New Voices in Buddhist Philosophy

This panel brings together presentations by five early-career scholars of Buddhist philosophy. Some presentations offer new perspectives on well-established problems, exploring Nāgārjuna’s tetralemma, Vasubandhu’s idealism, and omniscience in Abhidharma. Other presentations bring Buddhist philosophy into contemporary contexts, exploring Buddhist philosophy through the lens of quantum physics, or the philosophical pedagogy of the Tibetan monastic Geshe curriculum in the United States.

The first paper, “The Difficulty of Nāgārjuna,” argues that Nāgārjuna is difficult to read. But in what way? This paper articulates the difficulty of Nāgārjuna as first and foremost a difficulty of form. It argues that by attending to the form of his texts—particularly, his use of authorial, first-person voice—we can make progress in interpreting his texts’ appearances of assertoric content, and above all concerning the ‘doctrine of emptiness.’ For more basic than the question of whether the doctrine of emptiness is (conventionally, ultimately) true is the question of whether the doctrine says anything. Traditionally, the latter question has been understood in terms of the Prasaṅgika/Svataṅtrika dispute. But the dispute rests on an assumption: that if all Nāgārjuna is doing is tetralemmic reasoning (prasaṅga), then he holds no thesis and only nihilates theses. Challenging this assumption, this paper seeks to hold space to see how Nāgārjuna might assert nothing independently of whether his tetralemmas succeed.  

The second paper is titled “Rethinking Idealism and Ineffability in Vasubandhu's Twenty Verses, Thirty Verses and Treatise on the Three Natures.” Use of the term “idealism” in relation to Vasubhandu’s Twenty Verses (Vimśikā), Thirty Verses (Triṃśikā) and Treatise on the Three Natures (Trisvabhāvanirdeśa) has provoked abundant controversy. This paper endorses the view that the term “idealist” applies to Vasubandhu insofar as his citta-mātratā theory constitutes a variant of epistemic idealism—the view that all knowables are mental—along with the related view that Vasubandhu is only an epistemic idealist “in the realm of conventions” (Gold 2011, 125). By this, the paper suggests that the mental construction of all appearances as of mind-independent objects is not, for Vasubandhu, equivalent to the nature of ultimate reality. It means also that Vasubandhu does not positively argue for the non-existence of anything not-mind-only at either the conventional or at the ultimate level of analysis. This presentation attempts to avoid the pitfalls of presupposing that “early Yogācāra was a homogenous and distinctly defined doxographical entity” (Tzohar 2018, 14) to which the concept deployed in the term “idealism” does or does not correspond, by narrowing the scope of my paper to analysis of Vasubandhu’s language in the Vimśikā, the Triṃśikā, and the Trisvabhāvanirdeśa and to evaluation of Jonathan Gold (2011; 2015) and Amber Carpenter’s (2014) commentaries.

The third paper, “A Descent into Madness: Reconciling Omniscience with Buddhist pramāṇas in Abhidharma,” argues that the Buddha’s purported omniscience through direct perception is a phenomenological shift in his experience, which is difficult to account for based on the Sarvāstivāda-Vaibhāṣika conception of omniscience (sarvajña), and two of their accepted means of knowledge (pramāṇas): perception and inference.

First, the paper discusses the scope of the Buddha’s omniscience in Abhidharma Buddhism. Second, it discusses the path toward omniscience according to the Sarvāstivāda-Vaibhāṣika school. Third, it briefly summarizes the Sarvāstivādin theory of perception, showing that the Buddha cannot be omniscient through perception under the Sarvāstivāda model due to their metaphysical commitments. Following this, the paper considers whether the Buddha can be omniscient through inference and show that inference does not rescue the Sarvāstivādin view of omniscience by appealing to both Vasubandhu and Dhammapāla. Last, it posits that the Buddha’s omniscience is a phenomenological shift in his experience due to prajñā and not fully comprehensible through pramāṇa theory.

The final two papers in the panel explore Buddhist philosophy from cross-cultural angles.

The fourth paper is titled, “Relational versus Holistic theories in quantum mechanics and Buddhist philosophy: a convergence of the interconnectedness of reality?” The alleged convergence of quantum physics and Buddhism has been one of the main standpoints of the dialogue between science and Buddhism ever since its incipience in the 1980s. Notably, proponents of such ‘parallelism’ have argued that there is an underlying interconnectedness of the universe which bridges quantum theory and Buddhist philosophy through entanglement and interdependence (pratītyasamutpāda). Such conjecture is however not sufficiently informed, if at all, by the considerable array of interpretative theories of quantum phenomena and various schools of Buddhism, which could very well invalidate the argument. Hence, the paper will investigate the object of an ongoing doctoral research devoted to a comparative two-layered analysis of such compatibility for interconnectedness, through relational versus holistic theories (that is between Relational quantum mechanics and Nāgārjuna on the one hand, and David Bohm’s holism and Hua-yen Buddhism on the other). While both theories fall under the interconnectedness criteria, they differ substantially in promoting either the relationalism or interpenetration of all things in reality.

Finally, “Buddhist Philosophy Between Worlds: Gelug Presentations of Buddhist Philosophy at the Tibetan Monastery and the North American Dharma Centre,” explores the monastic philosophical curriculum of the Gelug tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. The curricula of the Gelug monasteries are rooted in the presentation of the 14th century scholar Tsongkhapa, who emphasized the importance of the classical Treatises (rgya gzhung). These texts were written in Sanskrit by great Indian scholars (paṇḍitas) between the 4th and 6th centuries CE and translated into Tibetan beginning in the 9th century CE. Upon completion of the curriculum emphasizing these great texts and their Tibetan commentaries over a period of eighteen to twenty years, monastic graduates receive the title of Geshe (dge bshes). Since the late 1960s, Tibetan monastic scholars have been teaching Buddhism in contemporary secular societies such as North America. This paper will examine how the Geshes present subjects of an ancient philosophical curriculum to diverse modern audiences, and the challenges they face in the process.