 Hello, I'm JJ Joaquin and welcome to Philosophy and What Matters, where we discuss things that matter from a philosophical point of view. Our topic for this episode is Asian philosophy. Or better yet, philosophy is found in Asia. Now in philosophy, we study metaphysics, the nature of reality, semology, the nature and limits of human knowledge, and ethics, the nature of morality. Now we learn what the great philosophers have said about these matters. Through the works of Plato and Aristotle, Augustine, Anselm, Thoms Aquinas, the modern philosophers, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Barthé, Eumann, Kant, and everyone who came after Hegel. But the canon of philosophy is dominated by philosophers from the West. What are the Taoists? What are the works of the Confessions and the Buddhists? What could these philosophies found in Asia offer us, and would they even matter? Now joining us to discuss these philosophies of these, we have Graham Priest, the distinguished professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. So hello Graham, welcome to Philosophy and What Matters. Hi JJ, thanks for joining us. Yeah, so before we get into the main topic, let's first discuss your philosophical background. So how did you get started in philosophy? Well, I was trained as a mathematician. My doctorate is in mathematics, actually in mathematical logic. And mathematical logic is closely connected with many issues in philosophy. By the time I finished my doctorate, I realized two things. The first that I was never going to be a very good mathematician. And the second was that philosophy was a lot more fun. So I tried to get a job in a philosophy department until I was surprised I was successful. And I've never got back since then. It's been an enormous amount of fun. I mean, since I had very little knowledge of philosophy, I spent my whole philosophical life educating myself. It's been a blast. Okay, so you were born in the UK, but you moved to Australia. So what was that move about? Yeah, correct. So I finished my doctorate. That was at the LSE. And of course I applied for lots of jobs. And I was offered two temporary jobs. One was in the Math Department of City University. One was in the Philosophy Department at St Andrews. And for me, it was a no brainer. I went to St Andrews. And of course that was a temporary job. And I carried on applying for jobs in the UK and elsewhere. And no one seemed to want to offer me a job. The first permanent job I was offered was at the University of Western Australia in Perth in Australia. And since it was the only permanent job I was offered, I took it. I moved with my family to Australia. And we thought we'd be back in the UK for a few years. In a few years. That turned out not to be the case. We'd actually emigrated, although I didn't realize that for a number of years. So most of my working life I've lived in Australia. I was offered a job here in the US about 11 years ago. And I moved here, but I'm not an American. When I hang my philosophical boots up, as it were, I intend to go back to Australia. Australia is a country I love very much. It's got problems like most countries. But I like Australian people. They're very friendly and no nonsense. And philosophically moving to Australia was a really good move for me. It turned out in retrospect. Because Australian philosophy has two great... Well, the way Australians do philosophy has two virtues. First of all, it's very open-minded. The attitude is, well, tell us something interesting. Let's think about it. The second is that it's pretty hard-nosed. People won't take bullshit. So if you think what you're saying won't fly, they're criticising it. So this combination of open-mindedness and hard-nosedness actually is a great breeding ground for philosophy. Bad ideas with a very fast. Good ideas get developed. So in retrospect, the move to us was serendipitous. Okay. So you've been moving around in many universities. But who or what influenced you to pursue a career in academic philosophy? What is easy? As I said, I discovered that philosophy was fun. I mean, it seems to be actually engaging. It's challenging. I enjoy thinking about philosophical issues. That's what made me want to be a philosopher, not a mathematician. Who is a bit harder? You know, I've been fortunate to know many very good philosophers and of course to read many great philosophers as well. And I think the impetus of all these things, both the people I know and the people I've read, have motivated me to go on in philosophy. Okay. So you work mostly in philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics and logic, the latter of which you have contributed immensely. So how did you get into Asian philosophy? Okay. So coming from my mathematical background, my first interest was the philosophy of mathematics. And that's closely connected with issues in philosophical logic in many ways. And that's closely connected with issues in metaphysics in many ways. So, you know, when you do philosophy as you probably discover, the topics are kind of entangled. If you're interested in one thing, it's connected with issues in other areas. And so you get interested in those. So over my life, my interests have drifted. I've never lost an interest, but I've gained lots as the kind of network of connections has spread out in my thinking. So nowadays, there are actually very few bits of philosophy that I don't engage with one way or another. The current book manuscript I have is actually on political philosophy, which is a sort of a new development for me. But that was in turn interesting. That was in turn engendered by my interest in Buddhist ethics. Okay, which brings me to your question of how I got involved in Buddhist ethics, or Buddhism generally. So, I've been in the profession for about 20 years, and I was starting to think that I had some sense of the area of philosophy. When I met someone who is now a very old friend and we've written a great deal together at Jay Garfield. So Jay Garfield is an American philosopher, although he had the chair in Tasmania in Australia at that time. We met at a conference and we started talking. I'd just finished Beyond the Limits of Thought, which you're showing on the screen. He'd just finished his translation of Nagarjuna's Malamudamika Karaka. And as I talked to him, I realised that there was so much interesting stuff in what he was doing in Buddhist philosophy. And I was kind of shocked because it made me realise that there was half the world's philosophy that I knew nothing about. So, you know, Western philosophy stemming from sort of the Middle East, Greece is one thing that Western philosophy is not about. But of course there's Chinese philosophy and Indian philosophy, and those of course go into many other cultures as well. But India and China have great philosophical traditions and I was just shocked to discover that they weren't discussed in the West. So I made a point of trying to educate myself. So I've studied in India and Japan, and I've taught in China and Japan. So that started about 25 years ago and I've been slowly educating myself in the Asian traditions. I haven't lost interest in the West, but philosophical problems are so much more rich and more exciting when you have a multicultural perspective on these things. You know, in many problems, many philosophical problems are universal. They crop up in all philosophical traditions. What's the nature of the world? How should one live? Is there a God? How do you know these things? You find those in all philosophical traditions I'm aware of. Sometimes philosophizing different, thinking enormously. So, you know, that's how I got into Asian philosophy and what it's done to help me in my philosophical thinking. Okay, so you might say that J. Garfield ushered you in Asian philosophy. Now let's turn to this topic. It was another bit of serendipity, okay? Life is full of these things which influence your life in a way that you might never have imagined. Okay, so here in the Philippines and in Asia for the longest time, we have learned about Indian philosophy, Chinese philosophy, and all the rest of these Asian philosophies. But there's always one objection against these things. They're saying, are these even philosophies or just schools of thought? So what can you say about that objection? Okay, there are several things here. First of all, a lot of Asian philosophy is connected with Asian religions. That's obviously true of Buddhism, Hinduism. I don't know whether you want to call Confucianism a religion, but you might. That does not make it non-philosophical. And you only have to think about medieval Western philosophy, which is closely connected with Christianity. So the fact that you have religious connections does not mean it's not philosophy. Secondly, that religions themselves are multifaceted things. They have canonical texts. They usually have a priesthood. They have sacred rites, practices, places and so on. But all the great world religions have philosophies. So these are people who engage in the sorts of philosophical problems that are generated by their religions. Now, the fact that the problems are generated by the religions does not mean that they're specific to those religions because many of these problems are fundamental problems about metaphysics and ethics, which transcend narrow religious boundaries. So what's always engaged me in the Asian philosophical religions is the philosophical parts of these religions, not the other things. Although they're kind of interesting for me on a lay basis, but there's the philosophical stuff which interests me. Final comment. The view that you're describing was kind of orthodox in Western circles up till about, I guess, 50 years ago. I mean, there have been very well-known Western philosophers who took the Indian traditions and the Chinese traditions seriously, such as Hegel and Chopinow. But quite enlarged, the dominant view was that these are not philosophy, that these are religion, irracula, pronouncements, wise men's sayings, et cetera, et cetera. Now, that view, it must be said, can only be held in ignorance of the texts. Because once you start reading the texts, you see that people are engaged in philosophical issues. They're arguing with each other. Philosophical arguments are going backwards and forwards. So that view that is not philosophy, at least in the West, is now lapsing, I think. And very few Western philosophers are prepared to endorse this. But there's still a view that these things are kind of marginal to philosophy. There are some things which are central to philosophy, like Western history of philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind. And the other stuff is just frills. I think that this is still a very common view in the West, and it's completely wrong, because all the great things in philosophy are discussed in the Asian traditions and argued about in the Asian traditions. Of course, if a Western philosophy picks up an Asian philosophical text, you hit the fact that it's coming from a different culture. It's written in a different language. Different assumptions are being made about what can be taken for granted. There are different ways of writing philosophy. And that's a hurdle that a Western philosopher has to jump. But even in the West, philosophy is written in many ways, in many languages, in many styles. And you get used to reading philosophy coming from different backgrounds, like Ancient Greece on medieval Europe, or 19th century Germany. So if you're interested in philosophy, you should want to jump those cultural linguistic backgrounds just to explore what's going on the other side. If you don't speak the language, you're going to be limited in a certain sense. But philosophy is written in so many languages, even just in Western philosophy. It's written in Greek, Latin, French, German, English. Very few people, very few Western philosophers speak all those languages. So if you can't speak the original language, you have to depend heavily on translators and scholars who can. That's fine. As long as you are aware of your limitations, you can work in the traditions. Okay, so I'm sensing a pattern here. So what you're saying is that in Asian philosophy, in Indian philosophy, Chinese philosophy and so on, they're still doing philosophy, but they're engaging in a metaphysical dispute, or questions about ethics or questions about epistemology. So these are philosophical in nature. Is that what you're saying? Absolutely. So you open the texts of philosophical texts in India or China, you will find people discussing the nature of reality, whether there's a God, how one should live, how one should run the state, how you know all these things. And there are robust debates going on in the... I don't know when you want to say that these traditions start probably around the same time that Greek philosophy kicks off. That's about 2,500 years ago. I think there are two things to note about Asian philosophy. There was a radical change in Western philosophy because of the scientific revolution. And Asian philosophy never made that break. So there was a change in Western philosophy around the 17th century, and that change never happened in the East. But that doesn't make what happened in the East obsolete. I mean, obviously we still now talk about philosophical writers in the West. Before the scientific revolution. Western philosophy is full of Plato, Aristotle, and so on. The second thing is that because of Western cultural imperialism, Eastern philosophers have had to come to terms with the influence of Western philosophy has had on their traditions. So the British Raj brought the British traditions to India. Probably the best known Japanese philosophy of the 20th century initiative was highly influenced by Western philosophy. And of course the influence on Marxism on China hardly needs to be... So because of Western imperialism, Asian philosophers over the last couple of hundred years have had to come to terms with Western philosophy, and many have sort of brought the Western and Asian in a way that Western philosophers have not done yet. Okay, now the economic and political center of gravity of the world is moving to the East. Clearly the 21st century will be dominated by China in a way that the 20th century was dominated by the United States. That's a bold claim. That's a bold claim, Graham. I might sound right. I'm going to talk about this if you want, but it will take us off with something of a tangent, but I stand by it. Okay. And so for many reasons, both intellectual and sort of cultural Western philosophers will engage with Asian traditions. I think we're in a kind of exciting time in philosophy because whatever you might think about, economic globalism, we're entering a phase of global philosophy where the world's traditions are going to become entangled with each other. And that is a very fruitful time because when philosophical traditions entangle, all kinds of things happen. So when Buddhism moves into... from India into China, for example, you get the sort of genesis of Chinese Buddhism, which is a fantastic development, or when Judaic thought meets Greek thought in Christian philosophy, you get this sudden flourishing of Christian philosophy. I mean, you know, these are always really, really exciting times. New ideas emerge from that. I think we're moving into that kind of area now. So you're seeing Western universities offering more Asian philosophy courses in the future? Absolutely. I mean, 30 or 40 years ago when I started teaching, there were virtually no courses in Asian philosophy in Western universities. Many Western universities have courses now. I think really every university in Australia does. My own university teaches them occasionally. There are still some old and more traditional departments which don't reach teach courses in Asian philosophy, but more and more courses are being taught. Now, of course, not many philosophers know much about it. So they're kind of limited in what can be taught, but you have a chicken and egg problem. If you don't know about it, you can't teach it. If you can't teach it, people don't know about it, and so the cycle propagates itself. But slowly as people learn more, more will be pulled, people will know more, and more people will want to do research on it, publish on it. This is a movement that's slowly underway, and it's gaining momentum. Okay, so let's have a bird's-eye view first of Asian philosophy. So how should we understand these philosophies in terms of their overall themes, methods, and ways of philosophizing? Yeah. Look, that's sort of an impossible question to answer. Just think about the corresponding question for Western philosophy. Now, tell me about Western philosophy. What makes it tick? What's essential to it? Look, there are many, many Western philosophers. Plato is not Nietzsche. Wittgenstein is not Heidegger. Kant is not Kripke. Look, in the same way, there are many, many different Asian philosophical traditions. So you can't say, well, there's one thing that holds the whole lot together. Okay. Yeah, that's fair enough. Let's get into one of your areas of research. You have done a ton of research in Buddhist philosophy. And what's interesting about your work is that you're comparing and contrasting some salient Buddhist idea with ideas found in Western philosophy. So let's do some comparative philosophy, shall we? Okay. So let's start with the Buddhist idea of sunyata or emptiness. I think that you explored this in your works, in particular this latest, one of your latest works, one. So can you spell out this idea for us? Sunyata. Okay. So sunyata means empty. Sunyata, emptiness. And I think often this is misunderstood. Let's do a little bit of historical backtracking. A major topic in Buddhist philosophy is the nature of reality. And Buddhism developed in an early form, if by about 500 years, in India. And what emerges are called the Abhidharma tradition of philosophy. And they have very distinctive metaphysics. According to them, there are two sorts of reality. There's a conventional reality, which is the world we're familiar with, the Laban's world. And there's kind of an ultimate reality that is what really is there in reality. Now in the Abhidharma tradition, ultimate reality is composed of things called dharmas. You can think of those as metaphysical atoms. And conventional reality is the kind of conceptual construction out of these. In a way that you might think that, well, a chariot is a conceptual construction out of its parts, its axles, its wheels, and so on. That's a standard analogy. But ultimate reality is composed by these dharmas. These things are metaphysical atoms and they are what they are in and of themselves. The Sanskrit word is, self-being. So it's like a substance in Greek philosophy? Pretty much, pretty much, yeah. Now there's a sort of revolution in Buddhist thinking, which arises around the turn of the common era. When a slightly later form of Buddhism emerges, not the older form disappears, you know, still there, but in the new form is called Mahayana. Mahayana has differences from the older tradition, both ethical and metaphysical. But let's concentrate on the metaphysical stuff. The most important early Mahayana writer was a philosopher called Nagarjuna, who influenced all Mahayana philosophy thereafter, both Indian and Chinese and Japanese. And he, in his text, the Milamudhyamaka Karaka, which is one of the great works of philosophy, he launches a swinging attack on the older metaphysical view. So what he argues is that there are no such things as these dharmas, these things which have self-being. So everything is empty, shunya. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist. What it means is, if something is empty, it's empty of something, like glass is empty of beer, right? To be empty is to be empty of something. And what things are empty of is self-being. There's nothing which has self-being. And what this means roughly is that there's nothing which is what it is in and of itself. Everything is what it is in virtue of its relations to other things. So this is a highly relational ontology, if you want to call it that. So that's the view, that's Nogajuna's view of reality. Everything is empty. Now that's really you just get your head around. It gets kind of complicated after that, because you might have think, I mean Nogajuna operates with this distinction between conventional and ultimate reality. It's everywhere in Buddhism. And you might think that having disposed of the Dhammas, these things with Svalpalva, he had given up the notion of ultimate reality and he doesn't. He's quite explicit about that. So conventional reality is what it is. We've always been. Many are labors built. What the hell is ultimate reality now? Okay, that's where it gets murky. This has caused great debates in Buddhist philosophy ever since Nogajuna. But he used this as word shunyata, emptiness for what he takes to be ultimate reality. And then there's a big question about what shunyata as opposed to shunyata is. And many many of the traditions that's been of Nogajuna, and I think Nogajuna himself, but that's contentious, takes it to be something which is ineffable. And so following Nogajuna, you get discussions of an ineffable ultimate reality in Buddhist philosophy. When Buddhism goes into China, this kind of morphs into Buddha nature, which plays an enormous role in Chinese philosophy, especially Zen, or Buddhist Chinese name, Chan. Okay, so I'm trying to wrap my head around the concept here. So you have the Abhidharma Buddhism which has this kind of substance ontology. So you have the Dharma as the foundation of ultimate reality, as opposed to the Nogajuna type of thinking or ontology that you don't have that Dharma, but you have Sunya. So things are empty because they have to be related to each other. So I'm trying to figure it out because in one of your interviews and in one of your papers, you actually put an analogy or you use the analogy of Leibniz and Newton to explain the difference here. Can you tell us something about that? Yeah, so if you're meeting the notion of Sunya for the first time, it might be kind of hard to get your head around if you're coming from a Western tradition of Western philosophy. I mean, things which are Sunya have a relational existence. Now, what does it mean to have a relational existence? Well, there's one thing that's well-known in Western philosophy and that's debates about the philosophy of time. And the debate between Newton or the Newtonians and Leibniz on the philosophy of time is interesting because Newton held that space and time is a thing even of itself. It doesn't depend on the events that happen in it. It will be there if there were nothing. Space and time are kind of locusts in which things happen but they are what they are independently of any events that happen. So space and time or moments in space and time, places in space and time have this kind of self-being. Leibniz rejected this picture. He wasn't an absolutist about time. He was a relationalist. So if you take an event in time, let's say I don't know the election of Donald Trump. So 2016, on November 2016, if you're Newton, that designation, November 2016, refers to a point in space and time. Which is what it is, independent of anything that happens. Leibniz says no. 2016 is just a marker for a set of relations between the things that happened in 2016, the things that happened before 2016, things that happened after 2016. So 2016 doesn't mean anything in and of itself. It's just a marker for a place and a bunch of relations between the events before and after. And that view is relatively well known in Western philosophy and it sort of shows the difference between conceptualising something as having something as being really relational. So sometimes I'd use that analogy to try and get over the notion of relational existence in Western philosophy. But is it the same or is it different from Nagarjuna's Sunniya? Well, the major difference is that according to Nagarjuna everything is empty. Everything has really relational existence. And very few people that I know in the West, in fact I don't really think of anybody in the West who's endorsed this view, Leibniz certainly thought there were that not everything had relational existence. I mean, his theory of monads, monads of things with sub-Harva, par excellence. And of course if you believe in a Western God, God is a thing with sub-Harva par excellence. So what's so distinct about Nagarjuna is the view that everything is empty and then this has various consequences which he explores. Okay, so finally about this concept of Sunniyata so you have not really given a description of what Sunniyata is. Well, there's a description, it's an ineffable thing. But what is that? Well, that's a very good question. Look here's one way of looking at Sunniyata. At Leibnizville I convinced reality is at least conceptual construction. So for me what I'm sitting on is a chair but if you put it in the middle of a culture where they didn't have furniture they wouldn't think of it in that way. It wouldn't be a chair or be a strange shaped object. Conceptual construction plays an enormous role in our thinking about the world. Nations have no intrinsic existence. Nations are simply nations because we conceptualise places and people in the certain way. So a Buddhist is going to say that our conceptual world is a conceptual construction. Now think about taking reality and peeling off the conceptual overlay. So take the chair I'm sitting on and remove its conceptual overlay. This blackness, it's full-leggedness, it's charit-ness. Once you've removed the conceptual overlay what remains is ultimate reality. What's it like? Well, obviously you can't say because to say will be to imply concepts and you've stripped all those away. So this is kind of one of the arguments which drives the thought in Mahayana Buddhism that ultimate reality is ineffable. So if you ask what it's like, I can't tell you. That doesn't mean you cannot experience it in the Buddhist tradition. It means you have no knowledge by description. You can have knowledge by acquaintance to use the kind of Rasulian words. I can't tell you what it's like but hey, come down to my temple, do my meditation exercises and you'll experience it. That's the story. So the fact that it's inevitable doesn't mean you can't experience it. That's all fine. What's not so fine is this. Look, I told you that ultimate reality is ineffable. Haven't I just been talking about it? I sure have. And so do all the great Mahayana Buddhist philosophers. So they're in this situation where they're telling you that something is ineffable and describing it at the same time. Now they know there's an issue here. It's a contradiction. Why do you do? Do you accept the contradiction? That's one possibility. Do you try and diffuse it in some way? You know, paradoxes and contradictions everywhere in philosophy. Western philosophy and Asian philosophy. And often people, when they meet a paradox, try to diffuse it. And there are many standard strategies for this and you find those in Asia and as much as you do in the West. So one of the debates you get in the Asian in the Buddhist tradition after Nagarjuna is exactly how to handle this apparent paradox of ineffability. It looks as though you can talk about ineffability what is one to make of that situation. Okay, so before we get into that let's proceed first to Buddhist ethics which the idea of Karuna or compassion which you explored in your paper Compassion and the Net of Indra which was published in this book. So what is this notion all about? The notion of Karuna. Okay, first of all the word, Karuna. Standard translation is compassion. That's a somewhat problematic translation because compassion sounds a bit passive suffering with, okay. Whereas Karuna is actually a very active thing. It's taking steps to a benevolence and beneficence towards other people. Amber Carpenter suggests it's me that care is a better translation. I think that's probably right. Because to care about things you can't, if you say I care about you and you do above all it just shows you're not speaking the truth. To care you've actually got to do stuff and Karuna is active in this way. However the standard translation of Karuna is compassion. Let's stick with that but just remember my warning. So one of the core ethical principles of Buddhism which goes right back to the original teachings of the Buddha is that life is characterised by, and then there's one of these Sanskrit words which is hard to translate, dukkha Sanskrit or Pali. Usually it's translated suffering and that captures something of it. But it's really, it has many resonances it's certainly suffering of the body and the mind it's sort of frustration, anguish, dissatisfaction, ennui all the negative states. The first principle of Buddhism is hey life is like that, get your head around it. Sometimes people think of Buddhism as a pessimistic view. It's a realistic view and it's not pessimistic because then Buddhism goes on to say hey there's a cause of your suffering understand what it is and let me tell you how you can get rid of it. So it's actually an optimistic philosophy because yeah life has its problems let me tell you how to solve them. So the aim of Buddhism then is to move your life your thinking in such a way as to get rid of dukkha. Now if you left the description there it will be somewhat misleading because that suggests that Buddhism is very selfish. Buddhism is about getting rid of my suffering. Each person wants to get rid of their own suffering and of course you do want to get rid of your own suffering but why that is so misguided is that Buddhism has always insisted upon the fact that the aim is not simply to get rid of your own suffering but to get rid of everyone's suffering so you should be concerned to get rid of the dukkha or other people that is you should have this compassion for them. Now why? Well the virtue of compassion is there from the earliest Buddhist times but pre-mahayana the thought seems to be that karuna is good because it stops you being so self-centred and self-centredness is one of the things which causes your suffering. So karuna has a sort of instrumental value Now what changes with the rise in mahayana is that that ceases to be the case it does not have instrumental value it becomes the prime ethical virtue of mahayana Buddhism and if you become a mahayana Buddhist you take a vow not to but by this time Buddhist thinking enlightenment getting rid of your dukkha comes by degrees and there's a kind of an ultimate stage ultimate enlightenment and if you become a mahayana Buddhist you will take a vow that even when that you won't enter ultimate enlightenment until everybody does so you vow to work for the end of suffering for everybody and you're not going to pull out and leave everybody on their own in a self-extraction you are going to hang in there and help everybody else even though you could pull out as it were so karuna becomes the central ethical virtue of mahayana Buddhism Let me try to grasp what's going on here Mahayana Buddhism karuna is like an instrumental value that is you're using it so that selfishness or self-centredness will be out of the way it's one of the sources of suffering I think that's the way it's looked on in the earlier forms of Buddhism which is not to say that the karuna is unreal on the contrary it motivates people to act very much but I don't think it's thought of as a virtue in and of itself whereas this is certainly the case in mahayana to the extent that anything is thought of in and of itself but we've been through that topic right so I'm just there's another concept in mahayana Buddhism like the bodhisattva is this the person who makes a vow so in earlier Buddhism the thing to be is an ahat, an enlightened person so you strive for your own enlightenment getting rid of your own joka but that is changed when you get to mahayana Buddhism so mahayana literally means greater vehicle and sometimes mahayana Buddhism refer to the early tradition as henayana, the lesser vehicle but the difference is that the greater vehicle is greater precisely because it's concerned with the nivaya enlightenment liberation of all people that's what makes it greater and the bodhisattva is a person who has swan the bodhisattva vow is precisely a person who has swan to aid the enlightenment, divana liberation of all people and as I said by the time you get to this point of Buddhist philosophy nivana comes in stages, there's a path and there's an ultimate nivana which you force swan until everybody goes together but once you've taken the vow, you're on the bodhisattva path and then you gradually make progress until you're capable of entering ultimate nivana but you refrain from doing so traditionally it has 10 stages and by the time you get to stage 8 or 9 you're pretty powerful so there's a sort of religious there's a cosmology that goes with Buddhism and by the time you reach the 8 or 9th stage you live in a celestial, you can live in a celestial realm which is just another planet really, I mean Buddhists and materialists about these things but you're so powerful you can emanate avatars to many places at once and those avatars help people so there's one very advanced bodhisattva called Avalokiteshvara who lives in this celestial realm and hence avatars and the traditional view is that the Dalai Lama is an avatar of Avalokiteshvara this is all religious stuff the cosmology that goes with Buddhism that's religious stuff so we're not talking philosophy here I mean I'm very sympathetic to most Buddhist philosophy, I'm not sympathetic to all this cosmological stuff but anyway, you asked me about what a bodhisattva is in Buddhism that's what it is what's the relationship of Kailuna and the Net of Indra yeah it's a derivative one but let's get the Net of Indra straight first so the Net of Indra is a metaphor that plays an enormous role in Chinese Buddhism especially the school called foiyan but also derivatively in Chan in Zen and the metaphor is this there's this god Indra that's spread out a Net through reality and at every node of the Net Indra has hung a brightly polished jewel so if you look at one jewel you can see another jewel, all the other jewels reflected in it so this jewel reflects this jewel but of course this jewel is reflecting this jewel so this jewel reflects this jewel reflecting this jewel which is reflecting this jewel which is reflecting this jewel and so on so I don't know if you've ever done this but it's like if you get two mirrors and put them face to face and you kind of peek what you can see is reflections of the mirrors in each mirror all the way down and then you can see reflections between infinity that's the picture of the Net of Indra and what this metaphor is meant to demonstrate is that the jewels are a metaphor for the objects in reality and the fact that each is reflecting all the others is a way that each one is meant to show that each one encodes all the others each one sort of is what it is because of what the others are alright so that's the metaphor now come back to Nagarjuna as I said he has an enormous influence on all Mahayana philosophy and these schools of Chinese Buddhism are Mahayana he thinks Nagarjuna thinks that everything is empty, everything is what it is by relating to other things other things mean some other things in Nagarjuna that everything is what it is by relating to all other things some other things now what you get in Huayen Buddhism is that this gets universalised everything is what it is not by relating just to some other things but by all other things okay and that's what the Net of Indra metaphor is meant to demonstrate that every dual reflects every other dual reflecting every other dual now how the Huayen get there from some to all is kind of interesting but we can go down to that if you'd like but let's leave that aside because your question was about Karuna so this change from Shunya meaning some to all is a metaphysical change of course but at least it's possible to argue I sort of argued this in one that it has ethical ramifications because suppose you and I are jewels in the net then of course I suffer, I do come but you suffer, you're human but your suffering is encoded in my being as it were so if I want to get rid of Duka I have to get rid of your suffering as well as my own so that's the ethical ramifications I might add that I don't think this is orthodox Buddhist philosophy it's something that I argue for in one and it makes sense to me so let's now turn to the main theme of your latest book the fifth corner of four so here's the idea of the four corners I know that you have incorporated a bunch of logical machinery to understand this concept so let's get into the idea of Karuna okay Josh Kotzi means literally four corners, four points and what are the four corners well they're true, false, both neither so consider some questions suppose I ask you a question and you give me a possible answer there are four possibilities what you say is true, what you say is false what you say is both true and false or what you say is neither true nor false well this is a very distinctive view by western standards because what has dominated western logic not completely universally but it's certainly dominated are two principles of metaphysical logic which are the principles of non-contradiction and the principles of exclusive middle exclusive middle says that everything is either true or false non-contradiction says that something can't be both true and false is either true and true only or false every declarative statement is either true and true only or false and false only and the Chaturish Kotzi takes on that view there's truth only, false only, but there are these two other possibilities something can be both true and false and neither true nor false so that's the Chaturish Kotzi and the thought that things can be both true and false predates Buddhism, you find this thought in Vedic scriptures predating Buddhist scriptures so this is not an invention of Buddhism but it certainly seems to be the four possibilities certainly seem to be a well-acknowledged framework when Buddhism appears and we know that because in some of the early Buddhist sutras this framework is deployed explicitly so in one of the sutras someone says, well gee Buddha what happens to enlightened person after they're dead? Do you think they exist? Buddha says, no I'm not going to tell you that so do you think the enlightened person doesn't exist? I'm not going to tell you that do you think they both exist and don't exist? I'm not going to tell you that do you think they neither exist nor not exist? I'm not going to tell you that so the Chaturish Kotzi is presupposed okay now you'll notice that the Buddha refuses to endorse any of them most of the dialogue is left at that point but there's a question of what the hell you make of that and that's something which kicks in big time when you get to Nagarjuna so this is where the ineffable comes in again yeah it does although the connection between that and the Chaturish Kotzi is a bit it's not entirely obvious so in the what you find is lots of arguments the fact that things don't have Svabhava and a lot of the argument is by kind of four-way reductive and absurdum so take something you suppose to have Svabhava like space or time or a person or the Four Noble Truths or whatever and then given that claim you can divide into four cases I mean suppose that this thing has Svabhava okay there are four cases to consider truth, falsity both neither and a lot of the argument in Nagarjuna is run through the four cases showing that all are impossible so it's a kind of four-way reductive and absurdum sorry let me rephrase that it's not a reductive-add-contradictione to contradiction because contradiction is one of the kotzi it's a reductive-add-absurdum and some things are more absurd than contradictions so the thought that you're a frog is more absurd than a lie sentences through our flaws so you've got this hypothesis that something has Svabhava a four-way reductive argument alright so how does an availability come into this well this takes us back to our discussion of Shunyata an ultimate reality because it at least appears that in Nagarjuna he says that none of the four possibilities explicitly applies to the status of the enlightened person after death which is the same as ultimate reality that's you know pretty much word for word so since true false both and either are the four kinds of things you can say about something it seems to suggest that the status of the enlightened person after death that is the nature of ultimate reality is ineffable because you can't say any of these things so that's why it looks as though Nagarjuna is endorsing the claim that there's a fifth possibility namely ineffability okay so I remember reading your work the logic of Katashkoti you mentioned about Jay Garfield's interpretation where he takes the four corners as a kind of first-degree deal with logic but you're arguing that that's not the case because the fifth corner that is, it's ineffable pushes you to a kind of five-valued logic not just a four-valued logic like DFT can you tell us something about that that's right so the Katashkoti has four possibilities if this interpretation Nagarjuna is right, they're actually five so that's not actually in contradiction with the Katashkoti for the following reason if you're talking about truth, false you're both on either, you're talking about the kinds of things which can be true, false both and either call them what you like, statements, propositions, beliefs sentences, okay those are the kinds of things to which the four-valued Katashkoti applies now if you're talking about things that are ineffable, you can't be talking about those because sentences by their own nature are not ineffable they're conventional they're conventional but not only that but obviously a statement is not ineffable because it's bloody well there in your face if something is ineffable it's not a statement, it's a state of affairs so when you're talking about ineffability you're not talking about statements, you're talking about states for fares some states for fares are ineffable now states for fares aren't the kind of things which are true but there's a kind of analog, namely they exist or they don't so you've still got the four corners exists or doesn't exist or better its negation exists but you've got this fifth possibility so the four corner Katashkoti applies to statements the five corner Katashkoti applies to states for fares so there could appear to be a disagreement but there's not because they're really dealing with different things at least that's the line that I run in the fifth corner of the floor okay so it all connects so from the metaphysics down to this logic to the ethics that we have discussed there's a kind of philosophy an overall worldview being offered here yeah well there are many different worldviews because what I've said is interpreted by Buddhist philosophies in many different ways and we haven't gone into the differences so Buddhism is not a single thing anymore there are a lot of disagreements people are gaseous and that's what makes it fun so even within the Mahayana tradition there are serious disagreements but way back when we started to discuss I said that one thing you learn about philosophy is that you get engaged in this issue and it takes you to another issue because it's related and that relates to another issue so in the end you discover that philosophical issues have no Svabhava, they're Shunya because if you can't get your head around them you can't engage in these other things so the metaphysics the logic, the ethics are related to each other in this way and we've only just started because we haven't talked about the epistemology and the political philosophy but they're looking in the wings as well okay so on a more personal note you've been an academic philosopher for most of your life you've seen all there is to see in this career, once being the chair of your department in the university of Melbourne and the other for being the president of the Australasian Association of Philosophy so we might say you've been really out there in the field so to speak so what's your advice to those starting their academic careers in philosophy? yeah good question especially now okay so getting a job as a professional philosopher is not easy because there are a lot more people who do doctorates in philosophy who want professional jobs as professional philosophers and there are jobs and that's particularly true at the moment just because virtually every university in the world that I'm aware of has been hit hard by the pandemic which means that they're financially strapped for cash and so of course they're cutting back on apartments in fact they're sacking people a lot of universities that are laying people off which of course means fewer jobs and this is not going to return anything like it was before if ever but certainly not for the next four or five years so it's going to be harder than ever for people with doctorates in philosophy to find jobs so first thing is if you intend to get a philosophy job you should have a plan B because you may not get a job you've got to be prepared to do something else and it might be being a journalist, it might be being a lawyer it might be going into IT, it might be being a taxi driver if you love that, it could be anything but you should be prepared for this possibility especially because you know by this time in your life it's quite likely you're going to have a family, a partner, kids so that's something that you should bear in mind in your thinking, that's the first thing second thing is this I said be a taxi driver if you want if you love doing that and that wasn't actually a facetious remark because you should do what you love in life well that's not quite true if you love hurting other people you shouldn't do that but you know set that aside you spend every person will spend a lot of their life working it might be being a homemaker it might be being a parent it might be being an academic, it might be being a journalist it might be being a politician, who knows right you're going to spend a lot of your life doing that and if you don't enjoy it you're going to be in serious trouble you're going to spend a lot of your time doing stuff you hate and it's not great so you should do what you love doing in life if there are things that you love doing and most of us have things we love doing professional philosophers are kind of lucky because the thing they love doing gets them a job I can't say that's the worst truth so return to professional philosophers which is where we started when I get you a job if you're lucky and what is going to help you as a professional philosopher is doing the best philosophy you can in the end you will do best what you love doing if you take on something that you find shit boring and just write papers on that they're not going to be very inspired so my advice to young philosophers, in fact any philosophers including myself is to do what you love in philosophy if you find a topic that engages you that you find fascinating that you think you can say something interesting about do that don't worry so much about whether it's a hot topic in philosophy because hot topics come and go I've been in the pression over 40 years now and I've seen all kinds of crazies come and go to Derridaeanism, to Wittgensteinism to grounding to these things come and they're important and they're interesting and they get kind of worked out so I wouldn't pay too much attention to what is currently hot pay attention to things which you think are really interesting, really challenging which you really enjoy thinking about it is the career worth it is the career worth it the career of being an academic philosopher is it worth it that's a very subjective question so what would you say about your career was it worth it but let me answer it, it's a fair question I became a philosopher because I stopped doing philosophy and I told myself that if I ever ceased to do that I would get out and do something else so you know I could have become a lawyer or a journalist, I could have found jobs but they'd have been jobs that would have interested me of course by the time I was in my 50s it was kind of too late to change horses but as a matter of fact that situation has never arisen I've loved every moment of my philosophical career I've been teaching myself philosophy I've been thinking about new issues all the time and I've loved every moment of it so that's why I've done philosophy and continue to do philosophy I hope my philosophical career ain't over yet there are still many more things I want to write about so other philosophers well if you go into a philosophical career you don't love it, you're choosing the wrong profession if you choose it and you burn out which some do, then hopefully you burn out in time to change career if you burn out and you're too old to find a new career well actually the job situation is changing getting a job in your 50s is hard now everywhere I think but older people are getting into jobs and moving to new areas perhaps more than this was possible 30 years ago, I'm not sure but if you burn out then I wouldn't hang in the pressure you're going to just become a time server you'll hate it, you're probably teaching you'll bother shit out of your students as well so I think you should get out of it give a chat to someone who does love doing what they do find something else you love doing and try and make an income out of doing that okay that's a good piece of advice so thanks again Graham for sharing your time with us and join me again for another episode of Philosophy and What Matters where we discuss things that matter from a philosophical point of view I'll see you next time