The Buddhist Challenge

“Buddhist philosophy’s guiding thought is expressed in the “no-self” (anātma) doctrine: the claim, sketched with admirable nuance by Garfield, that persons do not have enduring, unitary selves.”

“As David Hume similarly argued, this is because any moment of experience turns out upon analysis to consist in countless momentary events, none of which makes sense as one’s “self.””

“It’s important to emphasize, though, that Indian Buddhist philosophers strenuously rejected materialism”

“The Buddhist rejection of materialism reflects a commitment to understanding the no-self doctrine as ethically significant — as the basis, indeed, for practices of self-transformation that promise to change, as well, the very world we experience.”

“While the idea of dualist reductionists may be counterintuitive, Buddhists had a strong stake in emphasizing the basic reality of consciousness.”

“That is not to say they affirmed the reality of any kind of conscious substance (as reductionists, they generally held that there are no enduring substances at all) — only that they thought conscious events are real, and that these cannot coherently be thought to have distinctly physical causes.”

“A central Buddhist conviction is that consciousness, far from being an epiphenomenal product of the objective world, veritably produces the experienced world — and that if we are to transform a world chiefly characterized by suffering, it can therefore only be by transforming consciousness that we do so.”

“crucial to efforts at overcoming that mistake, which can only be achieved by habituating consciousness to experience the world selflessly.”

“Buddhists typically emphasized that the “conventional truth” of ordinary experience (in which things like “selves” and “persons” routinely figure) differs fundamentally from an “ultimately true” account, on which no such things really exist.”

“For Buddhist idealists, the ultimate truth is that only conscious events finally exist, albeit not as we habitually think; only fleeting moments of experience exist (there is no self to which they belong), and they arise not from interaction with the world but simply out of habituated dispositions.”

“Experience thus results not from a self’s interaction with the world, but from the accumulated weight of our own psychological pasts.”

“Against this, proponents of the skeptical Madhyamaka school denied that momentary mental events are any more “ultimately” real than selves are.”

“Anything at all posited as definitively explaining experience turns out itself to be reducible to further causes and conditions; analysis never reaches the bottom, and the ultimate truth, we thus ought to understand, is that there is no ultimate truth.”