The Other Side of Realism: Panpsychism and Yogācār

by Douglas Duckworth

Yogācāra, “the yogic practice school” – from yoga and ācāra (practice) – came to be one of two main lines of interpretation of Mahāyāna Buddhism. There is a good deal of internal diversity within this “school,” and this chapter will make some distinctions among its interpretative strands, including an important one between subjective idealism and absolute idealism. Subjective idealism is the claim that only mind exists (as Berkeley said, “existence is perception”), and

absolute idealism is the claim that everything is unitary and thus that all r elations are internal. The latter does not necessarily entail the former. The place of mind in Yogācāra texts remains an open question. Namely, are external objects reducible to mind (subjective idealism)? Or are objects co‐dependent with minds (in a relational network), or in some sense nondual (absolute idealism)? I wish to argue that Yogācāra is not necessarily a form of subjective idealism, although it can be. Yet when read as subjective idealism (as in the philosophy of “mind only”), it is not so interesting. Other readings, such as absolute idealism or relational pluralism, are more promising. Absolute i dealist and pluralist readings are clearly distinct from subjective idealism, for subjective idealism

collapses objects into a subject. In contrast, in absolute idealism, external relations (like those between subject and object) are unreal as they are subsumed by the whole. Alternatively, neither mind nor matter need have a privileged place in a relational ontology where the world is c onstituted by relations. Just as is the case with Yogācāra, there are a number of different interpretations of panpsychism. “Panpsychism,” from the Greek pan (all) and psyche (mind or soul), has been defined as “the view that all things have mind or a mind‐like quality” (Skrbina 2005, 2). Like Yogācāra, there are parallel distinctions to be made in terms of how panpsychism has been conceived: in a relational, pluralistic, or singular (or nondual) way. In its strong form, panpsychism can mean that everything, including electrons, has a mental dimension along with a physical one. I will refer to this strong form of panpsychism as

Douglas Duckworth30 “animistic panpsychism”1 (but since this is not a form directly relevant to Yogācāra, I will not discuss it further here). Panpsychism also can be taken in a singular form as absolute idealism, where everything takes place within a unified structural whole. Yet a panpsychist position need not be so extreme; a weak form of “relational panpsychism” can simply refer to observer‐dependence, whereby mind is affirmed to be everywhere simply because any actual reality is always an experienced one. A singular (or nondual) form of panpsychism presents a necessary unity of the whole, while deeming relations to be unreal.

F.H. Bradley articulates this absolute idealism by stating that “Everywhere in the end a relation appears as a necessary but a self‐contradictory translation of a non‐relational or superrelational unity” (Bradley 2012 [1914], 209 n.1). The “non‐relational or super‐relational unity” is the supermind of absolute idealism.2 On the other hand, a relational form of panpsychism (as the one put forward by William James, who critiqued the “block universe” (James 1977, 140) of Bradley’s idealism as a static singularity) does not presume a singular whole, but only acknowledges a relational structure. Like the singular (or nondual) account of

absolute idealism, relational panpsychism is not subjective idealism, either. It need not be an assertion that mind is only internal, nor that the world is only mental, but expresses a dynamic process of interactions. For example, consider the case for this kind of panpsychism with the appearance of something like a rainbow. For a rainbow to appear we need at least three things in place: white light (e.g., the sun), a refracting medium (e.g., water), and a receptor of light (e.g., eyes). Of course the eyes have to be looking in the right direction, and the light coming to the eyes at the right angle (between 40 and 42 degrees) to be

visibly refracted, too. Without any of these things (light, water, eyes) properly configured, no rainbow appears. It is not that the rainbow is “out there” in the world, nor is the rainbow only “in here” in our eyes or minds. Rather, the appearing rainbow is the result of an intricate relational structure in which the perceiving eye is intertwined. Just as the eyes are integral to the perception of a rainbow, we need not be subjective idealists to affirm that the mind is constitutive to the world. In other words, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” does not necessarily mean that beauty is totally subjective, as if it were “all in our heads,” but it can simply mean that the subject is an integral part of the dynamic process by which beauty takes place.

Buddhism and Panpsychism

Buddhists describe an irreducibly complex matrix of interrelation: a causal process that denies singularity and difference to cause and effect (temporal entanglement), and likewise posit a spatial entanglement that denies real

ingularities (and real differences, too). Buddhists like Nāgārjuna have claimed that there is nothing really singular because nothing exists independently; there is only ever a relational presentation of the world – nothing can be found that is truly singular because everything is dependent on something else.3 A.N. Whitehead made this point in the twentieth century: The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of

“independent existence.” There is no such mode of existence; every entity is only to be understood in terms of the way in which it is interwoven with the rest of the Universe. (Whitehead 1941, 687) A relation entails at least two things, but there is not a single thing that is o utside the relational matrix (and if there were, we could not know it, because knowledge implies the relation of knower and known). The only viable candidate for “one” is the whole itself, the uni‐verse –  the unified structure of the multiplicity – yet the “one” of the universe cannot be a determinate, static one, for it is constituted by interpenetrating

relations.4 Panpsychism can be understood as a theoretic articulation of the relational structure of existence – the matrix of dependent arising as the Buddhists call it. The mind is clearly implicated in this structure, as a dependent component, and a necessary condition for the arising of anything. Whereas the mind is a necessary condition for a world, it is not necessarily a sufficient condition for a world because the mind alone – as if floating in a vacuum in space – cannot know or be known without being immersed in a field of interaction – stimuli, the phenomena of a world. This does not mean that phenomena are simply reducible to mind (as in subjective idealism), it just means that they do not exist – and cannot exist – as they do without mind. We can take a lesson straight out of modern physics: observers always affect a phenomenon. It is not that what we observe is totally controlled by our observing, but it is just that being there as an

observer plays a part, an inextricable part, of the phenomenon that is observed. Reality is a participatory affair. This is not just true on the quantum level; this is true everywhere. When the truth of this fact everywhere is taken seriously, writ large, we come to panpsychism, at least in its weak form (i.e., mind‐dependence). Importantly, panpsychism does not treat the substance of the world as a m ysterious thing called “matter,” the working assumption of materialism, nor does it posit a non‐material spirit or “ghost in the machine,” as in dualism. Rather, for a panpsychist, the mind inhabits the world fundamentally – whether relationally (“weak panpsychism”), constitutively (“animistic panpsychism”), or comprehensively (“absolute idealism”). In any case, the takeaway from panpsychism is that mental life is the one experiential reality of which we have c ertainty – not as the grammatical subject of Descartes’ cogito, but the

sheer facticity of cognitively inhabiting a lived world. To claim anything more (or less) than the experiential world is to delve into the realm of metaphysical speculation. Panpsychism is not only a claim in the realm of metaphysics, it can be an empirical claim, too. A motion to take seriously the matter of experience was put forward by William James in his 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” (James 1912, 42). James sought to overcome abstract metaphysics, which rely on “faith” in notions like “matter” to build knowledge. In doing so, panpsychists like James clarify the implications of empirical knowledge and their

foundations, all the way to their counter‐intuitive and uncomfortable conclusions. F.H. Bradley, despite being criticized by James, formulated a logical foundation for this kind of experiential metaphysics in his Appearance and Reality: Find any piece of existence, take up anything that any one could possibly call a fact, or could in any sense assert to have being, and then judge if it does not consist in sentient experience. Try to discover any sense in which you can still continue to speak of it, when all perception and feeling have been removed; or point out any fragment of its matter, any aspect of its being, which is not

derived from and is not still relative to this source. When the experiment is made strictly, I can myself conceive of nothing else than the experienced. (Bradley 1930, 127–128) This kind of analysis is the starting point of panpsychism. While the notion of panpsychism may strike a casual reader of philosophy as strange, the strangeness of the notion “materialism” is too often casually overlooked, as Galen Strawson starkly observes: If one hasn’t felt a kind of

vertigo of astonishment, when facing the thought, obligatory for all materialists, that consciousness is a wholly physical phenomenon in every respect, including every Experiential respect – a sense of having been precipitated into a completely new c onfrontation with the utter strangeness of the physical (the real) relative to all existing commonsense and scientific conceptions of it – then one hasn’t begun to be a thoughtful materialist. One hasn’t got to the starting line. (Strawson 2008, 36) Whether or not panpsychism is true, it is no stranger than materialism (and arguably less so).

Contemporary philosophers like Timothy Sprigge have argued that panpsychism offers a more coherent account of the world than the alternatives of physicalism (a.k.a. materialism) and dualism (Sprigge 1983). David Ray Griffin also makes this case, citing his mentor, Charles Hartshorne, who argued that materialism is “dualism in disguise” because materialists implicitly acknowledge a difference between experiencing and non‐experiencing things (Griffin 1998, 77). Materialists reduce mind to matter, yet idealists do just the opposite: they reduce matter to mind. In this way, idealists, too, are crypto‐dualists. The environmental

philosopher Freya Matthews articulates how panpsychism offers a way around the crypto‐dualisms of materialism and idealism: Dualistic theories are typically contrasted with materialist theories, on the one hand, which explain mentality or ideality reductively in physicalist terms, and idealist theories, on the other hand, that posit forms of mentality or ideality that cannot be thus theoretically reduced to physics and in which indeed matter is often written off altogether as a mere mirage of appearances. But materialism and idealism are in fact just flip sides of dualism itself… The true converse of mind‐matter dualism is neither materialism nor idealism but a position that posits some form of nonduality of mind‐matter unity, implicating mentality in the definition of matter and

materiality in the definition of mind. (Matthews 2003, 26–27) Contrary to idealists (who describe a matter‐independent world) and materialists (who describe a mind‐independent world), panpsychism can be understood as a relational philosophy of mind‐matter, a philosophy of nonduality. Matthews continues to formulate this alternative: A theory that posits mind‐matter unity should be described as p anphysicalist as well as panpsychist, since psychic or ideal phenomena will be as physically based, from the unified point of view, as physical phenomena will be psychically based. (Matthews 2003, 27) Matthews argues that panpsychism is not only compatible with “panphysicalism,”5 she furthermore contends that panpsychism, in contrast to materialism and idealism, offers a sound basis for ethics:

Materialism – the deanimation of the world – has always been in a r elation of philosophical codependency with idealism. Materialism tends to front up as the commonsense version of dualism, idealism as the esoteric, philosophical version. Idealist philosophies are thus always current in materialist cultures.

(Poststructural relativism is the prevalent form of idealism in Western societies today: poststructuralism disallows inference from cultural constructions of reality to any postulate concerning an “objective” dimension of things, such as that which was traditionally regarded as the province of physics.) Materialism and idealism are equally retrograde from an environmental point of view: the materialist regards the world as an inert lump of putty for his own designs; for the idealist it is an inconsequential mirage of appearances, unknowable and hence for practical purposes nonexistent in its own right. (Matthews 2003, 27) Clearly,

not every panpsychism is a metaphysical idealism. As is the case among Buddhist (and Yogācāra) philosophies, we find a range of meanings for panpsychism. One of the takeaways from panpsychism, besides the fact that non‐experiential matter is incoherent, is that the notion of mental‐matter can serve pragmatic purposes, just like mindless‐matter. Nothing need be lost by including mind in matter, and there is much to gain, particularly when we recognize the important difference between (methodological) objectivity and (ontological) objectivity: the former serves to remove biases of prejudice (interests that color subjective orientations such as wish‐fulfillment or fear), while the latter presumes to remove the subjective component of experience in toto. The former is an important component in a pragmatic, scientific method, yet the latter is an impossibility for the simple fact that everything known is necessarily e xperienced. A common mistake in modern notions of the world is the presumption that materialism is a predetermined fact – the realm of hardnosed scientists – whereas panpsychism is a flakey, metaphysical notion. Yet as the contemporary analytic philosopher Galen Strawson pointed out, “We really don’t know enough to say that there is any non‐mental being” (Strawson 2008, 44). In his influential article subtitled “Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism,” Strawson makes a distinction between physicalism, “the

view that every real phenomena in the universe is…physical,” and physicSism, “the view – the faith – that the nature or essence of all concrete reality can in principle be fully captured in the term physics” (Strawson 2006, 3–4). A problem inherent in the position Strawson outlines as physicSism (a.k.a. physicalism) has been dubbed “Hempel’s dilemma.” Hempel’s dilemma (named after the philosopher Carl Hempel) points to a major problem with the tenet of physicalism, namely, that it cannot account for phenomenal experience within the current model of physics, so it must appeal to a future physics that supposedly will be able to do so. Yet the idea of what constitutes “physical” in the future may be quite d ifferent from what is held to constitute the physical in present‐day physics, and if history has taught us anything, the future physics will conceive the world in a much different way than the physics of today. So that leaves us with the dilemma: will the future “physical” include the mental?6

Panpsychism is not so easily dismissed just because it is counter‐intuitive or “weird,” a common complaint about it (if it is taken seriously at all and not just ignored). Thankfully, simply being counter‐intuitive is not enough to exclude a topic from intelligent inquiry, for where would science be if any claim that was counter‐intuitive were a priori taken off the table of reasonable truth?

Subjective and Absolute Idealisms in Yogācāra

Buddhist Yogācāra traditions do not postulate a metaphysical notion of matter independent of experiential reality. Since the “stuff” of the world is cognitive, the primary material of the world is not completely opaque to cognition, unlike a physicalist’s mysterious notion of “matter.” The eighth‐ and ninth‐century Indian Buddhist Prajñākaragupta conveyed the problem with the claim to an external world concisely as follows: “If blue is perceived, then how can it be called ‘external’? And, if it is not perceived, how can it be called ‘external’?”7 In Yogācāra texts we find a number of arguments that deny a mindi ndependent world,

such as the dream argument (that our perceptions of external objects are as mistaken in waking perception as they are in dreams), arguments that objects are observer‐dependent (e.g., water appears differently to fish and humans), and arguments that objects are always accompanied by cognitions (objects are always known objects).8 Other arguments found in Yogācāra texts attack the very notion of materiality, such as Vasubandhu’s arguments against partless particles constituting extended phenomena (Viṃśatikā v. 11–14; Vasubandhu 1957), Dignāga’s a rgument that neither external particles nor their combinations can provide an

account of the perception of phenomena (Ālambanaparīkṣā v. 1–5; Dignāga 1957a), and Dharmakīrti’s argument that perceived objects are not real because they are neither unitary nor singular: “That form in which entities are perceived does not exist in reality, for these (things) have neither a unitary nor a multiple form” (Pramāṇavārttika III.359; Dharmakīrti 1957a).9 It is needless to say that these Buddhists, famous for proclaiming the absence of a self, were not afraid to follow logic to its counter‐intuitive consequences, including the denial of an external world. Vasubandhu is the godfather of arguments against external realism.

In the fifth century, he clearly pointed out a central problem of emergence: that we cannot get extended objects from what is not extended. His successor, Dignāga, pointed out a further problem with a dualistic metaphysic, namely, dualism’s inability to provide a coherent account of the phenomenal world. Both of these influential figures raised philosophical problems in terms of a coherent account that can relate the (indivisibly) small with the (macroscopically) large. Dignāga’s arguments shed light on a problem in terms of (i) the relation between extended things and what is not extended, and (ii) the relationship

between mind and matter. For the first problem, Dignāga echoes Vasubandhu’s argument in the Twenty Stanzas that extended objects cannot be constituted by indivisible particles that lack extension. The second problem – the relationship not between macro‐objects and micro‐objects, but between cognition and matter – 

is known as the “hard problem” of consciousness. It is a version of the mind–body problem that addresses the question: how can experience arise from matter, which does not share its nature? This problem is set up by the presumptions of a mental–physical dualism, but can be answered with m onism. Dignāga’s answer is not, however, a physicalist monism (which is left with an explanatory gap that fails to address experiential reality), but rather the monism of panpsychism. A distinctive feature of Dignāga’s panpsychism is that he makes external r ealism compatible with idealism – the same principles that guide a coherent causal

process in terms of external entities can function without those entities as well. That is, we might call something “matter” or a “configuration of energy” and presume a causal story around the kind of entity we designate. We can presume that matter is external and separate from mind, or we can presume that matter (or energy) is the same kind of stuff as the mind and still have the same regularity of causal processes that external realism demands. Furthermore, with panpsychism the causal process need not be initiated by mind (as in the “top‐down” mental causation of subjective idealism) or by m atter (the “bottom‐up” causation of physicalism) but by means of a third entity, which is neither external nor internal but the cause of both. In fact, this third alternative, as a form of neutral

monism (that is neither mental nor physical but shares properties of, or is the cause of, both), is another possibility available to describe a Yogācāra metaphysic. In fact, the status of the world, as either subjective idealism or absolute idealism (or neutral monism), is another level of ambiguity at play in Dignāga’s philosophy (in addition to the one between external realism and subjective idealism). We can say that the ambiguity here is one between subjective idealism (everything that exists is perceived) and a bsolute idealism (nothing is outside the unitary structure within which there are only internal relations). In the former case, mind is constitutive of the world; in the latter case, mind is intertwined with the world. In both cases, there is nothing outside mind. An

important feature of Dignāga’s Yogācāra is his notion of self‐awareness, which is not simply a subjective feature, but the unity of the subject–object structure of the world. In Dignāga’s self‐awareness, as in absolute idealism, the subjective and the objective components constitute two facets of a larger whole. With this kind of account, the content of mental perception need not be a mental projection, as in the fictional objects of (subjective) idealism, for the subjective mental image along with the objective mental image form the structure of self‐awareness (Pramāṇasamuccaya 1.8–10; Dignāga 1957b).

The dual‐aspected nature of self‐awareness resembles the substance of Spinoza’s dual‐aspect monism. Like Spinoza, who used thought and extension as examples of attributes of substance, Dignāga and his commentator, Dharmakīrti, outlined subjective and objective features of self‐awareness. In his Pramāṇaviniścaya, Dharmakīrti claimed that “What is experienced by cognition is not different [from it]”10 (Dharmakīrti 1957b). Self‐awareness in this case is thus both the means and content of knowledge, similar to Spinoza’s notion of substance, which he defined as “what is in itself and is conceived through itself” (Spinoza 2002, 217

definition 3). Spinoza also supported the case that subjects and objects only appear to be distinct but in fact are not by following the principle that unlike things cannot be causally related,11 like Dharmakīrti.12 While a supermind of absolute idealism is not explicated by Dignāga or Dharmakīrti, such a form of self‐awareness, as the ultimate substance or truth, is found in the works of the Tibetan scholar Śākya Chokden (shākya mchog ldan, 1428–1507). Self‐awareness for Śākya Chokden is sui generis, like Spinoza’s substance (a.k.a. God). In the way that for Spinoza, mind and matter are nothing but attributes of the one (infinite) substance of God,13 Śākya Chokden claims that the only thing that is real is self‐awareness, and that this self‐awareness is the ultimate reality –

  the real ground for the unreal subject– object presentation of duality. Yet the self‐awareness that Śākya Chokden claims to be real is exclusively a nondual awareness, not ordinary (conventional) self‐awareness, for he denies the reality of any awareness that perceives duality (Śākya Chokden 1975, 477–478). Real self‐awareness for him is of another order than ordinary cognitions. Śākya Chokden creates a third c ategory for self‐awareness, beyond dualistic subjectivity and objectivity. This self‐awareness is thus a kind of supermind, or gnosis (ye shes), as opposed to ordinary consciousness (rnam shes). Although Dignāga may not necessarily follow Śākya Chokden down the road to absolute idealism, his explanation does not simply reduce cognition to the subject, as in a simplistic model of

subjective idealism (a.k.a. “mind‐only”) in which objective percepts are simply the products of a subjective mind. Rather, there is a more complex and arguably more nuanced causal story. Dignāga’s account of perception entails a temporal, self‐generating, and selfregulating process of conscious experience, which is driven by a feedback loop of predisposition and habituation to predispositions. That is, he says that the capacities for perception reside in cognition, and cognition arises from these capacities. In this way, his account of the cognitive process exemplifies the c ognitive coupling of agent and environment, which

mutually cooperate to create a life‐world. In this system, moreover, both the dualist’s and physicalist’s problem of emergence – how mind arises from matter – is skirted, because the transcendental structure of the world is not spatially located in here or out there, and so is not bound by the temporality that it shapes.

The status of the external world is clear in Yogācāra: there is none. Yet what constitutes reality is ambiguous: is it all mind or not? This question is reflected in the status of the dependent nature in the Yogācāra theory of three natures: the imagined nature, the dependent nature, and the consummate nature. Conceptual construction is the imagined nature – what we impute as the reality of things like trees, selves, and tables, and the concepts we use to capture these entities. We hold these things to be real and a natural part of reality, when they are in fact cultural artifacts; that is to say, they are not separate from our conceptual constructions. The real world is not the way we construct it to be; reality’s emptiness of constructions is the consummate nature. Reality is the

dependent nature, the basis of our false conceptions, which is the inexpressible field of reality and an indeterminate matrix of relations. The dependent nature is structured by dependent arising, a structure that implicates the mind, too. The dependent nature is thus entangled with c ognition; it constitutes a panpsychist world. The dependent nature has been identified with the distorted mind,14 like the foundational consciousness, and we can see how both these notions play pivotal roles in Yogācāra, as the causal story of the world. Like the dependent nature, the foundational consciousness is a structure that is not only internal, nor only mental, but a causal process that is the source and content of the attribution of subjects and objects. While the foundational consciousness, being nominally a “consciousness” (vijñāna), may be identified with the subjective pole of perception, it is the source not only of the subjective

representations of mind, but also of objective representations of bodies, environments, and materials as well. Thus, the function of the foundational consciousness supports a form of panpsychism – that all is mind or mind‐like (or at least a weak form of panpsychism, that all is mind‐dependent). Alternatively, the foundational consciousness can be seen as a form of neutral monism: a causal matrix that is neither mind nor matter, but the ground of both. This is because rather than simply being a form of subjective idealism, the foundational consciousness constitutes the content of subjects as well as objects. At the end of the day, Yogācāra may better be described in the more neutral terms of panpsychism rather than the subjective idealism of “mind‐only” because panpsychism not only captures the fact that the foundational consciousness is a consciousness and the content of object presentation, but also conveys that the foundational consciousness is the content of the presentation of subjectivity, too. In this way, the reality of the subject along with its subject– object presentation can be denied while affirming a conscious process (like the dependent nature), just as when the mere flow of consciousness is affirmed in a causal story that denies any enduring entity like a unified self. This process comes from something that is not itself a subjective consciousness, but from what is said to be an “internal” consciousness nonetheless (simply because it is not “out there”).

We can discern a tension in Yogācāra, namely, a tension between subjective idealism and panpsychism, as seen in the respective meanings ascribed to subjectivity, internality, and cognition. Given that the foundational consciousness is said to be “internal,” the meaning of internality – retained as something distinct from ordinary subjectivity, and particularly in the absence of external objects – leaves the ambiguity of Yogācāra in place.

Conclusion

Yogācāra is often harnessed with the unspecified label “idealism,” and thus s addled with the problems associated with subjective idealism – such as those of solipsism, there being an asymmetry between a (real) mind and an (unreal) object, and there being no way to drive a wedge between an “internal” mind and an “external” object (the wedge upon which subjective idealism depends, since there is no place to stand outside of a subject–object relation to split those up and privilege the former). Yet the importance of Yogācāra analyses is often overlooked in one‐sided caricatures of this tradition. While subjective idealism is

logically problematic, absolute idealism (or panpsychism) is not. In fact, A.K. Chatterjee puts forward Yogācāra as a philosophy of idealism that cannot simply be replaced by another constructive philosophy, but one that can only be challenged by deconstruction or silence: Yogācāra philosophy is…a perfect example of coherent construction. It is not to be challenged by other constructive philosophies; one d ogmatism is not refuted by another dogmatism. If one refuses to accept idealism, one can do so, not by embracing another speculative philosophy, but only by ceasing to have any speculation at all. (Chatterjee 1975, 229) The

logical coherency of absolute idealism is quite different from the critical or skeptical modes of thought that simply unmask the shaky foundations of any system of thought. Like panpsychism, Yogācāra is a formidable philosophy, even while it is often represented in the form of a straw man, and criticized as simply subjective idealism. Panpsychism, however, cannot be dismissed simply because it is counter‐intuitive, for it remains a coherent model of the universe, and a metaphysic with empirical and logical support.

Notes

1 With “animistic panpsychism” I mean to express a view that distinct minds inhabit discrete entities, as opposed to a view that the mind is intertwined with the world in a relational structure.

2 Reflecting the “implicative negation” (ma yin dgag) of a Yogācāra interpretation of emptiness, which leaves a ground that remains in emptiness, Bradley says, “Every negation must have a ground, and this ground is positive” (Bradley 1922, 117). 3 Throughout his Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, Nāgārjuna consistently showed the contingent nature of entities, that nothing has intrinsic nature. He furthermore stated: “Without intrinsic nature, how could there be extrinsic nature?”

(Mūlamadhyamakakārikā XV.3; Nāgārjuna 1957). 4 Perhaps the organization can be articulated with Arthur Koestler’s notion of holons. A holon is composed of parts, is a whole itself, and is part of a larger whole. As Koestler said, “A ‘part,’ as we generally use the word, means something fragmentary and incomplete, which by itself would have no legitimate existence. On the other hand, a ‘whole’ is considered as something complete in itself which needs no further explanation. But ‘wholes’ and ‘parts’ in this absolute sense just do not exist anywhere, either in the domain of living organisms or of social organizations. What we find are intermediary structures on a series of levels in an ascending order of complexity: sub‐wholes which display, according to the way you look at them, some of the

characteristics commonly attributed to wholes and some of the characteristics commonly attributed to parts… It seems preferable to coin a new term to designate these nodes on the hierarchic tree which behave partly as wholes or wholly as parts, according to the way you look at them. The term I would propose is ‘holon’” (Koestler 1967, 48). A panpsychist takes account of the psychically configured structure of multiple and hierarchical layers of the universe. 5 “Psychicism” might be a better alternative to the term panpsychism, because physicalists do not use the prefix pan‐ as in “panphysicalism,” but simply use physicalism. 6 This physicalist’s dilemma is exasperated by Buddhist philosophers who kowtow to the popular notion of a “scientific establishment” – as Amber Carpenter, in her otherwise excellent book, echoes the voice of a (real or imagined?) natural scientist when she claimed that “philosophers are best off taking the natural world

to be as the natural scientists describe it” (Carpenter 2014, 112). Socrates would roll over in his grave if he were to hear that a philosopher is best off t ransmitting “truths” from de jour scientific consensus (unless by “best off,” what is meant is survival – that is, it is dangerous to stand up for truth and deadly to swallow the hemlock)! 7 Prajñākaragupta in PVBh 366, 17 (III.718). Cited in Kajiyama (1966, 140): yadi saṃvedyate nīlaṃ kathaṃ bāhyaṃ tad ucyate/na cet saṃvedyate nīlaṃ kathaṃ

bāhyaṃ tad ucyate. 8 Sakya Paṇḍita states two main reasons for the view that the world has a cognitive nature: (i) all objects of cognitions are cognitive because it is impossible for an object of cognition to lack clarity and awareness; and (ii) objects are always n ecessarily observed together with cognitions (lhan cig dmigs nges) (Sakya Paṇḍita 1989, 55).

The Other Side of Realism: Panpsychism and Yogācāra 41 9 Pramāṇavārttika III.359: bhāvā yena nirūpyante tad rūpaṃ nāsti tattvataḥ/ yasmād ekam anekaṃ vā rūpaṃ teṣāṃ na vidyate. Citation and translation from Steinkellner (1990, 78). 10 Pramāṇaviniścaya 1.38a: nānyo ’nubhāvyo buddhyāsti. See Keira (2004, 40 n.75). 11 Spinoza claims that “If things have nothing in common with one another, one of them cannot be the cause of the other” (Spinoza 2002, 218 Proposition 3); also, he adds that “although two attributes may be conceived to be really d istinct (i.e., one may be conceived without the aid of the other), we still cannot infer from

that that they constitute two beings, or two different substances” (Spinoza 2002, 221 Scholium to Proposition 10). 12 See Dharmakīrti on self‐awareness, in Pramāṇavārttika III.326–327; and on causes “of the same type” (sajāti), in Pramāṇavārttika II.36. See also Arnold (2012, 33). 13 Spinoza states in Proposition 15 of the Ethics: “Whatever is, is in God, and n othing can be or be conceived without God” (Spinoza 2002, 224). 14 For instance, Asaṅga characterized the dependent nature as follows in the Mahāyānasaṃgraha I.21: “What is the characteristic of the dependent nature? It is a cognition comprised by unreal imagination concerning the basic c onsciousness potentiality” (Asaṅga 1977). In Tibet, Mipam also described the dependent nature in cognitive terms. See Duckworth (2008, 48).

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