Berk.eley and the Mysterious West - Theodore Benke · Berk.eley and the Mysterious West Theodore Benke Being in company with a gentleman who thought fit to maintain Dr. Berkeley's

Berkeley and the Mysterious West Theodore Benke

Being in company with a gentleman who thought fit to maintain Dr Berkeleys inshygenious philosophy that nothing exists but as perceived by some mind when the gentleman was going away Johnson said to him Pray Sir dont leave us for we may perhaps forget to think of you and then you will cease to exist

BoswdlsLUeoflohnson

In this paper I compare Berkeleys theory that esse is percipi to V asubandhus concept cilta-mlllra or

mind-only with a few side-glances at related matters These are usually regarded as the two purest forms

of idealism in world philosophy and as quintessentially dream-world philosophies But as we shall see

there is nothing dreamy about them at all if we take that term in the sense of subjective idealism or soli pshy

sism The more you look into them the less the teem idealist seems to fit Both men actually had quite

practical and realistic purposes in mind I will look at Berkeleys arguments as presented in the Principles of

Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues Vasubandhus in the VirpJatiM and TriJpSik6 2 Preliminary to

that however I have a few reflections on the nature and implications of such East-West comparisons

Lingering Shadows

Comparisons like this are now thought to be outmoded-homogenization or the dissection of dead

forms But as in botany this can be a very useful first step I justify it as a simple exercise in clarifying the

foem and place of so-called idealism in global view of philosophy Enlightened and reflexive self-awareness

in comparative philosophy is de rigueur these days but has its own shadows and problems-the drive to

confess and disavow our presumptions and prejudices as the latest intellectual contest and the danger of a

lingering and rarefied orientalism We may not have escaped the shadows cast by the myth of Asia as

much as we like to think 3

As has been pointed out by Edward Said in his Orientalism and others working in the field of postshy

colonial studies comparative philosophy was an invention of the Enlightenment The universalization of its

ideals of reason has been ab origine complicit with imperialism at first blatantly now more subtly The

West not being able any longer to dominate other peoples politically it tries to maintain-most of the time

IThis is how they are designated by Joel Hoffman Dream-World Philosophers Berkeley and Vasubandhu in Philososhyphy EastPhilosophy West A Critical Comparison of Indian Chinese Islamic and European Philosophy (Oxford Univershysity Press 1978) and it is still the prevailing view of them The view of Yogllcllra as pure idealism has a long tradition Stcherbatsky Murti Conze and Chatterjee 2For Berkeley references are unless otherwise specified to the standard edition The Works of George Berkeley Bishop of Cloyne ed AA Luce and TE Jessop vol 1 and 21948-9 For Vasubandhu I have used Stefan Anacker (1pound and ed) Seven Works of Vasubandhu the Psychological Doctor Delhi Motilal Banarsidass 1984 and Thomas Kochumuttom A Buddhist Doctrine of Experience A New TtIJIlslatioJl and Interpretation of the Works of Vasubandhu the Yog1lclriJl (Delhi Motilal Banarsidass 1982) 3A11uding to the 1969 book of the same title by JM Steadman which disposes across-the-board of every stereotype about Asian otherness

unconsciously-a certain picture of the world by means of comparative studies 4 From this viewpoint

global philosophy is expansionism through sympathetic incorporation Comparative philosophy has now

become a model of multicultural sensitivity and appreciation but the perspective of globalizing neutraliz ashy

tion is still there Some question the whole notion that a universal perspective a grand narrative in Lyotards

phrase which homogenizes the incommensurable is possible or even desirable To get around this comshy

parative philosophy currently stresses and celebrates the differences but it is not clear that a discourse of dishy

versityentirely escapes the old perspective This is the down side of this question and should not be overshy

played Universalization has also been more importantly the means of promoting human rights tolerance

and cultural understand ing

One of the undoubted achievements of comparative philosophy has been to dispel the clich that

Eastern philosophy is all mystical monistic other-worldliness Stereotypes about the mysterious East have

had a long life-the mystical dreamy despotic sensuous opulent spicy colorful cruel Orient The eastern

mind was supposedly inclined to idealism mysticism intuition and irrationalism in contradistinction to the

rationality empiricism logic and practicality of the western mind For a long time absolute idealism was

thought to be typical of Indian philosophy in particular We now recognize that this dichotomy was largely

the product of a selective vision at the service of imperialism and that as wide a spectrum of viewpoints is

to be found there as in Euro-American philosophy ranging from materialism and Nyfya- Vaie~ika realism

to a variety of idealisms Conversely the laquoWest has forms of idealism Platonic realism Neo-platonism

and the mediaeval doctors of the Church Berkeleys empiricism-idealism hybrid Malebranches Occasionshy

alism Leibnizian monads Spinozas pantheism Schellings romantic idealism Hegels absolute idealism

McTaggarts donnish personal idealism and Bradleys donnish Parmenidean absolutism that rival and surshy

pass in sublimity and transcendentality anything eastern If anything it may be more appropriate to speak

of the idealistic West The point of my title is that Berkeleys system of empirical idealism is at least as

strange and mysterious as anything from the other end of the Eastern hemisphere

Berkeley was greeted by contemporaries as an eccentric expounder of paradox and quickly became

a standing butt for quips like Dr Johnsons The initial response to his three philosophical classics A New

Theory of Vision The Principles of Human Understanding and Three Dialogues berween Hylas and Phishy

lonous was celebrity and ridicule eventually settling into his reputation as the author of the strange but unshy

answerable proof that to exist is to be perceived and so into his place among the illustrious oddities of

philosophy (that is if you leave out of account the strong impact of his sensationalism on Hume and his

ideality on Kant) The ingenious sophistry of his disproof of the existence of matter was obviously

wrong-headed and repugnant to all commonsense but appeared to be perfectly logical and irrefutable

Nothing was more calculated to get under the skin of good plain sense and has provoked plenty of rockshy

These remarks were prompted by a reading of Raimundo Pannikar What Is Comparative Philosophy Comparing in Interpreting Across BOWldaries New Essays in Compamtive Philosophy Gerald James Larson and Eliot Deutsch (ed) Princeton University Press 1988

kicking I refute it thuses 5 It was all the more maddening that he imperturbably granted the solid comshy

monsense realness of things while flinging this nonsense of immateriality in the publics face As a last reshy

sort it could be dismissed as an excess of Anglican devotionalism or as one among his other eccentricities

and Celtic idiosyncrasies the quixotic and failed enterprise to found a missionary college in Bermuda then

Rhode Island to educate colonists and Indians for the conversion of the savage Americans and his proshy

motion of the medicinal properties of tar-water as a panacea 6

SMot notably Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason (A 366-80 B69ff B274-278) and GE Moore the foe of all uncommonshysense in many papers the most famous being Refutation of Idealism These disproofs though have never had the charm cogency or suasiveness of Berkeleys original though Moores was thought to have put paid to esse is percipi Kant was at great pains to refute good Bishop Berkeley and demarcate his dbgmatic idealism from his own critical idealshyism his blosser schein which degrades bodies to mere illusion from Transcendental ideality The gist of his critique is that Berkeleys realism about space and time is incongruent with his idealism Moore mounts his attack on the principle of esse is percipi believing it to be the necessary premise of all idealist and spiritual views of reality- disproved idealism is refuted His main brief is that Berkeley is mired in PSYChOl0~isti confusion of sensation and inferrable object The blue sensation implied by the Indian analogue-the sahopalambb 1 principle of Dharmak1hi that blue and our awareshyness of blue are non-distinct for they are apprehended together would eqUallY~OJ1Sense Frege also attacks the noshy bLtion of green ideas in Der Gedanke He totally rejected the idea that to be is to ex even more decisively than Moore Such idealism was hopelessly sunk in the confusions of psychologism _ I fJYc~((

Freges critique of idealism was tied up with his anti-psychologism and was only incidental to his main 10gfCist projshy Cyectof codifying the laws of logic and arithmetic He extrapolated his platonism about the objective nature of numbers to

thoughts His purpose in doing so was to insulate logic from psychology and every trace of mentalism This led him to tj VJ e sharply divide the content of judgements and thoughts from the processes of judging and asserting Thoughts are like v- --dJnumbers real but not wirklich objectiv but not spatio-temporal They are neither subjective or material but inhabit a third realm all their own similar to mathematical entities like the Pythagorean theorem They are not properties of the mind (Frege has been criticized by some ie Sluga Baker and Hacker for being naively platonist in assuming that the only alternative to psychologism was Platonism Crispin Wright however has defended his platonism about mathematishycal objects at least)

Frege saw psychological idealism as breaking down important distinctions between ideas sensations concepts and properties The empiricists and idealists wrongly confuse thoughts and ideas Thoughts are not subjective factors like ideas they are not contaminated with psychological processes They are not mental entities images or pictures Frege rejected the subjectivity of thoughts on three counts They cannot be ideas because ideas are existence-dependent upon a bearer ideas are privately owned and unshareable ideas are privately known and incommunicable Thoughts though are public objective and communicable The idealists wrongly assume that concepts are ideas But it is manifestly absurd to predicate an idea of an idea To predicate green of A is to predicate a green idea of A There are no green ideas except in poetry But as has been pointed out Freges distinction of ideas Ilnd thoughts just assumes that there is a domain of mindshyindependent entities to which we have some unaccountable access just what Berkeley and Vasubandhu question It is not at aU clear that there is such a realm of pure thoughts from which to scorn the merely psychological

In Der Gedanke Frege oulines further objections If experience is confined to subjectivities then we can never know of the existence of other minds and not everything can be an idea since ideas need a bearer viz a self These are not new

lgt ([v criticisms as if Berkeley an~Vasubandhu had not thought long and hard about them Curiously Vasubandhu might have been quite a reeable to Fre la notion of the ob eCi1ve~nature of thoughts It is comportable with his disposition of

wv (l1 thoug eYon oLh subjectivity and objectivity the mental and the physical Whereas Berkeley is more susceptible laquo rr) ~ ) to his critique of the subjectivity of IdeasneeOilig as he does to preserve the self as a substance in which ideas psychically _~ pL- inhere Yet he accepts as strongly as Frege that ideas presuppose a self distinct from them To Freges charge that they have reduced everything to the subjective even numbers Berkeley would respond that all things are real in God He is not

impugning their existence Vasubandhu would be even less non-plussed there is no self to which they can be reduced All three reject representationalism Frege to preclude false subjectification of the objective and to clearly demarcate the inner and outer worlds Berkeley and Vasubandhu topr~ false objectification and to dissolve the innerouter demarcation

Dummett positions Frege as a realist ers as a Pll)msJ~7 But as with Berkeley and Vasubandhu there are elements of both realism and idealism in tensio rtaint whether he should be counted a realist a Platonist or a Kanshytian transcendentist wk ~lt- )

We can generally characteri )lnti-realist in Dummetts semantic taxonomy Dummett has reframed the realismanti-realism truth claims about statements But it is in his intuitionism where we find a certain rapproachmeil ilI- -mett defines realism as the claim that statements containing physical object words like the cat on the mat are determ ately true or false even if we do not or cannot know this to be so Anti-realism is the claim that such statements do not h ve determinate truth-values true or false Determinate bivalence f tr is the sine qua non of realism Anti-r~alism sees the real a jndet~rmilllteil_~j~~~t_ItlElj_e~ that Va~batl~J1u~nd

C IJ-) vNlrglfrjuna for that matter woulo be q~~I)1rLE_fllbI~_With this defiJitionfFor them the real tran~cendsourc~nstructions r1- I and is in a sense formless ana unreiiluntil we mtervene an determme its forms by our perceptions concept10ns meanshyv ~rf1 ings and scientific theories Dummett himself says that a re physical and material thing comes into existence only as ~ bullwe become aware of it but we do not create it ourselves Tru and Other Enigmas (London Duckworth 1978) pp xxviishy

- 4) IXxix Things are not fixed and simply there but the results 0 a continuous process of rediscovery( 11J~ )iMy facts are drawn from the biography of Berkeley by AA Luc Tbe Life of George Berkeley Bishop of Cloyne Thomas ltpp

JA Nelson Edinburgh 1949 As the Father of idealism and tar wate Berkeley has been endlessly derided but the whole tale of fc-L- yU tar-water when inquired into afresh actually reflects well on e good bishop It was not entirely t11f quackish fad it is r r

----

-- ~ y vyV ~J yl-~ (I -A _() gt

lc It ) jpound4J bull f ~ flJ amp9 1~i i ItA ~ Ill bull Y I) Ir _ shy

L~ ~ orl ~ ~ bull My view is that it makes little sense to call Berkeleian idealism or Yogllclra dre~ philosdphies ~

( tZ Berkeley never denied or deprecated our commonsense experience of a world of real things He was only

questioning the abstract status of materiality that philosophers attached to them and grounding them in the

truth of spiritual reality Vasubandhu similarly did not repudiate our conventional (~vahDra) experience

of things it is designated in the trisvabbllva theory as paratanatne-revetolcausat-~erdependence and is

true It is untrue only from the level of ultimate truth or perfection pariniggtanna Therefore Vasubandhu

might say as Berkeley does about the concept Matter thatwe should speak with the vulgar and think with b~ the learned in such matters Neither Berkeley or vasubandhu~isc~~~nl SUfllOSed1was ~ )~~o~~i~~ cJi-1Y

(A)~It)ist mystic who denied the reality of things they were rather interrogating the conceptual and ontological

SCJr status that the intellect accords them To describe them as ideas-only or mind-only was to secure their Ir)

realness not to vaporize them into dream fantasy or hallucination Though employing the dream analogy J2 -~ ~

as a skeptical tool both clearly distinguished dream and waking experience and did not conflate the two ~u L-~~

The label of idealist is itself problematic The conceptual tenn idealism only came into use in the lvVcL7 eighteenth century It was a construct of early modem European thought and its applicability or relevance toW~middot

Indian thought is of considerable dubiety To categorize any Indian school as idealist is already to have in- -i(- ~

sinuated a loaded foreign vocabulary which presumes and presorts the subject Labeling Yogaclra idealist 4~ -rlt0 has deeply shaped Western interpretation but this comparative category may have been more productive of trY ~ obscurity than clarity This was inescapable for all understanding as Heidegger Gadamer and De Man tJ-e ~

f lt ()lt1

have shown us is forever caught in between clarification and obscuration ampC ht ~s ~A

Even in the case of Berkeley the label has confounded things considerably He did not call himSei1r~_ A YVeJ

an idealist he referred to his view as the immaterialist hypothesis This designation expressed his constitu- u tional opposition to materialism The opposite of idealism is realism But Berkeley is not an anti-realist in

the common acceptation of that word He did not intend as I have stated to deny the realist notion that in

perception we are directly aware of objects that persist unchanged when we cease to perceive them If anyshy

thing he meant to strengthen that immediacy The prinCiple of esse is percipi was never intended to void

out common empirical experience My contention is that neither Berkeley nor Vasubandhu is idealist in this

anti-realist sense This is easy to see in the fonner case more difficult in the latter because of burial for so

usually made out to be He had heard about the medicinal virtues of pine and fir resins while in New England Native Americans used it as a preventative and tonic Pharmacologically the aromatic bafsams of pine and fir do in fact have therapeutic value as a disinfectant expectorant and deodorant As Luce recounts it had a wide if transient success many cures were reported and tar-water was admitted to a place in the British pharmacopoeia which it still holds Berkeley adopted and promoted it somewhat over-optimistically as a wonder-cure from the New World for dysentery smallpox and the other epidemic diseases of poverty he had to contend with as Bishop of eloyne He experimented on himself and found it efficacious for many ailments and taking seriously his priestly responsibilities for public health and welfare hoped it might be a cheap readily available remedy The Siris was his meditation on the vis vitae at work in tar-water and the healing powers of nature on the spiritus mundi that connects the aromatics of pine-tar to the ether of the divine The same therapeutic optimism and hope can be seen to actuate Berkeleys idealism-to save the world from the diseases of materialism and freethinking both were expressions of the same benevolent spirit and were animated by the same practical altruism Vasubandhu would have understood this spirit of pragmatic compassion it is the very heart of Buddhism As Berkeley does in Principles sect 30 33 for Vasubandhu dreams are imaginary (parikalpita) and distinct from the relashytively real (paratantra) See the Tri-svabh1fva-nirdela on the three levels of the true

long under Mtldhyamika Nyllya and Vedantic polemics and on top of that the Western import of Idealshy

ism

Berkeley never ceases to protest that he is defending commonsense realism from the natural phishy

losophers abstract ideas the chief and most dangerous one being Matter Of course the oft remarked irony

is that while claiming to vindicate commonsense he makes the most uncommonsensical claim of all-that

matter does not exist

All things that exist exist only in the mind that is they are purely notional What therefore becomes of the sun moon and stars What must we think of houses rivers mountains trees stones nay even of our own bodies Are all these but so many chimeras and illusions on the fancy-To all which and whatever else of the same sort may be objected I answer that by the Principles premised we are not deshyprived of anyone thing in nature Whatever we see feel hear or any wise conceive or understand reshymains as secure as ever and is as real as ever There is a rerum natura and the distinction between realishyties and chimeras retains its full force PHK sect 34

To say that things are notional or ideas-only is not to deny their reality but to establish it The same I beshy

lieve is also true for Vasubandhu when he says things are mind-only Both are investigating what is truly

real in them at the bottom of all abstraction

There are several aspects of Berkeleys ideas-only and Vasubandhus mind-only I want to look at

the soteriological and apologetic purpose the critique of abstract ideas and the representational theory of

perception and the concept of vijJapti-matra the critique of Lockean-Newtonian science and Abhidharma

the refutation of outness and bllhyllrtha the relation between God and the lI1ayavij1Jana and the question of

subjective idealism

Berkeley was essentially an apologist who was safeguarding the orthodox doctrines of God and

soul from the dogmatic rationalism of the mechanical philosophy He was committed to the Anglican esshy

tablishment and his view were thoroughly devout but tempered by a philanthropic and benevolent spirit

Promulgation of idealism was a charitable ministry He saw his mission to signpost as a dead-end the road

from materialism to atheism opened up by the new sci ences In this respect he was like Malebranche and

Leibniz reactively trying to contain science within the fold of Christian faith His idealism Occasionalism

and the Pre-Established Harmony are similar attempts to preserve theism and reconcile reason and faith

Berkeleys apologetic intent is evident in those long baroque titles in fashion in his day The Treatise

Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge is subtitled wherein the chief causes of error and diffishy

culty in the sciences with grounds of skepticism atheism and irreligion are inquired into And the Three

Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous is subtitled The design of which is plainly to demonstrate the realshy

ity and perfection of human knowledge the incorporeal nature of the soul and the immediate providence of

a Deity in opposition to Sceptics and Atheists Also to open a method for rendering the Sciences more

easy useful and compendious These elaborate titles are grand facades to some of the most lucid prose in

philosophy and a world away from the terse shorthand of Vasubandhus stanzas

A similar religious purpose also motivates Buddhist philosophy-to save human beings from

clinging to a world of falsely-objectified material things The aim of Asanga and his brother Vasubandhu

was to propagate Buddhadharma and the truth of Mabflylna The soteriological aim is primary to describe

the workings of the samsaric mind and liberate all beings theory is secondary and pragmatic Consequently

it is misleading and has been the source of much mis conception ever to read strictly theoretical works like

the Vicplafikll separately as texts of pure philosophy They must be seen in the context of the practice of

Yoga and the whole corpus of YogJchworks Then theirpractical purpose becomes clear 8

esse est percipi

In the Principles Berkeley endeavors to show that not only are our thoughts passions feelings

sensations and ideas in our minds but that even our experience of external objects extended in space is

likewise entirely mental or made up of ideas The strange and vulgar error prevails among men that

houses mountains rivers all sensible objects have a natural real absolute existence distinct from our pershy

ception of them But this involves a contradiction All we perceive and know are our own perceptions and

ideas How can these exist unperceived they do not their esse is percipi it is not possible that they should

have any existence out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them Matter and material things do

not exist as such or rather material things in space are but ideas in our minds for Berkeley the only exisshy

tents are active conscious spirits passive ideas in their consciousnesses and the Deity who creates them

The world is a completely spiritual reality More exactly then to exist is either to perceive or to be pershy

ceived

All the choir of heaven aod furniture of earth in a word all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world have not aoy substaoce without the mind so long as they are not actually perceived by me or do not exist in my mind or that of aoy other created spirit they must either have no existence at all or else subsist in the mind of some Eternal Spirit

The Principles can be boiled down to four main arguments for this immaterialist hypothe sis

(1) Against naive realists who believe that we directly see touch hear and therefore know solid

material things Berkeley insists that this belief contradicts the other commonly held supposition that material

objects have a stable constant nature of their own The same thing can be hot or cold sweet or sour large

or short to different people or the same person at different mo ments This is his relativity of perception arshy

gument

(2) Against philosophic realists who subscribe to the dualism of Locke and his distinction between

primary and secondary qualities Berkeley insists that both are equally mental9 Distinguishing them is the

chief error of Lockean abstract ideas in his view Locke believed that the primary qualities of extension figshy

ure motion rest solidity impenetrability and number inhere in corporeal objects as independent external

substance whereas the secondary qualities color sound feel and taste are purely sensible Berkeley demshy

onstrated that there is no evidence or proof that primary qualities are any less sensible than sec ondary qualishy

ties What is at work here is his Mte noire-abstraction Primarily qualities are artifacts of abstract thinking

8See the Madhyinta-vibhaga I-lion false ideation the TrimliklI on the traosformations of consciousness aod related works of AsaAga bull 9Principles Intra sect 7-17 Pt 1 sect 9-21

and are inseparably united with secondary sensations in the corporeal object We do not see color and exshy

tension but colored extensions and extended colors

Locke was a Cartesian dualist who held that there are two substances matter and mind Berkeley

disposed of this dualism replacing it with one spiritual substance Extended matter is a quiddity an hypothshy

esis of which he has no need For him the idea of material substance was the breeding ground of skepticism

and freethinking To explain how minds come to know these material things Locke devised his sensationalshy

ist epistemology

The understanding seems to me not to have the least glimmering of any ideas which it doth not receive from one of these two External objects furnish the mind with the ideas of sensible qUalities which are all those different perceptions they produce in us and the mind furnishes the understanding with ideas of its own operations These when we have taken a full survey of them and their several modes we shall find to contain all our stock of ideas and that we have nothing in our minds which did not come in one of these two ways

An Essay Concerning Human Understandiag 10

For Locke ideas represent things to us and give us mediated access to them Berkeley attacked this represhy

sentational theory because it opened a gap for skeptical doubt to enter separated the individual from the dishy

vine and fractured the real into things and ideas

so that for aught we know all we see hear and feel may be phantom and vain chimera and not at all agree with the real things existing in rerum natura All this scepticism foHows from our supposing a difference between things and ideas PHK 87

He does so by pushing the logic of Lockes ideas beyond the limit he set them and turning them around

Materiality itself is sublimed into pure idea We do not know things through ideas rather we have immedishy

ate knowledge of things because they are our ideas That they might exist outside our mind is unintelligible

and inconceivable Berkeley was the first to perspicuously discern with devastating clarity the problems

~i _ wiL~~~ean representationalism his tabula rasa psychology and the correspondence theory of truth he

I ~~ (adumbra~~rWittgenstein Sellars Quine and Davidson in this regard ~ -----~----

J (3) The argument from causality Berkeley rejects the view that the existence of matter can be inshy

ferred as the cause of our percepts The fall-back positiorlof re~i~~ th~ though we perceive only our ~----- - ~--- -~---- ---shy

own percepts we nonetheless must infer as causes of those percepts real existing objects Berkeleys

countermove his dictum that causes and effects must resemble each other Passive inert matter cannot be

the cause of active conscious perception the material cannot cause the mental This is obviously a weak arshy

gument and a vestige of mindmatter substantialism

(4) Finally the so-called Berkeley Circle Berkeleys piece de resistance is the principle of esse ~

percipi itself the impossibility of conceiving anything extra-mentally To think of anything as existent outshy

side the mind is already to be thinking of it Outness as he terms it is always an idea in our mind All sup-

IOBook II Of Ideas Chap L Sec 5

position that we can conceive infer or imagine the existence of unperceived objects depends on the omisshy

sion of the perceiver

but what is aU this I beseech you more than framing in your mind certain ideas which you call books and trees and at the same time omitting to frame the idea of anyone that may perceive them But do you not yourself perceive or think of them all the while PHK 23

There is no end to the logical inadequacies to be detected in these arguments when sub jected to anashy

lytic critique I do not propose to go into them Berkeleys idealism is a fragile South Sea bubble easily

enough popped by logical pinpricks II

Cittamatra

Asanga and Vasubandhu systematized and synthesized the strands of Mahttylll1a and Abhidharma

and worked out an elaborate and sophisticated psychology2 Yogllclrameans the practice of Yoga and was

rooted in meditational practice and stressed seeing phenomena as mental constructions Theories on mind

are tentative devises or skillful means to lead the practitioner beyond all mental constructions to a direct

experience of things as they are and then to be abandoned Therefore the emphasis was on consciousness

and the role of the mind in fabricating experience This is the practical origin of the concepts of vijfapti-mltshy

tra representation-only or citta-mlltra mind-only They are epistemological modalities not ontological deshy

scriptions The statement All this is mere conception (vijnaptimftram evedam) is intended to counter such

absolutism All meaning all experience and thisto concretize the universal with a demonstrative

To explain the continuity of memory karma and the momentary mind-stream of the apparent self

they innovated (in addition to the six in early Buddhism the eye- ear- nose-tongue- and mind-vijnanas)

two new vijlfanas the manas and the llJaya or repository of karmic seeds The Ilaya might be described as a

combination of the Freudian and Jungian-collective unconsciousnesses Astoundingly our experiences of

our own personality and an external world of things and other people were claimed to be merely projections

of this l1aya the germinating of the karmic seeds of previous actions When the world is said to be mindshy

only it is these projections that are meant The unenlightened mind is completely enclosed within its own

projections and representations vij1lapti An extra-mental world is not being denied as such it is just that

we cannot see it through the screen of our vijJaptis

In the TrirJ$ik6 Vasubandhu expounds this psychology in some detail while the ViIplatiki is a

polemical text in the form of a dialogue with a realist opponent similar to the platonic Three Dialogues It

advances an anti-representational illusionism and defends the theory that the world is representation-only in

a way that certainly sounds idealist 13

IlFor examples of this kind of analytic scrutiny see George Pitcher Berkeley Arguments of the Philosophers Series (Routledge amp Kegan Paul London 1977) Kenneth P Winkler Berkeley An Interpretation (Oxford University Press 1989) and Robert G Muelmann Berkeleys Ontology (Oxford University Press 1992) I~he following all-too-brief summary of YogacJra was gleaned from Peter Harvey An Introduction to Buddhism Teachshyings history and practices (Cambridge University Press 1990) I3Kochumuttom translation 164f

1 The whole universe is vijGapti-only since there are appearances of non-existent external referents as when someone with an eye disease sees a non-existent sees a knot of hair moons etc which do not exshyist in reality

II [An objection] If the representations of consciousness are without extra-mental objects then there would be no determinations of experience with regard to space and time nor would there be indetermishynacy of it with regard to streams nor would there be determination of actions prompted [by a particular experience]

III [Vasubandhus reply] Determination of space etc is obtained just as in the case of a dream

XVI Perception [can occur without extra-mental objects] just as it happens in a dream etc The correshysponding external object is not found Ho can then one speak of its perception

XVII It has been already said that there is a representation of consciousness which appears as that [namely the respective object] from it does the memory arise Those who are not awake do not realize that the objects they see in a dream do not exist

These verses have usually been taken as saying that the world is all dream or mRyl but that is not

Vasubandhus point As Kochumuttom observes

The strong polemic against belief in objects (artba) is very easily mistaken for a polemic against belief in things as such14

But Vasubandhu intended that no more than Berkeley did What he is saying is that external objects are misshy

representations of what is really there The perception of externality of objects outside us btlbir-atthEt is itshy

self a distorted perception There is no outness as Berkeley would say All we are seeing are our own proshy

jective representations What Vasubandhu is getting at is like Berkeley the~onceptual net of mateshy

riality and objectivity we cast out on things the Myth of Mind Apart 7 ~ -Ilr~o t~~ I c- )ampc r _ ~ YrtI i

1 ~ Jl~ (rJJiJ t1(1 ~ The Critique of Abstraction and Vij1lapti ~ iA ~VI )JjV 01 ~Iamp0 (

The introduction to the Principles is devoted to a critique of abstract thinking and this becomes a( (N(~shy

L vrunning motif throughout the book His excoriation of the devil of general ideas inaugurates the typical conshy t-

cern in British philosophy with abstract ideas as distorting and confusing empirical experience our probshy

lems originate in a departure from concrete thinking in a fallacy of misplaced concreteness Berkeleys anshy

swer was to see language and the power of words squarely as the source of our difficulties It is the abuse

of language and the faculty of framing abstract ideas that has perplexed speculation We can solve our

philosophical problems by extricating ourselves from theirthrall and weeding out falsifying and vague genshy

eralities L

We need only draw the curtain of words to behold the fairest tree of knowledge whose fruit is excellent K Uld within the reach of our hand Intro to PHK sect 24

( J~ ------ (r nri- i _J-~

v ~jSr i~ Th~s_view of philosophy as stuck in ~~ati~ti~ ~orifusion culminates in ordinary language philosshy1

~J6j rophy and logical positivism Wittgenstein attempted to de-metaphysicalize the use of language and saw

J Hr~homas Kochumuttom Vasubandbu the YogiicliHn A New Translation and IntetpretaLioll of Some of his Basic Works ll ~ PhD Thesis University of Lancaner 197825-26

metaphysics as meaningless conceptual nonsense Berkeley could only nod in agreement to his statements

in the Tractatus

4003 Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical Consequently we cannot give any answer to questions of this kind but can only establish that they are nonsensical Most of the propositions and questions of philosophers arise from our failure to understand the logic of our language

A Wittgensteinian interpretation has had considerable influence on recent Buddhology Vasubandhus crishy

tique of vij1fapti is seen as an examination of how language-games create the world we experience

Where Berkeley speaks of abstraction Vasubandhu speaks of viJiiapti or representation and clinging

to representational designations as the source of all our problems Vasubandhu is in entire agreement with

Berkeleys view that we are abused by the delusion of Words The essence of the ViJpsatikl is the critique

of linguistic designation as building up an erroneous picture of a world of fictional entities that appear to be

out there He carried this through in a far more radical way however not only matter things and exterishy

ority but selves god and the everyday experience which Berkeley thought was so sound are all cut away

as abstractions or vij1faptisby the Berke1eian razor IS

The ViJpatikf is an attack on the correspondence or representational theory of knowledge and as

such strikingly parallels Berkeleys refutation of the Lockean variety Both are subjecting psychological

atomism to critique Vasubandhu as the author of the Abhidharma-koJa began with Sautrililtika realism

but criticized this position after his conversion to Mabiylna The Sautdntikas looked back to the Suttas as

the name implies as authoritative and argued against Sarv1lstivfda atomism and substantialism Yogfch is

a development in many respects of Sautrmltika views The Sautdtltikas regarded theories as provisional exshy

planatory devises rather than as descriptions of the ultimate nature of things This line of thought was purshy

sued by both Mldhyamikas and Yogiclrins The Sautriintikas replaced the notion of substantialized dharshy

mas with the idea of karmic seeds as constituting the body-mind complex This notion flowers into the

alaya The Sautriintikas also had a representational-realist theory of knowledge which was subjected to

thorough-going criticism by Vasubandhu They recognized the reality of external objects these objects were

not immediately perceived but inferred Only caUSally-effected cognitions are directly known (the doctrine

of nitya-numeya-blbylJ1tha-vida) Vasubandhu discards such objectivity (arthatva) and causality (hetutva)

as indemonstrable As Berkeley subjects Lockean ideas to demolish Lockean representational realism so

does Vasubandhu employ vij1Japti or representation to confute Abhidharmika realism There are no things

behind the stream of phenomenal appearances Atthil are falsely discriminated from vij1laptis To say that

they are representation-only is to erase the idea of representation We perceive and know only a flux or

screen of representations which represent only themselves Things and events are seamlessly inseparable~vf-)

12~( ~ -~--1dshy15Dignltga worked out the logic of Vasubandhus anti-abstractionism the reference of a name is the-set 0 Irope~ a vJ j1 referent and not some abstract universal that exceeds the referent Language refers to things in a stricti mpincal and Cgtfshypragmatic way without the intermediation of absolutized entities abstracted from their signifying function Berkeley il- lustrates this by his example of the triangle in geometry Principles 13-17 The Anti-abstractionism of Dignaga and Ber- j)J keley Philosophy East and West A Quarterly Of Comparative Philosophy (University of Hawaii Press 1994 Jan) 44 frIAYj 55-71

from the processes of representation which constitute them Only Buddhas see things as-they-really-are

(tatbat6) without mental constructions (vikalpa) and projections (kalpatli) The purpose however is not to

erect Mind as some ultimate reality but to detach the mind from grasping a world of ephemeral things as

real just as Berkeley wanted to free us from the thrall of attachment to a fallen material world

For Vasubandhu the cardinal abstraction is subject-object discrimination The cardinal abstraction

for Berkeley is Matter but to get rid of it he had to apply his razor to its supports Newtonian absolute

space time and motion He does not deny their marvelous usefulness as principles of calculation and deshy

duction but they have been mistakenly universalized as real exteriorities when they are in fact only relashy

tive They are abstractions and arise from a confusion in representational thinking-taking a typical particushy

lar for a general real ity 16 In the Aiciphron he shows that force and gravitational attraction are scientific ficshy

tions which explain nothing however precisely the quantitative laws may work They are purely metaphysishy

cal Attraction or action at a distance is a very occult property How distant heavenly bodies can affect each

other is as mysterious as how things outside our minds can impinge on them 17 Natural laws cannot explain

this they can only describe it Forces and laws are useful as hypotheses signs and symbols but are not

real Only God is the explanation for the mystery of the universe and its forces He is the principle of order

and uniformity active in the world

Berkeley was one of the first to see the inadequacies in the mechanistic Newtonian model and the

heart of mystery in thingS18 His critique of Newtonianism is fascinatingly prescient of modem developshy

ments in science in a nominalistic and conventionalist direction Mach Poincar~ and Duhem come to mind

His empiricism is the precursor of the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle In their earlier phase they

were supporters of psychologism and phenomenalism Psychologism goes back through Mach to Berkeley

its central claim is that observation statements are based on the sense-impressions or sense-data of a parshy

ticular observer Psychologism about observation statements usually goes with the view that physical obshy

jects are constructed out of sense-data the doctrine of phenomenalism Berkeley of course goes farthershy

they are sense-data The similarities stop there The atheistic positivism of modem empiricism in all other

respects was the adversary

Berkeley interestingly extends his anti-abstractionism to mathematics In the Analyst he queries

whether the Newtonian and Leibnizian calculus of differentials of the infidel mathematicians was more

distinctly conceived or more evidently deduced than the mysteries of religious faith The answer was no

Infinitesimally small quantities were something more mysterious and illogical than anything in the Apostles

Creed Infinitesimals are the ghosts of departed quantities He who can digest a second or third fluxion

need not methinks be squeamish about any point in Divinity Berkeley put his finger right on the paradox

and incomprehensibility in science and mathematics that Godel and quantum physics were to reveal They

work practically but there is no rational explanation why

16Principles sect 11 0-11 7 17But even Newton himself acknowledged the hypothetical nature of the theory of gravity lampYasubandhu also criticizes Vaisesika atomism and the Vaibh7tsika aggregates as naive forms of realism Vim11-15

Berkeley is a precursor of the anti-Newtonian anti-Cartesian paradigm which has emerged in

twentieth-century physics and it must be added is popular in New Age ideas of spiritualization of science

But he got things right for the wrong reasons-to shore-up theism On the whole it was as well that his

view did not prevail for it would have no matter how benevolently intended smothered the independent

emergence of science only just freeing itself from Church dogma

Virtuality there is no there there

I describe what Berkeley and Vasubandhu are doing very tentatively as virtuality They both deny the sepashy

rability of subjectivity and objectivity The solid verifiable experience we have of external material things is

rather a feature of the mind Aesthetic experience has always been a virtual immersion in an irreal world to

borrow Nelson Goodmans word beyond inside and outside In painting three-dimensional depth on a flat

surface is created by an arrangement of colors tones perspective and foreshortening On a flat movie

screen a pattern of light is read as people and things moving in deep space The images on a televi sion

screen are flashing electronic dots Now VRML graphics construct realistic environments you can move

around in architectural walk-throughs flight simulators and computer-generated worlds to go adventuring

in In a sense Berkeley and Vasub andhu are saying that all experience is of this nature There is nothing

behind it being simulated it is pure appearance but appearance with perfect clarity and order like the images

in a mirror It is hyperreal As the Larikvatara-sf1tra says

All things therefore are just like the images in a mirror which are devoid of any objectivity that one can get hold of

The hypothesis of objectivity is redundant

In his first book An Essay toward a New Theory of Vision Berkeley critiqued the notion of spashy

tiality along just these lines In reality we do not immediately perceive distance or outness Visual depth is

suggested by visual tactile and kinesthetic cues Three-dimensionality is abstracted from the sens~tions of

sight touch and motion In some places he seems to be saying that visual appearances are altogether flat

and two-dimensional elsewhere that they have no inherent geometric qualities of flatness or solidity at all

But his point is clear 3-D is synthesized out of the pointillist impingement of light rays on our eyes in conshy

junction with the other senses 19

Realism and Idealism

As stated my view is that neither Berkeley or Vasubandhu intended to be subjective idealists

Whether they avoided it is another matter though There is scholarship which backs me up and overthrows

the common assumption that they are-the Luce thesis for Berkeley and a strong current of recent

l~he neurophysiology of vision corroborates Berkeley The retinal image is flat and is processed edited coded and modshyeled in inconceivably complex ways by the neural-optical-brain-net to yield our experience of things out there

Yogacara scholarship I cannot detail these debates here but accept their views as corroborative of my own

The Luce thesis is much assailed but I think still stands because it does Berkeley the honor of crediting

what he plainly says

I do not argue against the existence of anyone thing that we can apprehend either by sense or reificashytions That the things I see with my eyes and touch with my hands do exist really exist I make not the least question The only thing whose existence we deny is that which philosophers call Matter or corposhyreal substance PHK sect 35

In a nutshell the Luce thesis is that Berkeley is a realist and not an idealist20 The immaterialist hyshy

pothesis is his main argument and esse is percipi is subordinate Critics may have a point that this wont

do thatthe proof that everything is ideas is crucial as Moore believed and the whole edifice collapses into

magnificent ruins without it Be that as it may Luce strenuously challenges the picture of Berkeley as a vishy

sionary who proved all things a dream In his way he was as hard-headed a realist as Dr Johnson He

looked straight at things and faced up to them as realists t1y to do2l Immaterialism is not panpsychism

pantheism acosmism world-denial or any kind of nebulous escapist other-worldliness It is not wannedshy

over Malebranche It is not the moonshine of denying that external things really exist Luce concludes as I

do that the labels realist and idealist are irrelevant Berkeley is sui generis The same is true I feel for

Vasubandhu Calling him an idealist or realist is comparing apples and oranges They both are trying to go

beyond these category mistakes

Similarly there is a growing body of work that maintains Vasubandhu is a realist22 In his autoshy

commentary Vasubandhu himself is as plain as could be thathe is not denying the existence of things

The theory of the non-substantiality of dharmas does not mean that dharmas are non-existent in al1 reshyspects but only in their imagined nature The ignorant imagine the dharmas to be of the nature of sub jectivity and objectivity etc Those dharmas are non-substantial with reference to that imagined nature and not with reference to their ~faille nDtur~~whic~alQne is the object of the knowledge of the Buddhas Thus through the the-ory of representation-only the non-substantiality of dharmas is taught tiDnnedenial of their existence Vimf witti 10 ~ 1

I fel

Vasubandhu was precise in distinguishing the llnagined nature (parikalpita 1I1m_) from ~ineffab~- Ir thingness (anabhiJsectpya lltmanl) Consequently Kochumuttam thinks that we should read him in a Kanti S~i

way l rl~The object arrived at in perception is never the thing-in-itself but only the image constructed by the J shy23

mind )1 1 l ~lV n l-e

l0AA Luce Berkeleys Immaterialism A Commentary on his A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowle~~ ~ if~ (London Thomas Nelson amp Sons 1945) F 1 vmiddot J 21Ibid28 11-) 22See especially Florin Giripescu Sutton Existence and Enlightenment in the Lilillvatllra-sfttra a study in the ontology U (-Ir~ and epistemology of the Yogllclra School of Mahsectyllna Buddhism SUNY 1991 Janice Dean Willis On Knowing Reality fJ ry The Tattvlrtha Chapter of AsaJJgas Bodhisattvabhilmi (New York Columbia University Press 1919) Thomas Kochumut- V( tom A Buddhist Doctrine of Experience A New Translation and Interpretation of the Works of Vasubandhu the Yogllcllrin gt j v (Delhi MotHal Banarsidass 1982) Stefan Anacker Seven Works of Vasubandhu The Buddhist Psychological Doctor~ v (Delhi Motilal B anarsid ass 1984) Bruce Cameron Hall The Meaning of Vij1apti in Vasubandhus Concept of Mind VlV)~ yJournal of the InternatiCJIal Association of Buddhist Studies 9 no 1 (1986) 1-23 and Charles Ian Harris The Continuitz I )ltff MsdhyamRka and Y5gIlC1lra in Mahayana Buddhism Bril1s Indological Library (Leiden 1991) L--~-~)~

Koumutt~ if~vv-~l ~ J 1_ _( c~ ~0J~_ VLa-Y~ ~~I

There are certainly plenty of idealistic elements in YogaCata texts and those who conclude that it is idealist

or absolutist are not entirely wrong Nevertheless Vasubandhu is in the final analysis presenting not an

idealistic ontology but a processual transformational theory of consciousness It may actually be more acshy

curate to label him a pluralist realist than an idealist24 The development of YoglIc1Ira illusionism was essenshy

tially pragmatic primarily designed to provide the metaphysical underpinning for prior meditational praxis

Idealistic-sounding pronouncements are put forward only in a provisional sense in order to divert sentient

beings from their preoccupation with materialism exactly Berkeleys purpose They are expedient means

(upaya)

One must never forget the basic Mabllyltaa doctrine rflpam JanyatII Sanyatsect rlTpam form is emptishy

ness emptiness form as the Heart Sutra concisely puts it Form is not being denied it just does not exist

as we conceive it Likewise for Berkeley things are real but they do not exist just as we conceive them

They are abstractly misconstrued for Berkeley and overlaid with imaginative construction parikalpita for

Vasubandhu He introduced the paratantra level of relative reality expressly to guard against a Mtrdhyamika

nihilism which is liable to appear to be utterly voiding out all things But Madhyamika voidness was itself

never meant to deny the ultimate reality of things (yathlbhUtam tathat6 dharmatE liInyatl are all essentially

synonyms for this)

Compare and COl1trast

The real problem for both is dualism Berkeley saw nothing but a disaster in the Cartesian-Lockean

division of mental and material substances Similarly for the Vasubandhu vikalpa or the dichotomization of

subject and object is the root of all our troubles This misapprehension sets in motion the whole train of repshy

resentation and imaginary or virtual transformations of consciousness (vijJianaparitlllma) But this is not

meant explicitly to deny an external realm (bllhyavi~aya) only to rule out language-constructed referentialshy

ity as anything more than notional

The mind is not imagining the world as such it is imagining a dualism of subject and object

Tritplikl17

Dualism of subject and object is the fundamental misconception from it proliferates all the other conceptual

superimpositions To repeat neither Berkeley or Vasubandhu are denying that phenomenal things exist

they are correcting our double vision of their existentiality

Berkeley throws out the object but retains the subject as one mental-spiritual substance

Vasubandhu throws both out atman-substances and dharma-substances For the Vasubandhu the duality

of grasper and grasped (grllbyagrabaka) self and thing is the problem for Berkeley it is the division of

spirit and matter There is only one substance for Berkeley the spiritual for Vasubandhu the distinction

between subject and object is illusory and there are no substances (svabhlvas) at all Neither the mental or

1A-rhis again is the view of Kochumuttom 1-26

material subjectivity or objectivity exist as such This is why he cannot simply be categorized as a subje cshy

tive idealist or a realist in the Western sense of those terms There is no mind or soul by whom things are

known or in whom they appear The wOrld-appearance may be an intersubjective manifestation but there

are no subjects as such These distinctions are all prajapti-m1l1ra or conceptual abstractions as Berkeley

would say They are fanya or void or as I term it virtual Still the concept citta-m1l1ra has sounded to

many like the substantialization of mental substance but that is precisely where misunderstanding has crept

in Scholars have made the mistake of attributing an extreme view ie idealism to Vasubandhu which the

tenor of his work and the whole of Buddhism precludes Even distinctions like citta-mlllra are prajifaptisshy

only provi sional designations which have a practical usefulness like Berkeleys abstractions VijJfaptis and

prajfaptis likewise are patterns of habit-energy not reified mind-entities and must be be regarded pragmatishy

cally1S

Berkeley seems at first glance to be more properly described as a subjective idealist but for him all

things have an objective reality in God They do not depend on the plurality of subjective minds per se pershy

ceiving them to exist God is the solution Berkeley finds for preserving the reality of things as self-identical

and continuous even when we do not perceive them He is the author and guarantor of the coherence of our

shared experience of a stable concrete world He is the plenitude of all possible perceptions

When I deny sensible things an existence out of the mind I do not mean my mind in particular but all minds Now it is plain that they have an existence exterior to my mind since I find them by experience to be independent of it There is therefore some other mind wherein they exist during the intervals beshytween the times of my perceiving them 26

Philosophers have never been very satisfied with this answer for it seems like a quite literal deus ex mashy

china The whole system collapses without this arbitrary hypothesis

The concept God is Berkeleys substitute for matter It logically explains everything matter did

Vasubandhu substitutes the lllayavij11ana for the external world the self and God it explains everything

they did and has often been criticized as the covertre-introduction of the soul and God as absolutes under a

new name It is understandable that many have seen a monistic idealism here whether or not Vasubandhu

intended it It can be argued that a Vedantic absolute idealism is the natural conclusion of his arguments but

he was debarred from it by his Buddhist doctrinal commitmentsn One does find in the later Vij1fanav~dins

Dhannapma Slntarak~ta and Kamala~a what can be called with provisos full-blown idealism 28 But it is

1S0n the pragmatism (arthakriy1t) of Yogllctrra see Miranda Shaw William James and YogaciIra Philosophy A Comparative Inquiry Philosophy East and West (Honolulu July 1987) 37223-44 26Third Dialogue 230-231 27This is the view advanced by Thomas Wood in Mind-Only A Philosophical and Doctrinal Analysis of the Vilfinavada Monographs of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy no 9 (University of Hawaii Press1991) 2~his is why it is a mistake to read Vasubandhu even through the bhivras of the later Vijl1inavadins anq Chinese translashytions and comm~taries (eg Hntan Tsangs Cheng Wei-Shilun) let alone the polemics of Vedantist (SaJtlkara Mltdhva and Vcaspatimisra) or realist (Gautama Vittsylyana and Kumirila) critics of YogltcTlra This is the approach of Jadunath Sinha in his Indian Realism (Motilal Banarsidass 1972) in which he reconstructs Vij11lnavlda on the basis of the polemshyics of its opponents Stefan Anacker remarks that it is only starting with Dharmapllla and with reservations that one is justified in calling Vijlflifav1tda idealist The scholastic attack and defense of citta-mlltra as idealism is far removed from the original aim of Yoglcllra to dissolve all theories The stark illusionism of the Vilqatikl physical objects do not exshyist is asserted with tbe understanding that all positive theories must ultimately be crossed over Citta-mltra cannot simshyply be equated with the sahopalambhadi (self-luminous cognition) principle of Dharmaldrti as it was treated by the later

)J~ 1 e~ ~V- -r C ~( Y ~~ id) J V J JJY~o cr~lt

[CV lt J ( ~ ~r v~ j ))f~ highly misleading to read Vasubandhu through the later scholastics There undoubtedly are idealistic e1e- (J ~ll) ments in Vasubandhu but they should not be taken as a total rejection of the traditionalrealistic pluralism of LJJJ-~ early Buddhism To reiterate Vasubandhu never meant for the ll1ayavijtfiiiia or citta-mltra to be hypostatized f( or absolutized He constantly repeats that they must be superseded as well All concepts are provisional ~) designations tainted by ignorance He does not establish citta as an ultimate reality Reality is ineffab~~ ~ (anabhilllpya) and clearly to be distinguished from our mental constructions ~--~~y

Both substitutions God and lIlaya in a sense function as phenomenological epoches or suspensions- v-rr of-belief in material exteriority Or we might say with Wittgenstein that we change how we see things but J leave everything as it was By rejecting the concepts of objective space and external objects we have ef-

I

fected a change in how we frame our experience but the world is there and as real as ever Our apprehenshy sion has been transformed in the direction of freedom from erroneous conceptualization only the names

have been changed demonstrati~ the power both Berkeley and Vasubandhu declared language has over

us Berkeley says that he is re-describing material things in the same way Copernicus re-described the rising ~ of the sun The sun still rises and things are still real but our understanding has been revolutionized (

fJ-

Vasubandhu could say the same about his de-exteriorization of bflhir-atthll ~ ~ Since he accepts the existence of individual selves and God Berkeley has the problem of explaining othe nature of the relation between the ideas in our minds and Gods mindVasubandhu appears to have no rv--i such problem since selves and God do not exist (making ita purer phenomenalism than Berkeleys) But t

comes in the back door whenin explaining how we all experienc~e same worldhe postulates a plurality of ( 1~ individual mind-streams mutually affecting each other Just how these mind-steams influence each other v 1~~~ however is not very satisfactorily explained The opponent asks just the question we would If only represhy

Itsentations exist and there is no body nor speech etc how are sheep for example killed by anybody In )

other words how can you say that anything happens at all By the power of reciprocal influence the two fv U representations become determined Because of transformation in anothers representation the act of killing (OyJY

and injury occurs is the answer29 Here he is saying that as phenomenal streams of energy we exert energic (11)shyeffects on each other while earlier in stanzas 3-6 he suggests that we are karmically synchronized Either ~i r

VJI ( way does make sense if we assume that he is talking about karmically and COllectively fruitioning vijfaptis - -

flv not die dinge-an-sich It makes no more sense to Vasubandhu than to Berkeley to talk about things out- rr

1side of experience There is experience-only 1 v ~ fro)

Vasubandhus notion of a godless soulless flux of ideas however would have been anathema to Ber- ~f~1l keley30 He had radicalized Lockes sensationalism by getting rid of material substance but retained mind- t lt ~ 11

(~~~ntylnuslrins 2 Vilfl 16-18 I am using here Joel Hoffmanns citation of the translation by CH Hamilton reprinted in Radhakrishnan

yenand Moore A Source Book in Indian Philosophy 30 Most interestingly Berkeley himself accepted this very possibility in his early notebooks the Philosophical Commenshytaries where he strenuously denied that the mind is a mental substance The very existence of Ideas constitutes the soul( 577) Mind is a congeries of Perceptions Take away Perceptions amp you take away the Mind put the perceptions amp you put the mind (580) Say you the Mind is not the Perceptions But that thing which perceives I answer you are abusd by the words that amp thing[] these are vague empty words without a meaning (581) However he soon repudiated these dangershy

substance In the TreaJise of Human Nature (1739-40) Hume went all the way and radicalized Berkeley he

got rid of mind-substance as well The mind was a stream of sensations and ideas only They are not in

some mind-container any more than qualities are in a material-container or things are in a space-container

The mind too is an abstraction Berkeleianism was now hoisted on its own abstractions Such a notion

would have appeared to Berkeley as the triumph of the very skepticism he had fought against For Berkeley

space and time are entirely relations between thing-ideas He disposes of absolute space but draws back

from the implications of time as just the succession of ideas raquo31 to preserve the trinity of Minds-Ideasshy

God 32 The Tbird Dialogue is devoted to objections that his ideas would skeptically undennine the absolute

spiritual sub stance of ego and God Hylas remarks

Notwithstanding all you have said to me it seems that according to your way of thinking and in conshysequence of your principles it should follow that you are only a system of floating ideas without subshystance to support them Words are not to be used without a meaning And as there is no more meaning in spiritual Substance than in material Substance the one is to be exploded as well as the other (pp 233)

Hume did not recoil from these floating ideas By carrying the logic of empiricism through to its ultimate

conclusion he arrives at a point of view similar to the fourth-century Buddhist rejection of self-substance

(svabbfva)

In conclusion we can say that Berkeleys strange denial of the existence of matter has been vindishy

cated in some measure by twentieth-century science We hear of the myth of matter33 and the death of mashy

terialism Science has shifted into a post-Newtonian post-mechanical post-material paradigm leaving beshy

hind those old ideas of matter and the cosmic machine that distressed Berkeley so much Relativity theory

has exploded the absolute space time and matter of the Principia Einstein discovers four-dimensional

space-time and that energy=matter x c2 he speaks of space as an optical illusion in tenns that would have

delighted Berkeley In atomic physics 1rucentter becomes mostly empty space with a few atoms or quarks

whirling around in it In quantum physics matter has dissolved into patterns of energy that manifest in deshy

pendence on an observer and becomes as paradoxical and elusive a thing as the smile on the Cheshire cat or

rather Schrodingers cat Consciousness is fundamental In the hardest sciences matter now becomes if

not pure ideas at least as mysterious and evanescent a thing as Berkeley thought it was For him the world

is a divine mystery that will never be reduced to a syllogism an equation or a Theory of Everything Many

of the great physicists of the twentieth-century came to recognize as Berkeley did the limits of scientific

reason and have embraced Berkeley-like idealisms and Pythagorean mysticism Reality is beyond the veils

ous notions and insisted on the unity and independence of the self I am not my ideas (3D II 233f) See Pitcher for fuller discussion 181e 31Principles sect 98 32Berkeley also augurs the phenomenological rejection of representational space As Calvin Schrag writes Experienced space is not an extensive continuum represented as a container in which physical objects and events are assigned a place Such a representation occurs only on the level of cosmological abstraction Experience and Being pg 54 3lpaul Davies and John Gribbin The Matter Myth Toward 21st-Century Science Viking Press 1991

and shadows of our physics equations34 Jeans wrote famously that the universe begins to look more like a

great thought than a great machine Eddington concluded that the stuff of the word is mind-stuff Henry

(1-~ a physicist at UC Berkeley said more recently that everything we know about nature is in accord

)-rf1~ith the idea that the fundamental process of nature lies outside space-time3S And Schrodinger stated that

the world extended in space and time is but our representation Experience does not give us the slightest

clue of its being anything besides that-as Berkeley was well aware

34Quotations from Ken Wilbur (ed) QUat1tum Questions mystical writings of the great physicists (Shambala 1984) 3sHuston Smith in an interview in Mother Jones magazine (Nov amp D~c 1991 pp 42-42

unconsciously-a certain picture of the world by means of comparative studies 4 From this viewpoint

global philosophy is expansionism through sympathetic incorporation Comparative philosophy has now

become a model of multicultural sensitivity and appreciation but the perspective of globalizing neutraliz ashy

tion is still there Some question the whole notion that a universal perspective a grand narrative in Lyotards

phrase which homogenizes the incommensurable is possible or even desirable To get around this comshy

parative philosophy currently stresses and celebrates the differences but it is not clear that a discourse of dishy

versityentirely escapes the old perspective This is the down side of this question and should not be overshy

played Universalization has also been more importantly the means of promoting human rights tolerance

and cultural understand ing

One of the undoubted achievements of comparative philosophy has been to dispel the clich that

Eastern philosophy is all mystical monistic other-worldliness Stereotypes about the mysterious East have

had a long life-the mystical dreamy despotic sensuous opulent spicy colorful cruel Orient The eastern

mind was supposedly inclined to idealism mysticism intuition and irrationalism in contradistinction to the

rationality empiricism logic and practicality of the western mind For a long time absolute idealism was

thought to be typical of Indian philosophy in particular We now recognize that this dichotomy was largely

the product of a selective vision at the service of imperialism and that as wide a spectrum of viewpoints is

to be found there as in Euro-American philosophy ranging from materialism and Nyfya- Vaie~ika realism

to a variety of idealisms Conversely the laquoWest has forms of idealism Platonic realism Neo-platonism

and the mediaeval doctors of the Church Berkeleys empiricism-idealism hybrid Malebranches Occasionshy

alism Leibnizian monads Spinozas pantheism Schellings romantic idealism Hegels absolute idealism

McTaggarts donnish personal idealism and Bradleys donnish Parmenidean absolutism that rival and surshy

pass in sublimity and transcendentality anything eastern If anything it may be more appropriate to speak

of the idealistic West The point of my title is that Berkeleys system of empirical idealism is at least as

strange and mysterious as anything from the other end of the Eastern hemisphere

Berkeley was greeted by contemporaries as an eccentric expounder of paradox and quickly became

a standing butt for quips like Dr Johnsons The initial response to his three philosophical classics A New

Theory of Vision The Principles of Human Understanding and Three Dialogues berween Hylas and Phishy

lonous was celebrity and ridicule eventually settling into his reputation as the author of the strange but unshy

answerable proof that to exist is to be perceived and so into his place among the illustrious oddities of

philosophy (that is if you leave out of account the strong impact of his sensationalism on Hume and his

ideality on Kant) The ingenious sophistry of his disproof of the existence of matter was obviously

wrong-headed and repugnant to all commonsense but appeared to be perfectly logical and irrefutable

Nothing was more calculated to get under the skin of good plain sense and has provoked plenty of rockshy

These remarks were prompted by a reading of Raimundo Pannikar What Is Comparative Philosophy Comparing in Interpreting Across BOWldaries New Essays in Compamtive Philosophy Gerald James Larson and Eliot Deutsch (ed) Princeton University Press 1988




















----

-- ~ y vyV ~J yl-~ (I -A _() gt
















f lt ()lt1











ism













subjective idealism























esse est percipi











ceived







gument















ist epistemology





























Cittamatra













































eralities L


( J~ ------ (r nri- i _J-~





in the Tractatus


















































































































I fel













(upaya)








synonyms for this)









Tritplikl17




















cally1S




















I




fJ-
























(svabbfva)










































----

-- ~ y vyV ~J yl-~ (I -A _() gt
















f lt ()lt1











ism













subjective idealism























esse est percipi











ceived







gument















ist epistemology





























Cittamatra













































eralities L


( J~ ------ (r nri- i _J-~





in the Tractatus


















































































































I fel













(upaya)








synonyms for this)









Tritplikl17




















cally1S




















I




fJ-
























(svabbfva)























----

-- ~ y vyV ~J yl-~ (I -A _() gt
















f lt ()lt1











ism













subjective idealism























esse est percipi











ceived







gument















ist epistemology





























Cittamatra













































eralities L


( J~ ------ (r nri- i _J-~





in the Tractatus


















































































































I fel













(upaya)








synonyms for this)









Tritplikl17




















cally1S




















I




fJ-
























(svabbfva)
























ism













subjective idealism























esse est percipi











ceived







gument















ist epistemology





























Cittamatra













































eralities L


( J~ ------ (r nri- i _J-~





in the Tractatus


















































































































I fel













(upaya)








synonyms for this)









Tritplikl17




















cally1S




















I




fJ-
























(svabbfva)



























esse est percipi











ceived







gument















ist epistemology





























Cittamatra













































eralities L


( J~ ------ (r nri- i _J-~





in the Tractatus


















































































































I fel













(upaya)








synonyms for this)









Tritplikl17




















cally1S




















I




fJ-
























(svabbfva)





























ist epistemology





























Cittamatra













































eralities L


( J~ ------ (r nri- i _J-~





in the Tractatus


















































































































I fel













(upaya)








synonyms for this)









Tritplikl17




















cally1S




















I




fJ-
























(svabbfva)





























Cittamatra













































eralities L


( J~ ------ (r nri- i _J-~





in the Tractatus


















































































































I fel













(upaya)








synonyms for this)









Tritplikl17




















cally1S




















I




fJ-
























(svabbfva)












































eralities L


( J~ ------ (r nri- i _J-~





in the Tractatus


















































































































I fel













(upaya)








synonyms for this)









Tritplikl17




















cally1S




















I




fJ-
























(svabbfva)
























in the Tractatus


















































































































I fel













(upaya)








synonyms for this)









Tritplikl17




















cally1S




















I




fJ-
























(svabbfva)











































































































I fel













(upaya)








synonyms for this)









Tritplikl17




















cally1S




















I




fJ-
























(svabbfva)








































































I fel













(upaya)








synonyms for this)









Tritplikl17




















cally1S




















I




fJ-
























(svabbfva)









































I fel













(upaya)








synonyms for this)









Tritplikl17




















cally1S




















I




fJ-
























(svabbfva)






























(upaya)








synonyms for this)









Tritplikl17




















cally1S




















I




fJ-
























(svabbfva)

































cally1S




















I




fJ-
























(svabbfva)


























I




fJ-
























(svabbfva)



































(svabbfva)






























Documents

Berk.eley and the Mysterious West - Theodore Benke · Berk.eley and the Mysterious West Theodore Benke Being in company with a gentleman who thought fit to maintain Dr. Berkeley's