Selfless Minds

As philosophers have increasingly shied away from belief in the soul, the Buddhist doctrine of “no-self” (anātman)—the idea that there is no real enduring entity to underpin our commonsense notion of a continuous, living being—has garnered growing respect. Monima Chadha’s Selfless Minds: A Contemporary Perspective on Vasubandhu’s Metaphysics brings classical Buddhist philosophical positions into vigorous engagement with current perspectives. Buddhist no-self is not merely a charming presage of modern discoveries but a live option only ignored to the detriment of current conversation. In particular, to consider seriously the positions of Vasubandhu (fourth/fifth century), the most influential Indian Buddhist philosopher to take up the topic, is to acknowledge a serious challenge to standard presuppositions about a wide range of “self”-centered topics in philosophy.The book is of immediate use for students and nonspecialists, since Chadha’s opening chapters provide admirable introductions to the basics of Indian Buddhist philosophy (chap. 1) and the approach to no-self in the Abhidharma traditions in which Vasubandhu is the central representative (chap. 2). Subsequent chapters argue that Vasubandhu can help address, under a no-self view: the ostensibly “subjective” character of conscious experience (chap. 3); the functionality of memory (chap. 4); the experience of synchronic unity (“binding,” chap. 5); the phenomenology of agency (chap. 6); and the phenomenology of ownership (chap. 7). On each of these topics, Chadha’s chapter explicates and defends Vasubandhu’s position in light of current philosophy and cognitive science. In her final chapters, Chadha considers, and finds wanting, the ethical implications of Vasubandhu’s no-self view (chap. 8) and its concomitant path of practice (chap. 9).Chadha’s analyses show that Vasubandhu’s no-self view cuts deeper than is generally recognized. Many contemporary interpreters read Buddhist no-self as “ultimately” true, ground-level metaphysics, but lean on the idea that the person still exists in a “conventional” sense. After all, the Buddha used pronouns and spoke of persons in his teachings all the time and only taught no-self to relatively advanced disciples. Chadha is adamant that, for Vasubandhu at least, the “person” does not exist even conventionally, and does not need to exist conventionally, whether for metaphysical or moral reasons. Chadha has put her finger on an important point. Vasubandhu ties reality to causality, arguing that the self fails the causal test: we know of nothing that could not occur in the absence of a self. While Chadha sometimes overstates the point (since Vasubandhu certainly acknowledged the conventions by which we accurately refer to persons), she is right that the explanatory and moral benefits we gain from recognizing the falsity of the imagined self are diminished if we allow a “surrogate” self—such as a process view of the self, a “minimal” subjective self, or even a conventional designation—to take up the self’s role in our reasoning. Chadha argues capably that Vasubandhu’s causally grounded view has no need of these half measures, and by arguing so, she leverages strengths in the Buddhist position to question assumptions and unduly self-assured positions among metaphysicians and phenomenologists.For instance, Buddhists declare that all things, even conscious experiences, are momentary, but Dan Zahavi has argued that the phenomenal structure of conscious experience requires that consciousness has temporal extension. And cognitive scientists such as Robin Le Poidevin bring neuroscientific evidence of the neural correlates of consciousness as evidence that experiences that combine distinct processes must have temporal duration. In answer, Chadha develops an account based in Yogācāra-Sautrāntika dharma theory according to which information is organized through protoconscious processes that gain consciousness gradually. The Yogācāra idea of a baseline consciousness (ālaya-vijñāna) provides her the locus of background neural processing. Vasubandhu’s Sautrāntika theory of seeds could also have been developed to make this point. Vasubandhu has argued, against those who think that present awareness of past objects proves the reality of the past, that this reasoning fails to distinguish between the temporal event of a representation and the way it appears. Where experience is understood to be misleading, the temporal quality of the representation (even its experienced “structure”) may belie the momentary flux of its supports.In some cases, however, Chadha is unwilling to accept the more radical results of the Buddhist position she elaborates. For instance, she argues against Mark Siderits’s view that the Abhidharma arguments against mereological composites ought to apply to complex conscious experiences. Where Siderits says that they must agree that our sense of unity across distinct domains of perception, cognition, and action should be understood as a mere convention, Chadha thinks this is a step too far. Since complex conscious events have causal results, she thinks, Vasubandhu ought to accept them as real, even though they are composite. She gives the example of shame (hiri), which, though simple, is not experienced as a “standalone dharma.” Other dharmas always accompany it, such as the intention (cetanā) to avoid evil acts (60). I think this may mistake the way that dharmas manifest in ordinary awareness with the ways that they interact causally. A dharma can be a unique particular without having a “standalone” causal sequence; quite to the contrary, most Abhidharma philosophers held that every dharma has multiple conditions and multiple causal results. And Chadha’s own notion, that contents in the baseline protoconsciousness become conscious through a gradual process, would mean that the ostensibly unified conscious awareness is subject to the sorites paradox critiques Buddhists pin to conceptual constructs. Still, Yogācāra philosophers have taken up both sides of the question whether appearance (ākāra)—how things manifest—is real, and Vasubandhu has been read to hold both positions. My own reading (which is that the question comes down to the level at which causality is articulated) is less relevant than the fact that Chadha has brought the conversation into the present and added a creative step, drawing in contemporary neuroscience.The middle chapters argue in turn for four significant claims on behalf of the doctrine of no-self. For the first two of these—memory and synchronic unity, respectively, without a self—Chadha builds on Vasubandhu’s famous “Refutation of the Person,” the ninth chapter in his Abhidharmakośa-bhāṣya, and weaves its themes into new, compelling arguments that draw from contemporary cognitive science. The third and fourth—against the phenomenal content of agency and ownership—are innovative positions, responding as they do to arguments not raised in traditional Buddhist literature. The Buddha said there were actions but no agents, and that there were possessions but no owners. While most scholars have taken it for granted that this flies in the face of immediate experience, Chadha is to be commended for taking the Buddhist tradition at its word and examining the evidence closely: What if there really is no reality to the purported experiences of agency and ownership? In both cases, she points out that the best evidence shows experiential content emerging only in cases of failures, whereas their success is unmarked, contentless. Patients suffering from somatoparaphrenia evince a sense of loss of ownership of parts of their body (“It’s not mine” [155]), but what does it feel like to own a limb? Such a state is always described as pretheoretical, preconscious awareness. Yet if that is so, it only comes into consciousness as a conceptualization, which makes it subject to Buddhist constructivist critique. For many, Chadha’s deployment of scientific research should help Vasubandhu’s position appear far more plausible than it otherwise would.I am more convinced by Chadha’s discussions of explanatory metaphysics (arguments that take up the bulk of the book, chaps. 2 to 7) than Buddhist ethics (chaps. 8 and 9). Chadha is right to point out that realizing no-self must mean eradicating selfishness, because it dissolves the unjustified reification of a bias in favor of one’s own interests over those of others. Philosophers such as Śāntideva (eighth century) use no-self in arguments targeted to alleviate anger and resentment and to cultivate patience. Yet the no-self view is by no means the most widely cited justification for generosity. Buddhist authors generally motivate ethics by appealing not to no-self but to karma and the benefits of advancement on the path to liberation. Furthermore, Buddhist ethics requires at least some minimal conceptual identification of a boundary between oneself and others, for practical purposes. Chadha points to the many deeds of extreme self-sacrifice—giving away his own body parts, for instance—that the bodhisattva (a Buddha to be) is said to have performed in his past lives. This indeed suggests a moral life where others’ interests become one’s own. But it also requires a robust distinction between oneself and others, lest one give away someone else’s body parts, which the bodhisattva is apparently never in danger of doing.Chadha considers the bodhisattva path too demanding, arguing that life’s possibilities would be unduly restricted by a single-minded motivation to help others. She argues that it would follow from no-self that bodhisattvas are so committed to alleviating others’ suffering that they could never stop to enjoy a sunset, study the arts, or play sports. This argument seems no longer to be taking Vasubandhu, or the Buddhist tradition, seriously on their own terms (the bodhisattva is often depicted as cultured, and often joyous). Chadha’s split with Vasubandhu here may be due to a dismissal of karma and rebirth. Traditionally, every bodhisattva action participates in a virtually endless process of moral growth, where each life is a laboratory for research and development of benefits for oneself and others. Without rebirth, the bodhisattva’s current life might be taken to be the limit of its significance, and experimentation and learning might be curtailed by the necessity to do the most good as quickly as possible. For many non-Buddhist philosophers, rebirth may indeed be a nonstarter. Yet for a life’s significance to participate in a larger process does not require that beings really get reborn, only that we understand our lives to be interconnected with those of others. And that understanding, it seems to me, is something that does follow properly from no-self.Setting aside such concerns, and in spite of the controversy her disavowal of “self” conventions is liable to elicit, Chadha’s work is an important contribution to the study of the self. It succeeds well by taking classical Indian Buddhist approaches seriously on their own terms and orienting them to current questions in philosophy and cognitive science. It is readable, concise, and well organized, so that students and scholars with interests in personal identity will benefit whether or not they are already engaged with Buddhist philosophy

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