Indian Buddhist Theories of Persons

Vasubandhu's Refutation of the Theory of a Self

James Duerlinger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134367887
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

In this book, Vasubandhu's classic work Refutation of the Theory of a Self is translated and provided with an introduction and commentary. The translation, the first into a modern Western language from the Sanskrit text, is intended for use by those who wish to begin a careful philosophical study of Indian Buddhist theories of persons. Special features of the introduction and commentary are their extensive explanations of the arguments for the theories of persons of Vasubandhu and the Pudgalavâdines, the Buddhist philosophers whose theory is the central target of Vasubandhu's refutation of the theory of a self.

1
INTRODUCTION TO
THE TRANSLATION

Vasubandhu's “Refutation” and the central philosophical questions about which Indian Buddhist theories of persons are concerned

The text translated in this book is a Buddhist treatise on “the selflessness of persons” (pudgalanairātmya) composed by Vasubandhu, who is generally regarded as one of the most important philosophers of the scholastic period of Buddhist thought in India.¹ The treatise, which I will call the “Refutation,” after its full title, “Refutation of the Theory of a Self,” deals with philosophical questions about persons that are different from, but closely related to, a number of important philosophical questions about persons discussed in the West. For this reason it should be of considerable interest not only to Buddhists and scholars of Buddhism, but also to those who are familiar with the relevant discussions in Western philosophy. Although not all of the philosophical questions discussed by the Indian Buddhists are explicitly raised in the “Refutation,” I believe that a careful study of this treatise is the best way to gain initial access to them. To facilitate this access this Introduction begins with a sketch of these questions and how they are related to the study of Vasubandhu's treatise.

According to the Indian Buddhists, when we conceive ourselves from the first-person singular perspective and ascribe attributes to ourselves in dependence upon our bodies and minds,² we create a false appearance of ourselves as selves, the acceptance of which appearance is the root cause of our suffering. Vasubandhu agrees with the Pudgalavādins, his Buddhist opponents in the “Refutation,” that the selves we falsely appear to be are persons who can be identified independently of our bodies and minds. His chief non-Buddhist opponents, the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣikas, believe that we are selves of this sort, since they claim that we are substances that exist apart from our bodies and minds. The most basic philosophical issue Vasubandhu addresses, therefore, is whether or not we are selves. Whether or not the acceptance of a false appearance of ourselves as selves is the root cause of our suffering is a further issue, of course, but it is not an issue Vasubandhu discusses. Nor does he discuss whether or not we actually create such an appearance when we conceive ourselves from the first-person singular perceptive and ascribe attributes to ourselves. An issue he does raise, however, concerns in what form we ultimately exist if we do not exist as entities that can be independently identified. In the “Refutation,” discussion of this issue takes the form of a debate with the Pudgalavādins. According to Vasubandhu, our ultimate existence — the existence we possess apart from being conceived — is the existence of the bodies and minds in dependence upon which we are conceived. According to the Pudgalavādins, we ultimately exist without being the same in existence as our bodies and minds and without being separate substances.

There are, in addition, Indian Buddhists who believe that we do not ultimately exist. The most articulate of these Buddhists, Candrakīrti, thinks that we suffer because we give assent to our false appearance of existing by ourselves, apart from being conceived. So another issue that is discussed by the Indian Buddhists is whether or not we ultimately exist. This issue is only alluded to in the “Refutation,” but it is important to a proper assessment of the central issue it does concern, which is whether or not, if we cannot be identified independently of our bodies and minds, we can still exist independently of our bodies and minds.

Because Candrakīrti believes that nothing ultimately exists, he thinks that first-person singular reference to ourselves does not depend upon a reference to something that ultimately exists. This does not mean that he thinks that “I” is not a referring expression. Rather, it means that it refers to a mentally constructed “I” and to nothing else. Vasubandhu and the Pudgalavādins believe that first-person singular reference to us is possible because it is also a reference to something that ultimately exists. So another issue that arises from a consideration of Indian Buddhist theories of persons is whether or not first-person singular reference to ourselves is possible if we are not the same in existence as something that exists apart from being conceived.

These disagreements about whether or not we ultimately exist, and if we do, in what form we ultimately exist, and if we do not, whether reference to ourselves is possible, cannot be settled without an answer to the more general question of what it means to exist. Although most Indian Buddhist philosophers agree that what exists can enter into causal relationships with other things, they do not all define existence in this way. Different conceptions of existence play a crucial role in Buddhist debates about the existence of persons. One view is that to exist is to be a substance or an attribute of a substance, and another is that it is to be either a substance or a collection of substances conceived for practical purposes as a distinct entity of some sort. A third view is that it is to exist apart from being conceived, and a fourth is that it is to exist in dependence upon being conceived.

There is also a set of issues that arise from the arguments used by those who propound the different theories of persons presented in the “Refutation.” Among these are questions about how exactly appeals to our conventional ascriptions of attributes to ourselves are to count for or against theories concerning our mode of existence and/or identity. Vasubandhu's opponents seem to believe that his theory, that we are the same in existence as our bodies and minds, should be rejected because it fails to account for our intuitions concerning the subjects of the attributes we ascribe to ourselves. Such attributes include our being the same at different times (and in different lives), being single entities rather than many, remembering objects experienced in the past, having perceptions, feelings and other mental states, being agents of actions who experience the results of our actions, etc. At issue here is whether or not the form in which we ultimately exist undermines these ascriptions of attributes. Vasubandhu argues that the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣikas' theory, that we are separate substances, cannot be used to explain ascriptions of these attributes to ourselves, and that the Pudgalavādins' theory, that we ultimately exist without being either separate substances or the same in existence as our bodies and minds, is both logically incoherent and contrary to the teachings of the Buddha. He believes that the intuitions upon which the objections to his theory are based are expressions of our mistaken view of ourselves.

An issue raised by Candrakīrti concerns whether or not, if we ultimately exist, our ascriptions of these attributes to ourselves can be explained. He believes, following the lead of Nāgārjuna, the founder of the Mādhyamika school of Buddhist philosophers, that if we ultimately exist, we possess natures of our own by virtue of which we exist, and so, cannot enter into causal relationships with other phenomena, for which reason we could not come to be, cease to be, change, or perform any of the functions we, as persons, are believed to perform. This issue, although not discussed in the “Refutation,” is relevant to an assessment of the debate between Vasubandhu and his opponents concerning the form in which we ultimately exist.

Finally, there are different views concerning knowledge of our existence. The Nyāya-Vaiśeṣikas think that we are known to exist as separate substances by means of inference. In the “Refutation,” Vasubandhu attempts to show that a number of these inferences are incorrect. Vasubandhu believes that knowledge of our existence apart from being conceived is knowledge of the existence of our bodies and minds. The Pudgalavādins think that by means of perception we are known to exist apart from being conceived without being separate substances or being the same in existence as our bodies and minds. In the “Refutation,” Vasubandhu challenges their account of how we are known to exist if we exist in this way. Candrakīrti thinks that we are known to exist only as part of the conceptual scheme that creates us. However, both Vasubandhu and the Pudgalavādins can ask how, if we do not ultimately exist, knowledge of our existence is even possible, and if so, how.

This is a very brief statement of the central philosophical questions to which a study of the “Refutation” gives rise. In this Introduction and in the Commentary I will explain how they arise when the treatise is carefully read and its theses and arguments are carefully assessed.

The Sanskrit text and its translation

Vasubandhu probably composed the “Refutation” as a separate work, and then added it, as a ninth chapter or appendix, either to his Treasury of Knowledge (Abhidharmakośa), which I will call the Treasury, or to his Commentary on the Treasury of Knowledge (Abhidharmakośabhāṣya), which I will simply call the Commentary.³ Although many scholars have assigned to this treatise the title, “An Examination of the Person” (Pudgalaviniścāyaḥ), which was used by Yaśomitra, one of the Indian Buddhist commentators of the Treasury, the title that Vasubandhu himself uses is “Refutation of the Theory of a Self” (ātmavādapratiṣedha).⁴ The Treasury, its Commentary, and the “Refutation” were composed in India during the fourth or fifth century CE. In the Treasury the theses (siddhānta-s) that typify those held in the Vaibhāṣika (Exposition follower) schools of Indian Buddhism are explained. In the Commentary these theses are evaluated from the point of view of the teachings of the Buddha in his sūtras (discourses) and on the basis of independent reasoning. The Vaibhāṣika schools are the schools named after a work called the Mahāvibhāṣā (Great Exposition), a second century CE compendium of Indian Buddhist philosophy.⁵ The school of Indian Buddhist philosophy from whose point of view Vasubandhu composed most of the Commentary and the “Refutation” is called the “Sautrāntika” (Sūtra follower) school.

Sanskrit copies of the Treasury and its Commentary, which included the “Refutation,” were discovered in Tibet in 1936 by Rahula Samkrtyayana.⁶ Before that time modern scholars were in possession only of a Sanskrit copy of Yaśomitra's commentary (sixth century CE) on the Treasury, called Gloss of Full Meaning on the Treasury of Knowledge (Sphuṭārthābhi-dharmakośavyakhyā), which I will hereafter call the Gloss.⁷ The manuscripts found by Samkrtyayana were first edited in 1967 by Prahlad Pradhan,⁸ and then in 1970–3 by Dwarikadas Shastri.⁹ For my translation of the “Refutation” I consulted the editions of both Pradhan and Shastri, as well as the corrected reprint of Pradhan's edition made by Aruna Haldar in 1975,¹⁰ Yaśomitra's Gloss, and the careful work done by Akira Hirakawa, et al.¹¹ and Yaśsunori Ejima¹² on the Sanskrit text of Pradhan's edition. My Translation is an extensive revision of a translation I did that was first published in 1988.¹³

The “Refutation” was translated once into Tibetan¹⁴ and twice into Chinese.¹⁵ Yaśomitra's Gloss is the only commentary that seems to have survived in Sanskrit. There are three Chinese commentaries on the Chinese translations, composed by Pû-guâng, Fâ-bâu, and Yuán-huî,¹⁶ that still exist. There were commentaries on the Treasury and/or Commentary written in Sanskrit by Saṃghabhadra, Sthirāmati, Pūrṇavardhana, Śamathadeva, Dignāga, and Vinītadeva. Although the original Sanskrit texts have been lost, they exist in Tibetan translation. Among these commentaries, those composed by Saṃghabhadra, Sthirāmati, and Vinītadeva do not deal with the “Refutation.” Since the commentary of Śamathadeva deals primarily with the identification of the sūtras quoted in the “Refutation,” and Dignāga's commentary on the “Refutation” is brief and merely quotes some of its arguments, they do not provide useful information pertinent to the present study, which concerns its philosophical import. The commentary on the “Refutation” composed by Pūrṇavardhana has not been consulted, since I first learned of it after my own work on the treatise had been completed.

In reliance upon Yaśomitra's Gloss and the Tibetan translation, Theodore Stcherbatsky composed an interpretative English translation, entitled “The Soul Theory of the Buddhists.”¹⁷ A French translation, by Louis de La Vallée Poussin¹⁸ is based on Yaśomitra's Gloss, the Chinese translations by Paramārtha and by Xúanzàng, and the commentaries by Pû-guâng, Fâ-bâu, and Yuán-huî. (The commentary of Pūrṇavardhana, which in the Tibetan translation is included as the last portion of the commentary on the eighth chapter of the Treasury, is not mentioned by Stcherbatsky or by La Vallée Poussin. It may have been overlooked by them, as it was by me, because it is included as part of his commentary on the eighth chapter of the Treasury.) There is also a complete English translation of La Vallée Poussin's translation made by Leo Pruden.¹⁹ However, these earlier translations, which were not based on the Sanskrit text, do not in my opinion always accurately convey the meaning of important theses and arguments in the Sanskrit original. Although I disagree on many substantive points with these translations, I have not taken readers through all of the tedious details about where, how, and why I disagree, except for crucial passages. My major disagreements with these translations are for the most part included in my notes to the Translation, although some are also discussed in the Commentary on the Translation. The pioneering work of Stcherbatsky and La Vallée Poussin was a great achievement, but our understanding of Indian Buddhist philosophy has now advanced to the point at which its errors need to be corrected. Nonetheless, I gratefully acknowledge that without the help of their work I might easily have gone astray in my reading of the text in numerous passages. Relatively little has appeared in print more recently to advance our understanding of the “Refutation” as a Buddhist treatise on the selflessness of persons.²⁰

Vasubandhu's abbreviated style of composition in the “Refutation” is sui...