The Idea of Self-East and West: A Comparison between Buddhist Philosophy and the Philosophy of David Hume

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Because it mediates between such different universes of discourse, comparative philosophy assumes great intellectual risks. After all, there is difficulty enough in trying to interpret a philosopher who is close to us in time and culture. Take David Hume as an example. Even British philosophers, whose historical favourite he seems to be, engage in endless debate over the exact meaning of his philosophy, details of which he left in disarray, as if his candor and clarity were a trap for those who wished to interpret him with genuine rigor. Yet though Hume is, in a sense, unknown to us, there is a strange, at least surface likeness between his dissolution of objects and selves and that undertaken by the Buddhists, especially those of the Theravada persuasion. What can or should we make of the likeness? Strangely or not, it extends to the human temper of the Buddhists, who were always urging themselves to be dispassionate and benevolent. I assume that they would approve of the man, Hume, who described himself, accurately enough, as "of mild dispositions, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions." Yet how could the Theravada philosophers resemble him deeply? I see them in my mind's eye as orange-clad monks who obey a whole host of monkish rules, who go out begging in the morning and then, prayer and ritual apart, sit memorizing traditional texts and filling palm leaves with faithful exegesis. How could they, dogmatic, scripture- crammed, obsessively analytical, Nirvana-bound monks, their minds filled with "aggregates," "elements," "bases," and "faculties," with the Four Noble Truths, and with the cycle of Dependent Origination, have thought essentially like Hume, the gentlemanly Scotsman avid for literary fame, "the Atheist" skeptical of every received truth, who was called, with joking unkindness, "that fattest of Epicurus's Hogs"?

In the field of East-West comparative philosophy, one can trace two opposing tendencies. One school is very keen on differentiation. It holds that the East brought forth "religious mystical philosophy," the West "critical rationalism", thus East and West can never meet. The other school tends to over- look cultural and semantic differences and thus overemphasizes similarities.

I believe that a comparative study of East-West thought should avoid such extremes. It should, on the one hand, refrain from generalizations such as "the mystical East" and "the rational West," and on the other hand, not be too keen on identification. It is relatively easy to point out parallel features when comparing systems of philosophy. It is a more delicate task to discover behind such similarities subtle differences in mood and method. However, such variations, if brought to the surface and juxtaposed, may provide interesting material for a comparative study.

A philosophy, whether that of an individual or that of a group, is basically the expression of one's mode of being in the world. The philosopher tries to convey this intuitively felt mode of being through interrelated statements which, in their entirety, are called "a system" of philosophy. The verbal expression of the so-called "philosophical system" is of course influenced by linguistic and cultural conventions of the philosopher's era.

In comparing the views of an eighteenth-century British philosopher with those of ancient India, so far removed in space and time, it is essential that we try and see beyond the verbal structure, into the basic intuition that created the words. In order to reach beyond the conceptual abstraction to the basic intuition, I have presented reports of psychotic states of mind and of drug experiences.