Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute talk, Ven Robina Courtin argues that Western philosophy—Greek skepticism and David Hume, Sextus Empiricus, Wittgenstein—illuminates Buddhist emptiness. She opens with His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s counsel that Westerners needn’t become Tibetan to grasp Buddhist ideas, then uses these Western thinkers as gateways to the same Madhyamaka concepts. She defines emptiness as a relational term (empty of what?) across three domains: external objects, self, and emptiness itself. She walks through the core framework of dependent origination examined on three dimensions: causation, part-whole relationship, and conceptual imputation—the idea that things gain identity through convention, not essence. She introduces Sextus Empiricus’ modes, particularly the argument from animal perception: if different beings perceive the world differently, there is no access to its nature independent of appearances. Pitched at educated Western practitioners and philosophy students.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 E.mp3
UUID: 6a16b520-84a3-4f1f-b2d8-5f43f43f265a
Teacher: Ven Robina Courtin
Collection: y Approaching Emptiness from the West (Ven Robina Courtin)
Date: 1997 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.5 minutes
Words: ~7,445
Thanks for doing what I would never do, that is giving up a gorgeous Sunday afternoon to hear a philosophy talk. I’m going to be talking thoroughly and formally in a somewhat loose way. This isn’t gonna be a formal heavy duty lecture. And so I’d like you to also feel free to interrupt me at any time with questions, with objections, with refutations, or expressions of disgust. I’d be wasting my time and you’d be wasting your time if I stood up here for a long time and bored you or confused you.
That’s a really terrible way from the sunny Sunday afternoon. And so do me this favor. If at any point I can say something that is incomprehensible, either because of my speaking very, very quickly, an incomprehensible American accent, or because it’s just muddy and obscure, then stop me. Ask for clarification. Ask questions.
And in general, what I will do is adopt a convention that is to interpret silence as rapt interest, complete comprehension, comprehension, and universal applause. Okay? So if you don’t intend to convey all of those messages, don’t be silent. Because if you’re silent and you don’t intend to convey those messages, that makes you a liar, which is bad. And it also makes me an ineffective teacher or lecturer, which is also bad.
So don’t, you know, don’t do that. So I will re I will rely on you and trust you to to interrupt me when when need be. Okay. So I’ve been asked to talk a little bit about the idea of emptiness and to do that from a Western perspective, which might seem like a strange thing. And one of the reasons that I like doing this, I want to give a little bit of a very general background before I actually start talking about some philosophy.
In October nineteen ninety, I was in Dharmasala when His Holiness the Dalai Lama was giving Lama Chopa teachings, the Guru Puja teachings, which is a very, very interesting set of teachings. But for me, one of the most interesting moments was when his holiness turned to the group of westerners who were there. And, you know, when you a lot of you probably been up to Dharmasala. Some of you haven’t, but it’s one of these surreal scenes where you’ve got every conceivable kind of person with every conceivable connection to Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy there, among whom are a certain cadre of Westerners who are doing their very best to transform themselves into Tibetans in various ways. You know?
And one of the things His Holiness said when he turned to the group of Westerners, said, look, know, it’s really great that you’ve got this interest in Dharma. It’s really great that you’ve got this interest in Buddhism. And some of you have, you know, become Buddhists and Buddhist practitioners, and that’s really great too. But remember that by becoming Buddhist, you don’t thereby have to become Tibetan. You don’t have to grow long fingernails on your fifth finger in order to be a Buddhist.
And you don’t need to wear stupas if you’re more comfortable in jeans. And you can still be a Westerner and be a Buddhist. You don’t have to give up your culture. And Tibetan culture isn’t necessarily somehow identical with Buddhism. And part of that train of thought that that set off in my thinking, which is part of why I’m here today, is that it’s also the case that in order to get at philosophical ideas that are very central to the Buddhist tradition and the Buddhist practice, you don’t always have to get at those ideas by reading them in texts that were originally written in Pali or Sanskrit or Tibetan, because a lot of the ideas that are central and important in Buddhist philosophy are also developed formulated ways in various parts of the Western tradition.
And there’s no reason, just because a text was written by a white guy in England, to think that it’s junk any more than you need to be properly dressed, you need to wear a robe. So partly it’s this idea that I want to focus on that you can be interested in Buddhist practice and Buddhist ideas and use the Western tradition as a mine of valuable resources. This, of course, what His Holiness was saying wasn’t, of course, completely original, because all of you by now, as a result of hearing many, many Buddhist teachings, heard the remark that the Buddha himself made to his disciples, don’t believe what I say because I say it. Test it. You know, rub it, scratch it, and so forth.
And if part of the import of that isn’t just that anything that one finds in the Buddhist canon ought to be subject to analysis and accepted if and only if it passes your own analytic test. It also suggests that if something passes the same analytic test that comes from outside the Buddhist canon, the fact that the text itself is outside the Buddhist canon doesn’t make it junk. It can, that is, you could have a a text which satisfies exactly the same standards of analytic rigor that, as I say, happens to be written by an English guy or a French guy or something like that. And we’ll be talking about some texts here written by Greek guys, English guys, and German guys today, none of whom were Buddhist. Now, there is, however, not only a kind of adventitious conceptual connection between the tradition in the West that I’ll be talking about and the Buddhist tradition.
And so let me say right now, the tradition in the West that I’ll be talking about is a tradition that you can very broadly and loosely call the Neo-Pyrrhonian tradition of philosophy in the West. Pyrrhon, I’ll start talking about Pyrrho, I’ll start talking about him in a minute, was an important classical Greek philosopher and the founder of the school known as Pyrrhonian skepticism. Pyrrhonian Skepticism was a big deal in Hellenistic philosophy in Greece. That is the period of time when the Academy founded by Plato was flourishing for several hundred years. And a lot of the treatises, a lot of the doctrines of Pyrrhonian philosophy were systematized in encyclopedias by the great philosopher Sextus Empiricus.
Now, the reason I say all of this now, and I’m actually going to talk more historically in a moment, is that in the seventeenth century, especially in Scotland and England, but not exclusively there, there was this amazing revival of interest in Pyronian philosophy. And part of the fruit of that revival is the work of David Hume, who really resurrected the methodology of Pyrrhonian skepticism and a lot of the concerns in very dramatic ways, wrote these brilliant treatises, like the Treatise of Human Nature and the Enquiries and the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Now hume, as most of you will probably know, becomes an extremely important philosopher in the early modern period, and subsequently, we’re also fortunate to be living in the midst of a gigantic hume revival over the last decade or so in the English speaking world. Hume was influential on Kant for one, Schopenhauer for another, and Wittgenstein for another, as well as Nietzsche for that matter. And so you’ve got these kind of trickles of Pyrrho that move up through the Western tradition, and you can generally identify a stream of thought, starting with Pyrrho and kind of ending yesterday afternoon, that we can broadly call a Neo Pyrrhonian tradition, even if Pyrrho himself isn’t quite in evidence through all of this.
This is generally also called the skeptical tradition. And what I’m going to be doing is taking arguments, texts, insights from the Western skeptical tradition and using them as vehicles for expressing views that are generally associated with the Madhyamaka Middle Way tradition, in Mahāyāna Buddha schools. Now, that was a long digression, coming back to saying that there isn’t simply an adventitious conceptual relation between these two schools, there’s also an interesting historical relation. Because Pyrrho didn’t stay in Greece all his life. See, there was Alexander the Great.
And Alexander went to India, as you know, with armies of conquest. And everybody knows about Alexander’s military accomplishments. What a lot of people don’t realize is that Alexander wasn’t only a kind of crazy military genius, but he was also on these conquests taking along a team of academics. he took along biologists and geographers and cartographers and physicians and philosophers Because he wanted to sort of, you know, figure out what the, you know, what people thought all over the world. And he took two philosophers with him, Pyrrho and Timon.
So Pyrrho turns up in India round about the time that the Mahāyāna is getting going. Round about the same time that depending on your taste, the Prajñāpāramitā Sutras are either being rediscovered or composed, round about the time that Nāgārjuna and his students are off doing some interesting things, Pyrrho shows up in India. Now, Greek accounts of Piero and Piero’s biography, especially if you read Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers, are quite interesting. You know, Pyrrho went to India and came back saying the strangest things. Pyrrho came back saying, things have no nature of their own but are determined by convention.
We should not say of anything that it is, that it is not, that it both is and is not, or that it neither is nor that it’s not. But human convention governs existence. Things are neither this way nor that. One should have no philosophical position. These are all quotes attributed in the Greek tradition to Pyrrho and Timon.
Sound familiar? Now, now we get the skeptical tradition, rooted in Pyrrho, that comes up through the West, and it shouldn’t be surprising that there are certain affinities. Now, there’s this whole cottage industry in Western classical scholarship right now that’s devoted to the following question. Did the Indians get Madhyamaka from Greece? Or did Westerners get skepticism from India?
Right? And people advance all these arguments. So some people say, well, hey, if you look at the rise of the Mahāyāna in India, there wasn’t really anything very much like that before Alexander shows up. Alexander brings Pyrrho and Timon, and these people start saying these amazing things which sound pretty Greek. So probably Mahāyāna Buddhism is a Greek invention.
Other people say, well, skepticism doesn’t really arise in Greece until Piero comes back from India, so probably skepticism is an Indian invention. I can’t get real excited about this debate myself. And I can’t get real excited about it because, again, it seems to me to pose a false dichotomy. What it ignores is the fact that this period is a kind of historical smudge, where you’ve got a lot of Greeks showing up in India both before and after Alexander. You’ve got Greek universities in South India and North India.
You’ve got Greeks coming and getting silk and spices and things and dropping off olives and such like in India. And you’ve got Indian traders from the Malabar Coast trading with Greeks in Aden and in Cairo and places like that. And you’ve got the Silk Road, which is a large going concern. So I think you’re doing this period, which is an extraordinarily fertile period in Middle Eastern and Indian history, you’ve got a lot of people talking to each other about a lot of ideas. And I think that right now there’s not much point in trying to find this cold trail and say, who first uttered a tetralema, or something like that.
But anyway, you get the idea. No matter how you draw, where you want to put the root, if you care about that, or even if you don’t care about that, there’s a lot of interaction between classical philosophy and early Madhyamaka philosophy. And so, again, it’s not surprising that we’re gonna find some Madhyamaka ideas percolating through the Western tradition. So that’s another reason for thinking about trying to approach emptiness from the West. Now, given that, why should one bother to approach emptiness from the West?
I mean, after all, if we already have a bunch of really superb texts written in Tibetan and Sanskrit, and some of them translated into English at varying degrees of success. Why not just read those and forget about the Western texts? I think there are good reasons for not doing that. I mean, not not for not reading the Indian text. Believe me, Fun to read the Indian text and really useful.
But why should you also read Western text? Well, I think that’s, for a bunch of reasons. The first is this. For the same reason that I always castigate my Western philosophical colleagues for calling their departments philosophy departments when they ignore the philosophy of half of the world, say to call a Western philosophy department if you want. There’s nothing wrong with having Western philosophy departments, but if you’re not gonna offer Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Tibetan, Arabic philosophy, stop calling it a philosophy department, please.
I think for the same reason, if you’re interested in studying Buddhist philosophy, don’t think that you’re studying the ideas if you’re only studying them as they’re articulated in one set of texts. I mean, after all, you’d think you were pretty narrow if you’d just read Madhyamaka texts, and didn’t read Yogachara texts, or didn’t read Sama, or didn’t read in the Pali Canon. You’d think you were narrow. I think you should also think of yourself as narrow even if you care about a sort of philosophy if you don’t read texts that are developing similar ideas in the West. And the reason for that is because you do get differences of expression.
You get different idioms. You get different presuppositions. You get different kinds of examples. You get different kinds of applications. And you just get a presentation that might be more tuned to the cultural background that you bring to the text.
And so very often, I think it’s the case, you can actually get an easier entree or a better entree into some of these ideas by reading them in your home culture. So that, for instance, when I teach Western philosophy at Tibetan universities in India, which is one of the stranger things that I do, very often I find it useful to explain a Western text by contextualizing it with respect to an Indian or Tibetan text that my audience is already familiar with. And you can explain the alien Western text by putting it into this more familiar background. Similarly, I think that you’ll find it easier to approach Indian and Tibetan texts if you sometimes approach them by contextualizing them with respect to a background of more familiar presentations that you might find in the West. So I think there are actual positive there’s positive value for a lot of reasons.
Besides, it’s a good multicultural experience to learn your own culture as well as others. I’m always amazed when I teach classes in Buddhist or Asian philosophy, you know, tell students, well, you know well, there’s a great I’ll give you one one one antidote that I’ll start doing philosophy. I was teaching a Buddhist philosophical text in a course last year amusingly called The Meaning of Life. And a student raised his hand. We were talking about Shanti it was a text by Śāntideva, a Bodhicaryāvatāra.
And a student asked a question, he said, look, is this connected in some way to the Job story? I thought about a really interesting question. So then I put it back to the class, and said, well, what do you think? There were these blank faces. Finally, this one timid person raised his hand and said, what is a Job?
And it transpired that in a class of fifty people, only two could identify Job and knew that it had something to do with the Bible. So I began to wonder about this enterprise of this multicultural enterprise of teaching people who had not a clue about their own culture, about some other. So anyway, another good reason for reading Western philosophy is you can find something out about your own culture, which actually is a pretty cool culture. Alright. So now I’m gonna start talking about emptiness.
Because the what I really wanna talk about is approaching emptiness from the west, and so I wanna explain what I mean by emptiness, first of all, before we do that. The first thing to say is that the the term empty is a relational term. Right? It’s not what we call in the in the jargon a one place term. So I can say truthfully truthfully that I am now speaking to an empty room.
I don’t mean that in any deep philosophical sense. I mean it is utterly bereft of camels. It is empty of camels. There’s not a single one in this room. Now that doesn’t change the fact that it’s not empty of people.
Right? But it is empty of something. So when you say that something is empty, you always have to ask empty of what? So even if this bottle, well it isn’t, I need an example, were empty of water, it wouldn’t follow that it was completely empty. It might well have plenty of air in it.
So when we talk about something being empty, always have to ask the question, empty of what? And in a Buddhist philosophical context, and in a peculiar Western philosophical context that I’ll be introducing, when we speak about emptiness, we mean emptiness of essence or emptiness of substantiality, emptiness of inherent or independent existence. And all of these, I think, are roundabout ways of coming at the same thing. Part of it, an interesting philosophical enterprise, is to explain just why all of these ways come to the same thing. And maybe some of that will emerge as I talk today.
But when we talk about emptiness in this sense, we mean emptiness of essence, substantiality, independence. When we think about essence, what we mean is emptiness of any very characteristic or identity that makes a thing the thing that it is, independently of convention, independently of other phenomena. That’s what we mean by emptiness. Okay? So when I when say that something’s empty, I don’t mean that it’s empty of camels.
I don’t mean that it’s empty of water. And then in particular, I don’t mean that it’s empty of existence to the core. Right? There are some things that are completely empty of existence. I hate to break the news to you, but Santa Claus is among those.
Empty of any kind of existence at all. Could they be fictional existence? Right? Even Santa Claus got some kind of existence. But, even for a committed skeptic, this glass isn’t independent, isn’t empty of existence in the same sense that Santa Claus is.
It’s not fictional. It may be empty of substantiality. It may be empty of essence, but it will have some other kind of existence more of that anon. So first of all, that’s what we’re going to mean by emptiness in general. Okay?
Clear enough. Secondly, I’m going to want to talk about three general divisions or three general kinds of emptiness. Well, not kinds, gen Get my mouth working. Three different domains of emptiness is a better way to put that. I want to talk a little bit about the emptiness of external phenomena, that is of ordinary things out there in space and time that are objects of perceptual knowledge, the kinds of things we bump into and trip over and so forth.
I want to talk about emptiness of the self, that is the subjective side as opposed to the objective side, emptiness of the thing that I call I or me or J or hey you. And then I will also want to talk, at the very end, very briefly and obscurely about the emptiness of emptiness. Because preview of coming attractions, it would be very odd for us to end up arguing, or even examining arguments for things being empty of essence and then to argue that therefore emptiness is their essence. So emptiness itself has better come out to be not only essencelessness but essenceless. And we will look at examinations of that possibility.
Now all three of these different domains of emptiness receive very specific and very careful attention in the Mahāyāna, and particularly the Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophical tradition. And it’ll be specifically the Madhyamaka tradition that I have in mind. So that if you read Nāgārjuna’s wonderful text called Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, it’s the Sanskrit title, Or if you read Candrakīrti’s text, Madhyamakāvatāra, the Entrance into the Middle Way, you see these examined in a great deal of careful detail. Both of these are available in English, so I would invite you to look at those if you’re interested in reading really terrific texts about these issues. But these are, yes?
Yeah. No, I don’t. I’m sorry. I don’t have anything to write with. The I can give you English editions of those really quickly.
The University of Hawaii Press has published a translation by Geshe Ngawang Wangchen and Chris Huntington of Madhyamakāvatāra called The Emptiness of Emptiness. And that’s available in paperback on University of Hawaii Press. And it’s a very, very nice edition, a very nice translation job. There’s translation of an excellent Tibetan text that’s a lot about emptiness. It’s called Tsongkhapa’s Lam Rim Chenmo, or Great Digest.
And that’s translated by José Cabezón. And the title is A Dose of Emptiness. And that’s State University of New York Press. Yeah. The and then the Nāgārjuna is Mūlamadhyamakakārikā.
There’s about a half dozen different translations into English, and you can take your pick. There’s one by Sprung that’s on Harvester Press, which is really hard to find. There’s one by Kenneth Inada that’s on a Japanese press whose name I forget. Do you remember the name of the press that publishes It might be Iida Press, I R I D A, but I’m not sure. There’s one by David Kalupahana on State University of New York Press called, what’s Kalupahana’s translation called?
Called I should know that. I forget. But Kalupahana, k a l u p a h a n a. There’s whose am I forgetting? There are two more.
One of them I’m not forgetting, but the other one I am. And then there’s one that I did recently that’s on Oxford University Press that’s called Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, but I’m forgetting one of the others. Strang Sprung, Mervyn Sprung has a translation that’s pretty good too. So, anyway, there’s lots of different translations, and it’s useful to read two or three of them side by side and to triangulate them. Sprung’s is published by Prajñā Press.
Okay. So anyway, these are good texts to read if you’re interested in traditional presentations of emptiness. But I’m gonna give you texts to read that’ll give you non traditional Western presentations of emptiness. And if you want some of these texts and bibliographic references, Sextus Empiricus outlines of Pyrrhonism, which is, there’s a really nice abridged English edition on Hackett, is really cheap, by Hallie called Sextus Empiricus Selections on Skepticism, Man and God. And I’ll be talking about David hume’s Treatise of human Nature.
And I’ll be talking about Wittgenstein’s philosophical investigations. And all of those, of course, are widely available in a number of different editions in English and are good text to read. So anyway, it says that all of these three divisions of emptiness or three domains of emptiness are well treated in the Indian and Tibetan tradition. So, this is a traditional kind of botany. But I’m going to talk about them specifically as they’re developed in the western tradition.
Now, let me talk a little bit more about emptiness here. Emptiness in the Madhyamaka tradition is thought of and analyzed in terms of dependent origination or interdependent origination depending on how you like to translate this term. Codependent origination. Codependent arising. The idea that things all exist, come to exist, stay in existence, pass out of existence, and have their identity in dependence on other things.
And that’s a different way of saying that things are without their own essence or nature or characteristic. And the idea is that emptiness doesn’t stand as a separate thing independent of dependent arising, but emptiness is, as it were, the flip side of the coin of conventional reality and dependent arising. Now when we think about dependency and interdependency in this sense, we can again think of interdependency on a number of different dimensions. And there are three dimensions on which I want to talk about it. The first is dependence of things on various causes, conditions, and other kinds of circumstances.
So that, for instance, when I say that there’s water in this glass, the water didn’t just get there all by itself, and it doesn’t just stay there all by itself. The water got there by being poured in, so there was a cause that brought it the water being in the glass into existence. The water doesn’t just stay there all by itself either. A combination of gravity and the relative solidity of the glass itself keeps the water there. The water is also kept there by my not drinking it too fast.
See? Moreover, we can ask why is the water there, and we can give a kind of purpose for it being there. It’s there so that I can have a handy philosophical example and occasionally slake my thirst. So for all of these different causes, the water is in there. Without those, there’s no water in there.
The water’s not just somehow there by itself. And if you think about any particular kind of phenomenon, we can talk about its dependency on a range of causes and conditions like that. Moreover, though, we can talk about dependence in terms of dependence of holes on their parts and parts on their holes, hole part dependence. So, again, to have this much water in here, however much that is, about two ounces. I still think in ounces.
I haven’t been in Australia long enough to do it in milliliters quickly enough, so we’ll talk ounces for a minute. So you’ve got this much water here. That’s dependent upon there being all these little particular molecules there. Right? And all of those molecules being parts of the water in this glass depend upon there being a volume of water in that glass in which they participate.
Similarly, when we think about it from our side, we can say, gee, my my body or myself doesn’t exist all by itself. It exists in dependence on a whole range of parts. And each of those, in order to be j body parts, requires the existence of the whole for them to to be body parts. You know? So if you even if you just had this thing right here lying gruesomely on the table, even though you would have a hand, you wouldn’t have j’s hand if it weren’t attached to the rest of me.
Right? That sort of gives it its point. Do not try this at home. And finally, the third kind of interdependence and one of the most interesting kinds is dependence upon conceptual imputation. And this is the one that you take a long deep breath before making plausible and explaining.
But it’s actually not a complex or bizarre idea. Okay? In particular, it’s not the idea that somehow my thought magically brings the world into existence. It’s not idealism. It’s not some kind of magic.
Rather, it’s the idea that things have their identity and their identity conditions in dependence upon conceptual and linguistic practices. Let me be specific here. I’m gonna change examples for a moment. Question. This is not magic, no trick questions, nothing up my sleep.
How many things am I holding in my hand right now? Here’s one good question answer to that question. One, you’re holding a bottle of water. Here’s another good question. Answer to the question.
You’re holding two things, a bottle and some water in it. Here’s another answer to the question. You’re holding three things, a bottle, some water in it, and a label. You get the picture. There’s also an answer that says, oh, billions and billions and billions of things, all these little atoms swarming around.
Right? All of those are possible. Here’s another. Your hand you you don’t have anything in your hand. At best, you’ve got a part of something, namely a part of a case of bottled water that’s out there, one part of which happens to be here.
Now, answer. Which of these is correct? What is this thing independent of any individuation convention, independent of any kind of designation? Is it a part of a case of water that happens to be here? Is it a zillion things?
Is it one thing? Is it three things? Answer. What a stupid question. Right?
Answer. Depending on the convention you adopt, adopt, any of those answers will do. And that’s a way of saying that this thing owes its identity as a single thing to a nominal or conceptual imputation. And that’s another way of saying that it’s empty of having any identity or essence that makes it the thing that it is independent of that imputation. Now here’s the thing.
If you think about dependence and interdependence as at least three-dimensional on these different on these different dimensions. You can you can play with this idea as as often as you want, and there are lots of different divisions and and explanations of emptiness. But let’s just take these three. And if you think about it, everything you have ever seen, heard, tasted, smelled, or tripped over, including yourself, is interdependent in all three of these senses. Owes its existence, its coming into existence, and its characteristics characteristics to a whole range of various causes and conditions, owes its existence to the various parts that it’s got, and owes its existence to its status as a part of a larger whole, and has its identity conditions in dependence on conceptual imputation.
Everything’s like that. And that’s a way of saying that everything’s dependently arisen. But when you say that everything’s dependently arisen like that, that’s another way of saying that nothing exists independently, that nothing has an essence that makes it what it is independently of convention, that nothing is some kind of an independent autonomous substance that merely happens to have some characteristics. Characteristics. That is that’s another way of saying that things are empty of inherent existence.
Okay? So emptiness is not some deep hidden occult mystery. It’s just a fairly clear standard, way of providing an analysis of what it is to be an entity. So to take an old Madhyamaka slogan, if you understand emptiness this way, we don’t say that because things are empty, they are nonexistent. We rather say that because things exist, they are empty.
Emptiness is what existence amounts to on this particular analysis. Okay? So in particular, we’re not talking about some kind of an appearance reality distinction or some kind of a veil of illusion of existence that if only you peeled it back, you see this incredible luminous void and suddenly be sucked into endless bliss. Right? That’s not what we mean when we talk about emptiness.
It would be nice if the world was like that. It would make philosophy a lot easier. Right? All we’d have to do is, you know, find the place where you pull up the screen and all bliss out. But the idea is more that emptiness isn’t something behind ordinary reality that’s in us.
It’s basically the mode of existence of ordinary things. The trick from the standpoint of Peyronian skepticism and the standpoint of Madhyamaka, is to figure out ways to convince yourself of that fact and to actually make that fact part of your ordinary cognitive apparatus. So, so far, all I’ve talked about is what we mean by emptiness and the relationship between emptiness and interdependence. And the reason that I do that is because, emptiness, because the kind of arguments and analysis that we’re gonna see in the West, like those that we typically see in Asian philosophy for emptiness, are, in the first instance, arguments for certain kinds of interdependence. And so the claims about non substantiality and essencelessness come out of arguments that are in the first instance for interdependence on these various dimensions.
So it’s not as though by arguing for interdependence, we’re arguing we’re beside the point. Rather, that simply is the point. Okay? So now let’s start talking a little bit about external objects and specifically how folks like Sextus, Empiricus, and David Hume think about external objects. So so far, what I’ve done, I want to sort of again let sort of give you a summary of where we’ve come so far, is I’ve given you a very general historical warm up as to why you ought to be doing if you’d be interested in this.
And then what I’ve done is given you a completely nontextual analysis of the relationship between emptiness and interdependence that I have claimed, and you might believe me or not, that is reasonably common to both of these philosophical traditions. And now I want to talk about how it’s articulated, specifically in the western tradition. Are there any questions so far? Because I don’t want to have succeeded in losing anybody. Okay.
Clear enough? Now remember how I’m interpreting silence. So if you’ve got questions or objections or puzzles and you’re being silent now, that makes you a very bad person indeed. See? Here’s somebody who has to worry about being a very bad person indeed.
It’s a long time before the next cell, John. So welcome. Yeah. That’s a very good question. Did everybody hear the question?
You should repeat it. Okay. The question is when I talk about conventional imputations, do I just mean imputation that depends upon linguistic conventions? Or are there more basic kinds of imputation that are nonetheless conceptual and imputational? And the example given was that of a spider who’s creeping along a wall and sees a fly and has to impute existence to the fly in order to count on it, sink its fangs into it, and, you know, all that other gory stuff.
And so the question is, is this this spider who knows nothing of any linguistic conventions also engaged in imputation? Yeah. I think that’s a more fundamental, more basic kind because part of what we mean by imputation, I think we ought to be careful about this. I mean, I don’t know much about spiders. I mean, that is like I’m I I don’t know any to whom I speak regularly.
Because so now there’s two stories we can tell about spider consciousness. Okay? Here’s one story you might tell about spider consciousness. The spider has to represent to itself the existence of a fly in order to leap on it, sink its fangs into it, liquefy it, and drink it. Right?
If so, then the spider has to be engaging presumably through some kind of hardwired stuff that its little spider nervous system does in taking a range of sensations and imputing an existence as an external object to this. That’s one story we might tell about spiders. Spiders, however, might be a little more basic than that. Spiders might not, for all I know. I mean, like I say, I’ve never asked a spider.
Spiders, for all I know, might not engage in any representation of the fly as an external object. They might just have certain sensations which cause their legs to leap and their fangs to to go in and and not be guilty of this kind of ontological profligacy at all. But to the extent that they are ontologically profligate, then yes, there you have to make room for a kind of in of of imputation that’s, say, a little bit more basic than kind of nominal conventional imputation that we talk about. You know? But I’m sort of assiduously now con restricting myself to the human domain.
And I’m restricting myself to the human domain because I want to talk about the ontology that we know and love. Because especially if you believe the arguments of Sextus Empiricus, for all we know, a spider world may be entirely different from ours and it may not contain any imputations of external objects. See, now now I’m getting into sextus, which is good. I could have paid you for this question. It’s a good question because one of Sextus’ modes — what Sextus does, you see, he argues Sextus, like Nāgārjuna, for instance, argues that he’s not defending any philosophical position.
He doesn’t have any philosophical position. And that his goal is the destruction of all philosophical positions and views. And he says that skepticism isn’t a philosophical view. Rather, he says it is an ability, it’s a word that he uses, to place in antithesis, to place in opposition philosophical theses or philosophical theses with appearances so as to get people to reject those philosophical theses. And Sextus’s idea is that I mean, Sextus kind of sets himself himself up as, you know, the kind of old fashioned Western American gunslinger.
Right? You come into town with a philosophical position, hombre, and I’m gonna refute it. Okay? That’s the way Sextus sets him up himself up as a philosopher. Not as somebody who’s going to be offering another one, but as somebody who’s going to be erasing other philosophical positions.
And Sextus’ arsenal, if you want, the kind of range of weapons, the Wheel of Sharp Weapons that he has, to borrow another metaphor, is a bunch of arguments that he calls modes. And each of these arguments, Sextus says, is not one which establishes any claim about the nature of things, but rather is an argument which enables you to take any claim about the fundamental nature of things and show that it’s unjustified, unjustifiable, and nonsensical. And Sextus’s idea here is that the reason that the modes work is that the very idea of the nature of things, the way things are, is a really bad philosophical idea, because there isn’t anything called the nature of things. And this, of course, might remind you, those of you who have read the eight thousand line Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra, of the wonderful line that says, things have exactly one nature. That is no nature.
And it’s a wonderful paradoxical line, but Sextus actually says virtually the same thing in virtually the same words. So one of Sextus’ first modes, in fact, the one called the first mode, is the mode from difference in animals. And Sextus says, look, If there’s a nature of things about which we can be confident, then it should be, one, that we can have some kind of access to. Because the only things that we can talk about externally are things that we know. Right?
We’re not talking about things nobody’s ever seen, heard, ever thought about. But he says, look. If we imagine the way a thing looks to us and we imagine the way the thing looks to, say, another animal, a spider, for instance, it may look very different. It may look small to us, large to the other animal. We may have a certain set of senses that reveal various characteristics of it that may not be shared by that other animal.
The other animal might be sensitive, say, to electromagnetic fields or something like that. Who knows? We have a sense of taste. The other animal may have only a sense of smell and so forth. Sextus says, if you think about this and you recognize that the world that we live in, the world of external objects, is a world as delivered by our senses.
And the world that an animal lives in is a world delivered by its senses. And then we ask, okay. Who’s got the nature of the thing as opposed to the way the thing appears? Sextus says you’ve got a problem. Because if you imagine yourself in a debate with a spider regarding the fundamental nature of reality, spiders have lots of eyes, for instance.
Right? They’ve got these incredible compound eyes. Some of them have like sixty, seventy eyes on their heads, and they don’t integrate if we understand spider perception. Right? They can in fact, they’re kind of like watching a multi cinema.
Okay? And we ask and the spider says, you know, the world’s incredible. It’s like a kaleidoscope. And we say to the spider, no. It’s not.
You’ve got distorted vision. And the spider says, no. No. No. You are stark with these defective monocular eyes.
Poor human being. The world you the world that is in fact kaleidoscopic looks unitary to you. We say, no. No, spider. The world that’s in fact unitary looks kaleidoscopic to you.
To whom are we going to turn as an arbiter? We say, let’s turn to the dog. The spider says, no, thanks. I’ll have the house fly. More compound eyes.
Right? And we’ve got a problem here in trying to figure out the nature of the world. Now, Sextus’ diagnosis is, the problem is that what each of us has really good access to is our appearances, the way things appear to us. And the world that we live in is a world of appearances, a world of things as they appear to us. But our concept of the nature of things, of things having a fundamental nature, is the concept of there being something that underlies those appearances.
If there is something that underlies those appearances, there ought to be some way of getting some access to it, and the spider and us should be able to do it equally well. Or if one of us can’t, one of us should be able to show the other one why we can’t. But if all we ever have access to are the appearances, that explains why we and spiders can’t agree about anything. Right? And the idea that, well, there might be something behind that that neither of us are getting access to, Sextus points out is the idea of not the nature of the things that we know and love, but now we’re talking about the nature of something that nobody’s ever seen, heard of, or could see or hear of because all we have access to are appearances.
And that’s not what you meant by the essence of things. Again, the parallel here to Candrakīrti in the sixth chapter of Madhyamakāvatāra, the entrance to the middle way, where Candrakīrti is worried about somebody who says, look, I don’t mean the nature of the things that appear to me. I just mean the nature of something itself independent of any knowledge. Candrakīrti says, look it. The thing that is the basis for grasping and the thing that’s the basis for the positing of identity is a nature of things you think you experience.
When I say I think that this bottle has a substantial independent existence, I mean the bottle that appears to me, not some other bottle that nobody and no animal has ever seen, heard, smelled, touched, or tasted. But what Sextus is arguing in the first mode is all that appears to me are a bunch of appearances, and the appearances are strictly speaking relative to my sensory apparatus. This leads Sextus to the, third mode. I’m I’m skipping modes around here. There’s ten of them.
We’re not gonna do all of Sextus’ modes. But it’s one of my, favorite modes, and that’s what he calls the mode of admixtures. And it’s a very deep mode indeed. Because let’s pay attention to his appearances now. You might say, well, gee Sextus, if that’s right, all I have access to are my appearances.
But the appearances to which I have access are appearances of the objects and reflect properties of