Vasubandhu and the Denial of External Objects

     Vasubandhu, the first century CE Indian philosopher was the creator of Yogacara Buddhism, one of the two main schools of Mahayana Buddhism. Yogacara means the practice of yoga, however what many people don’t know is that Vasubandhu denied the existence of external objects, his way of making sense of the doctrine of emptiness attributed to Mahayana Buddhism. This argument was in response to the representationalist account of Buddhism in which there is an external object and that object is represented in the mind. The same process occurred in Western philosophy in the 1700 England with Locke and Berkeley completely independently of the Indians. His argument is that the world consists of nothing but impressions like the case of someone seeing unreal fibers on the moon who has bad eyes. The person with bad eyes, sees unreal fibers on the moon when there is nothing there. He argues that all of our impressions are like the fibers on the moon for the person with bad eyes, i.e. they seem to represent something in the external world when there is nothing there. The defense is that there are things about experience that suggest external objects creating our representations such as the empirical reality of experience and the intersubjective notion of objects. Empirical reality of experience involves multiple things such as when a person enters a room that he has been to before, the objects are in the same location that he left them and when a person drops an object, it always falls to the ground. Things also tend to have a vivacity that they don’t have in dreams. The intersubjective status of objects says that when you see an object in a room, for instance, the other people see the same object that you see. Vasubandhu uses karma as a reply to this objection. The initial step in the argument is that when people go to Hell (The Buddhists regarded Heaven and Hell as temporary states, in addition to reincarnation and nirvana), there are demons there that  torture people and the demons karma does not place them in a lower place due to the torturing. Therefore, the demons must not be real entities like the rest of the world, and in fact they are projections of the people’s karma. Thus they can be seen as a massive hallucination of the people’s karma. The argument is that the world is also a cumulative hallucination due to the populations collective karma. For instance, dogs are color blind and have increased smell, and this is a consequence of their karma, and the same goes for humans. They collectively experience what is central to their karma. Now the question is, why accept this argument over the standard interpretation that there is external objects? Vasubandhu invokes the principle of lightness. This says that you should go with the theory that has the fewest assumptions and positing an external object adds assumptions beyond positing no external object. Vasubandhu introduces his own hypothesis of karma. However, we can appeal to this example without resorting to karma. For example, there is a famous play, where the woman who has just had her husband killed feels there is blood on her hands and washes them, when the audience member sees that there is really nothing there. So there must be some causal laws connecting past desires and current events. Perhaps these causal laws have a role to play in our experience.