In Buddhism and in Kant, there exists a common quest for an incompatible yet harmonious mutual dependence between the constraining of all possible phenomena within the bounds of natural causality and the spiritual liberation from such causal chains: saṃsāra vs. nirvāṇa in Buddhism and nature vs. freedom in Kant. Kant believes that transcendental epistemology is necessary to resolve said paradox, and this position has proven so incomprehensible for later thinkers that philosophers nowadays still feel compelled to defend Kant. Meanwhile, in Buddhism, debates continue to rage on whether epistemology constitutes a proper means to explain the dependence, and such debates have resulted in the split of Mahāyāna Buddhism into Madhyamaka and Yogācāra, and subsequently Madhyamaka into Svātantrika and Prasaṅgika. The mainstream understanding of the epistemology in the philosophical traditions of Kant and Buddhism is problematic because the cognitive system is understood to be operating ontologically in time. I shall attempt to demonstrate that the ontological assumption in the mainstream understanding is the root cause for both the difficulty in appreciating Kant's transcendental idealism and the indeterminable position of epistemology in Buddhism, especially Dignāga's anti-realistic epistemology. I will also defend epistemology by denying the ontological attribution to the epistemic system and by establishing what I term “critical epistemology.” This entails focusing on the need for an additional, distinct kind of causality (causality of freedom) on top of the natural causality in both traditions, be it textually or philosophically. The causality of freedom only necessitates the cause of cognition and its relation to all cognitions, whereas the causality of nature is only effective in the results of cognition but never on the cause of cognition. Although the two kinds of causality operate independently, they constitute a formal unity in the realization of every possible cognition. The orthogonality between the two kinds of causality sharply distinguishes the free (reflexively cognizing) status from the constrained (reflexively cognized) status of a person; furthermore, its empty inner product, i.e., the empty impact these two kinds of causality exert upon each other, makes sense of each vector subspace (dimension), namely ideality and reality, in all possible realized cognitions, thus culminating in a single world of “experience.”
目次
1. Introduction 1 1.1 The Problems and General Ideas of the Investigation 1 1.2 Analyses of the Problematics 11 1.3 Backgrounds of the Problems 20 1.3.1 Background in Buddhism 20 1.3.1.1 Two Truth Theory in Buddhism 20 1.3.1.2 Probability for Critical Epistemology in Buddhism – Especially with the Clues in Chinese Commentaries 31 1.3.2 Kant: Critical Epistemology and Transcendental Idealism 42
2 The Problem of Kant's Third Antinomy on Freedom 51 2.1 The Problem of the Third Antinomy 56 2.2 Realistic Presentation of the Thesis and Two-World Reading of Its Modification of Transcendental Idealism 63 2.3 Kant's Proposal. Transcendental Idealism as the Resolution to the Antinomy, Two-Aspect Reading and Support from Critical Epistemology 73
3 Dignāga in the Middle of the Madhyamaka-Yogācāra Conflict, Especially on the Issue of Causality 83 3.1 Nāgārjuna's Madhyamaka Worries about Absolute Causes in Relation to His Project of Practice 92 3.2 Plural Vasubandhus and Dignāga 105 3.3 Yogācāra Dignāga and the Epistemological Turn in Buddhist Philosophy, Especially Regarding the Non-temporality of Cognitive Causality and the Allowability for a Holistic Model of Epistemology in Contrast to Proceduralistic Model in Time 113
4 The Ontological Neutralism in Dignāga's Epistemology – Critical Reconstructive Interpretation of Related Passages in NMukh and PS(V) 121 4.1 The Two Pramāṇa-s 121 4.2 Formal Conformity between Pramāṇa and Prameya 126 4.3 Twofold Appearance 132 4.4 The Claim about Self-awareness: Pramāṇa, Prameya and Phala Are Not Separate from One Another 147 4.5 The Holistic Argument for Mental Perception from Verse 6 on 158 4.5.1 Valid Cognition Is Holism 158 4.5.2 Exhaustive Analysis of All Kinds of Mental Perception and Pseudo-mental Perception 160 4.5.3 Mental Awareness Is Self-evident (Perceptual) 165 4.5.4 Appendix. Explanation for the Twofold Appearance in the Demonstrative Fact of “Recollection” 168 4.6 Appendix. Jinendrabuddhi – The Difficulty in the Sharp Distinction between the Object-aspects in Accordance with the Two Pramāṇa-s 174
5 Conclusion 199 5.1 Freedom and the World. General Review of the Critical Understanding of Kantian and Buddhist Epistemology 199 5.1.1 Freedom and Phenomenal Causal Exhaustion – West (Kant) and East (Buddhism) 199 5.1.2 Defending Kant's Transcendental Idealism on Freedom in the Thesis of the Third Antinomy 202 5.1.3 The Madhyamaka-Yogācāra Conflict 204 5.1.4 The Epistemological Situation Talks 205 5.1.5 Conclusive Remark 208 5.2 Freedom and Hope. Practical Goals/Consequences of Doing Critical Epistemology 209 5.2.1 Radical Evil, Banal Evil and Responsibility in Light of Critical Epistemology 209 5.2.2 Nirvāṇa as One Necessary Possibility for Awareness to Get Rid of Phenomenal Causal Exhaustion and the Goal of Cultivation in Buddhism 215 5.2.3 Rejection of the Experience of Non-Conceptual Perception: A Tentative Response to Arendt's Pardoning Eichman 218 5.2.4 Conclusive Remark 222 5.3 Logic and Spiritual Development 222 5.3.1 Transcendental Logic Is Epistemological Logic, Whose Structure Is Necessarily Coined and Expressed in All possible Phenomena via Cognition/Self-cognition 222 5.3.2 Inference vs. Dialectics of reductio ad absurdum 228 5.3.3 Logic and Practice: The Same Logic, but Different Employments. 231
