William James and Yogaacaara philosophy

·期刊原文
William James and Yogaacaara philosophy: A comparative inquiry

By Miranda Shaw
Philosophy East and West
Volume 37, no.3
July 1987
P.223-244
(C) by the University of Hawaii Press

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P.223

INTRODUCTION

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 a
momentary 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 of
the 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 epistemological
realism 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.

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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 basis
of 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 M乴ler'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

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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 two
highly 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 directly
experienced, 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 of
its 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 of
experience, 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

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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 of
departure 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 or
vij~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.

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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 intellectual
inventions."(20) Yogaacaara's parallel assertion is
implicit in its word for ordinary experience,
abhuutaparikalpa. The verbal root of parikalpa is
pari鹝!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 of
experience) 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 of
experience (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 inarticulate
feeling 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:

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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 by
the 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 the
mere 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. The
sensations 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 every
perception 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 we
give 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

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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, these
names 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 looks
darker 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 effects
upon 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 supposition
that 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

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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 been
characterized 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 genuinely
idealistic 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-

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ical idealists, but share a position of phenomenal
realism, 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. Both
philosophies 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 two
extremes, 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 the
nonexistence of emptiness, too. (Y14)

Simply stated, for something to be empty, something
must exist! When Sthiramati says that

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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, and
momentariness, 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 a
variety 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)

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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 as
the 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 share
a 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 to
the 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, 鹴an, "to
weave," 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 Universe
to 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 argues
first 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 mutual
reference 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 the
immediate 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 inherently
wholistic 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 and
transformability 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 inner
nature 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 its
human 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 phenomenal
reality.

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 approach
truth, 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 empiricism
means 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 between
real 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 moral
and 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 of
great 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 and
Sthiramati'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 and
sought 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 its
mark 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 Kyoto
school 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 documents
James' 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 俶 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 of
the 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.

15.James, Essays, p. 27.

16.James, Varieties, p. 489.

17.James, Essays, p. 69.

18.James, Essays, p. 65.

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.

21.James, Psychology, p. 13.

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

23.James, Psychology, p. 12.

24.James, Meaning of Truth, p. 36.

25.James, Psychology, p. 170.

26.James, Psychology, p. 171.

27.James, Psychology, p. 154.

28.James, Psychology, p. 155.

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

30.James, Essays, p. 4.

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.

39.James, Meaning of Truth, p. 88.

40.James, Essays, p. 49.

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.

47.James, Essays, p. 30.

48.James, Pluralistic Universe, p. 31.

49.James, Pluralistic Universe, p. 116.

50.James, Pluralistic Universe, p. 115.

51.James, Pluralistic Universe, p. 146.

52.James, Pluralistic Universe, p. 147.

53.James, Essays, p. 46.

54.James, Essays, p. 46.

55.James, Essays, p. 66.

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 as
Elucidated 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.

63.James, Essays, p. 45.

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.

67.James, Essays, p. 66.

68.James, Essays, p. 49.

69.James, Essays, p. 17.

70.James, Meaning of Truth, 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, ⒑.6-7, cited by
Nagatomi, in "Arthakriyaa," p.62; see also p.63.

75.James, Varieties, p. 367.

76.James, Pragmatism, p. 40.

77.James, Pragmatism, p. 143.

78.James, Varieties, p. 19.

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

80.James, Pragmatism, p. 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 Note
on 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.