The Indian Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu is known for his critical contribution to Buddhist Abhidharma thought, his turn to the Mahayana tradition, and his concise, influential Yogacara-Vijñanavada texts. _Paving the Great Way_ reveals another dimension of his legacy: his integration of several seemingly incompatible intellectual and scriptural traditions, with far-ranging consequences for the development of Buddhist epistemology and the theorization of tantra. Most scholars read Vasubandhu's texts in isolation and separate his intellectual development into distinct phases. Featuring close studies of Vasubandhu's (...) _Abhidharmakosabhasya_, _Vyakhyayukti_, _Vimsatika_, and _Trisvabhavanirdesa_, among other works, this book identifies recurrent treatments of causality and scriptural interpretation that unify distinct strands of thought under a single, coherent Buddhist philosophy. In Vasubandhu's hands, the Buddha's rejection of the self as a false construction provides a framework through which to clarify problematic philosophical issues, such as the nature of moral agency and subjectivity under a broadly causal worldview. Recognizing this continuity of purpose across Vasubandhu's diverse corpus recasts the interests of the philosopher and his truly innovative vision, which influenced Buddhist thought for a millennium and continues to resonate with today's philosophical issues. An appendix includes extensive English-language translations of the major texts discussed. (shrink)

Some of the basic terminology of Yogācāra philosophy needs reevaluation. Whereas commentaries almost universally gloss the term dvaya ('duality') with some version of the phrase grāhya grāhaka ca (lit. 'grasped and grasper', but usually translated as 'subject and object'), in fact this gloss is absent from the earliest strata. The term and its gloss are derived from separate streams of Yogācāra reasoning - one from discussions of linguistic conceptualization and the other from discussions of perception. Once we see that these (...) two are distinct, it becomes clear that the commentarial literature asserts their identity in order to philosophically unify Yogācāra thought. One upshot of this is that even in this later assertion 'duality' refers not to the distinction between internal and external reality (as in 'textbook' Yogācāra), but to the falsely projected distinction between mental subjects and mental objects. (shrink)

This essay defends a Buddhist answer to the question of how a skeptical tradition might account for its moral position. Two domains in Buddhist thought and practice are often considered to be dissimilar, perhaps contradictory. On the one hand, there is an aspiration to nirvana and a philosophy that describes everything as “emptiness” and rejects, with apparent universality, “attachment to views.” On the other hand, Buddhist traditions of practice recommend actions based in compassion and loving kindness, and the cultivation of (...) contentment, introspective awareness, and peace of mind. It is argued that these arenas are not in conflict, but are linked through Buddhist psychology, wherein the proven limitations of concepts are quite explicitly leveraged to show that beings hampered by such limits ought to think and act with epistemic humility. The result is not nihilism, but a method for improving our perspectives on ourselves and our society—a method that may serve as a model for humanistic research. (shrink)

A Critique of Western Buddhism: Ruins of the Buddhist Real, by Glenn Wallis. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019. 232 pp., Hb. £90.00, ISBN-13: 9781474283557; Pb. £26.99, ISBN-13: 9781350155213.