james and yogaacaara philosophy

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William James and Yogaacaara philosophy: A comparative

inquiry

By Miranda ShawPhilosophy East and West

Volume 37, no.3

July 1987

A general kinship between the philosophy of William

James and certain aspects of Buddhist thought is

immediately apparent and frequently noted.(1) This

kinship is most apparent in their shared conviction

that the self is not a permanent entity or

"soul-substance,'' but is rather an aggregate of

processes (Buddhism's skandhas) including amomentary series of states of consciousness (James'

"stream of consciousness" and Buddhism's

cittasa.mtaana) .(2) There are, however, deeper

comparisons that can be made between James and

specific Buddhist thinkers. For instance, the

concept of "pure experience'' in the philosophies of

James and Nishida Kitaroo have much in common. David

Dilworth has written a splendid essay on this,(3)

and my article is meant in a sense to complement

that study. Dilworth notes that the founder of the

Kyoto school of Zen philosophy was influenced by

James, having been introduced to James' books by D.

T. Suzuki.(4) Dilworth explains that James'philosophy struck a familiar chord for Nishida,

highlighting streams of thought that were already

present in Buddhism, but fully enough absorbed into

the background that Nishida was inspired to make

them explicit once again, in the process adding the

distinctive touch of the religious genius for which

he is renowned in the global philosophical arena.

The Kyoto school of philosophy in turn has come to

the West and is stimulating Western philosophy in a

process of cross-fertilization that characterizes

the current international intellectual climate.

The purpose of this essay is to explore some ofthe similarities between James and Buddhist thought

that rendered the Cantabrigian's philosophy so

compatible with Nishida's Zen philosophy. In order

to do this, I will analyze the parallels between

James' thought and that of early Yogaacaara

philosophy,one of the two main streams of Maahayaana

philosophy in India. Yogaacaara philosophy, no less

than Madhyamaka, was familiar to and assimilated by

the formulators of Ch'an in China. What suggests a

comparison of William James and Yogaacaara Buddhism

is the numerous parallels between their analyses of

experience and the pragmatic theories of truth that

they developed to retain a degree of epistemologicalrealism in view of those analyses. My discussion

begins with a section on the primacy of experience

for both James and Yogaacaara, since this



constitutes the cornerstone of their respective

metaphysics. The rest of the essay examines the

nexus of philosophical insights that informs the

interpretation of experience by each system, under

the headings of(l) experience as a constructive

activity and abhuutaparikalpa, (2) the external

world: a pluralistic universe and paratantra, (3)

pure experience and parini.spanna, and (4)

pragmatism and arthakriyaa.

P.224

The discussion of James draws on an array of his

writings. I developed this discussion on the basis

of his Essays in Radical Empiricism (published in

1912) because it embodies his mature philosophy.

However, quotations are drawn from a range of his

works, starting with the relatively early Psychology

(the Briefer Course, 1892). James' philosophy is

consistent on the topics covered in this essay. The

descriptive model of experience and its metaphysical

underpinnings outlined in Psychology form the basisof the understanding of experience that informs all

of his subsequent work. Further, Psychology was an

exercise in the empiricism that Essays advocates,

while pragmatism pervades all of his writings.(5)

The discussion of Yogaacaara focuses on the

Madhyaantavibhaaga-`saastra, "Treatise on

Discrimination between the Middle and Extreme

(Views), '' the first systematic formulation of

Yogaacaara philosophy.(6) My translations are from

Susumu Yamaguchi's critical Sanskrit edition of the

Madhyaantavibhaaga (hereinafter cited as Y with page

citations), which includes Vasubandhu's commentary

(bhaa.sya) and Sthiramati's subcommentary(.tiikaa).(7)

One issue that arises at the outset is that of

the possible influence of Buddhist thought in

general and Yogaacaara in particular upon William

James. There is no doubt that James was exposed to

Buddhist thought. He and his neighbor Charles

Lanman, a Sanskrit scholar who worked mainly with

early Buddhist texts, were close friends, and he

knew Paul Carus, another student of early Buddhist

thought.(8) James also owned and annotated a number

of books on Buddhism, such as Paul Carus' History of

Buddhism, Warren's Buddhism in Translations,Koeppen's Die Religion des Buddha, and Max Mller's

Hisotory of Ancient Sanskrit Literature.(9) Despite

his acquaintance with Buddhist thought, there is

little evidence that his philosophy is deeply

informed by Buddhism. The works to which he had

access discuss the basic doctrines of Buddhism, but

James rarely refers to these doctrines in his

writings. An isolated reference occurs in Varieties

of Religious Experience:

I am ignorant of Buddhism... but as I apprehend the

Buddhistic doctrine of Karma, I agree in principle

with that.(10)

In his Psychology--wherein James lays out the views

of the self, perception, and the stream of



consciousness that are so acutely analogous to those

of Buddhism-he does not cite Buddhism, but bases his

discussions on his own scientific knowledge of

physiology and psychology, upon which foundation he

doubtless could have developed his views

independently and then perhaps noticed the Buddhist

parallels later.

Further disconfirmation of Buddhist

philosophical influence upon James is the

selectivity of his own interest in world religions.

It was not an interest in philosophy, logic, or

doctrine that guided his study of world religions,

but his interest in personal religious experience

and meditative or mystical states, toward the end of

developing an objective science of religions based

on the psychology of that experience. James'

interest in the psychology rather than the

philosophy of

P.225

Buddhism is seen in Varieties, wherein he discusses

not the doctrines of Buddhism, but Buddhist

meditative states.(11) From this, one might infer

that James was more knowledgeable about the

psychological than the technical aspects of Buddhist

philosophy. Given the state of Buddhist scholarship

in his day, he certainly would not have been aware

of the Yogaacaara doctrines that so closely parallel

his own. While the question of the influence of

basic Buddhist doctrine upon James' thought must

remain an open question, there is no doubt that he

developed his philosophy of "experience only''

independently of that system. Therefore, these twohighly analogous philosophies arose independently in

second-century India and nineteenth-century New

England.

I. THE PRIMACY OF EXPERIENCE

William James stated that he intended to formulate a

philosophy based solely on postulates drawn from

experience, and he called his philosophy radical

empiricism:

To be radical. an empiricism must neither admit into

its constructions any element that is not directlyexperienced, nor exclude from them any element that

is directly experienced.(12)

Guided by this criterion, he derived what for him

was the primary and incontestable fact:

The first and foremost concrete fact is that

consciousness of some sort goes on... [;] 'states of

mind' succeed each other.(13)

That is, the principal fact of experience is

experience itself. This fact, for James, is also an

encompassing fact. Since an experience consists ofits content, there is no reason, nor is it possible,

to imagine an experience apart from its content:



What represents and what is represented is here

numerically the same;... we must remember that no

dualism of being represented and representing

resides in the experience per se.... There is no

self-splitting of it into consciousness and what the

consciousness is `of.' Its subjectivity and

objectivity are functional attributes solely,

realized only when the experience is 'taken,' i.e.,

talked-of, twice... by a new retrospective

experience.(14)

Thus, for James, the content should be included in

the category of experience rather than in a separate

category. Just as an experience is indistinguishable

from its content, so its content is inextricable

from the experience. James states that the first

great pitfall that his radical empiricism prevents

is "an artificial conception of the relations

between knower and known."(15)

On the basis of the indivisibility ofexperience, James concludes that the conscious

field, its object, the attitude toward the object,

and the sense of a self to which the attitude

belongs all meld together to form "a full fact, the

kind to which all realities belong, unlike the

abstract 'object' when taken alone."(16) Here, the

encompassing nature of experience for James becomes

clear when he states that "all realities" are

enveloped by it. His more radical way of stating it

is that

P.226

experience is all there is, the materia prima of

everything, which cannot be pinned down to either

inner or outer reality.(17) This is one of the

meanings of James' term "pure experience." (For the

other, more technical, usage see section IV.) "Pure

experience" in this context is a slightly misleading

term, for it connotes a form or level of experience

that is pure or contentless, while James means by it

that we live in a world that is purely, that is,

solely, experience.

Just as experience is the cornerstone of James'

empirical philosophy, it provides the point ofdeparture for the philosophy unfolded in the

Madhyaantvibhaaga. The text opens in kaarikaa I.1

with the statement "imagination exists"

(abhuutaparikalpo 'sti). That is, the mental life in

all its vicissitudes is uncontestably real, an

undebatable postulate of Yogaacaara philosophy.

Imagination here is synonymous with what James calls

experience, but the Sanskrit compound is more

descriptive because it contains an explicit

reference to its misleading quality. The full

translation of the term is "imagination of the false

(or unreal)." The next phrase specifies what is

misleading about it: "There is no duality in it"(dvaya.m tatra na vidyate). Like James, Yogaacaara

upholds the ultimate integrity of experience in its

indivisibility into "experience" and "content.'' In



Yogaacaara terminology, experience is "empty"

(`suunya) of this division. Commenting on this

verse, Sthiramati explains that "the imagination of

what is false, being devoid of a real subject and

object, is said to be empty" (abhuutaparikalpo hi

graahyagraahakasvaruuparahita.h `suunya ucyate)

(Y10). Sthiramati agrees with James when he explains

that both subject and object are encompassed by

experience or imagination, and hence inextricable

from it:

Indeed, it is not the case that the imagination of

what is false is the perceiver of anything, nor is

it perceived by anyone. (Y11)

Imagination of what is false is to be treated as an

indivisible unit. It is not the perceiver of

anything because it encompasses its object;

similarly, due to its enveloping nature, it cannot

be objectified. James agrees that experience cannot

experience itself:

Experience in its original immediacy is not aware of

itself, it simply is, and the second experience is

required for what we call awareness of it to

occur.(18)

That is, the process of witnessing cannot be

witnessed; it simply occurs. In James' words, "We

should say 'it thinks' as we say `it rains' or

simply: thought goes on."(19)

Therefore, Yogaacaara, like James, upholds

experience as the sole reality. Yogaacaara treatises

refer to this postulate as cittamaatra orvij~naptimaatra. Although often translated as "mind

only," the use of the noun "mind" tends to

substantialize the concept in a way that Yogaacaara

did not intend, by conjuring an image of a permanent

substance and then inviting the label of absolutism,

when it is the processual life of the mind--the

conceptualizing process and the emotions--that is

meant here, and not a static mental substrate or

"cosmic consciousness" underlying variegated

experience.

P.227

II. EXPERIENCE AS A CONSTRUCTIVE ACTIVITY AND

ABHUUTAPARIKALPA

The previous section discussed how James and the

Madhyaantavibhaaga both treat experience as an

encompassing category that envelops experiencer and

content, or subject and object, in a single category

through which a definite dividing line cannot be

drawn. That is. experience is an intermixture of

subject and object and, due to the subjective

elements, experience is constructive rather than

passive. James asserted that "reality is an

accumulation of our own intellectualinventions."(20) Yogaacaara's parallel assertion is

implicit in its word for ordinary experience,

abhuutaparikalpa. The verbal root of parikalpa is



pariûk!p, "to construct, create, imagine, divide,"

a range of meanings that expresses how this mode of

experience is disjunctive or dualistic and also

constructive, creating the reality that we

experience. Thus, experience in both philosophies is

not simply synonymous with sensation or perception,

but is an apperceptive and interpretative process as

well.

Both philosophies divide experience into two

main phases, prereflective and reflective, and

demonstrate various ways that experience is

constructed during the reflective, or conceptual,

phase. On the whole, James provides more extensive

exemplification, offering an Abhidharma-like catalog

of mental processes, partly because his thesis was

more novel in his intellectual tradition and partly

because he was doing pioneering work in the field of

psychology as well. Yogaacaara, on the other hand,

worked against the background of an extensive corpus

of Abhidharma literature (detailed

psychophilosophical analyses of the constituents ofexperience) and a pan-Buddhist conviction that all

mental phenomena are constructed or "conditioned"

(sa.msk.rta). Another reason for terseness in the

Yogaacaara case is that the text was meant to serve

as a springboard for a teacher's oral commentary,

while James provided his own commentary and

exemplification.

James and Yogaacaara similarly describe a

prereflective phase of experience, although James'

description carries more rhetorical force, since he

was going against the prevalent philosophical grain.

He was arguing against Hume's atomistic theory ofexperience (which posits no connecting agent) and

Cartesian and Kantian epistemological dualism. James

describes the prereflective stage of experience as

direct, immediate, and intuitive and calls this

phase "sensation, " while the subsequent mental

operations performed upon sensation he calls

perception, conceptualization, or classification:

'Ideas' about the object mingle with the awareness

of its mere sensible presence, we name it, class it,

compare it, utter propositions concerning it.... In

general, this higher consciousness about things is

called Perception, [while] the mere inarticulatefeeling of their presence is Sensation.(21)

James describes the unity that characterizes the

stage of sensation or immediate awareness, using the

example of looking at a piece of paper. In the first

moment of experience, the paper and the observer are

unitary:

P.228

There is no context of intermediaries or associates

to stand between and separate the thought and thing

... but rather an allround embracing of the paper bythe thought.(22)

To say "This is a piece of paper, at which I am



looking" involves interpretation, which is a

constructive or intellectual process. Indeed, what

is experienced is not an external piece of paper,

but "the immediate results upon consciousness of

nerve-currents as they enter the brain."(23) All

that one can really say is that a sensation or

experience has occurred:

The paper seen and the seeing of it are only two

names for one indivisible fact which, properly

named, is the datum, the phenomenon, or the

experience.(24)

The Yogaacaara (and indeed pan-Buddhist)

equivalents of James' "sensation" are spar`sa,

literally "contact" between sense-organ and object,

and vij~naana, the "consciousness" that results from

their contact. The Madhyaantavibhaaga commentaters

echo James' description of the prereflective phase

of experience:

Consciousness (vij~naana) is the cognizance of themere thing (arthamaatrad.r.s.ti). 'Mere' means that

particular attributes (vi`se.sa) are not cognized;

there is only the perception (upalabdhi) of the

thing itself (vastusvaruupa). (Y31)

After the nondichotomous and direct experience of

the datum or mere thing, the sensations are digested

or re-presented, as it were, and their significance

establsihed. It is in this reflective

phase--perception, conceptualization, or

classification in James' terminology, and vikalpa,

prapa~nca, or sa.mj~naa in Yogaacaara's--that

experience becomes a constructive process. Thesensations are interpreted in light of past

experience, including cultural and linguistic

constructs and individual interests and preferences.

James identifies the first agent of construction

as attention, because attention selects which

aspects of a field of awareness will receive its

focus:

Consciousness is always interested more in one part

of its object than in another, and welcomes and

rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks....

Accentuation and Emphasis are present in everyperception we have.(25)

For James, the result of attention is the

reification of certain aspects of the reality that

is transmitted by the sensations:

Out of what is in itself an indistinguishable,

swarming continuum, devoid of distinction or

emphasis.... Attention... picks out certain

sensations as worthy of notice, choosing those that

are signs to us of things which happen practically

or aesthetically to interest us, to which we

therefore give substantive names and to which wegive the status of independence and dignity.(26)

James notes that names and seemingly independent



things are the products of the reification process.

The independent status of objects is purely an

attributed status according to James because, as

discussed above in section I, he claims subject and

object to be inextricably interfused in the

prereflective phase of experience. James further

notes that the world we construct is stable and

uniform

P.229

while experience and phenomena are dynamic and

ever-changing.(27) Similarly, for Yogaacaara and

indeed all Buddhism, the basic products that the

hypostatization of the field of awareness produces

are phenomena whose seeming independence belies

their underlying interconnectedness and whose

seeming staticity betrays the momentariness of

existents and the stream of consciousness.

For both James and the Madhyaantavibhaaga, thesenames and forms have an interreferential character,

for they are established through mutual

opposition--for example, subject as opposed to

object, thought to thing, being to nonbeing, black

to white--and also through mutual

interrelationship-for example, above, below, more,

farther, brighter, similar, and so forth. James

holds that there is no single, objective quality

that does not vary according to its context. In

Psychology and Essays, he gives many examples of

this interreferentiality. A few examples from the

visual sphere are that something violet appears more

intense when juxtaposed with yellow; black looksdarker next to white than to gray; something bright

becomes dull with the appearance of something

brighter; and so forth.(28) In addition, objects

tend to be defined in terms of their function, which

again expresses a relation, namely, to human needs

and purposes. Some qualities are clearly values that

have been subjectively attributed and cannot be said

to inhere in the phenomena themselves, such as

preciousness, dangerousness, rarity, beauty, and

repulsiveness. Yet, James points out, these same

qualities cannot simply be relegated to the mental

or purely nonobjective realm, either, because they

have a physical realm of activity in their effectsupon human physiology and even behavior.(29)

Therefore, while reflection seems to reveal

definite images and objective attributes, what in

fact is occurring is a complex classificatory

process that takes into account a variety of

contexts, functions, and relations. These relations

occur within experience, forming its

self-referential quality and supporting James'

thesis that what we experience is, after all, not an

external world, but pure experience:

My thesis is that if we start with the suppositionthat there is only one primal stuff or material in

the world... and if we call that stuff `pure

experience,' then knowing can easily be explained as



a particular sort of relation towards one another

into which portions of pure experience may enter.

The relation itself is part of pure experience.(30)

For this reason, James likens consciousness to a

stream in which

every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed

in the free water that flows round it... the sense

of its relations.... The significance, the value, of

the image is all in this halo or penumbra that

surrounds and escorts it,--or rather that is fused

into one with it.(31)

On this point, Yogaacaara agrees with James that

the stream of consciousness conditions itself. For

James, each image in the stream is "steeped and

dyed" by the surrounding images, that is, by the

interreferential context provided by

P.230

experience itself. For Yogaacaara, too, previous

moments in the stream of consciousness condition

later ones (Y25):

Dualistic thought (vikalpa) is constructed by other

dualistic thought (Y23)

and

Consciousness arises with the appearance of objects

through the ripening of its own seeds. (Y11)

These seeds (biija) incubate in the aalayavij~naana,a "store consciousness" that functions to shape

future actions, perceptions, and feelings on the

basis of past ones through the action of "perfuming"

(vaasanaa). The aalayavij~naana is an integral part

of abhuutaparikalpa and, as its underlying causal

basis (hetupratyaya), is its fundamental or basal

structure(Y33).

Because of their strong emphasis on the unity of

subject and object in the prereflective phase of

experience and the active role of the subject in

constructing the reflective phase of experience,

both James and Yogaacaara have at times beencharacterized as propounding forms of idealism.

James has been characterized as a Berkelian idealist

by E. C. Moore and A. O. Lovejoy.(32) Although some

current studies are disputing this

interpretation,(33) Yogaacaara consistently has been

interpreted as idealism. For instance, Ashok

Chatterjee says that for Yogaacaara the world is

unreal and "consciousness is the sole reality."(34)

Surendranath Dasgupta claims that Yogaacaara is an

"uncompromising idealism" for which the external

world does not exist, but is constructed by

"ignorant minds."(35) T. R. V. Murti calls it

"idealism par excellence... the only genuinelyidealistic school in India,"(36) while no less a

Buddhologist than Edward Conze calls it "a

metaphysical idealism, which teaches that



consciousness... creates its objects out of its own

inner potentialities."(37) These various assessments

rightly acknowledge the primacy of experience in its

constructive or illusionary aspects for James and

Yogaacaara. However, they do not recognize that

James and the Yogaacaara of the Madhyyantavibhaaga

and its commentaries do not deny the existence of

phenomenal reality. Rather, they conflate subject

and object, inner and outer, into a single category

that includes both. The Madhyaantavibhaaga itself

never states that abhuutaparikalpa creates or

imagines the phenomenal world; what it imagines or

creates is dualism, most notably subject-object

dualism. Sthiramati explains that this is what makes

it imagination of what is unreal:

The term 'unreal' means that this [the external

world] does not exist in the way that it is

constructed, i.e. in the form of subject and object.

'Imagination' means that an object does not exist in

the way that it is imagined. (Y13)

James, too, encompasses subject and object in a

single category rather than reducing the external

world to the subject's consciousness.

The aforementioned interpreters of James

classify him as a metaphysical, or ontological,

idealist along with Berkeley, while the interpreters

of Yogaacaara similarly place it in the metaphysical

idealist camp. That they are not metaphys-

P.231

ical idealists, but share a position of phenomenalrealism, constitutes the theme of the next section.

III. THE EXTERNAL WORLD: A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE AND

PARATANTRA

Since both James and Yogaacaara define reality in

terms of"experience only," their philosophies have

been mistaken for metaphysical idealism, which

denies the existence of the external world of

phenomena. Yet neither philosophy denies the

existence of external objects that exist

independently of the experiencing subject, however

much they delimit that independence. Bothphilosophies maintain an element of realism, but

they nuance that realism with a recognition of the

relativity of all phenomena. James' view of

relativity emerges in his characterization of the

universe as pluralistic, while for Yogaacaara it

appears in the discussion of paratantra.

James was quite straightforward in his

phenomenal realism. He characterized himself as a

"realist"(38) and declared that

I am... postulating here a standing reality

independent of the idea that knows it.(39)

Some of his colleagues, such as Rudolf Lotze, held

that a thing that is taken in two relations cannot



be the same thing in each, that is, that the M in

M-L must be different from the M in M-N. In

opposition to this atomistic (and Humean) position,

James asserted that "one and the same world is

cognized by our different minds."(40) He argued that

the various relations, being conceptual, are

substitutional and variable, while the M in each

case is the same piece of sensible experience.(41)

This hearkens back to his psychology of experience,

which posits two phases: (1)direct sensation and (2)

conceptual knowledge, which consists of establishing

various relations. James never meant to deny the

existence of external objects; he simply insisted

that there is no dualism of subject and object in

experience.

Yogaacaara's affirmation of the reality of

phenomena reflects the necessity of treading the

Buddhist middle path between the ontological

extremes of nihilism and absolutism, or negation

(apavaada) and reification (samaaropa) , of

existents. In charting its course between these twoextremes, Yogaacaara used as its guiding principle

the crowning Mahaayaana doctrine of emptiness

(`suunyataa). Emptiness was as misunderstood in

second-century India as it is today, for it

perennially is mistaken for "nothingness" or

"nonexistence," a doctrine of totalistic nihilism.

Yogaacaara was aware of and consciously addressed

this misconception, sometimes with a note of irony,

as when Sthiramati comments:

The definition of emptiness is wrongly understood if

one thinks that everything exists or that nothing

exists. For one thing, this would mean thenonexistence of emptiness, too. (Y14)

Simply stated, for something to be empty, something

must exist! When Sthiramati says that

P.232

emptiness would not be possible if what is

designated as empty were nonexistent, like

impermanence and so forth, (Y14)

he is appealing to the fact that the doctrine of

emptiness, like those of nonself, impermanence, andmomentariness, arose in order to describe something,

through antecedent predication. That is, "emptiness

pertains to one thing in terms of something else"

(anyena hi anyasya `suunyataa d.r.s.taa) (Y14), as

when it pertains to a monastery in terms of

elephants or absent monks.(42) According to the

Madhyaantavibhaaga, imagination of the unreal

exists, and emptiness is the absence of duality in

it. Sthiramati comments:

Emptiness is indeed this very thing, the absence of

subject and object in imagination of what is false;

therefore, emptiness is not nonexistence. (Y 11)

Here, both subject and object are held to be

illusory; it is not simply the object that is



illusory. Being a Buddhist philosophy, Yogaacaara is

just as concerned with the abandonment of belief in

a self as it is with the cessation of mistaken

reifications of phenomenal reality. The `saastra is

very explicit in stating that the experiencer

(bhokt.rvastu) is empty (`suunya) along with what is

experienced (bhojanavastu) (Y53). It emphasizes that

the subject and object are inseparably related to

one another, which would not be possible if either

did not exist or were reducible to the other. Their

inseparable relatedness or mutual relativity is what

the commentary on this passage calls "great

emptiness" (mahaa`suunyataa)(Y 54).

Having established that emptiness does not imply

the nonexistence of phenomenal reality, Yogaacaara

never wavers on the point that concepts of external

objects do not mirror or grasp those objects. Yet to

say that experience is a mental construct (parikalpa

or vikalpa) is not the same as saying that what one

is experiencing is purely mental. According to the

Madhyaantavibhaaga:

It (an object) does not exist as it appears, but it

does not exist in every respect. (Y20)

A relevant metaphor occurs in the

La^nkaavataara-suutra, which likens the operation of

imagination of what is false to a magician's

conjuration:

Depending upon grass, wood, shrubs, and creepers...

all beings and forms take shape... which appear

endowed with individuality and material body....

Like-wise... the false imagination recognizes avariety of appearances.(43)

Experience may have an illusory aspect, like a magic

show, but it does not arise in a vacuum. The grass

and creepers in the metaphor represent the objective

cause (aalambanapratyaya) or basis (a`sraya) of

consciousness, the "mere thing" (vastumaatra) ,

while the beings and forms are the verbal

designations of the experience, which, however

illusory, is dependent upon objects. A classical

Yogaacaara metaphor invoked by Sthiramati is that of

a rope mistaken for a snake in the dark or due to a

magical trick:

The nature of a snake is absent from the rope;

therefore, the rope is empty with regard to that

(that is, a snake) at all times, but the rope is not

empty in every way (that is, is not nonexistent).

(Y14)

P.233

The Yogaacaara concept of "consciousness only"

does not imply the existence of the experiencer and

the nonexistence of external phenomena, nor does it

absolutize abhuutaparikalpa or aalayavij~naana asthe basal structure of abhuutaparikalpa. Sthiramati

is quite explicit about not intending to subordinate

the object to the subject or make the object somehow



reducible to the subject:

Subjectivity (graahakatvam) is not possible if no

object (graahya) exists. (Y26) Since there is no

object in the absence of a subject, it is not

possible for there to be a subject when there is no

object, (Y11)

To uphold the sole existence of the subject or even

of consciousness itself would be to fail to attain

the nondual, transcendent wisdom of a bodhisattva

that this text means to impart (Y27). It is simply

that the subject and object, in their oneness,

relativize each other.

Thus, neither James nor Yogaacaara denies the

existence of an external world, and both agree that

it is the basis of our multifarious interpretations

of it. This is a phenomenally realistic view; what

they protest is the ordinary way of seeing the world

as external, separate from the experiencer, and

consisting of discrete, static entities. They sharea vision of the relativity and interrelatedness of

all things. Section II preceding discussed their

rejection of the hypostatization of the flow of

experience into absolute, permanent entities. James

laments how concepts construct a world of mutual

exclusion:

What we conceptualize, we cut out and fix, and

exclude everything but what we have fixed. A concept

means a that-and-no-other.(44)

In the same vein, Sthiramati says:

Indeed, consciousness takes on the appearance of

manifold images, in the form of all sorts of

independent things. like the eyes in the tail of a

peacock... (but) the independent elements

(dharmasvabhaava.h) ... are merely illusion

(bhraantimaatra). (Y31)

Clearly, the non-separateness of subject and

object for James and Yogaacaara is not limited to

that case, but extends to all phenomena in some

sense, This is seen in James' insistence upon a

pluralistic universe and Yogaacaara's adherence tothe classical Buddhist doctrine of mutual causation,

implying the interconnectedness of all things. In

Buddhism, this interconnectedness is all-embracing.

There is no limit to the causes of a given event. As

Vasubandhu states in his Abhidharmako`sa: "All the

elements (of the universe) are the general cause of

an event."(45) The vision that emerges (and is so

powerfully and poetically evoked by Hua-yen

Buddhism) is one of universal cooperation and

interpenetration. This is expressed in the

Yogaacaara term for what exists, paratantra,

literally, "other-dependent." It is also evoked by

the verb from which -tantra is derived, ûtan, "toweave," suggesting the interweaving of numerous

strands of existence. This is the level of things

just as they are, which is experienced directly in



the preconceptual phase of awareness, and hence is

unformulable in words:

P.234

Paratantra means ruled by others (parava`sa).... It

is not constructed (akalpita), is born from causes,

and is thoroughly inexpressible (anabhilaapyas

sarvathaa). (Y22)

Further, paratantra is defined as the "pure, worldly

domain" (`suddhalaukikagocara), that is, phenomena

unobscured by ignorance or mental defilements (Y22).

To see reality in this way is not to lose sight of

the particularities, for example, the separate eyes

in the tail of a peacock. It is simply to see their

connectedness, to see that no one thing has

independent (svabhaava) existence.

Unlike Yogaacaara, James was making an original

statement with his vision of a pluralistic universe,

He devotes at least half of A Pluralistic Universeto refuting what he calls the "absolutistic monism"

of Bradley, Spinoza, and Emerson, because they make

an abstract "whole" prior to the experienced parts.

He also rejects theories that disjoin phenomena

totally in order to provide an alternative to

monism. James argues for an abandonment of these two

extremes on the ground that they have no empirical

basis:

Neither abstract oneness nor abstract independence

exists; only real concrete things exist.(46)

In keeping with his empirical orientation, he arguesfirst for a move away from the purely abstract back

to the realm of experience, wherein things are

indeed experienced as continuous and as entering

into various relations with one another. The

ontological implications of these experienced

continuities and relations should be taken into

account, he says, "in a world where experience and

reality come to the same thing."(47) In the case of

any A and B, the very fact that they can enter into

relation shows, for James, that they are not

entirely distinct, "not separated by a void," not

mutually impenetrable or irrelevant; rather, they

are co-implicated and "must have an inborn mutualreference each to each."(48)

For James, the mutual relatedness of phenomena

does not cancel out their separateness, however

mutually exclusive the logical categories of unity

and disunity, oneness and manyness, may seem to be:

"In life distinct things can and do commune together

every moment."(49) Thus, James opts for a

nonmonistic and nonatomistic position that closely

resembles that of Buddhism, holding that in one

sense things retain their particularity, in another

they are interconnected and compenetrable:

Without being one throughout, such a universe is

continuous. Its members interdigitate with their

next neighbors in manifold directions, and there are



no clean cuts between them anywhere.(50)

James offers a vision of infinite and all-embracing

relativity that equals that of Buddhism:

Our 'multiverse' still makes a 'universe'; for every

part, tho it may not be in actual or immediate

connexion, is nevertheless in some possible for

mediated connexion, with every other part however

remote, through the fact that each part hangs

together with its very next neighbor in inextricable

interfusion.(51)

P.235

James says that his version of unity is not "the

monistic type," but what he prefers to call "the

type of continuity, contiguity, or

concatenation,"(52) which is in effect an equivalent

of the Buddhist doctrine of pratiityasamutpaada and

Yogaacaara's conception of paratantra.

IV. PURE EXPERIENCE AND PARINI.SPANNA

As discussed in the preceding section, the external

world is not unreal for James or early Yogaacaara,

but they agree that what is real cannot be

approached directly through words or concepts. It

can only be experienced through direct, unmediated

experience. This is the more technical usage of

James' term "pure experience." When he uses the term

in this technical sense, it refers to direct,

preconceptual, and unreified experience:

'Pure experience' is the name which I give to theimmediate flux of life which furnishes the material

to our later reflection with its conceptual

categories.(53)

What is experienced in pure experience is

a that which is not yet any definite what, tho ready

to be all sorts of whats.(54)

A concept is part of the stream of pure experience,

too, insofar as it is directly experienced; however,

the concept displaces the corresponding phenomenon

as the object of direct awareness.(55) Similarly,retrospective conceptualization about a given

concept replaces it as the immediate content of the

ongoing stream of experience.

A phenomenon in its pure state, unqualified by

concepts, before even its name has been conceived,

is what James means to indicate by "the mere that"

and is precisely what Buddhism tries to capture in

the terms tathataa and dharmataa, variously

translated as "suchness," "thatness," and "bare

reality." James agrees with Yogaacaara that this

awareness (vij~naana) occurs in the first moment of

sensation. According to James:

It reduces to the notion of what is just entering

into experience, and yet to be named... before any



belief about the presence had arisen, before any

human conception had been applied.... We may glimpse

it, but we never grasp it; what we grasp is always

some substitute for it.(56)

James could have been writing a Yogaacaara treatise

here, saying that the content of such experience

comes before belief (d.r.s.ti) and conception

(vikalpa) and can be glimpsed or seen (dar`sana),

but not grasped (anupalabdhi or anupalambha). They

also agree on the vividness of pure experience.

Speaking like a seer who is familiar with this mode

of experience, James reports its clarity and

vividness,(57) a characteristic of direct experience

that the Yogaacaara logicians expressed with the

term sphu.tatva.(58)

Thus, the realm of pure experience is not a

transcendental or objectless realm for either James

or Yogaacaara. It is the realm of ordinary life and

phenomena, but experienced directly, with no

intervening conceptualization. The Yogaacaara term

P.236

for this mode of experience is

parini.spannalak.sa.na, defined as the "sphere of

nondiscursive wisdom" (avikalpaj~naanagocara) (Y22).

There is only one reality, paratantra. When viewed

with attachment, with a mind that engages in falsely

dualistic constructions (vikalpa) , paratantra

becomes obscured by imaginative projections

(parikalpita). It becomes sa.msaara, the realm of

suffering. When the experiencer sees through the

dualisms that s/he has injected into an inherentlywholistic process, paratantra is seen "as it really

is" (yathaabhuutaartha) and hence is in that sense

perfected or consummated (parini.spanna).(59) Seen

for what it truly is, this world has become

nirvaa.na, the realm of bliss, serenity, and

liberation. Clearly, the three "natures" of

Yogaacaara's tripartite scheme do not describe three

levels of reality. They describe different ways of

experiencing reality, which remains the same

throughout, and this constitutes the unity and

interchangeability of the three natures.

In the process of awakening to reality,imagination of what is false has to be purified

(vi`sodhyaartham) of duality or illusion. This

purification is possible because, as stated in

Madhyaantavibhaaga I.1, "emptiness exists in it,"

that is, because it is ultimately empty of

subject-object duality and all dualism. Therefore,

emptiness is the "basis of purification"

(vi`suddhi-aalambana) (Y48). Emptiness is also the

basis of purification because it establishes the

identity of the three natures themselves. It is

emptiness, the absence of unchanging substances and

intrinsic, independent, fixed identities, that makes

possible their interchangeability andtransformability into one another.

For Yogaacaara. parini.spanna, the mode of



purified awareness, is the goal of Buddhist

practice. The term is a past passive participle

meaning "perfected" or "consummated,'' showing that

it is something that is the result of action; it is

a mode of experience, not an ontological

category.(60) In James' philosophy, pure experience

at first glance seems only to be a descriptive term

for the direct awareness that occurs in the first

moment of every sensation. Yet James envisions a

soteriological role for pure experience as well. He

acknowledges that concepts and philosophy have a

practical value, but goes on to say that ultimately

they must be abandoned if a direct experience of

reality is to be gained:

Theoretic knowledge... is knowledge about things, as

distinguished from living contemplation or

sympathetic acquaintance with them.

...................................................

Direct acquaintance and conceptual knowledge are...

complementary of each other.... But if, as

metaphysicians, we are more curious about the innernature of reality or about what really makes it go,

we must turn our backs upon our winged concepts

altogether.... Dive back into the flux itself... if

you wish to know reality.(61)

James characterizes the state of mind that dives

back into the flux of reality as a passive,

luminous. "intuitive sympathy," which would make a

fine translation of the Buddhist term for direct,

intuitive wisdom, praj~naa. James agrees with

Yogaacaara that the purpose of life and of

philosophy is to restore pure experience in its

direct immediacy:

P.237

Reality falls in passing into conceptual analysis;

it mounts in living its own undivided life--it buds

and burgeons, changes and creates.... Philosophy

should seek this kind of living understanding of the

movement of reality, not follow science in vainly

patching together fragments of its dead results.(62)

Other philosophies try... to restore the fluent

sense of life again.... The perfection with which

any philosophy may do this is the measure of itshuman success and importance in human history.(63)

From the preceding discussion, it should be

clear that if James and early Yogaacaara were to be

included in the idealist camp, it would be on the

side of epistemological idealism rather than of

ontological idealism. Nonetheless, neither

philosophy constitutes a pure or thoroughgoing

epistemological idealism either, because they

consider only the reflective phase of experience to

be subjectively constructed. They both posit a level

or mode of experience in which experience is

unmediated and hence has direct access to phenomenalreality.

V. PRAGMATISM AND ARTHAKRIYAA



James' and Yogaacaara's dichotomy between words and

reality would seem to leave them without any

criteria for determining the validity of a given

concept, statement, or practice, since all verbal

and conceptual constructs falsify the contents of

pure experience. Yet each philosophy does offer such

a criterion, and their criteria are remarkably

similar. James' answer to this dilemma is expressed

by another name that he gave to his philosophy,

pragmatism, which Yogaacaara's criterion comes in

the form of arthakriyaa. The thrust of both of these

positions is that action is both the goal and the

measure of the truth of ideas. That is, the

consequences of ideas when they are implemented

determines their truth. James summed up the

principle when he wrote:

On pragmatic principles we can not reject any

hypothesis if consequences useful to life flow from

it.(64)

Similarly, one of the meanings of arthakriyaa is

"useful action" (while a related term,

arthakriyaakaarin, means "capable of useful

action"). In both the Jamesian and the Buddhist

contexts, the consequences of ideas can be borne out

in two spheres of meaning and action. One is that of

ordinary life, wherein concepts serve the attainment

of the practical necessities of daily living. The

other is the higher life of humankind, wherein

concepts support the pursuit of moral and spiritual

aims and aspirations.

James rejects concepts as a way to approachtruth, but he acknowledges their usefulness in daily

life: "The function of intellect is practical rather

than theoretical."(65) The usefulness of any given

concept is measured by its consequences, and this

usefulness is coordinate with its validity or truth:

They [concepts] have, indeed, no meaning and no

reality if they have no use. But if they have any

use they have that amount of meaning.(66)

P.238

This understanding of truth is consistent with his

stance of subject-object nonduality, because

usefulness is always dependent upon a specific point

of view or purpose:

Truth is a relation inside of the sum total,

obtaining between thoughts and something else, and

thoughts, as we have seen, can only be contextual

things.(67)

At the same time, James' pragmatism retains its

empirical basis, for the pragmatic test of truth

also proceeds in reference to pure, "sensible"experience. To be proved as true, an intellectual

operation must be confluent with a wave in the

"finite stream of feeling":



Only in so far as they lead us, successfully or

unsuccessfully, into sensible experience again, are

our abstracts and universals true or false at

all.(68)

If James denied the existence of a world external to

consciousness, the empirical test would not be

possible. If thoughts were things, then the thought

of a fire would be very handy if one were stranded

in a blizzard, but, as James points out, some fires

will burn sticks and warm our bodies and some will

not:

Mental fire is what won't burn real sticks....

Mental knives may be sharp, but they won't cut real

wood.... With 'real' objects, on the contrary,

consequences always accrue; and thus the real

experiences get sifted from the mental ones, the

things from our thoughts of them.(69)

To put it simply, the pragmatic aspect of empiricismmeans that when a concept is true its application

will "work satisfactorily."(70)

Arthakriyaa can be translated as "to work

satisfactorily" or "workability." Other possible

translations are "causal efficacy, " "successful

action," and "useful action."(71) The concept does

not figure in the Madhyaantavibhaaga, but it was

developed by later Yogaacaara logicians--notably by

Dharmakiirti in his Pramaa.navaarttika(72)--as part

of pramaa.na theory, the theory of the sources and

criteria of valid knowledge. Arthakriyaa was

designated as the means of distinguishing betweenreal and erroneous perceptions. One classical

Yogaacaara example is that of fire. One can have a

valid perception of a fire, a mistaken perception of

a fire, or merely a mental image of a fire. The test

of validity is whether the fire can burn fuel and

cook food.(73) Another classical example is that of

a mirage. One can have a perception of water when

what one is in fact seeing is only a mirage. The

test in this case as in the case of fire is the

consequences of the cognition when acted upon. If

one can drink and quench one's thirst, then the

perception of water has been a valid one.

Admittedly, "water" is a mental construct (vikalpa)and corresponds to the parikalpa mode of experience.

What is actually perceived, the thing itself

(vastumaatra). is ultimately indeterminable in the

conceptual sphere; it is only determinable in a

specific context. The Madhyaantavibhaaga adduces

that where a human being sees water, a preta

(insatiable ghost) sees a river of pus and

excrement, while a yogin engaged in certain types of

meditation might see nothing at all or might see in

its place skeletons or another object of meditation

P.239

(Y21). Another example that might be more directly

accessible to us might be that of an apple. Where we



see food, a physicist might see a configuration of

atoms, a botanist might see a seed-bearing vehicle,

an artist might see a red sphere to paint, a native

of some tribe might see the manifestation of the god

of that tribe, and so forth. The apple exists, as

paratantra, but due to its emptiness, its lack of

intrinsic identity, it can be seen as many

things--in James' terms, taken in many

relations--depending upon the point of view and

purposes of the perceiver. Usefulness has to be

usefulness to someone; it is not a function of the

object so much as of the subject, although the

capability of usefulness in various contexts--and of

giving rise to a cognition, be it a cognition of

water, pus, or skeletons--resides in the real

object. It is the unresolvability of objects into

universally valid concepts that makes a test of

validity necessary. This ultimate unresolvability is

also what limits the validity established by

arthakriyaa to a particular context. According to

Dharmakiirti, that validity pertains to the

conventional level of truth and reality(vyavahaara)(74) and thus cannot claim ultimacy.

James acknowledges the same limitation or

context-dependence in his pragmatic test of truth:

How is success to be absolutely measured when there

are so many environments and so many ways of looking

at the [successful] adaptation? It cannot be

measured absolutely; the verdict will vary according

to the point of view adopted.(75)

In their pragmatic theories of truth, James and

Yogaacaara were both concerned with the practical

necessities of daily life, but also with the moraland spiritual dimension of life. James was deeply

interested in religion but, in accordance with his

pragmatism, was more interested in religious

experience and in the fruits of a spiritual life

than he was in the doctrinal or institutional

aspects of religion. He held that theological

statements can be subjected to the same test of

truth as practical ones, that is, by judging their

practical results:

If theological ideas prove to have a value for

concrete life, they will be true, for

pragmatism.(76)

Therefore,

on pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God

works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the

word, it is true. Now... experience shows that it

certainly does work.(77)

His Varieties of Religious Experience is a

compendium of the fruits of various religious

beliefs and even different types of religious belief

and temperament. These fruits include courage; hope;

moral strength; personal integration; and lives ofgreat piety. charitable works, and mystical

attainment. Clearly, James' criteria for religious

truth--which include immediate luminosity and



philosophical reasonableness along with moral

helpfulness(78)--allow of a plurality of religious

"truths." He acknowledged and defended his

conflation of the notions of "truth" and "what is

beneficial or efficacious"(79) and concluded: "What

other

P.240

kind of truth could there be, for [pragmatism], than

all this agreement with concrete reality?"(80)

The Madhyaantavibhaaga does not say that

religious beliefs and practices are justified by

their practical consequences, but this stance

characterizes Buddhism in general. Buddhists have

long upheld the difference between conventional,

everyday language (vyavahaara) and ultimate truth

(paramaarthasat), which is experienceable but not

verbally expressible. Therefore, Buddhist teachers

employ upaaya, skillful liberative techniques and

provisional teachings, in order to teach the Dharma.The value and meaning of these upaaya inhere in

their practical results, so they are meant to be

empirically tested and then abandoned once the

practitioner has reached the goal. This attitude

toward the Buddhist teachings informs some of the

radical statements in Praj~naapaaramitaa and

Madhyamaka literature that there is no Buddha, no

Dharma, and no path to liberation. Although

Yogaacaara would not disagree with such statements,

they do not characterize Yogaacaara literature. One

can infer that one reason they do not might be the

justification for them that is provided by the

epistemology presented in this essay. The statements"there is enlightenment" and "there is no

enlightenment" may be equally false insofar as they

proceed from the dualistic thinking of imagination

of what is false. However, the statement and

conviction that there is enlightenment is more

helpful and can be tested in practice with splendid

results. There must be some way to differentiate the

statement "there is enlightenment" and other

statements of religious and practical value from

totally deluded or nonsensical statements.

Dharmakiirti's pragmatic epistemology provides such

a method.

In conclusion. neither James nor Yogaacaara

completely devalues concepts as purely subjective

and divorced from phenomenal reality. They hold that

concepts serve as a bridge that can be crossed to

that reality through praxis and, as such, are

valuable and even indispensable.

CONCLUSION

In this essay I have documented various parallels

between the thought of William James and early

Indian Yogaacaara philosophy as it is expressed in

the Madhyaantavibhaaga-`saastra and Vasubandhu's andSthiramati's commentaries upon it, focusing on their

views of experience and examining the analogousness

of their respective conclusions that subject-object



dualism is illusory, reality is not verbally

formulable or conceptually graspable, and the

pragmatic test of validity provides a criterion for

truth. James and Yogaacaara both developed

philosophies that emphasize the encompassing nature

of consciousness without becoming monistic,

metaphysically idealistic, or atomistic. For both

James and Yogaacaara, the pragmatic test of validity

accomplishes a dual philosophical aim. It prevents

the absolute reification of any given conceptual

construct and at the same time prevents a totally

deconstructive or nihilistic denial of meaning and

truth.

P.241

These similar philosophical systems arose in

different cultural contexts in response to entirely

different intellectual milieux. James was working

within the empirical tradition of Bacon, Locke,

Berkeley, and Hume. He protested the subjectivistic

idealism of Humean and Berkelian empiricism andsought to overcome the epistemological dualism of

Descartes and Kant. Yogaacaara was heir to the

radical via negativa of the Praj~naapaaramitaa

literature and sought a mediating epistemological

alternative to Madhyamaka's two-truth theory, which

seemed to accord truth to the nonconceptual sphere

of ultimacy (paramaarthasat) and leave little basis

for distinguishing between valid and invalid

conventional (vyavahaara) verbal and mental

constructs.

Each philosophy exerted tremendous influence in

its own hemisphere. William James' thought left itsmark in the fields of psychology and comparative

religion. His philosophy contributed to the rise of

modern pragmatism, possibly influenced Husserlian

phenomenology,(81) and currently provides a resource

for the pragmaticization of analytic philosophy.(82)

In the religious sphere, James' ideas provided one

of the inspirational forces behind the evolving New

Thought movement and even Alcoholics Anonymous. In

the Eastern hemisphere, Yogaacaara modified

Madhyamaka philosophy over centuries of debate and

permeated T'ien-t'ai and Ch'an formulations in China

and Tendai and Zen in Japan. The influences of James

and Yogaacaara then converged in the modern Kyotoschool of philosophy. Judging from the breadth of

their respective streams of influence, these

philosophies have provided a compelling key to life

for many people. They both offer a perspective that

can accommodate epistemological idealism, phenomenal

realism, and the possibility of direct, intuitive

knowledge of reality, as well as a pragmatic

justification for the linguistic and symbolic

constructs used to point to that reality.

NOTES

1.See, for example. Kenneth Inada and Nolan Jacobson,eds., Buddhism and American Thinkers (Albany, New

York: State University of New York Press. 1984),

pp. vii, xv, 49, 76.



2.See D.C.Mathur, "The Historical Buddha (Gotama),

Hume, and James on the Self: Comparisons and

Evaluations," Philosophy East and West 28, no. 3

(July 1978): 262-270.

3.David Dilworth, "The Initial Formations of 'Pure

Experience' in Nishida Kitaroo and William

James," monumenta Nipponica 24, nos. 1-2 (1969):

93-111.

4.Dilworth, "initial Formations," p. 95. Suzuki

probably was introduced to James' writings by Paul

Carus, with whom he lived and worked as a

translator, because Carus was keeping abreast of

the formulation of American pragmatism by James

and Charles Sanders Peirce. This information was

related to me by Eugene Taylor of the Department

of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, who has an

article, "William James and Swami Vivekananda:

Asian Psychology at Harvard in the 1890's, "

forthcoming in Prabuddha Bharata, that documentsJames' personal connections, both direct and

indirect, with Asian scholars.

5.William James Earle, "William James," in Paul

Edwards, ed., Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New

York: Collier Macmillan Pub., 1973), 4:242, 246.

6.The authorship and date of the work have not been

determined, although the commentary and

subcommentary can be dated with some confidence to

the fourth or fifth century. The text itself is

P.242

attributed to a Maitreyanaatha. who taught or

revealed it to Asa^nga. The exact identity of

Maitreyanaatha is debated, as is whether a divine

revealer or human preceptor is meant.

7.Susumu Yamaguchi, ed., Madhyaantavibhaaga.tiikaa:

Exposition Syst ‚m atique du

Yogaacaaravij~naptivaada (Nagoya, Japan: Librairie

Hajinkaku, 1934), hereinafter cited as Y in body

of essay. I do not cite Gadgin Nagao's edition ofthe Madhyaantavibhaaga-bhaa.sya (Tokyo: Suzuki

Research Foundation, 1964) because it does not

include Sthiramati's.tiikaa.

8.See my note 4 preceding.

9.Eugene I. Taylor, "Psychology of Religion and

Asian Studies: The William James Legacy," Journal

of Transpersonal Psychology 10, no. 1 (1978):

69-70.

10.William James, Varieties of Religious Experience:

A Study in Human Nature (New York: Random House,Inc., 1902), p. 512.

11.James, Varieties, pp. 391-393.



12.William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, ed.

Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis

(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University

Press, 1976), p. 22.

13.William James, Psychology, American Science

Series, Briefer Course (New York: Henry Holt and

Co., 1982), p. 152.

14.James, Essays, p. 13.


16.James, Varieties, p. 489.



19.James, Psychology, p. 152.

20.William James, The Meaning of Truth, ed. Fredson

Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge,

Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1975), p.43.


22.James, Meaning of Truth, p. 35.







29.James, Essays, pp. 75-76.


31.James, Psychology, pp. 165-166.

32.E. C. Moore, William James (New York: Washington

Square Press, 1965), p. 144; A. O. Lovejoy, The

Thirteen Pragmatisms and Other Essays (Baltimore,

Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963),

p. 142.

33.Notably, Janice Dean Willis, On Knowing Reality:

The Tattvaartha Chapter of Asa^nga's

Bodhisattvabhuumi (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1979); Thomas A. Kochumuttom, A Buddhist

Doctrine of Experience: A New Translation and

Interpretation of the Works of Vasubandhu the

Yogaacaarin (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1982);Stefan Anacker, Seven Works of Vasubandhu: The

Buddhist Psychological Doctor (Delhi: Motilal

Banarsidass, 1984) ; Bruce Cameron Hall, "The



Meaning of Vij~napti in Vasubandhu's Concept of

Mind." Journal of the International Association of

Buddhist Studies 9, no. 1 (1986): 7-23.

34.Ashok Chatterjee, The Yogacara Idealism (Delhi,

Varanasi, & Patna: Motilal Banarsidass,1975), p.24.

35.Surendranath Dasgupta, A History of Indian Philosophy,

(Delhi, Varanasi, and Patna: Motilal Banarsidass,

1975), vol. 1, p. 145. In all fairness it should

be remarked that he based this interpretation on

his study of the La^nkaavataara-suutra, which

contains many extremely idealistic passages and is

not a classical Yogaacaara text, but is only

loosely associated with the school. See note 43

following.

36.T.R.V.Murti, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism

(London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1960), p.316.

37.Edward Conze,Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies

(London: Bruno Cassirer, 1967), p. 78.

P.243

38.James, Meaning, of Truth, p. 106.



41.James, Essays, pp. 50--51.

42.Yogaacaara based its definition of emptiness on a

formula found in the Cu.lasu~n~nata-sutta, to the

effect that emptiness is the "presence of an

absence," which requires the absence of something

and the presence of that from which it is absent.

The sutta gives the examples of a meditation hall

that is empty of elephants and a forest that is

empty of villages. See Gadgin M. Nagao, "What

Remains in `Suunyataa: A Yogaacaara Interpretation

of Emptiness," in Minoru kiyota, ed., Mahaayaana

Buddhist Meditation: Theory and Practice

(Honolulu. Hawaii: University Press of Hawaii,

1978), pp. 67-69 and pages following.

43.Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, trans., The La^nkaavataara

Suutra (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd.,

1932), p.51. The earliest Yogaacaarin to cite this

suutra was Sthiramati. For a discussion of its

date and association with the Yogaacaara school,

see Jikido Takasaki, "Sources of the

La^nkaavataara and its position in Mahaayaana

Buddhism," in L. A. Hercus, ed., Indological and

Buddhist Studies: Volume in Honour of Professor J.

W. de Jong on his Sixtieth Birthday (Canberra,

Australia: Faculty of Asian Studies, 1982) :

545-568.

44.William James, A Pluralistic Universe, ed. Fredson

Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge,



Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1977), p.

113.

45.Abhidharmako`sa II.50, trans. and cited by F.Th.

Stcherbatsky, Buddhist Logic (New York: Dover

Pub., 1962), vol. 1, pp. 130-131.

46.James, Pluralistic Universe, p. 32.










56.James, Pragmatism, p. 119.

57.James. Psychology, p. 14.

58.F. Th. Stcherbatsky, Buddhist Logic (New York:

Dover Pub., 1962), 2:398 n.5.

59.Gadgin M. Nagao, "The Buddhist World-View asElucidated in the Three-Nature Theory and Its

Similes, " Eastern Buddhist 16, no.1 (Spring

1983): 14.

60.Nagao, "Buddist World-View." p.2.

61.James, Pluralistic Universe, pp. 111-113.

Throughout the chapter he alternates between

presenting it as Bergson's position and advocating

it as his own, reached independently (pp. xxiii,

xxiii n. 8, and n. 101.3).

62.James, Pluralistic Universe,p. 118.


64.James, Pragmatism, p.131. Potential problems

with James's pragmatic theory of truth are

discussed by Israel Scheffler in Four Pragmatists:

A Critical Introduction to Peirce, James, Mead and

Dewey(New York: Humanities Press, 1974) , pp.

110-116.

65.James, Pluralistic Universe, p.110.

66.James, Pragatism, p. 131.







71.For a comprehensive discussion of the philology

and ranges of meaning of this term, see Masatoshi

Nagatomi, "Arthakriyaa," Adyar Library Bulletin

31-32, Dr. R. Raghavan Felicitation

Volume(1967-68): 53-72.

P.244

72.For a discussion of Dharmakiirti's philosophical

affiliations, see Dalsukhbhai Malvania's critical

edition of the Dharmottarapradiipa (Patna:

Kashiprasad Jayaswal Research Institute, 1955),

pp.xvi-xxiv.

73.Nagatomi, "Arthakriyaa," pp. 56, 62.

74.Pramaa.navaarttikav.rtti, ¢º.6-7, cited by

Nagatomi, in "Arthakriyaa," p.62; see also p.63.





79.James, Pragmatism, pp. 42-44.


81.For discussions of the relationship between

James and phenomenology, see especially Bruce

Wilshire, William James and Phenomenology

(Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press,

1968) ; James M. Edie, "William James and

Phenomenology," Review of Metaphysics 23, no. 3

(March 1970): 481-536; Richard Stevens, James and

Husserl: The Foundations of Meaning (The Hague:

Martinus Nijhoff, 1974); Michael Tavuzzi, "A Noteon Husserl's Dependence on William James," Journal

of the British Society for Phenomenology 10, no. 3

(October 1979): 194-196.

82.Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis,

Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. xviii.

james and yogaacaara philosophy

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