(fourth–fifth century A.D.), Theraveda Buddhist philosopher whose major work was the Visuddhimagga (‘Path of Purification’). He accepted the typical Buddhist doctrine that everything that exists (Nirvana aside) is impermanent and momentary. A mind at a moment is only a momentary collection of momentary states; over time it is a series of such collections; similarly for a physical object. He held that, through sensory perception, physical objects are known to exist mind-independently. To the objection that perception of an object cannot occur in a moment since perception requires memory, attention, recognition, examination, and the like, he theorized that there is physical time and there is mental time; a single physical moment passes while distinct mental moments mount to sixteen in number. Hence a complex perceptual process can occur within a series of mental moments while a single material moment passes. Critics (e.g., Buddhist Yogacara philosophers) saw in this a denial of impermanence. See also BUDDHIS. K.E.Y. Buddhism, a religion of eastern and central Asia founded by Siddharta Gotama Buddha. The Buddha found ready-made in Indian culture the ideas of karma (‘fruits of action’) and samsara (‘wheel of rebirth’), as well as the view that escape from the wheel is the highest good. Buddhist doctrine, like that of other Indian religions, offers its distinctive way to achieve that end. It teaches that at the core of the problem is desire or craving – for wealth, pleasure, power, continued existence – which fuels the flame of continued life. It adds that the solution is the snuffing out of craving by following the Eightfold Path (right speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, concentration, views, and intentions). The idea is that intuitive wisdom follows upon moral conduct and mental discipline in accord with Buddhist precepts. This involves accepting these claims: all existence is unsatisfactory (dukkha); all existence is impermanent (anicca); and there is no permanent self (anatta). Along with these claims go the doctrines of momentariness (everything that exists is transitory, lasting only a moment) and codependent origination (everything that exists does so dependently on other things).
Since God is typically conceived in monotheistic religions as existing independently and as either eternal or everlasting, there is no room within a Buddhist perspective for monotheism. Save for a heretical school, Buddhist traditions also reject all belief in substances. A substance, in this sense, is something that has properties, is not itself a property or a collection of properties, and endures through time. The obvious contrast to the Buddhist perspective is the notion of a self in Hinduism and Jainism, which is beginningless and endless, an indestructible entity sometimes conceived as inherently self-conscious and sometimes viewed as conscious only when embodied. But even the notion of a substance that endured but had a beginning or end or both, or a substance that existed dependently and endured so long as its sustaining conditions obtained, would run deep against the grain of typical Buddhist teaching.
The Buddha is said to have offered no opinion, and to have found no profit in speculation, on certain questions: whether the world is or is not eternal, whether the world is or is not infinite, and whether the soul is different from or identical to the body. The religious reason given for this indifference is that reflection on such matters does not lead to enlightenment. A philosophical reason sometimes given is that if, as Buddhism claims, there is no world of substances, whether minds or bodies, then these questions have no straightforward answer. They are like the question, What does the horn of the hare weigh? Hares have no horns to be heavy or light. Seen in the context of the assumptions common in the culture in which they were asked, the questions would suggest that there are substantival minds and bodies and a world made up of them, and to answer these questions, even negatively, would have involved at least implicitly sanctioning that suggestion. Broadly, Indian Buddhism divides into Theravada (‘Doctrine of the Elders,’ namely those who heard and followed the Buddha; this school is also called Hinayana, or ‘Lesser Vehicle’) and Mahayana (‘Greater Vehicle’). The Sautrantika and Vaibhasika schools belong to Theravada and the Madhyamika and Yogacara schools are Mahayana. The Theravada schools. The Sautrantika school holds that while sensory experience justifies belief in the existence of mind-independent objects, the justification it provides requires us to infer from our sensory experience physical objects that we do not directly experience; it embraces representative realism. Thus, while our seeming to experience mind-independent objects is no illusion, our knowledge that it is not illusory rests as much on inference as on perception. The explanation of the fact that we cannot perceive as we wish – that we see and taste but rice and water though we would prefer meat and wine – is that what we see depends on what there is to be represented and what the conditions are under which we do our perceiving. The Vaibhasika (followers of the Vaibhasha commentary) school defends direct realism, contending that if sensory perception does not justify us in claiming actually to sense objects there is no way in which we can infer their existence. If what we directly experience are alleged representations or copies of objects we never see, from which we must then infer the objects copied, we have no reason to think that the copies are copies of anything. We do not determine the content of our perception because it typically is determined for us by the objects that we see. The very distinctions between dreams and waking perceptions, or veridical perceptions and illusions, to which idealists appeal, depend for their appropriateness to the idealist’s purpose on our being able to tell that some perceptual experiences are reliable and some are not; but then the idealist cannot successfully use them. For both Theravada schools, there is no need to correct our belief in physical objects, or in minds, beyond our viewing both minds and objects as collections of (different sorts of) momentary states.
The Mahayana schools. The Madhyamika school holds out for a more radical revision. Our experience of physical objects is reliable only if the beliefs that we properly base on it are true – only if things are as they sensorily seem. These beliefs are true only if we can sensorily distinguish between individual objects. But everything exists dependently, and nothing that exists dependently is an individual. So there are no individuals and we cannot distinguish between individual objects. So our sensory experience is not reliable, but rather is systematically illusory. Madhyamika then adds the doctrine of an ineffable ultimate reality hidden behind our ordinary experience and descriptions, which is accessible only in esoteric enlightenment experience. In this respect it is like Advaita Vedanta, which it probably influenced. One result of the overall Madhyamika teaching described here is that Nirvana and samsara, the goal and ordinary life, are identified; roughly samsara is how Nirvana seems to the unenlightened (as roughly, for Advaita, the world of dependent things is how qualityless Brahman appears to the unenlightened).
The Yogacara (perhaps ‘Yoga’ because it used meditation to remove belief in mind-independent physical objects) school of Mahayana Buddhism contends for a more ambitious revision of our beliefs about objects than does Sautrantika or Vaibhasika, but a less radical one than the Madhyamika. Against the latter, it contends that if mind itself is empty of essence and if all there is is an ineffable reality, then there is no one to see the truth and no reliable way to discover it. Against the direct physical-object realism of the Vaibhasika and the representational realism of the Sautrantika, the Yogacara philosophers argue that dream experience seems to be of objects that exist mind-independently and in a public space, and yet there are no such objects and there is no such space. What we have experiential evidence for is the existence of (non-substantival) minds and the experiences that those minds have. There are no substances at all and no physical states; there are only mental states that compose minds. Yogacara philosophers too had to explain why our perceptual content is not something we can decide by whim, and its explanation came in terms of the theory that each collection of momentary states, and hence each series or stream of such collections, contains impressions that represent past experiences. These impressions become potent under certain circumstances and determine the content of one’s explicit or conscious perception. The stream, or substream, of representative impressions is a storehouse of memories and plays a role in Yogacara theory analogous to that of the Atman or Jiva in some of the schools of Hinduism. Critics suspected it of being a thin surrogate for a substantival self. AsaNga, Dignaga, and especially Vasubandhu were leading Yogacara philosophers. Further, critics of the Yogacara idealism argued that while the view contends that there are minds other than one’s own, it provided no way in which that belief could be justified. Our discussion has dealt with Indian Buddhism. Buddhism largely died out in India around the thirteenth century. It thrived in other places, especially China, Tibet, and Japan. Japanese Pure Land Buddhism resembles monotheism more than do any of the traditions that we have discussed. Zen is a form of Mahayana that developed in China in the sixth and seventh centuries A.D. and spread to Japan. It involves esoteric teachings outside the sacred writings, following which is believed to lead to realization of Buddhahood. The metaphysical and epistemological issues briefly discussed here