Book contents
- Spirituality for the Godless
- Cambridge Studies in Religion, Philosophy, and Society
- Spirituality for the Godless
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- A Shakespearean Prologue
- Introduction
- 1 ‘A Spiritually Enlightened Individual’
- 2 ‘The Resources of a Much Earlier Phase of the Tradition’
- 3 The Distractions of Baruch Spinoza
- 4 Immanuel Kant: ‘To Regard as Petty What We Are Otherwise Anxious About’
- 5 Wittgenstein’s Cool Temple
- 6 Rilke, Shakespeare … and a Little Freud
- 7 Concealment and Revelation
- 8 Mindfulness and the Form of a Philosophical Life
- 9 Epictetus: ‘The Beginning of Philosophy …’
- 10 Ted Hughes: Evaporation, Translation, Translocation
- 11 Philosophy as an Inventive Convergence of Methods
- 12 Richard Norman: ‘The Truths It Contains Are Human Truths’
- 13 Perspectives: Marmalade Stains on the Breakfast Table
- 14 David Hume: Wanting the Natural Sentiments of Humanity
- 15 ‘What is the Difference between Love and God’s Love?’
- 16 ‘Peace, Wild Wooddove, Shy Wings Shut’
- 17 ‘Only a Little Snivelling Half-Wit Can Maintain That’
- 18 ‘The World Is Too Much with Us’
- 19 Of Self and SELF, of Ātman and Anātman
- 20 ‘I Am Myself Alone’
- 21 The Five Heaps or Skandhas
- 22 ‘We Claim That There Is a Person, but We Do Not Say That He Is an Entity’
- 23 Birds, Frogs, and Tintern Abbey
- 24 Human Resources and Hubris
- References
- Index
22 - ‘We Claim That There Is a Person, but We Do Not Say That He Is an Entity’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2021
- Spirituality for the Godless
- Cambridge Studies in Religion, Philosophy, and Society
- Spirituality for the Godless
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- A Shakespearean Prologue
- Introduction
- 1 ‘A Spiritually Enlightened Individual’
- 2 ‘The Resources of a Much Earlier Phase of the Tradition’
- 3 The Distractions of Baruch Spinoza
- 4 Immanuel Kant: ‘To Regard as Petty What We Are Otherwise Anxious About’
- 5 Wittgenstein’s Cool Temple
- 6 Rilke, Shakespeare … and a Little Freud
- 7 Concealment and Revelation
- 8 Mindfulness and the Form of a Philosophical Life
- 9 Epictetus: ‘The Beginning of Philosophy …’
- 10 Ted Hughes: Evaporation, Translation, Translocation
- 11 Philosophy as an Inventive Convergence of Methods
- 12 Richard Norman: ‘The Truths It Contains Are Human Truths’
- 13 Perspectives: Marmalade Stains on the Breakfast Table
- 14 David Hume: Wanting the Natural Sentiments of Humanity
- 15 ‘What is the Difference between Love and God’s Love?’
- 16 ‘Peace, Wild Wooddove, Shy Wings Shut’
- 17 ‘Only a Little Snivelling Half-Wit Can Maintain That’
- 18 ‘The World Is Too Much with Us’
- 19 Of Self and SELF, of Ātman and Anātman
- 20 ‘I Am Myself Alone’
- 21 The Five Heaps or Skandhas
- 22 ‘We Claim That There Is a Person, but We Do Not Say That He Is an Entity’
- 23 Birds, Frogs, and Tintern Abbey
- 24 Human Resources and Hubris
- References
- Index
Summary
It is instructive to see the intellectual fate of the Pudgalavadins, who seem to have had serious misgivings about this binary opposition – continua of events over against persisting entities – and claimed, as Bartley puts it, that ‘there was an entity called a person (pudgala) that emerged from the interactions of the five constituents’ (or skandhas) (p. 120). But they seem to have been outclassed dialectically by their opponents, whose version of the dialogue has come down to us via Vasubandhu. Not only were they outclassed but they were also stymied by conceding the metaphysics their intuitions rendered dubious.
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- Spirituality for the GodlessBuddhism, Humanism, and Religion, pp. 169 - 172Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021