This paper defends the persistence of the subjective or self-intimating dimension of experience in non-ordinary and pathological states of consciousness such as non-dual awareness, full absorption, drug-induced ego dissolution, and the minimal conscious state. In considering whether non-ordinary and pathological conscious states display any subjective features, we confront a dilemma. Either they do, in which case there needs to be some way of accounting for these features in phenomenal terms, or they do not, in which case there is nothing it (...) is like to be in them. But the dilemma only arises if we assume that opacity rather than phenomenality is a pervasive feature of these non-ordinary states. However, non-ordinary conscious states are deemed phenomenally opaque only by overly restrictive standards of conceivability that: (i) fail to account for the variety of nonordinary and pathological experience in non-arbitrary ways; (ii) sidestep the problem of the attribution and location of mental content (given intelligibility requirements for experience) or relegate them to illusory constructs; (iii) assume an unproblematic appeal to testimonial evidence. I discuss some cases from contemplative traditions and psychopathology and offer some plausible alternative explanations. (shrink)

The article concerns a mediaeval Indian debate over whether, and if so how, we can know that a self exists, understood here as a subject of cognition that outlives individual cognitions, being their common substrate. A passage that has not yet been translated from Sanskrit into a European language, from Jayanta Bhaṭṭa’s Nyāyamañjarī, ‘Blossoms of Reasoning’, is examined. This rich passage reveals something not yet noted in secondary literature, namely that Mīmāṃsakas advanced four different models of what happens when the (...) self perceives itself. The article clarifies the differences between the four, and the historical and logical relationships between them. It also hypothesizes pressures that constituted the need for the creation of the newer views, i.e. perceived problems with the earlier views, which the proponents of the newer views saw themselves as overcoming. (shrink)

There have been several attempts of late to read Yogācāra through the lens of Western phenomenology. I approach the issue through a reading of the Cheng weishi lun, a seventh-century Chinese compilation that preserves the voices of multiple Indian commentators on Vasubandhu’s Triṃśikāvijñaptikārikā. Specifically, I focus on the “five omnipresent mental factors” and the “four aspects” of cognition. These two topics seem ripe, at least on the surface, for phenomenological analysis, particularly as the latter topic includes a discussion of “self-awareness”. (...) Yet we find that the Cheng weishi lun account has little in common with the tradition associated with Husserl and his heirs. The categories and modes of analysis in the Cheng weishi lun do not emerge from or aver to a systematic reflection on the nature of “lived experience” so much as they are focused on subliminal processes and metaphysical entities that belong to the domain of the noumenal. In my conclusion I suggest that the later pramāṇa tradition associated with Dignāga and Dharmakīrti—a tradition that profoundly influenced later Yogācāra exegesis in Tibet—did indeed take a “phenomenological turn.” But my comparison shows that both traditions falter when it comes to relating conceptual content to non-conceptual experience, and thus there is reason to be skeptical about claims that phenomenology is epistemologically grounded in how the world presents itself first-personally. (shrink)

The paper gives an account of Rāmakaṇṭha’s (950–1000) contribution to the Buddhist–Brāhmaṇical debate about the existence or non-existence of a self, by demonstrating how he carves out middle ground between the two protagonists in that debate. First three points of divergence between the Brāhmaṇical (specifically Naiyāyika) and the Buddhist conceptions of subjectivity are identified. These take the form of Buddhist denials of, or re-explanations of (1) the self as the unitary essence of the individual, (2) the self as the substance (...) to which mental properties belong, (3) the self as the agent of both physical actions and cognitions. The difference of Rāmakaṇṭha’s position from both Nyāya and Buddhism is then elaborated. He posits a self, but not one that is an eternally unchanging substance, nor one that is anything other than consciousness. Hence his difference from Nyāya. He falls with Buddhism in holding that consciousness does not require anything other than itself to inhere in, but departs from Buddhism in holding that consciousness is not momentary but enduring. The guiding metaphor here is light, but light considered as a dynamic, qualitatively unchanging repetition of the action of illumination. (shrink)