Indian Buddhist Philosophy by Carpenter Amber

Author:Carpenter, Amber
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317547761
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Consummate nature: phenomenology as metaphysics

Just as the Yogācāra styles itself the ‘third turning’, after Abhidharma and Madhyamaka, so Vasubandhu is not happy with merely two natures, ‘constructed’ and ‘other-dependent’. On a Madhyamaka account these two look very much like conventional reality and ultimate reality – the ‘emptiness’ that is the ultimate nature of all things just is their other-dependence; while, not separate from that, conventional reality is all these very same other-dependent beings, not considered as such but rather, taken as each is misleadingly conceived, as a distinct identifiable thing. According to Vasubandhu, these mutually defined ‘constructed’ and ‘other-dependent’ natures remain within conventional reality, yet point to the still unrecognized nature of ultimate reality.

If I attend properly to my experiences, I will realize that they neither are, nor imply, nor are of a mind-independent, spatiotemporal reality. There are just the manifold cognitions. Attend to these, as such, and we would notice that, amid the complex, shifting patterns of mutual dependency, there is, after all, a constant – besides their otherdependency. If we practise overcoming objections to eliminating rūpa dharmas from our ontology, the process of thinking through the revised Yogācāra picture of what is actually happening in ordinary, everyday experience reveals a recurring pattern. Whatever arises is always a complementary and mutually exclusive pair of ‘mode of cognition’ (the other-dependent mental events) and ‘content of cognition’ (out of which fabricated reality is fabricated). These might be determined in any countless number of ways, with respect to their content and with respect to mode. But it is always the case that wherever there is the one there is the other associated with it, and excluded by it. However various, experienced reality yet has a common structure: all moments have a mode of awareness – volition, say, cognition, perception, bare awareness; and they all have some content differentiated from and related to that mode – the colour perceived, the object desired, the proposition thought. All of reality is double-sided, the side of one kind (call it ‘mode of cognition’) implying the side of the other kind (call it the ‘object’ or ‘content of cognition’).

This might be seen as a sort of Cartesian point, although much more precise and modest than Descartes’ ‘I am’. Wherever any perception, cognition, feeling, emotion or volition arises, there must likewise be some mode of awareness. Consciousness is implied by anything that could be evidence – distorting or otherwise – for anything else. It is incontrovertible bedrock. For, where that fails, so does everything else, and indeed the very possibility of anything else. And wherever there is a mode of awareness, there is that of which it is aware: logically distinct from it, even if that object is a qualitative blank or placeholder. This mutual implication of mode and content of cognition is epistemologically as well as metaphysically incontrovertible. No one maintaining any theory of the nature of reality, or none at all, can deny that all their experiences are also, whatever else they may be, modes or instances of awareness.

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