Let's read the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye!

[Antonio the Sixth]

Fascinating stuff. I completely agree that any sound epistemology has to start from somewhere, and that "somewhere" includes the sensory perceptions that are actually real to us, and will keep being real no matter how much we try to doubt them. I don't think sensory perceptions are the only thing that's true about, though. Abstract thought is just as real, and isn't something we humans can turn off any more than our senses. And then there are emotions, which can never be reduced to a given sensory input, and which certainly seem necessary if we want to even have a hope of understanding what suffering is. Consciousness, as a whole, is irreducibly true, but that's a broader and more complex entity than just senses. There's a whole world in there.

As for metaethics, I have to agree that its necessity as a field of study at this point is largely a product of a lot of very bad ideas that philosophers in the past century or so have begun spreading around. Although it does have some uses against some older bad ideas as well (as you might remember from our discussions on theodicy).

[Antonio the Sixth]

Fascinating stuff. I completely agree that any sound epistemology has to start from somewhere, and that "somewhere" includes the sensory perceptions that are actually real to us, and will keep being real no matter how much we try to doubt them. I don't think sensory perceptions are the only thing that's true about, though. Abstract thought is just as real, and isn't something we humans can turn off any more than our senses. And then there are emotions, which can never be reduced to a given sensory input, and which certainly seem necessary if we want to even have a hope of understanding what suffering is. Consciousness, as a whole, is irreducibly true, but that's a broader and more complex entity than just senses. There's a whole world in there.

Buddhist epistemology classifies consciousness as a sense! The six senses are sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, and thought or consciousness; the six objects of the senses are light, sound, physical bodies, flavors, odors, and objects of mental perception.

Fascinating. I don't think I can agree with this (thought seems to me like it has a fundamentally different role to play than other senses, especially since it can relate to and interact with those senses in a way the others can't with each other) but it's at least a more interesting and useful division than the traditional Western view of The Mind as something purely abstract and detached from The Real World.

I'm more interested in how Buddhist epistemology relates to emotions and volition specifically, though. Especially given that suffering is correctly diagnosed as the one feature of life most in need of addressing, and since the way of addressing it is typically framed as a form of renunciation of or at least distanciation from one's desires. I don't know how one can arrive at that without a theory of the mind as a fundamentally emotive entity.