Abstract. In the current literature, it is often assumed that Abhidharma Buddhists held the same essentialist view of gender. In Sexuality in Classical South Asian Buddhism, for example, José Cabezón draws on passages in Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośabhāṣya (AKBh) to describe a generalized Abhidharma Buddhist account of gender. In this interpretation, Vasubandhu and his Vaibhāṣika interlocutors only disagree about the specific reasons why genitals do not exist in the form-realm, and are otherwise in agreement that material sex faculties ‘are responsible for everything that makes people male and female’, including their sex characteristics and gendered natures. This, then, would mean that both Vasubandhu and the Vaibhāṣikas are gender essentialists.

In my paper, I agree that the above is an accurate representation of the Vaibhāṣika view, and affirm the characterisation of Vasubandhu and the Vaibhāṣikas as being in general agreement about what these sex indriyas are. As AKBh I.43cd explains of the Vaibhāṣika position and Vasubandhu reaffirms in his own account of the sex indriyas in AKBh II.2, the sex indriyas refer to an arrangement of material atoms found on the surface of each individual’s genitals. However, I argue by drawing on passages in AKBh I, II, and VI that Vasubandhu disagreed about what these sex indriyas could do. The Vaibhāṣikas argued that these material atoms were able to collectively hold causal power over the arising of sex characteristics and gendered behaviours, but Vasubandhu found that statement problematic, attacking it on three different fronts and limiting what the sex indriyas could reasonably be said to have power over.

The first line of attack involves the materiality of these atoms. At AKBh 1.42, he draws on arguments that he attributes to the Vijñānavādins, adding his own observation that since the sensory indriyas – including the sex indriyas – are material, they are not actually capable of being indriya over their professed domains – that of seeing, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. As he argues in the case of the material indriyas that the Vaibhāṣikas claim to be responsible over seeing, ‘what is it that sees? When even form is concealed, there is no obstruction of seeing; here it is only consciousness related to the eye which produces seeing’ (AKBh I.42). Applying this to the case of the sex indriyas, even the arising of sexual sensation should not be attributed to them, and would more appropriately be the domain of consciousness instead. And this appears to apply to the other things that the Vaibhāṣikas claim to be caused by the sex indriyas. While the Vaibhāṣikas claim that the sex indriyas cause differences in gendered behaviour, causing and justifying the conceptual distinction we make between women and men (AKBh II.1), Vasubandhu removes references to gendered behaviour from his own definition of the sex indriyas at AKBh II.2, and removes conceptual distinguishing as something that the sex indriyas are powerful over.

The second line of attack involves the causal powers that the Vaibhāṣikas attribute to the sex indriyas. At AKBh II.41a, Vasubandhu takes issue with the Vaibhāṣika claim that there are fundamentally real causes of similarity (sabhāgatā) that have the quality (-tā) of being the cause (bhāga) of similarity (sa) within sentient beings or a subset of sentient beings. In the case of gender, these causes of similarity explain the uniformity in the sex indriyas found in the sentient beings that are then accurately conceived of as ‘women’, and likewise for the case of men. However, Vasubandhu, rejects that there is any such thing as causes of similarity, and argues that there is no fundamental entity capable of performing such a task. Thus, for Vasubandhu, there is nothing that guarantees uniformity in the sex indriyas that we identify in different individuals. Not only that, the refutation of causes of similarity involves Vasubandhu rejecting the Vaibhāṣika claim that our concepts of ‘sentient being’, ‘woman’, and ‘man’ would only arise if there was something fundamentally real grounding and justifying it. Coupled with Vasubandhu’s earlier claim that this kind of conceptual distinguishing was the domain of consciousness and had little to nothing to do with the material indriyas, it becomes more evident that there is no fundamentally real basis or justification to the conceptual distinctions that our mind has elected to make regarding gender.

Finally, I point to his attempts to clarify his definition of an indriya, which involve a reframing of what it means for something to be a gateway of arising. While the Vaibhāṣikas attribute causal power to the collections of atoms that make up each of the material indriyas, Vasubandhu rejects that collections of atoms count as foundational entities (dravya), and insists that it is only the individual dharmas – which we conventionally group together and call ‘indriya’ – that are able to act as gateways of arising. Here, Vasubandhu identifies ādhipatya as a synonym of indriya, and then provides a definition of ādhipatya that simply means ‘being produced before what is subsequent’. Rather than pointing to some innate causal power held by each dharma, Vasubandhu simply identifies a pattern in our causal attributions. Drawing on a Sautrāntikas objection that analogises the Vaibhāṣikas as ‘trying to eat the air’ when they attribute causal power to conceptual imputations like indriyas, Vasubandhu concludes that ‘there are only dharmas and only cause and effect’. He adds that it is inaccurate to characterise indriyas as performing an activity or function – that is only a figurative expression that arises from the desire for a customary designation. Ultimately, ‘one should not cling to “the eye indriya sees” or “the consciousness cognises”’ (AKBh I.42). Thus, one should not cling to the false view that the sex indriyas perform any real activity or causal role that would provide justification for the kind of gender essentialism that the Vaibhāṣikas endorse.  

Abstract. In Circus and Philosophy: Teaching Aristotle Through Juggling, Wallace observed that there is often a lack of first-person engagement in philosophy courses. This, Wallace notes, is strange when teaching aesthetics courses, for students are usually not expected to ‘at least minimally participate in the activities or artforms that are being philosophized about.’ Wallace divided her course into two kinds of classes: (1) discussion-based days where philosophical arguments were ‘introduced and analyzed a priori’, and (2) activity days where students engaged in a practical activity that would allow them ‘grasp the material differently, seeing for themselves how the concepts directly apply.’ 

In Do the Thing: Philosophy Teaching with Practical Workshops, Nguyen and Saint-Croix discuss their experiences with adopting Wallace’s approach in their respective courses. Nguyen’s philosophy of play course incorporated game-design workshops; Saint-Croix’s Tabletop Philosophy course introduced students to a new tabletop game every other week. In Saint-Croix’s unit on moral learning, for example, students played a William James-inspired Dungeons & Dragons module where they had the first-personal experience of ‘deciding whether to keep one person in misery if doing so brings about the happiness of many others’. Saint-Croix noted that this first-personal experience allowed students to use the feelings experienced and choices made in-game as a starting point for their discussion. 

With thanks to a Yale-NUS Research Grant and the Dean of Faculty Fund, I was able to design and run a Philosophy of Games course inspired by the above approaches alongside two local game masters and designers. My intention was not only to encourage philosophy as practice, but to allow students to experience philosophy as a way of life. To this end, we designed an original tabletop role-playing game (provisionally) titled Everyday Philosophers set in a local Singaporean campaign setting. Where games like Dungeons and Dragons allow players to play as classes like fighters, bards, and clerics, Everyday Philosophers offers ten philosophical systems that are covered in the College’s Common Curriculum, including Utilitarianism, Stoicism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Islamic Philosophy, and Existentialism. To ensure the accuracy of each system, we were thankful for the input of various philosophy consultants, including Abdul Ansari, Ng Sai Ying, and Mak Rui Teng, Phoebe. 

Students were responsible for designing characters to roleplay over eleven game sessions spanning from the start to the end of the course. They also chose the philosophical system that their character would adopt. As the semester progressed, students roleplayed their character’s responses to various philosophical thought experiments and ethical dilemmas. We also scheduled periods of “downtime”, where students roleplayed interactions with their characters’ friend groups, communities, and families. In several cases, in-game events led students to decide that it was necessary for their character to give up their chosen philosophy and adopt another. What was most unexpected were students who eventually proposed to “multiclass”, adopting principles from multiple philosophies as a way of responding to the complexities of their characters’ circumstances and inner lives. This sort of semester-long gameplay, I argue, allows students to attain an additional first-personal experience: they were able to experience what it feels like to live by a philosophy covered in the Common Curriculum, and to do so in community with others who subscribe to different philosophical views. 

Abstract. Invented and coined by Daniel Paul O'Donnell, the unessay is an assignment format that encourages students to engage with course material on their own terms: they pick a topic of their own and present their ideas in a format of their own choosing. This prompts students to consider how their ideas might be presented in formats outside of the standard academic essay, and encourages them to incorporate and explore other skillsets in order to effectively communicate their understanding of course materials to external audiences. 

While the unessay has been adopted in various disciplines across the humanities such as anthropology, literature, and history, there are few to no instances of the unessay being explored in a philosophy classroom, where the emphasis is often on analytical writing and argumentation skills. This is despite the fact that many influential philosophical works were not written as academic essays: Plato's works were written as dialogues and have been performed and adapted for the stage; many South Asian philosophical root texts were written and recited as poetry; and Confucius' Analects include short stories and aphorisms. Additionally, where real-world applications of philosophy are concerned, much of public philosophy takes the form of video essays, podcasts, news articles, and Youtube lectures directed towards a lay audience. As such, I argue that it is entirely relevant for students of philosophy, who in most cases will not proceed to become academic philosophers, to be exposed to assignment formats like the unessay that will give them the opportunity to learn to communicate their philosophical ideas in other formats. 

With the support of a Yale-NUS Research Grant and the Dean of Faculty Fund, I am in the midst of a two-year study on the unessay format at Yale-NUS College, a small liberal arts college (SLAC) in Singapore. At Yale-NUS, courses have a maximum enrolment of 18 students, which is additionally conducive to personalised instruction and assignment design. The Philosophy course offerings see enrolment from a variety of majors across Humanities and Science disciplines, including Anthropology, Literature, Psychology, Economics, Mathematics and Computational Sciences, and Life Sciences. Thus, exploring the unessay additionally encourages students to explore how the philosophical ideas explored in the class might be applied to their own disciplines. 

In my study, I assigned the unessay for four philosophy courses. These spanned different topics, time periods (classical, contemporary), and levels (introductory to advanced). After students completed their standard presentation and academic essay assignments in the first half of these courses, we would proceed to the Unessay Phase, which consistently included the following four components:

1. Explaining the Unessay. A class section where I explained the unessay assignment format and the intended goals of the unessay;

2. Exploring the Unessay. A two-month period where students developed their unessays, either individually or in collaboration with each other;

3. The Unessay Symposium.  An end-of-class event where students gathered to share their finished projects with their peers and the rest of the Yale-NUS community; and

4.  The Unessay Zine. A class zine or book volume which was developed and edited alongside student collaborators for intended release to the wider community.

This study is still in progress, with some courses having completed all four components and others still in the pre-Unessay phase. The project will be complete by June 2025, at which point I plan to synthesise my findings into a paper. 

Abstract. In Essay 9, Proclus reports on Theodorus of Asine's arguments for his view that the virtues of men and women are the same. In his fourth argument, Theodorus argues from the commonality of individual parts of women and men's bodies and souls that the purpose, perfection, and virtues of their bodies and souls are the same. Proclus agrees with Theodorus' conclusion, but is troubled by Theodorus’ neglect of an important qualifier that appears in both the Republic and Timaeus: even though the virtues of women and men are the same, women are by nature inferior to men. In Essays 8 and 9, Proclus goes beyond what we find in Plato to provide an account of this natural inferiority. Notably, he theorises that there is a real distinction between masculine and feminine souls, and that 'masculine souls are more capable by nature than feminine [souls]' (<αἱ> ἀρρενωποὶ ψυχαὶ τῶν θηλυπρεπῶν δυνατώτεραι).

In the above, we see Theodorus and Proclus wrestling over the legacy of Plato and his comments on gender. Where, according to Baltzly 2013 and Tarrant 2017, Theodorus was content to take the remarks on gender in the Timaeus non-literally, Proclus believed that Plato's comments were to be taken literally, and created a metaphysical differentiation between two kinds of souls to support it. In the debates between different Classical South Asian Buddhist sects, we see similar discussions about the Buddha's assertion that there is a 'man indriya' and 'woman indriya', which I collectively call gender indriyas. The prominent school of Vaibhāṣika Ābhidharmikas took the mention of these two indriyas to be significant, given that they were part of a list of twenty-two indriyas. They believed that the gender indriyas required metaphysical accounts of their own, and in doing so provided an account of ultimately real material entities that explained and legitimized the conceptual differentiation of humans into women and men. Much like Theodorus' choice to discount the claims in the Timaeus, the Mahāyāna position found in the Lotus Sūtra and Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra also chooses to make no mention of these gender indriyas. The Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra takes Śāriputra to be a representative of the Abhidharma position, portraying him as a dogmatic figure who is so attached to rules and concepts that he is unable to truly understand emptiness as it relates to gender and other topics. The text depicts a goddess’ successful attempt to shock Śāriputra out of his rigid adherence to doctrine in favour of understanding the ultimate truth of emptiness.

With this comparison, my hope is to not only compare the different metaphysics of gender proposed by Theodorus, Proclus, and the Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra, but to ask a hermeneutical question about what it means to be the inheritors of the legacies of influential thinkers like Plato and the Buddha. Which of their words do we decide to treat as definitive (nītattha), what can we decide is merely provisional (neyyattha), and on what basis should this decision be made? And finally, at what point and in what respects should we reject their claims on gender as unsalvageable?

Blurb. "The right view is like a snake. For the Buddhists, it is not enough to grasp the right view — one must also grasp it in the right way to not be bitten by the snake. Just as there are many different ways to handle a snake and use a raft, through different representations and styles, this collection of fifteen unessays gives shape to a multitude of conversations surrounding Buddhist thought." 

The print publication of Anātman: A Buddhist Philosophy Zine was made possible by a Faculty Grant from the National University of Singapore's Buddhist Studies Group, and will be launched in 2025. For now, the web version of the zine can be found here. 

Abstract. Within the canonical Sutta Piṭaka (“Basket of Suttas”) of the classical South Asian Śrāvakayāna Buddhist tradition, the Buddha is depicted as claiming that there is something called ‘woman-indriya’ (itth-indriya) and something called ‘man-indriya’ (puris-indriya). While these claims appear only a handful of times in the extensive version of the Sutta Piṭaka that we have today, the rarity of canonical statements about gender meant that Śrāvakayāna Buddhist philosophers often invoked these two gender-related indriyas when advancing their metaphysical theories about gender. 

In current scholarship about these gender-related indriyas, it is generally accepted that they mean the same thing across the Sutta Piṭaka and the later Abhidharma Buddhist commentarial texts—they are material faculties within the bodies of individuals, determining an individual’s biological sex characteristics and gendered behaviours. I disagree. In my dissertation, I focus on demonstrating three different metaphysical accounts of the gender-related indriyas that were found within the texts of the classical Śrāvakayāna tradition, resulting in a multiplicity of attitudes about gender.

The first chapter argues, based on the classical linguistic analysis (nirvacana) of ‘woman-indriya’ and ‘man-indriya’ and descriptions within the Sutta Piṭaka, that these terms refer to whatever is most powerful (indriya) over the soteriologically negative outcome of becoming fettered to a ‘woman self’ (itth-attan) and ‘man self’ (puris-attan). Here, I argue that the invocation of ‘woman self’ and ‘man self’ means that discussions about gender-related indriyas in the Sutta Piṭaka should be understood as a further elaboration of the central claim within this collection of texts that any and all views of self are inaccurate and must be abandoned. 

My second chapter focuses on identifying what is indriya or most powerful over this soteriological outcome within the Sutta Piṭaka. Based on the Saṃyoga Sutta’s description of an individual mentally generating (manasi karoti) what is indriya or most powerful over the fettering to a gendered self, I argue that ‘indriya over woman’ and ‘indriya over man’ are not described as singular material faculties, but as series of irrational mental generations (ayoniso manasi-kāras) on the part of the individual. These involve inaccurately labelling a variety of objects of attention as belonging to 'woman' or 'man' and as 'internal to self' or 'external to self', causing the individual to not only view the world through these gendered categories, but to become fettered to a gendered self. 

My third chapter focuses on the later Abhidharma Buddhist tradition which formed around the teachings of the Sutta Piṭaka. Where current scholarship claims that there is a single Abhidharma Buddhist view of the gender indriyas, I demonstrate through records from the Mahāvibhāṣā (‘The Great Compendium’) that everything about the metaphysical status of the gender-related indriyas was up for debate. Eventually, the Abhidharma Vaibhāṣika view that these indriyas were real collections of atoms that held power over biological sex and gendered behaviour emerged as the dominant view. But even during this period, Vaibhāṣika-instructed philosophers like Vasubandhu pushed back against this view. Though he allowed that these indriyas were material faculties, he rejected that material entities could be most powerful over the arising of gendered conceptual distinctions and behaviours. He proposed a dualist account where these material indriyas were only powerful over biological sex, attributing gendered behaviour to consciousness or mind (vijñāna) instead.

Read the dissertation here. 

Volume Description. The nature of matter and the idea of indivisible parts has fascinated philosophers, historians, scientists and physicists from antiquity to the present day. This collection covers the richness of its history, starting with how the Ancient Greeks came to assume the existence of atoms and concluding with contemporary metaphysical debates about structure, time and reality. Focusing on important moments in the history of human thought when the debate about atomism was particularly flourishing and transformative for the scientific and philosophical spirit of the time, this collection covers:

• The discovery of atomism in ancient philosophy

• Ancient non-Western, Arabic and late Medieval thought

• The Renaissance, when along with the re-discovery of ancient thought, atomism became once again an important doctrine to be fully debated

• Logical atomism in early analytic philosophy, with Russell and Wittgenstein

• Atomism in Liberalism and Marxism

• Atomism and the philosophy of time

• Atomism in contemporary metaphysics

• Atomism and the sciences

Featuring 28 chapters by leading and younger scholars, this valuable collection reveals the development of one of philosophy's central doctrines across 2,500 years and within a broad range of philosophical traditions.

Read the book volume here. 

This semester's Rector's Teas showcase the diversity of the liberal arts, Sheriah Peries

Diversity Week 2024: Place, community, and identity, Glenn Chua

A recording of the talk can be found here.