NOTES 3697 I Corinthians 15: 3, 4.
8 For Vedanta, the Vedas and Upanishads with the authoritative commentaries on these
texts by Badarayana and others; for Jainism, the Jaina Sutras; for Theravada Buddhism,
the Pali Canon.
9 I must have found this version in A. L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India (New York:
The Macmillan Company, 1954) but I cannot relocate it.
10 Maitri Upanishad I, 3–4.
11 H. C. Warren, Buddhist Scriptures (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1959), p. 186.
12 This is not true for the other varieties of Vedanta, or for all versions of Mahayana
Buddhism.
13 Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan and C. A. Moore (eds), A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 513. Hereafter cited as “RM.”
14 RM, p. 269.
15 Herman Jacobi, trans., Jaina Sutras (New York: Dover Publications, 1962; originally
published in 1896); I, p. 264.
16 Jaina Sutras, II, p. 64.
17 RM, p. 260.
18 RM, p. 284.
19 H. C. Warren, Buddhism in Translations (New York: Atheneum Press, 1969), p. 146.
20 RM, op. cit., p. 125.
21 Also, of course, nirvana – whose nature will be discussed in a later chapter.
22 This will be clearer after we have discussed the conceptual contexts within which the
diagnoses and cures are held.
4 What sorts of religious experience are there?
1 Exactly how many sensory modalities there are seems to be a matter of dispute. Wondering
how many current theory offered us, I went to our local bookstore to check out the
introductory textbooks in use in psychology, which in the local context seemed at the
time not to differ greatly from introductory physiology. Three texts were in use, and
while each ridiculed traditional philosophers like Aristotle and Locke for thinking that
there were five sensory modalities, they themselves differed as to how many there are;
eleven, thirteen, and seventeen were proposed. Nothing argued here requires that there
be five, eleven, thirteen, or seventeen sensory modalities. There are at least the five
noted.
2 The relevant account here is of course enormously complex; by the time beliefs based on
commonsense perceptual experience are purified by filtering them through contemporary
theory, it is plausible that (say) experience of God, if it is reliable at all, is the basis for
beliefs that need less filtering than their perceptual cousins.
3 Or perhaps sub-kind, since all are sensory experiences.
4 Anything having this property, or the next, has it essentially.
5 There are two ways of having the property not being alive – having been alive and now
being dead, and not being capable of life. Corpses have the former, rocks the latter. I do
not intend that this way of putting things entails the existence of negative properties –
it is fine with me if not being alive just amounts to lacking being alive.
6 There are complications here that we need not get into in detail. Suppose that something
like traditional monotheism is true, a monotheism that includes (a) If anything exists
that might not have existed, then God exists. Any actual experience of sort B is something
that might not have existed. So if (a) is true, God exists. But God exists entails (something
along the lines of) There is a self-conscious being of impressive holiness whose presence