Philosophical Criticisms of Buddhism

Discussion
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To me, the idea of something happening outside the epistemic capabilities of the 6 sense senses / 5 khandas is “proliferating the unproliferated”.

To put it another way, conscious experience, that which is discerned, is IMO what is real and actual. Something that is not discerned is not real and actual (this has been called ‘conscious realism’ in modern times).

I think some suttas support this view, e.g SN 35.23:

And what is the all? It’s just the eye and sights, the ear and sounds, the nose and smells, the tongue and tastes, the body and touches, and the mind and thoughts. This is called the all.

Mendicants, suppose someone was to say: ‘I’ll reject this all and describe another all.’ They’d have no grounds for that, they’d be stumped by questions, and, in addition, they’d get frustrated. Why is that? Because they’re out of their element.”

AN 4.174:

“Reverend, when these six fields of contact have faded away and ceased with nothing left over, does anything else exist?”
…
“If you say that ‘when the six fields of contact have faded away and ceased with nothing left over, something else exists’, you’re proliferating the unproliferated. …

IMO, we cannot imagine or think about anything outside sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches and mental objects. We can fool ourselves into thinking we are thinking about something outside the all, but that is actually just mind objects hitting the mind sense base.

So I have to revise my initial statement. If I go by conscious realism, a “first cause” cannot be real and actual if it cannot be discerned.

I am willing to accept a hard limit about what can be known about the past here. The best the 5 khandas can do is to recollect eons of past lives. Speculating about what is outside this doesn’t work.

Maybe, who knows :slight_smile:

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20

I guess there can be the conviction that there is an ‘outside’, an untouchable ‘real’ which sustains our physics as an emergent phenomenon. As you said, I don’t think there’s a benefit in imagining what this could be, but it’s a reminder that what we deal with are mental images which work more or less. The projection of time for example is necessary for a normal human/social functioning, but it’s not ‘real’.

What we are left with is to examine (with the mind) how mind and consciousness function and how - by their nature - they constantly produce specific distortions. My image of the Buddha is that he was a scientist is this peculiar field.

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There is a sutta, MN 76, where Ananda warns that logic is not a good method for understanding the truth. Neither is tradition, trusting allegedly infallible teachers, or eel-wriggling. Instead, practice of Samadhi and the higher knowledges are encouraged. Of course, it’s Ananda making this claim, not the Buddha. Does anyone know of a parallel to that sutta where the Buddha says something similar?

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Maybe:

“It is fitting for you to be perplexed, Kālāmas, fitting for you to be in doubt. Doubt has arisen in you about a perplexing matter. Come, Kālāmas, do not go by oral tradition, by lineage of teaching, by hearsay, by a collection of scriptures, by logical reasoning, by inferential reasoning, by reasoned cogitation, by the acceptance of a view after pondering it, by the seeming competence of a speaker, or because you think: ‘The ascetic is our guru.’ But when, Kālāmas, you know for yourselves: ‘These things are unwholesome; these things are blameworthy; these things are censured by the wise; these things, if accepted and undertaken, lead to harm and suffering,’ then you should abandon them.

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Good point, @Satananda, on the Kalama sutta. It’s ironic that the Kalama sutta is often invoked in favor of using reason, but really it’s a call to base your knowledge on experience.

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How do you reconcile that with the effectiveness of science, which works precisely with the kind of reasoning this passage is talking about?

by logical reasoning, by inferential reasoning, by reasoned cogitation, by the acceptance of a view after pondering it

Perhaps by adopting an anti-realistic understanding of science: by telling ourselves that it can never inform us about phenomena in themselves, only about the relationships of phenomena to each other (phenomena that appear to us in the experience).

Reason is then only useful to account for the links of experience, which has primacy.

This series of videos talks about it (especially the first one).

:pray:

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Hi venerable. I see your point and it does make sense linguistically here.

However I think we also need to see this issue in the context of other teachings, mainly how the Buddha’s teaching is focused on the phenomenological reality. I am referring to teachings such as that found in SN 35, which says that the “all” is merely the six sense spheres and any other “all” is beyond range.

Likewise, the idea that speculating about cosmological issues is outside of the Buddhadhamma can be seen suttas like SN 12.48.

So, while I accept that the Buddha’s position is not purely epistemic and includes some ontological sense, I also do not think that this extends into cosmological matters like the big bang and so forth.

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I think some interesting questions that might be relevent to this debate has not been asked so far,

Is reason a part of experience or is experience a part of reason?

Can experience, experience/know it self?

Edit: if I would hazard a guess,
individuals who are labeled insane seems to say, do and believe very unreasonable things(that might be just because they are in the minority, if the majority were like that, then I would be the insane one). Certainly, it must appear completely reasonable in their experience.

This is one reason why I believe, mind/paññā has to have recourse to some thing else, that unconditioned element. Otherwise it does not seem logical to me that, there could be a complete eradication of doubt.

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a lot is possible in the realm of fantasy :wink:

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I have wondered whether suttas like SN35.23 (The All) are a specific rejection of the assumed “underlying reality” of Atman/Brahman described in the Upanishads.

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Advaita vedanta and its understanding of the Atman-Brahman is posterior to the Buddha.

nagarjuna_vedanta
nagarjuna_vedanta1450×5947 2.11 MB

Reference to the Upanishads does not exist in the nikāyas. Only reference to the Four Vedas is found: Did the Buddha ever mention the Upanishads or the Vedas?

I’ve talked a little bit about it here.

You might be interested in this paper.

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I wasn’t referring specifically to Advaita, which is of course a later development, and arguably only loosely based on the Upanishads.
It’s true that the Buddha didn’t specifically refer to the Upanishads, though there are various explanations for that, and I’ve seen different academic opinions on the chronology of suttas v. Upanishads.

But as to my question, do you think The All is a specific rejection of an alternative contemporary view or belief? Why do you think the Buddha made statements like this?

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Seems a bit long to read on my phone. But the main conclusion seems to be

most reasonable interpretation of the Nikāyas
is that final Nibbāna is no more than the cessation of the five khandhas.

I don’t agree completely(or I agree in part). But it’s all good. Trying to settle this intellectually might not end for another 2500 years.

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Not quite. There are late references, both explicitly and to the thought-world. DN 13:

Even though brahmins describe different paths—the Addhariya brahmins (Aitareya), the Tittiriya brahmins (Taittiriya), the Chandoka brahmins (Chandogya), and the Bavhadija brahmins (Bharadvaja) —all of them lead someone who practices them to the company of Brahmā.

Of these the Chandogya is known to us only by its Upanisad (theoretically there could have been a Brahmana though). Also Brahmaloka became a prominent goal only in the late Brahmanas and early Upanisads - so at least brahmaloka in the suttas refers to ideas which were also developed in the Upanisads.

Late suttas also have references to ‘vedanta’, in SN 7.9 and Snp 3.4 (as ‘vedantagu’).

Anyhow, I think contemporary criticism of Buddhism is more fruitful than the ancient ones. From the distance we can see some things people immersed in the culture couldn’t (of course we also cannot see many things they could).

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I didn’t know that reference. It’s very interesting, thank you!

:pray:

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Hi @Satananda

You might want to check out Jay Garfield, who is a philosophy professor who was trained in Western & Tibetan philosophy & seems to spend a lot of his time arguing with other Western-trained philosophers that Buddhist philosophy is real philosophy (i.e. not just religion). I’m not hugely familiar with his work, but I watched the first 3 videos of “Emptiness and the Mind Perceiving It” (see link) from Sravasti Abbey. He had me at “the object-less mind is no mind”. But he also made some other points- like when we talk about emptiness, we should ask, “empty of what”…some people see a lot of similarity between this approach and Wittgenstein. I mean, it’s not that we couldn’t have equally addressed the same issues adequately within a Theravada or EBT framework- maybe try Y. Karundasa, Early Buddhist Teachings. I just guess that you are interested in Madhyamaka.

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He looks interesting. I’ve never heard of him. I’ll take a look at it, thank you!

:pray:

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I’m putting this here: Paul Williams & Intellectual Consistency.

:pray:

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I’ve fantasised another simile( just for fun)

I think Einstein has shown, atleast intellectually that all motion is relative. All our mind has ever known is motion. Even Jhana is motion(sankhāra;Puññābhisaṅkhāra & āneñjābhisaṅkhāra). Surely, without glimpsing what is true stillness, there is no going beyond doubt that, whatever stillness we perceive is not just relative.

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Perhaps if both are viewed as using instruments to investigate phenomena: the body/mind and microscopes and such?

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