In the Indian philosophical debate, the relationship between the structure of knowledge and external reality has been a persistent issue. This debate has been particularly prominent in Buddhism, as evidenced by the earliest Buddhist attestations in the Pāli canon, where reality is described as a perceptual defection. The world (loka) is perceived through cognition (citta), and the theme of designation (paññatti) is central to the analysis of the Abhidhamma. Buddhism can be viewed as navigating between nominalism and cognitive normativism, as (...) it deconstructs language, which is seen as an obfuscating element that separates the subject from the world. In this article, we explore these issues through a philosophical dialogue between Early Buddhism, Abhidhamma, and Madhyamaka, utilizing methodological tools from Western philosophical traditions, both ancient and modern. We engage in a clash between nihilism and absolutism, in search of the substantiality of entities, which, behind the emptiness of conventional designations, conceals a complex fractal network of pansematism. (shrink)

. Recent discussions of the mind‐brain and the soul‐body problems have been both advanced and complexified by the cognitive sciences. I focus explicitly here on emergence, supervenience, and nonreductive physicalist theories of human personhood in light of recent advances in the Christian‐Buddhist dialogue. While traditional self and no‐self views pitted Christianity versus Buddhism versus science, I show how the nonreductive physicalist proposal regarding human personhood emerging from the neuroscientific enterprise both contributes to and is enriched by the Christian concept of (...) pneuma and the Buddhist concept of pratityasamutpada. (shrink)

Buddhist scholars in the West broadly agree with the proposition that Buddhism has a philosophical tradition, in many respects comparable to Western ones, while many claim that it also has a practical or empirical dimension that Western philosophies, especially the analytic tradition, lack. There is also a scholarly consensus that an implicit metaphysical system serves as the foundation for the doctrines and practices of early Buddhism as represented in the Pāli suttas. However, Buddhist scholarship to date has not distinguished clearly (...) between philosophical speculations, on the one hand, and on the other, teachings based on experience and practice. This study explores early Buddhist texts’ concept of “domain” (viṣaya/visaya, 境界), which encompasses both an experiential domain and a linguistic framework; i.e., a word is only valid within its own domain, and fails to refer beyond it. As such, it closely resembles Rudolf Carnap’s ideas of “internal” and “external” questions regarding linguistic frameworks, and his suggestion that metaphysical questions, considered as external questions, are meaningless and cannot be answered. More specifically, the Buddha’s refusal to directly answer the “unanswered” questions may indicate that early Buddhism took an attitude similar to Carnap’s rejection of metaphysics. Moreover, textual evidence suggests that teachings such as impermanence and dependent origination, though they may appear to be “metaphysical” to modern readers, are in fact empirical in the context of the early suttas. (shrink)

Seemingly contrary ideas of Nirvana are found in early Buddhist literature. Whereas some texts describe one who attains Nirvana as being conscious of everything, others depict Nirvana as a state in which consciousness has no object but emptiness or Nirvana. In this paper I deal with this paradox of Nirvana consciousness by exploring the correlations between several statements in early Buddhist texts. A number of sutta passages are cited to show that they contain doctrinal elements which, when considered collectively, may (...) cast valuable light on how to reconcile this paradox. Two pivotal notions are ‘non-abiding consciousness’ and ‘consciousness that is infinite, pervasive all around’. These two notions are connected to each other and seem to subsume or bridge the two strikingly distinct forms of Nirvana consciousness mentioned above. Nirvana consciousness said to be ‘non-abiding’, which is analogous to ‘without object’, does ‘not abide’ in any objects in the sense that it does not cling to them or rest on them. The ‘infinite, all-pervasive’ consciousness, based on stopping normal consciousness, does not depend on any sense objects, and hence it is unconditioned by them and operates unhindered. Nirvana consciousness thus constitutes the infinite realization free from all conditioning and hindrance. This resonates with the idea that one who attains Nirvana is conscious of everything. (shrink)