Indian Buddhist Philosophy

Indian Buddhist PhilosophyAncient Philosophies
This series provides fresh and engaging new introductions to the major schools of philosophy of antiquity. Designed for students of philosophy and classics, the books off er clear and rigorous presentation of core ideas and lay the foundation for a thorough understanding of their subjects. Primary texts are handled in translation and the readers are provided with useful glossaries, chronologies and guides to the pri- mary source material.
Published
Ancient Scepticism Harald Thorsrud
Confucianism Paul R. Goldin
Neoplatonism Pauliina Remes
Plato Andrew S. Mason
Amber D. Carpenter
© Amber D. Carpenter, 2014
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. No reproduction without permission.
First published in 2014 by Acumen
ISBN: 978-1-84465-297-6 (hardcover) ISBN: 978-1-84465-298-3 (paperback)
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notices Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience And knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility.
To the fullest extent of the law, neither the Publisher nor the authors, contributors, or editors, assume any liability for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions, or ideas contained in the material herein.
v
Contents
Preface vii Acknowledgements xi Abbreviations xiii Chronology xvi Development of Buddhist thought in India xviii
1. The Buddha’s suff ering 1
2. Practice and theory of no- self 20
3. Kleas and compassion 48
4. The second Buddha’s greater vehicle 72
5. Karmic questions 93
7. The third turning: Yogcra 137
8. The long sixth to seventh century: epistemology as ethics 169 I. Perception and conception: the changing face of
ultimate reality 171 II. Evaluating reasons: Naiyyikas and Dinga 180 III. Madhyamaka response to Yogcra 189 IV. Percepts and concepts: Apoha 1 (Dinga) 214 V. Effi cacy: Apoha 2 (Dharmakrti) 219 VI. The path of the Bodhisattva 224
Epilogue 232
contents
vi
Background information Appendix 1: The languages of Buddhism 242 Appendix 2: Intellectual context 244 Appendix 3: The Abhidharma 246 Appendix 4: Snapshot of Indian philosophy 248
Notes 251 Bibliography 289 Index 305
vii
Preface
If ancient philosophy remains alive, this is because it is about life. How- ever abstract the debate may get (and it does get abstract), however abstruse the discussion, a thread leads back, anchoring it in the inescap- able concern with how to live and how to be. This is true of the ancient Greek philosophers, which is why their work remains alive for us still; and it is equally true of the philosophers of ancient India, including the Indian Buddhist philosophers whose work is the focus of this book.
I cannot hope to have given a comprehensive account of Indian Buddhist philosophy, which spanned several centuries, and involved an enormous variety of interlocutors. In what follows, I have aimed instead to present only suffi cient breadth that the reader may become oriented within the terrain, develop a sense for which sorts of concerns weighed with the Indian Buddhists, and how they articulated these concerns. And I have otherwise tried to focus on following through particular arguments, so that one might come to see what it is to do philosophy with these Buddhist philosophers and their texts, and come to appreciate how rewarding – and how challenging – this is. For although Buddhist philosophers remained alive to the basic ques- tions and concerns that may resonate with anyone, they developed sophisticated conceptual tools and arguments for pursuing these. They challenged each other to make more precise articulations of their understanding of the Buddha’s teachings, and to give more sophisti- cated defences of these views. When Buddhist thinkers were not imag- ining new and better ways of understanding the Buddhist position, and justifying them to each other, they were responding to pressures from non-Buddhist philosophers deeply sceptical of Buddhism’s main
preface
viii
metaphysical and epistemological commitments – and therefore scep- tical of Buddhism’s basic ability to give a decent account of how we ought to live, think and understand ourselves.
The fi rst chapter sketches the basic framework around which Bud- dhist thought was structured, and it off ers an account of suff ering that connects the metaphysical fact of suff ering to the felt undesirability of it. Chapter 2 examines the claim for which Buddhism was, and remains, best known (or, indeed, most notorious): the absence of self. I explore whether this should be taken as a claim about reality or as advice for a kind of praxis of dis-identifi cation, before examining the arguments of the early Buddhist philosophers, who took it to be a claim about ‘what there is’, in need of explanation and defence. Their arguments lead them to adopt a sort of trope-theory, which rejects not only selves as underlying subjects and unifying agents but also any such complex wholes that might be thought to underlie or unite diverse properties.
Whether meant as a claim about what there is or as advice about how to think, the aim of the no-self claim is the same: to eliminate suff ering by eliminating the causes of suff ering, above all craving. We might ask how exactly this is supposed to work (How does see- ing there are no selves eliminate craving?); we might also wonder, however it works, whether the game is worth the candle (Should I seek to eliminate suff ering at the expense of eliminating all desires?). Chapter 3 considers what exactly the Buddhist ideal is, looking at both the Bodhisattva ideal and the Arhat ideal it challenges, and asking whether either is an attractive goal, or should be expected to be. It also considers what there might be to say to someone who claimed that there was a higher aim than eliminating suff ering. We continue the examination of Mahyna ethics in Chapter 4 with Ngrjuna, the fi rst named philosopher in the Buddhist tradition. His Madhyamaka interpretation of the Buddha’s teachings claimed to go back to basics, to the more authentic meaning of the Buddha’s words, and at the same time off ered a systematic basis for the Mahyna view. His mode of argumentation is distinctive and diffi cult, relying on destructive tet- ralemmas that appear to countenance contradiction. I suggest that if we understand his form of anti- essentialism and anti-foundationalism, we may understand why he chose this elusive style of argumentation; yet foundationless metaphysics may also leave us without ground for moral improvement.
Central to moral thinking is not just the possibility for improvement, but the attribution of responsibility. Chapter 5 looks at karma (action)
preface
ix
as the term through which Indian philosophers generally engaged with questions of moral responsibility. We ask what karma is for the Bud- dhists, how it works within the Buddhist view as a whole, and whether it can (and ought) to be revised, or even dispensed with altogether. The worry that a no-self view eliminates responsibility was one pressed by non-Buddhists, and we turn in Chapter 6 to look at the sophisticated Nyya arguments for the existence of self. Experience itself, they say, demonstrates the unity-of-multiplicity distinctive of the self which the Buddhist would deny. Memory unites experiences at diff erent times; desire unites diff erent psychological modes (perception, memory) into a single moment. Buddhist minimalism, which seeks to eliminate all complex unities from the catalogue of really existing entities, may fi nd it diffi cult to give an adequate account of memory, of individual responsibility, and even of desire – the supposed root of suff ering.
Vasubandhu takes Buddhist minimalism to the extreme. Recogniz- ing that nothing can be located in space and still be absolutely sim- ple, he argues that Buddhists must therefore be committed to there being nothing spatially located at all. Chapter 7 considers his argu- ments, and whether the position he advocates should be called ‘ideal- ist’. Answering this requires understanding Vasubandhu’s analysis of modes of existence, and of the preconditions for the possibility of any experience. The ultimate precondition, I shall suggest, is that of which Vasubandhu says nothing can be said, or thought – and recognizing this fact is just what thoroughly transforming ourselves consists in.
Any view that proposes, as Buddhism does, that ‘seeing things as they are’ is our central aim must take epistemology seriously. This is implicit in Buddhism’s phenomenological bent, but made explicit above all in the work of Dinga, whose revolution in theories of reasoning, logic and language were part of a larger explosion of intellectual activ- ity that took place within Buddhist circles, and in India more generally, from about the middle of the sixth century. Chapter 8 takes a look at this ‘epistemological turn’ in Buddhist philosophy. Dinga formalizes the Buddhist view that conceptualizing distorts reality, which itself is non-conceptual and, on Dinga’s account, directly perceived. This preserves our moral task as one of ‘letting go’ of clinging to conceptual contrivances – especially that of the self, and the distinction between self and other; but it does so at the risk of making all language-use equally false, and thus allowing no space to reasoning on the path towards moral improvement and eventual enlightenment. Dinga and Dharmakrti try to resolve these worries through an analysis of
preface
x
inference and its grounds, while their Madhyamaka contemporaries favour eliminating altogether the supposed distinction between ‘mere conceptual contrivance’ and ‘the really real’. Thus, Bhviveka argues vigorously against the Buddhist idealist claim that there is some ulti- mate, utterly unconceptualizable reality, while Candrakrti supposes even such arguments concede too much to Vasubandhu and his epis- temologist successors. The ultimate reality we are to see consists in seeing that there is no ultimate reality. If this seems to lead to an intolerable quietism – a philosophy that leaves everything too much in its place – ntideva off ers one way in which a Mdhyamika might reject all metaphysical and epistemological asymmetry, and yet retain a notion of progress along a path of moral development.
This book ends when most of the crucial philosophical pieces have been put into play – the lay of the land has been surveyed, and claims staked. Non-Buddhist philosophers in India off er ever more serious and sophisticated challenges to this range of Buddhist views, eliciting ever more sophisticated replies. We do not investigate these here; but what we cover should enable an interested philosopher to carry on the discussion into the ninth to eleventh centuries, particularly as source materials from this period become increasingly available in English.
xi
Acknowledgements
My own engagement with Indian Buddhist philosophy was enabled at a crucial moment by a grant from the Einstein Forum, where I was an Einstein Fellow in 2008. I am grateful to them for the rare opportunity to begin something genuinely new and open-ended; the benefi ts of their willingness to make that kind of investment, and take that kind of risk, will continue to reach far beyond this book. Thanks are also due to the University of York, which followed up with support in the form of an Anniversary Lectureship, allowing a sustained period of study over several months. The careful and encouraging comments of the anonymous reader for Acumen were appreciated, and have certainly improved the book.
Some of what appears here was presented fi rst as talks: for their engaged and incisive comments I must thank colleagues at the Uni- versity of Western Australia; participants in the “Making Sense of Suf- fering” conference in Prague, 2010; and residents at Thösamling, who in addition off ered a marvellous spaciousness during my stay there in 2009. I must also thank my students at the University of York, on whom most of the ideas in this book had their dry run. Teaching a course with Graham Priest on Indian Buddhist and Greek philosophy was great fun as well as fruitful; Chapter 3 is particularly infl uenced by our conversations during my time as a visitor at the University of Mel- bourne, and I thank Graham for his tenacious disagreement, as well as for creating the opportunity for it. Rachael Wiseman has been a stead- fast philosophical interlocutor, thrashing out together (among many other things) whether metaphysics does matter, if so then how – and is it still metaphysics? It is a joy to thank her, and Kadie Armstrong,
acknowledgements
xii
Fabian Geier, Joseph Hardwick, Seishi Shimizu and Ben Young, who kept up the spirit of inquiry, as well as the body sustaining it, through their lively discussion and wholesome food in the fi nal stages of writ- ing this.
All of my teachers have my heartfelt gratitude. M. M. McCabe and Verity Harte showed me how to do philosophy with Plato, and not just about him – a precious gift of how to work with philosophical texts whose infl uence extends to my engagement with the Indian philoso- phers treated in this book; Rai Gaita taught me that thinking clearly and speaking truly remain the hardest tasks in philosophy, and the most important. All three modelled a way of doing philosophy that is as uncompromisingly convivial as it is critical. I am particularly grate- ful to those early teachers – Jonathan Lear, Susan Neiman, Jonathan Glover – who did not ask me to make my fi eld of interests more narrow than it is, or insist that philosophy be found only in a narrow range of texts. Without their ecumenical attitude, much less would be possible in philosophy – certainly not this book – and philosophy today would be much less alive.
The deepest gratitude is reserved for the earliest teachers: my sister, who taught me letting go of affl ictive emotions; my uncle, who taught me to wonder, to doubt, and trust only my own experience; and my mother, who taught me dependent origination.
xiii
Abbreviations
Throughout this book, I have tried to take quotes from translations that are widely available, when that was possible. Abbreviations refer to the texts and translations detailed below, unless otherwise noted.
AK Vasubandhu, Abhidharmakoa (Treasury of Abhidharma); see AKBh AKBh Vasubandhu, Abhidharmakoabhya (Commentary on the Treasury of
Abhidharma). Edited and translated into French from the Sanskrit by Louis de la Vallée Poussin, and from the French into English by Leo M. Pruden. 4 vols (Berkeley, CA: Asian Humanities Press, 1988)
AN A guttara Nik ya. Translated as The Numerical Discourses of the Buddha by Bhikkhu Bodhi (Boston, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2012)
BCA ntideva. Bohic ry vat ra. Translated as A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life by B. A. Wallace & V. A. Wallace (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 1997)
C ryadeva, Catu ataka. Translated as ryadeva’s Catu ataka: on the Bodhisattva’s Cultivation of Merit and Knowledge by Karen Lang (Copen- hagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1986)
Dhp. Dhammapad . Translated with annotations by Gil Fronsdal (Boston, MA: Shambhala, 2005)
KV Kath vatthu. Translated as Points of Controversy, Or Subjects of Discourse by S. Z. Aung & Mrs R. Davids (Oxford: Pali Text Society, [1915] 1974)
MA Candrak rti, Madhyamak vat ra. Translated as Introduction to the Mid- dle Way: Chandrakirti’s Madhyamakavatara by the Padmakara Transla- tion Group (Boston, MA: Shambhala, 2002)
MAl ntarakita, Madhyamaklamkra. Translated as The Adornment of the Middle Way, by the Padmakara Translation Group (Boston, MA: Sham- bhala, 2005)
abbreviations
xiv
MH Bh viveka. Madhyamakah daya. Books IV and V translated by M. D. Eckel in Bh viveka and His Buddhist Opponents (Cambridge, MA: Har- vard University Press, 2008)
MMK N g rjuna, M lamadhyamakak rik . Translated as The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: N g rjuna’s M lamadhyamakak rika, by J. Garfi eld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)
MN Majjhima Nik ya. Translated as The Middle-Length Discourses of the Bud- dha by Bhikkhu Bodhi and Bhikkhu Ñ amoli (Boston, MA: Wisdom Publications, 1995)
MP Milindapañha. Translated as Milinda’s Questions by I. B. Horner (Oxford: Pali Text Society, 1963–64)
NS Gautama, Ny ya-S tra. Translated as Ny ya-S tra With Ny ya-V r ika by Ganganatha Jh (Allahabad: E. J. Lazarus, 1910)
NV Nyya-Vrttika, see NS. Section on NS I.1 translated by Matthew Kap- stein in Reason’s Traces (Boston, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2001)
PP Candrak rti, Prasannapad . Selections translated as Lucid Exposition of the Middle Way by M. Sprung (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979)
PS Di n ga, Pram asamuccaya (Compendium of Means of Knowing): Chapter 1 translated by Masaaki Hattori in Dign ga, On Perception (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968); Chapters 2 and 5 translated by Richard Hayes in Dignaga on the Interpretation of Signs (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988)
PSV Dinga, Pram asamuccayavtti (Commentary on the Prama samuc- caya); see PS
PTS Pali Text Society PV Dharmakrti, Pramavrttika (Commentary on the Pramas). Selec-
tions translated by John Dunne in Foundations of Dharmak rti’s Philoso- phy (Boston, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2004)
PVSV Dharmak rti, Pramavrttikasvavtti (Auto-Commentary on the Pram av rttika); see PV
R N g rjuna, Ratn val . Verses remaining in Sanskrit translated by Gui- seppi Tucci, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 66 (1934): 307–25; 68 (1936): 237–52, 423–35. Translated from Tibetan translation as Buddhist Advice for Living and Liberation: Nagarjuna’s Precious Garland by J. Hopkins (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 1988)
SN Sa yutta Nik ya. Translated as The Connected Discourses of the Buddha by Bhikkhu Bodhi (Boston, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2000)
TK Vasubandhu, Tri ik -K rik (Thirty Verses). Translated by Stefan Anacker in Seven Works of Vasubandhu, the Buddhist Psychological Doc- tor (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1984)
abbreviations
xv
TS ntarak ta, Tattvasa graha. Translated with the Commentary of Kamala la by Ganganatha Jh (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1939)
TSN Vasubandhu, Trisvabh va-Nirde a (Treatise on the Three Natures). Trans- lated by Stefan Anacker in Seven Works of Vasubandhu, the Buddhist Psychological Doctor (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1984)
VK Vasubandhu, Viatik-Krik (Twenty Verses). Translated by Stefan Anacker in Seven Works of Vasubandhu, the Buddhist Psychological Doc- tor. (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1984)
Vsm. Buddhagho a, Visuddhimagga. Translated as The Path of Purifi cation by Ña amoli Bhikkhu (Onalaksa, WA: Pariyatti Publishing, [1975] 1991)
Ch ro
no lo
gy Bu
dd hi
st N
y ya
O th
7  
xviii
Siddhartha Gautama (The Buddha), c. 500–400 bce Sutta Pitaka (discourses)
Vinaya Pitaka (code of discipline)
Abhidhamma Pitaka (‘higher teachings’)
literature Stavravdins Mahsagikas
On the Three Natures
The Mahyna (‘greater vehicle’)
Asaga, 4th c.
1
one
The Buddha’s suff ering
The legend is familiar, and simply told. At the birth of the only heir to the family fortune, wise men confer and determine that the child will either be a great ascetic or else a great ruler. Greatly preferring the latter outcome for his son, the father does his best to bring up the boy in luxury, in a comfort designed to off er no occasion for unto- ward thoughts of renunciation or joining up with the wandering ascet- ics, society’s dropouts, known even in far- off Greece for their naked insight.…