without possessing some goods, and this calls (1) into question, as well as sitting uneasily
with the judgment that Buddha must be maximally great. Attributing effort and so on to
Buddha also sits uneasily with
(7) Buddha has no temporal properties.
This too is partly axiomatic: subjection to time and change would make Buddha less than
maximally salvifically efficacious, just as knowing states of affairs temporally, as they
come into being and pass away, would be less perfect than knowing them eternally. But
(7) must be held together with:
end p.76
(8) Buddha seems to non-Buddhas to have temporal properties
in the various senses already discussed.
(1)–(8) raise a number of difficulties much discussed by Buddhist thinkers. Among them
is the question of whether Buddhas can, on the model of Buddhahood explored here,
remember the past. It seems not, for on most accounts of memory, some causal relation to
a past event or events seems required, and this may be ruled out by (6) and (7). This was
of concern to Buddhists because on other grounds they wanted to say that Buddhas can
remember their previous lives, and it is hard to see how such memory, even if it is
restricted to bodies of magical transformation, can be categorized as an emergently
apparent property, as it would seemingly have to be. Another difficulty was found in the
tendency of this way of thinking to lead to something like Sankara's nondualism, a
conclusion that Buddhist thinkers wanted on many grounds to avoid.
But it is beyond the scope of this essay to look more closely at these Buddhist
discussions. They are, for the most part, discussions about whether the views of
Buddhahood that had developed by the fifth century ce or so in India required the
abandonment or modification of other items of Buddhist doctrine. They are not—again,
for the most part—based on worries about whether the set of propositions (1)–(8) is
internally consistent. It seemed so to Buddhist theorists, and it seems probably so to me.
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