"Paradox drives a good deal of philosophy in every tradition. In the Indian and Western traditions, there is a tendency among many philosophers to run from contradiction and paradox. If and when a contradiction appears in a theory, it is regarded as a sure sign that something has gone amiss. This aversion to paradox commits them, knowingly or not, to the view that reality must be consistent. In East Asia, however, philosophers have reacted to paradox differently. Many East Asian philosophers-both (...) in the Daoist and the Buddhist traditions-have openly embraced paradox. They have taken compelling arguments for contradictory positions to suggest that the world is-at least in some respects, and often in very deep respects-inconsistent, and that our best theories of the world will therefore be inconsistent. This book is an initial survey of the writings of some influential East Asian thinkers who were committed to paradox, and for good reason. Their acceptance of contradiction allowed them to develop important insights that evaded those who consider paradox out of bounds"--. (shrink)

And I find myself knowing the things that I knew Which is all that you can know on this side of the blueIs there such a thing as direct, non-conceptual experience, or is all experience, by its very nature, conceptually mediated? Is some notion of non-conceptual sensory awareness required to account for our ability to represent and negotiate our physical environment, or is it merely an artifact of deep-seated but ultimately misguided Cartesian metaphysical assumptions? Perhaps conscious experience in humans is (...) inextricably tied to the representational or self-reflexive capacities of language; if so, does it necessarily follow that newborn infants and animals are not conscious? Is the very notion of non-conceptual... (shrink)

The Chan tradition is renowned as the “meditation” school of East Asia. Indeed, the Chinese term chan 禪 is an abbreviated transliteration of dhyāna, the Sanskrit term arguably closest to the modern English word “meditation.” Scholars typically date the emergence of this tradition to the early Tang dynasty , although Chan did not reach institutional maturity until the Song period . In time, Chinese Chan spread throughout East Asia, giving birth to the various Zen, Sŏn, and Thiền lineages of Japan, (...) Korea, and Vietnam, respectively. Today these traditions continue to promote, at least in theory, meditation practices, and these have been the subject of considerable scholarly .. (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 use of the concept ‘religious experience’ is exceedingly broad, encompassing a vast array of feelings, moods, perceptions, dispositions, and states of consciousness. Some prefer to focus on a distinct type of religious experience known as ‘mystical experience', typically construed as a transitory but potentially transformative state of consciousness in which a subject purports to come into immediate contact with the divine, the sacred, the holy. We will return to the issue of mystical experience below. Here I would only note (...) that the academic literature does not clearly delineate the relationship between religious experience and mystical experience. The reluctance, and in the end the inability, to clearly stipulate the meaning of such terms will be a recurring theme in the discussion below. (shrink)

One of the arguments that has been directed against the Buddhist anātman (“non-self”) theory, by Dan Zahavi among others, is that the doctrine cannot account for why we never mistake our own bodies for the bodies of others. This is not, however, a new objection; it can be found, for example, in a list of objections to the anātman doctrine in the Dazhidulun (“Treatise on the Great Perfection of Wisdom”), a medieval compendium attributed to Nāgārjuna and compiled and translated (and (...) perhaps partially authored) by Kumārajīva in the early fifth century. The text offers several responses to this objection, the most interesting of which is the claim that there is indeed an instance of a person experiencing himself as another. We then hear the tale of a young man who went through a “body transplant”—his body is replaced, piece by piece, with that of a corpse. In my chapter, I analyze this amusing but nonetheless illuminating narrative, showing how the story is a classic example of a medieval Buddhist “thought experiment” (Gedankenspiel), which was freely altered by Buddhist authors as it was deployed in different doctrinal/philosophical contexts. I conclude with some reflections on how our approach to such didactic tales affects our understanding and appreciation of Buddhist philosophy writ large. (shrink)