Milinda’s Questions

(previous installment here)

The concluding chapter of OBM is quite brief. Griffiths summarizes his findings thus:

It seems, then, that in looking at the Indian Buddhist debates surrounding the attainment of cessation the following conclusions can be drawn about the basic Buddhist view of the relations between the mental and the physical. First, the mental and the physical are categories of event which are phenomenologically irreducibly different. Second, these events are not attributes or properties of any substance; to give an account of their causal functions and interrelations is to give an exhaustive account of what there is in the world. Third, certain kinds of causal interaction between the mental and the physical are envisaged, but no event of one class may ever come into existence solely as the result of the occurrence of an event of another class. In sum, we have a non-substantivist event-based interactionist psycho-physical dualism.
(emphasis added)

It is valuable to have this explicit formulation of the Buddhist position in terms of contemporary philosophy of mind. My disappointment arises because I do not see that that formulation is a result of Griffiths’study; indeed, it is just as much a presupposition of his investigation as a conclusion. Griffiths demonstrates in practice that the three propositions in question are adequate interpretative hypotheses for understanding the Buddhist text under consideration, in the sense that they are consistent with the most plausible analyses of those texts. He does not, however, show that the argumentative purpose of those texts, in their original contexts, were to establish a view such as that he describes. He does not show that they were formulated in response to other views on the same topic that differed in significant ways (for example, parallelist or epiphenomenalist views), or that such views have sufficient strength as alternative hypotheses to make these particular texts and arguments valid test cases of Griffiths’ interpretation.

Moreover, given that none of those the three conclusions should be particularly controversial to those acquainted with the subject matter (with a partial exception to be discussed below*), I do not see that he does much to advance the reader’s understanding of the mind/body problem. Those acquainted with contemporary discussions of the philosophy of mind in Western traditions will find his treatment cursory and unsatisfactory.

*The Yogacarins are somewhat of an exception here; Griffiths’ claim might be considered controversial with regard to them. Here’s how he addresses the issue:

The question of the difference between the mental and the physical is naturally answered differently by the Yogacara, since for them there is no ontological distinction between the two in any sense. Everything is mind. This ontological difference between the Yogacara and the other Indian Buddhists makes surprisingly little difference to the way in which the philosophers of the former school discussed the problem. They preserve the fundamental phenomenological difference between the mental and the (quasi)physical and are thus still under obligation to provide a causal account of the relations between members of the two sets.

The classical Buddhist texts and debates are largely irrelevant to the concerns of contemporary philosophers of mind because their primary focus is on an issue of temporal causation: What are the causal relationships between the mental states of the meditator before, during, and after the state of cessation, given the standard accounts of how the meditator’s intentions are efficacious in the meditative process? In contrast, the main concern of contemporary discussion is the synchronic causal relations between physical and mental states. Obviously, there is a connection between the two issues: One possible explanation for the continuity between temporally separated mental states is that they are causally linked through physical states. Yet the Buddhist texts Griffiths onsiders seem to ignore that solution, and instead posit a variety of other devices (bhavanga, alayavijnana) to account for that connection. (There is a major problem as to whether these solutions are compatible with the fundamental Buddhist principle of anicca, but that’s a different issue.)

Griffiths is well aware of this problem, as he indicates in the following passage:

Finally, and oddest of all, in the other cases in which the practitioner’s consciousness can be caused to emerge from the attainment of cessation, for example by the needs of the community or the summons of the Buddha, the events which cause this have nothing whatever to do with the continuum of physical events that defines the practitioner in the attainment of cessation. The needs of the community are, presumably, collections of mental and physical events which are, in some more or less well-defined sense, external to the practitioner. Further, the practitioner cannot be aware of these events, because then some mental event would be occurring in the continuum that constitutes the practitioner. This would violate the canonical definition of the attainment of cessation. There must, therefore, be some kind of (in principle specifiable) type of causal connection between the collection of mental and physical events that constitutes the needs of the community and the continuum of physical events that constitutes the practitioner in the attainment of cessation. It is not easy to see what kind of connection this could be, given that it cannot be one of direct awareness on the part of the practitioner. And in fact the texts make no effort to develop this possibility or to specify the the kind of causal connection that obtains; the questions I have been asking in the last few paragraphs are nowhere asked or answered by the texts, a fact that indicates the non-centrality of the possibilities suggested here to the tradition.

This in interesting. Here Griffiths states, in admirably clear and explicit form, certain questions that seem obvious if one takes the Buddhist metaphysics of the self seriously as an explanation of intersubjective experience, yet concedes that the tradition does not seem to confront or even be aware of these questions.

In this light, it seems legitimate to ask whether Griffiths retains his optimism about the project of cross-cultural philosophizing. Granted, OBM effectively refutes the most extreme theses of "cultural incommensurability," those according to which the concerns of classical Indian philosophers and contemporary Western scientists are so radically different that it is illegitimate to construe them as in any way addressing the same concerns. But I submit that the notion of rationality has to do not merely with whether claims are intelligible as speaking to a common issue, but to the entire form of a discussion: which questions are emphasized and which ignored provide important clues to how those doctrines and arguments were understood by their original proponents.

Griffiths’ career subsequent to writing OBM may shed some light on these issues. With one exception, all his subsequent books have been on interreligious or explicitly Christian topics. He became a Catholic in 1996, and currently holds a Chair in Catholic Studies at the U. of Illinois—Chicago. Not having read any of his other books, I can only speculate as to the course Griffiths on views have taken on the subject of whether different traditions address similar questions, and whether the answers provided can be compared from some neutral standpoint. (Indeed, as a scholar, it would be inappropriate for him to let his personal history influence his writing too greatly.) There’s an interesting clue, though, in this review which Griffiths wrote in 2000 of a volume entitled Buddhist Theology:

To become seriously Buddhist, I would like to think (because I am not myself, I can only speak from without), involves permitting, joyfully, a tradition of intellectual practice to reshape and reorder one’s own intellectual practice, to immolate confidence in one’s intellectual independence in the fires of compassion, and by so doing to offer one’s mind to the tradition and the tradition’s mode of reasoning to the world. Anything less is just not serious: it is a game without stakes, a theology without risk. . . .

That the opportunity to begin engaging in genuinely theological Buddhist thought has not yet been grasped is evident from the fact that, for the most part, “Buddhism” serves in these essays to label an instrument, a set of conceptual devices, to be used in the service of something other than itself—as an acolyte to the desires and needs of feminists, psychoanalysts, and so on. We will see Buddhist theology being done only when we see Buddhists writing and thinking with sufficient intellectual confidence to construe all other intellectual activities as acolytes in the service of Buddhism, jottings in the margin of the Buddhist master-text.

It’s instructive to compare this quotation with the one from 1986 with which I began this series of posts, and to ask to what extent the more recent quotation represents a development or a wholesale rejection of his earlier view. Pursuing this question would, however, make this already overlong post even lengthier than it already is.