## 1. Classical Indian Conceptions of Persons


### 1.1 Vedic Conception of Persons: Upanisads



Hindu philosophical schools develop their philosophical position as an
attempt to interpret and defend the various metaphysical theses that
are found in the Vedas (the foundational Hindu scriptures) and more
specifically the Upanisads. The Upanisads, literally
"the last chapters, parts of the Veda", are often thought
of as expressing the crux or the purpose of the Veda. The concept of
*atman* (soul, self) as the essence of individual persons
and knowledge of that atman is the central focus in all of the
Upanishads. The self (*atman*) is primarily conceived of
in the Upanisads as a pure subject of experiences, detached from
the objects of its consciousness, enduring and changeless and separate
and independent of its mental and physical states. In the
Brhadaranyaka Upanisad, the sage
Yajnavalkya says



> 
> 
> The sages call it the eternal self. It is neither big nor small,
> neither long nor short, neither hot nor cold, neither bright nor dark,
> neither air nor space. It is without attachment, without taste, smell,
> or touch, without eyes, ears, tongue, mouth, breath, or mind, without
> movement, without limitation, without inside or outside. It consumes
> nothing, and nothing consumes it.
> 
> 
> 
> The Self is the seer, Gargi, though unseen; the hearer, though
> unheard; the thinker, though unthought; the knower, though unknown.
> Nothing other than the Self can see, hear, think, or know (BU 3.7, 8,
> 11).
> 
> 
> 



This picture of the self as a witnessing subject is in sharp contrast
with another Upanisadic conception: that of persons as agents,
the doers and the enjoyers of the fruits of their actions. This
conception of persons is also found in the
Brhadaranyaka Upanisad:



> 
> What a man turns out to be depends on how he acts and on how he
> conducts himself. If his actions are good, he will turn into something
> good. If his actions are bad, he will turn into something bad. A man
> turns into something good by good action and into something bad by bad
> action. And so people say: "A person here consists simply of
> desire." A man resolves in accordance with his desire, acts in
> accordance with his resolve, and turns out to be in accordance with
> his action. (BU 4.4, 5)
> 



And again, in the Svetasvatara Upanisad, we find
talk of person as an embodied soul. Chapter 5 explains the cycle of
birth and rebirth of individual persons as process of soul (self)
becoming embodied as a result of being entangled in the material
qualities (*Gunas*):



> 
> Only he [the person] who gets attached to the pleasurable qualities of
> things does work for the sake of its fruits, and enjoys the fruits of
> his own deeds. Though really the master of the senses, he becomes
> bound by *Gunas*, and assuming various forms, wanders
> about the three paths as a result of his own deeds.
> 



> 
> By desire, contact, sight and delusion, the embodied soul assumes
> successively various forms in various places according to his deeds,
> just as the body grows nourished by showers of food and drink.
> 



> 
> The embodied soul chooses many forms, gross and subtle, based on the
> qualities belonging to himself, to the actions and to the mind. The
> cause of their combination is found to be still another. (SVU 5.
> 7, 10, 11)
> 



The agential conception of persons assumes the Vedic doctrine of
*karma*, so it deserves to a short explication. The doctrine of
*karma* has two dimensions: a moral cosmology and a
psychological dimension (Phillips 1997, 329). According to the thesis
of moral cosmology, actions have immediate as well as non-immediate
consequences. The latter embody a moral dimension: good actions result
in rewards, bad actions in punishments in the form of *karmic*
residues which ripen and bear fruit in this lifetime or in future
lifetimes. According to the psychological thesis, actions create a
tendency, a disposition to repeat that act. The two dimensions
together might seem to entail fatalism, bad actions result in
acquisition of bad *karmic* residues and bad habits that
dispose the agent to repeat the same offences with the result that the
agent is doomed to inferior rebirths with no possibility of liberation
from the cycle of birth and rebirth. This impression is mistaken. The
individual person is free at all times to break the bad habits and
perform novel good actions in accordance with duty (*dharma*)
and thereby inculcate the right dispositions that incline the agent to
good actions and superior births and finally liberation. There is an
important caveat though, "duty has to be performed for the sake
of duty alone" not because of attachment to pleasures or fruits
of actions because that results in bondage of the soul to the material
qualities and many different rebirths follow. The quality of the
deeds, good or bad, determines the kind of embodiment (physical and
psychological characteristics, caste), length of life, quality of
experiences, dreams and much else that is to be endured by person
while it is entrapped in the cycle of birth and rebirth. Although the
soul is thought of as the controller of the senses, once it is
embodied, the qualities of material form have the habit of taking over
and driving individual persons on account of their attachments to
sensual pleasures. And it is on account of the quality of its actions
and their *karmic* fruits, in this birth, that the embodied
soul is reborn in (another) new form. The only way out of suffering in
the perpetual the cycle of birth and rebirth is knowledge the real
nature of the individual person and its entanglement in the material
world.



The Upanisadic philosophers recognize the conception of the self
as the pure detached subject of experiences separate and unaffected by
the material world (*nivrtti*) and the person as an
active agent engaged with the material world
(*pravrtti*). The *nivrtti* tradition is the
exemplified in the later Upanisadic renunciant tradition and is
also developed by Hindu schools such as the Vedanta and
Samkhya-Yoga. In contrast the *pravrtti*tradition exemplified in the Vedic ritualistic tradition is
developed by the Nyaya-Vaisesika and
Mimamsa schools. This difference in emphasis is
also brought out in the various paths to liberation: the path of
action (*karma yoga*) and the path of knowledge
(*jnana yoga*). The *nivrtti*tradition stresses the importance of knowledge of the self
(*atma-vidya*) sometimes equated with mystical
awareness of Brahman (*brahma-vidya*). This, according to
Upanisads, is the most promising route to the supreme good,
liberation (*moksa*). But it is not exclusive or
independent of *karma yoga*, because knowledge of the self will
result in transformation of a person's attitudes towards sensual
pleasure and earthly goods, and desires which contribute to action.
And conversely, the training in *karma yoga* together with the
doctrine of rebirth and transmigration will result in a transformation
of how the person views the self.



The Upanisadic conception of person is that of an
'embodied soul'. The soul is essence of the person and it
is what makes us the same person over time (possibly even across
lifetimes). The Hindu schools defend what is contemporary philosophers
call the Non-Reductionist view of persons. According to the
Non-Reductionist view, the continued existence of persons is a deep,
further fact, distinct from physical and psychological continuity, and
a fact that holds completely or not at all (Parfit 1984, 445). Parfit
notes that a Cartesian Ego, would be one such entity. The soul
(*atman*) as described by the Vedas and explicated by
Hindu would be another. These ideas from the Upanisads are
developed into various conceptions of persons by the Hindu
philosophical schools which will be discussed in turn Sections 1.2 and
1.3 before we turn to unorthodox conceptions in Section 1.4.


### 1.2 Spiritual Conceptions of Persons



The Vedanta and Samkhya-Yoga is the most important
school that develop the spiritual and mystical insights in the
Upanisads. The Advaita Vedanta is well-known for upholding
monism, there is only one reality and that is Brahman. Furthermore,
the Advaita Vedanta philosophers argue that the individual self
and the supreme Self (*Brahman*) are identical. The plurality
of the external world of everyday experience is explained away as an
illusory projection (*maya*), a cosmic illusion which
is a product of our ignorance. The nature of this self is simply pure
consciousness. Self, according to the Advaita Vedanta is not to
be understood as a substance that has the property of consciousness
but rather it is consciousness itself, the principle of illumination
or manifestation (*prakasa*). This consciousness
manifests all things. Just as without the sunlight, the universe would
be shrouded in darkness, similarly without consciousness nothing would
be known or manifested' (Gupta 2003: 31-2; cf. 106).
According to the Advaitins,



> 
> consciousness has no form, no content; its only function, like that of
> light, is to show the object on which it is focused.... The
> Advaitins argue that, that which manifests everything cannot have the
> form of any particular thing; manifestation is its only function.
> (Gupta 2003: 119-20)
> 



The Advaita Vedanta thesis is that this consciousness is what a
person is at the most fundamental level, the self
(*atman*). But as far as my sense of myself as a person
is concerned, I take myself to be a psychophysical thing among others,
having certain properties and relations, such as belonging to a
certain family (caste, according to the Hindus) and having a certain
social role. The Advaita Vedanta philosophers argue that this
sense of self is a result of a false identification with aspects of
the projected world. Person (an empirical self in their terminology)
in their sense has no ultimate reality, it is merely another
projection of the cosmic illusion. Though the person is ordinarily
experienced as a particular entity in the world and standing in
manifold relations to other entities, it is dismissed as a product of
ignorance. Their concern is with the 'self/supreme Self'
identity and with self-knowledge as the most promising route to
liberation (*moksa*). Once we understand the true nature
of ourselves, primarily through the study of the Upanisads
complemented by the practice of meditation, we will grasp that essence
of an individual (*atman*) is identical with the real
Self (*Brahman*). The person or empirical self will fall away
as merely an illusory projection of consciousness.



The Samkhya and Yoga schools draw inspiration for their
metaphysics of persons from the Upanisads and develop the
insight that the real essence of a person is the soul or in
Samkhya terminology, the Spirit (*purusa*).
But unlike the Vedanta, the Samkhya and Yoga
philosophers do not regard the multiplicity of true persons as a mere
illusion. They speak of the absolute purusa
(*isvara*) and individual purusas
(*jivas*). Verse 18 of the
*Samkhya-karika* offers a proof and
explanation for the existence of multiplicity of real persons



> 
> The incidence of birth and death and the action of the sense faculties
> different for different individuals; all people not having the same
> inclinations at the same time; the thoughts arising out of the action
> of the three gunas being different for different people -
> it follows that souls (*purusas*) are many (each person
> having a separate soul). (Translation adapted from Radhanath Phukan
> 1960).
> 



Every individual person (*jiva*) is a manifestation or
instantiation of the absolute *purusa*, which is present
as an undivided whole in every person. The *purusa* is
thus the universal aspect in virtue of which we are persons. But each
individual person is also a finite particular. The particular aspect
of an individual person is derived from the material form or nature
(*prakrti* ) which supplies the physical body and its
adjuncts (sense organs, etc.). Nature (*prakrti*) works
through three *gunas* which are its functional forces,
known as existence or beingness (*sattva*), force of bringing
about change (*rajas*), and force for restrains change
(*tamas*). *Sattva* exhibits the physical characteristic
of buoyancy and illumination, and the psychological characteristic of
pleasure. *Rajas* exhibits the physical characteristic of
stimulation and movement and the psychological characteristics of pain
and passion. *Tamas* exhibits the physical characteristic of
weight and resistance and the characteristics of dejection and
despondency. The disturbance in the equipoise of the three
*gunas* starts the process of evolution which is the
process of creation. As explained in the quote above, each individual
person is a unique composition of *gunas* that determine
her physical and psychological characteristics, for example those with
a predominance of *tamas* will be naturally disposed to resist
change and activity.



According to Samkhya philosophers, the relation between
*prakr*ti and *purusa* in an individual
person is said to be eternal and irresolvable. This raises a problem
for the Samkhya, namely, how are we to explain the bondage
(coming together) of *prakr*ti and *purusa*
(soul), and how is the final release liberation of
*purusa* possible? The clue lies in understanding the
process of evolution. Verse 21 of the
*Samkhya-karika* offers a succinct
answer:



> 
> For the sake of *purusa*'s perception of
> *prakr*ti and for the sake of his release, a union of the
> two takes place, which resembles the union of the lame and the blind
> (translation adapted from Majumdar 1930, 77).
> 



The author of the *Karika* makes use of an analogy
often exploited in classical Indian philosophy, of the union of the
lame and the blind who happen to encounter each other and decide to
cooperate for their mutual benefit which is to reach their desired
destination (metaphorically liberation). The lame man (soul) mounts
the shoulders of the blind man (matter) and directs both to the
desired destination. And, just as the blind man and the lame man part
company when they reach their mutual destination, so do soul and
matter. Creation of an individual person results from the desire to
perceive and experience *prakr*ti and her manifestations
in the form of sensual pleasures derived from material objects.
Creation is more properly understood as evolution of
*prakrti* to reveal her many forms to the soul for the
sake of his enjoyment, even though the union of *prakr*ti
and *purusa* is eternal. Bondage results in the soul
being tricked by the various forms of *prakr*ti
especially the ego-sense (*ahamkara*) and the
physical body to the extent of identifying with these material forms
as part of the soul. This identification results in the soul
forgetting its true nature and being totally spell-bound by
*prakrti* and the many pleasures afforded by material
forms. This forgetfulness results in alienation of the soul which
causes in unhappiness and misery. Most of us, ordinary persons, are in
fact in this situation. But because the enjoyment of the material
forms and the union of matter and soul is tainted with suffering and
pain, persons seek liberation. The way out for an individual person is
to dispel the delusion of the soul by developing the right kind of
psychical conditions. The right kind of psychical development requires
proper moral and religious training though it may take an inordinately
long time, possibly many rebirths. The end of the delusion also means
the end of bondage and with it goes all unhappiness and misery.
Liberation of the soul consists in indifference towards the
manifestation of *prakrti* and with it the renunciation
of many sensual pleasures and material objects. The purusa thus
returns to its native enlightened state of bliss. (For an elaborate
account of such a delusion and its consequences, see the
Santiparvan of the Mahabharata, Chapter 302
(verse 41-49) and Chapter 303).



The Yoga school shares much with the Samkhya regarding the
nature of the true self and the individual person, differing in its
emphasis on the yogic practices (psychophysical techniques centering
on meditation) as the means of discovering the true nature of the real
self. The Samkhya and Yoga philosophers disagree with the
Advaitic thesis that individual persons (*jivas*) are only
delusions, but agree that the true self, the essence of the person is
the soul or consciousness untainted by matter. There is no value to
development of persons as such, according to these spiritual
philosophies, the only activity worthy of pursuit is the search for
the true self.


### 1.3 Worldly Persons



The Nyaya-Vaisesika and Mimamsa
philosophers differ from the philosophers of Advaita-Vedanta in
that they emphasise the reality of distinct many distinct individual
persons (*jiva*). However, because of their allegiance to
the Vedas there is not much explicit discussion of persons, the focus
is on the search for is the essence of persons (*atman*)
and their pursuit of the highest good, liberation
(*moksa*). Ordinary persons are embodied souls, according
to these philosophers. The soul (*atman*) is the essence
of the person; the mind, body and the senses are merely adjuncts. The
soul is a distinct and independent substance, possessing the property
of consciousness. The philosophers belonging to
Nyaya-Vaisesika and Mimamsa
traditions, contra the spiritual philosophers, emphasized that the
soul is not just an experiencer but more importantly an agent -
a knower and a doer and enjoyer (of *karmic* consequences).
But, one may ask how might a disembodied separate soul substance be a
doer and knower and enjoyer? We return this question below in the
discussion of these views.



The focus of the Nyaya-Vaisesika is on the self rather
than the person. The individual self (*jiva-atma* is
their preferred term) occupies a central place in the
Nyaya-Vaisesika ontology. Selves are really distinct
individuals and do not merge into one ultimate reality at liberation.
Much attention has been paid to the Nyaya arguments for the
existence of the self, the ways of knowing the self, the
characteristics of the self and the means to liberation. Let us begin
by noting *Nyaya-sutra* 1.1.10, which provides the
famous 'characteristics of the self' as well as the basis
of the inferential proof for the existence of the self:



> 
> Desire, aversion, volition (*prayatna*), pleasure, pain, and
> cognition are characteristics of the self. (NS 1.1.10)
> 



Dasti writes that for Nyaya, agency is a special expression of
the self's different capacities and potentialities, which
coherently ties together all its distinctive characteristics (2013,
114). Dasti is right to emphasise that the Nyaya self is much
more than a subject of experience, that it is more importantly an
agent - a doer and a knower. But Dasti and others in
contemporary literature fail to emphasise that the distinctive
qualities (*visesa*) of the self, desire, cognition,
pain, etc., are transitory and come into existence only when the self
is in contact with the mind-sense organs-body complex. The
substance-quality distinction which is the hallmark of Nyaya
ontology, and an important tool that accounts for all the goods
afforded by the Nyaya postulation of the self as distinct
substance. As Dasti puts it:



> 
> Nyaya's account of personhood involves substances and
> properties: an enduring substantial self with its fluctuating,
> world-engaging properties like memory, awareness, and volition allow
> for full personhood. Like Samkhya, Nyaya allows for
> a self which endures through time, survives bodily death, and
> participates in ultimate liberation. But like the Buddhists,
> Nyaya's person is directly engaged in the world. We are
> here now (2013: 135).
> 



Dasti rightly uses the term personhood as signifying the self together
with its properties and talks about person (rather than the self) as
directly engaged in the world, but he fails to note that the
Nyaya-Vaisesika account is plagued with problems.
Problems arise when we pay attention to the fact that according to the
Nyaya philosophers, although the self is a substance which is
separate from the mind-sense organs-body complex, the self is totally
dependent on this complex for its functionality. The mind-sense
organs-body contact is needed to engender cognition, desire, etc., the
self cannot bring cognition into being by itself. Reflection and
memory too require the self to be in contact with the mind. Even the
effort of the self is induced by the mind-sense-body contact, so it
seems that the self cannot initiate any activity by itself. Self by
itself is causally impotent (this is, indeed, exactly the Buddhist
argument against the existence of the Nyaya self). It seems that
the self by itself is just a bearer of its distinctive qualities which
are induced by mind-sense organs-body contact. It is merely the
passive observer of activity and remote carrier of the mediate
(*karmic*) consequences of actions. Therefore, it is not the
self by itself but the embodied self or person that is the agent, doer
and originator of all actions and the enjoyer of the results of the
action.



Furthermore, the distinctive qualities of the self are not its
essential qualities. The self is without its qualities temporarily
during sleep and similar states and loses these qualities permanently
in the state of liberation (moksa). The self in the state of
liberation is totally lacking in consciousness, Dravid describing it
as 'an insentient stone-like condition' (1995, 1). The
firm separation between the self and its qualities means that even
though the latter are always changing, the self is totally unaffected
by these changes. The Buddhist objects if the self remains totally
unaffected by changes in its qualities it would not be able to
register the changes, that is to say that the self by itself would not
be able to perceive those changes (Watson, 2018, 337). This robs the
self of its status as the cognizer (*jnatr*);
it is rather the embodied worldly self or persons that perceive. So,
it seems that the Nyaya self by itself can't even be an
experiencer. To ensure that self can really live up to its job
description as an agent and experiencer the Nyaya discussion
should have been focused on the embodied wordly self or person that is
the agent (*kartr*), enjoyer (*bhoktr*)
and cognizer (*jnatr*), rather than the
self.



Most Nyaya philosophers claim that the agential self is not
perceived but can only be inferred from the actions of the body. The
Nyaya-Vaisesika philosophers offer the analogy of
inferring the driver of a chariot when you see it moving along the
road, avoiding potholes and other moving vehicles and persons. The
analogy might remind us of Descartes' analogy of a sailor in the
ship. But as Descartes pointed out in the sixth Meditation that the
connection between self (conceived of as the referent of
'I') and body has to be much more intimate than that of a
sailor in the ship, otherwise the self would not feel pain when the
body was hurt, but would merely perceive the damage just as a sailor
perceives by sight if his ship is broken (Cottingham, 1996, 56). The
Nyaya-Vaisesika self in the driver's seat,
independent and separate from the chariot (body), doesn't quite
do justice to the relationship between the self and its body.



The Nyaya philosophers have two options at this point. They must
give up on the notion of the self as a separate substance untouched by
its qualities. The talk of the remote self needs to be replaced with
embodied selves (or persons). Or, they need to conceive of the self in
the way the Bhatta Mimamsa do as more
closely connected with its qualities, so that it can undergo
modification. The second option is available, but does it suffice? We
will revisit this question after drawing out the conception of person
implicit in Mimamsa.



The stated goal of Mimamsa is to interpret the
statements of the Vedas, and thus to provide specific guidance to
Hindus for performing the rituals and sacrifices they enjoin. The
Mimamsa philosophers agree with other Hindu
schools that the true self that we cognize in self-recognition is a
single thing that remains identical over time and thus it cannot be
identified with the mind, body and the sense organs (See Taber 1992
for the Mimamsa argument for a self). There is
not much discussion of their notion of a person directly in the texts.
However, there is implicit discussion of wordly persons in the context
of the performance of duty (*dharma*) and religious rituals. A
person is one who performs the rituals and follows the
*dharma*, the doer of the deeds and enjoyer of the fruits of
the deeds in accordance with the karma doctrine. Every religious
ritual or sacrifice, according to the Mimamsa
philosophers, is said to have a specific result and characterized by
an eligible persons (*adhikara*) (Freschi, et al. 2019).
The eligibility identifies the person who is enjoined by the Vedas to
perform a religious ritual or sacrifice, has the means to perform it
and will be the bearer of the *karmic* result accrued on
account of the performance. This is particularly relevant in the
context of Vedic sacrifices, since they always include many
performers. An eligible person (*adhikarin*) is the one
who is enjoined by the Vedas to perform the sacrifice and entitled to
its result; the former implies that one can hear or read a Vedic
injunction and understand oneself as the addressee, which, in turn,
implies that one belongs to one of the social groups that is
traditionally expected to study the Vedas. Being eligible further
implies having physical ability (see *Exegetic Aphorisms*
6.1.42) and material resources (*Exegetic Aphorisms*
6.7.18-20) to organize the performance of a sacrifice (Freschi,
et al. 2019). The latter, the entitlement to the result of the
successful performance of a sacrifice is automatically guaranteed by
the law of karma. This notion of a person implicit in this discussion
of injunctions by Mimamsa philosophers suggests
that persons are embodied beings, belonging to a certain social class,
possessing material wealth or otherwise, the bearers of
*karmic* residues and the enjoyers of *karmic*
results.



The Bhatta Mimamsa, specifically
Kumarila, argues that the self can undergo transformation even
though it is eternal. Pleasure, pain etc. are qualities of the self,
changes in these qualities entail a change in the self, but it is mere
qualitative change. The self can be transformed but it remains
numerically identical through the change in its qualities. Some
aspects of the self are permanent, for example its consciousness,
existence and substantiality, but other aspects such as pleasure, pain
etc. undergo change. The self, Kumarila says, can be compared to
a piece of gold that can be remoulded into a necklace or earrings or a
gold coin. The stuff of which the self is composed is eternal, just
like the eternal gold atoms. The self can change, but to count as the
same self there can be no change in whatsoever in its essence, it must
remain the very same substance. In this sense, the self remains a pure
subject untainted by physicality. The Vedic assumption that the self
is a separate soul substance is difficult to square with the
conception of the self as cognizer, agent and the enjoyer. The Hindu
philosophers who want to maintain this conception must reject the
assumption of an eternal separate soul substance. An embodied self or
person, by contrast, is a more suitable candidate for it can be the
cognizer and characterized by agency and by enjoyment.


## 2. Unorthodox Conceptions of Persons


### 2.1 Jaina



Among the non-Hindu traditions, we begin with Jaina conception of
persons because it is closest to the Hindu conception, specifically
that of the Bhatta Mimamsa and
Samkhya schools. Like the Samkhya, the Jainas
are essentially dualistic. The universe is constituted by two kinds of
things: living (*jiva*) and non-living
(*ajiva*) akin to *purusa* anf
*prakrti*. The self is described in Jaina from the
noumenal and the phenomenal points of view. From the ultimate or
noumenal points of view the self or the soul is pure and perfect,
characterised by pure consciousness. It is a simple, immaterial and
formless substance. From the phenomenal point of view, the soul is
described as life force (*prana*) which in conjunction the
non-living forces is manifested in various life forms, including human
persons. The Jainas posit only four non-living (*ajiva*)
forces: matter or pudgala which is manifested as karma, time, space
and movement (Kalghatgi, 1965). The coming together of these things is
the Jaina conception of life as pervading all aspects of the natural
world. Each life-form stands within a hierarchy of ascent from
elemental beings, microbes and plants, worms, insects and the array of
fish, reptiles, amphibians and mammals all the way to persons. The
nature of the next birth is dependent of the actions performed in the
immediate past body, plants and microbes can be reborn higher up in
the hierarchy, or mammals can be demoted to lower forms. Persons too
depending on whether their actions are virtuous or vicious can be
reborn in a heavenly realm, or suffer torture in one of the seven
hells. Persons at the top of the hierarchy, are unique in that they
are able to perform the *karmic* necessary purgations to attain
freedom or liberation (*kevala*), the highest end which is
break free from the cycle of birth and rebirth. The story so far is
not very different from what we find in the Hindu texts, except that
karma is literally a material force.



The Jainas also agree with the Bhatta
Mimamsa that the essence and the qualities of the
self are not totally separate from each other. They are two aspects of
the same thing: one and the same self substance is unchanging and
eternal when viewed from one point of view, and changing when viewed
from another point of view. Its permanence is indexed to its essence
and its impermanence to its qualities to allow for the very same self
to be transformed through the cycle of birth and rebirth. Though there
is much similarity between Jaina and the Bhatta
Mimamsa view, there is a curious difference. The
Jainas think that though the self is immaterial, it changes it size
according to the body with which it is associated. The self, so to
say, fits the body it is housed in.



Again, though there is not much explicit discussion of persons in the
Jaina tradition, the notion of a person is present as a moral agent
with the capacity for attaining the highest freedom or liberation.
Persons alone have the capacity to escape the cycle of birth and
rebirth. Moral agency requires sensitivity to the nature of our world,
according to which all living beings are said to be interconnected.
This brings with it a moral obligation to respect all living beings
including plants and not be unscrupulous in using natural resources.
What makes us the same person over time is the soul substance, so the
Jainas would also be classified as Non-Reductionists about persons in
contemporary parlance.


### 2.2 Buddhist



The next group of philosophers to consider in this section are the
Buddhists. The Buddhist tradition is unique in having a clear concept
of a person as distinct from a self. Mark Siderits sums up the
Buddhist distinction between persons and selves succinctly: "By
'self' (*atman*) they understand whatever
counts as the essence of the psychophysical complex, while by
'person' (*pudgala*) they understand the
psychophysical complex as a whole" (2019, 303). It is well-known
that the Buddhists reject the self, but it is not so well known that
some Buddhists defended the reality of persons. There are many
different Buddhist schools and the most well-known for an ardent
defenders of persons, against fellow Buddhists, are called
Pudgalavadins or personalists. The main impetus for the
introduction of persons in Buddhist philosophy, in the absence of
selves, is the need for a bearer of moral responsibility. We need a
bearer to support the notion of moral responsibility, which is a
constitutive element of their theory of karma and rebirth. Buddhists
believe in rebirth without appeal to transmigration of self. All
Buddhists allude to the Buddha's talk of persons in the
*Bharaharasutra* (the *sutra* on
the bearer of the burden) as one of the most important reasons to
consider the question about the reality of persons. The text reads as
follows:



> 
> I am going to teach you, O monks, the burden, the taking up of the
> burden, the laying down of the burden, and the bearer of the burden.
> Listen to it, pay attention carefully and well. I am going to speak.
> Of what does the burden consist? It consists of the five constituents
> to which one clings. Which five? The constituent to which one clings
> that consists of corporeality, [and] the [four] constituents to which
> one clings that consist of [affective] sensation, ideation, the
> conditioning factors, and cognition. Of what does the taking up of the
> burden consist? It consists of craving, which leads to rebirth [and]
> which, accompanied by desire for joys, takes delight here and there.
> Of what does the laying down of the burden consist? It is the total
> elimination, the abandonment, the removal, the exhaustion, the
> avoidance, the cessation, the extinction, and the disappearance of
> that very craving which leads to rebirth [and] which, accompanied by
> desire for joys, takes delight here and there. Of what does the bearer
> of the burden consist? One could say: 'A person', i.e.,
> that sir who has such a name, who has such an origin(/birth), who
> belongs to such a family(/lineage), who has such a livelihood, who
> experiences such pleasure and pain, who has such a long life span, who
> remains for such a long time, whose life has such an end. [I have
> thus] answered to what I [promised to] say, i.e., "I am going to
> teach you, O monks, the burden, the taking up of the burden, the
> laying down of the burden, and the bearer of the burden". The
> Blessed One said this. Having said this, the Sugata, the Teacher,
> further said this: "Having laid down the heavy burden, one would
> not take up another one, [for] taking up the burden is suffering,
> [while] laying down the burden is bliss. Having, due to the exhaustion
> of all fetters, eliminated all craving [and] thoroughly known all
> substrates [of existence], one no [longer] falls into rebirth."
> (Eltschinger 2014: 457).
> 



The originality of this *sutra* lies in introducing the
notion of a burden-bearer (*bharahara*) defined as
a 'person' *(pudgala*). In the text, the term
'burden' is interpreted as desire or craving that is the
root cause of morally wrong action, which in turn is the cause of
rebirth and suffering according to the Buddhist doctrine of karma. The
person is introduced in the original *sutra* as the
bearer of moral desert.



The controversy over persons raged among Indian Buddhists for more
than a millennium. The question is whether the 'person' in
the *sutra* is to be interpreted as ultimately real, as
Pudgalavadins (Personalists) did, or, as only conventionally
real, as the mainstream Abhidharma Buddhists did. According to the
Abhidharma doctrine, the only things that are ultimately real are the
indivisible, momentary physical and mental dharmas (best understood as
tropes; see Ganeri 2001). Everything else that can be decomposed into
parts, physically or conceptually, is only conventionally real.
Siderits explains the Abhidharmika position thus:



> 
> A statement is said to be ultimately true iff it corresponds to how
> things are independently of the concepts one happens to employ. Such a
> statement can neither assert nor presuppose the existence of any
> composite entity... . Many entities in people's folk
> ontology are not ultimately real: chariots, forests, trees, pots, and
> so on. Such entities are said to be conventionally real, mere
> conceptual fictions. (2019: 314)
> 



Different schools in the Indian Buddhist tradition have different
strategies for making sense of the Buddha's thought and talk of
persons. The Pudgalavadins are alone in holding that persons are
ultimately or substantially real. The dispute between the
Pudgalavadins and their opponents is not just an attempt to lay
claim to 'what the Buddha taught', but it is also
motivated by philosophical considerations about consistency with the
no-self doctrine and other important Buddhist theses, for example
impermanence, dependent origination, and the *karma* theory.
The Pudgalavadin position on persons is best placed in the
Emergentist camp, they try to steer a middle path between Hindu
Non-Reductionism (eternalism) and Abhidharma Buddhist Reductionism
(annihilationism) (Ganeri, 2012; Carpenter, 2015). They regard persons
as emergent entities not reducible to mental and psychological and
mental atoms (*dharmas*), although they depend on those atoms.
The Abhidharma and Madhyamaka traditions hold very different views
about persons.



According to the Madhyamikas, the pragmatic usefulness of
person-talk is important as a catechetic device for teaching the
doctrine to the uninitiated. The Buddha's talk about persons and
other continuing entities in the sutras is aimed at ordinary
people who, due to ignorance are beset with the false view of a self.
As Vincent Eltschinger puts it, "these preliminary and merely
provisional teachings are meant to offer a transition between the
adhesion to worldly beliefs and the intuition of universal
emptiness" (2014, 470). The Prasangika
Madhyamikas not only deny the inherent existence of persons at
the ultimate level but also deny the inherent existence of persons at
even the conventional level. In doing so the Prasangikas
take themselves to be faithful to the original teachings of
Nagarjuna, the founder of Madhyamaka. Nagarjuna
denies both that the person is the same as the psychophysical
constituents to which the Buddhist Reductionists try to reduce it and
that it is other than those constituents in the way that the Hindu
Non-Reductionists claim. Nagarjuna warns: "Beyond good
and evil, profound and liberating, this [doctrine of emptiness] has
not been tasted by those who fear what is entirely groundless."
In contemporary terms, Madhymaka position can be likened to minimalism
(Perrett, 2002). As Johnston argues in "the particular case of
personal identity, minimalism implies that any metaphysical view of
persons which we might have is either epiphenomenal or a redundant
basis for our practice of making judgements about personal identity
and organizing our practical concerns around this relation"
(Johnston 1997, 150).



Nagarjuna, and his follower Candrakirti denied that
persons are reducible to the aggregates and that they are distinct
from the aggregates. They are irrealists about selves and persons.
According to Candrakirti the proper explanation of this is that
our everyday conception of self or person consists in 'an
appropriative act of laying claim to the elements of the
psycho-physical aggregate, an act that does not require there to be
any object that is the person, nor any of the usual apparatus of
reference to things. The term 'I' does not refer to selves
or persons. In support of Candrakirti's view, Ganeri notes
that that Reductionist accounts fail to explain the significance of
the distinction between the anticipation of one's own future
pain and the concern one feels for the future pain of another (2007,
195). He further claims that irrealists are able to avoid this problem
by substituting for a positive account of the metaphysics of persons
an account of how one's sense of self arises from the
psycho-physical stream. According to this irrealist account, in spite
of appearances the function of person-talk is not to talk about
persons, or selves, but to appropriate experiences, emotions, and
bodies.



The Abhidharmikas, on the other hand, did not think of
'person' as a useful pragmatic device or skillful means
but emphasized that it is nothing but a conventional designation, a
mere name for a group of psychophysical aggregates, ultimately the
collections of dharmas The Abhidharma position has been classified by
Siderits as Reductionism. Parfit claims that on the Reductionist view,
"persons do exist. But they exist only in the way in which
nations exist. Persons are not, as we mistakenly believe fundamental.
This view in this sense is more impersonal" (1984, 445).
So-called Abhidharma Reductionism about persons was first championed
by Mark Siderits in his classic paper "Buddhist
Reductionism" (1997, see also Perett 2002). More recently, this
interpretation has been challenged in literature. Chadha (2021) argues
that Vasubandhu's Abhidharma is best construed as an
Eliminativism about persons. Vasubandhu's argument against the
Pudgalavadins is based on the causal efficacy principle:
everything that is real or substantial (*dravya*) is causally
efficient, having specifiable cause-and-effect relations with other
entities (see, for example, Gold 2015). Everything else is a
conceptual construct, a mere convention (*prajnapti*),
and thus should be rejected as only conventionally real.
Vasubandhu's uses the same principle to argue against the self
as posited by the Hindu philosophers (in particular the
Nyaya-Vaisesika). Selves too, according to Vasubandhu,
are only conventionally real.



What does Vasubandhu mean by saying that persons are only
conventionally real? The term person is just a collective term for a
group of aggregates, ultimately collection of physical and mental
dharmas, just as milk is a term for a collection of tropes--such
as whitishness, liquidness, and potability. For Vasubandhu, only
dharmas or tropes exist ultimately or substantially. All other things
exist in name only. Siderits explains the idea thus: 'The point
about "chariot" and "person" is that they are
opaque enumerative expressions: when taken at face value they seem to
denote individual entities, only further analysis shows them to be
ways of referring to a plurality of entities in a certain
arrangement' (2019: 313). So, persons, chariots and pots are
conceptual fictions. Siderits adds, 'The idea here is that the
enumerative term "pot" represents a concept that has
proven useful for creatures with certain interests (in this case, for
storage) and certain cognitive limitations (such as the inability to
track all the many parts)... . Now conventional truths do
typically guide one to successful practice. This would be difficult to
explain if the truth-makers for conventionally true statements
consisted of nothing but mere conceptual fictions. Thus conventionally
real entities are said to supervene on ultimately real entities'
(2019: 314-15). The idea of conventional realities like persons
being useful fictions was introduced in Siderits (1997) as a faithful
interpretation of Abhidharma. Recently, this too has been contested
(Chadha 2021). Some conventional entities may well be useful fictions,
for example, chariots, armies and nations. But persons cannot be on
that list. Persons inherit the work of the selves, so they are just as
dangerous as selves. The Buddhist Eliminativist about selves cannot
and should not condone persons.


### 2.3 Carvaka



The last group of philosophers to consider in this section are the
Carvakas. Carvaka philosophers are materialists in
the classical Indian tradition and the most ardent critics of the
Vedas and scriptural authority among the heterodox schools. They deny
the existence of the self, as the essence of the person and with it
the possibility of transmigration and rebirth. They are the only
philosophers in the classical Indian tradition that rejected the
doctrine of *karma* and liberation or freedom. Death of the
body is the end of the person. The Carvaka philosophers are
best thought of as defending animalism or the biological view of
personal identity. The Carvaka philosophers argued that a
person, just like everything else in the world, is just a body, an
aggregate of material elements qualifies by consciousness.
Consciousness is an emergent property of the four material elements
(earth, water, fire and air) in a specific proportion. The
Carvakas offer the analogy of an Indian after dinner treat
called "*paan*" which releases red colour when
chewed even though none of its ingredients (betel leaf, chopped
betelnut (areca) and slaked lime (calcium hydroxide)), are red. Just
so consciousness emerges when several material elements come together
in a specific proportion that constitutes a person. Their view is
surprisingly close to modern day physicalism. They did not believe in
the existence of the soul as the essence of the individual person or
any other immaterial substance. The main argument against the
existence of the self rests on an epistemological principle:
perception is the only source of knowledge. The argument can be stated
thus:



> 
> P1: The self cannot be perceived.
>   
> 
> P2: Whatever exists must be perceived.
>   
> 
> C: The self does not exist.
> 



Another argument offered by the Carvakas for the claim that
a person is identical with the body is a linguistic argument. Consider
sentences: "I am youthful", "I am stout". In
these sentences the "I" refers to the body. Linguistic
arguments were quite common in classical Indian philosophy because of
the influence of the grammarians and also because the Indian
philosophers paid attention to common speech behaviour which
presumably expresses what common sense teaches us. With respect to the
conception of a self, philosophers in the Indian tradition paid
attention to the usages employing the first-person pronoun as data
that any philosophical theory of the self must account for. The
Nyaya philosophers also relied on arguments from language to
respond to the Carvaka philosophers. The Nyaya
philosophers claim that the referent of 'I', whatever it
is, appears in our consciousness as something internal. Therefore,
'I' cannot refer to the body. Furthermore, the word
'I' in each person's mouth refers to (picks out,
denotes) that person uniquely. The referent of 'I' cannot
be a generic body (material object) because it does not refer to the
body of another person. Nor can 'I' refer to one's
own body because properties of the body (physical characteristics) are
not sufficient to identify a unique person. Any physical property, for
example, the shape of the body is an essential property of the body,
but other bodies can have exactly the same shape. If the term
'I' referred properties of the body, two persons who have
exactly the same shape would be equally good candidates for the
referent of a given use of 'I' by either of them.
Therefore, 'I' cannot refer to the body. And lastly, the
Naiyayikas challenged the Carvakas to account for
phrases like 'my body'. Such phrases suggest that there is
a distinction between me and the body, it implies that there is
something, the referent of 'I', a self, which has or
possesses a body. The Carvakas dismiss such phrases as
'my body' are mere metaphors and do not indicate that
there is a self that is separate from the body. It is worth noting
that the Naiyayikas and other Hindu philosophers have a similar
problem accounting for statements such as "I am fat",
"I am tall" etc.



To conclude, it is worth noting that apart from Abhidharma Buddhism
and Advaita Vedanta, most Buddhist philosophers and other
classical Indian philosophers accept that persons are real.


## 3. What do we need persons for?



Contemporary philosophical investigation into questions about the
nature of persons and personal identity may seem very far from these
ancient discussions in classical Indian philosophy. The
Non-Reductionist view so popular among the mainstream Hindus is not in
favour these days. The most important reason to deny that we are
separately existing non-physical soul substances is that such things
are impossible to trace through space-time. If we are essentially
non-physical souls, there still would be no way to know that you now
are one and the same person that committed the crime at an earlier
time. If judgments about personal identity were grounded on judgements
about the identities of immaterial souls, then personal identity would
be completely mysterious (Perry 1978, 402-3). It is true that we
sometimes lack epistemic access to metaphysical truths. But if this
were the right metaphysical theory it should undermine all confidence
in our judgments of identity in a way that seems bizarre (Shoemaker
and Tobia, forthcoming). That might seem bizarre from a contemporary
point of view, but the Hindu Non-Reductionists are not going to be
worried by these objections. Most classical Indian philosophers,
except the Carvakas, agree that ignorance about our own
natures-- about who and what we are--is the cause of our
bondage in the cycle of birth and rebirth and the suffering that comes
with it. The Upanisadic sages were no strangers to metaphors and
mysteries. Their strategy was to heighten the mystery associated with
knowledge, "not so much in a self-serving secretiveness or
a disinclination to share the knowledge that gives them power but as
response to a deep respect for the power of that knowledge, and a
recognition of the need not to be frivolous either with the knowledge
itself or with its potential recipients" (Ganeri 2007,13). The
Katha Upanisad puts it thus: "Hidden in all the beings,
this self is not visibly displayed. Yet, people of keen vision see him
with eminent and sharp minds." (KU 3.12).



Most contemporary philosophers assume that Reductionism is true. The
Reductionists draw inspiration from Locke, perhaps the first
philosopher in the history of Western philosophy to put forward a
version of the psychological continuity view that was developed by
Parfit. But there is another more important point that Locke brought
centre-stage to the discussion about personal identity: theorizing
about persons is motivated by a distinctive normative concern about
moral responsibility. Locke writes:



> 
> In this personal Identity is founded all the Right and Justice of
> Reward and Punishment; Happiness and Misery, being that, for which
> every one is concerned for himself...the Apostle tells us, that
> at the Great Day, when every one shall receive according to his
> doings, the secrets of all Hearts shall be laid open. The Sentence
> shall be justified by the consciousness all Persons shall have, that
> they themselves in what Bodies soever they appear, or what Substances
> soever that consciousness adheres to, are the same, that committed
> those Actions, and deserve that Punishment for them. (Locke 1690
> [1975, 341-347])
> 



In the classical Indian context, as we have seen above, it is the same
concerns that led to the search for an eternal soul as the essence of
persons by the Hindu philosophers and also motivated the Buddhist
personalists to introduce persons (*pudgala*) as
'burden-bearers'. Classical Indian philosophers did not
invoke God but relied on karma to dole out just rewards and
punishments in the course of the cycle of birth and rebirth. Normative
concerns about responsibility are thus an important motivating concern
across the East-West divide.



Contemporary philosophers, however, have broadened the scope of
normative concerns beyond that of moral responsibility. Shoemaker
(2007, 318-9) helpfully presents a list of practical concerns
that are presumably grounded in personal identity which includes moral
responsibility but adds many more: anticipation of future experiences;
special self-concern for one's own future self; surviving death
and anticipation of the afterlife; compensation, maximizing utility
intrapersonally but not interpersonally; self-conscious emotions
(pride, regret, etc.); special non-derivative concern and
other-regarding emotions I have for a certain limited network of
people, all of whom bear certain sorts of special relations to me;
first-person reidentification and self-regarding emotions I have for
my past and future self. This long list is likely to put pressure on
any single criterion of personal identity.



The psychological continuity criterion originally proposed by Locke
and developed most famously by Parfit (1984) does well to account for
moral responsibility and anticipation of the afterlife and survival
but falls short on compensation and maximizing utility
intrapersonally. The animalist or biological continuity criterion does
not fare well in accounting for concern about moral responsibility,
but it does much better on compensation and special non-derivative
concern and other-regarding emotions I have for a certain limited
network of people, all of whom bear certain sorts of special relations
to me (DeGrazia 2005). These are not the only competitors though. Some
might suggest, as do Tierney et al., that we can be pluralists about
personal identity. Rather 'empirical evidence and philosophical
thought experiments indicate that judgments about personal identity
are regimented by two different criteria, one in terms of
psychological traits and one that largely conforms to biological
criteria' (Tierney et al. 2014, 198). Shoemaker (2007) goes
further to settle for a wide-ranging pluralism in the face of the
disunity of our practical concerns. But Shoemaker stops short of
giving up on persons and person-related concerns in the hope that
there is a theory (or theories!) of the relation between personal
identity and our person-related practices and concerns. He says,
'several concessions may be required, including admission,
perhaps, of (a) the irrelevance of certain powerful and popular
criteria of personal identity for (at least some of) our practices and
concerns, (b) the ultimate disunity of these practices and concerns
(such that multiple types of theories of the relation between them and
the metaphysics may be called for), and/or (c) the possibility of
different types of rational grounding--justification and
rendering-possible--where justification may actually be off the
table altogether for some practices and concerns' (2007,
354).



Some others though develop a different approach to the problem of
personal identity which upends the debate between the supporters of
animalism and psychological continuity theorists. One example of such
an approach is the "characterisation" criterion that has
been recently developed by Marya Schectman (2014). In her words,
personal identity "just consists in the fact that the person
before us now is viewed as, treated as, and acts as the same locus of
normative concerns as the [previous] person" (Schectman 2014,
152). Although Schectman has only four normative concerns in mind from
the above list (moral responsibility, special self-interested concern,
compensation, and survival), her move ensures that these normative
concerns trump any metaphysical considerations. According to
Schectman, a person is, whatever it is, that is the locus of our
normative concerns. Another recent view that deserves a mention in
this context is the Minimalist view, defended in a series of papers by
Mark Johnston (1987, 1992, 1997). According to Minimalism, the
metaphysical "deep" facts of personal identity are
irrelevant to the justification of our person-related practices and
practical concerns. Our practices are grounded not on a metaphysics of
persons but on our circumstances and needs. Johnston writes: "in
the particular case of personal identity, minimalism implies that any
metaphysical view of persons which we might have is either
epiphenomenal or a redundant basis for our practice of making
judgements about personal identity and organizing our practical
concerns around this relation" (Johnston 1997, 150). The
characterisation criterion and Minimalism extol the primacy of our
normative practices and concerns suggesting the latter



> 
> may actually authoritatively constrain, shape, or even be immune or
> irrelevant to one's theory of personal identity. This is a
> general methodological dispute about the proper direction of
> argumentation in the arena of personal identity and ethics. (from
> section 7 of the entry
>  personal identity and ethics,
>  Winter 2021 Edition)
> 



This is, however, not the only dispute. The biggest problem is that we
have no settled conception of persons or personal identity. I've
discussed four different views here, and there are many more. There
seems to be no clear winner.



Revisionism about personal identity has been popular since
Parfit's *Reasons and Persons*. But contemporary
philosophers stop short of questioning our normative concerns and
practices. Parfit flirted with revisionism about normative concerns
about practices in proposing the Extreme Claim, according to which,
one's moral and prudential concerns cannot be grounded without a
deep separate fact about personal identity. But Parfit thinks that
another view is also defensible. This view results from the
combination of reductionism with the Moderate Claim, which says that
our moral and prudential concerns may well be grounded in what does
matter in personal identity. This, according to Parfit, is
psychological connectedness and/or continuity (1984, 311). Parfit
believed that the Extreme Claim is defensible, he retracted it only
because he did not have an argument to defend it. But if we run with
the Extreme Claim it entails that our person-related practices and
concerns are ungrounded, period. This opens the door for
reconsideration of our person-related practices. However, this option
is ignored in contemporary philosophy. Philosophers, as we saw, are
willing to consider pluralism about criteria of personal identity,
pluralism about theories of the relation between personal identity and
person-related practices. Shoemaker, as we saw above, is also willing
to consider the disunity of practices. But no one is willing to
consider revising the practices themselves. But why are the practices
considered sacrosanct? P.F. Strawson balks at such a question. He
writes, 'I shall reply, first, that such a question could seem
real only to one who had utterly failed to grasp the purport of
... the fact of our natural human commitment to ordinary
inter-personal attitudes. This commitment is part of the general
framework of human life, *not something that can come up for
review*' (1974: 14, emphasis added). Strawson is not only
claiming that it is hard for us to give up our interpersonal attitudes
and concerns, but he also thinks to give up these would be to give up
on our humanity.



A thoroughgoing revisionist willing to explore the consequences of
endorsing the Extreme Claim would reconsider some of our
person-related concerns and practices and attitudes. That is exactly
the strategy adopted by the Abhidharma Buddhist Reductionist. Buddhist
Reductionists are willing to revisit our ordinary normative practices
and concerns, especially those to do with self-concern and the special
concern that we have for those we love dearly. The Buddhists do
recognize that it is built-in precondition of our form of life that we
have self-concern and special concern for our loved ones. That is why
the Buddhists do not recommend giving up on this self-concern or
special concern for our loved ones. Rather they recommend expanding
similar concern to all others, including one's enemies. And they
do not think that such an expansion comes easy to us given our human
nature: it has to be inculcated by extensive training in
'spiritual exercises' which include meditation, knowledge
of the Buddhist texts and insight. This expansion is not to be thought
of as the giving up of one's humanity, as feared by Strawson,
rather the idea is to enlarge our humanity.



It is important for us to realise that any set of norms or value
system is not immune to revision, just because it is, as Strawson
puts, 'part of the general framework of human life'. The
problem is that there is no such 'general' framework. The
normative concerns and practices of human societies are varied, and
not such as to be weighed systematically against each other. The
practices we regard as important because they are 'part of the
general framework of human life' cannot be justified as having
been chosen by ideally rational beings. Persons as moral beings are a
product of our histories and culturally constrained preferences.
Imagine being in a world in which the Buddhist thesis of the no self
was widely held. Or consider a culture where the really significant
entities are family lines, and it is axiomatic that children are
justly to be held responsible for their parents' wrongdoing.
What evidence is there against such a code, or in favour of
'our' belief that persons are separate individuals,
responsible for their own crimes. It is therefore not clear that we
should assume that all normative systems must include some special
concern for one's future self and those that we love dearly. The
anticipation of one's own future self or one's survival
are also up for question. These important assumptions that often goes
unnoticed because they basically treated as "part of the general
framework". Buddhist philosophy invites us to ask the question:
Is there such a framework?