Buddhism and Western philosophy

Part of a series on
Philosophy
Philosophy portal Contents Outline Lists Glossary History Categories Disambiguation
Philosophies By period Ancient Ancient Egyptian Ancient Greek Medieval Renaissance Modern Contemporary Analytic Continental By region African Egypt Ethiopia South Africa Eastern philosophy Chinese Indian Indonesia Japan Korea Vietnam Indigenous American Aztec philosophy Middle Eastern philosophy Iranian Western American British French German Italian Russian By religion Buddhist Confucian Christian Hindu Islamic Jain Jewish Taoist
Branches Epistemology Ethics Logic Metaphysics Aesthetics Education History Language Law Metaphilosophy Mind Ontology Phenomenology Political Religion Science
Philosophers Aestheticians Epistemologists Ethicists Logicians Metaphysicians Philosophers of mind Social and political philosophers Women in philosophy
v t e

Buddhist thought and Western philosophy include several parallels.

In antiquity, the Greek philosopher Pyrrho traveled with Alexander the Great's army on its conquest of India (327 to 325 BCE) and based his philosophy of Pyrrhonism on what he learned there.^[1] Christopher I. Beckwith has identified a translation of the Buddhist three marks of existence^[2] in Pyrrho's teachings.

In the modern era, a few European thinkers such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche engaged with Buddhist thought. Likewise, in Asian nations with Buddhist populations, there were also attempts to bring the insights of Western thought to Buddhist philosophy, as can be seen in the rise of Buddhist modernism.

After WWII spread of Buddhism to the West scholarly interest arose in a comparative, cross-cultural approach between Eastern and Western philosophy. Much of this work is now published in academic journals such as Philosophy East and West.

Hellenistic philosophy

According to

Adrian Kuzminski argues for direct influence between these two systems of thought. In Pyrrhonism: How the Ancient Greeks Reinvented Buddhism, Kuzminski writes: "its origin can plausibly be traced to the contacts between Pyrrho and the sages he encountered in India, where he traveled with Alexander the Great."^[4] According to Kuzminski, both philosophies argue against assenting to any dogmatic assertions about an ultimate metaphysical reality behind our sense impressions as a tactic to reach tranquility and both also make use of logical arguments against other philosophies in order to expose their contradictions.^[4]

Hume and Not-Self

Part of a series on
Buddhism
Glossary Index Outline
History Timeline The Buddha Pre-sectarian Buddhism Councils Silk Road transmission of Buddhism Decline in the Indian subcontinent Later Buddhists Buddhist modernism
Dharma Concepts Four Noble Truths Noble Eightfold Path Dharma wheel Five Aggregates Impermanence Suffering Not-self Dependent Origination Middle Way Emptiness Morality Karma Rebirth Saṃsāra Cosmology
Buddhist texts Buddhavacana Early Texts Tripiṭaka Mahayana Sutras Pāli Canon Sanskrit literature Tibetan canon Chinese canon Post-canon
Practices Three Jewels Buddhist Paths to liberation Five precepts Perfections Meditation Philosophical reasoning Devotional practices Merit making Recollections Mindfulness Wisdom Sublime abidings Aids to Enlightenment Monasticism Lay life Buddhist chant Pilgrimage Vegetarianism
Nirvāṇa Awakening Four Stages Arhat Pratyekabuddha Bodhisattva Buddha
Traditions Theravāda Pāli Mahāyāna Hinayana Chinese Vajrayāna Tibetan Navayana Newar
Buddhism by country Bhutan Brazil Cambodia China India Indonesia Japan Korea Laos Malaysia Mongolia Myanmar Russia Singapore US Sri Lanka Taiwan Thailand Tibet Vietnam
Religion portal
v t e

The Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote:

"When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception"^[5]

According to Hume then there is nothing that is constantly stable which we could identify as the self, only a flow of differing experiences. Our view that there is something substantive which binds all of these experiences together is for Hume merely imaginary. The self is a fiction that is attributed to the entire flow of experiences.^[6]

Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other, and never all exist at the same time. It cannot, therefore, be from any of these impressions, or from any other, that the idea of self is deriv'd; and consequently there is no such idea...I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.^[5]

This '

British philosopher Derek Parfit has argued for a reductionist and deflationary theory of personal identity in his book Reasons and Persons. According to Parfit, apart from a causally connected stream of mental and physical events, there are no "separately existing entities, distinct from our brains and bodies". Parfit concludes that "Buddha would have agreed."^[8] Parfit also argues that this view is liberating and leads to increased empathy.

Is the truth depressing? Some may find it so. But I find it liberating, and consoling. When I believed that my existence was such a further fact, I seemed imprisoned in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my lives and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.^[9]

According to The New Yorker's Larissa MacFarquhar, passages of Reasons and Persons have been studied and chanted at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery.^[10]

Other Western philosophers that have attacked the view of a fixed self include Daniel Dennett (in his paper 'The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity') and Thomas Metzinger ('The Ego Tunnel').

Idealism

Friedrich Nietzsche admired Buddhism, writing that: "Buddhism already has - and this distinguishes it profoundly from Christianity - the self-deception of moral concepts behind it - it stands, in my language, Beyond Good and Evil."^[22] He further stated: "Buddhism is the only genuinely positive religion to be encountered in history, and this applies even to its epistemology (which is a strict phenomenalism) – It does not speak of a “struggle with sin,” but, yielding to reality, of the “struggle with suffering.”^[22] Nietzsche (as well as Buddha) accepted that all is change and becoming, and both sought to create an ethics which was not based on a God or an Absolutist Being.^[23] Nietzsche saw himself as undertaking a similar project to the Buddha. "I could become the Buddha of Europe", he wrote in 1883, "though frankly I would be the antipode of the Indian Buddha".^[24]

However, Nietzsche believed that Buddhism's goal of Nirvana was a form of life denying

Antoine Panaïoti argues in Nietzsche and Buddhist Philosophy that both of these systems of thought begin by wrestling with the problem of nihilism and that they both develop a therapeutic outlook for dealing with the suffering and anxiety brought about by the crisis of nihilism. While Nietzsche and Buddhism do diverge in some ways, which is why Nietzsche saw himself as an 'Anti-Buddha", Panaïoti stresses the similarity of both systems as paths towards a "vision of great health" that allows one to deal with the impermanent world of becoming by accepting it as it truly is.^[26] Ultimately both world views have as their ideal what Panaïoti calls "great health perfectionism" which seeks to remove unhealthy tendencies from human beings and reach an exceptional state of self-development.

Robert G. Morrison has also written on the "ironic affinities" between Nietzsche and Pali Buddhism through close textual comparison, such as that between Nietzsche's 'self-overcoming' (Selbstüberwindung) and the Buddhist concept of mental development (citta-bhavana).

David Loy also quotes Nietzsche's views on the subject as "something added and invented and projected behind what there is" (Will to Power 481) and on substance ("The properties of a thing are effects on other 'things' ... there is no 'thing-in-itself.'" WP 557), which are similar to Buddhist nominalist views. Loy however sees Nietzsche as failing to understand that his promotion of heroic aristocratic values and affirmation of will to power is just as much of a reaction to the 'sense of lack' which arises from the impermanence of the subject as what he calls slave morality.^[29]

Comparative work has also been done by Japanese interpreters of Nietzsche and Buddhism, such as Nishitani Keiji, in his The Self Overcoming Nihilism (Albany, N.Y., 1990), and Abe Masao in his essays on Nietzsche. In his "The History of Western Philosophy", Bertrand Russell pitted Nietzsche against the Buddha, ultimately criticizing Nietzsche for his promotion of violence, elitism and hatred of compassionate love.

Phenomenology and Existentialism

Christian Coseru argues in his monograph "Perceiving reality" that Buddhist philosophers such as Dharmakirti, Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla "share a common ground with phenomenologists in the tradition of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty." That common ground is the notion of the intentionality of consciousness.^[34] Coseru compares the concepts of the object aspect (grāhyākāra) and the subject aspect (grāhakākāra) of consciousness to the Husserlian concepts of Noesis and Noema.

Modern Buddhist thinkers who have been influenced by Western Phenomenology and

Complete linguistic analysis of the Buddhist canonical writings provides us with a perfect opportunity of becoming acquainted with this means of seeing the world which is completely opposite of our European manner of observation, of setting ourselves in its perspective, and of making its dynamic results truly comprehensive through experience and understanding. For us, for anyone, who lives in this time of the collapse of our own exploited, decadent culture and has had a look around to see where spiritual purity and truth, where joyous mastery of the world manifests itself, this manner of seeing means a great adventure. That Buddhism - insofar as it speaks to us from pure original sources - is a religio-ethical discipline for spiritual purification and fulfillment of the highest stature - conceived of and dedicated to an inner result of a vigorous and unparalleled, elevated frame of mind, will soon become clear to every reader who devotes themselves to the work. Buddhism is comparable only with the highest form of the philosophy and religious spirit of our European culture. It is now our task to utilize this (to us) completely new Indian spiritual discipline which has been revitalized and strengthened by the contrast.[35]

Fred J Hanna and Lau Kwok Ying both note that when Husserl calls Buddhism "transcendental" he is placing it on the same level as his own transcendental phenomenology.^[36] Also, that Husserl called Buddhism a "great adventure" is significant, since he referred to his own philosophy in that way as well - as a methodology which changes the way one views reality which also brings about personal transformation.^[35] Husserl also wrote about Buddhist philosophy in an unpublished manuscript "Sokrates - Buddha" in which he compared the Buddhist philosophical attitude with the Western tradition. Husserl saw a similarity between the Socratic good life lived under the maxim "Know yourself" and the Buddhist philosophy, he argues that they both have the same attitude, which is a combination of the pure theoretical attitude of the sciences and the pragmatic attitudes of everyday life. This third attitude is based on "a praxis whose aim is to elevate humankind through universal scientific reason."^[36]

Husserl also saw a similarity between Buddhist analysis of experience and his own method of epoche which is a suspension of judgment about metaphysical assumptions and presuppositions about the 'external' world (assumptions he termed 'the naturalistic attitude). However Husserl also thought that Buddhism has not developed into a unifying science which can unite all knowledge since it remains a religious-ethical system and hence it is not able to qualify as a full transcendental phenomenology.^[36]

According to Aaron Prosser, "The phenomenological investigations of Siddhartha Gautama and Edmund Husserl arrive at the exact same conclusion concerning a fundamental and invariant structure of consciousness. Namely, that object-directed consciousness has a transcendental correlational intentional structure, and that this is fundamental -- in the sense of basic and necessary--to all object-directed experiences."^[38]

Heidegger

According to Reinhard May and Graham Parkes,

The German existentialist Karl Jaspers also wrote on the philosophy of the Buddha in his "The Great Philosophers" (1975). He recommended that Western Christians could learn from the Buddha, praised his cosmopolitanism and the flexibility and relatively non-dogmatic worldview of Buddhism.^[50]

Kyoto School

The

Many modern interpreters of Nagarjuna (Jay Garfield, C.W. Huntington) take a Wittgensteinian or Post-Wittgensteinian critical model in their work on Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophy.[57] Ives Waldo writes that Nagarjuna's criticism of the idea of svabhava (own-being) "directly parallels Wittgenstein's argument that a private language (an empiricist language) is impossible. Having no logical links (criteria) to anything outside their defining situation, its words must be empty of significance or use."^[58]

See also

• Buddhist philosophy
• Buddhism and psychology
• Buddhism in the West
• Buddhism and Christianity
• Buddhism and science

References