[Buddha-l] Re: Emptiness

[Richard Hayes]

On Tuesday 23 October 2007 08:42, curt wrote:

> I am not a Yogacara expert, not by a million miles. 

Nor am I. I have never read any account of Yogacara that made sense to me. The 
texts are opaque to me in Sanskrit and get even worse when people try to 
explain them in some other language.

> But the idea that 
> "everything is (caused by) mind alone" (to cast Yogacara in a crude
> reductionist light) has something very important going for it, at least
> when compared to "physicalism". 

While I agree that there are serious problems involved in physicalism, I have 
never encountered any other explanation of mental events that is any less 
problematic. It seems to me that to insist that ANY account of the relation 
between bodily states and mental states is uniquely worthy of consideration 
is to plunge headlong into inexcusable dogmatism.

> This is precisely the fact that, on the 
> one hand, the physical can only be known through the mind, for to "know"
> requires a "mind" - while, on the other hand, at least in theory one can
> (and many have) suppose that "mind" is "prior to" the physical.

Surely this is begging the question, for you are assuming that the mind is 
something that does the knowing and that it could do the knowing without the 
help of the body. But that is precisely the contested issue. Your claim 
hardly rules out the possibility that the mind is what the brain does (as 
Pinker puts it). 

I am not sure how one could establish the priority of mind to body in a 
non-question-begging way. My old friend Dharmakirti tried very hard to 
establish logical priority of the mind, but he offers no compelling reasons 
to believe that mental events owe their existence to other mental events 
rather than to physical events. What he DOES do rather well is to show that 
the physicalists of his day offer no compelling reasons to believe that 
mental events owe their existence to physical events. I'm not sure things 
have changed in principle very much since he wrote some 1500 years ago.

While I think it would be irrational to insist that physicalism is the only 
reasonable explanation of mental events, I also think that physicalism is as 
good as any other working hypothesis that anyone has concocted, and I don't 
think that adopting physicalism as a heuristic is a prima facie sign of 
insanity. Given that there are physicalists in our day and age, and given 
that the best of Buddhist practice should be able to work within the 
framework of almost any theory, I find it interesting to think about how one 
might present a physicalist Buddhist theory as a basis for productive 
practice.

While I readily acknowledge that the relation of mind and body is one of the 
questions that the Buddha did not answer and said was irrelevant to the 
attainment of nirvana, I also like to make Buddhism accessible to as many 
people as possible, regardless where they stand on any of the unanswered 
question.

-- 
Richard P. Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes