[Buddha-l] Moment of individuation

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Fri, 2005-04-22 at 08:43 -0400, Stanley J. Ziobro II wrote:

> If you would not prefer the adverb "essentially" how about "basically" or
> "fundamentally"?  That said, since you've brought up the matter of
> essences, it is the case that such referents are found in Greek, Indian,
> and related philosophies, is it not?

Yes, and as I am sure you are aware, Buddhist philosophers in India
routinely and consistently argued against the idea that things have
essences or natures. All notions of essence are said by Buddhists to be
conceptual fictions and social conventions. 

> I've been wondering, though, whether the notions of soul that
> Buddhists deny are the same notions of soul held by philosophers and
> theologians in the West.

For the past thirty years or so I have been insisting that Buddhists
never denied souls. What they denied was an enduring and unchanging
self. Buddhist psychology (the study of souls) talks of cognition and
conation in ways very similar to the way that medieval European
psychologists spoke of the faculties of the soul. Where Buddhists tended
to differ from their Indian counterparts, though, was that most systems
of thought posited that the soul is an eternal substance (a non-material
one) that has transitory properties, such as knowledge, ignorance,
happiness, sadness and desire temporarily attached to it. The Buddhist
position was that knowledge, ignorance, happiness, pain, desire and so
forth are events that are neither substances not qualia that inhere in a
substance. The concept of "mind", just like the concept of "body", is a
conceptual fiction and a conventional designation rather than an
ultimately real thing.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico