philosophy.  Given the state of Buddhist scholarship
　　   in his day, he certainly  would  not have been aware
　　   of the Yogaacaara doctrines that so closely parallel
　　   his  own.  While  the question  of the influence  of
　　   basic Buddhist  doctrine  upon James'  thought  must
　　   remain  an open question, there is no doubt  that he
　　   developed  his  philosophy  of  "experience   only''
　　   independently  of that system.  Therefore, these two
　　   highly analogous philosophies arose independently in
　　   second-century  India  and  nineteenth-century   New
　　   England.

　　   I. THE PRIMACY OF EXPERIENCE

　　   William James stated that he intended to formulate a
　　   philosophy  based  solely  on postulates  drawn from
　　   experience,  and he called  his  philosophy  radical
　　   empiricism:

　　   To be radical. an empiricism must neither admit into
　　   its constructions  any element  that is not directly
　　   experienced, nor exclude from them any element  that
　　   is   directly   experienced.(12)

　　   Guided  by this criterion,  he derived  what for him
　　   was the primary and incontestable fact:

　　   The  first  and  foremost  concrete   fact  is  that
　　   consciousness of some sort goes on... [;] 'states of
　　   mind' succeed each other.(13)

　　   That  is,  the  principal  fact  of  experience   is
　　   experience itself.  This fact, for James, is also an
　　   encompassing  fact.  Since an experience consists of
　　   its content, there is no reason, nor is it possible,
　　   to imagine an experience apart from its content:

　　   What  represents  and  what  is represented  is here
　　   numerically  the same;...  we must remember  that no
　　   dualism   of  being  represented   and  representing
　　   resides  in the experience  per se....  There  is no
　　   self-splitting of it into consciousness and what the
　　   consciousness　　 is   `of.' Its   subjectivity   and
　　   objectivity   are  functional   attributes   solely,
　　   realized only when the experience  is 'taken,' i.e.,
　　   talked-of,   twice...   by   a   new   retrospective
　　   experience.(14)

　　   Thus, for James, the content  should be included  in
　　   the category of experience rather than in a separate
　　   category. Just as an experience is indistinguishable
　　   from  its  content, so its  content  is inextricable
　　   from  the experience.  James  states  that the first
　　   great pitfall that his radical  empiricism  prevents
　　   is  "an  artificial  conception   of  the  relations
　　   between knower and known."(15)