The Early Buddhist Psychology of Philosophical Views

Most of us are familiar with the reductio ad absurdum dialectic adopted by Nāgārjuna (c. 2nd cent.) for the abandonment of all philosophical views and ideologies (sarva-dṛṣṭi-prahānāya). However, when we come to early Buddhist teachings as recorded in the Pāli suttas we encounter a completely different approach adopted for the same purpose. This is what I would like to introduce here as the Buddhist psychology of philosophical views. Without resorting to logic and dialectics, it seeks to transcend, rather than reject as false, all views and ideologies through a diagnosis of their psychological mainsprings, the psychological factors responsible for their emergence and prevalence in the world. This, of course, does not mean that the Buddhist critique of views is confined only to psychology. What it means is that besides many other factors based on logic, ontology, and epistemology, Buddhism takes into consideration the psychological dispositions that serve as the causative factors for the emergence of ideological positions. The idea behind this is that our desires and expectations have a direct impact on what we choose to believe in. Therefore, from the Buddhist perspective, metaphysical speculations are but rationalizations of our deep-seated desires and innate anxieties. Some of these speculative views, as we know, appear very lofty and profound, beautiful and awe-inspiring. Nevertheless, the Buddhist position is that they are external manifestations of our desire to satisfy our innermost yearnings and compulsive urges. From the Buddhist perspective, therefore, any critique of ideological positions or philosophical arguments should be supplemented with a psychological diagnosis of their causal genesis.

The best evidence for what I maintain here comes from the first Buddhist discourse in the Collection of Long Discourses, called The All-Embracing Net of Views.¹ It mentions some sixty-two views, which is claimed “to go beyond the confines of any particular time and locale” and is therefore capable of embracing all actual and possible philosophical views on the nature of the “self” (atta) and the “world” (loka). They all have as their epistemological ground either “logic and pure reasoning” (takka-vīmaṃsa), or experience gained in “mental concentration” (ceto-samādhi), or a combination of both.

Among the sixty-two views, there are (1) some dealing with the notion of a “creator god” (issara-nimmāṇa-vāda), (2) some pertaining to “eternalism” (sassatavāda), that is, the spiritualist view that the self (soul) is eternal while the physical body is perishable, (3) some pertaining to “annihilationism” (ucchedavāda), the materialist view that the self is the same as the physical body and therefore comes to complete annihilation at the time of death, with no prospect of postmortem existence, (4) some dealing with cosmological speculations: whether the universe is eternal or noneternal in terms of time, or whether the universe is finite or infinite in terms of space, (5) theories of “fortuitous origination” of the self and the universe (adhiccasamuppanna), and (6) some versions of “skepticism” (amarā-vikkhepa): the view that with our limited faculties we cannot fathom the true nature of the self and the universe and hence its refusal to commit itself to any philosophical stance.²

What is most interesting about the Buddhist approach to the sixty-two views is that it is neither argumentative nor confrontational. In point of fact, not a single view is accepted as true nor rejected as false. What we find here, instead, is a psychological diagnosis of how these views arise and why they persist in the world at large, and more importantly, how they can be transcended by identifying and eliminating their psychological roots.

Buddhism distinguishes between two kinds of views. The first, called attavāda, is the belief in a self, the notion that there is a permanent individualized self-entity within the empiric individuality. The second, called diṭṭhigata, embraces all forms of “speculative metaphysics intended to explain the nature of the self” (atta-vāda-patisaṃyutta) and “the nature of the universe” (loka-vāda-patisaṃyutta). Of these two kinds of views, it is the first that is primary, because in...