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Buddhist Personhood and a Doxastic Rationale for Killing

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A Buddhist Theory of Killing

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This chapter introduces in detail the Buddhist metaphysics of the person, in both soteriological and ontological registers. The implicit value of life is analysed with regard to the telos of Buddhist praxis, before describing the synchronic Buddhist conception of the person as an aggregated psychophysical entity (nāmarūpa) lacking substantive self. The same model of the person is then conceived diachronically in terms of the ontogenetic theory of the twelve links of dependent origination (paṭiccasamuppāda), theorising possible ontological bases for the aetiology of killing in human beings, with regard to volitional properties. The dependency relations between physical and mental properties of the aggregates of the person are then analysed prior to a generic account of what might doxastically justify killing, in the most general terms, for typical lethal agents. The analysis then turns to a fuller account of the person not merely as a universally reified metaphysical entity, but as a being with predicated properties of personhood and self which conceives other such propertied beings as a basis for intentional acts. This account further considers the predication of psychophysical properties as a cognitive-phenomenological basis for lethal acts, before narrowing this argument to the primal basis of volition in its role both in the commission, but also as the object of, such acts, to be continued in depth in Chap. 8, in Part II.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    SN II 3ff. otherwise specifies the functional properties of nāma as “feeling, apperception, intention, contact and attention” ie. vedanā, saññā, cetanā, phassa, manasikāro.

  2. 2.

    Gethin (1986) provides a thorough overview; cf. Harvey (1993).

  3. 3.

    We can understand by ‘tropes’ properties that are bare particulars rather than universals (e.g., a phenomenal redness, a coldness, or a dryness) specific to a place-time and not common to several.

  4. 4.

    In fact, everything, nibbanā included, is not-self: “Like all other things or concepts (dhammā) it [nibbanā] is anattā, not-self. Whereas all conditioned things (saṃkhāra—that is, all things produced by karma) are unsatisfactory and impermanent (sabbe saṃkhāra dukkhā…aniccā) all dhammā whatsoever, whether conditioned things or the unconditioned nibbanā, are not-self (sabbe dhammā anattā).” (Collins 82)

  5. 5.

    Harvey (2000, 39ff.) The sotāpanna is, by definition, also incapable of murdering his parents, an Arhat, or maliciously drawing the blood of a Buddha.

  6. 6.

    The Aṅguttara Nikāya and the Puggala-Paññatti of the Abhidhamma develop these descriptions, particularly in terms of characterologies of kinds of persons and of the differences between them (puggala-vemattatā) (see Kuan 2015).

  7. 7.

    Nāmarūpa as a dvandva compound is common to Pali and Sanskrit.

  8. 8.

    Rūpa signifies literally ‘form’ or ‘shape;’ as the first khandha however it designates that which manifests form or shape as any material entity. Hence, a drawn rectangle might be rūpa, where an imagined one wouldn’t be.

  9. 9.

    Nidanasaṃyutta (tr. Bodhi 2000, 535).

  10. 10.

    Gethin notes that “there are a number of passages in which the translation “perception” fails to make sense of the nikāyas’ usage of saññā as a technical term. Wayman suggests that it is the word “idea” that should regularly be employed as a translation of saññā. This certainly seems to make better sense of the technical usage in connection with the khandhas. A saññā of, say, “blue” then becomes, not so much a passive awareness of the visual sensation we subsequently agree to call “blue”, but rather the active noting of that sensation, and the recognising of it as “blue”—that is, more or less, the idea of “blueness”.” (1986, 36)

  11. 11.

    Different Pāli and Sanskrit transliterations appear interchangeably in the following, mainly due to differing usages of scholarly commentary.

  12. 12.

    Collins (1982, 207–8) discusses the related notions of constructed and constructive consciousness (abhisaṃkāra-viññāṇa) and their conative agency in the variable evolution of samsaric experience.

  13. 13.

    Giustarini (2011, 98) suggests that “Saṅkhāra is sometimes translated with coefficients, conditions, formations, physical or mental tensions, synergies, etc., but it is nevertheless an enigmatic term.”

  14. 14.

    Collins among others even assigns to this central feature of the person a metaphysical function: “we can understand the position of the concepts of saṃkhāra and abhisaṃkhāra in Buddhist psychological thought, and how it is that these concepts were seen in conjunction with that of viññāṇa, ‘consciousness,’ as the basis of the ultimate Buddhist account of temporality and continuity.” (1982, 202) Here, the volitional-formative work of conative human existence structures the experience, and thence existence, of time, so that the ultimate dissolution of the constructive process in nibbāna deconstructs not merely the suffering intrinsic to the skandhas and their activity (in the suttas repeatedly made equivalent to dukkha) but the possibility, and experience, of temporality per se.

  15. 15.

    See for example MN 148.

  16. 16.

    Elsewhere in the canon (e.g., DN 33, MN 140 and SN 27.9) two additional elements are given: the space and consciousness properties. Space (ākāsa) here signifies the idea of space occupied by any of the other four elements. Any physical object occupies space, and though that space is not a property of the object, the amount of space it occupies (or negotiates through various non-physical functions) is a derived property of the elements. Hamilton (2000, 72) gives examples such as “processes of swallowing, retaining and expelling” to illustrate more concrete instantiations. For the more process-oriented Abhidhammic classifications as solidity, fluidity, heat and mobility see Dhs. 175, 177; Vibh. 82–4; Dhs-a. 333–6; Vism. XI 87, 93.

  17. 17.

    Like some other sensed objects, sound might be ambiguous between rūpa and nāma, ie., a heard or experienced sound is nāma, while sound-waves themselves, as physically capturable (via the appropriate technology, including the natural human organ) might be rūpa (as are also the graphemes variously representing them as sine waves or musical notes).

  18. 18.

    For e.g., in the Sutta Nipāta; cf. DN II 62–3.

  19. 19.

    See 1. Suttantabhājanīya of the Paṭiccasamuppādavibhaṅga (Analysis of Conditional Origination) (Chap. 6 of the Abhidhamma Vibhaṅga). A third kind of kamma-formation (the ‘imperturbable’ āneñj’ābhisaṅkhāra) pertains only to those cetanās accompanying the four formless wholesome cittas, produced only in jhāna or meditative absorption states.

  20. 20.

    The āsavas are four: of sense-desire (kāmāsava), of (desiring eternal) existence (bhavāsava), of (wrong) views (diṭṭhāsava), and of ignorance (avijjāsava).

  21. 21.

    See Collins (1982, 205ff.).

  22. 22.

    This refers to normal human functioning. The formless rebirths and states of cessation are anomalous conditions of ‘mind-without-body,’ or ‘body-without-mind,’ that represent potential or actual aporiae in the Buddhist-soteriological project.

  23. 23.

    In the Abhidhamma citta is generally employed to refer to different classes of consciousness distinguished by their concomitants, reifying the qualitative objects that viññāna as the active awareness of states and events knows as a mental continuity. This echoes the passive and active senses of saṃkhārā, citta (formed of the same Pāli verbal root as the active terms meaning ‘to will’) being closely related to volition generally: the kind of mind (citta) that perdures depends largely on the kind of intention (cetanā) by which it is motivated.

  24. 24.

    Rather than being self-caused or the bearers of essential properties, dhammas/dharmas are discrete property-particulars causally dependent on other such property-particulars. They are thus not the full-blown substantive entities of rival Indian metaphysics (or their Western analogues) (see also Harvey 1993, 39; Hamilton 1996, xxix).

  25. 25.

    Confirmed in Gethin’s qualification of a purely mereological analysis of the person. For him “the khandhas are presented as one way of defining what is dukkha” (1986, 41); (cf. Hamilton 2000 passim). Their multiple correspondences with other modes of embodied existence “represent different ways of characterizing the given data of experience or conditioned existence, and are also seen as drawing attention to the structure and the sustaining forces behind it all […] the khandhas begin to take on something of a wider significance than is perhaps appreciated when they are seen merely as a breaking down of the human individual into constituent parts.” (42) The person qua khandhas is then a synecdoche for all suffering existence.

  26. 26.

    See Siderits (1997), Goodman (2004), Ganeri (2012), MacKenzie (2019), Tillemans (2020), for applications of trope-theory to the Buddhist-philosophical context.

  27. 27.

    See Lin (2013), Spackman (2012), MacKenzie (2019).

  28. 28.

    Griffiths’ formulation of the relation is of “a non-substantivist event-based interactionist psycho-physical dualism.” (1986, 112)

  29. 29.

    Indeed, the Abhidhamma describes a taxonomy by which its analyses divide and classify all the permutations of the nominal designations of the khandhas, thereby providing “hundreds of different sets of divisions for each of the five khandhas and a comprehensive analysis, by which any given conditioned dhamma can be categorized under one of the khandhas.” (Ronkin 2005, 44)

  30. 30.

    Only the Yogācāra tenet system asserts mind as an ultimate truth and entity. The Sautrāntika, while holding (unlike the Vaibhāṣika-Sarvāstivāda) a representationalist rather than direct theory of perception, with the Madhyamaka accepts the existence of external objects (bahyārtha).

  31. 31.

    This is also in part the thesis of P. Strawson in the third chapter of Individuals (1959). If, like that thesis, the differentiation of mind and body is parasitic on the notion of the person then the Buddhist qualification would be that, unlike that thesis, the person is not a substance as a particular, but a conceptual construction (either on its constitutive dhammas, or for the Madhyamaka as imputed of whatever identity-conditions conventionally constitute ‘person’).

  32. 32.

    On the Abhidhammic view, the dhammas to which the khandhas reduce define the ultimate ontology of what the person is, whereas for the Mahāyāna even these are conceptually constructed. Hence, the property of ‘personhood’ is only conceptually or conventionally real in each case.

  33. 33.

    This fictive example can of course be multiplied with the substitution of different real-world agents and their various more or less spurious reasons, from Nazi genocidal agents to indigenous elders or mediaeval Christian priests lethally punishing the sin of witchcraft, and so on.

  34. 34.

    Recall that the Abhidhamma specifies vitality (āyu) as consisting of one physical and one mental life-faculty (jīvitindriya). In the MN-a Buddhaghosa stresses the identity of vitality with the life-faculty and heat with the energy generated by action (kammajateja), where each is a necessary condition for the existence of the other.

  35. 35.

    Harvey writes: “the life-principle accepted by the Suttas is a complex of vitality, heat and consciousness. Heat is a physical process, vitality consists, according to the Abhidhamma, of one life-faculty which is physical, and one which is mental, and consciousness is mental. This complex consists of conditionally arisen changing processes, which are not identical with the mortal body (except for heat and the physical life-faculty), nor totally different from it, but partly dependent on it.” (1993, 31) One of many Nikāya expressions of this formulation is at DN II 334–335.

  36. 36.

    Harvey summarises: “Neither the two sets [of processes of nāma and rūpa], or the processes they comprise, are independent substances, for they are streams of momentary events which could not occur without the interactions which condition their arising.” (1993, 40)

  37. 37.

    The question of what kind of objects intentional objects are in this case can be for the moment suspended: we’re concerned just to delineate their intentionality, not whether they are substantively, inexistently, or nominally real or non-existent. ‘Intentional objects’ signifies whatever it is that directed consciousness is about. They might be things, properties, events, qualities or thoughts, or mental objects, though the term ‘property’ is typically used here to denote that element or object x predicated of a broader element or object y (ie. not a broader construal of x. For example, water is a property of the sea, which could be understood as an extension of water. But the sense of property meant here is that object which is not a necessary or sufficient condition for the existence of y). Given a Buddhist rejection of universals we can construe talk of properties here nominally.

  38. 38.

    There may be rare dissociative psychotic states relevant to a ‘meaningless version’ of the lethal act, that might belie this claim; but even ‘meaninglessness’ could be said to be meaningful in its deprivation of meaning. In any case it is those acts characterized by broadly familiar rational motivations with which we are here concerned.

  39. 39.

    See MMK; Chaps. 3, 4, 8, 9, 12–14, 17 and 18.

  40. 40.

    Note, however, that the cessation of life again necessarily signifies something much more than the mere fact of death, for its agent and his social milieu. The taking of life ineliminably, and in the first instance, represents any number of intensional states, such as the relief of subjective suffering, the vindication of revenge, the removal of an obstacle, the vanquishing of an enemy, and so on.

  41. 41.

    Collins’ paraphrase contains quotes from SN and Vism.

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    Martin Kovan

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Kovan, M. (2022). Buddhist Personhood and a Doxastic Rationale for Killing. In: A Buddhist Theory of Killing. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2441-5_7

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