Please join Cornell's Society for Buddhist Studies, for a talk by Prof. Laura Guerrero (Philosophy, William & Mary).

In a recent article Kris McDaniel has suggested that a fruitful way to understand the Abhidharma distinction between conventional reality and ultimate reality is as a distinction between two modes of being: a degenerate mode and a fundamental mode, respectively. On McDaniel’s ontological pluralist view both conventional and ultimate entities are real, but they are real in different ways. McDaniel’s proposal, and his exchange with Andrew Brenner about it, raises once again the question of whether or not conventional entities are real. Abhidharma texts generally are clear that conventional entities exist conventionally and that we can conventionally say true things about them, but what it means to call an entity, or a truth about it, conventional is unclear. Is calling something conventionally real a polite way to say of something unreal that it is useful? Or is calling something conventionally real, like McDaniel suggests, a way of indicating the particular degenerate mode of being that a real entity has? In this paper Prof. Guerrero will explore the possibility that Ābhidharmikas were ontological pluralists by examining some debates between Sarvāstivāda and Sautrāntika Abhidharma Buddhists about what exists.

This talk is funded by the GPSA-FC and open to all interested. The Buddhist Studies Seminar series is presently co-sponsored by the Departments of Anthropology, Asian Studies and Philosophy, by the South Asia Program, and by the Society for the Humanities. For accessibility queries please contact buddhiststudies@cornell.edu