The study of Indian Buddhist philosophy has, for the most part, been connected closely to the study of the Buddhist religion. This, of course, is just as it should be and to say that this is the case is in one sense only to state the obvious. What I wish to point out here, however, is how this may bias in certain respects our perceptions of Buddhist thought: we are drawn to focus on those issues which lend themselves to discussion in the contexts of contemporary Religious Studies or Philosophy of Religion, perhaps neglecting topics which have no immediate bearing on the concerns of these disciplines. The problem arises in part because Indian Buddhists did not categorize their intellectual pursuits in quite the same way we do, a difficulty that affects not only the study of non-Western civilizations, for similar considerations apply to the study of the pre-modern West. The topic of the present essay is a case in point: the conflict between mechanism and the various types of vitalism belongs to the domain of natural science and the philosophy thereof, but in Greek and mediaeval philosophy it crops up frequently in discussions of what we now call "philosophical psychology" or "philosophy of mind." What I will argue here is that significant features of this debate are to be found in the conflict between Buddhist thinkers and their opponents over the existence of a substantial self (dtman). Given the many issues this conflict raises, as well as the prolonged and intense philosophical research it generated in India, it is not surprising that quasi-scientific problems would have arisen in this context, for the debate about dtman was, in the end, a debate about the nature and ends of human beings. 1
Under the general heading of "vitalism," 2 historians of philosophy and science unite a great many biological and pseudo-biological doctrines. Their unifying property is the notion that a living organism