•  23
    The Tantric Context of Ratnākaraśānti’s Philosophy of Mind
    Journal of Indian Philosophy 46 (2): 355-372. 2018.
    The conflicting positions of the two early eleventh century Yogācāra scholars, Ratnākaraśānti and his critic Jñānaśrīmitra, concerning whether or not consciousness can exist without content are inseparable from their respective understandings of enlightenment. Ratnākaraśānti argues that consciousness can be contentless —and that, for a buddha, it must be. Mental content can be defeated by reasoning and made to disappear by meditative cultivation, and so it is fundamentally distinct from the natu…Read more
  •  17
    Abstract:Ratnākaraśānti (ca. 970–1040) holds three conflicting positions: luminosity (prakāśa) is the ultimately real nature of consciousness; luminosity and appearances (ākāras) are identical; and appearances are false (alīka) because they are targeted by the neither-one-nor-many argument. But why is luminosity not false, too, given its identity with appearances? In response to this worry, Ratnākaraśānti develops a notion of identity (tādātmya) that lets him claim that, although luminosity and …Read more
  •  16
    This paper considers Jñānaśrīmitra’s defense of manifestation as the criterion of ultimate existence. In the first section, "Asatkhyāti and Adhyavasāya: making sense of manifestation as the criterion of the real", I show the way that, in response to Ratnākaraśānti’s Nirākāravāda, Jñānaśrīmitra argues for a sharp distinction between manifestation and determination in an effort to establish that the manifestation of something unreal is incoherent. The unreal, he thinks, is only ever determined; it…Read more
  •  15
    The present book is true to its title. A collection of articles that stems from a symposium of the same name at the University of Hamburg in 2017, the authors here bring different perspectives to bear on the philosophical and historical relations between Buddhism and scepticism. Though this is relatively well-trodden ground, the insightful studies here shed new light on the matter. We find historical studies of the possible links between Pyrrhonism and Buddhism ; a defense of Nāgārjuna's philoso…Read more