Abstract
In this paper I probe the narratively constructed self as a proper object of negation in the Madhyamaka. The paper borrows idioms and tropes from Western theories of the narrative self to illuminate and contemporize the discussion. Since Mādhyamikas reject the two-tiered interpretation of the Buddhist two truths, they are philosophically unobligated to reduce the self. Although both Mādhyamikas and Ābhidharmikas would accept the conceptually constructed self as conventionally real, they would disagree about its ontological significance. For the latter, the narrative self as a conceptual construct necessitates reduction. Mādhyamikas, who reject the svabhāva-dharma architecture, can be less dismissive of the conventional self. Their conventional self is a narrative construct, but of what kind? The paper tries to answer that question by bringing Mādhyamikas into interlocution with select modern narrative self theorists. It divides into two sub-sections. Each pivots on a theme about the narrative self in contemporary discourse. The first asks how important is ethics for the constitution of the conventional self. The second discusses fictionality of the self in the Madhyamaka.
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Notes
I follow the trend in modern scholarship to use the terms Madhyamaka for the middle-way school of Buddhism, and Mādhyamika to refer to the philosopher of the Madhyamaka. Furthermore, the paper concerns itself with three specific Prāsaṅgika Mādhyamikas—Nāgārjuna, Candrakīrti, and Śāntideva. It bypasses the debates on the exact boundary between the two Madhyamaka sub-schools of Prāsaṅgika and Svātantrika (Dreyfus, 2011), or controversies on the very validity of the Prāsaṅgika-Svātantrika divide (Edelglass, 2004).
The distinction between person (pudgala) and self (ātman) (Siderits, 2014, 298) is not employed in the paper for the following reasons. First, the distinction is germane to counter the view of a permanent self. But for Candrakīrti, the ātman view is a philosophical lightweight. Second, the English word self is more fluid across diverse philosophical traditions.
The term bundle theory reductionism (BTR) neatly labels the early Buddhist schematics of no-self. The early Buddhists take the self to be reducible to five bundles or aggregates of psycho-physical constituents. The Abhidharma, be it of the Pāli Theravāda tradition or the Sarvāstivāda-Vaibhāṣika and the Sautrāntika schools, gives a neat classification of the dharmas that make up each of the five bundles. In this way, Buddhist bundle theorists claim to reduce the self to impersonal, ultimately real components. For an interesting treatment of reductionism about the self in contemporary thought, see Parfit (2014).
Excepting the Madhyamaka, all schools of Buddhist philosophy compulsorily accommodate reductionism about the self. The early Buddhists, the various Ābhidharmikas, and the Buddhist logicians have their own formulae to reduce the self. Even the Yogācāra-Vijñānavāda can be read as reducing the self first to subjectivity, and then eliminating it in favor of absolute consciousness, which is free from the subject-object duality. Interestingly, within the Madhyamaka fold Śāntideva employs a purely reductionist argument to justify the altruism of the bodhisattva.
All Buddhist philosophical schools agree on a common principle to explicate no-self. It involves refuting the eternal self, while at the same time making provisions in varying degrees within ontology for the conventional self. None, as far as I know, favors outright eliminativism.
Other traditions that fall under the rubric ‘Abhidharma’ are the Sautrāntika and the Pāli Abhidhamma system.
The Mādhyamika Candrakīrti in chapter 6 of his classic text, the Madhyamakāvatāra (MA), provides an extraordinarily detailed refutation of BTR. There he also espouses the conceptually constructed conventional self as the proper object of Madhyamaka negation. Translations of MA are from Huntington, Jr. and Namgyal Wangchen (1989). For a perspective from the Advaita Vedānta of Śaṅkara on the kind of self Buddhists refute, see Bilimoria (1997). I am grateful to Purushottama Bilimoria for making me aware of this important discourse.
Siderits (2013, 311) argues that the Ābhidharmika can accommodate the narrative self view as part of conventional reality. A narratively construed self would serve to increase happiness and minimize suffering. It could become the fulcrum to evaluate the long-term benefit or harm of actions (Siderits, 2013, 311.) However, the Ābhidharmika would take such a self to be a double-edged sword. Despite its functionality, such a self ferments grasping.
The self or ‘I’ in the Abhidharma appears to be a ‘centrally controlling unitary whole’ which conceals the complex processes that engender it (Varela, 1999, 36–43).
The Ābhidharmika two truths stand in sharp conflict with each other. They invoke contrasting world views. The first is the domain of suffering, and its pragmatic value is but adventitious. The Ābhidharmika takes conventional truth to be dispensable. Such a sharp dichotomy is absent in the Madhyamaka conception of two truths.
For a detailed set of arguments by Vasubandhu (as an Ābhidharmika) explaining why a self is not required to account for the functioning of the aggregates, see Pruden (1991, 153-276).
Westerhoff (2009, 163) suggests that Nāgārjuna might accept an ontological parity between the self and its constituents, since whole and parts are mutually dependent upon each other.
Our commonplace narratives about ourselves and others seldom involve references to impartite entities and mechanistic processes, unless, as with Heidegger’s hammer (Heidegger 1962), something within a self has broken down. Imagine a doctor trained to see a road accident victim as a body that needs to be fixed. But it would be absurd to treat friends and family in our everyday lives as series of psycho-physical aggregates. The use of bare technical terms to denote the self fits uneasily with the pre-theoretical and everyday usage of the concept of self.
In chapter 24 of MMK, Nāgārjuna advances arguments against the possibility of ethics if svabhāva is taken to characterize reality. For instance, he contends that in a non-empty world, there would be no distinction between moral and immoral actions (MMK 24: 33, 34). All conventions of the world (including ethical conventions) would be contradicted if emptiness is refuted (MMK 24: 36). Furthermore, human agency would be meaningless (MMK 24: 37) in a non-empty, static (MMK 24: 38) world. Finally, the eradication of defilements, a pursuit necessary for Buddhists to attain nirvāṇa, too would then be impossible. As far as I know, nowhere does Nāgārjuna argue that these endeavors, which draw on ethics in varying degrees, could be possible if emptiness is upheld. In true Prāsaṅgika fashion, he merely demolishes the reified positions of the interlocutor, without asserting any of his own.
Translations of the BCA are from Wallace and Wallace (1997).
Recent works by Buddhist philosophers on Buddhist fictionalism, though eminently insightful, miss an important point. They fail to register that Buddhist (specifically Madhyamaka) practitioners and unenlightened people alike are not just readers or observers vis-à-vis the unfolding fiction of conventional truth. They are participants. And as participants, they would surely be either characters or authors, or both, and occasionally critics. There ought to be a difference between watching a movie and taking notes, and living in it. Any discussion of Madhyamaka fictionalism that does not ask questions from the perspective of the stakeholders in the fiction misses out on something important.
Any meaningful discussion of Madhyamaka ficitonalism cannot exclude the Mādhyamika participant, any more than a discussion of human nature can leave out the human subject.
One could, of course, stay within the story and doubt certain or even most parts of it. For example, I could upon discovering in my late teens that I was adopted as an infant start wondering if my entire life has not been a lie. But such skepticism would be well within the boundaries of the fiction, and would not threaten to unravel it. Unless I, as a character in a story, doubt my very existence, and not just my world, I do not threaten to cast aspersions on the ‘facts’ that there is a story and I am in it. My very existence would be made up of narratives that cohere as a self. But as Zahavi (2014) argues, there might be something pre-linguistic and thus more primeval out of which the narrative self sprouts. There are two closely connected arguments, found in phenomenological literature of recent vintage, that may show that while it may be possible for us to doubt our exact roles in a fictitious world, we cannot doubt the certainty of our existence in it. The first argument, advanced by Gallagher and Zahavi (2012, 227), claims that the narrative practices that generate a notion of selfhood take, as their ‘pre-linguistic presupposition,’ a ‘minimal,’ pre-reflective experiential dimension. In other words, a temporally extended self-consciousness is required for narrative construction. If this is correct, then one’s existence in the world can be suspected to be unreal only when the intuitive certainty of the experiential, first-personal perspective is brought under doubt. But according to the second argument, again offered by Gallagher and Zahavi (2012, 230–235) and which draws on evidence from the empirical sciences, even disnarrativia caused by psychiatric disorders does not erase the experiential dimension. When a patient of schizophrenia complains of thought insertion, they contend that certain thoughts in their mind do not belong to them. But, Gallagher and Zahavi argue, it would be absurd to ask them if they are certain that it is they who suffered the insertion of thoughts. Their confusion is thus one of ‘misattribution and not misidentification’ (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2012, 235). The ‘minimal experiential self’ (Zahavi, 2014, 18), which in its bare form retains a rudimentary capacity for narrative-formation, might be ineliminable. Regarding the question of whether or not one can be aware of fictionality tout court while still a character, this could be said to have happened only when one is convinced that not just the world, but one’s basic first-personal perspective or sense of mine-ness, is unreal. I may be able to question any or all episodes within the fiction of life, but not the fact of fictionality itself as long as the fickle basis for my capacities to form narratives persists.
After all, tales of mythical gandharvas, though mere mental fabrications, can be internally consistent. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out that the Mahāprajñāpāramitā Śāstra contains descriptions of the city of gandharvas.
Yathā māyā yathā svapno gandharvanagaraṃ yathā.
tathotpādastathā sthānaṃ tathā bhaṅga udāhṛtaṃ (MMK 7: 34).
Kleśāḥ karmāṇi dehāśca kartāraśca phalāni ca.
gandharvanagarākāra marῑcisvapnasaṃnibhāḥ (MMK 17: 33).
Highest, because with śūnyatā Madhyamaka analysis ceases. Fictional, because śūnyatā too is a conceptual construction at the end of the day.
Nivṛttam abhidhātavyaṃ nivṛtte citta-gocare, anutpannāniruddhā hi nirvāṇam iva dharmatā. (MMK 18: 7).
Garfield (2006, 1) writes, ‘So, measured against reality, many of the claims in works of fiction are simply false, and nobody frets about that’ (italics mine). I think this point underestimates the distinction between reading a fictive piece (or watching it unfold in a play or a movie), and being a participant in it.
I have also based my argument for a concentric circles model of the self upon the graded conception of conventional reality found in MA. At MA 6: 23, Candrakīrti argues that a ‘correct’ perception involves seeing all things as lacking intrinsic existence. An incorrect perception on the other hand grasps things in terms of some sort of intrinsic existence. This perception is illusory and fictitious. Conventional reality can be bifurcated into two sub-categories. The first is that which fails even the test of unimpaired sense faculties. The second is established through unimpaired sense faculties and carries inter-personal sanction (MA 6: 160). Illusions induced by ophthalmia are instances of the former. All widely held conventions, on the other hand, would fall within the second category. Narratives about the self too can be organized on similar lines. Narratives that seem to violate worldly conventions would be considered illusory (such as when those suffering from alien hand syndrome claim that their hand does not belong to them). On the other hand, stories that we commonly accept as legitimate are conventionally valid but ‘false’ from the perspective of the ultimate truth. (‘I am a banking executive with a degree in accounting.’) But since there is no ceiling of ultimate truth to hit, there need not be a strict bifurcation of conventional truth when it comes to the self. Theoretically, there could be a plurality of stories about a self, varying in degrees of fictionality. See also Newland and Tillemans (2011).
Te prapañcat prapañcas tu śūnyatāyāṃ nirudhyate (MMK 18: 5 cd).
Karma-kleśa-kṣayān mokṣa karma-kleśā vikalpataḥ (MMK 18: 5ab). See also the dedicatory verses in MMK¸ and MMK 27: 30. Soteriology is always directed at the individual. Mādhyamikas accordingly target the psychological tendency to superimpose intrinsic existence. It is the collective propensity to transact with reified concepts that some Mādhyamikas take to be impervious to reforms. It seems that Mādhyamikas identify two kinds of reification. One is pointed out explicitly whereas the other is implied as a matter of fact.
Perhaps Candrakīrti would counter that conventions would be generated through less reified processes, as more and more individuals in a community stop superimposing svabhāva in their personal lives. One could imagine a utopian Madhyamaka Buddhist community where members create rules and codes of conduct, but do not think of them in ultimate terms. The conventions such a community generates would be empty.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers and editor-in-chief for their incisive comments. Gratitude is also extended to Thomas Carroll for the valuable suggestions.
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Correya, S.J. Never Waking into Reality: Narrative Self in the Madhyamaka. SOPHIA 62, 159–177 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00881-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00881-1