A Buddhist Account of Epistemic Wellbeing

Knowing in Vaibhāṣika philosophy is a particular type of occurrent mental state. This mental state is a complex state that can be analyzed into a bundle of different types of dharmas. As such mental states are not ultimately real. They have a derivative mode of existence that depends on the bundle of dharmas that constitute them. Buddhists in general deny the fundamental existence of substances and the Vaibhāṣika, like other Ābhidharmikas endorse an alternative ontology of tropes that when bundled together constitute substance-like entities that are merely derivatively, and not fundamentally, real. Like mental states, the persons to whom mental states are ordinarily thought to belong are among the merely derivatively real entities. On the Vaibhāṣika view, mental states do not belong to a person but rather partly constitute them.

The ontological dependence of persons on their mental states problematizes the idea that knowing mental states are those that arise from the exercise of an agent’s intellectual virtue. From the Vaibhāṣika point of view, an agent’s intellectual virtue is in an important sense not distinct from the knowing mental state itself. Understanding the role that virtue plays in knowledge thus requires an impersonal level of description on this account.  

The Vaibhāṣika account of mental events is a direct realist account: the object of cognition is distinct from, and in direct relation to, the cognition that takes it as object. Given the Vaibhāṣika commitments to the future and past existence of dharmas, it is possible for a cognition in the present to be directly related to entities that exist in the future and the past. This allows for the possibility of a series of mental states in the present to continue to take the same perceived entity as their intentional object even after the entity is no longer present. This can account for the phenomenon of reflection, for example. It is important to the Vaibhāṣika view that the cognition is in direct relation with the real object as it is the object that sets the veridicality conditions for a mental state. The Vaibhāṣika agree with most epistemologists that a necessary condition for a mental state to count as a knowing state is that it is veridical.

Because all cognitions are in direct relation with their intentional object, the possibility of a certain kind of accidental knowledge is precluded. Knowledge is only ever possible with respect to the object that is actually related to the cognition. So, for example, if I walk into a shed, see a rope as a snake and thus think “there is a snake in the shed,” even if the proposition is true because there is actually a snake in the shed, my thought does not count as knowledge because the object of my thought is the rope not the snake—it is the rope with which my cognition is related. On the Vaibhāṣika account, such a cognition does not even count as veridical, even though the statement expressing the thought is true. The account is, in this way, strongly externalist in flavor.

In keeping with this externalist approach, the Vaibhāṣika describe every presently occurring mental state as being constituted by various co-occurring dharmas: a cognition, an intentional object (or objects within a particular sense modality), a sense faculty that makes the object(s) available to cognition, and some set of mental factors (of which there are 46 possible types) that contribute to the way the object is cognized. Among these are: contact (sparśa), which relates the sense faculty and object(s) with cognition; ideation (saṃjña), which brings the object under a concept often with the aid of language; and understanding (prajñā), which understands the nature of the object. While understanding, and a subset of understanding that is often characterized as knowledge (jñāna), might lead one to believe that knowledge can be reduced to this particular mental factor, the possibility of false prajñā makes clear that the status of a mental state as a state of knowing cannot be reduced to presence of prajñā alone nor to any other single dharma. Knowledge must be analyzed in terms of a combination of various dharmas that together at least partially constitute a particular mental event. 

In this paper I argue that we when examine the dharmas required for a mental event to constitute a knowing event we discover, perhaps unsurprisingly, that some of these dharmas are best described as epistemic virtues. One of the main goals of Buddhist practice is to cultivate the kind of virtues that enable the generation of the kind of knowing mental states that eradicate future states of suffering. At least some Buddhist virtues are thus properly epistemic. The liberative kind of knowing is extraordinarily difficult to achieve but constitutes the highest level of our wellbeing. This paper explores the ways in which these virtues are constitutive of knowledge.