Vasubandhu/Xuanzang and the problem of consciousness

Consciousness and the Great Philosophers What would they have said about our mind-body problem? Edited by Stephen Leach and James Tartaglia I~~~o~!~;n~~~up LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX 14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Stephen Leach and James Tartaglia The right of Stephen Leach and James Tartaglia to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. 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. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Ubrary Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Ubrary of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: Leach, Stephen D., editor. Title: Consciousness and the great philosophers: what would they have said about our mind-body problemll[edited by] Stephen Leach and James Tartaglia. Description: I [edition]. I New York: Routledge, 20 16.1 Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016011598 I ISBN 97811 38934412 (hardback: alk. paper) I ISBN 9781138934429 (pbk.: alk. paper) I ISBN 9781315678023 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Consciousness. I Philosophers. I Mind and body. Classification: LCC BI05.C477 C6485 2016 I DDC I28/.2-dc23LC record available at https:lllccn.loc.gov/20 160 I 1598 ISBN 13:978-1-138-93441-2 ISBN 13:978-1-138-93442-9 ISBN 13:978-1-315-67802-3 (hbk) (pbk) (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman and Gill Sans by Sunrise Setting Ltd, Brixham, UK Contents Notes on contributors Preface viii xi Plato David Skrbina 2 Aristotle Lenn E. Goodman 3 Plotinus " 19 Suzanne Stern-Gillet 4 Vasubandhu/Xuanzang 28 Dan Lusthaus 5 DharmakTrti 37 Mark Siderits 6 Avicenna 45 Nader EI-Bizri 7 Aquinas 54 Edward Feser 63 8 Descartes John Cottingham 9 Locke Matthew Stuart 73 Contents VI 10 Spinoza 82 Genevieve Lloyd II Leibniz 89 Tim Crane 12 Berkeley 96 Tom Stoneham 13 Hume 106 PJ.E.Kail 14 Kant 115 Tobias Schlicht 15 Hegel 125 Richard Dien Winfteld 16 Schelling 133 Sebastian Gardner 17 Schopenhauer Robert J. Wicks 142 18 152 James Owen Flanagan and Heather Wallace 19 Nietzsche 162 RexWelshon 20 Frege 172 Darragh Byrne 21 Husserl 177 John J. Drummond 22 Russell 185 Philip Goff 23 Collingwood Stephen Leach 192 Contents 24 Wittgenstein vii 199 Oskari Kuusela 25 Heidegger 209 Denis McManus 26 Ryle 217 Julia Tanney 27 Sartre 228 Joseph S. Catalano 28 Merleau-Ponty 235 Shaun Gallagher 29 Quine 244 Alex Orenstein 30 Anscombe 253 Rachael Wiseman 3\ Derrida 261 Simon Glendinning 32 Rorty 272 James Tartaglia Postscript: the golden key Bibliography Index 280 283 300 4 Vasubandhu/Xuanzang and the problem of consciousness Dan Lusthaus Vasubandhu (India, c. fourth century CE) and Xuanzang (China, 600-64) are two prominent figures of the Yogacara (pronounced yoga-char~) school of Buddhism. Vasubandhu, a prolific author, made major contnbutions to epistemology, logic, hermeneutics, theories of language, theories of perception, and psychology in India. Xuanzang did likewise in China, by translating works by Vasubandhu and others, imbuing his translations with Indian developments that had accrued sin~e Vasubandhu's time. The single philosophical work he produced that IS not strictly a translation, but a pastiche of'Yogacara texts and commentaries, is the Cheng weishilun, which is built around one ofVasubandhu's foundational texts, The Thirty T7erses(Trilftsikii).! His translations also reveal philosophical nuances by the way he renders terms, a project so innovative that his translations came to be known as the New Translation style. Consciousness was a main focus of Yogacara, evident by one of its signature doctrines, vijiiapti-mdtra, frequently translated as "consciousness only." The root jiid (cognate to gnosis, know) means "knowing, cognizing." Grammatically, vijiiapti is a causative, meaning "to make known'; miitra signals reductiveness, "nothing but," and often has a negative implication. Properly understood, vijiiapti-mdtra means that, while unenlightened, what we take to be reality is "nothing but what is made known to us by our cognitions." This is similar to epistemological idealism which holds that everything we know or think about occurs to us in and through cognition, including our ideas about what might lie outside our cognitive sphere. Yogaciira also claims that in unenlightened experience we only know what we encounter through our senses and cognitive activities. Even the idea that external objects exist is an idea since awareness of the objects themselves only occurs in cognition, and the same is true of any theories concerning such objects and their status. The key difference between Yogacara and Western epistemological idealists is that the latter consider access to the non-cognitive realm difficult or impossible, while Yogacara considers immediate access to reality a basic aspect of enlightenment, in which the obstructions to Vasubandhu/)(uanzang 29 what is knowable ijiieya-dvaranay are eliminated, and one's discursive consciousness (vijiiiina) becomes direct and immediate cognition (jiiiina). Vijiiapti-mdtra is not a declaration of metaphysical idealism, in which only mind is real, but rather a caution about a cognitive veil, a consciousness that projects and superimposes false notions and presuppositions on to reality, by which we mistake our interpretations for reality itself. Unenlightened cognitions are cognitive constructions. The Yogacara project is to overcome erroneous cognition and lift the veil. With enlightenment, the projections cease and one's mind becomes the great mirror cognition (mahddarsa-jiidnai that reflects everything just as it is (yathiibhiita). Eight consciousnesses Prior to Yogacara, Buddhists recognized six types of consciousness, one for each of the five senses and one for the mental faculty. When a sense faculty comes into sensory contact with its respective sensory sphere, a corresponding consciousness arises. For instance, when the eye comes into contact with colors and shapes in the visual sphere, visual consciousness occurs. The mind is considered a sense faculty; its cognitive field consists of mental objects as well as the cognitions of the other five consciousnesses; mental faculty plus mental object produces mental consciousness imanovijiidna). That model, while simple and elegant, proved insuffic~ent to tackle a host of issues that arose in the course of many centunes of debates. Consequently Yogacara expanded the mental realm by adding two additional consciousnesses: manas, which was responsible for collecting experiences into a sense of self and identity, so that sensations and ideas become my sensations and ideas; and the eighth consciousness, best known by one of its monikers, iilaya-vijiiiina, literally meaning "adhering consciousness" (since it adheres to bodies) but understood as a storehouse consciousness that collects experiences and projects their consequences back out when instigated. The iilayavijiidna is the repository and executor of karmic conditioning. In this latter capacity, the eighth consciousness is called vipdka-vijhdna, "maturation consciousness," since it carries and brings to fruition the consequences of one's prior actions. Unlike the sensory consciousnesses, which operate sporadically, sometimes in tandem, sometimes alone-for instance, the se~ses don't operate when one is unconscious, in deep sleep, etc.; the blind can hear but not see-the dlayavijhdna is always functioning, even when we are otherwise oblivious. It is the dlayavijiuina that retains the karmic habits and transmits them from life to life in the cycle of rebirth. 30 Dan Lusthaus Since the dlayavijhdna was a novel Yogacara invention, other Buddhists questioned it. To the objection that it sounded like a permanent self, Yogacara replied that it is constantly changing each moment with every new experience and, like a stream, is in perpetual flux. To the accusation that it sounded like solipsism, Yogacara explained that each sentient being has its own dlayavijiuina, which consists ofthe accumulated conditioning of that being's actions, and that beings interact and influence each other, so there are teachers and students, ways to enhance or to harm each other. Vasubandhu, in his Twenty verses (Vif!lsikal,2 points out that, based on past experiences, different types of being tend to congregate together, reinforcing the prejudicial ways they view reality. Alluding to Buddhist cosmological realms, he points out that hell beings see a river of flame, while hungry ghosts see streams of pus, blood, and other odious fluids, humans see a river of water, and the gods see rivers of ambrosia (amrta). Each type of being thinks its view is the right one, while what the others see is a distortion. Each type of being is born, temporarily, into one of those realms based on past actions and experience (karma), and so how they perceive reality is shaped by those past experiences. An updated version ofVasubandhu's example might be that if a human sees fresh feces at the side of road, she would probably find it disgusting, while flies would see lunch. Neither is right or wrong; both are simply the products of their conditioning, which, if one is a Buddhist who believes in rebirth, means that even the type of body and perceptual apparatus through which one engages the world has been shaped by prior experiences. It is not only the theoretical notion of what it means to perceive that distinguishes those reactions, but the entire manner by which, based on how one perceives, one engages with the world. That manner, according to Buddhists, is conditioned by one's actions. This sort of collective karma is why racists congregate with and reinforce each other's biases, literally seeing the world the way they do, and why people of various cultures, religions, political persuasions, etc., engender collective visions. Some habits are harder to change or break than others, but karmic conditioning is always modifiable. Buddhist praxis provides a wealth of tools to affect such modifications. Karma is defined by Buddhists as any intentional action of body, language, or thought. Intention means that cognitive dispositions are at play. An action devoid of intention is not karmic (though unconscious motivation is still considered an intention). Bodily gestures, verbal expression, and thoughts all involve cognitive intention. And these are not sui generis but products of prior experiences. The dlayavijiidna stores these experiences as predilections and predispositions, latent potentials awaiting a trigger to infuse a new experience with the filters of the past. Vasubandhu/)(uanzang 31 There are the intentions one brings to an experience, which Vasubandhu calls one's own seeds. There are the intentions that others convey to us through interaction, which he calls "others' seeds." Some interpreters, thinking Vasubandhu only allows for an ontology of seeds, and nothing else, argued that realms such as the hells and even our world only exist through the projections of the beings inhabiting them, so that when no one is there to project them, such places do not exist. Xuanzang explicitly rejects that idea, pointing out that the hells-there are many types of hell in Buddhist cosmology, and one's time spent there is always temporary, though it can be of long duration; it is not a final destination-exist whether anyone is there or not. Vasubandhu offers an interesting argument about the link between the hells and the human realm. The hells are typically depicted as a place where hell guardians herd and torture those unfortunates whose past karma has caused them to be reborn there. However, Vasubandhu points out, the hell guardians themselves relish and enjoy their sadistic roles. They are not suffering for misdeeds. That is illogical. Therefore, hell guardians cannot be real. Rather, they are collective projections of the hell denizens who effectively are torturing themselves with their own sadistic projections. Some miseries in our realm are likewise self-projected. The seventh consciousness, manas, watches the dlayavijiidna operating and mistakes it for a self These feelings are "my feelings," this sensation is "my sensation," this idea is "my idea." The sixth consciousness, manovijiidna, appropriates the five sensory cognitions and conveys that to the dlayavijiidna, which then stores it. The dlayavijiuina itself is karmically neutral, devoid of intention, in order to accurately store and dispense conditioned predilections without prejudice or bias. Those predilections themselves can be morally stainless or contaminated, karmically advantageous or disadvantageous, but the dlayavijiidna remains neutral throughout. According to Vasubandhu's Trimsikd, the dlayavijiidna is destroyed when one becomes enlightened. Xuanzang's Cheng weishilun clarifies that the aspects of the eighth consciousness associated with adhering and attachment are eliminated, but the other basic function ofthe eighth consciousness itself continues, namely serving as a basis for cognition, albeit as the great mirror cognition rather than a storehouse of conditioning and attachment. General features of consciousness Yogacara, along with other Buddhists, settled on several basic features that apply to any instance of consciousness, even while they often disputed many of the details and implications of those features. 32 Dan Lusthaus According to many Buddhists, consciousness is invariably accompanied by life-force tjivitendriyay and heat. This means that there is no disembodied consciousness that is not somehow attached to some kind of body in some manner. Put another way, a body has to maintain at least minimal vital signs in order to support consciousness. Various liminal cases, such as forms of meditation in which the body exhibits minimal life signs, or detailed accounts of how consciousness leaves the body on dying,' received intense attention and discussion. What sort of bodies and senses beings reborn in formless realms might possess also exercised scholastic speculators, including Xuanzang. That such beings had to have some sort of body, even if in some way immaterial, was unquestioned. How various theories sought to solve these conundrums sometimes reads like the Buddhist version of arguments about how many angels fit on the head of a pin. Of more philosophical interest, Buddhists also held that every instance of consciousness must have an dlambana and an dkdra. At the simplest level, this parallels HusserI's dictum that all consciousness is consciousness of, i.e. that consciousness always has an object, something of which it is cognizant. Vasubandhu says that the dlayavijiuina is always functioning. But how can it be apprehending an object, an dlambana, when one is unconscious and oblivious? Sthiramati, a sixth-century Indian commentator on Vasubandhu, explains that its dlambanas and iikiiras are indistinct, subliminal. Exactly how these two terms are to be understood was a matter of debate between Buddhists. Cheng weishilun defines an iilambana-echoing an idea that another important Indian Yogacara epistemologist and logician, Dignaga (fifth and sixth centuries), presented in his Investigation of the Alambana (Alambana-parfh;ii)4-as a condition which is causative (JilTfff;) and cognitive (JilT ;,t). It is that part of a cognitive object (vi~aya) which causes a cognition and which is experienced cognitively. It is important to keep in mind that the Yogacara school, often accused by opponents (and some secondary literature) of being a form of metaphysical idealism, retains this definition of dlambana. An iikiira could mean an "aspect" or "modality," but Xuanzang translates it in this context as "defining activity" O-Y1§). This reflects an anti-metaphysical critique against Buddhists committed to forms of metaphysical substantialism. A basic form of Buddhist analysis is to determine what a thing basically is, i.e. its svabhdva (basic nature), and what it does, what its activities are (karitra). This is analogous to distinguishing nouns and verbs. For Buddhists like Vasubandhu and Xuanzang, such analysis is fine as long as one avoids the pitfall of substantializing the nouns. One way that Xuanzang signals this in the Cheng weishilun is by how he defines the eight consciousnesses. For instance, for manas, the Cheng weishilun asks: what is its basic nature and what is its activity? Vasubandhu/)(uanzang 33 Answer: its nature is mentation and its activity is to mentate. Comparable moves are made with the other consciousnesses and with other items. The ensuing discussion indicates that this is not intended as a descent into tautology but rather to illustrate that what something "is" is nothing more than what it does. The verb, the activity, the discharge of causal efficacy, is the criterion that makes something real, not some nominalized abstraction of that activity. This is a consequence of the strong emphasis in Buddhist philosophy on causality. The proper way to understand something is to understand its causes and conditions. Causal conditions are sequences and chains of causal events. Sorting out the various types of causal chain and their interactions occupies a sizeable portion of Yogacara texts, including Cheng weishilun. Their analysis is detailed and elaborate, and we can only touch on some basic features here. Perception In early medieval Buddhism, including for Vasubandhu, there were three types of legitimate sources of knowledge: perception, logical inference, and authoritative scripture. In debates between opposing Buddhists, this was alluded to as relying on scriptures (agama) and reasoning (yukti). Dignaga, seeking to include non-Buddhists in the debates, recognized that the authority scriptures held for one group did not confer comparably authoritative status on other g.roups, and proposed that only perception and inference be permitted as legitimate sources of knowledge. This allowed for ecumenical debates, and a new era ofIndian philosophy was enabled, one in which Indians could seriously debate with each other instead of talking past each other. It also forced Buddhists and others to scrutinize perception more carefully. While Dignaga, for instance, defines valid perception as excluding things like hallucinations, mistaken identifications, etc., he offers no theory of perceptual error, much less any criteria for determining within a perception whether it is or isn't valid. Subsequent Buddhists had to take up that task. This dovetailed with the basic notion, found in most forms of Buddhism, that ordinary perception is fundamentally flawed, if for no other reason than that it tends to impute substantialism and selfhood into things and beings. Buddhism encourages insight into no-self, meaning the absence of persistent, invariant, unchanging self-same essence or identity in anything. This is expressed in Mahayana and Yogacara texts as emptiness qua selflessness of persons and selflessness of things. Reality, instead, consists of perpetually fluctuating causal sequences. Eliminating the factors that produce erroneous cognitions becomes a fundamental Yogacara imperative. ?~ 34 Dan Lusthaus Vasubandhu's elder half-brother, Asanga, who introduced him to Yogacara, distinguished between "perceiving" idarsana, lit. seeing) and "images" (nimitta). The word he used for images can also mean signs, indicators-they point to something other than themselves; they are referents. Another word for a mental object or object of cognition is artha, which means "that towards which an intentionality intends", artha also means a target, goal, wealth, meaning, etc. Perception is casting a vision toward a referent, an act of desire and appropriation. So perception is also called "grasped and grasper" (griihya-griihaka). Perception is not a neutral act of receiving data but an active appropriation of a cognitive field, a search for exploitable, possessable resources, a way of hiding the anxiety of a palpable lack of self while filling the lacuna where one wishes there to be a self. Fill it with stuff, with ideas, with identities, with belongings. These things belong to me, and I belong to that or those. Perception is active, ongoing appropriation. Asanga and Vasubandhu also describe this as abhiaa-parikalpa. which means to imagine something in a locus in which it is absent. The classic example is mistaking a rope for a snake. One imputes a snake in a locus in which it does not exist. What is important for Buddhists about the rope-snake analogy is not simply the mistaken identity but that one's entire emotional and behavioral response is triggered and goes into overdrive. Walking on a dark path, one sees what one thinks is a snake. Fear! Panic! One climbs a tree and spends the night there afraid, trembling, distraught ... the snake never leaves. Then, with daylight, it turns out the snake was really a rope. What a wasted night, caused by one's own delusion. The rope is real. But it too lacks an abiding selfhood; it is constructed of strands of hemp which were woven together, after being harvested, with people and a myriad additional conditions all responsible for it being present at that time and place, including the conditions for the perception or misperception (light or lack thereof), mental dispositions (fear of snakes, sense of the neighborhood, etc.)-all the conditions which have led this individual to be here now, primed to misperceive, and so on. Reality, in other words, are the causal conditions constantly at play, altering what is the case each and every moment. And the plural "are" in the previous sentence was intentional. Yogacara employs a model of three self-natures and three nonself-natures to flesh this out further. The first, the problematic aspect, is called parikalpita, lit. imagining all around (:iJ!!i~m¥jvt1). These are the erroneous projections of selfhood, etc. with which we infuse our cognitions and ideas of everything. These are the cognitive constructions we take to be reality apart from ourselves, while it is actually our Vasubandhu/)(uanzang 35 own narcissistic projection. That is what vijiiapti-mdtra means. The second is called paratantra, dependent on others (1&1mm~H1),meaning cognitions arising dependent on conditions other than themselves. The third is called parinispanna, fully consummated (lipJG.'~1).The imaginary nature is, by nature, unreal and thus lacks a self-nature. Dependent on others, by definition it is devoid of self, since its existence is caused by things other than itself. The consummated nature is defined by Vasubandhu as the absence of the imagined in the dependent. Xuanzang further explains this by distinguishing a contaminated dependent nature and a purified dependent nature. By this he means that of the three only the second reflects actual reality, namely the profusion of causes and conditions. When one's cognition misconstrues this, it is contaminated by imaginary imputations and presuppositions. Consummation means to purify and cleanse cognition of those imputations so that the dependent nature of everything is seen as it is. That an object can look the same from moment to moment gives the illusion that a self-same object is perduring across time. But in fact the conditions of existence-the factors generating that appearance each moment-as well as the conditions by which those appearances are viewed-the amount of light, the degree of alertness of the perceiver, etc.-are in flux. What seems to be similarity misleads cognition to presume an invariant continuity, a permanent self and identity. We project that on to things in an attempt to garner the same permanence for ourselves. The illusion of permanence allows one to mistakenly believe that there are eternal and invariant things in the world, whereas, according to Buddhism, all conditioned things rise and cease and thus are impermanent. Nothing in human experience-except in our imaginations-is ever observed to be otherwise. Thus the most fundamental place to focus one's practice is on one's own consciousness, one's own way of cognizing and putting a world together. Recognizing that each moment of cognition is momentary opens the door to understanding that all things are momentary but are cognitively constructed to appear as if permanent and unchanging, although even our memories change. Cognitions arise and cease every moment. Consciousness, according to Vasubandhu and Xuanzang, is constantly changing, undergoingpariljama, a word that Vasubandhu defines as "becoming otherwise" (anyathatva). All eight consciousnesses are perpetually becoming otherwise. Asanga, in the chapter on the "Ideas of Reality" (Tattvartha) in his Bodhisattvabhiimi,5 begins by pointing out four types of approach. The first is the ordinary world view of naive realism (loka-prasiddha). Next are the philosophers and logical speculators (yukti-prasiddha). Next are those who "cognize the world having purified their emotional obstructions" (klesa-avara/Ja-visuddhi-jfiana-gocara), by which Asanga means 36 Dan Lusthaus Hinayana Buddhists. Finally, there are those who "cognize the world having purified their cognitive obstructions" (jiieya-iivarm:za-visuddhijiiiina-gocara), by which he means Mahayana Buddhists. Eliminating the cognitive obstructions means to see things as they are, devoid of linguistic-conceptual superimpositions. That is enlightened cognition. One naturally asks, what does the world look like when correctly seen, when the distortive obstructions are removed? Aside from saying it is the full sensorium idharma-dhdtus purified of erroneous cognition, Yogacara desists from more explicit descriptions for a very obvious reason. A description will excite the imagination to construct an image, which will necessarily be another imaginative construction, a delusional fiction over which to argue. Any description would encourage conceptual reductionism. Some imaginings might be more accurate than others, but they remain imaginary either way, just as when someone describes a place one has never been, and one conjures an image based on the description. The consciousnesses undergo a radical overturning (pravrttiy. As mentioned, the eighth consciousness changes from an attached, hoarding, karmic-spewing cognitive projector to a mirror cognition that reflects whatever is before it accurately, fully, and without prejudice or attachment. Manas, the egoistic consciousness, becomes the equalizer cognition (samatii-jiiiina), seeing all things as equa1. The sixth consciousness becomes cognition of particulars (pratyavek:}alJii-jiiiina), since conceptualization deals only with classes and sets and can only think about particulars reduced to universal sets of specifics, while this enlightened cognition sees particulars in all their particularity devoid of conceptual overlay. Finally, the five sensory consciousnesses become cognitions that accomplish whatever they undertake ikrtydnust hiina-jiiiina). 6 Notes Trirpsikii has been translated numerous times-for example, by Kochumuttom (Vasubandhu fourth century a) and Lusthaus (Vasubandhu fourth century b). Translations of Cheng weishilun (JjJZIl1E~~, tr. by Xuanzang 659c; see Talsho # 1585, v.3l, in Takakusu et al., eds., 1924) include de La Vallee Poussin (Xuanzang 659a (French)),Tat (Xuanzang 659b) , and Cook (Xuanzang 659c); d.Vasubandhu fourth century b. 2 3 4 5 6 Translations ofthe Twenty Verses include Kochumuttom (Vasubandhu fourth century c) and Cook (Vasubandhu fourth century d). For a translation of the section on dying in the Yogiiciirabhumi, see Lusthaus (forthcoming). For an overview of some Tibetan views, d. Lati and Hopkins (1985). Several translations of Investigation of the Atambana are available-for example,Tola and Dragonetti (Dignaga fifth and sixth centuries a). A major, multivolume study of the Chinese translations and commentaries on this text is forthcoming from Brill. Willis has translated the Tattvartha chapter into English (Asanga fourth century). For further reading, see Lusthaus (1999).