Immaterialism is the idea that matter is a mistaken, theoretically incoherent concept, so that it makes little sense that any such thing exists. In the West, this idea has been articulated most eminently by the Scottish empiricist George Berkely in the 17th century, whose main argument was that so long as all that we know is found within the domain of perception, it makes little sense to see the objects of our knowledge as ingrained in lifeless matter. Some of Berkeley’s key moves were anticipated by central Buddhist Mahāyāna philosophers, mainly Nāgārjuna (2-3rd C CE) and Vasubandhu (4th century CE). While the latter’s argument on the infinite divisibility of matter is better known and echoes similar ideas raised in the West, the full force of the former’s position has yet to be appreciated. Nāgārjuna argued for the impossibility of there being a substantial level of reality, which would have svabhāva - own-being, self-nature - and which could interact with and produce other levels of reality that are distinct from it. My interpretation is that matter is meant to be precisely this impossible, incoherent, level of reality.

These questions address a variety of concerns related to contemporary understandings of consciousness. Here, we will look at these arguments and the world-picture that emerges from them, asking whether it must be idealist, non-dualist, or skeptical, suggesting that the metaphysical consequences are significant for the philosophy of science. We will also examine two more arguments that relate to these questions and that to the best of my knowledge are new, which rely on the question of the relation between the whole and its parts.

Eviatar Shulman is Chair of the Department of Comparative Religion at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and member of the Department for Asian Studies. He has worked and published extensively in different areas of Buddhist philosophy and religion, including two monographs – Rethinking the Buddha: Early Buddhist Philosophy as Meditative Perception (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and Visions of the Buddha: Creative Dimensions of Early Buddhist Scripture (Oxford University Press, 2021). He cultivates an interest in questions of consciousness and reality, and some of his recent work has begun to address such question in a comparative perspective.