Is there a mind-body problem in Buddhism?

No” and “Yes” in the East-West perspective

Victoria Lysenko, Institute of Philosophy

Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow

To the question proposed in the title one could give a typically Buddhist “middle way” answer, that is, the problem is there in some respects, and it there in some other respects.

The mind-body problem, formulated in different forms, such as — Is the mortal body (safira) the same thing as the life-principle (jivd)l Is the mortal body one thing and the life-principle another thing? — has come to us from the Buddhist Pali canon.

But it seems to belong neither to the Buddha himself nor to the Buddhist circles. In fact, these and other formulations of the mind-body problem were known from the brahmana-sramana milieu outside of Buddhism, and were set aside by the Buddha as pertaining to the so-called indeterminate (avyakata / avyakrta) questions "accompanied by suffering, distress, despair, fever, and not leading to disenchantment, dispassion, cessation; to calm, direct knowledge, full awakening, unbinding.”

As this standard Buddhist formula shows, the “indeterminate questions” didn’t have for the Buddha any soteriological value. Why? Because, according to him, they were based on the metaphysical presupposition of a permanent self (Atman). For the Buddha, any assumption of permanence was irrelevant because, to state it as briefly as possible, his starting point was one’s experience of one’s impermanent states.

The Buddha’s own approach to the mind-body problem, as far as we can judge from the Nikayas, may be interpreted as a “phenomenological” and "experiential” in as much as it gives an account of whatever bodily or mental states one is experiencing in one’s meditation.

In my opinion, the importance of bodily factors in the Buddhist explanations of ordinary experience is connected with the importance attributed to the awareness of the somatic element in the Buddhist meditational practices. This very awareness, in its turn, may be due to the fact that the Buddha himself successfully practiced the dhyanas only after having restored his health broken by a harsh asceticism. The famous sati / smrti, mindfulness meditation, starts from mindfulness with regard to the body. It is in the meditations of the sati type that his phenomenological analysis of what is there, in one’s experience, might be initially developed.

A cognitive experience extending from ordinary perception to the highest states of “knowledge and vision” (nana-dassana) is at the centre of the Buddhist soteriological project. This orientation on knowledge is quite natural for it is through knowledge that one can reach emancipation, as well as it is through ignorance or corrupted knowledge (avidya) that one got enslaved into the circle of rebirth (samsara).

As true knowledge constituted by an insight into reality (‘knowledge and vision’ / haha- dassana, prajna) is obtained through the ascending meditative states, it is the meditation that has become a model and a starting point for the analysis of the ordinary cognitive experience in the Nikayas. Here, the phenomenological approach was applicable only to the actually developing cognitive experience. In this regard, the mind-body problem seems to be irrelevant as it makes no sense to inquire into the origins of phenomena.

Whatever their origin — bodily or mental, what matters for the Buddha is their being pure facts of experience — the dharmas. It is through experience that one can know whether objects are exterior or interior. Individual experience is interpreted in terms of the processes (santana), as against the so-called “substantivist” and “essentialist” theories of a permanent self (Atman).

Let us return now to the avyakrta question mentioned in the beginning of the paper: Is the mortal body (sarira) the same thing as the life-principle (jlva)! Is the mortal body one thing and the life-principle another? As we see, the terms used for “body” and for “soul” are, respectively, sarira and jlva. But, as a matter of fact, neither of them was characteristic for the Buddha and the Buddhists in their talks about body and mind. In Buddhism, the term sarira refers mainly to a dead body, or to relics (the relics of the Buddha were called sarira). To designate a living body, the Buddhists used the term kaya.

As for the term jlva, it doesn’t mean “soul” in the Suttas, but a combination of factors that keeps the body alive — vitality (ayus), heat (usna) and discernment (vijnana). These three factors were evoked by the Buddhist Mahakasyapa against the so-called “experiments of Payasi with a dead body”. As Mahakasyapa said: “a body endowed with vitality, heat and discernment is lighter and more pliable than a dead body, just as a heated iron ball, endowed with heat and hot air, is lighter and more pliable than a cool one” (D. II.334-5).

The Suttas are very clear about the fact that neither mind nor body exist apart and can function independently in as much as they are different facets or, rather, functions involved in the same process that makes up individual existence. Even in the life-principle, or jlva, which outside of Buddhism is often regarded as a synonym of Atman, we always find some combination of physical, somatic and mental factors. In fact, there is no sharp distinction between physical, somatic or mental events: all of them are regarded as mutually dependent, co-arising and co-determining factors of cognitive experience.

The jlva is neither the same as the mortal body (sarira) nor different from it, as their relationship is that of mutually-dependent process. In modern terms, one can say that the mind in Buddhism is always regarded as “embodied”, “enactive” and “situated”. This approach draws Buddhism nearer to some modern cognitive theories like that of F. Varela and his colleagues. There is another interesting aspect of the Buddha’s approach to the mind-body problem.

The avyakata question is qualified by the Buddha as improperly formulated, primarily because it involves some linguistic and conceptual constructions which make us believe that modes of verbal expression are the modes of reality itself. The questions “what is X?” and “whose is X?” imply an ontological opposition between subject and object. So, the problem itself originates because a verbal expression projects its own meanings as a form of reality.

I would like to remark in passing a striking resemblance of the Buddha’s criticism with regard to ordinary modes of verbal expression using the personal pronouns “I”, "mine” etc. to Wittgenstein’s theory of linguistic games as used by his followers to treat a mind-body problem as a pseudo­problem, related to linguistic constructs.

As already mentioned, the Buddha is fully aware of the mind-body problem as it was formulated by his contemporaries. There is, according to him, a false view (ditthi) that jiva is identical with body, and another view that jiva and body are different entities. In terms of Western philosophy we have before us a clear statement of monistic and dualistic positions with regard to the mind-body problem.

The monistic position may be interpreted either in materialistic or in idealistic sense. The first one is equivalent to the statement that the living principle depends on the body and can be reduced to it — in the Buddhist vocabulary this position is called the ucchedavdda /the doctrine of annihilation. The second one boils down to the statement that the body depends on the living principle in the Buddhist terms — sassatavada / the doctrine of eternal soul, or eternalism.

What is unacceptable to the Buddha is well expressed in these very terms: the uccheda conveys the idea that the living principle is destroyed after the death of the body, the sassata that the living principle is eternal and immutable. This does not mean that the Buddha denies the existence of the soul, or Self, though his teaching is known as the anatmavada (a doctrine of non­Self).

What is meant by non-Self is the absence of any constant substance behind the ever changing phenomena of experience. In modern terms, the Buddha offers a phenomenological approach which may be understood as an anti-substantialist and anti-essentialist solution of the mind-body problem. This interpretation gives sense to his criticism of the sassatavada and the ucchedavdda, both of which being based on the substantialist idea of Self.

Instead of the substantial integrity of a person, the Buddha proposes a model of series of causally interdependent experiential events — the so-called dharmas. The causality is thus at the center of the Buddhist account of experience.

Many causal factors are taken in consideration and they are said to produce their effect by their co-arising (sahajata) condition, supporting each other and consolidating each other (like sticks in a tripod supporting each other), or acting as a foundation for each other (in the same way as the earth acts as a support or foundation for trees); or coming together at one time and place (a sprout is produced by many factors coming together — sprout, soil, an appropriate temperature and humidity conditions etc). So, a standard causal explanation of perception in the Suttas takes the following form:

Visual discernment (cakkhu-vihhana) arises as dependent on the eye (indriya) and visible shape-color (rupa); the coming together of the three is contact (phasa); from contact as condition arises Feeling (vedana); what one feels one cognizes... (e.g. M.I.lll).

The phenomenological account of the psycho-somatic experience is conceptualized and classified in a number of terms, like skandha, nama-rupa, pratitya-samutpada and different classifications of the dharmas: as ayatana, dhatu, citta-caitta, etc.

Among them, the closest to the mind-body problem seems to be the nama-rupa. Ndma (literally, name, symbol) is often associated with the mental, while rupa with the material and bodily factors. However, we have no reason to believe that it is a kind of Cartesian dualism of substances.

Rupa is not synonymous with physical matter: being a part of person (pudgala'), it constitutes an animated, living matter, a body as abode of sensitivity, sensate material stuff (Lusthaus). It is not accidential that rupa is often associated with resistance — pratighata. The four primary elements (the mahabhuta) which are often mentioned as the most important instances of rupa, are, as a matter of fact, not external substances as such but properties characterizing different types of our sense-reactions to their mode of action:

the element of earth is the property of solidity, the element of water—liquidity and flow, the element of fire — temperature, the element of wind — touch. According to Dan Lusthaus’s pertinent remark, rupa is more essentially defined by its amenability to being sensed than its being matter, in terms of its function; “what it does, not what it is” (Dan Lusthaus, Buddhist Phenomenology: A Philosophical Investigation ofYogacara Buddhism and the Ch’eng Wei-shih Lun. Routledge, 2002, page 183).

Rupa is also presented as a skandha — the first among the five groups of dharmas which were aimed to explain individual experience without postulating of any constant substantial self. As a skandha, rupa includes, besides the four primary elements (mahabhuta) mentioned above, their derivatives: 1) indriyas — different somatic and mental faculties, and 2) objects (visible forms, sounds, smells, tastes, tangible things).

Symptomatic enough is that the most important changes in course of the development of the Buddhist doctrine occurred in the rubric of indriyas. To the five traditional sense-organs (eye, ear, nose, tongue, body) mentioned in the earlier parts of the Nikayas, later, in Abhidharma literature and Abhidharma philosophical schools, were added such indriyas as femininity, masculinity, sensations of pleasure, displeasure, satisfaction, dissatisfaction, indifference, faith, effort, memory, mindfulness and discernment and some other purely mental phenomena (in total 24 factors).

It is clear that the Buddhist authors of these lists did not really care about a strict demarcation between the categories of physical and mental phenomena. Therefore, we can say with certainty that the Buddhist rupa is in no way comparable to a material substance in the dualist systems like that of Descartes. Even the classification, known as nama-rupa, does not entail a demarcation between bodily and mental factors. What was then the purpose of these Buddhist classifications? What unites all these heterogeneous somatic and mental phenomena into the rubric of rupas‘1 In what do they differ from other groups of skandhas, referred to as nama (normally these are vedana, samjna, samskdra and vijnanajj

The skandhas from vedana to vijndna are said to be directed towards the objects. In Western philosophical terms, we may call them intentional, while the rupa factors are not intentional. Some rupas are objects (like visible forms, sounds, smells, they are sense-data in Western terminology, not external physical things); some rupas are instrumental forms of experience, like six indriyas, etc.

I cannot go into further details of this quite interesting and challenging question. For the purpose of this paper it will suffice to say that relationship between rupa and other skandhas is not that of material-mental, body-mind, or even object-subject (Sue Hamelton).

I propose the following solution: rupa-skandha contains what is not a subject or, rather, an agent (grahaka) of experience (graha) — it includes objects and instruments, the subject being the vijndna-skandha (or group of cognitive discernment, a synonym of citta) accompanied by mental auxiliaries — vedana (sensation), samjna (verbal and conceptual identification) and samskdra (karma-based factors like intention) skandhas (united by the category of caittika-dharmas).

This repartition of roles fits well with the traditional opposition between vijndna and nama-rupa attested in the Suttas where a person (pudgala) is often understood as an interaction not between nama and rupa, but between cognitive discernment (vijndna') and ndma-rupa (D.II.32, 63-4, III.9-10).

It is also lately illustrated by Vasubandhu to justify the order of the skandlias in AKB I. 22: “Rupa is the pot, vedana is the food, samjna are the seasoning, the samskdra are the cook, and the vijndna is the consumer”.

Thus, there are three kinds of interactive and mutually supportive factors: 1) somatic and psycho-somatic (rupa). 2) mental (nama: vedana, samjna, samskdra — they are often classified as caitta) and 3) conscious (vijndna, citta). This proves that we have to do not with a simple psycho-somatic dualistic interaction as some scholars believe, but with a more complicated process in which a plurality of factors is involved and which could hardly be subjected to this quite simplistic mind-body division.

Moreover, it seems to me that for the Buddhist thinkers after the Buddha, as well as for the other Indian philosophers, the distinction between the subject and the other factors somehow dependent on it, including not only somatic but also mental elements, is much more important from the soteriological perspective than the distinction between mind and matter, mind and body.

This becomes evident if we take the examples of purusa and prakrti in Samkhya, where the prakrti incorporates intellect, mind, reasoning (buddhi, manas, ahamkdra) — all that what we in the West are used to associate with the subject. The same is true for the opposition of Atman and antahkarana in Advaita etc. It is namely this very point that makes a remarkable contrast with the Western philosophical tradition. In Buddhism the role of subject is played by different mental dharmas under different circumstances, but among the skandhas it seems to be the vijndna.

As the Abhidharma analysis developed, there arose a number of problems pertaining to the explanation of the karmic causation of experience, that has gradually acquired a primary importance. If a true reality is tantamount only to an actually present cognitive events (dharmas) that a meditator can discover in his experience, how could we explain the karmic influences of the past actions which are not discernable in one’s meditation?

The problems of this kind have revealed the limitations of a purely phenomenological approach. The difficulties that Abhidharmikas came across in their explanations of karmic causation have led them to some metaphysical and ontological developments in their theories. These theoretical developments were aimed at the justification of a karmic continuity between past, present and future experience. The total causal interdependence and “interactionism” of different factors of experience has become a subject of more exigent scrutiny.

As the factors of consciousness arise both from homogeneous and heterogeneous conditions, questions have arisen as to the possibility of re-emergence of consciousness after its cessation in the nirodha-samapatti meditation or attainment of cessation: if the series of consciousness being interrupted at the moment of cessation, from what it reappears afterwards in the absence of any immediately previous moment of consciousness (samanantara-pratyaya)!

— Is it possible for the moments of mental series to have an immediately previous moment in the series of some non-mental factor? Other problems discussed by the Buddhist authors were a possibility of relapse into defilement of those adepts who were supposed to be free of them, as well as an arising of new mental states which had no precedent Aetw/causes in the individual series (santana) etc.

The debates about the attainment of cessation and the related matters have been profoundly studied by Paul Griffits in his book On Being Mindless: Buddhist Meditation and the Mind-Body Problem. (Satguru Publications, 1986). As he pertinently remarks, the crucial question is “whether, without a substance-based ontology, without postulating an entity of which the mental and physical events described by Buddhist theorists can be predicated, it is possible to make sense of the observed facts of continuity of identity, of memory, of character traits and of beginnings and ends” (ibid., p. 113).

In my opinion, the necessity of a substance-based ontology can also be explained from the point of view of karmic causation. Along with a tendency to switch the emphasis from a direct experience of the actually changing reality of dharmas to attempts of establishing a sort of substantial basis for karmic continuity within personal series of momentary mental states, a predominantly phenomenological approach in the Nikayas has been superceded by an ontological and metaphysical conceptualization in the Abhidharma schools of Theravada, Kashmiri Vaibhasika and Sautrantika.

If we assume together with Kashmiri Vaibhasikas that only the immediate perception and especially the highest stages of meditation reveal to us the reality as it is, in that case we cannot duly explain how the karmic machinery works: how karmic fruits are ripening (karma-vipaka) and how they are accumulated (karmopacaya').

Why? Because this karmic causation is not a matter of direct observation. It requires a potential dimension of experience through which a continuity between an action, its past root and its future fruit, between a karmic cause and its effect, could only be established. Kashmiri Vaibhasikas postulated a number of ontological (dravya) entities (dharmas) to explain the continuity between potential and actual factors of karmic experience.

I will just mention such dharmas as prapti and aprapti (possession and non-possession), vijhapti-rupa and avijhapti-rupa (indicative or non-indicative bodily and speech actions), as well as the idea of anusaya (potential tendency).

For Sautrantikas, all these dharmas are just nominal and unreal, their karmic potential depends on the mental factor of volition, but as the event of volition lasts only an instant, the continuity of karmic efficiency is achieved through mental seeds (bijas) and vasanas (perfumes) arising and disappearing in a series (samtati) of dharmas.

The potential dimension of experience is already there but still not fully legitimized. It has become legitimized with the Yogacaras in the form of alaya-vijhana — a receptacle of the karmic seeds. In that way they have introduced a kind of quasi-substantial ontological basis for their otherwise phenomenological picture.

Of course, this innovation does not concern the ultimate reality (parinispanna) but it seems to be indispensable for the explanation of the samsaric, karmic experience relative to the paratantra level. What is the connection between the mind-body problem and the recognition of the potential dimension of experience? I will formulate it in the following way: in as much as Buddhist thinkers based their psychological doctrines on the data observed in an immediate experience the phenomenological approach was quite at place, from its perspective, as I have argued, the mind-body problem makes no sense.

Once they came across some extreme cases, like an attainment of cessation, relapse into defilements etc. which could be explained only if some potential states of consciousness are assumed (in the form of anusaya or blja) the problem arises as to how the causal relations within each of the two sets (mental or bodily events) and between them can be established. But as these problems were quite few in number, I have an impression that the mind-body problem remains for later Buddhist thinkers a matter of quite marginal interest