 Thank you, Lucia. Actually, thanks to everybody at SOAS who has been involved in my invitation and my visit here. I actually know how difficult it is to set these things up. It's a lot of work. And I really do appreciate it. It really is a pleasure being here. These lectures are a bit of an experiment for me. I'm using them to bring together things that I've been thinking and writing about over the last few years. But the truth is, and this is maybe embarrassing, I've been thinking about these things since I first got interested in Buddhism as a teenager. And while the material that I'm going to talk about, particularly today in the approach, might seem esoteric, particularly to the non-specialists here, my project is really to convince you that it's not esoteric. That it's important. The four presentations, which are today's lectures and then the three seminars, which are happening over the next three days, are intended in my own mind to constitute a whole. And that's a bit of a challenge. I'll begin today with what I see as an underlying paradox or loop that lies at the very center of and gives structure to Buddhist thought, really throughout Buddhist history. And then I'm going to argue that the place of the loop is at the very heart of the tradition so that any attempt to untangle the loop just yields another loop. Also in the spirit of the comparative dimension of the Jordan lectures, in my next two seminars, I'm going to move away from Buddhism altogether and move into Western philosophy and phenomenology. That's on Wednesday. And then into quantum mechanics on Thursday. When you hear Buddhism and quantum mechanics, you know that I've gone over the edge, I guess. But my object is to demonstrate that the loop that I'm going to identify today is not simply an artifact of some problematic way that the Buddhists set up the problem, that they're saddled with some wrong-headed metaphysical assumptions or whatever. My point is to show that the problem they're struggling with is not merely analytical but existential and that any serious reflection on what it is to be a human being is going to run into the loop since that reflection involves being both subjects and objects to ourselves. And that turns out to be really strange, not only to philosophers but to hard-headed scientists as well. And that's why I'm bringing in quantum mechanics. The final lecture on Friday is going to turn to Zen Buddhism or Chan, which is often seen as a kind of mysticism or anti-philosophy. But I'm going to try to argue that that really misses the point, at least when it comes to the sophisticated Zen of the Song dynasty period. And I'm going to argue that the Zen writings are rigorously philosophical, but to see it, you first have to understand the question to which Zen is an answer. So today, I'm going to start out dealing with some rather technical issues in the Buddhist tradition, drawing on medieval Indian Buddhist scholasticism. I'm going to try to go through it in such a manner that non-specialists, I don't know if they're non-specialists here, but I did the handout for people. I mean, if you know anything about Buddhism, you don't need the handout. But just in case there are non-specialists here, I really want to go through this slowly enough so that you really get what the arguments are about. There should be plenty of time for questions at the end. So again, even though there's going to be a bunch of terminology thrown at you, don't worry about that. Just notice how the argument works. If some of my claims about the existential nature of the loop strike you as implausible or forced or contrived, then I encourage you to come at least to tomorrow's seminar. And that's where I'm going to put Buddhism aside and to try to actually not just convince you but demonstrate that the loop is real. So today, well on a stroll with the physicist Abraham Pius, Albert Einstein suddenly turned to Pius and asked whether he really believed that the moon only exists when someone is looking at it. Einstein thought the idea bizarre and throughout his life he continued to insist that belief in an external objective reality is an indispensable foundation for the natural sciences. Einstein conceded, however, that this was a belief and not an empirically verifiable fact. To quote from Einstein, since, however, sense perception only gives information of this external world or a physical reality indirectly, we can only grasp the latter by speculative means. Now people have pondered the existence and nature of the mind independent world since the beginnings of philosophical reflection. But the modern form of the debate has been shaped largely by the critical investigations of Descartes and Hume and Kant. By the end of the 19th century, the debate had become rather technical and arcane, accessible only to specialists who had worked their way through Kant's transcendental arguments. But in the 20th century, the rise and stunning success of quantum mechanics gave a new life and urgency to the issue. Contrary to Einstein, who held that science necessitates realism, some scientists, notably those who came to be associated with the Copenhagen interpretation, came to the opposite conclusion. They felt that the indeterminacy observed at the quantum level calls into question the very existence of a mind independent universe. It appears that the physical stuff or at least the unimaginably tiny bits of stuff that show up at the quantum level don't exist until they are observed. Now as to what exactly it means to be observed and whether observation entails consciousness and whether consciousness entails discrimination, these are all areas of ongoing controversy and debate. But one result of the quantum revolution is that reputable physicists could now claim without irony that quantum mechanics provide scientific evidence for a kind of idealism. Now figuring out the early Buddhist view of the existence if any of a mind independent world is not easy. It's far from clear that early Buddhists would have been able to make any sense out of the question. One strand of early canonical thought which foregrounds dependent origination holds that the world we perceive arises together with mind. That is to say the material or the rupa dharmas that comprise the physical world, dharmas are these tiny little, they're Buddhist atoms, the stuff out of which the universe is comprised. So the material atoms or dharmas come into being if and only when causal conditions permit and the causal conditions include the presence of mental dharmas. In the classical dependent origination formula, ignorance, mental formations and cognition are antecedent to the arising of name and form. Name and form I'm understanding as the senseate world. But there's a curious variation on this in the Mahindana Sutta in which name and form is said to be dependent on consciousness but then the text immediately goes on to say that consciousness is dependent on name and form. This is sometimes called the hidden vortex and the vortex clearly foreshadows the loop that I'm gonna talk about today. In any event, given the doctrine of dependent origination, it doesn't seem to make any sense to speak of objects existing in the absence of an observer or a sentient being. But things are not so straightforward. There are passing references in Pali materials, for example, to material as such, dharmata rupa. A form of matter that appears to exist independently from sentient beings. Moreover, even in the dependent origination formula, it is unclear whether the list of causal relations are intended to be understood temporally or logically. And besides, the doctrine of dependent origination is part of a satiriological project. The goal of which is liberation from the cycle of life and death. So in all likelihood, the speculative question as to what might exist independently of mind would have seemed irrelevant, if not inimical, to that goal. Be that as it may, the emphasis placed on dependent origination suggests that the early tradition leans toward the anti-realist side of the metaphysical spectrum. Now Quentin Miesu has coined the term correlationism to refer to the idea according to which, and here I'm quoting from Miesu, the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from one another. In Miesu's analysis, almost all contemporary philosophy is correlationist in that it holds the numinal domain of the real, what he calls the great outdoors, or the absolute outside. To be off limits to serious philosophy. Continental philosophy, drawing from her Serlian phenomenology, abandons the real via the epoché and the methodological priority according to what, accorded to what is given in the immediacy of perception. According to Miesu, even analytic philosophy under the influence of Wittgenstein and the linguistic term, abandons the real as a something about which nothing can be said. Now, I don't wanna argue about the details and cogency of Miesu's critique, but I do believe that he has captured something of the current philosophical zeitgeist. And given the primacy placed by Buddhist exegetes on the co-arising of subject and object, of mind and world, Buddhism might well be viewed as the epitome of correlationist thought. But again, things are not quite so simple. It's true that skeptical arguments of the sort favored by Western idealist philosophers, arguments based on the experience of epistemic error or predicated on the contingent species-specific anatomy of our sense faculties, these kind of arguments were familiar to Buddhists from early on. The oft-used example of a rope mistaken for a snake comes immediately to mind. Yet despite their analysis of co-arising, early Buddhist thought is not in any simple sense phenomenology or idealism, much less analytic philosophy. If anything, the abhidharmakas are metaphysical dualists. The dharmas of mind are no more and no less real than are the rupa or the physical dharmas. And besides, the entire dharma theory presupposes a realist by which I mean a frame invariant or observer independent perspective. The abhidharmakas may be skeptical about the ultimate existence of compound things such as a cart or a pot or a self, but their skepticism did not extend to the transient dharmas of which the compounds are comprised. The intent of the myriological dharma theory is not to do away with the external world, but rather to undermine belief in an overarching self or a kogito. And this is accomplished by deconstructing experience into its constitutive elements. But the elements themselves are real. One might say then that the early Buddhist theory of dependent arising was pulling in both idealist and realist directions at the same time. On the one hand, there is no world without an observer, so mind and consciousness have a certain ontological priority. On the other hand, this observer emerges through the convergence of transient entities whose inherent properties are observer independent. And thus the domain of dharmas, we might call it the dharma dhatu, are is ontologically prior to observation. The resulting tension proved philosophically fertile. In fact, I would argue that the entire history of Buddhist thought can be seen as an ongoing attempt to grapple with this metaphysical riddle. One issue that is rarely, if ever addressed, is the chicken or egg problem, which came first, mind or real. Since Buddhist cosmology regards time as beginningless, the issue of how the whole thing got going in the first place doesn't really arise. It actually arises occasionally, but for the most part they'll say it's always gone, it's always been this way. But that still left plenty of other issues to preoccupy Buddhist skoliasts. What ultimately are dharmas? Do they have determinant natures, babava, or are they merely nominal postulates? Are material dharmas directly knowable? If not, if consciousness has access only to second order representations of physical objects, what warrants truth claims pertaining to the material domain? If there is no real world outside the transient flow of mind, how might we explain the experience of intersubjective cohesion and predictability? And if the co-arising of subject and object, mind and world is ultimately governed by karma, or the law of cause and effect, what exactly is the ontological status of this law? Does it belong to the domain of the absolute, the world, or to the contingent and conventional domain of mind? Now I will not pursue these complex in detail here. To do so would require rehearsing the entire history of Buddhist thought, which is not something I'm competent to do. My aim rather is to identify the underlying loop that runs through and structures the debates. A loop that entangles both realism and idealism, such that they cannot in the end be pulled apart. This loop, I argue, has its roots in the nature of what it is to be an embodied sentient being. We are at one and the same time subjects and objects to one another, to ourselves, I'm sorry. We are both inside the world and outside the world at the same time. As such, the idealist claim that the world emerges in us and the realist claim that we emerge within the world while contradictory are both true. And again, my talk tomorrow is going to try to flesh out and argue that position. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that the Buddhists discovered or even recognized this loop. Rather, my claim is that the loop is an inescapable feature of our life world and thus any serious reflection on the relationship of mind and world is bound to bump into it sooner or later. Even modern physics, that branch of science devoted to the exploration of the elemental constituents of the physical world has come up against it. Note how contemporary quantum theorists working from the same accepted body of experimental data offer competing theories that run off in divergent, realist, and idealist direction. In my second seminar on Thursday, I will show that the rival positions advanced by quantum theorists, like the Copenhagen interpretation, hidden variables, many worlds, decoherence, relational quantum mechanics and so on, they end up replicating in many respects the positions founded in Buddhist writings. Now, Buddhist correlationist metaphysics may have brought the loop to the surface, but with a few notable exceptions, Buddhist exegetes were loath to acknowledge it. Philosophers in India were no more comfortable with contradiction and paradox than were their counterparts in the West. And thus, Buddhist exegetes did what they could to untangle or tame or flatten out the loop. Rather than conceding that idealism and realism are both true, much like the quantum theorists, they try to resolve the paradox in favor of one or the other perspective. That is to say, they try to articulate and defend an internally consistent, a non-contradictory, idealist or realist position. In doing so, they make use of a few key exegetical strategies. And one is what I'm going to call the fission gambit. This is a popular divide and conquer strategy that involves insisting that what is held to be single is actually multiple. Another, which I will call the fusion gambit, is just the opposite. It involves declaring that what appears to be many is, on analysis, just one. And another strategy is dialectical sublation, which is an attempt to resolve a dialectical tension by identifying and transcending the antinomies. As we will see, the use of such stratagems is often a clue that the author is caught in the loop and desperately looking for a way out. Now, my third seminar on Friday will end this series by turning briefly to the Zen tradition, which I will argue is among the few Buddhist schools that recognized, foregrounded, and even celebrated in both its philosophical writings and its religious practice, the paradoxical manner in which mind and world enfold one another. And rather than seeking to evade the loop through fission or fusion or sublation, they try to labor its structure and sort of dangle it right in front of your nose. So let's begin with the status of dharmas that comprise the building blocks of early Buddhist ontology. Are they empirical objects known directly by the senses or are they known inductively? Or in the end, are they merely nominal postulates? Now, given the witness of early Abhidharmaka sources, it would appear that Buddhist skoliasts drawn on scriptural counts originally held that all consciousness is conceptually mediated. That is to say, cognition or vinyana of an object is invariably accompanied by various associated mental factors, the chaitasika dharma, that contribute to the apprehension, conceptual identification, and affective response to the sense data. So to borrow from Brentano's terminology, at least in this, what I'm identifying as an early Abhidharma strata, consciousness is intentional in that there is no consciousness without content. For the Buddhists, content requires the capacity to discriminate. And by discrimination, just think of it very generally as the ability to pull a figure out from a ground. And in the early tradition, this discriminative capacity is linked to conceptual and linguistic capacities. There is, in short, no room for unmediated knowledge of the physical world. This is arguably a logical entailment of early Buddhist correlationism, which holds that thinking and being are inextricable. Note that in our early sources, nirvana is not merely the cessation of discrimination and cognitive content, but it is the cessation of consciousness itself. This, I admit, is somewhat controversial, but I have argued it, and I'm right. Okay. But I'm talking about a very early, sort of hypothetical strata. But this created a problem. The Abhidarmaka model of perception posited a temporal gap, however brief, between the apprehension of a material object, or the object field, the Vishaya, by sense cognition and the subsequent arising of mind cognition. This is not a crazy idea. It's the idea that initially there's some kind of raw apprehension of an object by the sense doors, and then consciousness kicks in and discriminates or recognizes what it is. It's a very, it's kind of natural epistemology. So it is mind cognition that discerns or discriminates the object via the application of names and categories. But if this is true, then the senses must first make, when they first make contact with a physical form, there must be an initial non-conceptual moment in which a sense faculty or sense cognition grasps its object directly or immediately. So despite the widely accepted view that sense cognition does not have access to conceptuality and hence not discriminate, that that's the view from the scriptures, the Abhidarmakas who are trying to make sense of the scriptures are forced to concede that sense cognition does apprehend in some manner a physical form. And this raised a host of problems. And it's the same problems that actually surround recent debates over qualia, including questions surrounding the content, if any, of non-conceptual states and whether such states can properly be described as being conscious, as opposed to constituting part of the subconscious or sub-doxastic background. See the problem, this is a problem, I've actually written about this in some detail, but it's a problem where the Buddhist debates start to directly, they look very much like contemporary debates between the conceptualists and non-conceptualists in philosophy of mind. Now the Vibhashika approach to this puzzle, I'm gonna be talking about Vibhashika versus Sotrantika, they're two different sub-schools within the Sarvasthi Vardhanas and these are major Abhidharma scholastic traditions in North India. So the Vibhashika approach to this puzzle is to divide and conquer. They distinguish between three different kinds of discrimination and claim that only the second and third kinds of discrimination, Abhinyurupana vikalpa and Anusmanana vikalpa, that they involve conceptuality, but in contrast, the first kind of discrimination, they call it Svabhava vikalpa, consists in the raw or unmediated apprehension of the object field in which the sense faculty, or according to some exegetes sense cognition, directly grasps the inherent characteristic of the object. So you see a field of red and you directly grasp maybe red. Unsurprisingly however, they have a tough time making conceptual sense of the content of this non-conceptual perceptual state. But this is the price they must pay for grounding perception in the unmediated sensory apprehension of the real. They want that they need there to be this initial, immediate grasping of a sense datum. The Vibhashika trivikalpa theory, this theory of three different kinds of discrimination, then paves the way for a correspondence model of truth that mitigates the correlation of slide into idealism. They wanna hold on to a real world that we have immediate access to, that's the argument. Now the Sotranthika analysis perception parts away with the Vibhashika model on several significant points. First, they reject the argument that the sense object, sense faculty, and sense cognition arise simultaneously. In the Sotranthika model, there is an initial moment in which a sense faculty, that's what we might think of as sense organ or at least the kind of strange mechanism behind the sense organ, it arises in tandem with an object and this serves as the cause for the subsequent arising of a raw sense cognition. But given the transient nature of Dharmas, the original material object is gone before the sense cognition arises. As such, sense cognition is confronted with a kind of after image or a representation, it's known as the akara of the object rather than the object as such. So in contrast to the Vibhashika analysis, the Sotranthika's hold that there is never direct contact between consciousness, including sense consciousness and the material dharma. So they're sometimes regarded as nominalists and they do seem to flirt at times with idealism. There's according to later doxographic accounts, the Sotranthikas eventually emerge into Yogicada which is often understood to be a Buddhist idealist school. But Sotranthika exegetes are in fact at pains to mitigate idealism, they don't wanna go there. And to this end, they argue that the akara or mental representation is simply mind itself assuming the form of the object. It's great. That is to say, while consciousness trades only in representations, the representations have a direct causal link to the object field grasped by the sense faculties and this makes knowledge of the objective world possible. So to conclude this little, I realize it's technical very quickly, both the Vibhashika and Sotranthika conform to scriptural orthodoxy in that they want to maintain that the material world arises in conjunction with an observer. But in their view, this correlationism is not idealism because the objects of raw sense perception, whether they are cognized directly as the Vibhashikas believe or indirectly as the Sotranthikas believe, they are real in and of themselves. They have Sbabava, they have some inherent existence. And presumably the Abhidharma has grasped the threat that idealism poses to the entire Abhidharma project. And thus they felt compelled to affirm the empirical status of Dharmas. However, both the Vibhashikas and Sotranthika struggle to make sense of the preconceptual, perceptual moments in which the physical domain is disclosed. They repeatedly characterize it as what it is to know blue as opposed to knowing conceptually this is blue. In other words, before the cognitive discriminatory apparatus kicks in, if you're just looking at a field of blue, they say, you know blue. You don't know this is blue and you don't know blue in quotation marks, but you know blue. But when you actually look at them to try to make sense of that, it gets really hairy. So one question it begs, for example, is whether the non-conceptual raw apprehension of blue is conscious in any meaningful way. Is that something happening consciously or subconsciously? Right, or is it just part of the cognitive machinery running in the background? Curiously, the question is not explicitly addressed until the fifth century compilation, which is rather late for this. This is by a fellow named Sangha Badra in his Nyaya Nusada. He actually tackles this problem by employing the fission gambit, right? He argues that we need to distinguish three different kinds of perception. There's immediate perception by the sense faculty. There's perception of what sometimes translated perception of inner feeling and perceptual awareness. And this allows him to claim that while immediate sense perception, that first moment of blue, may not be conscious in and of itself, it arises concurrently with the perception of feeling. And this involves some kind of inner awareness. The result is that in Sangha Badra's analysis, that initial moment of non-conceptual sense perception both is and is not conscious. A delightful example of the divide and conquer approach that is deployed to resolve potential contradictions. Now that both Vibhashika and Sotranthika sought to stave off idealism, suggests that they were aware of certain stakes. If the phenomenal domain that is cognitively available to us is not ultimately grounded in mind independent reality, in a dharma dhatu, however understood, how do we account for the intersubjective stability and cohesion of the life world? This is Einstein's position, by the way, right? He just said, we can't give that up. We're just gonna be unable to really account for how it all works unless we hold on to some kind of objective mind independent reality. There must be some fundamental laws of nature working behind the scenes that govern the dynamics of the virtual correlationist world that we inhabit. For Buddhists, these laws are the laws of cause and effect, or karma, that regulate interactions among these fleeting dharmas. But in their analyses of the nature of causations, Buddhists, like Hume, discovered that causation is more elusive than it initially appears. In short, they run up against the loop. To give a single example, one issue that the Abhidharmakas wrestle with is the temporal contiguity between cause and effect. Some of them insisted that you cannot properly claim that one thing causes another unless there is a gap between the two. They must be separate, or you can't talk about causation. If they arise together, you can't disambiguate which is the cause and which is the effect. But others disagree, insisting that if there were a gap, then a necessary relationship could not be definitively established. You would have conjunction, but not causation. In this latter view, causation proper requires the actual concurrence of cause and effect. So the Vibhashikas opted for concurrence. Their claim that cause and effect arise simultaneously is a natural corollary of their theory of the present existence of past and future dharmas. This is a doctrine that they're very famous for, that past, present, and future all exists. Indeed, for the Vibhashika, it sounds actually a crazy notion, but it's absolutely tied to this understanding of causality. For the Vibhashika, the present existence of past and future is necessitated by the doctrine of momentariness. A transient event that is already past can function as a present cause only to the extent that the past event still exists. It's not an unreasonable idea. The Sotranthikas find this nuts. They argue that it makes no sense to claim a cause-effect relationship between two concurrent events since the very notion of causation entails a temporal disjunction. But then the Sotranthika must explain how a no longer excellent event can have a causal efficacy in the present. And here they come up with a theory of seeds. Past events leave behind seeds that endure and later mature to serve as the efficient causes for present events. So once again, there is a highly technical and sophisticated literature on this topic that I'm not gonna go into here. My point is simply to note that the early Avidarmakas recognize at least tacitly the humane problem. That phenomenologically we are confronted with contiguity but not necessity. Yet they are at pains to avoid the humane conclusion that the so-called law of causality is mere conceptual imputation. They propose two competing theories each of which has an air of desperation about it. One claims that past events, albeit past, still exist and the other that past events are no more but their seeds continue. Here too we see the lengths that Avidarmakas will go to avoid slipping into idealism. The Avidarmakas have good reason to be worried. They're claimed that the self is an illusion that arises through karmically determined interactions of transient mental and physical dharmas is tenable only to the extent that karma and dharmas are real. In other words, if karma and dharmas are to be used to explain how the world appears, they must have some reality apart from those appearances. And yet asserting such mind independence existence seems incompatible with the very doctrine of dependent arising. See the problem? Okay. So this is where Nagarjuna will intervene. His project is to debunk Sarvasivadha realism which he regards as incoherent and inconsistent with the core insight of dependent origination. And his task will be relatively easy given that the Vibhashikas and Sotrantikas have already done much of the heavy lifting. Which is to say Nagarjuna will use the Vibhashika critiques of Sotrantika and the Sotrantika critiques of Vibhashika in order to undermine both their positions at the same time. And this strategy is evident, for example, in chapter one of the Mula Madhyamaka Karikas which takes to task the notion of cause and effect. Here Nagarjuna argues pitting Vibhashika and Sotrantika positions against one another that causation cannot hold if there is a disjunct between cause and effect, right? So if seed and sprout are temporarily discreet, you cannot establish a causal link between them, but they also cannot hold if they are concomitant, if the sprout is already somehow coexistent within the seed. The conclusion of Nagarjuna's complex argument is that an internally consistent account of the nature of causation is unavailable precisely because causation has no nature. It is not something that exists in and of itself but is rather a conceptual imputation. He then goes on to apply the same reducto ad absurdum method to virtually every other important concept in the Abhidarmaka arsenal, including motion, the senses, the aggregates, the defilements and so on. All such concepts are empty of own being. They do not astend actual things in the mind independent universe but are merely conventional or relational ways of speaking. This for Nagarjuna is the central insight of Buddhist correlation of teachings, okay? So far, so good. But then it would seem that Nagarjuna's reducto ad absurdum argument should apply to the Buddhist teachings as well, to the fornable truths, to the stages of awakenings, the three refuges and so on. If they too are mere conceptual imputation, it would seem that Nagarjuna's critique threatens to undermine the truth of the Buddhadharma, the Buddhist teachings itself. If everything is empty, as Nagarjuna claims, what grounds are there to privilege the Buddhist teachings over those of his rivals? This is the worry that motivates chapter 24 of the Kadikas in response to which Nagarjuna famously distinguishes between two truths, absolute or ultimate truth and conventional or relative truth. Buddhist teachings, he says, are conventionally true insofar as they point toward the absolute. This presumably will allow him to distinguish the conventional truth of the Buddhist teachings from the conventional falsehood of his rivals. I should point out that he actually doesn't make that move. He doesn't talk about conventional falsehood but it's implicit there and it's brought out by commentators later on. So insofar as the conventional truth of the Buddhist teachings are warranted in the end by their privileged relationship to the absolute, much will depend on how we understand the absolute. And here we see Nagarjuna and his commentators pressing up against the loop. In terms of logical structure, absolute is to conventional as realism is to idealism. So I'll try to unpack that. At first, the two truth doctrine might appear to be out of step with the rest of Nagarjuna's text and a skeptic might well view it as an apologetic leap to shield the Buddhist teachings from the full force of his own deconstructive logic. If Nagarjuna's aim is to purge Buddhism of misplaced dogmatic realism, right? The realism of the Abhidharma theory and to reinstate the early correlationist insights of dependent origination, why doesn't he just say, yes, of course, my critique applies to the teachings of the Buddha as well. They're empty. In that case, there would be no need to posit an absolute truth, a truth of emptiness. That, by the way, I argue, creates all the problem. That Nagarjuna boxed at this and instead takes recourse in the fission gambit, right? He's dividing truth into two, can seem like special pleading, right? By dividing it into two, it allows the Buddhist teachings to be true conventionally but not true ultimately, at one and the same time. So he gets to keep his Buddhist cake and eat it too. But whatever Nagarjuna's attempt may have been, the doctrine of the two truths, more so than any other Indian Buddhist doctrine, captures the philosophical structure of the loop. And I suspect this is why it has attracted so much interest and debate. The nature of conventional truth seems clear enough. At its most basic, it refers to the phenomenal world of our mundane existence. The socially and conceptually constructed world made up of carts and pots and cows and persons and all sorts of other things. It is comprised of the shared linguistic conventions, beliefs and practices that sustain what sociologists call the nomos. It is essentially pragmatic, which is to say that conventional truth claims are warranted insofar as they work for us and elicit general assent. The Buddhist teachings is conventionally true in that it is able to mitigate suffering. While the teachings of his rivals presumably perpetuate conceptual falsehoods and lead only to more pain. The rub is that the conventional truth of Buddhism liberates one from suffering precisely by pointing in the direction of the absolute so everything now hinges on how one understands this absolute. See, the argument is the conventional only makes sense as conventional vis-a-vis the absolute. But it turns out to be really hard to characterize the absolute. By definition, it is not relative or conditional and thus as an in itself cannot be understood in relation to anything else. Mahayana exegete struggled with the issue over many centuries given rise to multiple competing and increasingly sophisticated accounts. For our present purposes, I'm going to discuss the arguments under three broad groupings. Deflationary or sometimes analytic approaches, transcendental or phenomenological approaches and synthetic approaches that try to mediate between the first two. So under, and you'll see for those specialists in the room, you'll see I'm covering here hundreds of different exegetes. I wanna see if I can get away with this. Under these three headings. Under the deflationary heading, I would include positions classified as Prasangika or Rong Tong by the Tibetan Tibet, or those are two different ones by Tibetan doxographers as well as certain strands of Chinese Chan such as the Baotong school, Baotong here. According to this view, Nagarjuna's arguments demonstrate the necessarily contingent nature of all language. All denotation and predication is based on making distinctions, on slicing and dicing and thus truth claims are necessarily observer or context dependent. There is no escape from contingency. The, what Thomas Nagel calls the view from nowhere is just another view from somewhere. Since the very notion of a view presupposes a subject position, even to claim that all things are empty cannot be true in any ultimate sense since it pertains only to what can be said about the world and not to the world as such. So given this logic, what I'm calling this this deflationary logic, the distinction between the convention and the absolute is itself conventional since the absolute does not broke any distinctions. We then arrive at a very peculiar conclusion that absolute truth is precisely the truth that all truth is conventional, right? So the great outdoors is a chimera, a piece of philosophical nonsense. There is no outside, but we're not done. If absolute truth is merely the claim that all truths are conventional, then conventional truth is the only truth left standing. The very notion of an extrinsic or mind-independent world that might serve to ground truth claims, whether conventional or ultimate, is itself the product of our inescapably conventional and dualistic ways of thinking. So if conventional truth is the highest truth there is, it's absolute. It turns out that we've been in the great outdoors all along, right? This is, I think this is a Viconstinian argument, a kind of later Viconstinian argument. Here the loop rises to the surface. The absolute is precisely the conventional and the conventional is the absolute. They enfold one another as do idealism and realism. And I would note that there are good scriptural warrants for this line of interpretation in the Prajnaparamita literature where Samsara and Nirvana enfold each other and vice versa. So for much, so much for the deflationary view, transcendental approaches, so I'm now working with a whole other approach to the two truth dialectic. Transcendental approaches to the two truths are more typical of Yogachara, Tathagatagarbha, Shentong, some Svatantrika commentators and some Zen commentators. This line of interpretation rejects the deflationary or analytic position as incoherent and self-contradictory. But more critically, the transcendentalists claim that the deflationary view undermines the Buddhist path insofar as it collapses the gap between Samsara and Nirvana. Ignorance and awakening, path and goal. The transcendentalists hold that there is no Buddhism without a goal. And the goal, the final goal, is merely the realization that the convention... Sorry, did I do that well? Oh, I really, start again. Transcendentalists hold that there is no Buddhism without the goal. And if the final goal is merely the realization that the conventional is all there is, that there is no final escape from contingency, what is the point? So like Mieshu, the transcendentalists want to escape the correlationist circle. And they view the deflationary approach, the claim that the circle, seen for what it is, just is the real, they claim that that's a cop out. Now there are steep divisions among different transcendentalist approaches, but they are united insofar as they agree that the absolute is something that stands apart from contingency. It is the domain of the real, attained or realized or known by the Buddhas and advanced bodhisattvas. In a world it is near to vikopa. It is free of discrimination, free of ignorance, duality, discrimination, conceptual imputation. But what could it possibly mean to attain or realize or know such a state? One possible approach to the absolute is to consider it tantamount to the ascetic nirvana of the early shramana tradition in which nirvana is escape from samsara period. That is, once near vikopa or non-discrimination, the state of non-discriminative awareness is attained and the dualisms of figure and ground, subject and object, mind and world, or caste aside, the aggregates cease and with them cognition and phenomenality. One might characterize this as a higher order thought approach to nirvikopa if you're familiar with contemporary philosophy of mind, in which case the absence of conceptual discrimination means the absence of consciousness and the collapse of the world. Now this notion of the absolute is rather difficult to distinguish from death as death is understood by modern secularists who do not believe in afterlife. And it's easy to see why this Hinayana understanding of the absolute was associated rightly or wrongly with nihilism. And unsurprisingly, this reading never gained much traction among Mahayana exegetes. Nevertheless, it is arguably the interpretation of Nagarjuna recently advanced by Ann McDonald, if anybody's interested in her work. And I suspect that the threat of nihilism may have motivated at least in part the transcendentalist arguments. So now to come to the transcendentalists, their problem is how to positively characterize the collapse of subject object duality such that something remains in emptiness. Their solution is to claim that the state of non-discrimination, this Nirvikalpa, simply discloses what has always been present, the non-dual in itself from which the phenomenal world emerges. Indeed, according to this view, the very claim that the phenomenal domain is contingent is only intelligible against the backdrop of the real. Various terms are used to denote this non-contingent absolute, including shunyata, dharmatta, dharmadhatu, tatata, tatagatagarbha, aliavinyana, paratantras, vabhava, and so on, Buddha nature. They go at it. The challenge then is to make sense of what these terms are talking about. Given that first, it must be bereft of all sensible qualities and cognitive content and at the same time, it must be distinguishable from the heterodox, non-Buddhist, non-correlationist notion of Brahman. They don't want to turn into Advaita Vedantists. So in their positive accounts of Nirvikalpa, the collapse of mind-world duality, Mahayana transcendentalists fall into one of two camps. Here, I'm using the fishing gamut. They can either claim that mind alone remains or that the world alone remains. In the first approach, the falling away of subject-object duality discloses the ground of luminous mind, right? Or pure consciousness, amalavinyana. This luminous consciousness has in fact been present all along but was obscured by defilements and deluded thoughts. Writers frequently avert to analogy to explain how this can be solved. So they'll say luminous mind is like the still surface of a clear mirror that registers but is ultimately untouched by the transitory images that appear within. Or it's like the ocean. The wind blows stirring up waves that obscure the natural clarity of the water. As the waves and winds settle, the abiding clarity is revealed. This luminous mind strategy is popular in certain Yogachara, Tathagatagarbha, Northern Chan and Tantric traditions. Like the Abhidharmakas, they feel compelled to ground their correlationism in a non-contingent empirical reality. But where the Abhidharmakas made unconstructed cognition, the bare quail present in the first instance of sense cognition before conceptuality kicks in, these transcendentalists have this, now this non-conceptual reality as an enduring untainted background consciousness. The problem of course is that luminous mind begins to suspend suspiciously like an internal soul or an atma and this did not go unnoticed by critics. And that's why we have the alternative strategy which is actually less well known. The alternative strategy steers clear of the Atman problem by claiming that near vikopa or the elimination of discrimination brings an end not to the world but to mind itself. This approach has the advantage of derefying mind and consciousness and thereby hewing to the correlationist insight that consciousness being intentional, like that it has a subject-object structure, necessarily entails cognitive content. As such, the attainment of non-discrimination which is tantamount to the end of the illusion of an anonymous self or cogito that stands apart from the natural world is the end of consciousness itself but while the four itself ceases, the holistic in itself or the dhammadattu is left untouched. This is weird, right? This consciousness ends but the world does not. This is not like cessation, it's not nihilistic. To attain the absolute is thus to lose oneself in or reunite with the in-sentient natural world. Mieshu's ancestral world that exists prior to giveness, that's a little for those of you who know Mieshu. This is not nihilistic, it's not the hinayana insentience of utter nothingness but the quiescent insentience of grasses and trees, walls and fences, roof styles and stones. That's a traditional list given in Chinese texts. A roof tile, put it this way, is being devoid of any sense of self clings to nothing and therefore is free of suffering. In short, nirvikopa or non-discrimination is mindlessness, wuxin. This position is characteristic of Aksed Chan texts that explicitly defend the buddhahood of the in-sentient but I would also include in this category the robobuddha interpretation of Chandrakirti advanced by Mark Sitteritz, if anybody's familiar with that. And it also is, to my mind, reminiscent of the illimitive materialism of Quine and Dene. Now some might argue that the distinction between luminous mind on the one hand and mindlessness on the other is in the end merely rhetorical. That is to say they're both merely fingers pointing to the moon, the moon being the transcendent, non-dual, ineffable ground of being. Hence differences between these two transcendentalist positions have more to do with rhetorical style or pedagogical considerations rather than their ultimate purport. But Buddhist exegetes evidently felt otherwise and they invested considerable energy defending their respective positions. They were driven in the end, I believe, to distinguish their positions from the mindlessness of Narodasamapati which is a kind of meditative state akin to being in a deep unconscious coma. And also to differentiate their positions from the beings without conception. These are fascinating celestial beings who have material bodies but no minds. At the same time, so on the one hand they have to distinguish themselves from those kind of deep comatose or mindless states but they also need to avoid the monistic atman or Brahman theories of the non-Buddhists. And this didn't leave them much wiggle room. The eighth century debates between the so-called Southern and Northern schools of Chan as well as the Samyay debates between the Indian master Kamala Sheila and Mohyain were attempts to identify and delineate what little wiggle room they could find. Now there's one more approach. I'm coming to the end here. One more approach that we might loosely call synthetic and it tries to mitigate the tension between the antinomies of conventional and ultimate. These approaches draw from an attempt to synthesize the various deflationary and transcendental perspectives by employing a divide and conquer approach. I have in mind the Svatantika distinction between two kinds of conventional truth, the Yogachara doctrine of the three natures or Trisvabhava, the Tiantai claim that Nagarjuna possessed not two truths but three and so on. In each case, exeges posit a new category that is intended to mediate between or straddle across or sublate the antinomies of the conventional and the real or mind and world. Thus the Svatantikas come up with true conventional reality. Yogacharans speak of the dependent nature. The Tiantai exeges have a middle truth between the other two truths and so on. The point of these synthetic theories is at least in part to mitigate the strong correlationism of the deflationary approach which collapses the in itself into the for itself and at the same time to avoid the reification of the absolute that is endemic to transcendental approaches. The synthetic positions recognize the incoherence of standalone realist and idealist positions and aim for some kind of synthetic solution. They do so through a combination of fission and fusion through the proliferation of new categories and schemas that capture and ultimately resolve or sublate the contradictions. Yet insofar as they seek to reign in the loop to find a stable handhold in the unfolding of mind and world they are doomed to fail. In time another commentator will come along convince that with just a little more tweaking a little more fission here and fusion there they can make a go of it but they never succeed. And the problem is there is simply no place to stand either inside or outside the loop to take the loops measure. So to conclude many of the great debates in contemporary philosophy between analytic and continental philosophy between idealism and realism between non-conceptualism and conceptualism seem to share a similar underlying structure namely the paradoxical looping structure that I've tried to identify here. I would also include here the well-known debates between Herbert Dreyfus and John McDowell or between Charles Taylor and Richard Roarty both of these are happened within the last few decades. Now Medieval Buddhist Scholiasts wrestled with the same loop and so as we will see do quantum theorists. With a few notable exceptions philosophers tried to get a grip on the loop by hitching their cart to one of two horses. The first is the anti-realist or idealist horse that privileges mind or appearances and the claim is that there is no world unless and until it shows up for someone and thus it makes no sense to speak of a moon when nobody is looking. The second is the realist or physicalist horse that privileges the world. There is no mind in the absence of world and thus the moon is there irrespective of whether anybody notices it or not. That both positions are ultimately true is a claim that is rarely made much less taken seriously but given that the loop seems irrepressible and that 2000 years of philosophical debate in both East and West have done little to settle in favor of one side or the other perhaps it is time to take it seriously and to take seriously the notion that paradox is an ineligible feature of our world and that is what I'll be doing in the remaining three sessions. Thank you. Thank you.