Abstract
In the absence of continuing selves or persons, Buddhist philosophers are under pressure to provide a systematic account of phenomenological and other features of conscious experience. Any such Buddhist account of experience, however, faces further problems because of another cardinal tenet of Buddhist revisionary metaphysics: the doctrine of impermanence, which during the Abhidharma period is transformed into the doctrine of momentariness. Setting aside the problems that plague the Buddhist Abhidharma theory of experience because of lack of persons, I shall focus on problems that arise because of its allegiance to momentariness and explore some responses on behalf of the Abhidharma Buddhist philosophers. I address two challenges to the Buddhist view in this paper. The first, which I will call the “Phenomenological Challenge”, primarily concerns the temporal properties of what is represented in conscious experience. The second, which I will call the “Metaphysical Challenge”, concerns the temporal properties of conscious representation itself.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Versions of what I have called the Metaphysical and Phenomenological Challenges are longstanding issues in the phenomenology of time. I will present here a reconstruction of how the Abhidharma philosophers might address these challenges. This is not, however, to suggest that by referring to Abhidharma ontology we have addressed these problems once and for all. Residual problems remain, as is to be expected, with the solutions proposed n this paper.
Chapters 1–8 of the Abhidharmakośa-bhāsya are divided into verses. I will follow the usual practice of citing passages by giving verse numbers. Chapter 9 is in prose; I will cite passages using page numbers in Pruden’s English translation.
Skandhas are aggregates of dharmas (1.7a-b).
Dreyfus notes an important qualification that these basic components must, at least indirectly, be phenomenologically available (2011, p. 118) in the sense that some of these may not be introspectable. They might, however, be available with appropriate mental training, as in mindfulness meditation.
The Sarvāstivādins acknowledgement of the existence of the past and future dharmas gives them extra ammunition to deal with the Phenomenological and Metaphysical Challenges raised in this paper. However, a reconstruction of such a response on behalf of the Sarvāstivāda philosophers and an evaluation of its success will take us too far afield from the task of this paper.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer of this journal for clarifying this point.
The unconditioned dharmas are constituents of meditative states and liberation and are thus beyond the scope of this paper.
A similar worry which draws its inspiration from James’s slogan that a succession of awareness is not an awareness of succession has been raised by Dainton (2000) and Tye (2003). The thought is that instantaneous experiences cannot account for the phenomenology of the experience of succession. Dainton puts the point thus:
We are constantly aware of phenomenal contents undergoing passage, there is constant flow and continual renewal of content. This experienced passage is both continuous and homogeneous … If experiences were packaged into discrete units this would not be the case (2000, p. 129).
Dainton offers the phenomenologically primitive relation of diachronic co-consciousness as the glue for the unity of consciousness. It is hard to understand this ‘sui generis’, ‘unanalysable’, basic experiential relation because Dainton does not do much more than characterise it in negative terms. Co-consciousness is not itself an experience, nor does it depend on further experiences (except those it relates) or any other sort of awareness. Diachronic co-consciousness, it seems, is meant to provide the phenomenological glue that confers phenomenal unity and continuity but, as far as I understand, it adds no explanatory value to the phenomenological account offered by Husserl. The pre-reflective consciousness that accompanies every experience provides is the common factor that binds together all of one’s experiences over a reasonable breadth of time, positing the relation of co-consciousness over and above such a consciousness is multiplying relations without necessity.
I thank an anonymous reviewer of this journal for suggesting this formulation of the Metaphysical Challenge.
The posit of ‘ālaya-vijñāna’ (1987, pp. 12, 18) introduced primarily in what Schmithausen (1987, pp. 12, 18) calls the ‘initial passage’ in the Basic Section of the Yogācārabhūmi. In the initial passage basic consciousness is described as a kind of unmanifest consciousness that persists within the material sense-faculties during the highest meditative state (‘nirodha samāpatti’, literally translated as the ‘attainment of extinction’, signifying the extinction of perception and feeling). The later sections of the Yogācārabhūmi also offer other proofs for the existence of ālaya-vijñāna some of which aim to provide a fix for the problem of kammic continuity. However, it is important to note that ālaya-vijñāna is one of a number of fixes proposed to deal with this problem.
The account given in the paper is meant to show that the Abhidharma account cannot be ruled outright as conceptually incoherent or as empirically unviable. It has the resources to deal with some objections. That said, I do not wish to claim that all issues in the phenomenology of time can be resolved by adopting the Abhidharma ontology. For other problems that still plague such an account, see Phillips (2010).
References
Dainton, B. (2000). Stream of consciousness: Unity and continuity in conscious experience. London: Routledge.
Dehaene, S., & Naccache, L. (2001). Towards a cognitive neuroscience of consciousness: basic evidence and a workspace framework. Cognition, 79, 1–37.
Dreyfus, G. (1997). Recognizing reality: Dharmakirti’s philosophy and its Tibetan interpretations. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Dreyfus, G. (2011). Self and subjectivity: A middle way approach. In M. Siderits, E. Thompson, & D. Zahavi (Eds.), Self, No-Self? Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological, and Indian Traditions (pp. 114–144). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dreyfus, G., & Thompson, E. (2007). Asian perspectives: Indian theories of mind. In M. Moscovitch, E. Thompson, & P. Zezalo (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Efron, R. (1967). The duration of the present. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 138, 713–729.
Ganeri, J. (2001). Philosophy in classical India. New York: Routledge.
Ganeri, J. (2012). The self: Naturalism, consciousness and the first-person stance. Clarendon: Oxford University Press.
Goodman, C. (2004). The treasury of metaphysics and the physical world. Philosophical Quarterly, 54(216), 389–401.
Le Poidevin, R. (2011). The temporal prison. Analysis, 71(3), 456–465. doi:10.1093/analys/anr047.
Lewis, D. (1986). Philosophical papers (Vol. II). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Maurin, A.-S. (2013 Edition, Fall). Tropes. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. URL: <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/tropes/>. Accessed 21 Dec 2013.
McKinnon, N. (2003). Presentism and consciousness. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 81(3), 305–323.
Phillips, I. (2010). Perceiving temporal properties. European Journal of Philosophy, 18(2), 176–202.
Pockett, S. (2002). On subjective back-referral and how long it takes to become conscious of a stimulus: a reinterpretation of Libet’s data. Consciousness and Cognition, 8, 45–61.
Pockett, S. (2003). How long is ‘now’? Phenomenology and the specious present. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2, 55–68.
Pruden, L. (1988). Abhidharmakośabhāyam English translation of Poussin, Louis de la Vallée., 1923-1931/1980. L'Abhidharmakośa de Vasubandhu, 6 vol., Bruxelles: Institut Belge des Hautes Études Chinoises. Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press.
Ronkin, N. (2005). Early Buddhist metaphysics: The making of a philosophical tradition. London: RoutledgeCurzon.
Ronkin, N. (2010). Abhidharma. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, URL: <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2010/entries/abhidharma/>. (Vol. Fall 2010 Edition).
Schmithausen, L. (1987). Ālaya-vijñāna: On the origin and early development of a central concept in Yogacara philosophy. Tokyo: The International Institute for Buddhist Studies.
Sekar, K., Findley, W. M., Poeppel, D., & Llinás, R. (2013). Cortical response tracking the conscious experience of threshold duration visual stimuli indicates visual perception is all or none. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 110, 5642–5647.
Sergent, C., & Dehaene, S. (2004). Neural processes underlying conscious perception: experimental findings and a global neuronal workspace framework. Journal of Physiology-Paris, 98(4–6), 374–384. doi:10.1016/j.jphysparis.2005.09.006.
Siderits, M. (1997). Buddhist reductionism. Philosophy East and West, 47(4), 455–478.
Thorpe, S., Fize, D., & Marlot, C. (1996). Speed of processing in the human visual system. Nature, 381, 520–522.
Tye, M. (2003). Consciousness and persons. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Waldron, W. S. (2003). The Buddhist unconscious: The alaya-vijnana in the context of Indian Buddhist thought. London: RoutledgeCurzon.
Weatherson, B. (forthcoming). Humean supervenience. In B. Loewer & J. Schaffer (Eds.), Blackwell Companion to David Lewis. http://brian.weatherson.org/papers.html. Accessed 21 Dec 2013.
Williams, P. (1981). On the Abhidharma ontology. Journal of Indian Philosophy, 9, 227–257.
Zahavi, D. (2012). The time of the self. Grazer Philosophische Studien, 84, 133–159.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their extremely insightful and helpful comments. The paper has improved greatly because of their input.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Chadha, M. Time-series of ephemeral impressions: the Abhidharma-Buddhist view of conscious experience. Phenom Cogn Sci 14, 543–560 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-014-9354-2
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-014-9354-2