Causation-by-ideation theory

subjective idealism in Mahāyāna Buddhist thought

pp. 18-25

in: Alfonso Verdu, The philosophy of Buddhism, Berlin, Springer, 1981

Abstract

As we have just seen, the scholastic theories of Hīnayāna Buddhism reduce reality to a flux of "factors' for conscious experience. In so doing they foreshadow the doctrines of the British empiricists, especially David Hume's denial of substantial personality and self-identity. The dharmas are the pluralistic factors of conscious experience whereby an apparent permanent subject stands in correlation to its world-object. This apparently self-abiding, continuous subject is the illusory effect resulting from the in-itself-discrete, quantum-like sequence of homogeneous dharma-elements of subjective awareness called vijñāna (discriminative consciousness) as they appear in coordination with their concomitant "objective" dharmas. The dharmas are spatio-temporally discrete and discontinuous; they manifest themselves as congeries or aggregates brought forth under the influence of sets of causal conditions. These causal conditions arise through the concurrence of a number of principal and subordinate causes (hetu-pratyaya). This pluriform conception of causality runs parallel to the pluralistic nature of the dharmas themselves.