ABSTRACT

The manifest fact of experiential unity—namely, that a single experience often seems to be composed of multiple features and multiple objects—was lodged as a key objection to the Buddhist no-self view by Nyāya philosophers in the classical Indian tradition. We revisit the Nyāya-Buddhist debate on this issue. The early Nyāya experiential unity arguments depend on diachronic unification of experiences in memory, but later Nyāya philosophers explicitly widened the scope to incorporate new unity arguments that invoke synchronic unification in experiences. We argue that classical responses to this objection in the Buddhist traditions are not satisfactory. We offer a new solution on behalf of the Buddhists, with some help from cognitive sciences. We argue that there are different kinds of experiential unity and that, once we distinguish between these kinds, the Nyāya argument becomes difficult to sustain.

摘要

经验统一的明显事实——也就是说，一个单一的体验似乎往往由多个特征和多个对象组成——是印度古典传统中 Nyāya 哲学家对佛教无我观的主要反对意见。我们重温 Nyaya-Buddhist 关于这个问题的辩论。早期的 Nyāya 经验统一论证依赖于记忆中经历的历时统一，但后来的 Nyāya 哲学家明确扩大了范围，以纳入新的统一论证，这些论证在经验中调用了共时统一。我们认为，佛教传统中对这一反对意见的经典回应并不令人满意。在认知科学的帮助下，我们代表佛教徒提供了一个新的解决方案。我们认为有不同种类的经验统一性，一旦我们区分这些种类，