Online research in philosophy

Buddhists call Buddhism the Buddha Dharma: the Dharma, a collection of methods for getting enlightened, taught by a Buddha, a Fully Enlightened One. Buddhists refer to themselves as people who have taken refuge with the Three Jewels: 1) the Buddhas or Fully Enlightened Ones, 2) the Dharma or methods taught for reaching enlightenment, 3) and the Sangha or community of Buddhist monks and nuns, called Bhikshus and Bhikshunis. In formally becoming a Buddhist one becomes a disciple of a Buddhist master, a fully ordained Bhikshu, who administers the Three Refuges: "I take refuge with the Buddhas; I take refuge with the Dharma; I take refuge with the Sangha.".

1 Buddhist-Christian Dialogue: Its Significance and Future Task1 The contemporary world is rapidly shrinking due to the remarkable advancement of science ...

In his _Treatise on the Golden Lion_, Fazang says that wholes are _in_ each of their parts and that each part of a whole _is_ every other part of the whole. In this paper, I offer an interpretation of these remarks according to which they are not obviously false, and I use this interpretation in order to rigorously reconstruct Fazang's arguments for his claims. On the interpretation I favor, Fazang means that the presence of a whole's part suffices for the presence of the whole and that the presence of any such part is both necessary and sufficient for the presence of any other part. I also argue that this interpretation is more plausible than its extant competitors.

This is an attempt to explain, in a way familiar to contemporary ways of thinking about mereology, why someone might accept some prima facie puzzling remarks by Fazang, such as his claims that the eye of a lion is its ear and that a rafter of a building is identical to the building itself. These claims are corollaries of the Huayan Buddhist thesis that everything is part of everything else, and it is intended here to show that there is a rational basis for this thesis that involves a nonstandard notion of parthood and, importantly, that does not violate the principle of noncontradiction.

This paper elaborates upon various responses to the Problem of the One over the Many, in the service of two central goals. The first is to situate Huayan's mereology within the context of Buddhism's historical development, showing its continuity with a broader tradition of philosophizing about part-whole relations. The second goal is to highlight the way in which Huayan's mereology combines the virtues of the Nyāya-Vaisheshika and Indian Buddhist solutions to the Problem of the One over the Many while avoiding their vices.

This book is the first comprehensive treatment of the Huayan school of East Asian Buddhism in a Western language.