary postulation (arthāpatti) is the epistemological instrument by which we understand the apūrva. Moreover, Śālikanātha must have a shared understanding with Kumārila over what the object of debate is. To say: ‘it is not understood through arthāpatti, it is understood through anvitābhidhāna’ requires a shared understanding of what it is (even if specifics of its nature are under debate). Otherwise, their conversation would cease to be coherent. And no one would disagree that for Kumārila the apūrva is the sacrifice’s trans-temporal potency to produce its result.

Śālikanātha’s position against Kumārila that the apūrva is directly signified by language (i.e., by an actual morpheme in svargakāmo yajeta) allows Śālikanātha to maintain the further position that the specific verbal suffix -eta directly signifies the apūrva (whereas on Kumārila’s position of ‘necessary linguistic presumption’, we postulate an extra term not there in the text to communicate the apūrva –> explained above: yāgena apūrveṇa svargam bhāvayet). In turn, saying the apūrva is directly signified by the verbal suffix –eta allows Śālikanātha to subordinately incorporate Kumārila and Maṇḍana’s theory of bhāvanā (the ‘bringing into being,’ best understood as intentional action to produce an outcome). Here is how:

All Mīmāṃsakas agree that in yajeta the verbal suffix –eta is the predominant element in relation to the verbal root yaj-, and Śabara, Kumārila and Maṇḍana all hold that the suffix –eta directly signifies the (in their view, predominant) bhāvanā. Śālikanātha accepts that the verbal suffix –eta signifies the ‘bringing into being’ (bhāvanā), but by advancing the position that the verbal suffix –eta also directly signifies the apūrva, opens the door for the bhāvanā to be positioned as the subordinate linguistic element on the basis of its ontological subordination (if both referents are communicated by the same suffix, we must look to the ontological structure to determine their relative hierarchy). Thus, when both the apūrva (the immediate effect of the bhāvanā) and the bhāvanā (the immediate cause of the apūrva) are established as directly signified by the verbal suffix –eta, this opens the door for the bhāvanā to be positioned as linguistically subordinate to the apūrva on the grounds of its ontological subordination in the causal chain of events.

The payout of this is a new model for Prābhākara Mīmāṃsā whereupon the bringing into being (bhāvanā) is subordinately incorporated to the apūrva – a model entirely unattested in Prabhākara’s own treatise(s). I will defer the interested reader to my recent article in JHS (esp. Cummins 2021 pp. 318-322), but put succinctly, the way this new model works is:

On Prabhākara’s theory of the command (niyoga), the commandee feels an obligation to the action expressed by the verbal root (e.g., yaj- ‘sacrifice’), and then Śabara’s injunctive theory kicks in at moment two the computational process. However, Prabhākara doesn’t really have a solution for where Śabara’s concept of bringing into being (bhāvanā) fits into the command’s computational process, he largely side-steps the issue.

In contrast, Śālikanātha has a solution to this very problem via the apūrva. On Śālikanātha’s new model, the commandee feels an obligation towards the apūrva, not the action (e.g., sacrifice). The payout is the exclusion of the bringing into being (bhāvanā) from being the item towards which one feels an obligation towards at moment one of the command’s computational process. Then, at moment two of the computational process – when bhāvanā theory explicitly kicks in (remember that for Śālikanātha, the bhāvanā is still directly signified by the verbal suffix –eta) – the bhāvanā is incorporated as subordinate in the language hierarchy to the apūrva. In short, this allows Śālikanātha to account for the bhāvanā and also systematically incorporate Kumārila’s new philosophical resources in a Prābhākara model (for an explanation of this in detail with citations, please see my article in JHS pp. 318-322).