On the Cognitive Linguistics of Emptiness

This essay applies an analytical method developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, especially as it occurs in the book Metaphors We Live By, originally published in 1981, with a revised edition 2003. I will also draw on their other published works, notably Lakoff (1987) and Johnson (1987). Lakoff and Johnson tell us that "cognitive metaphors" are ubiquitous in human language. These metaphors involve treating a target domain as if it were a member of the same category as the source domain. In these metaphors the source domain is usually some form of physical interaction that humans have with the objective world, and the target domain is some feature of cognition. In this way, cognitive metaphors are what enable us to think about the world in abstract terms. 

This is a modern form of philosophical analysis not available to the ancient world. So this type of analysis offers the possibility of new insights when applied to old discourses. This method has occasionally been applied to Buddhism in the past, though the application has been patchy and the methods involved have not become mainstream. In this essay, I am going to use the methods developed by Lakoff and Johnson to critique the abstract concept of "emptiness" as we mainly meet it in accounts of Buddhism. In this case, I'm not criticising any particular usage, but want to make some general points about the concept. 

Cognitive Metaphors

A metaphor involves treating one things as if it were another. In a series of five blog posts in 2016, I outline John Searle's account of social reality in which "as if" plays a major role (see Social Reality). In that account of social reality I noted that language is an institutional fact:

Language itself only works because of collective intentionality, i.e. we all agree that certain verbal sounds count as words; that certain words count as representing concepts; that certain combinations of words count as sentences, and so on. (Institutional Facts & Language: Social Reality. II).

What this means is that language relies on us all agreeing that a given word means what it means.  As Wittgenstein famously said, 

“For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word “meaning” it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.” (Wittgenstein 1967, section 43)

This is often abbreviated to "meaning is use". Individualism has a role to play in the evolution of language, especially where the individual is influential.  But, generally speaking, language relies on our collective agreement on what words mean (semantics) or do (pragmatics). Cognitive metaphors are no different; other people must understand our use of cognitive metaphors in order for us to communicate about abstractions. 

The metaphor relation is not arbitrary. It is not that anything can be anything. The relation requires that the target domain has some properties that make it a good candidate for metaphorical projection. I won't go more deeply into this since it involves invoking the image schema and explaining this is too involved for an essay like this one. The standard work on image schemas is still (as far as I know) Mark Johnson's book The Body in the Mind (1987). Suffice it to say that the target domain for the metaphor must be a good fit. 

For example, we may state a commonly used cognitive metaphor: IDEAS ARE OBJECTS. (I use Lakoff and Johnson's convention of citing metaphors in small caps). In this metaphor, the source domain is our physical interactions with objects, while the target domain is a subjective experience of thought. If we accept the metaphor IDEAS ARE OBJECTS, then any operation we can physically perform on an object we can perform mentally on an idea. If I can grasp an object, then under this metaphor I can grasp an idea, as if it were an object. I can turn an idea over and look at it from another angle. I can look at an idea from different angles. If I have more than one idea, I can juggle them. I can throw an idea out, toss it around, and kick it into the long grass. Virtually anything I can physically do with an object finds a metaphorical application to an idea under the cognitive metaphor, IDEAS ARE OBJECTS.

A poor metaphor might be IDEAS ARE COWBOYS. Cowboys ride, bait, and subdue semi-wild animals for entertainment. It's not clear in what way an idea is like a cowboy. This metaphor is not intuitive. Another one might be FISH ARE BICYCLES. Note that these propositions are not forbidden by the rules of English grammar. Still, they don't make for obvious metaphorical usage. The metaphor IDEAS ARE OBJECTS works because ideas have a limited scope, they can often expressible in a succinct way that makes each idea seem discreet from other ideas. Expressing the idea leads to a transfer of that discreet piece of knowledge to another person. It's not that an idea is an object, but that an idea is sufficiently like an object in specific ways. The similarity occurs at the level of "image schemas", which I'm trying to avoid for reasons of brevity. 

It may seem simplistic to labour the point, but I think it's worth saying that ideas are not real objects. In making the metaphor, we are not reifying the abstraction. Moreover, contrary to the prevailing view of humans amongst Buddhists, people are not easily fooled into reifying cognitive metaphors. It would be odd for a person to claim that ideas are objects in a substantial sense. We know this is not true. No one ever literally held an idea in the palm of their hand, for example. We know it's a metaphor and we intuitively deal with thousands of such metaphors every day. If we had to stop to analyse each one, abstract thought would not be possible.

Unlike a computing language I don't have to "declare" the metaphor before using it. We effortlessly decode hundreds and thousands of these cognitive metaphors on the fly without even noticing that we are doing it. When people are sitting around a table at a meeting and someone says, "we need to move on", and they change the subject rather than getting up and leaving the room, no one is surprised by this.

In this case, it is because we can form a cognitive metaphor: A CONVERSATION IS A JOURNEY. For example, we might be having a conversation and it "takes a turn" (perhaps a strange or unexpected turn, or a turn for the worse). Someone might wish to "return" to what was said earlier. If it's going badly, we might say "Let's start over". If the conservation was difficult but productive, we may say: "we got there in the end". When a conversation is at an impasse, we might say that we have to move on and leave the impasse unresolved. And a conversation may reach a natural conclusion: "let's stop there".

These cognitive metaphors are not incidental but rather they form an integral part of language use. The richness of our metaphorical use of language is part of what makes us human. Our ability to talk about one thing as if it were a member of a completely different class of thing is what distinguishes human communication from all other animals. Clearly, some animals and birds are capable of abstract thought to some extent. But they don't communicate in metaphors. We do. 

Once we get attuned to this idea of cognitive metaphors, we begin to see them everywhere. When I talk about typing on my keyboard (a physical act) and words appearing "on my screen" this is two cognitive metaphors: WORDS ARE OBJECTS and SCREENS ARE SURFACES. Of course the screen is literally a surface, but the words are not on it in a physical sense. I can't physically interact with words on a screen. Even on a touch screen that's not what is happening. Rather the patterns of light and dark created by pixels make words seem to appear on the screen, and electrical interactions between surface and finger help to create the illusion of physical interaction. At the end of the day there is dust and fingerprints on my screen, but no physical objects called "words". Still, all the verbs that can be used to describe interacting with objects on a surface, can now be applied to "words on a screen".

In order to get at the underlying metaphors involved in talking about emptiness in a Buddhist context, we have to consider the use of container metaphors.

Container Metaphors

A very common cognitive metaphor involves likening something to a container. For example, in English we have the metaphor: A BOOK IS A CONTAINER. A book can, for example, be filled with ideas (here again: IDEAS ARE OBJECTS). With this combination we make a complex source domain: putting objects into a container maps onto putting ideas or words into a book. We use the same verb in each case, but use it substantively on one hand and metaphorically on the other.

A very common metaphor in English is MIND IS A CONTAINER and more specifically, mind is a container of experiences. In this view, experience happens in the mind; experience is the content of the mind qua container of experiences. Interestingly, however, Indian Buddhists do not seem to have used a specific container metaphor that we take for granted: i.e. sensory experience is contained in the mind. In Buddhism, the mind (manas) is more like a translator that turns (physical) sensory experience into (mental) perception. An ancient Buddhist could not, for example, say something like "empty your mind" because this relies on the container metaphor and they did not conceive of the mind as a container or sensory experience as the content of the mind. They are more likely to use a surface metaphor for the mind, and to talk about sensory experience as a disturbance of that surface. They may also talk about a sensory event in terms of the sense organ being struck by the appearance of an object. Keeping in mind that "appearance" (rūpa) is to the eye as sound is to the ear.

Despite the fact that ancient Buddhists did not use the container metaphor for the mind, it is so ingrained in us as English speakers that it's almost impossible to not think of the mind as a container and sensory experience as the content. 

Given all this, what can we say about how to understand the term "emptiness" (Skt. śūnyatā)

Emptiness and Experience

The adjective "empty" and the abstract noun "emptiness" are part of the broader cognitive metaphor involving containers. There is no abstract "emptiness" in the absence of a container that could potentially contain something. Moverover, emptiness in the dictionary sense boils down to "the absence of content". "Emptiness" is defined by the Online Etymology Dictionary as "the state of containing nothing". Similarly Merriam-Webster defines emptiness as "containing nothing, not occupied or inhabited" and "lacking reality, substance, meaning, or value."

These definitions are curiously opposed to Buddhist definitions of "emptiness" which specifically state that it does not mean "void" or "nothingness". As one writer seeks to clarify:

"Emptiness is not complete nothingness; it doesn't mean that nothing exists at all. This would be a nihilistic view contrary to common sense." - Lewis Richmond.

In other words, in a Buddhist the concept "emptiness" does not mean emptiness, at least in any general sense. Rather it means, we are told, that things are not as they appear to us. It is the difference between appearance and reality. In which case, "emptiness" is obviously the wrong term for this concept. Still I want to press on and consider the cognitive metaphors that apply to our English word and circle back to the doctrinal mismatch.

Any given container—physical or metaphorical—may contain something or not, but to be a container it must potentially contain something. If a container contains anything, then it is not empty. If it contains nothing, it is empty. 

Note that this is unrelated to the expected content of the container. I drink my morning coffee from a teacup I like. The rest is in a thermos and stays hot. One could say that my cup is empty of tea, for example, but by being specific one falls down a rabbit hole. My cup may well be empty of tea, water, lime-juice, cooking oil, kerosene, and every other kind of liquid, but it presently is filled with coffee and thus my cup is not empty at all. This gives emptiness an important parameter. Emptiness tends to be an absolute: if my cup has any kind of content, then it is not empty. My cup is only empty when there is no liquid in it; i.e. when there is emptiness.

So far, so logical. But this is not how Buddhists, especially Mādhyamikas, use the termin practice. Mādhyamikas use the abstract noun "emptiness" in a concrete sense. The classic example is the statement "form is emptiness". This is a valid English sentence, but there is something wrong with it. Even when we take "form" to be "form in the abstract" (or matter generally as many Mādhyamikas do), this sentence is not logically valid because it is trying to equate two different levels of abstraction. "Form" here is generally taken to mean "phenomena". If the metaphor is FORMS ARE CONTAINERS then we might validly state that form is empty. 

There are several problems here. The first is that rūpa is (in English at least) not the container of experience, it is the content of experience (or part of it). Rūpa is to eye what sound is the ear. And note that this applies across the senses. Importantly, rūpa is to the eye as tangibles (spraśtavya) are to the body (kāya). Rūpa is on the wrong side of the equation to be equated with body, even metaphorically. In Chinese, rūpa is routinely translated as sè 色 "hue (from original meanings "form, appearance, complexion"); visual surface quality." (definition from Kroll). In Sanskrit, rūpa is typically a property of a surface reflecting light, it is not a metaphorical container. 

That said, there is no doubt that some modern Buddhists do take rūpa to mean "substance", "matter", or "body". We can see that this is incoherent even at face value since the word is neither defined that way nor used that way in ancient texts. Even the translation "form" misleads most English-speakers into thinking in substantive terms about rūpa. Rūpa means "appearance". Moreover, even if we invoke the container metaphor, it can't be applied to rūpa because rūpa is an element of experience, this is to say that rūpa is content. Ancient Buddhists preferred to see rūpa as a disturbance on the surface of the mind, but even in this metaphor, rūpa is not substantive.

The second problem is that even if rūpa were a container we could go as far as saying that it is empty if it did not contain anything. We could not logically assert that it is "emptiness". If emptiness is the absence of content and rūpa is content, then the two are logical contraries. Despite a great deal of hand waving in modern Buddhist philosophy, "form is emptiness" simply does not make sense in English. But then it doesn't make any more sense to state this in Sanskrit; rūpameva śūnyatā is still equating two different levels of abstraction. This is an egregious wrong turn in Buddhist philosophy.

I might never have thought of this had I not discovered that the phrase was not originally rūpaṃ śūnyatā "form is emptiness", but rūpaṃ māyā "appearance is illusion" (Attwood 2017). This equation occurs in Aṣṭa and in a few places in Pañc as well. It is clearly translated into Chinese by Kumārajīva as 色不異幻、幻不異色，色即是幻、幻即是色。 (e.g. at T 223, 8.239c6-7). Here huàn 幻 translates māyā "illusion", though it originally meant "creation" or the creative power of the devas to keep the world in harmony (ṛta). Given the long history of Buddhists comparing sensory experience to an illusion this makes perfect sense. A classic example of this is the Pheṇapiṇḍūpama Sutta, which concludes with a well-known verse:

Pheṇapiṇḍūpamaṃ rūpaṃ, vedanā bubbuḷūpamā /
Marīcikūpamā saññā, saṅkhārā kadalūpamā;
Māyūpamañca viññāṇaṃ, desitādiccabandhunā (SN iii.142).

Appearance is like a ball of foam, valence like a bubble.
Recognition is like a mirage, volition like a plantain.
Discrimination is like an illusion. So Ādiccabandhu taught.

Here, Ādiccabandhu means the Buddha, but it is a distinctively Brahmin name completely unconnected to any of the standard myths of the Buddha. A similar verse occurs at the end of the Vajracchedikā, where the simile becomes a metaphor:

tārakā timiraṃ dīpo māyāvaśyāya budbudaḥ |
supinaṃ vidyud abhraṃ ca evaṃ draṣṭavya saṃskṛtam ||Vaj 22 || (Harrison and Watanabe 2006)

We should see the conditioned as a star, a kind of blindness, a lamp;
An illusion, a dewdrop, a bubble, a dream, a lightning flash, a cloud.

We also find the simile in Aṣṭa, “appearance is like an illusion” (māyopamaṃ rūpam. Vaidya 1960: 9). And this is all quite straightforward: experience and reality are not the same thing; different rules apply. 

There is a popular rhetorical strategy for dealing with "form is emptiness" amongst Buddhists which can be illustrated with a random example from the Tricycle website:

Avalokita found the five skandhas empty. But, empty of what? The key word is empty. To be empty is to be empty of something.

If I am holding a cup of water and I ask you, “Is this cup empty?” you will say, “No, it is full of water.” But if I pour out the water and ask you again, you may say, “Yes, it is empty.” But, empty of what? Empty means empty of something. The cup cannot be empty of nothing. “Empty” doesn’t mean anything unless you know empty of what. My cup is empty of water, but it is not empty of air. To be empty is to be empty of something. This is quite a discovery. When Avalokita says that the five skandhas are equally empty, to help him be precise we must ask, “Mr. Avalokita, empty of what?”

What we see here is a fantastic distortion of reality, leading to a false conclusion. It is nonsensical for you to ask me what my cup is empty of, because to be empty in any sense, it has to be empty of everything. As I noted above, my cup could be and regularly is empty of tea (and all other liquids) but full of coffee: in which case my cup is not empty at all. The conclusion here—“Empty” doesn’t mean anything unless you know empty of what—is simply not true. This is a case of the tail wagging the dog. That is to say, we know what the answer had to be in order to legitimise Buddhist dogma on emptiness, and the question is phrased in such as way as to elicit only that answer. But in doing so, Buddhists blithely defy the conventions of language. 

We can never legitimately ask "empty of what?" The question is meaningless and the answer is simply a restatement of a dogma that doesn't make any sense. The idea that "empty of what" is a natural question is either extraordinarily naive or disingenuous. Either way, Buddhists propagate this falsehood in all sincerity. 

This invalid method and false conclusion are often parlayed into an even worse question using the abstract noun: "emptiness of what?" Such a thing is not allowed under English grammar. Emptiness is emptiness. "Of what" is an entirely meaningless question because if the answer is not "everything", then the vessel is not empty at all. 

We do sometimes suggest that emptiness might have degrees.  For example, we may say that a cup may be half full or half empty. Still, it's only from the point of view of being half full that we can ask "of what?" The "of what?" question only applies to the content of the container. An empty container has no content; a half empty container is half empty of all content. Even if we say the glass is half empty, no one in their right mind asks "Half empty of what?". This is simply not how the container metaphor works. 

We can see that the cognitive linguistic perspective is a powerful method for understanding utterances. But it also highlights how dogmatic the Buddhist discourse on emptiness is. This kind of invalid logic is de rigueur for Buddhist philosophy and is almost never questioned or critiqued: either from within or without. Rather such views are carefully curated by Buddhists, in the sense of being framed as deep truths, discovered by visionaries and mystics, and accompanied by frenzied hand waving so that they can be presented as something they are not, i.e. true. This is what we expect of a religious philosophy or theology. There are axioms that cannot be questioned or the whole thing would fall apart. The fabric of Madhyamaka is held together with unquestioned, religiously inspired, axioms. 

The same argument holds for Sanskrit which has identical cognitive metaphors. In Sanskrit it is nonsensical to say rūpaṃ śūṇyatā, but it is sensible to say rūpaṃ māyā, and even better to say rūpaṃ māyopamaṃ "appearance is like an illusion"

So my, rather awkward conclusion is this: Buddhists don't seem to understand the concept of empty, let alone the concept of emptiness. If they did understand, the question "empty of what?" would never occur to them. Worse, Buddhists routinely insist that this flawed concept of emptiness is what makes sense of Prajñāpāramitā. Two wrongs don't make a right. 

In this case, how should we understand the word emptiness?

Making Sense of Emptiness

The key here is to note that the first use of śūnyatā as a technical term is to refer to the state of meditative concentration in which all sensory experience has ceased due to the withdrawal of attention from the senses. This state is called suññatāvihāra or śūnyatāsamādhi. Since sensory experience is dependent on attention (manasikāra), by practising non-attention (amanasikāra), one prevents sensory experience from arising and causes arisen sensory experience to cease. 

Here, sensory experience can be seen as the content of experience or, in Buddhist terms as a distortion of the (naturally) smooth surface of the mind. As such, sensory experience may be present or absent and even admit degrees of these. Hence, between ordinary waking awareness and emptiness there are numerous stages (āyatana) of increasingly attenuated sensory experience. But here, too, absence is absolute; the presence of an any sensory experience means that emptiness doesn't apply. This point is made repeatedly in the Aṣṭasāhasrikā, for example. Emptiness in this case, is the complete absence of sensory experience. 

There are several Buddhist approaches to analysing the content of experience: a range of reductive ontologies into which experience is analysed. For example, the skandha-ontology, which focuses on the processes that give rise to experience, or the dhātu-ontology, which is focussed on the sense faculties and their objects. Mainstream Buddhism foregrounds this reductive, analytic approach of breaking experience down into simpler components in order to eliminate it as a source of absolute being. That complex objects disappear under analysis is not some great metaphysical truth, it is simply a consequence of methodological reductionism. 

If I dismantle my chariot, of course I no longer have a working chariot because I've just broken it on purpose. Who does that? Why would I want to dismantle a working chariot in the first place? And why would my destruction of the thing constitute proof that it never existed in the first place? This is the claim that many Buddhists make but, again, it is nonsensical.   

Prajñāpāramitā Buddhists, building on a tradition that is probably older than Buddhism itself, sought first to bring sensory experience to a halt. They didn't analyse sensory experience in any depth because the acme of their program was not an insight into sensory experience. What they sought, first and foremost, was an insight into death and rebirth. The whole fetish of emptiness was originally established on the analogy of emptiness with death. Mastery (vidyā) over sensory experience, in the form of the ability to voluntarily make it stop, equated to mastery over repeated death. This mastery was and is the driving force of Buddhism, even when it is buried in centuries of intellectual accretion. 

My current thinking is that the discovery of how to do this probably arose around the same time as major socio-political changes in India, reflected in, for example, the replacement of red and black pottery type by the painted grey ware style of pottery. Within a few centuries we see the emergence of walled city states which are stable for some 200-300 years before the Moriyan Dynasty of Magadha overwhelmed all the others, founding the first pan-Indian empire. One possible source of mind-training techniques that limit sensory experience is the "interiorisation" of Brahmanical rituals. In this development, some Brahmins began to perform their daily rituals in imagination rather than physically. This led to the discovery of radical changes in sensory experience, especially in the form of hallucinations due to sensory deprivation, and ultimately to the cessation and absence of sensory experience. By the time the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad was composed (in or around the Kingdom of Kosala) the correct performance of rituals was being linked to one's afterlife destination. Buddhists and Jains had similar ideas but focussed on actions more generally, with Buddhists refining this to just volitional actions. 

However it happened, it is apparent that in this milieu some religieux developed and shared the techniques that allowed them to bring sensory experience to a halt and to dwell in a state in which there is awareness but no content. Some Buddhists called this "emptiness" (śūnyatā). Other Buddhists called it "extinction"(nirvāṇa) and other names. This state is also known in modern times as "contentless awareness", "minimal phenomenal awareness", or "non-dual awareness". 

This is how I presently understand "emptiness" in Prajñāpāramitā.  I believe this is a better approach than anything based in later traditional interpretations based on the Madhyamaka telos (which sees Prajñāpāramitā merely as proto-Madhyamaka). 

Dharma as Container?

One of the key concepts in Madhyamaka is "the emptiness of dharmas". In this usage, dharmas have to be considered as metaphorical containers. The broader translation of dharmas as "phenomena" (as distinct from noumena; i.e. appearances rather than reality) seems to fit here, but what is the content of  a phenomenon? Is there really any phenomenon that is not sensory experience?

Nāgārjuna tells us that he expects that we will expect a dharma to have svabhāva in the sense of being autopoietic or self-creating. Nāgārjuna points out that this self-creating property of dharmas cannot exist in any changeable phenomenon. So far so good. The problem is that no one ever believed in self-creating dharmas. No one ever proposed this before Nāgārjuna. But he said that everyone believed it. Nāgārjuna appears to have lied about this. What puzzles me is that no one really cares about the lie. Many people seem to prefer this lie. 

The svabhāva of a dharma, according to Abhidharma lore, is the sui generis quality that gives us the ability to identify it. For example, it's important to all Buddhists to distinguish skillful (kuśala) motivations (cetanā) from unskillful (akuśala) ones. If I experience a moment of greed or generosity, I identify it as such by introspecting the content of the experience. The fact that I can identify an experience as motivated by greed or generosity doesn't imply anything like Nāgārjuna's autopoietic dharmas. As far as I can see, there is no way to even infer autopoietic dharmas from any early Buddhist doctrine. We have different kinds of experiences and these are identifiable by certain characteristics. No one disputes this, not even Nāgārjuna. 

However, Nāgārjuna also assumes that to be real a dharma must have svabhāva in his autopoietic sense. This axiom is incoherent, but is blindly accepted by all and sundry; even Graham Priest, the academic logician, seems to fail to see this basic logical error in Nāgārjuna's argument. Since he can (trivially) prove that no dharma can be autopoietic, he then deduces that dharmas are not real, that they don't exist. But this definition of "real" is completely incoherent. Not only did Buddhists never use this definition of real, they weren't even interested in the question of the reality or unreality of dharmas. They were interested in the arising and ceasing of dharmas; especially in the light of a state in which all dharmas cease except for the asaṃskṛtadharma, i.e. emptiness. Emptiness is asaṃskṛta because it does not occur due to the presence of a condition but rather occurs when all conditions for sensory experience are absent. 

In order to square the circle, Nāgārjuna has to introduce the nonsense idea of a "relative truth", which is not true at all. The ultimate truth, in this view, is that dharmas don't exist, because they are not self-creating. I can see no good reason to take Nāgārjuna seriously as a philosopher or even, frankly, as a Buddhist. He seems to have entirely missed the point of Buddhism and has gone off on a tangent. And still, he is routinely cited as "the most important Buddhist philosopher". 

Conclusion

The term "emptiness" is generally used in an incoherent way by Buddhists, especially in statements containing the idea "emptiness of...". We can never legitimately ask "empty of what?" let alone "emptiness of what?" because this is not how the container metaphor works. 

The idea that the proposition "form is emptiness" is meaningful now seems doubtful. Moreover, when we look at the kinds of post hoc arguments put forward to justify this proposition, they simply don't make sense. In addition, we know that it used to make sense when presented in the form: "appearance is an illusion." A sensory experience is like an illusion. I doubt anyone would argue with this.

It is also true that in the state called "emptiness" there are no dharmas because that state occurs only when all dharmas have ceased and no new dharmas are arising. This sense of the term is far more coherent than the general religious consensus that emptiness is reality. 

The incoherence reaches its apotheosis in Madhyamaka rhetoric about the emptiness of dharmas, by which Mādhyamikas mean that they think dharmas don't exist, since they tie existence to self-creation and it is trivial to show that dharmas cannot be self-creating. Nāgārjuna insists on an incoherent definition of what "real" means and uses that to argue that the concept of existence is incoherent. Prior to Nāgārjuna no one ever used this definition of real. Apart from his devotees, most Buddhists still don't use this definition. 

The standard ways we have of talking about this all seem to miss the point. Early Buddhists did not venture opinions on the existence or nonexistence of dharmas, except in the case of the sarvāsti doctrine. Even the Sarvāstivādins did not argue that the existence of dharmas was due to self-creation. The logic of sarvāsti is completely different but not difficult to follow. If a past dharma can be the cause of a present effect, then the doctrine of dependent arising itself says that it presently exists since imasmin sati, idaṃ hoti and imasmin asati, idaṃ na hoti. If the dharma doesn't exist now, then it cannot be a factor in the arising of a dharma in the present. This central argument is not even considered by Nāgārjuna, let alone refuted. 

The nature of dharmas is irrelevant in light of the fact that dharmas arise and cease, depending on where our attention goes. To say that dharmas lack svabhāva in Nāgārjuna's sense is trivial. To say that they have svabhāva in the Abhidharma sense is also trivial since we routinely recognise hundreds of different kinds of experience (for which we have thousands of words). The key to understanding Prajñāpāramitā lies in another direction entirely. The main point is that attention can be withdrawn from sensory experience. When we withdraw attention from sensory experience, it ceases, leaving us in a particular state characterised by some kind of basic awareness without any experiential content. That is, in a state of emptiness.

While it is not essential to my critique of Madhyamaka, it helps to understand the cognitive metaphors of emptiness and how cognitive metaphors function generally. This is so because "the emptiness of dharmas" is a cognitive metaphor: DHARMAS ARE CONTAINERS. But this is only true if dharmas exist and are capable of acting as metaphorical containers.

Still, it is only Madhyamakas who believe that in order to exist, to be real, a dharma must be self-creating. "Self-creation" is an odd choice for the content of that container. I can imagine a thing being self-creating, but I cannot imagining a thing containing self-creation. Self-creation doesn't fit the cognitive metaphor. 

So even if we could legitimately ask "empty of what?" the answer "empty of self-creation" is nonsense on several levels. For example, it would require us to relate to "self-creation" as content. To my mind this simply doesn't work. "Self-creation" is not a suitable target for the source domain of things we put in containers, except in the very broadest sense that IDEAS ARE OBJECTS. The idea of self-creation might be the content of a metaphorical container, the fact of self-creation cannot be.  

On the other hand, the emptiness of the mind, i.e. the concept of the absence of mental content in meditation, is not plagued by these inconsistencies and incoherences. In English it is natural to use the container metaphor for this. It is not so natural in scriptural languages, but, nevertheless, the absence of dharmas in meditation is the key concept here, not the absence of being self-creating. The whole idea of self-creating dharmas is a red herring. 

The metaphysical speculations that attract us as explanations for emptiness are largely based on prior indoctrination. In my reading, such speculations are absent from both early Buddhism and Prajñāpāramitā. This is not to say that metaphysics is generally absent from or irrelevant to Buddhism.  All ancient Buddhists believed in karma and rebirth, for example. These involve commitments to metaphysical views that we now know to be false, though few Buddhists will admit to this. 

The methods of cognitive linguistics are a powerful tool for thinking critically about Buddhist doctrines. That said, most existing applications of these methods have been in the service of tradition, i.e. used purely descriptively by scholars who have no interest in critiques of Buddhist philosophy. Whatever the reason for it, this side-stepping manoeuvre allows those people to continue evangelising for traditional Buddhism without ever confronting the inevitable antinomies between Iron Age or Medieval thought in India and present day science and philosophy. Many Buddhists seem attracted by the idea of subsuming all knowledge within Buddhism. This tends to involve a rather blasé form of dualism in which science is merely concerned with the "physical" and Buddhism is concerned something that we often see called "spiritual".

Unfortunately, this exceptionalist discourse appears to obscure and devalue the real contribution of Buddhists, i.e. the cultivation and exploration of states of contentless awareness. I see this as a lose-lose scenario. I see the neuroscience community studying this phenomenon and developing their own terminology for it, though at present we still see a proliferation of different terminologies. At some point, an objective account of the methods and consequences of meditation will eclipse the religious accounts. Those who insist on the religious accounts, with all their incoherence and misdirection, will be relegated out of the conversation and become irrelevant. I'd prefer to see experienced meditators staying in the game, but as long as they cling to outmoded forms of talking about emptiness, they will not be part of the conversation for much longer. 

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Attwood, J. (2017). "Form is (Not) Emptiness: The Enigma at the Heart of the Heart Sutra." Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, 13,52–80. http://jocbs.org/index.php/jocbs/issue/view/15/showToc.

Johnson, Mark. (1987). The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason. University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, George. (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (2003). Metaphors We Live By. New Ed. [Originally published 1981]. University of Chicago Press.

Image Schemas, Metaphor, and Thought.

Along The Yellow Brick Road

My understanding of myself and the world is quite strongly influenced by the writings of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. These two scholars are at the forefront of the idea of embodied cognition and between them have developed some of the basic terminology. In particular Mark Johnson explored some of the theoretical nuts and bolts of how we understand our world. The idea is that we structure our experience via what he calls the image schema. These can be represented by diagrams or content rich images or even propositional statements, but in practice they are more primitive than any of these. Schemas drawn from experience that can apply to other domains, particularly abstract domains, form the basis of metaphor.

In this essay I will outline three image schemas: path, link, and cycle, drawing primarily on a section in Mark Johnson (1987: 112-121). While there are many schemas and each of them might require a book in their own right to fully explore them, I found Johnson's outlines evocative and thought provoking. Using the path schema I will try to give a brief overview of the idea of image schemas and then add notes on link and cycle schemas, trying to show why this way of thinking is relevant to understanding thought itself. 

SCHEMAS

Some of the key early experiences we have as infants involve gaining control of our body. Moving our hands to where our eyes are looking, and moving our body from place to place for example. The path schema emerges from these kinds of experiences. Our body is in one place and we want to move it to another place. As we go from our starting point to our end point we traverse all the points in between, which form a path. Before we move we can project the path in imagination. If I plan to go down to the kitchen from my writing desk, there is a virtual path in my mind, based on my internal map of the house. Incidentally we now know these internal maps are stored in hexagonal arrays of neurons in the brain, called "grid cells". We literally locate ourselves on this internal map when we think about our location. The discovery earned the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Even more interesting is that in 2015 we discovered that the timing of when the grid cells are active also locates us in time (Kraus et al 2015).

Since we often travel with a purpose in mind, we experience paths as directional, though of course a path usually goes both ways (except in Ikea). This gives us the bare bones structure of the path schema. It consists of

• A starting point or source and,
• An end point of goal,
• connected by contiguous intermediate points.

This kind of structure, which is well defined and yet simple, is a feature of image schemas. Each is well demarcated in this way. They must also be pervasive in experience and for that reason widely understood. The ubiquity of schemas is what underpins our effortless use of metaphors, and also our ability to understand the metaphors of a long dead language like Pāḷi. 

The path schema is important for how we understand time in the English speaking world. We experience time as a path with the past as source and the future as goal. We are traversing the intermediate points. We don't know the future yet because we haven't arrived there. We look back to the past. However, in some cultures time is experienced as though we are standing in a river looking downstream - i.e. we are standing still and it is the path that moves. The past is downstream, in front of us and moving away; we can see it because it has happened. The future is upstream, behind us moving towards us, we cannot see it because it has not happened yet. These are both valid ways of describing the experience of being in time. 

Central to the experience of time is entropy. The universe because less ordered over time and we intuitively understand this because experience of non-living objects tends to confirm it. If a cup falls and smashes we go from more ordered to less ordered. Living beings use energy to hold themselves in an highly ordered state while alive and then rapidly become more disordered at death. We have internalised this law of physics before we can speak. If we see the film of this event backwards it is immediately apparent that it is backwards. Time is a path from more order to less order. Theoretical time travel notwithstanding, this is how we experience it. 

A key observation from the above examples of experiences of paths is that the desire to be in a particular location is the purpose for following a path. And on arriving we feel our purpose for following the path has been achieved. Thus there is an identity between our starting point and the state of desire; and also between our final location and satisfied purpose. This relationship is not itself metaphorical. It is simply that the path schema fits both situations. And this gives rise to the possibility of metaphorical mappings. For example we can state the metaphor: PURPOSES ARE PHYSICAL GOALS. So we say of a successful actor that "they have arrived". We can also arrive at a conclusion, or follow a path to enlightenment. Because the path schema applies in both domains, we can use the language of one to describe the experience of the other. 

This metaphor is very important in Buddhism. For example, we talk about the "path to purity" (visuddhimagga) or the "Noble Eightfold Path" (āryāṣṭāṅgamārga). We use these kinds of metaphors from Iron Age India without any need to stop and decode the idea of a path to an abstract quality like "purity" or "awakening". We can do so because image schemas underpin how we structure experience independent of culture and language. This is why these metaphors transfer effortlessly from the dead languages of Iron Age to living languages. This is a good demonstration of just how important images schemas are. There are, of course, some Pāḷi or Sanskrit metaphors that we do not get or some that we use that ancient Indians might not have understood. For example, in July 2012, I discussed the MIND IS A CONTAINER metaphor that is so vital to how we understand psychology in the present and tried to show that it is absent from Pāḷi literature. This difference affects our ability to translate between the two times.

These metaphorical mappings are not arbitrary, but are constrained by the structure of the schemas we use and by the applicability of the schema to the domain. Another common use of the path schema in Buddhist thought is paying homage to the three jewels. We bow, or make the añjali gesture, towards a shrine, stūpa, or buddharūpa and metaphorically something traverses the path from us to the image. Our transmission of homage, or worship, or however we conceive of what we are offering, goes from us (starting point) to the shrine (end point) traversing all the contiguous points in-between. This helps us feel connected to the three jewels, though here we are also invoking the link schema which I will come to shortly.

Another important application of the path schema is for arguments. As Michael Palin said "An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a definitite proposition." (Argument Sketch) Again the path schema fits. We have a start point (proposition not established, ignorance); an end point (proposition established, knowledge); and a contiguous series of connecting points (statements that are logically connected). And this enables us to use the important metaphor for discourse: AN ARGUMENT IS A JOURNEY. When making an argument we lay out our reasoning, one step at a time, trying to avoid being side-tracked, and arrive at a conclusion. The latter in Pāḷi is niṭṭhaṃ gacchati "arrive at a conclusion". Because an argument can be understood in terms of the path schema we can use the language of a journey following a path to talk about it. And because the path schema is ubiquitous and widely understood we don't have to explain our metaphor - it is immediately apparent to any English speaker, or Pāḷi speaker for that matter.

This overview of the path schema gives an idea of the basic features of any schema and how they underpin metaphors and other kinds of cognitive processes.

Link Schema

Like the path schema the link schema emerges from experience. The link schema is formed by our own relationships and the integrity of our body. When we grip an object in our hand we form a link between us and the object. A common action is that of binding two objects together. The schema here is precisely this: two or more objects, concrete or abstract, that are in contact within our experiential field. The most basic form of contact is physical adjacency, but we can also apply the schema to notional or abstract adjacency such as contiguous moments in time, or objects with shared characteristics. The caveat of "within our experiential field" is important in deciding what is intuitive and what is not. If the connection is not visible, or we should say sensible, to us then the possibility of linkage intuitively seems remote.

As social animals physically connecting with our social group is typically quite important even if it is formalised almost to the point of abstraction, as in a handshake. At the very least proximity to our social groups alone produces a sense of well-being. As infants we feel a sense of both physical and emotional connection to parents and other family members or carers. Separate an infant of any social animal (though perhaps not insects) from its mother and it feels a powerful anxiety. We come to see ourselves as bonded to members of our family and our circle of friends. We physically express our connection through hugs, kisses, touching, hold hands, and having sex, all of which also shape our experience of connection. As we grow older shared experiences form connections between unrelated individuals. A shared ordeal, such as a disaster, or a initiation ceremony, can create a life-long bond. The human experience is one in which we perceive ourselves as being at the centre of a web of an interwoven complex of concrete and abstract linkage: physical, spatial, abstract, notional, temporal. Everywhere we look we see and experience connections.

All of these metaphors for human connection—e.g. being BONDED by genetics or shared experience—are possible because the link schema applies in many domains and allows us to use the language of physical bonds metaphorically.

Ariel Glucklich has argued that a pervasive sense of interconnectedness is important for human beings. He sees it as the heart of the magical healing art of tantric wizards in Benares. In a passage I have cited many times, for example in Mantra, Magic, and Interconnectedness (27 June 2008), in which he says:

Magic is based on a unique type of consciousness: the awareness of the interrelatedness of all things in the world by means of simple but refined sense perception... magical actions... constitute a direct, ritual way of restoring the experience of relatedness in cases where that experience has been broken by disease, drought, war, or any number of other events. (1997: 12)

We may also experience events as linked or contiguous in time. And this allows us to perceive temporally linked events as having a causal relationship. We experience memories as providing links between temporal events. Thus the link schema is very important in the concept of causality. As David Hume discovered, we never see an even which could be called "causality". We see a sequence of events and project the idea of causality onto those events. Although we don't see causality, we do experience it. The idea of causality emerges from our experience of gaining control of our eyes and beginning to direct our gaze; from gaining control of our limbs and directing., e.g. where they reach and what they grasp; and from experience our will as setting us in motion towards all kinds of goals. In other words we begin to experience ourselves as agents of cause and generalise from this experience that all events have causes.

The coherence of connections between sequences of events underlies the idea of the arrow of time. If we show a movie backwards it is immediately apparent that events are proceeding in the wrong temporal direction. A backwards sequence is not coherent with our expectations of how the world works based on experience. Non-living objects do not fly up into the air, for example, without the application of some force. The force itself ought to leave some sense impression that accompanies the action. So a broken cup does not fly back to the table and reassemble itself. Experientially this never happens. Our sense of what is coherent derives from everyday experience from the moment our minds start processing sense data (probably in the womb).

The link schema also places limits on what seems intuitive. For example in the phenomenon of quantum entanglement there appears to be actions that are related in time (i.e. that happen simultaneously) and causally (observing the quantum state of one of a pair of entangled particles causes the second to adopt a quantum state determined by the first), but which can be separated by arbitrarily large distances in space. The counter-intuitive nature of this proposition was summed up by Einstein's quip that it amounted to "spooky action at a distance". Unfortunately we seem to be stuck with spooky action at a distance at the nano-scale, despite the fact it is powerfully counter-intuitive.

More apposite to Buddhist readers I have pointed out that the Doctrine of Karma requires action at a temporal distance, i.e. events that are causally linked but separated in time, often by many years or even lifetimes. This situation is disallowed by the Doctrine of Pratītyasamutpāda or Dependent Arising and it counter-intuitive compared to experiences of causality and time. Around the time that the Abhidharma was being codified, a number of solutions to this problem were proposed including the Sarva-asti doctrine which argues that dharmas must always be existent and only sometimes active, and the Doctrine of Momentariness which argued the opposite, that dharmas are only briefly existent, but always active. Of course "existent" (astitā) as it was used by the ancient Indians doesn't apply since it always implies permanence, but neither does non-existence (nāstitā) since this would preclude us actually having experiences. It was Momentariness that won the argument in Buddhism, but I've also showed that it fails to account for the phenomenon that it purports to explain (see The Logic of Karma).

Pre-Classical Buddhist texts largely eschew the language of causation, even though this is emphasised in the received tradition. In fact the Buddhist texts propose another kind of link, one which is based on presence rather than sequence. The key word is paṭicca  (Skt pratītya), the etymology of which is "going (√i) back to (prati)" and we can read as "based on" or "dependent on". The doctrine of pratītyasamutpāda is not a doctrine of causality at all but one in which arising is dependent on coexistence (sam-utpāda). The most apposite analogy for this is the requirement for foundations to support a wall, or walls to support the roof of a house. The foundations must exist before the walls can be erected, so we can can say that the foundations are a necessary condition for walls of the house, but the foundations do not cause the walls to go up. And this is the nature of conditionality also. 

Two kinds of abstract links are also very common. The first is shared characteristics, i.e. perceived links between objects of perception that have characteristics in common. Such links between perceived objects are what enable us to categorise perceptions and structure them into a comprehensible world. The subject of categorisation is covered in great depth in Lakoff (1987). Lakoff describes a philosophy of categorisation that draws on Wittgenstein's "family resemblances" amongst other sources. A category has a prototype, an image of the ideal member of the category defined by our experience of interacting with the world, and membership of the category is greater or less depending on the number of shared characteristics the object of perception shares.

The second is functional links. A functional link exists between objects or processes that are otherwise (potentially) unrelated if they work together to achieve a common goal. Level and fulcrum or wheel and axle do not fit into similar categories, but work together to form a useful mechanism.

Combinations of the link and path schemas are the basis of formal logic. A logical syllogism is a path in which propositions are linked by particular kinds of relations. Schemas emerge from experience thus even logic, usually thought of as a purely abstract process, is fundamentally embodied. Without the the experience of embodiment the structuring concepts used in logic would not make sense to us. Indeed, as Lakoff and Johnson (2003) repeatedly emphasise, virtually all abstract thought involves metaphors for which the source domain is our physical experience of the world, and the rationale for mapping one domain onto another rests in the applicability of image schemas that emerge from and structure experience. If we add the observations of Mercier & Sperber about the nature of reasoning then we see that Classical accounts of it were fundamentally and profoundly wrong. Making sense of experience is possible only when we consider the mind as embodied and how that embodiment contributes to the schemas that we use to make sense of the world.

The link schema really is pervasive and at the heart of how we orient ourselves in space and time, and how we perceive ourselves more generally. As social animals, connections define us. The link schema structures our perceptions of connections, shared features, and functional unities. It also enables us to make sense of notional connections such as causality or logical connectedness; making possible the notion of actions having consequences for example. The link schema also underlies our use of metaphor itself since in order to use metaphors we must understand the source domain and the target domain as having shared features which are isomorphic with the schema.

Cycles

The final schema I want to explore in this essay is the cycle. The cycle schema is another pervasive aspect of experience. We experience many natural cycles such as the annual cycle with its seasons; the phases of the moon and with them the tides and also the menstrual cycle which seems to be related to the lunar cycle; the diurnal cycle; our heartbeat, breathing, and digestion. Cycles of emotional arousal (mediated by the sympathetic nervous system) and recovery. We also experience conventional cycles such as weeks and weekends, months, terms, semesters, meal times, the working or school day, and holidays. Conventional cycles can overlay natural cycles.

Cycles as schema can be represented as a circle, though this can be misleading. A circle is an image, with more content than a schema. In fact again we see that the cycle is related to both the link and path schemas. The cycle schema is a path, or a series of contiguous links, in which the beginning and end-points are contiguous. The simplest form of this is a closed loop, of which the circle is an ideal. The journey around the loop is typically in one direction, one must go forward to return to the point of origin.

However, we also experience cycles as having a climatic quality. We think of the annual cycle for example as having a nadir in winter to which we descend through autumn (or fall), and a zenith in summer to which we ascend through spring. In this case the simple circle doesn't suffice and we can instead imagine a sin wave. 

Relation between circle and sin wave

The animated image on the right shows the relationship between these two. In this climatic version of the schema we often think of the cycle as having distinct phases. Researchers William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson described a cycle of human sexual response in terms of arousal, plateau, climax, and resolution. To some extent we can link this to the cycle of anticipation, seeking, reward, and satiation typically thought to underlie our responses to pleasurable sensations of all kinds. In this case we do have evidence from physiology that this experience is embodied in the form of the  different hormones and neurotransmitters that characterise the different phases of the reward system.

Mark Johnson insists that this climatic structure is not inherent to natural cycles like the annual cycle, that we project zenith and nadir onto the year (usually coinciding with mid-summer and mid-winter). I'm not so sure about this. Other cycles are built into this annual cycle which seem to me to undermine this claim. For example the length of the day and the average temperature also fluctuate cyclically because of the physics of the solar system. We're naturally more active in summer than we are in winter. These natural variations seem to me to contribute to the the experience of a climatic structure. 

Another image to which the cycle schema can be applied is the helix. Although the earth orbits the sun once per year and seems to return to the same spot each time, in fact the sun is in orbit around the galactic centre (the plane of the ecliptic is inclined by about 60º with respect to the plane of the sun's orbit ) and so the orbit of the earth describes a helix. In this sense a cycle is not simply a closed loop which always returns to its origin, but any cyclic phenomenon that recurs regularly or quasi-regularly.

Cycles constitute temporal boundaries for activities and tend to be rigid. Hence the persistence of the 60 seconds, 60 minutes, 24 hours, of the clock. Also the persistence of the seven day week. Apparently the Soviets tried to change this to five days and it was, according to Johnson, "disastrous". This system of time keeping goes all the way back to ancient Babylonia. 

The experience of cycles and the cycle schema may well explain why astrology continues to seem plausible to some people. The cyclic schema makes the idea of a relationship between those cycles we experience, between emotional states, or good and bad fortune, and the cycles of the observable planets. The planets were imagined to have agency and personality, especially they were seen as manifestation of gods (our names for the planets are the Latin names of Greco-Roman gods). The discovery of the true nature of the planets, of more and more remote planets not visible to the naked eye, of the precession of orbits, and the ambiguity in the definition of a planet have complicated the practice of astrology, though despite what some critics say, serious astrologers have tried to adapt to all this new information. However, there is no question that extremely remote lumps of rock or balls of gas orbiting the sun can affect our lives in the way that astrologers claim. They cannot.

Even with conventional cycles, such as the week we can experience a qualitative difference between the phases of the cycle. This is why despite 24/7 shopping many of us still feel differently about the different days of the week and the weekend. Again this difference is not inherent in the cycle - there is no inherent difference between Monday, Friday, or Sunday, but we experience them as being different. Such cycles can become so pervasive that they define the character of our experience.

The cycles that we live in are multiple, overlapping, and sequential. Many metaphors emerge from the applicability of cycles to experience, for example THE LIFE CYCLE IS A YEAR means we can talk about someone being a spring chicken, or being in their autumn years. The metaphor SITUATIONS ARE MARRIAGES is quite peculiar, but if I say that I'm in a new town, country or relationships and the "honeymoon period is over" you know what I mean (the underlying schema is related to the climatic cycle of novelty, familiarity, and indifference). A common metaphor in scholarship based on the climactic cycle schema is A SOCIETY IS A PERSON. Historians of the past we particularly fond of this one, seeing the phases of conception, birth, infancy, maturity and dotage as mirrored in civilisations: e.g. in the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Some early WEIRD scholars of Buddhism mapped this scheme onto the emic categories hīnayāna, mahāyāna and vajrayāna, seeing in this a climatic cycle, with vajrayāna representing the inevitable decline of Buddhism as it aged and became senile, helped by the Victorian contempt for magical thinking, and the embrace of teleological thinking, the idea that everything has a purpose and moves inexorably towards a predetermined end. The latter underlies the apocalyptic and millennial ideas that Christians share with some Buddhists who are convinced that we must be in the end times. That Buddhism had died out in India only reinforced this notion. In fact Buddhism has gone through many climatic cycles phases of decline and renewal, often many overlapping phases at once, and the idea of an overall arc has long been shown to be nonsense. 

The Classical Theravāda commentator Buddhaghosa used the idea of niyāma or restriction to describe the cyclic nature of unseen processes like kamma and citta. Both kamma and citta are like the life-cycle of a plant, in that if one sows rice one reaps rice. He called this restriction bījaniyāma "the seed limit" and used it to analogically explain that kusala actions gave rise to kusala vipaka or phala (literally fruit). Similarly with akusala actions and akusala fruits. He expanded the metaphor by adding that just as the trees flowered and fruited in the right season (utu) so kamma and citta produced their results at the appropriate time, a principle he called utuniyāma "the seasonal limit". The restrictions on kamma and citta were called kammaniyāma and cittaniyāma respectively. Buddhaghosa's fifth example of the cyclic niyāma was the miracles which inevitably manifest at key points in the life cycle of a Buddha (conception, birth, enlightenment, teaching, dying), which he called dhammaniyāma "the nature limit" (as in, it is the nature of a Buddha that their life is accompanied by miracles). This system was distorted by early translators so that it seemed to described causality in the universe seen at different scales. This distortion was popularised by the founder of the Triratna Buddhist Order, Sangharakshita, and recently refined by Subhuti into a grand meta-narrative. Buddhaghosa had something quite different in mind.

India and Buddhism are famous for their cyclic eschatology, the course of the life of an individual and the universe itself are governed by climatic cycles. Although in truth our Buddhist eschatology is a hybrid of cyclic and lineage eschatologies (see my Taxonomy of Afterlife Beliefs). Without making an effort to abandon seeking sense pleasure as a means to happiness one is reborn time and again in circumstances that are dependent on how one has lived. And if one is able to abandon pleasure-seeking then one is not reborn, though in pre-classical Buddhism which rejected absolutes, nothing more could be said by way of clarification of what happened to a tathāgata after death. The question was unanswerable (avyākṛta). The Upaniṣads have a similar eschatology, the major difference being the means of achieving liberation (ātman vs anātman) and the destination (Brahman vs avyākṛta).

Conclusions

To summarise, an image schema emerges from our physical experience of the world, it is pervasive in experience and thus widely understood. It has a simple, well-defined structure. It can be represented by diagrams, but our use of it is not necessarily visual or diagrammatic. Isomorphism, a similarity of form, in different domains allows the image schema to apply to many domains. This wide applicability of a schema is what enables us to effortlessly use metaphors in which we describe one domain in terms of another. The source domain is usually experiential, but the target domain may be experiential, entirely abstract, or somewhere in-between. For example if we talk about the flow of money around an economy, then we are applying the metaphor MONEY IS A FLUID and this is possible because a fluid schema exists and there is some isomorphism between our experience of fluids and our experience of money that allows the schema to apply in both domains and allowing us to use the language of one to describe the language of the other.

There are many image schemas, Johnson mentions about 50 in his book and seems to place no limits on the possible number. Because all human beings have the same kinds of bodies and sensory processes we can say that schemas are not cultural, but part of our shared heritage. As we've seen, metaphors used in the ancient dead language Pāḷi are often immediately clear. If a Pāli text refers to "grasping an concept" or "following the path to enlightenment", we understand without having to do anything more than translate the words. The metaphor is effortlessly, immediately apparent to us because we also have an object schema and a path schema that allows the mapping. Indeed we have these very same metaphors in English. 

The necessity of isomorphism between source and target domains of a metaphor does places limits on how and where metaphors apply. For example, a wall is not a path. The experience of a wall typically lacks the structural features which would allow us to map the path schema onto it. An exception to this might be that some walls are think and have a path along their top, as in a castle wall. But more typically the wall is characterised by the barrier schema, related to force schemas, which are also discussed in Johnson (1987).

One of the important assumptions of this work is that what gets stored in the brain is not individual metaphors, but the image schemas themselves. What is missing, so far as I know, is evidence from neuroscience supporting the philosophy. The description of image schemas is compelling and has good deal of explanatory power but we have yet to see the neural correlates. In the case of spatial and temporal location we now know that this information is stored in the brain in a hexagonal array of neurons which literally map out the space around us. And since the neurons involves fire in a sequence we also use them to orient ourselves in time, a discovery that was announce in 2015. We also know a good deal about how the cycles of our body are mediated by the sympathetic nervous and endocrine systems.

In a forthcoming essay I will again dip into Johnson (1987). I'll look at metaphors related to the body and how the entailments of metaphors guide how we make inferences from experience. This is an important process in understanding the history of religious ideas. 

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Glucklich, Ariel. (1997) The End of Magic. New York, Oxford University Press.

Johnson, Mark. (1987). The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason. University of Chicago Press.

Kraus, Benjamin J. et al. During Running in Place, Grid Cells Integrate Elapsed Time and Distance Run. Neuron, 88(3), 578-589. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2015.09.031

Lakoff, G., (1987) Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, George. (1995) Metaphor, Morality, and Politics, Or, Why Conservatives Have Left Liberals In the Dust. http://www.wwcd.org/issues/Lakoff.html

Lakoff, George & Johnson, Mark. (2003) Metaphors We Live By. New Ed. [Originally published 1981]

Mercier, Hugo & Sperber, Dan. (2011) Why Do Humans Reason. Arguments for an Argumentative Theory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 34: 57 – 111. doi:10.1017/S0140525X10000968. Available from Dan Sperber's website.

Arguments For and Against Antarābhava.

One of the features of Buddhist rebirth beliefs under the microscope, is a great deal of disagreement and dissent between various Buddhist schools of thought and even internally to each school. This disagreement is seldom given sufficient attention. There is no single agreed account of rebirth or karma and I've already used this blog to highlight a number of disputes that in some cases are unresolved after more than 2000 years. In this essay I want to return to the subject of the antarābhava or interim state. I previously tackled in The Antarābhava or Interim State as a Vitalist Concept (11 July 2014) which critiqued the views of Sujato and Piya Tan. In this essay I will note some findings from an article by Qian Lin (2011) and another by Robert Kritzer (2000).

Lin points out that many of the traditional arguments for or against the existence of the antarābhava rely on lists of people who are called anāgāmin. Since this did play a central role in Piya Tan's apologetic for antarābhava and I glossed over it in my previous essay I will go into it in a lot more detail here. Lin surveys the relevant literature in Pali, Sanskrit, Gandhari, and Chinese and summarises the various lists of types of anāgāmin, giving information about the sectarian affiliations of the lists and discussing the discrepancies. He points out that even under close scrutiny, the history of the idea of antarābhava is unclear. We cannot tell which version of the antarābhava (or even no antarābhava) came first. I will make a comment on this at the end of this essay.

The word anāgāmin means "one who does not come [back]" (from ā√gam 'come') and is usually translated as "non-returner". In early Buddhist texts there are four types of noble disciples (P ariyapuggala): stream-entrants (P. sotāpanna), once-returners (sakadāgamin), non-returners (anāgāmin) and arahants. The various types are defined by which of the 10 fetters they have broken or weakened; and by how many rebirths they have yet to suffer in the kāmadhātu or sphere of sensual desire. The anāgāmin, having broken all of the five lower fetters, attains nibbāna without further rebirth in the kāmadhātu (hence they do not 'come back').

One thing to be aware of here is the Buddhist habit of working out permutations. If we have the unawakened and the awakened, the Buddhist exegetes had a penchant for listing all the possible states and treating each as if it were a real category. Another example is the paccekabuddha. It's unlikely that this category of awakened who did not teach has any basis in history (though compare Vinay Gupta), but if one is working through the possibilities, then this is one situation that can hypothetically exist. In all likelihood the anāgāmin is merely hypothetical (indeed the category is impossible to test). Thus although a lot of ink has been spilt over the interim realm based on the interpretation of this category, whatever the conclusion is, it has to be taken with a grain of salt. The discussion only makes sense within the religious parameters of Buddhism, and only follows the internal logic of Buddhism. It tells us nothing whatever about the world. That said, my task is to essay the various forms of afterlife believe held by Buddhists, so clarifying this aspect of Buddhist belief is important for a complete history of the idea.

To complicate matters there are canonical and post-canonical lists of subtypes of anāgāmin which vary in unpredictable ways: for example they may have the same list items but in a different order, and some philological problems remain with the texts, so that some terms are unclear in meaning. In these lists there are five sub-types of anāgāmin, of which one called antarāparinirvāyin which must mean something like "one who is liberated in-between". In other languages:

• Pāli antarāparinibbāyin
• Gāndhāri aṃtarapariṇivaï
• Chinese 中般涅槃

Texts grouped by list type with school affiliation
(see Lin p.165)

The crux of the subsequent argument rests precisely on the question, "Between what?" The situation becomes more complicated as even the subtypes are sub-divided so that there are three kinds of antarāparinirvāyin. There are various approaches to explaining a total of seven sub-types of anāgāmin and there are three different lists of seven (the texts the different lists appear in along with their sectarian affiliation are represented in the table, right). The most prominent is the Pali Purisagati (Destination of Men) Sutta (AN 7.55; iv.70-4). This describes each type in terms of their practice, their level of realisation and uses a simile to illustrate the differences. Of the various lists all have the antarāparinirvāyin as the first member, but they are spread over a number of texts related to a range of different schools.

The Case Against Antarābhava

Lin surveys two main interpretations of the lists of anāgāmin types. The first occurs in the Aṅguttara Nikāya and the Chinese Madhyāgama and utilises the Iron Bowl Simile. In this simile an iron bowl (ayokapāle) is heated all day and struck with a hammer (Lin may have based his discussion on the Chinese counterpart in the Madhyāgama, as he discusses the simile in terms of an iron "slab": 159-60). The fate of the anāgāmin is likened to a chip or spark which flies off. For the sake of brevity, we'll stick to the similes for the antarāparinirvāyin anāgāmin. Struck by the hammer the chip...

1. arises and is extinguished (nibbattitvā nibbāyeyya)
2. arises, flies up, and is extinguished (nibbattitvā uppatitvā nibbāyeyya)
3. arises, flies up, strikes the floor, and is extinguished (nibbattitvā uppatitvā anupahacca talaṃ nibbāyeyya).

The traditional Theravāda interpretation of the antarāparinirvāyin anāgāmin found in the Puggalapaññatti is that the practitioner is reborn as a deva in the rūpadhātu and achieves liberation there before mid-life. This is consistent with the Theravāda view outlined above. "In-between" here is literally taken to mean the mid-point of life (in the rūpadhātu) i.e. between deaths. The 舍利億䰓誾曇論 = *Śāriptrābhidharma (T 1548) associated with the Dharmaguptaka Sect has a similar interpretation. Note that here that nibbattitvā is from nir√vṛt and nibbāyeyya is from nir√vā, and thus despite superficial similarities (rv > bb in Pali) the two words are not etymologically related.

Theravāda exegesis, particularly the Abhidhamma text, Kathāvatthu, explicitly denies the possibility of an antarābhava (Kv 361-5; Aung & Rhys Davids 1960: 212-213). A major problem with antarābhava from the Theravāda point of view is that the word is not found in the suttas. The whole idea of an antarābhava is in conflict with models such as the khandhas and the possible destinations for rebirth (gati). It is never mentioned as a gati. There is also the huge problem of continuity. For the Theravādin Ābhidhammikas the continuity of the viññānasota or stream of consciousness can only be maintained if rebirth is instantaneous: the last moment of consciousness in the dying person (cuticitta) must be the direct condition for the arising of the first moment of consciousness (paṭisandhicitta) in the new person. The more so because the cuticitta and the paṭisandhicitta have the same object (ālambana), as does any subsequent moment of bhavaṅgacitta (resting-state mental activity). If this series is interrupted the whole Theravāda model of how karma produces rebirth, including their solution to Action at a Temporal Distance, breaks down. So, historically, Theravādins reject the antarābhava on both scriptural and logical grounds.

Even so, in practice many modern day Theravādins accept the existence of an antarābhava, as noted in my previous essay. Lin cites the study by Rita Langer (2007: 82-84) which records that in Sri Lanka most lay people and many bhikkhus, against Theravāda orthodoxy, believe in an antarābhava. This ties in with local folk beliefs about the afterlife. Prolific translator Bodhi also seems to accept the idea of an antarābhava in his Aṅguttara Nikāya translation (see 2012: 1782 n.1536). Blogger and writer, Sujato also seems to accept it. Sujato (2010) glosses the Theravāda arguments against antarābhava and concludes:

"These argu­ments sound sus­pi­ciously post hoc. The real reason for the oppos­i­tion to the in-between state would seem rather that it sounds sus­pi­ciously like an anim­ist or Self the­ory."

While he is correct to be suspicious of vitalist or animist theories, he does not consider impact of discontinuity between beings on viññānasota (i.e. the destruction of the whole mechanism for karma carefully worked out by the Theravāda Ābhidhammikas). For Sujato the clinching argument comes from a single reference in the Kutuhalasāla Sutta (SN 44.9)

‘And further, master Got­ama, when a being has laid down this body, but has not yet been reborn in another body, what does the mas­ter Got­ama declare to be the fuel?’ 

‘Vac­cha, when a being has laid down this body, but has not yet been reborn in another body, it is fuelled by crav­ing, I say. For, Vac­cha, at that time, crav­ing is the fuel.’ [Sujato's translation]

His note shows that at least one of the Chinese counterparts to this text does not imply any gap. They also show that this passage is overlooked by the Kathāvatthu discussion. The question, then, is did this text even exist at that time? Sujato concludes that:

"the Buddha, following ideas current in his time – for Vac­chag­otta was a non-Buddhist wanderer (parib­bā­jaka) – accepted that there was some kind of interval between one life and the next."

Apart from general caveats about what the Buddha might or might not have believed being entirely obscured by history, we must concede that this sutta is phrased in such a way as to allow for the idea that the author might have accepted a gap between death and rebirth. However note that Buddhaghosa glosses this by saying it refers to the moment (khaṇa) when between death (cuti) and arising of the paṭisandhicitta (SNA 3.114), i.e. Buddhaghosa is concerned to preserve the integrity of the viññāṇasota. 

The context here resists the interpretation of antarābhava. Vacchagotta is involved in speculation about where famous people have been reborn or even if they have been reborn at all. The question raised is about rebirth generally, about how rebirth can occur at all. Vacchagotta's doubt is specifically related to not being reborn, he is perplexed about how someone is not reborn. In the metaphor "Fire burns with fuel, not without fuel" (aggi saupādāno jalati, no anupādāno). The metaphorical distance between one fire and the next is spatial not temporal. In answer to the question, what causes fire to spread across space and ignite new fires, the answer is wind (vāto), the archetype of physical movement. The wind element causes fires to spread. To then read the question about rebirth in temporal terms, as explaining a time gap between bodies (kāya) is to misunderstand the metaphor. The question, really, is about what drives a person (satta) from body to body (note the metaphysics of the question are still not orthodox Buddhism).

On the other hand it is de rigueur for Buddhists to allow the beliefs of their interlocutors to stand in an argument without disputing them, but to turn the conversation away from the content of beliefs towards practice. Thus when in the Tevijja Sutta the Buddha declares to the two Brahmin students that, unlike their own teachers, he definitely does know Brahmā, Brahmā's world and the way to Brahmā's world, we need not take the author literally. He is using the language of the theistic Brahmins without contention because his purpose is not to dispute metaphysics, but to direct attention to experience. Now, when the author of the Kutuhalasāla Sutta puts these words in Gotama's mouth he does not waste time having Gotama refute the metaphysics of rebirth, but simply gives the standard answer as to the condition for all kinds of rebirth: if one has any kind of existence the primary condition for that is craving. It's not, as Sujato seems to imply, that craving (taṇha) is a special kind of fuel (upādāna) for existence in the antarābhava. Craving is what keeps the rounds of rebirth turning. Taṇha is always the upādāna for bhava.

So if we see the Buddha answering a general question about rebirth in terms of an otherwise absent idea of antarābhava it really doesn't make sense. We cannot from such obscure and difficult passages claim to know the mind of the Buddha. In terms of Theravāda metaphysics, another kind of being in a previously unmentioned interim state is a philosophical disaster: the whole Abhidhamma model of karma collapses (which effectively means that Theravāda Buddhism collapses because answers to so many other questions ride on the model of karma). This means that even if some Theravādins believe in an antarābhava they are left with the task of reconstructing the whole of Theravāda metaphysics to account for it. In the process they abandon Buddhaghosa. Though we can see that antarābhava is attractive, it's clear that the implications of the belief have not been thought through.

The Case for Antarābhava

The literature which argues the case for the antarābhava is more extensive than the contrary. Lin highlights the Saṅgītiparyāya as containing an important argument in favour of antarābhava. This text (T 1536) is a Sarvāstivāda commentary on the Saṅgītisūtra (= P Saṅgīti Sutta DN ) included in their Abhidharma. In this reading the antarāparinirvāyin dies in the kāmadhātu, arises in the antarābhava and attains nibbāna before being reborn in the rūpadhātu. Other types of anāgāmin are reborn in the rūpadhātu and attain nibbāna from there, slowly or quickly. This pattern is also followed in the Vibhāṣā and the *Saṃyuktābhidharmahṛdaya. The Abhidharmakośa mostly agrees and confirms the reading of antarāparinirvāyin.

Like the Theravādins, the Sarvāstivādin Ābhidharmikas had been developing Buddhist doctrine in order to solve problems in the received teachings, particularly the problem of Continuity and the problem of Action at a Temporal Distance (See Sarvāstivāda Approach to the Problem of Action at a Temporal Distance). As a result of the solution they adopted, the Sarvāstivādins ended up with the opposite problem to the Theravādins. Where the Theravādin model of continuity breaks down with an antarābhava, the Sarvāstivādins reasoned that there would be no way to maintain continuity through death without an antarābhava.

The Sāṃmitīyanikāyasśāstra (associated with the Sāṃmitīya Sect) argues that vijñāna without rūpa (i.e. a body) is not possible and that some kind of body is required to carry vijñāna from one rebirth to the next (Kritzer 2000: 241). This is significant, because wrapped up with antarābhava is the idea of the manomayakāya the so-called "mind-made body". Although neither Lin nor Kritzer mention this entity it is crucial in some accounts of the afterlife and thus at some point we will need to consider what it is and how it functions (I'll return to this idea in a forthcoming essay).

For a further detail of the Yogacāra arguments for antarābhava we can turn to Kritzer (2000). His article examined the views of Vasubandhu, especially as found in the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya (Vasubandhu's auto-commentary on the Abhidharmakośa) but also crucially the Viniścayasaṃgrahaṇi. The Bhāṣya is both the most systematic and one of the most influential accounts of the subject, as much for its portrayal of Vasubandhu's opponents as for his own views. Much of the contemporary scholarly writing on antarābhava is based on the Bhāṣya, and in many ways it has been over used as a source text on schools whose own literature is lost, fragmentary or only preserved in Chinese (especially the Sarvāstivādins). Kritzer points out that despite commonalities with the Sarvāstivāda account, the two should not be equated as he shows by examining arguments in the Vibhāṣā, one of the foundation texts of the Sarvāstivāda.

I want to write a separate summary of Kritzer (2000), since it will be quite long, but for now will try to give a flavour of the arguments. The crux seems to be a development of the idea vijñāna supported by rūpa mentioned above. Vasubandhu returns to an agricultural metaphor for the life-cycle of humans comparing us to rice plants (cf. comments on the fivefold-niyāma in Experience and Free Will in Early Buddhism). Vasubandhu's interpreters have read this different ways, but what he seems to be getting at is that the rice seed provides continuity between rice plants. What we do not see is one rice plant becoming another rice plant with no interval. Vasubandhu imagines that humans produce "seeds" when they die (though here he seems not to be referring to the karmic seeds stored in the ālayavijñāna). These seeds provide us with an interim body of a sort that sustains vijñāna until it can connect with rūpa again in rebirth (it's here that the idea of a mind-made body is both relevant and paradoxical because it suggests that a manokayakāya is the manas playing the role of rūpa in order to be a condition for the arising of vijñāna - i.e. it involves circularity that is disallowed by other doctrines of how conditionality works). The Viniścayasaṃgrahaṇi contains a series of questions and answers including this one:

Question: how does one know that there is an intermediate existence? Answer: because [when a being] dies here, there is no way for his citta and caittas to go without support to another place. It is not like an echo because [an echo] is merely an illusion. It is not like a reflected image because that [object] does not perish. And it is not like grasping an object because there is no movement [of consciousness in the case of perception]. Because these similes are inappropriate, the intermediate existence must be understood to exist. Thus, one must contemplate the arising of rūpaskandha in accordance with this”. (Kritzer 247)

This ties in with another image related to rice. Vasubandhu uses the example of a load of rice being transported from one village to another. It does not simply disappear from one village and appear in another, but goes on a journey through a series of stages. In other words Vasubandhu is, unlike many of his predecessors, thinking explicitly and abstractly about causation. Change or movement, as Vasubandhu observes it, is not instantaneous but gradual and thus rebirth cannot be instantaneous either. This may well hark back to Nāgārjuna's abstruse discussions of change in the first chapter of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā.

Sujato may well argue here that this metaphor is analogous to the fire metaphor in the Kutuhalasāla Sutta: that the transportation through space is the root metaphor for rebirth, and that as transit through space is not instantaneous then rebirth cannot be instantaneous. Something must effect the transit between bodies. In response we might question whether reifying the metaphor is helpful. Is the transmission of certain crucial (moral) information about the actions of the previous life onto the next life so as to determine the realm and circumstances of rebirth simply a physical process, like spreading fire or transporting rice grain? Or does the metaphor allow for differences? For advocates of substance dualism the mind is clearly a different stuff to the body and cannot be subject to physical laws or it would not work. One of the features of ESP, a feature of many Buddhist discourse, is that it works with no regard for physical distance: in clairvoyance for example, one knows the thoughts of others as they think them. For advocates of substance monism the idea of an afterlife is so unlikely that it is hardly worth thinking about, but presumably a substance monist would insist that information transfer must take an appreciable time: like downloading a file from the internet. However, no Buddhist metaphysics excludes miracles, magic or ESP.

Vasubandhu is clearly trying to avoid the charge of eternalism by making the antarābhava analogous to other states of being: vijñāna arises in dependence on the manifestation of rūpaskandha in the antarābhava. The scriptural argument against this is simple and was stated in the Kathāvatthu more than 2000 years ago: if there is a an interim state of being, then why is it not included in traditional lists of such states? If there is rūpa then this is (effectively) a rebirth. Why is it not listed as a rebirth destination (gati)?

Vasubandhu's main argument is similar in form to Xeno's paradox. The counter argument is that if some interim state between rebirths (even transition from kāmadhātu to the rūpadhātu) is definitely required, then the same argument holds for the transition from the kāmadhātu to the antarābhava. By Vasubandhu's reasoning we are forced to postulate an antarā-antarābhava and along with it some even more subtle form of being. And so on ab absurdum. Every transition requires an interim state between the original state and the changed state with infinite regress. So the idea of an antarābhava does not solve Vasubandhu's observed problem with causality.

Conclusion

The logic of the arguments outlined is entirely bound up with versions of the Buddhist worldview. As with all afterlife beliefs, there is no way to argue about the antarābhava from first principles. How we view the antarābhava is entirely dependent on what we stipulate at the outset. On traditional arguments, it is either required or forbidden depending on our starting assumptions about how karma and rebirth work. For religious Buddhists this has meant, essentially that religious arguments (based on scripture) carried considerable weight and that reasoned arguments were always constrained by religious arguments.

And thus it is all the more curious that contemporary religious figures such as Theravāda bhikkhus and scriptural commentators reject the religious arguments of their own tradition and adopt the antarābhava, even though it invalidates their own model of karma and rebirth. Such doctrinal conflicts have clearly never bothered the religious lay people very much. Lay Buddhism has always been a religion of faith and propitiation rather than intellect and theology.

My earlier essay pointed out some of the philosophical problems that the antarābhava entails: it seems to involve a form of eternalism. This is something that the Continuity problem cannot ever avoid: either there is discontinuity or there is continuity. In the former the problem of how to transmit information karma is unsolved, in the latter the solution is inevitably eternalistic. The idea of dependent arising doesn't actually solve this dilemma, it only disguises it. There are any number of problems with using pratītyasamutpāda as a Theory of Everything. One cannot take a description of the phenomenology of mental activity presenting itself to awareness and turn that into a general metaphysics and especially not into a physics without creating problems.

So despite the fact that Theravādins settled on their explanation (until recently) and Māhāyānikas settled on Vasubandhu's explanation, in fact neither the problem of Continuity, nor the problem of Action at a Temporal Distance, were definitively solved by either party. The problems were simply shelved as original intellectual contributions dried up. In India, Buddhist exegesis became a competition with non-Buddhists traditions on matters previously considered inconsequential to the Buddhist project; while in Sri Lanka and Burma it turned into increasingly elaborate restatements of old ideas. I'm not well enough informed about Buddhism outside Indian to form definition opinions, but my impression is that the problems of assimilating Buddhism into a culture like China presented such massive problems that Buddhist theology went in entirely different directions. The Chinese seem to have deified the Buddha, whereas the Tibetans were constantly occupied with managing the massive proliferation of teachings. Modern Buddhism largely ignores discontinuities and is mainly concerned with presenting Buddhism as a transcendent truth with no visible flaws, a panacea that applied to everything, results in Utopia, emerging fully formed from a singularity we call Buddha. Could we be any further from the historical nature of our own religion?

At the outset I mentioned that it was unclear from Lin's account whether antarābhava was part of the original narrative of Buddhism or not. I now think it is clear that it is a late addition. Awareness of problems like Continuity and Action at a Temporal Distance only emerge in the post-sutta literature of the Abhidharma. Antarābhava simply doesn't occur in any early text, even when the concept of punabbhava is prominent. The single reference which seems to point to a poorly defined belief in at least a spatial distance between lives, hardly changes the picture. The fundamental disagreement about antarābhava means it can only have emerged once Buddhism had began to fragment into sects. The arguments evinced by the various sides rely on mature Abhidharma theories. The Theravādins only consider it as a reaction to the Abhidharma theories of other schools. So antarābhava was not part of the original Buddhist narrative about the afterlife. That said, the problems which led to antarābhava being proposed as a solution were in place early on.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Aung, Shwe Zan & Rhys Davids, C. A. F. (1960) The Points of Controversy: or, Subjects of discourse being a translation of the Kathāvatthu from the Abhidhammapiṭaka. Pali Text Society. First published 1915.

Bodhi. (2012) The Numerical Discourses of the Buddha. Wisdom.

Kritzer, Robert. (2000) 'Rūpa and The Antarābhava.' Journal of Indian Philosophy 28: 235–272.

Langer, Rita. (2007). Buddhist Rituals of Death and Rebirth: Contemporary Sri Lankan Practice and its origin. Routledge.

Lin, Qian. (2011) 'The antarābhava Dispute Among Abhidharma Traditions and the List of anāgāmins.' Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 34(1-2): 149–186.

Sujato (2010) Rebirth and the In-Between State in Early Buddhism. http://santifm.org/santipada/2010/rebirth-and-the-in-between-state-in-early-buddhism