Philiminality

Buddhist philosophy starts  life, in the shape of the “Four Noble Truths” (Catvāri Āryasatyāni),  with an analysis of the somewhat unhappy human condition, its ground,  and what to do about it. Over the next two millennia, as Buddhism spreads through Asia, and especially into China, different schools of Buddhism develop and add to these fundamental insights in different ways. In this talk, I will discuss the Four Noble Truths, and then, to the extent that time permits, some of the later developments.

According to the psychosomatic model found in the Yogavāsiṣtha, it is through the cultivation of joy—understood as the blissful tranquility of the mind (ānanda) that results from emotional purification— that we can heal from  disease. In this paper I present Vasiṣṭha’s psychosomatic medical theory  and analyze it in light of the main philosophical problem that arises:  How much control do we have upon our own mental agitations and thus,  upon our own healing? I will show that Vāsiṣṭha’s typology of disease  offers a useful distinction for a phenomenology of illness that can  accommodate the subjective feeling of the experience of disease as  something that “affects us” while being, at the same time, an experience  that we can transcend, and in this way, “heal”.  However,  I will  question Vasiṣṭha’s use of the famous Vedānta analogy, the  snake-and-the-rope, to explain our experience of “incurable diseases”  and will reinterpret it from a feminist, intersectional perspective  inspired by Johanna Hedva’s manifesto: “Sick Woman Theory”. By applying  this perspective, the dialogical and intersubjective aspect of  Vasiṣṭha’s therapeutic advice to Rāma becomes much more evident,  avoiding individualistic and psychologizing interpretations on the  emotional management of our lives.

Some of India's earliest  philosophy in the Upanisads relied on an implicit theory of knowledge  that saw the mind as a malleable material that 'becomes' what it knows.  We look at how this theory, when it meets the beginnings of metaphysics,  sets the scene for speculative philosophy as a therapy of  self-expansion, self-deepening, and self-remaking. Here, rather than a  quietist or stoic purpose for philosophy - as Pierre Hadot has suggested  - we see philosophy as the mind's capacity to recreate itself in the  likeness of the cosmos.