Selfless Minds: A Contemporary Perspective on Vasubandhu's Metaphysics

Selfless Minds offers a new interpretation of no-self metaphysics in Vasubandhu's Abhidharmakosa-Bhasya. Monima Chadha reads Vasubandhu as defending not only eliminativism about self but also about persons, and illusionism about the sense of self and all kinds of self-representation. This radical no-self thesis presents several challenges for Abhidharma Buddhist philosophy of mind. Even if we then grant that there is no self, we are left with deeper questions about the sense of self or self-representations implicated in our ordinary everyday experience and thought about the world and ourselves. And if we grant that there are no persons, questions remain about the status of our person-related concerns and interpersonal practices. Selfless Minds answers these questions on behalf of the Abhidharma Buddhist. The first part of the book defends the hypothesis that we can salvage much of our experience and thought without implicating self-representations. The second part of the book examines the revisionary implications of the no-person metaphysics. Some of these seem unpalatable, if not downright absurd. This, she argues, give us reason to re-evaluate both the Abhidharma metaphysics and our ordinary person-related practices and concerns in light of each other by using some sort of wide reflective equilibrium. Selfless Minds is a contribution to cross-cultural philosophy that studies the nature of selfless minds from a place at the crossroads of different traditions and disciplines: philosophy in the traditional Buddhist and contemporary Western traditions, and contemporary cognitive sciences.