ARGUMENTS (2) 273what is said to be self-authenticated is We have existential independence or
ontological security and are omniscient, it must have a phenomenology
appropriate to confirming that claim. The simplest description will be
something like at least apparently recognizing one’s existential independence
or ontological security and one’s omniscience. There are various problems with
offering this as the description relevant for the appeal to experience as
evidence.
Suppose that you and I are looking at an ancient coin. You claim it is
Roman, and I claim it is Greek. I say I see it is Greek and regard the case as
closed. You claim I see it is Roman and regard the case as closed. But at least
one of us is wrong, and neither of us has provided any evidence by describing
the experience in a way that simply assumes that our claim is true. It is not
that I express my evidence by saying I see it is Greek; I do not thereby recite
any evidence whatever. I merely repeat my claim. If your experience is to be
evidence that the coin is Roman,^7 it must be the case that there are features
that the coin at least seems to have such that, if the coin has those features, it is
at least probably Roman. So to speak, the phenomenology of your coin-
experience must be Romanesque. For example, it may bear the likeness of a
Roman emperor rather than a Greek statesman. If I am to have evidence, the
coin must at least appear to me to have some feature such that, if the coin has
that feature, that fact supports its Greekness. For example, it may bear the
likeness of a Greek statesman rather than a Roman emperor.
The case of enlightenment experience is analogous. Simply to assert, for
some religious claim C, that one has an experience in which one recognizes or
realizes its truth, with no specification of what it is about the experience that
confirms C, is pointless so far as evidence is concerned.
Evidence about what?
Enlightenment experience is supposed to teach one about one’s nature – about
what one is. This is obvious in the cases of Advaita Vedanta (identity with
qualityless Brahman) and Jainism (being an indestructible, all-knowing self-
conscious substance). It is typical of Buddhist traditions to deny that anything
has a “same-nature” or essence. Nonetheless, it is also typical of Buddhist
traditions to hold that every item that we commonsensically regard as an
enduring thing is really composed at a time of a bundle of momentary
elements and over time of a series of momentary bundles of elements.
Whether or not one calls this a doctrine of the nature of persons,^8 the idea is
that this is what persons really are. For each of these traditions, the goal is the
truth about oneself.