VASUBANDHU’S WORKS cohere within a view that I would like to characterize as “Buddhist Causal Framing.” By this term I mean to indicate the unified perspective that is implicit in the doctrines of the Three Natures and the storehouse consciousness (ālayavijñāna), and which I have shown Vasubandhu drawing from the central goals of Abhidharma and the Buddha’s core doctrines of impermanence, dependent origination, and no-self. The Buddha said that there is no self, and what appears to be the self is only an ever-changing mass (kāya) of separate entities. Those entities, taken together, appear unified and static, but they are in fact distinct and in constant flux, and only linked to one another through their joint participation in a complex of causes and results; each separate entity arises dependent upon what has come before, and provides a conditioning factor for what comes next. In speaking this way, the Buddha presented a clear dichotomy between what appears, and what is. What appears is the illusion of the self; what is is an ever-changing causal series.
Vasubandhu’s Abhidharma works seek to articulate the distinction between entities that seem real, and those that truly satisfy the Buddha’s reality requirements, which leads him to defend a universe of independent, momentary entities with definite causal results. Yet in the context of arguing for this view, Vasubandhu never closes a self-referential, ironic loop: the causality that is the foundation of his distinction between real entities and conceptual constructions cannot itself be established as a real entity. Causality, then, although it is the only legitimate condition for knowledge, is not itself knowable. It is only within a particular causal frame—determined, necessarily, by localized conceptual needs—that entities can be judged real or unreal. It is only as conceptual constructions, then, that entities can be determined real.
As a further irony, the fact that causality itself, though deemed arbiter, is only conceivable through “localized conceptual needs” is itself a claim pronounced in language, and so can only be a conventional, conceptual construction. After all, whose “needs” could they be, unless they are the needs of human persons, who are at the same time being claimed not to exist?1 This seems like a damning internal contradiction, but, as Graham Priest has urged, this kind of contradiction always arises when we attempt to talk about the limits of knowledge and language.2 Priest believes that, since the idea of inexpressibility is itself inexpressible unless we are willing accept the possibility of true contradictions, we must either accept that our knowledge is unlimited and our language unbounded, or accept the possibility of true contradictions. While Vasubandhu does not speak of true contradictions per se, he does affirm that all things have three natures—natures that are each simultaneously both real and unreal, both dual and unified. Vasubandhu does not abandon the law of noncontradiction; rather, he uses these “limit contradictions” to suggest the limitations of our conceptual capacities, and to propel his reader to seek a new view—a Buddha’s view.
At the same time, to suggest that the only perspective that is not ironically self-undermining (if not outright false) rests on the far side of enlightenment is to grant new legitimacy to the local utility of the ordinary world’s conceptual tools—for that is the only kind of legitimacy that conceptual tools can have. Vasubandhu argues in the VyY that causally relevant entities can be judged conventionally real, but no judgment may claim the authority of ultimate reality.3 The notion that all entities as we understand them are at some level conceptual constructions allows the recognition that there is no good, final answer to the causal story of perception and the reality of the external world as it appears. Ground-level, realist physical causality is no longer required in a world of appearances, and appearances are much easier to account for than physical realities. Yet the lack of ultimacy does not disqualify or negate the localized utility of entities that are causal within their proper contexts. Entities may be ultimately unreal, but still substantial, and therefore pragmatically useful for those seeking advancement on the Buddhist path. And the frame, in which entities acquire their status as substantial, remains always and only a causal frame.
In Buddhist Causal Framing, then, the question that is asked of any entity or concept is What is the causal story in which this entity operates, and what role does it play? To take the paradigmatic example of the self: framed within the causal story of the aggregates, it must be denied, since it plays no verifiable causal role. From a causal point of view, there is no agent and no experiencer who plays an indispensable role in the causal story of the aggregated elements that make up the apparent self. Framed within the story of the aggregates, the self thus disappears. The exceptions that prove the rule of the ubiquity of Buddhist Causal Framing are the occasional episodes in Buddhist scriptures where the self is reified for the sake of those who are unable to handle the complex and frightening doctrine of the five aggregates. In some cases, as Vasubandhu explains in AKBh IX, the Buddha speaks of a self or person, but this is always with the purpose of eliminating more damaging views than selfhood, such as the failure to accept the truth of karma and rebirth. But to say that such assertions are made with a different purpose is to say that they are made from within a distinct frame of reference; the Buddha never affirms the self within the frame in which he affirms the aggregates, as though the self existed over and above the aggregates. In this way, the Buddha’s teachings are always true within their particular frame of reference, their particular degree of depth, their particular level of analysis. At the level of personal existence, people are causally connected to their actions in previous lives. If people perform good deeds, they will end up in a better rebirth. This causal story is true, even though it lacks substantial truth from the perspective that recognizes that persons are conceptual constructions imposed upon the aggregates.
Throughout the AKBh, Vasubandhu asks the same questions not just of the self, but of every entity: What is the supposed causal story in which it plays a role? What are the causal consequences of its presence and absence? The effect of this analysis is to distinguish, ever more clearly, between entities that deserve their status as substantial participants in viable causal stories, and entities that can be accounted for merely as they appear, whether as mere objects of experience or as ostensibly necessary parts of dubious conceptual matrices. Vasubandhu targets his criticisms at the intellectual structures erected by the Vaibhāṣika tradition, in order to show that non-Buddhist reification results from a too-rigid adherence to the structures within inherited treatises and literalistic readings of scripture. And here non-Buddhist reification is reification of entities that play no notable causal role in the story of dharmas beyond their appearance.
In Yogācāra, then, every appearance is defined as a false nature, a conceptual construction, so that everything in our experience falls into this category. The causal story, the dependent nature, is outside of our experience. Even when we know that our experience is conditioned, it remains our experience. This is, in fact, the fundamental point, what it means to say that everything is causally conditioned: the world as we experience it is brought about not by any single event of reasoning or knowing, but by countless causes and conditions, which are unavailable to our immediate awareness. Things do not come about in the way that they appear to arise.
While this situation is an ontological fact with epistemological implications, the Buddhist tradition’s emphasis is always ethical and pragmatic: we are called upon to do our best to improve our understanding and free ourselves from our most damaging delusions. But given that our appearances have causes that are distinct from how they appear, the only way we can change what we experience is by learning of, and focusing on, the truest causes and conditions we can know. The philosopher’s job with respect to a conceptual construction is therefore different from what it would be with respect to a real entity. The job is no longer to decide how that thing acts and interacts with other entities, but rather to determine how it comes about that we think this unreal thing is real. We cannot fight an illusory man or scare away an illusory elephant. The same is true of changing anything in the world; change is not made by a single intentional act, directed at an apparent problem. Problems can only be undermined by accumulating the causes and conditions that prevent their continued arising, by placing a hand on a ringing bell.
Buddhist Causal Framing thus reflects several linked ideas:
1. To understand anything is first and foremost to understand its role within a well-defined series of causes and conditions;
2. Any entity whose causal relations can be explained fully by appeal to its component parts is only a false conceptual construct and does not itself have a claim to reality (within the causal frame that acknowledges its components);
3. While the story of a given set of causes and conditions may be reliable and valid (i.e., substantial) within a certain perspectival frame, no causal story is itself finally true (i.e., ultimate), since no causal story can itself be understood (in the terms of the first point)—every frame is, therefore, ironically self-undermining;
4. We seem to be individual, independent, intentional agents, engaging with the world and our own experiential contents—but this is impossible, since there is no place in the causal world for such a self;
5. Similarly, other people and the furniture of our experience appear stable and unchanging, tagged with specific meanings and identities—but this is also impossible, since (for instance) otherwise we could not experience them;
6. As with the things of the world, so too with our perspectives: to the degree that we can be aware of our concepts and perspectives, they do not exist as they appear (as abstract entities known or perceived by our minds), but are, like everything else, merely apparent conceptual constructions and not the causal reality;
7. If we are to correct our deluded perspectives, we cannot do it directly, intentionally, cognitively, by “convincing” ourselves; we must change ourselves indirectly, by studying, discerning, and manipulating, incrementally, the causes of our awareness;
8. As with ourselves, so too with the people and things of the world: to the degree that they are conceptual constructs, they are not susceptible to change, so we cannot change them in predictable ways by acting in accord with our conceptual constructions and abstract frameworks; we must understand the causes and conditions of the circumstances in which we are working, and address those causes we can effect directly, which often means working toward distant goals only incrementally;
9. The possibility of change is limited by the conditions in which action takes place, which means that in the short term there is very little that can be done; but causally real changes accumulate over time, so, given sufficient time, even apparently unyielding conditions can be changed—and time is limitless. So, although we are benighted, there is nothing we cannot accomplish by focusing on the immediate causes and results of our actions.
I name this perspective on causality “Buddhist” because it is so evidently a reflection of core doctrinal positions of Buddhism, and because it was developed in its clearest and most decisive form by Vasubandhu, the greatest mainstream Buddhist philosopher after the Buddha himself, as a reflection on Buddhist scripture. Yet it surely reflects the doctrinal standpoint of only a portion of Buddhist traditions, which have appeared in great variety since the Buddha’s time.4 And there is nothing in the above points that requires that advocates of Buddhist Causal Framing identify themselves religiously as Buddhists. Buddhist Causal Framing can certainly be articulated and advanced without adhering to the authority of the Buddha. As I intend the expression, it is a conceptual structure and method that can be employed without reference to Buddhist scriptures, and that has, in fact, appeared in many areas of thought outside of Buddhist intellectual worlds. The purpose of the next and final section, then, is to carve out what I see as an already resident space for Buddhist Causal Framing in the modern world, in order that we may better understand the conceptual nexus that it defines, and test the potential significance of Vasubandhu’s distinctive contribution to the intellectual, artistic, and ethical worlds of our present.
THE UNITARY CAUSAL LINE AS A THEORY OF THE MIND AND THE WORLD
After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, “I refute it thus.” This was a stout exemplification of the first truths of Pere Bouffier, or the original principles of Reid and of Beattie; without admitting which, we can no more argue in metaphysicks, than we can argue in mathematicks without axioms.
—Boswell, Life of Johnson
Idealism is counterintuitive, if not self-defeating. Samuel Johnson’s famous kick against a rock is taken by many as a decisive refutation of Berkeleyan idealism. Boswell reads it as a proof that reason is blind without a contribution from the empirical, which, once presumed, cannot be discarded. Yet Buddhism is founded upon the counterintuitive notion that we do not have a “self”—that the soul is an illusion generated for practical reasons as a conceptual construction imposed upon ever-changing component parts. Thus, it should not be a problem for Buddhists that the view espoused is counterintuitive, as long as it is sensible and coheres with Buddhist doctrine. And, for Buddhists, the empirical evidence is not as clear-cut as Johnson’s kick seems to presume. In these ways, I would suggest that the Buddhist view was prescient of our own ambiguous relationship to empirical reality.
For how counterintuitive is this form of idealism, once we accept what modern science teaches us about the causes and conditions of the furniture of our world? Let us take Johnson’s simple notion that there must be a physical world, since I can kick a rock with my foot, feel the resistance, and so on. There is elegance in the simplicity of this notion. Yet the simplicity of the idea that the solidity of a rock proves the physicality of the world is in serious jeopardy once we begin to describe the act of kicking a rock in the language of contemporary scientific explanations—our best current version of the empirical. In fact, it is not legitimate to help oneself to the “solidity” of a rock as though this were a simple thing. We know that, in fact, rocks and everything else in our world are made up of tiny component parts—molecules—which are in constant motion, themselves made up of atoms, with far more space between them than matter, which are themselves made up of subatomic particles or, if you like, superstrings. I take it the physicists are not yet satisfied that they have a complete theory of everything, but we know at least that rocks are not solid and unmoving in the way they appear to our senses. The resistance that a large stone puts up against my foot is explained by its mass, but its mass is in turn explained by superstring theory. If we wish to avail ourselves of the evidence of our senses, we must explain why it is that the rock appears solid when it is not, and the air appears as empty space, when it is not.
Granted, Johnson did not say, “I refute it by the fact that there is a rock that resists my foot by virtue of its solidity.” This was his genius; his kick proves that there must be something that provides physical resistance, without pinning himself to exactly what it is. But if we allow that this is his argument, then Johnson is not refuting Kantian or Buddhist forms of idealism, which acknowledge that there is something that makes up the noumena, the “ultimate” cause. The problem is that that something is unknown to us, and is by its nature unspeakable. The form of idealism we are left with is in fact confirmed when Johnson has to kick, instead of speak, to make his point.
If Vasubandhu had been present, perhaps when Johnson kicked his rock, he might have had the opportunity to challenge him to kick a rainbow, or any other of the many examples of an illusion put forward by the Yogācāra tradition.5 For the fact is that the world is not as it appears. The rainbow that seems to be hovering above the mountain is the result of the light being refracted through particles of water suspended in the air. But this doesn’t happen where the rainbow appears. There’s nothing up there.6 Furthermore, the physics of light does not fully account for the differences we readily draw between a rainbow’s color bands; those distinctions result from the structure of our perceptual apparatus, the ways we mix different signals in the brain, and, apparently, cultural training.
But of course this is just the beginning. I will not detail the positions widely held among psychologists and neuroscientists that the unity of the self is a useful psychological fiction, or that it is the fictive self constructed after the fact that enacts “the illusion of conscious will”;7 nor will I say anything of Nietzschean or Freudian “false consciousness,” and the thousand ways that psychologists tell us, echoing the Buddha, that we are deluded by our desires. We do not need to know most of these complex and disconcerting truths to understand that the world as “given” to our experience, which our senses and our brains enact for us, is selective and delusory in a thousand ways.8 All that we need is to know that the rock we kick with our foot is mostly empty space. Its identity as a rock, which even the dictionary tells us is solid, is no more real than a rainbow.9
Of course, to make this point is not to deny the genuine, causal differences between rocks and rainbows. But the only legitimate way to distinguish between them is pragmatic, and relative to our sensory experience. It is not the “rockness” that we feel, but the solid surface that our brains generate for us based upon manifold data from our tactile senses. Now, there are reasons for why our tactile senses generate data that lead to this kind of construction. We cannot make our foot pass through the rock, whereas a bird may seem to fly through the rainbow. Clearly the kinds of causes behind our sensation of the rock are different from those behind the rainbow. There are patterns in our tactile experience that we have learned to distinguish and label as “solid.” But our tactile sense of a rock is fundamentally just as delusory as our visual sense of a rainbow, to the degree that we deduce from it solidity “out there,” independent of our sensory experience. That pattern is caused by something—which is unknown as of yet, call it “superstrings”—acting in such a way as to create, for us, the experience we describe as “solid.” But the only way to preserve solidity as a real thing is to describe it as a quality evident in objects like rocks, relative to objects like my foot.
To speak thus of the constructed, relative nature of the entities of our experience is not to deny the legitimacy of the objective world as described by modern science. On the contrary, it is to take such descriptions seriously, and to discern the epistemic place such descriptions consign for us. Current evolutionary theory provides a good explanation for why we see things as we do, and it does not require that things be the way they appear. All that is necessary for the evolutionary development of sensation is for it to provide a selective advantage for some species in competitive circumstances. Since it turns out to have been of great advantage to our evolutionary ancestors to see, better and better, over countless generations, we can see. But, given the range of body sizes and the kinds of bodily control that were available to our evolutionary ancestors, there is no reason to think it would have been advantageous to them to see molecules, let alone superstrings. Even if we can imagine such vision being possible, we cannot manipulate individual molecules.10
We can imagine a slightly different planet from ours, one with a higher likelihood of species dying or being damaged by exposure to localized nuclear radiation, providing conditions conducive to species developing the ability to “see” radiation. In such an environment, such a sensory capacity could be a significant advantage. If we had such a sensory capacity, we might have trouble falling asleep in a room without sufficient lead in its walls to block out the radiation’s “light.” In that case, whether we would be convinced by Johnson’s “kick” might depend upon the iron content of the rock he kicked. Many stones that put up resistance to a kick are penetrable to deadly radiation.
The point is that evolution has picked out, and reified for us, certain significant patterns of qualities within our environment, since the sensory apparatus available to any given species is a causal result, over vast spans of time, of the massive accumulation of responses to environment. Significance, in this way, is always indexed to the capacities of the species to manipulate its environment. What we see—what exists for us—is only what we can engage with, causally, in some potentially beneficial way. The frame in which we find ourselves experiencing, and reifying, entities is the frame in which our ancestors have been most capable of manipulation.
This story focuses on perception, but the same point can be made, mutatis mutandis, with regard to conceptual-linguistic constructions overall. The formation of the thought “stone” in any given person at any given time is a causal result of the sensory capacities of our ancestors and their communal interactions around what they took to be stones, bequeathed upon their heirs through linguistic assimilation and education. The point is that we do not need there to be stones, per se, in the world (as, for instance, solid, unmoving objects), in order to account for the utility of the shared conception of stones. And, of course, a shared conception does not need to be shared exactly. Just as our sensory organs provide a vague representation of the solidity or smoothness of an object that does not reflect its precise surface, our words and concepts trade in vagueness about their objects, so that beneficial usage does not require perfection of conceptual reflection.
Philosophers of language distinguish between sociocultural “artifacts,” such as dollars and pots, which most agree are conceptual constructions, and “natural kinds,” which are often thought to exist independently. Yet awareness of the “deep time” causal processes that have led to human sensation, language, and culture provides a strong argument that everything that we take to be a “natural kind” is in fact just another kind of “artifact” (unless and until the physicists can ground all of the other sciences in a fundamental set of entities). Evolutionary causal processes in deep time therefore provide a modern translation of what Vasubandhu means when he says that beings in hell experience the same hallucination together because of the similarity of their endless karmic conditioning.11 Part of what it is to be a human is to have certain perceptions and conceptions shared by other humans, which we inherit with our human body. Nothing that we experience is as it appears, and the real causes and conditions of our shared, delusory perceptions are unending, and indescribable. But they can be known better. And the first step in understanding those causes is to acknowledge that the way things appear is caused in a way that is different from the way things appear to be caused. The Buddhist tradition, and modern science, both seek to focus our attention on clarifying the real causes. Even the “appearance only” tradition, which is founded in the denial of the real existence of external objects, then, may be called “realistic” in the conventional sense that it demands that we accept our situation for what it really is.
This is not to say that Buddhism itself is “scientific” in its methods or outlook. Traditional Buddhist meditation, for instance, should be understood through the conceptual lens of “ritual” as much as “science of the mind.” Still, it seems to me that a modern, scientifically educated rationalist has good reasons to hope that Buddhist ethical and epistemic discussions might provide useful engagements with a modern worldview.
Far from being a counterintuitive, solipsistic idealism, Vasubandhu’s worldview resonates in a commonsense way with the unavoidable recognition that we are medium-sized beings living in a world beholden to the physics of subatomic particles. Buddhist Causal Framing places sensible conditions on the kinds of affirmation such a reality permits: we are subject to our own, necessarily limited, frames of reference, but within those frames we are responsible to the inputs of objectivity-testing, which can call the frames themselves into question.
Finally, as a mode of cultural analysis, Vasubandhu’s “three natures” view suggests a cultural interpretation of the Yogācāra “storehouse consciousness” (ālayavijñāna), the mental source of the possibilities of experience and action. Culture conditions us and forms us, but we each contribute to its causal series, as a cetanā contributes to a mental stream. The better we understand our history and our humanity—and thus the better we understand the conditions that have contributed to what we take to be our identities—the better equipped we are to improve our own perspectives and to understand those of others. Vasubandhu sought, through the three natures, to sequester scripture’s multiple forms from the specter of nihilism. An appeal to causality undermines the claims of both “reality” and “unreality” by recognizing that no matter what views appear, they are all conditioned. Perhaps a three natures approach to culture may help, through the same means, to sequester cultural relativism while yet preventing a return to the false reification of bias. After all, we all share the nature of being subject to causes and conditions, and we all share the causal stream that makes it fun to bounce a ball.
Unsurprisingly, I find Buddhist philosophical traditions compelling not just in their intellectual and historical contexts, but in ours as well. I hope the reader will agree, if not today, then perhaps—in part due to the causal condition of having (intentionally) read this book—in the future.