Karmic Imprints, Exclusion, and the Creation of the Worlds of Conventional Experience in Dharmakīrti’s Thought

Prueitt, Catherine

doi:10.1007/s11841-017-0618-5

Cited by 3 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Indeed, Lusthaus's Buddhist Phenomenology (2002) is the first academic monograph that touches upon the intersubjective and collective aspects of Buddhist soteriology mediated by the concept of karma. More than a decade later, Tzohar (2016), Catherine Prueitt (2018), and Kachru (2019) rekindled this discussion, collectively examining the conceptualization and preconditions of intersubjectivity in Indian Yogācāra. Briefly speaking, both Tzohar and Prueitt analyze how Indian Yogācārins such as Vasubandhu and Dharmakīrti developed a constellation of concepts related to shared or similar karma to explain how the illusion of experiencing one shared external world arise.…”

Section: Intersubjectivity and Incommensurabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Adhipati, Yogācāra Intersubjectivity, and Soteriology in Kuiji’s Commentaries

2024

SOPHIA

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This study sheds light on a key concept of Yogācāra intersubjectivity that played a significant role in medieval Chinese Yogācāra. Specifically, it analyzes how Kuiji 窺基 (632–682) reinterprets adhipati (activating and amplifying influence; Ch: zengshang 增上 or zengshang li 增上力 or zengshang yuan 增上緣) to account for intersubjective karmic interactions across different lifeworlds in the events of teaching and killing.As this line of investigation shows, Kuiji’s theory of adhipati attempts to sidestep the entanglement of the problems of intersubjectivity and incommensurable worlds in Yogācāra. Extant scholarship on intersubjectivity often presumes one spatio-temporal world populated by sentient beings and insentient objects, which is fundamentally at odds with the Yogācāra tenet that each mental stream generates its distinct lifeworld. To address the pragmatic question of how different mental continuums of consciousnesses can impinge into each other’s lifeworlds, Kuiji employed adhipati in a specific way to account for intersubjective interplay across different, potentially incommensurable worlds. In this framing of intersubjectivity, the problem of one world or many worlds is explained non-dualistically: these lifeworlds are neither the same nor different, neither one nor many, but karmically interconnected.Expanding on recent discussions of the puzzle of intersubjectivity in Yogācāra, this paper shows that Kuiji’s deployment of adhipati provides an account of genuine intersubjectivity in which different mental continuums are recognized as subjects and engage in causal interactions among different spatio-temporal worlds. In Kuiji’s framing, this genuine intersubjectivity gives rise to the sense of one shared world.

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Section: Intersubjectivity and Incommensurabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Adhipati, Yogācāra Intersubjectivity, and Soteriology in Kuiji’s Commentaries

2024

SOPHIA

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“…For the Tibetan reception of Dharmakīrti, see Dreyfus (1997). 16 For the role that karmic history plays in Dharmakīrti's account, see Prueitt (2018). 17 Ganeri relates apoha to the concept of a quality space as discussed by Clark (1993;.…”

Section: The Apoha Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Fifth, conceptual cognition is motivationally and affectively biased. Concept formationthe construction of equivalence classes via exclusion-always happens under the influence of past experience and in the approach-versus-avoid context of obtaining the desirable and avoiding the undesirable (Dunne 2011;Prueitt 2018). We are motivated both to focus on certain causal effects as being relevant to our goals and to overlook others as being irrelevant.…”

Section: The Apoha Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Dharmakīrti's answer is that we take the phenomenal representations to be the same because they all cause us to judge perceptually "this is blue," where this judgement is conditioned by antecedent and historically formed dispositions (Dunne 2004: 109-126;Prueitt 2018). In other words, we take the representations to be the same because they all produce the same effect, namely, the same perceptual judgement.…”

Section: The Apoha Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

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What’s in a Concept? Conceptualizing the Nonconceptual in Buddhist Philosophy and Cognitive Science

Thompson

2023

Sophia Studies in Cross-Cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures

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O]ne and the same philosophical issue can be a matter of contention in philosophical centers entirely distinct from each other, widely separated in time and space, and belonging to disparate cultures. And this in its turn provides a compelling argument for two things: first, for the genuine universality of some major philosophical problems; and, second, for the desirability of further comparative study of the respects in which the two philosophical traditions in question may illustrate this universality… (Strawson 1999: 327) A recurrent problem in the philosophical debates over whether there is or can be nonconceptual experience or whether all experience is conceptually structured, mediated, or dependent is the lack of a generally accepted account of what concepts are. Without a precise specification of what a concept is, the notion of nonconceptuality is equally ill defined. This problem cuts across contemporary philosophy and cognitive science as well as classical Indian philosophy (Siderits, Tillemans, and Chakrabarti 2011), and it affects how we go about philosophically "engaging Buddhism" (Garfield 2015) in particular. Buddhist philosophers generally argue that our everyday experience of the world is conceptually constructed. For example, they argue that what appear to us to be stable, enduring entities possessing properties and belonging to kinds are fictions created by the imposition of concepts onto the incessant flux of momentary events. At the same time, "nonconceptual cognition" (nirvikalpa jñāna) marks the limits of conceptuality.But what precisely do "conceptual" and "nonconceptual" mean? Consider that "concept" is routinely used to translate the Sanskrit term, vikalpa; nirvikalpa is accordingly rendered as "nonconceptual." But vikalpa has also been rendered as "imagination" (Matilal 1986: 312-315), "discriminative construction" (Urban and Griffiths 1994), "discursive thought" (Wayman 1992), and "discrimination" (Sharf 2018). Related terms, such as kalpanā (conceptualization/mental construction) and kalpanāpoḍha (devoid of conceptualization/mental construction), have also been rendered in various ways. Besides the question of how to translate these terms in any givenBuddhist philosophical text, how should we relate them to current philosophical or cognitive scientific uses of the term "concept"? More generally, given that the relationship between the conceptual and the nonconceptual has been one of the central and recurring issues for the

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What's in a Concept? Conceptualizing the Nonconceptual in Buddhist Philosophy and Cognitive Science

Thompson¹

2020

Preprint

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A recurrent problem in the philosophical debates over whether there is or can be nonconceptual experience or whether all experience is conceptually structured or mediated is the lack of a generally accepted account of what concepts are. Without a precise specification of what a concept is, the notion of nonconceptuality is equally ill defined. This problem cuts across contemporary philosophy and cognitive science as well as classical Indian philosophy, and it affects how we go about philosophically engaging Buddhism. Buddhist philosophers generally argue that our everyday experience of the world is conceptually constructed, whereas “nonconceptual cognition” (nirvikalpa jñāna) marks the limits of conceptuality. But what precisely do “conceptual” and “nonconceptual” mean? Consider that “concept” is routinely used to translate the Sanskrit term vikalpa; nirvikalpa is accordingly rendered as “nonconceptual.” But vikalpa has also been rendered as “imagination,” “discriminative construction,” “discursive thought,” and “discrimination.” Related terms, such as kalpanā (conceptualization/mental construction) and kalpanāpoḍha (devoid of conceptualization/mental construction), have also been rendered in various ways. Besides the question of how to translate these terms in any given Buddhist philosophical text, how should we relate them to current philosophical or cognitive scientific uses of the term “concept”? More generally, given that the relationship between the conceptual and the nonconceptual has been one of the central and recurring issues for the Buddhist philosophical tradition altogether, can Buddhist philosophy bring fresh insights to our contemporary debates about whether experience has nonconceptual content? And can contemporary philosophy and cognitive science help to illuminate or even resolve some older Buddhist philosophical controversies? A comprehensive treatment of these questions across the full range of Buddhist philosophy and contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive science would be impossible. I restrict my focus to certain core ideas from Abhidharma, Dharmakīrti’s apoha theory, and Yogācāra, as refracted through current philosophical and cognitive science views of concepts. I argue for the following five general theses. First, cognitive science can help us to clarify Abhidharma issues about the relation between nonconceptual sense perception and conceptual cognition. Second, we can resolve these Abhidharma issues using a model of concept formation based on reading Dharmakīrti through cognitive science glasses. Third, this model of concept formation offers a new perspective on the contemporary conceptualist versus nonconceptualist debate. Fourth, Yogācāra offers a conception of nonconceptual experience absent from this debate. In many Yogācāra texts, awareness that is said to be free from the duality of “grasper” (grāhaka) and “grasped” (grāhya) is nonconceptual. None of the contemporary philosophical arguments for nonconceptualism is adequate or suitable for explicating this unique kind of nonconceptuality. Thus, Yogācāra is relevant to what has been called the problem of the “scope of the conceptual,” that is, how the conceptual/nonconceptual distinction should be drawn. For this reason, among others, Yogācāra has something to offer philosophy of mind. Moreover, using cognitive science, we may be able to render some of the Yogācāra ideas in a new way, while in turn recasting ideas from cognitive science. Fifth, in pursuing these aims, I hope to show the value of thinking about the mind from a cross-cultural philosophical perspective. Sixth, from an enactive cognitive science perspective informed by Buddhist philosophy, a concept is not a mental entity by which an independent subject grasps or represents independent objects, but rather one aspect of a complex dynamic process in which the mind and the world are interdependent and co-emergent poles.

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Karmic Imprints, Exclusion, and the Creation of the Worlds of Conventional Experience in Dharmakīrti’s Thought

Cited by 3 publications

References 18 publications

Adhipati, Yogācāra Intersubjectivity, and Soteriology in Kuiji’s Commentaries

Adhipati, Yogācāra Intersubjectivity, and Soteriology in Kuiji’s Commentaries

What’s in a Concept? Conceptualizing the Nonconceptual in Buddhist Philosophy and Cognitive Science

What's in a Concept? Conceptualizing the Nonconceptual in Buddhist Philosophy and Cognitive Science

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