Monima Chadha

Karma and the Problem of Evil: A Response to Kaufman

The doctrine of karma, as elaborated in the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain religious traditions, offers a powerful explanatory account of the human predicament, and in particular of seemingly undeserved human suffering. Whitley R. P. Kaufman (2005) is right to point out that on some points, such as the suffering of children, the occurrence of natural disasters, and the possibility of universal salvation, the karma theory appears, initially at least, much more satisfactory than the attempts made to solve the perennial problem of evil by writers working within the mainstream theistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (p. 19).1 Kaufman, we think, is also correct to highlight the lack of critical analysis given by contemporary (analytic or AngloAmerican) philosophers of religion to the theory of karma, at least in comparison with the voluminous body of work produced in recent years on the theistic problem of evil (p. 16). Kaufman’s recent article in this journal, therefore, is to be welcomed as a step toward redressing this imbalance in the literature, and in the process helping to remove the Western theistic bias of much contemporary philosophy of religion. On the other hand, we think that Kaufman has unfortunately done little to further the general understanding of the doctrine of karma and the way in which this doctrine is presented as an answer to the problem of evil. Kaufman offers six objections to the karma theory, stating ‘‘Here I will present five distinct objections to the theory of rebirth, all of which raise serious obstacles to the claim that rebirth can provide a convincing solution to the Problem of Evil’’ (p. 19).2 We believe not only that all of these objections fail in their stated aim, but that Kaufman’s way of proceeding, his methodology, helps to explain why his criticisms of the karma theory do not succeed. But before considering Kaufman’s six objections in detail, we wish to say something briefly about the preliminary remarks Kaufman makes in the introductory section of his article. First, a terminological worry. Kaufman states that he will be treating the karma theory as a ‘theodicy’ (pp. 16–17). As traditionally understood, a theodicy aims primarily, in the celebrated words of John Milton, to ‘‘justify the ways of God to men’’ ([1667] 2000, p. 3). That is to say, a theodicy aims to vindicate the justice or goodness of God in the face of the evil found in the world, and this it attempts to do by offering a reasonable explanation as to why God allows evil to abound in his creation. The construction of theodicies has therefore played a pivotal role in theistic

Self-awareness: Eliminating the Myth of the "Invisible Subject"

The interest in an account of self-awareness derives from the fact that it aims to illuminate, if only partly, an essentially invisible subject of experience. A preliminary look at accounts of self-awareness, discussed in ancient Indian and Western theories, shows that the self is neither essentially nor exclusively an invisible subject. Theories of self-awareness in the Indian and Western traditions fall under two broad categories: the paraprakāśa (literally other-illumination) or reflectionist theories and svaprakāśa (literally self-illumination) or reflexivist theories and are usually presented as incompatible alternatives. Here it is argued that the reflectionist and reflexivist theories of self-awareness are not deeply incompatible; rather they present or reveal different aspects of the self. However, it will be shown that the reflexivist has the upper hand in this debate since reflexive awareness constitutes the basic or fundamental form of self-awareness. Nonetheless, introspectionism and reflexivism together dispel the myth of the “invisible subject.”

A Buddhist Epistemological Framework for Mindfulness Meditation

One of the major aims of this article is to provide the theoretical account of mindfulness provided by the systematic Abhidharma epistemology of conscious states. I do not claim to present the one true version of mindfulness, because there is not one version of it in Buddhism; in addition to the Abhidharma model, there is, for example, the nondual Mahāmudrā tradition. A better understanding of a Buddhist philosophical framework will not only help situate meditation practice in its originating tradition, but it will also clarify a Buddhist perspective on consciousness. In this article, I present the Abhidharma account of mindfulness—as explicated in the Abhidharmakośa, the root text for the Abhidharma tradition—and the theoretical model of the mind that underlies its practice. Abhidharma–Yogācara model of the mind, I believe, contains critical philosophical insights relevant to contemporary concerns while at the same time placing mindfulness meditation in its proper philosophical context.

A Buddhist Explanation of Episodic Memory: From Self to Mind

In this paper, I argue that some of the work to be done by the concept of self is done by the concept of mind in Buddhist philosophy. For the purposes of this paper, I shall focus on an account of memory and its ownership. The task of this paper is to analyse Vasubandhu’s heroic effort to defend the no-self doctrine against the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣikas in order to bring to the fore the Buddhist model of mind. For this, I will discuss Vasubandhu’s theory of mind in the early Abhidharma as well as post-Abhidharma period to show the continuity in his work.

No Speech, Never Mind!

In a series of classic papers, Donald Davidson put forward an ingenious argument to challenge the ascription of minds to nonlinguistic animals. Davidsons conclusions have been mercilessly demolished in the literature by cognitive ethologists, but none of them have directly addressed Davidsons argument. First, this paper is an attempt to elucidate and evaluate Davidsons central argument for denying minds to nonlinguistic animals. Davidsons central argument puts forth a challenge to those of us who want to attribute minds to nonlinguistic animals. Second, this paper uses counterexamples offered in the cognitive ethology literature to meet Davidsons challenge directly.

No-self and the phenomenology of ownership

ABSTRACT The Abhidharma Buddhist revisionary metaphysics aims to provide an intellectually and morally preferred picture of the world that lacks a self. The first part of the paper claims that the Abhidharma ‘no-self’ view can be plausibly interpreted as a no-ownership view, according to which there is no locus or subject of experience and thus no owner of mental or bodily awarenesses. On this interpretation of the no-self view, the Abhidharma Buddhist metaphysicians are committed to denying the ownership of experiences, and thereby apparently obliged to explain our purported experience of ownership. My experiences seemingly come with the sense that I am the one who is undergoing this experience. But is there a really an experience of ownership—namely, an experience of being a subject that underlies our sense of ownership? I argue that there is nothing that it is like to be an owner of experiences, in the sense that there is no experiential phenomenology associated with the ownership of experience. The second part of the paper argues that, since there is no experience of ownership, there is no onus on the Abhidharma philosopher to give an explanation of the sense of ownership.

The Self in Early Nyāya: A Minimal Conclusion

In this paper I revisit the early Nyāya argument for the existence of a self. In section 1, I reconstruct the argument in Nyāya-sūtra 1.1.10 as an argument from recognition following the interpretation in the Nyāyasūtra-Bhāṣya and the Nyāya-Vārttika. In Section 2, I reassess the plausibility of the Nyāya argument from memory/recognition in the Bhāṣya and the Vārttika in the light of recent empirical research. I conclude that the early Nyāya version of the argument from recognition can only establish a minimal conclusion that self is a unitary and persisting conscious agent, in contrast to the ontological conclusion that the self is distinct a substance qualified by consciousness. In the final section, I address the tension between the two conclusions in Nyāya and suggest how it might be resolved.

Yet Another Attempt to Salvage Pristine Perceptions

In a recent debate in this journal, Arindam Chakrabarti (2004) astutely identifies a new problem space that has opened up in the debate on nirvikalpaka perceptions. He indicates that the problem space is a grid arising out of the possible answers to three distinct but interrelated controversies. In this comment I primarily concern myself with the first two of these controversies. It is to be expected that the discussion will have some bearing on the third issue, but I will not have much to say about that directly. I begin by listing the first two controversies, in Chakrabarti’s terms: 1. Do all our perceptions involve the use of concepts, or recognitions of general features, or do some perceptions involve purely concept-free content? 2. Are our perceptions necessarily or possibly self-aware or are there awarenesses that the subject of the awareness is necessarily unaware of? A little familiarity with the influential view about the Nyāya notion of nirvikalpaka pratyaks ̇ a makes it seem that it falls squarely within the second disjunct in each of the questions, namely that it is a purely concept-free perception and that the subject is necessarily unaware of it. This conjunction smells of incoherence, and this is a theme that Chakrabarti has pursued much in his work. Before we discuss his arguments in detail, I wish to note some points about the very formulation of the controversies. Regarding the first, the way the disjuncts are presented reveals that Chakrabarti endorses a tight relation between concepts and recognitional abilities involving general features. I think it is right to say that a subject who possesses the concept F has reliable (though fallible) recognitional abilities to identify F’s. However, I do not think that the converse is necessarily true. That is to say, a subject who has reliable (though fallible) recognitional abilities to identify F’s possesses the concept F. Animals are a case in point: everyone agrees that pet dogs have the capacity to recognize their masters—they may even have the capacity for recognizing masters of other dogs that they play with—but at the very least it is controversial whether the dog has the concept of master. Once we admit that having recognitional capacities with respect to a certain general feature does not automatically result in the possession of the concept of the corresponding universal, then we can allow that some concept-free perceptions may involve the recognition of general features. Regarding the second, we can say that the subject is necessarily unaware of indeterminate perceptions only if we qualify this by saying that the subject is unaware of the indeterminate perception at the moment it arises. By force of the Nyāya argument, I will show that the subject can be made aware at a later time that an indeter-

No-Self and Episodic Memory

This issue of Australasian Philosophical Review adopts a cross-cultural perspective across Western Analytic and Phenomenological traditions and Indian Hindu and Buddhist traditions to demonstrate how such dialogue deepens our understanding of an important philosophical problem and expands the domain of solution spaces it affords. Other philosophical debates, I believe, stand to similarly benefit from such fusion perspectives. The lead article, by Jonardon Ganeri, deals with a problem faced by Buddhist no-self theorists in ancient India: How to account for episodic memories without a self? This problem has become especially pressing in contemporary Western philosophy with the rise of the popularity of no-self views spurred by the growing influence of the cognitive sciences. Ganeri presents three accounts of episodic memory from the Buddhist Abhidharma perspective. The Abhidharma tradition can be dated as early as third century BC. It was the first scholastic effort to organize, interpret, and re-examine the Buddha’s scattered teachings into a systematic metaphysics and epistemology. The Buddhist no-self doctrine is profoundly counterintuitive, and the Abhidharma philosophers are acutely aware of this fact. Accordingly, Abhidharma writings are replete with attempts to explain phenomenological and other features of our experience of the world in the absence of selves or persons. According to Abhidharma philosophers, the familiar world of everyday experience is an illusion. All experienced phenomena can be analysed into sets of momentarily existing mental and physical atoms (dharmas). These dharmas are best thought of as ‘phenomenologically basic’ features that constitute conscious experience. This does not, however, mean that the phenomenological features are readily available in ordinary experience. The claim is that these features are, in principle, available in firstperson experience albeit through meditation practice. There being no selves or persons in the Abhidharma picture, the work of self is reallocated to mind, which in turn, is nothing more than a bundle of momentary mental dharmas which constitute sense awarenesses (sights, sounds, etc.), mental faculties (attention, intention, etc.), and conscious states (feelings, perceptions, etc.). Any such account of phenomenal experience of the world and ourselves in it, however, faces serious challenges. Episodic memory, insofar as it involves remembering oneself doing or experiencing something in the past, raises one such challenge for the Abhidharma philosophers. Tulving [2005: 14] puts the challenge thus:

Matilal, B.K. The Collected Essays of Bimal Krishna Matilal Volume I: Mind, Language and World; Volume II: Ethics and Epics, ed. Jonardon Ganeri: New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. xxxiv + 457, £18.99 (paperback), pp. vii + 445, £16.99 (paperback).

The aim of these volumes is to bring together some of Matilal’s published (although not easily accessible) papers, scattered in anthologies and journals, as well as some previously unpublished essays, to give the reader an insight into the extraordinary range of Matilal’s philosophical work on rational traditions in Indian thought. Jonardon Ganeri’s insightful introduction to the two volumes offers the reader a feel for Matilal’s programmatic purpose and methodological framework. Matilal sets himself a challenging task—to bring Indian philosophy into mainstream philosophy. It is a challenge because back in the 1970s and 1980s Indian philosophy was considered, in Matilal’s own words, to be ‘softheaded’, ‘mystical and non-argumentative, that is at best poetic and worst dogmatic’ [1986: 4 5]. The methodological framework needed to be sensitive to the peculiarities of the Indian tradition in order to be fair to it; at the same time, it needed to fight against the misconceptions in the West about Indian philosophy. Matilal handled this delicate task by directing attention to the rational mechanisms of internal criticism that are central to the classical Indian tradition. Notably, the classical Indian tradition is diverse and dynamic, and interactions among the schools and thinkers are overtly argumentative; and, while they are primarily aimed at refuting competing views, the constant sparring among the schools predictably led to cross-fertilization and enrichment. The two volumes bring together essays that display the range and depth of Matilal’s work. Volume 1, Mind, Language and World, includes sections on scepticism and mysticism, Nyaya realism, Indian Buddhism, and Sanskrit semantics. Volume 2, Ethics and Epics, deals with dharma, rationality, and moral dilemmas, epics and ethics, pluralism, relativism, and interaction between cultures—among other topics. The two volumes together offer the reader not only a taste of the concerns and issues that exercised the minds of classical Indian philosophers; they also show that these philosophers primarily employed a rational mode of enquiry: even so-called ‘mystics’ like Nagarjuna defended their views by reasoned arguments rather than by an appeal to spiritual insight or intuition or authority. Matilal’s work at best succeeds as a first step to bring Indian philosophy into the mainstream by pinpointing appropriate texts and topics in which Indian theory can be expected to make a substantial contribution to Western philosophy. More needs to be done. Nonetheless, the volumes are rich in thought-provoking material and should delight anyone interested in Indian philosophy.