Kaspars Eihmanis

The fundamental thrust of the Buddhist philosophy, its no-self (anātman 無我) doctrine in particular, is to question our commonsense views of subjectivity and strives to explain the functioning of our mental lives without postulating an enduring substantial self. Memory is one such mental faculty that seems to account for our psychological continuity over time, an idea that led some non-Buddhist philosophers in India to take memory to be a quality of an enduring self (ātman). Whereas the self-theorists can easily offload the burden of explaining the unity of experience and the ipseity of memory onto enduring substantial self, the no-self-theorist must account for memory in the absence of an enduring self. In place of a unitary self, we find a motley of mental factors bound together by causal forces, which allow a Buddhist thinker to sidestep the postulation of the self as an owner of memories. This view, namely that I shall name no-self causal theory of memory, accepts the thesis that it is sufficient to postulate causal connections between specific mental factors to render memory plausible. What interests me in this study is how the Buddhist philosophers defined memory (smṛti 念) without a reference to the self as an agent of remembering and owner of memories. My aim in this dissertation is to defend the plausibility of the no-self causal theory of memory, by tracing its historical connections within the Abhidharma corpus, by probing the relevance of pro et contra arguments for this theory of memory, and by establishing possible links with the contemporary theories in the philosophy of memory. Since smṛti is also oftentimes mentioned in relation to mindfulness, I claim that we should understand it as memory through and through. Following the definition of smṛti 念 as 'mind noting clearly' 心明記性 from the Jñānaprasthāna 發智論 and the Mahāvibhāṣā 大毘婆沙論 to Vasubandhu's Refutation of the Person (Pudgalaviniścaya 破我品), and engaging the Naiyāyika contention that memory is a quality of ātman, I provide an in-depth analysis of Vasubandhu's no-self causal theory of memory and its relevant terms: memory as 'distinctive mental event' (cittaviśeṣa), conceptual resemblance (sadṛśa-saṃjñā) and conceptual connection (sambandha-saṃjñā). I propose the reasons why we should take Vasubandhu to be the first thinker in the history of philosophy to formulate a robust causal theory of memory.