## 1. Buddha as Philosopher



This entry concerns the historical individual, traditionally called
Gautama, who is identified by modern scholars as the founder of
Buddhism. According to Buddhist teachings, there have been other
buddhas in the past, and there will be yet more in the future. The
title 'Buddha', which literally means
'awakened', is conferred on an individual who discovers
the path to nirvana, the cessation of suffering, and propagates that
discovery so that others may also achieve nirvana. This entry
will follow modern scholarship in taking an agnostic stance on the
question of whether there have been other buddhas, and likewise for
questions concerning the superhuman status and powers that some
Buddhists attribute to buddhas. The concern of this entry is just
those aspects of the thought of the historical individual Gautama that
bear on the development of the Buddhist philosophical tradition.



The Buddha will here be treated as a philosopher. To so treat him is
controversial, but before coming to why that should be so, let us
first rehearse those basic aspects of the Buddha's life and
teachings that are relatively non-controversial. Tradition has it that
Gautama lived to age 80. Up until recently his dates were thought to
be approximately 560-480 BCE, but many scholars now hold that he
must have died around 405 BCE. He was born into a family of some
wealth and power, members of the Sakya clan, in the area of
the present border between India and Nepal. The story is that in early
adulthood he abandoned his comfortable life as a householder (as well
as his wife and young son) in order to seek a solution to the problem
of existential suffering. He first took up with a number of different
wandering ascetics (*sramanas*) who claimed to know the
path to liberation from suffering. Finding their teachings
unsatisfactory, he struck out on his own, and through a combination of
insight and meditational practice attained the state of enlightenment
(*bodhi*) which is said to represent the cessation of all
further suffering. He then devoted the remaining 45 years of his life
to teaching others the insights and techniques that had led him to
this achievement.



Gautama could himself be classified as one of the
*sramanas*. That there existed such a phenomenon as the
*sramanas* tells us that there was some degree of
dissatisfaction with the customary religious practices then prevailing
in the Gangetic basin of North India. These practices consisted
largely in the rituals and sacrifices prescribed in the Vedas. Among
the *sramanas* there were many, including the Buddha, who
rejected the authority of the Vedas as definitive pronouncements on
the nature of the world and our place in it (and for this reason are
called 'heterodox'). But within the Vedic canon itself
there is a stratum of (comparatively late) texts, the
*Upanisads*, that likewise displays disaffection with
Brahmin ritualism. Among the new ideas that figure in these
('orthodox') texts, as well as in the teachings of those
heterodox *sramanas* whose doctrines are known to us, are
the following: that sentient beings (including humans, non-human
animals, gods, and the inhabitants of various hells) undergo rebirth;
that rebirth is governed by the causal laws of karma (good actions
cause pleasant fruit for the agent, evil actions cause unpleasant
fruit, etc.); that continual rebirth is inherently unsatisfactory;
that there is an ideal state for sentient beings involving liberation
from the cycle of rebirth; and that attaining this state requires
overcoming ignorance concerning one's true identity. Various
views are offered concerning this ignorance and how to overcome it.
The *Bhagavad Gita* (classified by some orthodox
schools as an *Upanisad*) lists four such methods, and
discusses at least two separate views concerning our identity: that
there is a plurality of distinct selves, each being the true agent of
a person's actions and the bearer of karmic merit and demerit
but existing separately from the body and its associated states; and
that there is just one self, of the nature of pure consciousness (a
'witness') and identical with the essence of the cosmos,
Brahman or pure undifferentiated Being.



The Buddha agreed with those of his contemporaries embarked on the
same soteriological project that it is ignorance about our identity
that is responsible for suffering. What sets his teachings apart (at
this level of analysis) lies in what he says that ignorance consists
in: the conceit that there is an 'I' and a
'mine'. This is the famous Buddhist teaching of non-self
(*anatman*). And it is with this teaching that the
controversy begins concerning whether Gautama may legitimately be
represented as a philosopher. First there are those (e.g. Albahari
2006) who (correctly) point out that the Buddha never categorically
denies the existence of a self that transcends what is empirically
given, namely the five *skandhas* or psychophysical elements.
While the Buddha does deny that any of the psychophysical elements is
a self, these interpreters claim that he at least leaves open the
possibility that there is a self that is transcendent in the sense of
being non-empirical. To this it may be objected that all of classical
Indian philosophy--Buddhist and orthodox alike--understood
the Buddha to have denied the self *tout court*. To this it is
sometimes replied that the later philosophical tradition simply got
the Buddha wrong, at least in part because the Buddha sought to
indicate something that cannot be grasped through the exercise of
philosophical rationality. On this interpretation, the Buddha should
be seen not as a proponent of the philosophical methods of analysis
and argumentation, but rather as one who sees those methods as
obstacles to final release.



Another reason one sometimes encounters for denying that the Buddha is
a philosopher is that he rejects the characteristically philosophical
activity of theorizing about matters that lack evident practical
application. On this interpretation as well, those later Buddhist
thinkers who did go in for the construction of theories about the
ultimate nature of everything simply failed to heed or properly
appreciate the Buddha's advice that we avoid theorizing for its
own sake and confine our attention to those matters that are directly
relevant to liberation from suffering. On this view the teaching of
non-self is not a bit of metaphysics, just some practical advice to
the effect that we should avoid identifying with things that are
transitory and so bound to yield dissatisfaction. What both
interpretations share is the assumption that it is possible to arrive
at what the Buddha himself thought without relying on the
understanding of his teachings developed in the subsequent Buddhist
philosophical tradition.



This assumption may be questioned. Our knowledge of the Buddha's
teachings comes by way of texts that were not written down until
several centuries after his death, are in languages (Pali, and
Chinese translations of Sanskrit) other than the one he is likely to
have spoken, and disagree in important respects. The first difficulty
may not be as serious as it seems, given that the Buddha's
discourses were probably rehearsed shortly after his death and
preserved through oral transmission until the time they were committed
to writing. And the second need not be insuperable either. (See, e.g.,
Cousins 2022.) But the third is troubling, in that it suggests
textual transmission involved processes of insertion and deletion in
aid of one side or another in sectarian disputes. Our ancient sources
attest to this: one will encounter a dispute among Buddhist thinkers
where one side cites some utterance of the Buddha in support of their
position, only to have the other side respond that the text from which
the quotation is taken is not universally recognized as
authoritatively the word of the Buddha. This suggests that our record
of the Buddha's teaching may be colored by the philosophical
elaboration of those teachings propounded by later thinkers in the
Buddhist tradition.



Some scholars (e.g., Gombrich 2009, Shulman 2014) are more sanguine
than others about the possibility of overcoming this difficulty, and
thereby getting at what the Buddha himself had thought, as opposed to
what later Buddhist philosophers thought he had thought. No position
will be taken on this dispute here. We will be treating the
Buddha's thought as it was understood within the later
philosophical tradition that he had inspired. The resulting
interpretation may or may not be faithful to his intentions. It is at
least logically possible that he believed there to be a transcendent
self that can only be known by mystical intuition, or that the
exercise of philosophical rationality leads only to sterile theorizing
and away from real emancipation. What we can say with some assurance
is that this is not how the Buddhist philosophical tradition
understood him. It is their understanding that will be the subject of
this essay.


## 2. Core Teachings



The Buddha's basic teachings are usually summarized using the
device of the Four Nobles' Truths:


1. There is suffering.
2. There is the origination of suffering.
3. There is the cessation of suffering.
4. There is a path to the cessation of suffering.



The first of these claims might seem obvious, even when
'suffering' is understood to mean not mere pain but
existential suffering, the sort of frustration, alienation and despair
that arise out of our experience of transitoriness. But there are said
to be different levels of appreciation of this truth, some quite
subtle and difficult to attain; the highest of these is said to
involve the realization that everything is of the nature of suffering.
Perhaps it is sufficient for present purposes to point out that while
this is not the implausible claim that all of life's states and
events are necessarily experienced as unsatisfactory, still the
realization that all (oneself included) is impermanent can undermine a
precondition for real enjoyment of the events in a life: that such
events are meaningful by virtue of their having a place in an
open-ended narrative.



It is with the development and elaboration of (2) that substantive
philosophical controversy begins. (2) is the simple claim that there
are causes and conditions for the arising of suffering. (3) then makes
the obvious point that if the origination of suffering depends on
causes, future suffering can be prevented by bringing about the
cessation of those causes. (4) specifies a set of techniques that are
said to be effective in such cessation. Much then hangs on the correct
identification of the causes of suffering. The answer is traditionally
spelled out in a list consisting of twelve links in a causal chain
that begins with ignorance and ends with suffering (represented by the
states of old age, disease and death). Modern scholarship has
established that this list is a later compilation. For the texts that
claim to convey the Buddha's own teachings give two slightly
different formulations of this list, and shorter formulations
containing only some of the twelve items are also found in the texts.
But it seems safe to say that the Buddha taught an analysis of the
origins of suffering roughly along the following lines: given the
existence of a fully functioning assemblage of psychophysical elements
(the parts that make up a sentient being), ignorance concerning the
three characteristics of sentient existence--suffering,
impermanence and non-self--will lead, in the course of normal
interactions with the environment, to appropriation (the
identification of certain elements as 'I' and
'mine'). This leads in turn to the formation of
attachments, in the form of desire and aversion, and the strengthening
of ignorance concerning the true nature of sentient existence. These
ensure future rebirth, and thus future instances of old age, disease
and death, in a potentially unending cycle.



The key to escape from this cycle is said to lie in realization of the
truth about sentient existence--that it is characterized by
suffering, impermanence and non-self. But this realization is not
easily achieved, since acts of appropriation have already made desire,
aversion and ignorance deeply entrenched habits of mind. Thus the
measures specified in (4) include various forms of training designed
to replace such habits with others that are more conducive to seeing
things as they are. Among these is training in meditation, which
serves among other things as a way of enhancing one's
observational abilities with respect to one's own
psychological states. Insight is cultivated through the use of these
newly developed observational powers, as informed by knowledge
acquired through the exercise of philosophical rationality. There is a
debate in the later tradition as to whether final release can be
attained through theoretical insight alone, through meditation alone,
or only by using both techniques. Ch'an, for instance, is based
on the premise that enlightenment can be attained through meditation
alone, whereas Theravada advocates using both but also holds that
analysis alone may be sufficient for some. (This disagreement begins
with a dispute over how to interpret D I.77-84; see Cousins
2022, 81-6.) The third option seems the most plausible, but the first
is certainly of some interest given its suggestion that one can attain
the ideal state for humans just by doing philosophy.



The Buddha seems to have held (2) to constitute the core of his
discovery. He calls his teachings a 'middle path' between
two extreme views, and it is this claim concerning the causal origins
of suffering that he identifies as the key to avoiding those extremes.
The extremes are eternalism, the view that persons are eternal, and
annihilationism, the view that persons go utterly out of existence
(usually understood to mean at death, though a term still shorter than
one lifetime is not ruled out). It will be apparent that eternalism
requires the existence of the sort of self that the Buddha denies.
What is not immediately evident is why the denial of such a self is
not tantamount to the claim that the person is annihilated at death
(or even sooner, depending on just how impermanent one takes the
psychophysical elements to be). The solution to this puzzle lies in
the fact that eternalism and annihilationism both share the
presupposition that there is an 'I' whose existence might
either extend beyond death or terminate at death. The idea of the
'middle path' is that all of life's continuities can
be explained in terms of facts about a causal series of psychophysical
elements. There being nothing more than a succession of these
impermanent, impersonal events and states, the question of the
ultimate fate of this 'I', the supposed owner of these
elements, simply does not arise.



This reductionist view of sentient beings was later articulated in
terms of the distinction between two kinds of truth, conventional and
ultimate. Each kind of truth has its own domain of objects, the things
that are only conventionally real and the things that are ultimately
real respectively. Conventionally real entities are those things that
are accepted as real by common sense, but that turn out on further
analysis to be wholes compounded out of simpler entities and thus not
strictly speaking real at all. The stock example of a conventionally
real entity is the chariot, which we take to be real only because it
is more convenient, given our interests and cognitive limitations, to
have a single name for the parts when assembled in the right way.
Since our belief that there are chariots is thus due to our having a
certain useful concept, the chariot is said to be a mere conceptual
fiction. (This does not, however, mean that all conceptualization is
falsification; only concepts that allow of reductive analysis lead to
this artificial inflation of our ontology, and thus to a kind of
error.) Ultimately real entities are those ultimate parts into which
conceptual fictions are analyzable. An ultimately true statement is
one that correctly describes how certain ultimately real entities are
arranged. A conventionally true statement is one that, given how the
ultimately real entities are arranged, would correctly describe
certain conceptual fictions if they also existed. The ultimate truth
concerning the relevant ultimately real entities helps explain why it
should turn out to be useful to accept conventionally true statements
(such as 'King Milinda rode in a chariot') when the
objects described in those statements are mere fictions.



Using this distinction between the two truths, the key insight of the
'middle path' may be expressed as follows. The ultimate
truth about sentient beings is just that there is a causal series of
impermanent, impersonal psychophysical elements. Since these are all
impermanent, and lack other properties that would be required of an
essence of the person, none of them is a self. But given the right
arrangement of such entities in a causal series, it is useful to think
of them as making up one thing, a person. It is thus conventionally
true that there are persons, things that endure for a lifetime and
possibly (if there is rebirth) longer. This is conventionally true
because generally speaking there is more overall happiness and less
overall pain and suffering when one part of such a series identifies
with other parts of the same series. For instance, when the present
set of psychophysical elements identifies with future elements, it is
less likely to engage in behavior (such as smoking) that results in
present pleasure but far greater future pain. The utility of this
convention is, however, limited. Past a certain point--namely the
point at which we take it too seriously, as more than just a useful
fiction--it results in existential suffering. The cessation of
suffering is attained by extirpating all sense of an 'I'
that serves as agent and owner.


## 3. Non-Self



The Buddha's 'middle path' strategy can be seen as
one of first arguing that since the word 'I' is a mere enumerative
term like 'pair', there is nothing that it genuinely
denotes; and then explaining that our erroneous sense of an
'I' stems from our employment of the useful fiction
represented by the concept of the person. While the second part of
this strategy only receives its full articulation in the later
development of the theory of two truths, the first part can be found
in the Buddha's own teachings, in the form of several
philosophical arguments for non-self. Best known among these is the
argument from impermanence (S III.66-8), which has this basic
structure:



1.
If there were a self it would be permanent.
2.
None of the five kinds of psychophysical element is
permanent.
[?]
There is no self.


It is the fact that this argument does not contain a premise
explicitly asserting that the five *skandhas* (classes of
psychophysical element) are exhaustive of the constituents of persons,
plus the fact that these are all said to be empirically observable,
that leads some to claim that the Buddha did not intend to deny the
existence of a self *tout court*. There is, however, evidence
that the Buddha was generally hostile toward attempts to establish the
existence of unobservable entities. In the Pohapada Sutta (D
I.178-203), for instance, the Buddha compares someone who posits
an unseen seer in order to explain our introspective awareness of
cognitions, to a man who has conceived a longing for the most
beautiful woman in the world based solely on the thought that such a
woman must surely exist. And in the Tevijja Sutta (D I.235-52),
the Buddha rejects the claim of certain Brahmins to know the path to
oneness with Brahman, on the grounds that no one has actually observed
this Brahman. This makes more plausible the assumption that the
argument has as an implicit premise the claim that there is no more to
the person than the five *skandhas*.



Premise (1) appears to be based on the assumption that persons undergo
rebirth, together with the thought that one function of a self would
be to account for diachronic personal identity. By
'permanent' is here meant continued existence over at
least several lives. This is shown by the fact that the Buddha rules
out the body as a self on the grounds that the body exists for just
one lifetime. (This also demonstrates that the Buddha did not mean by
'impermanent' what some later Buddhist philosophers meant,
viz., existing for just a moment; the Buddhist doctrine of
momentariness represents a later development.) The mental entities
that make up the remaining four types of psychophysical element might
seem like more promising candidates, but these are ruled out on the
grounds that these all originate in dependence on contact between
sense faculty and object, and last no longer than a particular
sense-object-contact event. That he listed five kinds of
psychophysical element, and not just one, shows that the Buddha
embraced a kind of dualism. But this strategy for demonstrating the
impermanence of the psychological elements shows that his dualism was
not the sort of mind-body dualism familiar from substance ontologies
like those of Descartes and of the Nyaya school of orthodox
Indian philosophy. Instead of seeing the mind as the persisting bearer
of such transient events as occurrences of cognition, feeling and
volition, he treats 'mind' as a kind of aggregate term for
bundles of transient mental events. These events being impermanent,
they too fail to account for diachronic personal identity in the way
in which a self might be expected to.



Another argument for non-self, which might be called the argument from
control (S III.66-8), has this structure:



1.
If there were a self, one could never desire that it be
changed.
2.
Each of the five kinds of psychophysical element is such that one
can desire that it be changed.
[?]
There is no self.


Premise (1) is puzzling. It appears to presuppose that the self should
have complete control over itself, so that it would effortlessly
adjust its state to its desires. That the self should be thought of as
the locus of control is certainly plausible. Those Indian
self-theorists who claim that the self is a mere passive witness
recognize that the burden of proof is on them to show that the self is
not an agent. But it seems implausibly demanding to require of the
self that it have complete control over itself. We do not require that
vision see itself if it is to see other things. The case of vision
suggests an alternative interpretation, however. We might hold that
vision does not see itself for the reason that this would violate an
irreflexivity principle, to the effect that an entity cannot operate
on itself. Indian philosophers who accept this principle cite
supportive instances such as the knife that cannot cut itself and the
finger-tip that cannot touch itself. If this principle is accepted,
then if the self were the locus of control it would follow that it
could never exercise this function on itself. A self that was the
controller could never find itself in the position of seeking to
change its state to one that it deemed more desirable. On this
interpretation, the first premise seems to be true. And there is ample
evidence that (2) is true: it is difficult to imagine a bodily or
psychological state over which one might not wish to exercise control.
Consequently, given the assumption that the person is wholly composed
of the psychophysical elements, it appears to follow that a self of
this description does not exist.



These two arguments appear, then, to give good reason to deny a self
that might ground diachronic personal identity and serve as locus of
control, given the assumption that there is no more to the person than
the empirically given psychophysical elements. But it now becomes
something of a puzzle how one is to explain diachronic personal
identity and agency. To start with the latter, does the argument from
control not suggest that control must be exercised by something other
than the psychophysical elements? This was precisely the conclusion of
the Samkhya school of orthodox Indian philosophy. One of
their arguments for the existence of a self was that it is possible to
exercise control over all the empirically given constituents of the
person; while they agree with the Buddha that a self is never
observed, they take the phenomena of agency to be grounds for positing
a self that transcends all possible experience.



This line of objection to the Buddha's teaching of non-self is
more commonly formulated in response to the argument from
impermanence, however. Perhaps its most dramatic form is aimed at the
Buddha's acceptance of the doctrines of karma and rebirth. It is
clear that the body ceases to exist at death. And given the
Buddha's argument that mental states all originate in dependence
on sense-object contact events, it seems no psychological constituent
of the person can transmigrate either. Yet the Buddha claims that
persons who have not yet achieved enlightenment will be reborn as
sentient beings of some sort after they die. If there is no
constituent whatever that moves from one life to the next, how could
the being in the next life be the same person as the being in this
life? This question becomes all the more pointed when it is added that
rebirth is governed by karma, something that functions as a kind of
cosmic justice: those born into fortunate circumstances do so as a
result of good deeds in prior lives, while unpleasant births result
from evil past deeds. Such a system of reward and punishment could be
just only if the recipient of pleasant or unpleasant karmic fruit is
the same person as the agent of the good or evil action. And the
opponent finds it incomprehensible how this could be so in the absence
of a persisting self.


## 4. Karma and Rebirth



It is not just classical Indian self-theorists who have found this
objection persuasive. Some Buddhists have as well. Among these
Buddhists, however, this has led to the rejection not of non-self but
of rebirth. (Historically this response was not unknown among East
Asian Buddhists, and it is not rare among Western Buddhists today.)
The evidence that the Buddha himself accepted rebirth and karma seems
quite strong, however. The later tradition would distinguish between
two types of discourse in the body of the Buddha's teachings:
those intended for an audience of householders seeking instruction
from a sage, and those intended for an audience of monastic
renunciates already versed in his teachings. And it would be one thing
if his use of the concepts of karma and rebirth were limited to the
former. For then such appeals could be explained away as another
instance of the Buddha's pedagogical skill (commonly referred to
as *upaya*). The idea would be that householders who fail
to comply with the most basic demands of morality are not likely (for
reasons to be discussed shortly) to make significant progress toward
the cessation of suffering, and the teaching of karma and rebirth,
even if not strictly speaking true, does give those who accept it a
(prudential) reason to be moral. But this sort of 'noble
lie' justification for the Buddha teaching a doctrine he does
not accept fails in the face of the evidence that he also taught it to
quite advanced monastics (e.g., A III.33). And what he taught is not
the version of karma popular in certain circles today, according to
which, for instance, an act done out of hatred makes the agent
somewhat more disposed to perform similar actions out of similar
motives in the future, which in turn makes negative experiences more
likely for the agent. What the Buddha teaches is instead the far
stricter view that each action has its own specific consequence for
the agent, the hedonic nature of which is determined in accordance
with causal laws and in such a way as to require rebirth as long as
action continues. So if there is a conflict between the doctrine of
non-self and the teaching of karma and rebirth, it is not to be
resolved by weakening the Buddha's commitment to the latter.



The Sanskrit term *karma* literally means 'action'.
What is nowadays referred to somewhat loosely as the theory of karma
is, speaking more strictly, the view that there is a causal
relationship between action (*karma*) and 'fruit'
(*phala*), the latter being an experience of pleasure, pain or
indifference for the agent of the action. This is the view that the
Buddha appears to have accepted in its most straightforward form.
Actions are said to be of three types: bodily, verbal and mental. The
Buddha insists, however, that by action is meant not the movement or
change involved, but rather the volition or intention that brought
about the change. As Gombrich (2009) points out, the Buddha's
insistence on this point reflects the transition from an earlier
ritualistic view of action to a view that brings action within the
purview of ethics. For it is when actions are seen as subject to moral
assessment that intention becomes relevant. One does not, for
instance, perform the morally blameworthy action of speaking
insultingly to an elder just by making sounds that approximate to the
pronunciation of profanities in the presence of an elder; parrots and
prelinguistic children can do as much. What matters for moral
assessment is the mental state (if any) that produced the bodily,
verbal or mental change. And it is the occurrence of these mental
states that is said to cause the subsequent occurrence of hedonically
good, bad and neutral experiences. More specifically, it is the
occurrence of the three 'defiled' mental states that
brings about karmic fruit. The three defilements
(*klesa*s) are desire, aversion and ignorance. And we are
told quite specifically (A III.33) that actions performed by an agent
in whom these three defilements have been destroyed do not have karmic
consequences; such an agent is experiencing their last birth.



Some caution is required in understanding this claim about the
defilements. The Buddha seems to be saying that it is possible to act
not only without ignorance, but also in the absence of desire or
aversion, yet it is difficult to see how there could be intentional
action without some positive or negative motivation. To see
one's way around this difficulty, one must realize that by
'desire' and 'aversion' are meant those
positive and negative motives respectively that are colored by
ignorance, viz. ignorance concerning suffering, impermanence and
non-self. Presumably the enlightened person, while knowing the truth
about these matters, can still engage in motivated action. Their
actions are not based on the presupposition that there is an
'I' for which those actions can have significance.
Ignorance concerning these matters perpetuates rebirth, and thus
further occasions for existential suffering, by facilitating a
motivational structure that reinforces one's ignorance. We can
now see how compliance with common-sense morality could be seen as an
initial step on the path to the cessation of suffering. While the
presence of ignorance makes all action--even that deemed morally
good--karmically potent, those actions commonly considered
morally evil are especially powerful reinforcers of ignorance, in that
they stem from the assumption that the agent's welfare is of
paramount importance. While recognition of the moral value of others
may still involve the conceit that there is an 'I', it can
nonetheless constitute progress toward dissolution of the sense of
self.



This excursus into what the Buddha meant by karma may help us see how
his middle path strategy could be used to reply to the objection to
non-self from rebirth. That objection was that the reward and
punishment generated by karma across lives could never be deserved in
the absence of a transmigrating self. The middle path strategy
generally involves locating and rejecting an assumption shared by a
pair of extreme views. In this case the views will be (1) that the
person in the later life deserves the fruit generated by the action in
the earlier life, and (2) that this person does not deserve the fruit.
One assumption shared by (1) and (2) is that persons deserve reward
and punishment depending on the moral character of their actions, and
one might deny this assumption. But that would be tantamount to moral
nihilism, and a middle path is said to avoid nihilisms (such as
annihilationism). A more promising alternative might be to deny that
there are ultimately such things as persons that could bear moral
properties like desert. This is what the Buddha seems to mean when he
asserts that the earlier and the later person are neither the same nor
different (S II.62; S II.76; S II.113). Since any two existing things
must be either identical or distinct, to say of the two persons that
they are neither is to say that strictly speaking they do not
exist.



This alternative is more promising because it avoids moral nihilism.
For it allows one to assert that persons and their moral properties
are conventionally real. To say this is to say that given our
interests and cognitive limitations, we do better at achieving our
aim--minimizing overall pain and suffering--by acting as
though there are persons with morally significant properties.
Ultimately there are just impersonal entities and events in causal
sequence: ignorance, the sorts of desires that ignorance facilitates,
an intention formed on the basis of such a desire, a bodily, verbal or
mental action, a feeling of pleasure, pain or indifference, and an
occasion of suffering. The claim is that this situation is usefully
thought of as, for instance, a person who performs an evil deed due to
their ignorance of the true nature of things, receives the unpleasant
fruit they deserve in the next life, and suffers through their
continuing on the wheel of samsara. It is useful to think
of the situation in this way because it helps us locate the
appropriate places to intervene to prevent future pain (the evil deed)
and future suffering (ignorance).



It is no doubt quite difficult to believe that karma and rebirth exist
in the form that the Buddha claims. It is said that their existence
can be confirmed by those who have developed the power of
retrocognition through advanced yogic technique. But this is of little
help to those not already convinced that meditation is a reliable
means of knowledge. What can be said with some assurance is that karma
and rebirth are not inconsistent with non-self. Rebirth without
transmigration is logically possible.


## 5. Attitude toward Reason



When the Buddha says that a person in one life and the person in
another life are neither the same nor different, one's first
response might be to take 'different' to mean something
other than 'not the same'. But while this is possible in
English given the ambiguity of 'the same', it is not
possible in the Pali source, where the Buddha is represented as
unambiguously denying both numerical identity and numerical
distinctness. This has led some to wonder whether the Buddha does not
employ a deviant logic. Such suspicions are strengthened by those
cases where the options are not two but four, cases of the so-called
tetralemma (*catuskoti*). For instance, when the
Buddha is questioned about the post-mortem status of the enlightened
person or *arhat* (e.g., at M I.483-8) the possibilities
are listed as: (1) the *arhat* continues to exist after death,
(2) does not exist after death, (3) both exists and does not exist
after death, and (4) neither exists nor does not exist after death.
When the Buddha rejects both (1) and (2) we get a repetition of
'neither the same nor different'. But when he goes on to
entertain, and then reject, (3) and (4) the logical difficulties are
compounded. Since each of (3) and (4) appears to be formally
contradictory, to entertain either is to entertain the possibility
that a contradiction might be true. And their denial seems tantamount
to affirmation of excluded middle, which is *prima facie*
incompatible with the denial of both (1) and (2). One might wonder
whether we are here in the presence of the mystical.



There were some Buddhist philosophers who took 'neither the same
nor different' in this way. These were the Personalists
(*Pudgalavadins*), who were so called because they
affirmed the ultimate existence of the person as something named and
conceptualized in dependence on the psychophysical elements. They
claimed that the person is neither identical with nor distinct from
the psychophysical elements. They were prepared to accept, as a
consequence, that nothing whatever can be said about the relation
between person and elements. But their view was rejected by most
Buddhist philosophers, in part on the grounds that it quickly leads to
an ineffability paradox: one can say neither that the person's
relation to the elements is inexpressible, nor that it is not
inexpressible. The consensus view was instead that the fact that the
person can be said to be neither identical with nor distinct from the
elements is grounds for taking the person to be a mere conceptual
fiction. Concerning the persons in the two lives, they understood the
negations involved in 'neither the same nor different' to
be of the commitmentless variety, i.e., to function like illocutionary
negation. If we agree that the statement '7 is green' is
semantically ill-formed, on the grounds that abstract objects such as
numbers do not have colors, then we might go on to say, 'Do not
say that 7 is green, and do not say that it is not green
either'. There is no contradiction here, since the illocutionary
negation operator 'do not say' generates no commitment to
an alternative characterization.



There is also evidence that claims of type (3) involve
parameterization. For instance, the claim about the *arhat*
would be that there is some respect in which they can be said to exist
after death, and some other respect in which they can be said to no
longer exist after death. Entertaining such a proposition does not
require that one believe there might be true contradictions. And while
claims of type (4) would seem to be logically equivalent to those of
type (3) (regardless of whether or not they involve parameterization),
the tradition treated this type as asserting that the subject is
beyond all conceptualization. To reject the type (4) claim about the
*arhat* is to close off one natural response to the rejections
of the first three claims: that the status of the *arhat* after
death transcends rational understanding. That the Buddha rejected all
four possibilities concerning this and related questions is not
evidence that he employed a deviant logic.



The Buddha's response to questions like those concerning the
*arhat* is sometimes cited in defense of a different claim
about his attitude toward rationality. This is the claim that the
Buddha was essentially a pragmatist, someone who rejects philosophical
theorizing for its own sake and employs philosophical rationality only
to the extent that doing so can help solve the practical problem of
eliminating suffering. The Buddha does seem to be embracing something
like this attitude when he defends his refusal to answer questions
like that about the *arhat*, or whether the series of lives has
a beginning, or whether the living principle (*jiva*) is
identical with the body. He calls all the possible views with respect
to such questions distractions insofar as answering them would not
lead to the cessation of the defilements and thus to the end of
suffering. And in a famous simile (M I.429) he compares someone who
insists that the Buddha answer these questions to someone who has been
wounded by an arrow but will not have the wound treated until they are
told who shot the arrow, what sort of wood the arrow is made of, and
the like.



Passages such as these surely attest to the great importance the
Buddha placed on sharing his insights to help others overcome
suffering. But this is consistent with the belief that philosophical
rationality may be used to answer questions that lack evident
connection with pressing practical concerns. And on at least one
occasion the Buddha does just this. Pressed to give his answers to the
questions about the *arhat* and the like, the Buddha first
rejects all the possibilities of the tetralemma, and defends his
refusal on the grounds that such theories are not conducive to
liberation from *samsara*. But when his questioner
shows signs of thereby losing confidence in the value of the
Buddha's teachings about the path to the cessation of suffering,
the Buddha responds with the example of a fire that goes out after
exhausting its fuel. If one were asked where this fire has gone, the
Buddha points out, one could consistently deny that it has gone to the
north, to the south, or in any other direction. This is so for the
simple reason that the questions 'Has it gone to the
north?', 'Has it gone to the south?', etc., all
share the false presupposition that the fire continues to exist.
Likewise the questions about the *arhat* and the like all share
the false presupposition that there is such a thing as a person who
might either continue to exist after death, cease to exist at death,
etc. (Analayo 2018, 41) The difficulty with these questions is
not that they try to extend philosophical rationality beyond its
legitimate domain, as the handmaiden of soteriologically useful
practice. It is rather that they rest on a false
presupposition--something that is disclosed through the
employment of philosophical rationality.



A different sort of challenge to the claim that the Buddha valued
philosophical rationality for its own sake comes from the role played
by authority in Buddhist soteriology. For instance, in the Buddhist
tradition one sometimes encounters the claim that only enlightened
persons such as the Buddha can know all the details of karmic
causation. And to the extent that the moral rules are thought to be
determined by the details of karmic causation, this might be taken to
mean that our knowledge of the moral rules is dependent on the
authority of the Buddha. Again, the subsequent development of Buddhist
philosophy seems to have been constrained by the need to make theory
compatible with certain key claims of the Buddha. For instance, one
school developed an elaborate form of four-dimensionalism, not because
of any deep dissatisfaction with presentism, but because they believed
the non-existence of the past and the future to be incompatible with
the Buddha's alleged ability to cognize past and future events.
And some modern scholars go so far as to wonder whether non-self
functions as anything more than a sort of linguistic taboo against the
use of words like 'I' and 'self' in the
Buddhist tradition (Collins 1982: 183). The suggestion is that just as
in some other religious traditions the views of the founder or the
statements of scripture trump all other considerations, including any
views arrived at through the free exercise of rational inquiry, so in
Buddhism as well there can be at best only a highly constrained arena
for the deployment of philosophical rationality.



Now it could be that while this is true of the tradition that
developed out of the Buddha's teachings, the Buddha himself held
the unfettered use of rationality in quite high esteem. This would
seem to conflict with what he is represented as saying in response to
the report that he arrived at his conclusions through reasoning and
analysis alone: that such a report is libelous, since he possesses a
number of superhuman cognitive powers (M I.68). But at least some
scholars take this passage to be not the Buddha's own words but
an expression of later devotionalist concerns (Gombrich 2009: 164).
Indeed one does find a spirited discussion within the tradition
concerning the question whether the Buddha is omniscient, a discussion
that may well reflect competition between Buddhism and those
Brahmanical schools that posit an omniscient creator. And at least for
the most part the Buddhist tradition is careful not to attribute to
the Buddha the sort of omniscience usually ascribed to an all-perfect
being: the actual cognition, at any one time, of all truths. Instead a
Buddha is said to be omniscient only in the much weaker sense of
always having the ability to cognize any individual fact relevant to
the soteriological project, viz. the details of their own past lives,
the workings of the karmic causal laws, and whether a given
individual's defilements have been extirpated. Moreover, these
abilities are said to be ones that a Buddha acquires through a
specific course of training, and thus ones that others may reasonably
aspire to as well. The attitude of the later tradition seems to be
that while one could discover the relevant facts on one's own,
it would be more reasonable to take advantage of the fact that the
Buddha has already done all the epistemic labor involved. When we
arrive in a new town we could always find our final destination
through trial and error, but it would make more sense to ask someone
who already knows their way about.



The Buddhist philosophical tradition grew out of earlier efforts to
systematize the Buddha's teachings. Within a century or two of
the death of the Buddha, exegetical differences led to debates
concerning the Buddha's true intention on some matter, such as
that between the Personalists and others over the status of the
person. While the parties to these debates use many of the standard
tools and techniques of philosophy, they were still circumscribed by
the assumption that the Buddha's views on the matter at hand are
authoritative. In time, however, the discussion widened to include
interlocutors representing various Brahmanical systems. Since the
latter did not take the Buddha's word as authoritative, Buddhist
thinkers were required to defend their positions in other ways. The
resulting debate (which continued for about nine centuries) touched on
most of the topics now considered standard in metaphysics,
epistemology and philosophy of language, and was characterized by
considerable sophistication in philosophical methodology. What the
Buddha would have thought of these developments we cannot say with any
certainty. What we can say is that many Buddhists have believed that
the unfettered exercise of philosophical rationality is quite
consistent with his teachings.