Journal of the International Association of

Buddhist Studies

Volume 18 • Number 2· Winter 1995

On Method

D. SEYFORT RUEGG

Some Reflections on the Place of Philosophy in the Study of Buddhism

LUIS O. GOMEZ

Unspoken Paradigms: Meanderings through the Metaphors of a Field

JOSE IGNACIO CABEZON

Buddhist Studies as a Discipline and the Role of Theory

TOM TILLEMANS

Remarks on Philology

C. W. HUNTINGTON, JR.

A Way of Reading

JAMIE HUBBARD

Upping the Ante: budstud@millenium.end.edu

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The Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies (ISSN 0 1 93-600XX) is the organ of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, Inc. It welcomes scholarly contributions pertaining to all facets of Buddhist Studies. JIABS is published twice yearly, in the summer and winter.

Address manuscripts (two copies) and books for review to Professor Donald Lopez, Editor, JIABS, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, 3070 Frieze, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor MI 48109-1285 USA.

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© 1995 by the International Association of Buddhist Studies, Inc. The editor gratefully acknowledges the support of the Center for Chinese Studies and the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures of the University of Michigan.

EDITORIAL BOARD

Donald S. Lopez, Jr. Editor-in-Chief

Robert Buswell Steven Collins

Collett Cox Luis O. Gomez

Oskar von Hinuber Padmanabh S. Jaini

Shoryu Katsura Alexander Macdonald

D. Seyfort Ruegg Ernst Steinkellner

Erik Zurcher

Editorial Assistant Alexander Vesey

Contributors to this issue:

JOSE IGNACIO CABEZON is Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Iliff School Theology in Denver, Colorado. His books in­clude A Dose of Emptiness and Buddhism and Language.

LUIS O. GOMEZ is C. O. Hucker Professor of Buddhist Studies and Adjunct Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan. His research interests and publications focus on Mahayana Sutra literature and the commentarialliterature (especially in the Madhyamaka tradi­tion), early Chan in China and_ Tibet, Buddhist traditions of faith and devotion, and the psychology of religion.

JAMIE HUBBARD holds the Yehan Numata Chair in Buddhist Stud­ies at Smith College. He is currently preparing books on Buddhist heresies in Tang China and contemporary Japan.

C. W. HUNTINGTON, JR. is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York. His most recent publication-a study of the Akutobhaya and its connection with the Chinese Chung Lun-is forthcoming in Etudes Asiatiques.

D. SEYFORT RUEGG is currently Professorial Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

TOM TILLEMANS is Professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. His research centers on Indian and Tibetan Buddhism, in particular the Madhyamaka and logic and epistemology.

D. SEYFORT RUEGG

Some Reflections on the Place of Philosophy in the Study of Buddhism

I

It is surely no exaggeration to say that philosophical thinking constitutes a major component in Buddhism. To say this is of course not to claim that Buddhism is reducible to any single philosophy in some more or less restrictive sense but, rather, to say that what can be meaningfully described as philosophical thinking comprises a major part of its proce­dures and intentionality, and also tha~ due attention to this dimension is heuristically necessary in the study of Buddhism. If this proposition were to be regarded as problematic, the difficulty would seem to be due to certain assumptions and prejudgements which it may be worthwhile to consider here.

In the first place, even though the philosophical component in Bud­dhism has been recognized by many investigators since the inception of Buddhist studies as a modern scholarly discipline more than a century and a half ago, it has to be acknowledged that the main stream of these studies has, nevertheless, quite often paid little attention to the philosoph­ical. The idea somehow appears to have gained currency in some quar­ters that it is possible to deal with Buddhism in a serious and scholarly manner without being obliged to concern oneself with philosophical con­tent. One has only to look at several dictionaries to see that the European terminology so often employed to render Pali, Sanskrit and Tibetan tech­nical terms is on occasion hardly coherent and did not reflect the state of philosophical knowledge even at the time these dictionaries were first published. This impression is reinforced by many a translation from these three languages as well as by some work on texts written in them.

This article is an expanded version of the presidential address delivered at the 11th International Conference of the International Association of Buddhist Studies at Mexico City in October 1994.

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An example of such lexical incoherence is the rendering of Sanskrit salJljna and Pali sanna "idea, notion" by the English word "perception" if, at the same time, the epistemological term pratya~a (pramafJa) is to be rendered as "(direct) perception"; for if in a well thought-out and coherent terminology salJljna is to be translated by "perception," pratyak~a could not be, and conversely. A somewhat more difficult case is the rendering "form" for nlpa, rather than the more precise "(elementary [mahabhuta = dhatu] and derived [bhautika], resistant) matter (for rupaskandha) / visible matter (having color and shape) (for rupayatana)." In the Abhidharma, nlpa is the first of the five skandhas "Groups"; and in the ayatana classification of the Sarvastivadins, the rupin Bases are nos. 1-5 and 7-11, the rupayatana or visible matter Base being no. 7 which is the sense-object of the ca~urindriyayatana (Base no. 1); and in the dhatu classification, the rupin Elements are nos. 1-5 and 7-11, the rupadhatu Element being no. 7 in relation to the ca~urdhatu (Element no. 1) and the cak~urvijnanadhatu (Element no. 13). Hence, when adopting the rendering "form" for rupa one is obliged to consider whether, in philosophical usage, this equivalent can actually bear the required meanings; a glance at a good dictionary of philosophi­cal terminology will reveal that the term "form" in fact very seldom does.! These are, then, fundamental terms and concepts in Buddhist

1. In the list of khandhas / skandhas, even while rendering safifia by "idea" the philosopher K. N. layatilleke retained "form" for rupa in his Early Bud­dhist Theory of Knowledge (London, 1963), e. g. p. 283. Conversely, Y. Karunadasa rendered rupa by "matter" while continuing to use "perception" tor safifia in his Buddhist Analysis of Matter (Colombo, 1967). Bhikkhu NaQ.ananda, Concept and Reality in Early Buddhist Thought (Kandy, 1971), also kept "perception" for safifia. These translations were given in The Pali Text Society's Pali-English Dictionary (London, 1921-25), and earlier in R. C. Childers, A Dictionary of the Pali Language (London, 1875). Already in 1939 the Critical pali Dictionary (Copenhagen, 1924 ff.) s. v. arCtpa had rendered rCtpa by "corporeal, material" (beside "form"!); it however curiously conflated safifia and vififiafJa, translating both terms by "conscious(ness)" s.vv. asafifia and avififialJa. The rendering "corporeality" for rCtpa(skandha) was adopted by Nyanatiloka / Nyanaponika, Buddhist Dictionary (4Kandy, 1980), which used "perception" for safifia. Much earlier, T. Stcherbatsky had employed "matter," "ideas" and "consciousness" to render these three skandha­terms in his Central Conception of Buddhism (London, 1923), elaborating on results obtained previously by O. Rosenberg (see Die Probleme der buddhistischen Philosophie [Heidelberg, 1924], where the renderings "das Sinnliche," "Unterscheidung" and "Bewusstsein" have been used). L. de La Vallee Poussin has frequently used "matiere" and "notion" in his translations. In his note "Sarpjfia," in C. Vogel, ed., Jfianamuktavali, 1. Nobel Com­memoration Volume (New Delhi, 1959) 59-60, H. von Glasenapp sought to

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thought for which no philosophically adequate translation has yet been agreed. Another kind of difficulty is presented by the Sanskrit term pramalJa, which has been variously translated as right / correct knowl­edge / cognition, veridical awareness, valid knowledge, validating knowledge, epistemic norm, standard, and authority, all of which render­ings are no doubt appropriate in some context either as denotations or, at least, as connotations of the word. 2 Until such problems associated with philosophical terminology and concepts have been first recognized to exist and then adequately investigated, lexicography and translation, as well as interpretation, will rest on insecure foundations, as will Buddhist studies in any full sense of this term.

In part, this situation might be though to be due to what could be called a philological fallacy were one to take the work philology exclusively in its narrow sense of textual study inclusive of content and context-a well-established sense that has long been recognized in classics for example. But since I understand the word philology in its full and com­prehensive sense, I would reject the expression "philological fallacy" as a suitable tag for the problem in question. The fallacy has rather to do with the presumption that the study of the linguistic expression in texts can somehow be divorced from content.

Secondly, the issue has been complicated by the dichotomy between philosophy and religion that has been current in western thought, and accordingly in academic structures. In the western tradition, philosophy has indeed very often defined itself in opposition to religion, and the fact that scholars of Buddhism may regard the subject of their studies as both a religion and a philosophy has then led to the most extraordinary misun­derstanding and confusion. If, for its students, Buddhism is both a phi­losophy and a religion in some meaningful sense of these two words, it is

clarify the issue, distinguishing between "Unterscheidungsvermogen" for sa'!ljnii ("wobei die Bedeutung 'separates Objekt einer Wahrnehmung oder Vorstellung' mitschwingt") and "Bewusstsein" for vijniina. Whilst rendering sa'!ljnii by "perceptions . . . et les notions qui en resultent," J. Filliozat rendered both senses together by "prise de conscience" in L'Inde classique, vol. 2 (Hanoi, 1953) 340 with 521; on 519 he explained nlpa as "including everything which is material in the universe." In an early effort to understand Abhidharma / Abhidhamma thought, H. Guenther rendered sannii by "sen­sation" and nlpa by "form" and "Gestalt"; see his Philosophy and Psychology in the Abhidharma (Lucknow, 1957) 58 and 151 (where only in his note did he provide a good explanation of nlpa). For sa'!ljnii, cf. also D. Seyfort Ruegg, Le traite du tathiigatagarbha de Bu stan Rin chen grub (Paris, 1973) 76n.2,117n.1. 2. See below, § IX.

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neither according to certain current definitions conditioned by the history of these subjects. Thus, Buddhist thought is not philosophy in the per­spective of e. g. logical positivism or linguistic philosophy as it was gen­erally practised earlier in this century. Nor has Buddhism normally been a religion in the sense of belief in a supreme being either as creator god or as a supernatural entity who can intervene in the natural order of things (thus giving rise to very difficult problems of theodicy). In addi­tion, the problems of (self-)definition which the study of Buddhism has thus had to confront may have to do with the place apart in the humani­ties that philosophy and religious studies have so often been assigned­indeed with the place that they have sometimes been quite content to assign themselves.

Thirdly, the problem has no doubt been connected with the presump­tion that anything regarded as so quintessentially Greek, and hence "Occidental," as philosophy cannot possibly be found in anything "Oriental."3 For-according to a widely held view-does not "Oriental thought" concern itself chiefly with the mystical and the irrational, or at best with what is called "wisdom" as opposed to reasoned philosophical thinking and the search for truth (defined in philosophy as the property of a proposition or state of affairs)?4 Moreover, does not the interest evinced in mind by Indian and Buddhist philosophy place it outside the pale of true academic philosophy, so long at least as mind-that so-called "ghost in the machine"-was regarded as an epiphenomenon of the material, or of behavior, and was not held to be a suitable subject for genuine philosophical inquiry?

A further drawback for the study of Buddhist philosophy is the fact that it has all too often been studied in isolation from Indian thought as a whole, and from Indology. It should be clear that both in its structures

3. A discussion has turned round the question whether Sanskrit even has a word that corresponds precisely to "philosophy," and whether the concept of philosophy is an indigenous, "ernie," category in Indian thought. See the valuable remarks in W. Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understand­ing (Albany, 1988); id., Tradition and Reflection (Albany, 1991), Chap. 7. 4. Confusion has probably been created, at least for non-specialists, by the translation of prajiiii by "wisdom" when one of the chief meanings of this term is discriminative knowledge (pravicaya = rab tu rnam par 'byed pa) bearing on the dharmas. See e. g. Vasubandhu, Abhidharmako§abhii~ya i.2b and ii.24 (prajiiii dharmapravicayaf:z), and PrajfHikaramati, Bodhicaryii­vatiirapaiijikii ix.I. This confusion has then been compounded by rendering vikalpa by "discrimination" when this term means "(dichotomic) conceptual construction." Even for jiiiina = ye fes, "wisdom" is a rather inadequate translation.

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and its development Buddhist thought must be investigated to a consider­able extent in its relation with Brahmanical and Jain thought.

Similarly, the study of Buddhist thought outside India must take account also of contextual factors such as Taoism, shamanism, Shinto­ism, Bon, etc.

But the undifferentiated idea of "Oriental thought," or "Asian philoso­phy," as some sort of monolithic entity, is of course a construct, a largely imaginary creature inhabiting the minds of some modern writers. At best, as often employed, the expression "Oriental thought" is of limited utility as a shorthand.

Still, very interestingly for us as students of Buddhism, to the extent that there really is substance in the idea of an "Asian philosophy," histor­ically it is in large part constituted precisely by Buddhism. For it is Buddhism that has linked together so many Asian civilizations from Afghanistan and Kalmukia in the west to Japan in the east, and from the northern Mongol lands to Sri Lanka in the south. At the same time, however, we have in fact long known of the enormously large and diverse ways of thought represented in Asia, which is after all a geo­graphical rather than a cultural entity. And amongst these ways of thought we have become familiar with a very considerable number of discrete Indian and Buddhist philosophies which require to be kept dis­tinct. 5 Several of the latter have indeed embraced within themselves some form of what has been called mysticism, and certain trends may on occasion have proved themselves to be non-rational, irrational, even anti­rational. But, after all, these are not characteristics peculiar to Asian, or Buddhist, thought alone!

II

The view that philosophy is at best of only marginal and incidental importance in Buddhism, even that the historical Buddha did not profess being a philosopher at all, claims to have support from within the Bud­dhist canon itself.

Holders of this view have based it in particular on the smaller Ma[Ulikyiiputtasutta, where it is related how the Buddha declined to answer questions put to him by the ascetic Malmikyaputta relating to the

5. But not totally isolated from each other. Thus the concept of "Buddhisms" (in the plural), which has recently gained popularity, seems only to displace the issues, and also to avoid the question as to why so many peoples with their various world-views have in fact called themselves Buddhists.

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permanence and endlessness of the world (loka, of living beings), to the link between the body (sanra) and the life principle (jlva), and to the existence of a tathagata after death. In this text, these questions set aside and left unanswered by the Buddha are described as unexplicated (avyakata == avyak.rta) points, and the reason for the Buddha's refusal to answer them is there said to be that they are neither relevant (atthasalflhita "goal-fitted, useful, salutary") nor linked fundamentally with pure practise (adibrahmacariyaka), and that they do not conduce to distaste (nibbida), dispassion (viraga), cessation (nirodha), calming (upasama), "superknowledge" (abhiiiiia) and NirvaJ?,a. To illustrate this, the sutra employs a parable that has become famous, that of the man wounded by a poisoned arrow and of the doctor called by his friends and relatives to treat his wound. According to this parable, if before allow­ing the removal by the doctor of the poisoned arrow embedded in his body the wounded man were to insist on knowing just what sort of per­son it was who shot the arrow and precisely of what materials the arrow and the bow from which it was shot were made, he would die from his wound before all his curiosity was satisfied. But the Buddha is like a true doctor who immediately sets about removing the arrow from a wounded man's body without stopping to investigate irrelevant circum­stances.6 Here we see that the Buddha's teaching is supposed to work therapeutically-to have a salvific and gnoseological purpose-and that certain questions have been excluded from its purview because they do not serve the immediate need and are thus irrelevant.?

Another canonical text cited in support of the claim that the Buddha had no wish to profess himself a philosopher is the one in which he declines to reply to Vacchagotta' s question as to whether an atta (atman) "self' exists or not, as well as to his question concerning the unexplicated questions (avyakatani d(~thigatani / avyakatavatthu==avyak.rtavastu, which

6. Cu!amaluizykasutta, Majjhimanikaya I, 426-32. In this context E. Lamotte once wrote in his Histoire du bouddhi~me indien, i (Louvain, 1958) 52: "La Loi bouddhique telle que la con~oit Sakyamuni releve de la morale et de l'ethique plutot que de la philosophie et de la metaphysique"; Lamotte's for­mulation was more moderate than that of some others. 7. On medicine in Buddhism and the Buddha as physician, see e. g. Hobo­girin s.v. "Byo." That the Buddhist aryasatyas were not, however, derived from a pre-existing medical teaching in India has been argued by A. Wezler, "On the quadruple division of the Yogasastra, the Caturvyuhatva of the Cikitsasastra and the "Four Noble Truths" of the Buddha," IT 12 (1984): 289-337; cf. also W. Halbfass, Tradition and Reflection, Chap. vii.

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have been described as set aside, .thapita, and excluded, pa,tikkhitta).8 In the case of the Buddha's silence concerning the atman, the tradition has sometimes regarded it as pedagogically motivated; 9 elsewhere, of course, the Buddha is shown teaching that the factors of existence are without self (anatta, anatman), without a permanent substantial essence. 10

In deciding whether Buddhist doctrine-either as preceptive scriptural teaching (ddanadharma) or as a way of life to be practised (adhigamadharma)-is genuinely philosophical, much will of course depend on what we think philosophy is about. Were it to be considered to be unbridled speculative thought, or about the arbitrary construction of a metaphysical system, Buddhist thought would no doubt not be pure philosophy. And a doctrine like Buddhism that has represented itself as therapeutic, and soteriological, would not be counted as essentially philosophical so long as philosophy is understood to be nothing but anal­ysis of concepts, language and meaning (though these matters do play an important part in the history of Buddhist thought too). But the fact remains that, in Buddhism, soteriology, gnoseology and epistemology have been closely bound up with each other. Indeed, as a teaching con­cerning the Path leading to the cessation of "Ill" (dukkhanirodhagamim pa,tipada), Buddhism has not only had to develop a soteriological method that is theoretically intelligible and satisfying, but it has found itself obliged to identify what is this "Ill" (dukkha) from which liberation is sought, whence it springs (dukkhasamudaya), and what is the nature of the cessation of III (dukkhanirodha, i. e. Nirval).a as the Fruit of the Path). For the purpose of explicating these four Principles-the aryasatyas-Buddhist thinkers have brought to bear what can be described as philosophical theory and analysis alongside practise. Even

8. See the Po.~thapadasutta in Dighanikaya I, 187 f; the pasadikasutta, ibid., 135 ff.; the ParammaraIJasutta in Smp.yuttanikaya II, 222 f; the Avyakata­salJ1yutta, ibid. IV, 374 ff (induding the Vacchagottasutta, ibid. IV, 395 f.); the Cu!amalUlikyasutta in the Majjhimanikaya I, 426 ff., and the Vaccha­gottasutta, ibid. 1,484 ff; and the Avyakatasutta in the Anguttaranikaya IV, 68 ff (on inter alia the ariyasavaka who is avyakaraIJadhamma with regard to the avyakatavatthus).

9. See e. g. Sarp.yuttanikaya IV, 400. Cf Nagarjuna, Mulamadhyamaka­karika xviii.6, xxii.12, xxv.21, and xxvii.8 (the problem of empty [null] subject terms is also taken up in Candrakirti's Prasannapada on this passage, as it is in ix.12). 10. A recent treatment of the unexplicated points is C. Oetke, "Die 'unbeant­worteten Fragen' und das Schweigen des Buddha," WZKS 38 (1994): 84-120, which arrived too late to be addressed here.

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their identification of a type of question (prasna) or matter (vastu) to be set aside (thapaniya = sthiipaniya = bzag par bya ba, as un explicated / undecided, avyiikata = avyii~rta) beside other questions susceptible of explication either categorically (ekii1J1sa-vyiikarafLiya), or after making appropriate distinctions (vibhajja / vibhajya-vyiikarafLiya) or after further questioning (pa,tipucchii - pariprcchya-vyiikarafLiya) is itself of philo­sophical significance. 11 In philosophy as well as in semantics and prag­matics, the principle of relevance (and the maxim of relation) is also acknowledged as essentially philosophical. 12

The canonical text in which the Buddha is shown declaring that he does not dispute with the world but that the world disputes with him, also, does not appear to justify the supposition that the Buddha was somehow anti-philosophical. The context in fact indicates that what the wise agree on as the given must provide the starting point for philosophical discus­sion. 13 What is rejected, then, is disputing for the sake of disputing, rather than useful discussion and analysis. The latter are in fact amply evidenced in many a Buddhist slltra; and in so much of Buddhist tradi­tion, scriptural authority (iigama) is regularly accompanied by reasoning and argument (yukti). But for Buddhist thinkers reasoning (yukti) and disputation (vivada) are not automatically equivalent.

In sum, according to Buddhist traditions, if it is true that a Buddha does not hold back, so to say in a closed teacher's fist (iicariyamu.~thi = acaryamu~ti), any relevant teaching required by his disciples, neither does he indulge in any utterance that is unwarranted and unjustified in a

11. See e. g. the Smig!tisuttanta, Dlghanikaya III, 229; Ailguttaranikaya I, 197; and Milindapafiha, 144-5. (Cf. K. N. Jayatilleke, Early Buddhist Theory of Knowledge, Chapter vi.) For the Sanskrit, see e. g. Sa1J1gitisutra (ed. Stache-Rosen) iv.26; and Vasubandhu, Abhidharmako§a(bhii~ya) v.22, with Y asomitra' s Vyiikhyii. 12. See for example P. Grice, Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge, MA: 1989); and D. Sperber and D. Wilson, Relevance (Oxford: 1986). 13. See the Pupphasutta in Sarp.yuttanikaya III, 138: naha1J1 bhikkhave lokena vivadami, loko ca maya vivadati / na bhikkhave dhammavadi kenaci lokasmi1J1 vivadati / yarJ! bhikkhave natthi-sammatarJ! lake pafLtfitanarJ! aharJ! pi tarJ! "natthi" ti vadami / yarJ! bhikkhave atthi-sammatarJ!loke pa1J.ritanarJ! aharJ!pi tarJ! "atthi" ti vadami /. ... For the Sanskrit parallel, and the context from the point of view of the Madhyamaka school, see Candrakrrti, Prasannapada xviii.8 (370): loko mayii sardharJ! vivadati naharJ!lokena sardharJ! vivadami / yal lake 'sti sammatarJ! tan mamapy asti sammataml yal lake nastisammatarJ! mamapi tan nasti sammatam /; Madhyamakiivatiirabha~ya vi.81. Cf. also the TrisarJ!varanirdeiaparivarta-mahiiyiinasutra of the Ratnakuta collection.

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given philosophical and teaching situation. 14 And what he is shown as eschewing was disputatiousness and contentiousness masquerading as philosophy rather than discussion, reasoning and analysis.

III

One of the most recent investigations known to me of the appropriateness of speaking of "Indian philosophy," and of attaching the appellation of philosophy to Buddhism, is to be found in a book by the comparative philosopher Guy Bugault bearing the challenging title L'/nde pense+ elie? which both provokes deeper thought on the matter and calls into question certain cultural shibboleths. There it is shown how-notwith­standing the very real differences between the traditions of philosophy in the west and in the Indian and Buddhist schools-there does exist a gen­uine sense in which we can, and indeed must, give due consideration to the philosophical dimension in the latter. Bugault's discussion turns round the questions whether what we find in India is "an other philoso­phy" rather than "something other than philosophy," and the extent to which a soteriology and therapeutic such as Buddhism is not wholly a philosophy but, nonetheless, a way of thinking that clearly comprises a philosophical dimension. 15

14. See Milindapaiiha, 144-5: natth' Ananda tathiigatassa dhammesu iicariyamu.~thfti. abyiikato ca the rena MiilUlikyiiputtena pucchito paiiho, taii ca pana na ajiinanena na guhyakaraf!ena. cattiir' imiini mahiiriija paiihabyiikaraf!iini ... bhagavii mahiiriija therassa Miilunkyiiputtassa talJ1 .thapaf!fyalJ1 paiihalJ1 nabyiikiisi. so pana paiiho kilJ1kiiraf!ii .thapanfyo? na tassa dfpaniiya hetu vii karaf!alJ1 vii atthi, tasmii so paiiho .thapanfyo. natthi buddhiinalJ1 bhagavantiinalJ1 akiiraf!am ahetukalJ1 giralJ1 udfraf!an ti. 15. See Guy Bugault, L'/nde pense-t-elle? (Paris: 1994), Chap. 1 "La ques­tion prealable," 50-51: "Apres avoir essaye de montrer qu'il existe une philosophie en Inde et aussi sa specificite, nous laissons finalement Ie lecteur face a la question qui nous parait l'essentiel : en queUe mesure est-ce une philosophie, en queUe mesure est-ce autre chose que de la philosophie? [ ... J Restent les mouvements qui ne relevent pas des briihmanes mais des sramanes : bouddhisme et jinisme. Si on les considere dans leur totalite organique, aucun d'eux n'est une philosophie. Ce sont des therapies, des soteriologies, mais qui comportent une dimension philosophique."-G. Bugault is emeritus professor of Indian and comparative philosophy at the Sorbonne (Universite Paris IV), the passage quoted being reprinted from his article "En queUe me sure et en quel sens peut-on parler de 'philosophie indienne'" in Andre Jacob ed., Ency­clopedie philosophique universelle I, L'Univers philosophique (Paris: 1989) 1585.

An interesting recent work analysing the conditions under which Indian philosophy first attracted attention in Europe, but then came to be largely for-

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We know of course that individual strands within Buddhist thought have been compared-if only more or less atomistically and episodi­cally-with Socratic maieutics, Stoic and Epicurean apathia and ataraxia, or Pyrrhonic skepticism; with Berkeley's pluralistic idealism, Locke's empiricism, Hume's views on causality and psychology, or Kant's tran­scendentalist idealism and criticism; with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche or Heidegger; with American transcendentalism or pragmatism; with Wittgenstein's linguistic analysis; with modern phenomenology and semiotics of various kinds; and, of course, with Derrida's deconstruction. However, although no doubt of use as intellectual exercises in a particu­lar-and more or less limited-context, comparison of the type "Buddhism and X" or "Nagarjuna and Y" can only take us just so far. More often than not, it has proved to be of rather restricted heuristic value, and methodologically it often turns out to be more problematical and constraining than illuminating. In the frame of synchronic descrip­tion this kind of comparison tends to veil or obliterate important struc-

gotten there, is also by a philosopher: R.-P. Droit, L'oubli de l'Inde, Une amnesie philosophique (Paris: 1989). Reference has already been made in note 3 above to the valuable studies by W. Halbfass. An older classic in this field of intellectual history is R. Schwab, La renaissance orientale (Paris: 1950), published (under the sign of Edward Said's problematic campaign on the theme of "Orientalism," concerning the relation of which to Buddhist studies see the present writer's remark in JIABS 15 [1992]: 109) in English translation as The Oriental Renaissance (New York: 1984). Reference may be made further to G. Franci, ed., Contributi alla storia dell'orientalismo (Bologna: 1985). A. Tuck's Comparative Philosophy and the Philosophy of Scholarship: On the Western Interpretation of Nagarjuna (New York: 1990)­notwithstanding several good observations on would-be objectivity vs. cultural relativism and on unconscious "isogesis" (defined as "a "reading into" the text that often reveals as much about the interpreter as it does about the text being interpreted" [pp. 9-10], in contradistinction to exegesis as a conscious pro­cess)-seems to be attempting to offer more than it can deliver, not least because it excludes from consideration some philosophically significant west­ern work on Nagarjuna and the Madhyamaka published in this century: R. Grousset, S. Schayer, J. W. de Jong and J. May (to mention only some) appear neither in the index nor in the bibliography even if several of them are mentioned, casually, in the text. Cf. also the review of Tuck's book by J. Bronkhorst, Asiatische Studien 47 (1993): 501 ff.

For some observations on the relation-and the lack of it-between philo­sophical study on the one side and Buddhism on the other side, see also G. Chatalian, "Early Indian Buddhism and the Nature of Philosophy: A Philo­sophical Investigation," lIP 11 (1983): 167-222.

One of the most significant attempts in more recent decades to relate the study of "Early Buddhism" in the Pali sources with philosophy was provided by K. N. Jayatilleke, Early Buddhist Theory of Knowledge (above, note 1). For a critique see G. Chatalian, loco cit.

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tures in thought, whilst from the viewpoint of historical diachrony it takes little account of genesis and context. For however much a philo­sophical insight or truth transcends, in se, any particular epoch or place, in its expression a philosophy is perforce conditioned historically and culturally.

But when saying that it is historically and culturally conditioned, I most certainly do not mean to relativize it or to espouse reductionism­quite the contrary in fact. The often facile opposition relativism vs. uni­versalism has indeed all too often failed to take due account of the fact that what is relative in so far as it is conditioned in its linguistic or cul­tural expression may, nonetheless, in the final analysis have a very gen­uine claim to universality in terms of the human, and hence of the humanities. It seems that this holds true as much when we postulate some "Western" or "Eastern" philosophy of this or that period as when we consider what is now termed human rights, which by definition must transcend specific cultures in time and place. 16

Now, it has to be recognized that our studies in Buddhist thought must indeed proceed on a comparative basis, that is, on a methodologically and phenomenologically well-founded comparativism which is, needless to say, a regular feature of scientific investigation. But a well-grounded philosophical comparison of this kind will differ very significantly from the one alluded to above by being structurally and systemically oriented, and at the same time sensitive to differences in historical genesis and context.

In the last analysis, of course, everything will depend on exactly how we actually engage in comparative philosophy. To pursue this point fur­ther would lead far afield and I shall therefore not attempt to do so at this point.

IV

For the purposes of a philosophical study of Buddhism we are today in a probably more favorable position than formerly thanks to certain con­temporary developments in the field of philosophy itself.

What is called the "linguistic turn" in philosophy and cultural studies has no doubt made investigators more aware of the complexity of lin­guistic issues, though one must beware of transforming this turn into a

16. Notwithstanding what some Pacific-rim politicians and entrepeneurs would have us believe about a so-called "Asian exception."

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dogmatic strait-jacket or surrogate ready-made philosophy. The same applies to post-modernist relativism and to some current forms of decon­struction. At all events, Buddhist theories of interpretation and her­meneutics, and the associated problem of the canonical vs. the apoc­ryphal, are in process of being addressed both more systematically and systemically, and doubtless more philosophically too. Such approaches will surely be fruitful provided they avoid the excesses of seeing so many things mainly as the expression of power relations between different trends in Buddhist thought and hermeneutics (in the wake of the "Hermeneutics and Politics" movement), or indeed between our academic disciplines. (Political forces may well have played a part in the history of Buddhist thought, but it will be a tricky task indeed to pinpoint these forces from the sutra and sastra sources as we now have them.)

In recent work in philosophy, some essays now collected together in the late Paul Grice's Studies in the Way of Words (1989) have no doubt contributed ideas and methods-not to speak of terms such as "implicature" (even if Grice's idea of the "conversational" in implicature would appear to have little relevance in Buddhist [and Indian] thought).]?

It may also turn out that a recent book by another philosopher will not only help to make it philosophically respectable once more to address the question of the mind after the long reign of a certain Behaviorism and its reductionist cohorts, but also enable us to talk more clearly and meaning­fully of consciousness and intentionality and of the mind/matter problem. I refer to The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992) by John Searle, who, while maintaining that the philosophy of language is in fact a branch of the philosophy of mind, has trenchantly elucidated issues in the mind / body problem while holding that monism and dualism are both false by argu­ing that the vocabularies and assumptions behind them are simply obsolete.

v

For my part, I am inclined to think that the approach to the understand­ing and analysis of our sources must initially be what has been termed

17. Cf. D. Seyfort Ruegg, "Purport, implicature and presupposition: Sanskrit abhipraya and Tibetan dgons pa / dgons gZi as hermeneutical concepts," lIP 13 (1985): 309-25. The concept of implicature has since been taken up by C. Oetke, "Pragmatic implicatures and text-interpretation," StIl16 (1992): 185-233. See also below, p. 14.

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"ernie" rather than "etic."18 That is, in the first instance, an effort has to be made, as far as is possible, to determine how the categories and terms of a culture relate to each other structurally and systemically, and so to place ourselves within the cultural contexts and intellectual horizons of the traditions we are studying, making use of their own intellectual and cultural categories and seeking as it were to "think along" with these tra­ditions. This is much more than a matter of simply developing sympathy or empathy, for it is a an intellectual, and scientific, undertaking. And very clearly it is not one of merely converting from one religion to another. 19 Nor is it a matter of anyone-sided, or absolute, preference for structural and systemic-or "emic"-analysis over the generalizing and comparative-or "etic"-one which would totally reject the comparative method at every stage of work. Rather, it is one of learning how intelli­gently and effectively to work with, and within, a tradition of thinking by steeping oneself in it while rejecting the sterile "us" vs. "them" dichotomy.2o Structural and systernic analysis is in a position to allow due weight to the historical as well as to the descriptive, that is, it may be diachronic as well as synchronic. Here the observation might be ven­tured that careful "ernic" analysis can provide as good a foundation as any for generalizing and comparative study, one that will not superim­pose from the outside extraneous modes of thinking and interpretative grids in a way that sometimes proves to be scarcely distinguishable from a more or less subtle form of neo-colonialism. It should go without say­ing that in proceeding along these channels it will always be necessary to steer clear of the Scylla of radical relativism-which would wish hermet­ically to enclose each culture in its own categories-as well as of the

18. This terminology-inspired by the use in linguistics of terms ending in -etic as opposed to -ernie-goes back to the "tagmernics" of K. L. Pike, Lan­guage in Relation to a Unified theory of the Structure of Human Behavior (The Hague: 1954-1960; 2nd ed., 1967). 19. This approach should therefore not become embroiled in the claim that a Buddhist is, as such, disqualified from lecturing on Buddhism in a university department of religion (where few seem, however, to be concerned about whether a Christian is disqualified from teaching courses on Christianity), nor need it enter into the opposite claim that only a Buddhist can be so qualified. These two positions are egregious examples of intellectually sterile arguments carried on with scant regard to the scientifie (not to mention spiritual) issues involved. 20. The procedure may be compared with epoche or bracketing (Einklam­merung, in relation to Einschaltung) in phenomenological method which has occupied a prominent place in the study of religion at least since the time of G. van der Leeuw's Einfiihrung in die Phdnomenologie der Religion (1925) and Phiinomenologie der Religion (1933).

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Charybdis of ethnocentrism, European or otherwise-which would study and judge all cultures by "our" standards-, these twin extremes being travesties of the "emic" and "etic" methods respectively.

It should be emphasized again that to say this is not meant to exclude bringing together different epistemes for comparative and heuristic pur­poses. Quite the reverse in fact. 21

As for the frequently made-and in some circles popular-distinction between (genuinely philosophical) evaluative study and historical (and philological) study of a philosophy or philosopher, it is evident that the first rests and depends on a successful pursual of the second kind of study. The two may be theoretically distinguishable and belong to sepa­rable phases and modes of investigation, but they cannot be totally decoupled.22

The distinction between the "emic" and the "etic" approaches-which have to do with our modes of analysis and understanding-is no doubt parallel to the distinction drawn between the use of author-familiar as opposed to author-alien terminologies for the purposes of comparison and exposition. But these two sets of concepts do not appear to be iden­tical because, for the expository and comparative purposes just men­tioned, it may still be possible to employ author-alien terminologies even within an approach that is committed to "emic" analysis and understand­ing. For example, in explaining the Buddhist theory of spiritual classes or "lineages" (gotra) to the extent that it is based on a biological

21. Surprisingly, however, the (of course quite legitimate) procedures seeking to analyse and understand traditional materials with the help of contemporary theoretical and methodological concepts in anthropological, cultural, histori­cal, literary, philosophical and religious studies-e. g. to understand the sastraic traditions of the Indian PaI,1<;lits through certain modem epistemes-is nowadays being referred to as contextualization by some Indologists. But since these procedures are by nature "etic" and comparative, it would seem that contextualization is exactly what they are not, and cannot be. For, surely, to contextualize something is to study it in its own cultural, systemic, and "ernie," terms and context. 22. For a recent investigation, from a somewhat different point of view, of the relation between philological and philosophical study, see C. Oetke, "Controverting the arman-controversy and the query of segregating philologi­cal and non-philological issues in studies on eastern philosophies and reli­gions," Studien zur Indologie und lranistik 18 (1993): 191-212 (a reply to observations made by J. Bronkhorst in WZKS 32 [1989]: 223-5.) This article came to my attention too late to be taken into account in the present discussion.

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metaphor, one might evoke the idea of a (spiritual) "gene";23 and in ana­lysing the exegetical principle of an intended ground (dgons gzi) to which an intentional (neyartha) utterance ultimately, but allusively, refers without explicitly expressing it, one might speak of an (hermeneutical) "implicature."24 Of course, both the modern biological term "gene" and the still more recent coinage "implicature" are alien to our Indian and Tibetan sources, in which no lexeme is to be found with precisely the meaning of either of these two modern words. Yet it seems possible to evoke, mutatis mutandis, the ideas expressed by these new terms when seeking to explicate the theories in question. In other words, author-alien (or source-alien) terminology could very well be compatible with an "emic" approach to understanding, and it does not necessarily bring with it an exclusive commitment to the "etic" approach. (Conversely, it would in principle be possible to employ source-familiar terminology and still misconstrue and misrepresent a doctrine, thus infringing the requirement of an "emic" approach.) Furthermore, as already indicated, the use of a source-familiar terminology need not stand in the way of proceeding from "emic" to "etic" analysis.

In this connection, a parallel might perhaps be drawn with the ques tions, both musicological and musical, that today arise in recovering and performing (so-called) "early music" (mediaeval, Renaissance and Baroque), a field in which there is also much discussion of problems of retrieval and rendition, i. e. interpretation.25 Thus, a piece of music may have to be retrieved or reconstructed from ambiguous documents in a way satisfactory to performer and musicologist (who mayor may not be the same person), and it has then to be performed in a manner pleasing to performer and listener. In the case of instrumental music, this can involve using either original instruments contemporary with the music and of the same provenance, modern copies of such instruments, or mod­ern instruments (for instance the piano for Bach). Any of these three methods may produce results that satisfy performer and listener, though the musicologist and the "purist" performer and listener would generally

23. Cf. D. Seyfort Ruegg, "The Meaning of the Term gotra and the Textual History of the Ratnagotravibhiiga," BSOAS 39 (1976): 341-63. 24. Cf. D. Seyfort Ruegg, "Purport, Implicature and Presupposition: Sanskrit abhipraya and Tibetan dgons pa I dgons gzi as Hermeneutical Concepts," JIP 13: 309-25. 25. The question of authenticity will be left out of consideration here because of the possible ambiguity of this concept and of the misunderstandings to which it call give rise.

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prefer to use original instruments (if necessary rebuilt or reconstructed) or, if such are unavailable, modern reproductions (which may sometimes be unavoidably hypothetical).

Interpreters of classical Buddhist writings using the "emic" approach and source-familiar terminologies find themselves in a situation some­what analogous to that of the performer of "early music" on contempo­rary instruments, or perhaps more accurately (because of the problems outlined above) in a position comparable with that of an instrumentalist . using largely rebuilt instruments or copies. And interpreters using prin­cipally or exclusively the "etic" method and source-alien terminologies may well resemble the performer using modern instruments, and perhaps even a modern style of performance. As for the interpreter using the "emic" approach, yet perhaps having occasional recourse to source-alien terminology, he might be compared more with a musician using the first or, above all, second kind of instrument, rather than to one playing mod­ern instruments in modern style. (To what extent it may be possible to compare the interpreter of ancient Buddhist writings with a modern vocalist performing "early music," where the question of old and modern instruments plays no part, is another matter. Just as it would no doubt be difficult for the modern vocalist totally to remove from his mind and technique all developments in singing in the time intervening since the production of the piece he is performing, so the modern interpreter of a Buddhist text may well experience difficulty in entirely eschewing all more modern forms of thinking and all more modern problematics. In both cases, the audiences might not desire such an exercise even if it were possible.) Like so many comparisons, the one offered here is of course not entirely on all fours with what is being compared, but it may at least help to illustrate the issues.

In any event, in its crudest inhibiting form as something in which the interpreter and scholar is so to speak imprisoned in his pre-understanding and in the limitations of his pre-judgments, the "hermeneutic circle" can, I think, be got out of if a real effort is made. And an analysis and cri­tique in "etic" terms of philosophical thought will only become genuinely meaningful and useful once one has understood, as it were "emically," the concerns, presuppositions and intentions-i. e. the problematics-of texts and their philosopher-authors, in other words the horizons and

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issues that have been theirs.26 No valid principle of scientific objectivity is being thereby abandoned. And to raise this objection against "emic" methodology would be to demonstrate a rather simplistic and indeed naive understanding of scholarly distance and objectivity-which is, as is well known, a not unproblematic thing even in the natural sciences-and a lack of awareness of certain implications of the theory of understanding in the humanities and of hermeneutics. The objection just mentioned would, then, be scientistic rather than truly scientific.

A more weighty objection against this approach is based on the hermeneutic principle that it is simply impossible for us today to project ourselves back into an age long past, that we cannot put ourselves in the skin, or in the mind, of a long-dead thinker in order to determine autho­rial intention-the mens auctoris-and that our understanding is deter­mined by its historicality. This view has been powerfully argued by sev­eral modem writers on hermeneutics. 27 An "archaeology of the mind" is a highly challenging project indeed. But while fully acknowledging the formidable difficulties involved in any search for understanding, and while recognizing the weight of certain theoretical problems involved, I think that considerable progress can still be made in genuinely penetrat­ing what the Buddhist tradition calls the intention (Sanskrit abhipraya, Tibetan dgons pa) of ancient authors and texts, and in understanding his­torically and contextually the evidence which we consider as historians of religion and philosophy. Thought forms, presuppositions, ~nd prejudg­ments as well as language may be prison-houses of sorts. But it is possi­ble to make progress in freeing ourselves from the shackles of our mind­sets, and to a significant degree also of our historically and culturally conditioned limiting horizons, if only we will-and provided, of course, we refrain from imposing currently fashionable ideas on what we are

26. By speaking of a crude and inhibiting fonn of the hermeneutic circle ref­erence is being made here to the negative, imprisoning effect of the circle, not to the positive nature of the hermeneutic circle as understanding in contextu­ality and historicality. 27. On the circle in philosophical hermeneutics, see e. g. H.-G. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode3 (Tiibingen: 1960) and the works of Paul Ricoeur. The concept of the hermeneutic circle-found earlier with Friedrich Ast, Sch1eiermacher and Dilthey-is current also in theology (Bultmann) as well as in philosophy (Heidegger). Cf. R. Palmer, Hermeneutics (Evanston: 1969), and J. Bleicher, Contemporary Hermeneutics (London: 1980). Some aspects of contemporary trends in hermeneutics have been usefully criticized by E. Betti, Die Hermeneutik als allgemeine Methodik der Geisteswissenschaften (Tiibingen: 1962), and by E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: 1967) and The Aims of Interpretation (Chicago: 1976).

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studying (a process that can on occasion come very close to neo-co10nia1-ism, as mentioned above). Surely the "us" and "them" dichotomy has been somewhat overworked in the theory of understanding.

VI

Continuities, structured patterns and non-essentialist and lattice-like po1ythetic "family resemblances"-however underlying they may be­are no less interesting than discontinuities and disagreements in studying the history of thought. 28 We are, after all, trying to understand what a tradition has meant to its representatives, even in the face of synchronic intellectual and spiritual tensions and of diachronic heterogeneity present within it.

One may focus on tracing such patterns and continuities, first, within Buddhist thought and, next, between it and its Indian (Brahmanical and Jain) context and, then, between this Indo-Buddhist culture and its pro­longation in the "Greater India"-I'Inde exterieure-of the Himalayan area, Inner Asia and East Asia. This kind of study has lead me to think that a very large sector of Tibetan civilization, although not simply reducible to the Indian, is typologically (and structurally) Indic in a number of highly interesting respects even though it has of course devel­oped its own specific and very characteristic features and contains much that is not historically attested in India. 29

Intercultural studies of course necessarily involve the careful clarifica­tion of the modalities of relations between two worlds of thought, between peoples whose civilizations are in contact. Thus it addresses the question of how one people (the Tibetans for instance) could adopt from its southerly neighbor and then thoroughly absorb and integrate a religio­philosophical system like Buddhism accompanied by the not specifically religious sciences-the vidyasthanas or rig gnas-with which this culture was closely associated in India, and with which it has continued to be linked in the Himalayan area and Inner Asia. This process of intercul-

28. See D. Seyfort Ruegg, foreward, Buddha-nature, Mind and the Problem of Gradualism in a Comparative Perspective (London: 1989). It is on this ground also that one can still continue to speak not of "Buddhisms" but of Buddhism. Compare below, §X. 29. The term "Indic" is used here not as an equivalent of "Indian" (as distinct from Amerindian, American Indian, "native American"), or of "Indo-Aryan," but rather to denote what is typologically and structurally Indian,without being attested (to the best of our knowledge) in our sources as having actually existed in India.

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tural borrowing and integration raises the fascinating question not only of linguistic areas-the Sprachbund theory of areal in contrast to genetic relationship between languages-but also of cultural areas.3o

VII

Let me now illustrate some of the above generalizations by a few exam­ples relating to the philological and historical study of philosophical texts and to the philosophical and hermeneutical analysis of these texts.

Critical editions of philosophical texts Following the publication in 1950 of the Sanskrit original of the Rat­nagotravibhaga31-an important early Mahayana treatise counted as one of the Dharmas of Maitreya that had hitherto been known in the west mainly through E. Obermiller's work on the Tibetan sources relating to it32-, it became apparent that this text, together with the theories of the buddha-nature (tathagatagarbha) and of spiritual types or "genes" (gotra) expounded in it, could provide a valuable starting point for research which should prove to be of interest for Buddhist studies under the aspects of both philosophy and religion and historical-philological method.

Philologically speaking, the Ratnagotravibhaga (RGV) is of interest because the study of this work together with its extensive commentarial literature has urgently raised the question of how best to handle an old text which is available in both its original Sanskrit and in (Chinese and Tibetan) translations, and which, within the Tibetan tradition, has been the subject of a vast body of exegesis from the eleventh century to mod­ern times. That is, this text is both a literary and historical record which is some 1500 years old and part of a living tradition. Work on it engages the question of the very nature of Indo-Tibetan (and Indo-Sinitic) philol­ogy and, more generally, what the scope and tasks ofIndo-Tibetan stud­ies are. A few decades ago these were questions that had by no means been adequately clarified, and even today uncertainty seems still to be rife concerning what Indo-Tibetan studies are about.

30. Cf. D. Seyfort Ruegg, Ordre spirituel et ordre temporel dans la pensee bouddhique de l'Inde et du Tibet (Paris: 1995). 31. Ratnagotravibhiiga Mahiiyiinottaratantrasiistra, ed. E. H. Johnston and T. Chowdhury (Patna: 1950). 32. E. Obermiller, "The Sublime Science of the Great Vehicle to Salvation," Acta Orientalia 9 (1931): 82-306.

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In Buddhist studies, critical philologically based editions are of course required of any Indian materials that may still be extant as well as of the relevant translated texts in the Chinese and Tibetan canonical collections containing sutra and sastra sources. In the course of this work it is neces -sary, inter alia, to draw on any proto-canonical, paracanonical and com­mentarial traditions having preserved textual variants that have to be taken into account for a genuinely critical edition. By commentarial traditions I mean both Indian commentaries-either in their original lan­guage or as now available to us only in translation-and commentaries composed by non-Indian authors. By proto-canonical traditions I refer, in the frame of Indo-Tibetan studies, to textual material belonging to the time antedating the constitution of the known bKa' , gyurs and bsTan , gyurs, such as that found in the Tibetan Dunhuang manuscripts (going back to the ninth century) and in inscriptions and manuscripts from Ta pho (going back to c.lOOO).33 And by paracanonical traditions I refer, in the same frame, to versions of a sutra or sastra text in editions postdat­ing the constitution of these bKa' , gyurs or bsTan ' gyurs, which may differ more or less from the readings found in the "standard versions"­printed or manuscript-of these two canonical collections. 34 Even when

33. In Dunhuang Tibetan rule lasted until 848. Aurel Stein dated the sealing of the caves to 1035. A. Fujieda, "The Tunhuang manuscripts," Zinbun, Memoirs of the Research Institute for Humanistic Studies 10 (Kyoto: Zinbun Kagaku Kenkyusho, 1969): 17 ff., dated (p. 22) the Tibetan materials to 782-848 (cf. JA 1981: 65-68, where Fujieda dated the closure of the caves to shortly after 1002). But see A. R6na-Tas, "A brief note on the chronology of the Tun-huang collections," AOH 221 (1968): 313-16. See in general, L. I. Cuguevskii, "Touen-houang du VIlle au Xe siecle," Nouvelles contributions aux etudes de Touen-houang, ed. M. Soymie (Geneva: 1981) 1-56; and for a recent very brief survey, see L. Petech, "The Silk road, Turfan and Tun­huang in the first millennium AD," Turfan and Tunhuang, The Texts, ed. A. Cadonna (Florence: Orientalia Venetiana IV, 1992) 1-13.

On the Ta pho / Tabo inscriptions and manuscripts, see E. Steinkellner, "A report on the 'Kanjur' of Ta pho," East and West 44 (1994): 115-36, as well as the articles by E. De Rossi Filibek, J. L. Panglung and H. Tauscher, ibid. 34. For information on the bKa' , gyur manuscripts and printed editions, see in particular the recent work of H. Eimer, P. Harrison, P. Skilling and J. Silk. The standard (printed) editions of the bsTan 'gyurs are those of Beijing, sNar than, sDe dge and Co ne, to which must now be added the so-called "Golden Tanjur" commissioned by the mi dbaiz Pho lha nas bSod nams stobs rgyas and recently published in facsimile in China (see P. Skilling, "A brief guide to the Golden Tanjur," Journal of the Siam Society 79 [1991]: 138-46).

In the case of the Ratnagotravibhiiga, its translation in the Chinese canon (available also in the edition by Zuiryu Nakamura published in Tokyo in 1961) has been treated by J. Takasaki, A Study on the Ratnagotravibhiiga (Uttaratantra) (Rome: 1966); some of his text-critical conclusions concerning

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already accessible, these are materials that have often been neglected when preparing editions of texts, something that is of course understand­able in view of their very great abundance.

In sum, the textual transmission of fundamental works such as the Rat­nagotravibhaga and Candrakirti's Madhyamakavatara(bha~ya) proves to be appreciably more complex than had been foreseen by their first editors earlier in this century.35 And for any truly critical edition of a sutra or

its Indian Dr-text have however had to be reconsidered (cf. D. Seyfort Ruegg, "The Meanings of the Term gotra and the Textual History of the Ratnagotra­vibhiiga," BSOAS 39 [1976]: 341-63). Even though the very useful edition of the Tibetan text with trilingual indexes published in Japan in 1967 by the Suzuki Institute was not a fully critical edition based on all existing textual materials, it had the merit of making use of the Beijing, sNar than and sDe dge editions of the bsTan ' gyur and referring in addition to the commentaries by rGyal tshab Dar rna rin chen and Kon sprul Blo gros mtha' yas.

As an example of the evidence for variant readings to be extracted from Tibetan commentaries, reference may be made to the comment on the RGV(V) by rGyal tshab Dar rna rin chen (1364-1432). There (f. 42a) we find a very significant variant reading not attested i~ the Beijing and sNar than bsTan 'gyur editions of this text translated by rNog Blo Idan ses rab (1059-1109), but which is not only suggested by the sense but is actually confirmed by both Johnston's Sanskrit text of the RGVV (i.12, p. 12.14) and by another bsTan 'gyur edition (sDe dge). This variant is non mons pa'i sbubs las ma grol ba = avinirmuktakleiakosa instead of non mons pa'i sbubs las grol ba = vinirmuk­taklesakosa in a sutra passage defining the relation between the tathiigata­garbha and the dharmakiiya: ayam eva ca bhagavaf!1s tathiigatadharmakiiYo 'vinirmuktakleiakosas tathiigatagarbha ity ucyate. Because it concerns the crucial matter of this relation, and since traces of both doctrinal views can be found in the Chinese tradition, the variant appears to be a doctrinally significant one and not to be explicable solely in terms of the textual transmission of the Tibetan bsTan ' gyur. See D. Seyfort Ruegg, introduction, Le traite du tathiigatagarbha de Bu ston Rin chen grub pp. 37-45.

As for the precise contents of the concepts of the proto-canonical and para­canonical, they will be further clarified by continuing research in respect to the history of the bKa' , gyur and bsTan ' gyur. 35. The Tibetan translation of the Madhyamakiivatiira and Bhii~ya-the only version of these texts now accessible-, was published by L. de La Vallee Poussin, Madhyamakiivatiira (St. Petersburg: BibliothecaBuddhica IX, 1907-1912) (evidently on the basis of the Beijing and sNar than bsTan 'gyurs). La Vallee Poussin referred also to the translation of the Kiirikiis alone by Nag tsho in the bsTan ' gyur and to a "paracanonical" edition which he described (p. ii) as "beaucoup plus correcte que celIe du Tandjour"; but since he included no critical apparatus in his edition, it is difficult to make out what use he made of this additional material known to him. In the Beijing edition of the bsTan 'gyur are found both a translation of the Madhyamakiivatara­kiirikiis ascribed to Kr~l)apal)qita and Nag tsho ]shul khrims rgyal ba (b. 1011) as revised by Tilakakalasa and Pa tshab Ni rna grags (b. 1055) (no. 5261) and one ascribed to Tilaka and Pa tshab (no. 5262, executed in Kasmir),

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satra text in the Indo-Tibetan tradition, alongside the printed and manuscript bKa' , gyur and bsTan ' gyur editions, the commentarial tradi­tions, and any paracanonical traditions available, have to be taken into account as important testimonia.

The need in philosophical study for such critically constituted texts of course requires no demonstration.

Historical study of doctrinal content With respect to the contents of the Ratnagotravibhaga, the historical­philological problems revealed by the examination of the tathagat­agarbha and related concepts have turned out to be no less challenging and interesting. These are some of them:

(i) It has been necessary to trace the sources of the relevant Mahayanist concepts in many branches of literature, Buddhist and non Buddhist, including in particular any possible anticipations in the earlier scrip­tural sources of the Sravakayana.36 This search in turn raises the prob-1em of continuities and discontinuities between the Mahayana and the Sravakayana.

as well as a translation of the same text_together with Candrakirti's autocommentary ascribed to Tilaka and Ni rna grags as revised by Kanakavarman and Ni rna grags (no. 5263, also executed in Kasmir). And in the sDe dge edition there are found a translation of the Kiirikiis ascribed to Tilaka and Pa tshab (rather than Nag tsho) as revised by Kanakavarman and Pa tshab (no. 3861) and a translation of the Kiirikiis together with the autocommentary ascribed to Tilakakalasa and Pa tshab as revised by Kanakavarman and Pa tshab (no. 3862). In 2u chen Tshul khrims rin chen's dKar chag to the sDe dge bsTan 'gyur (p. 785 of the Lhasa reprint of 1985), the information on no. 3861 very strangely conflates the names of Kr~l)a and Tilaka and the names of Pa tshab and Nag tsho, as if reflecting a problem which is, however, not resolved. There exists in addition a paracanonical edition from the Lhasa 201 par khan of Pa tshab' s translation of the Kiirikiis of the MA. In his comment on the MA(Bh), the dGons pa rab gsal, Tson kha pa has on several occasions preferred readings from Nag tsho's translation (prose as well as verse) over the "standard" translation by Pa tshab. 36. As suggested by the present writer in JIABS 15 (1992): 110-13, the term Hinayana had best be reserved as a technical one applying to cases where the arhat concept and the corresponding Path of the doctrinal schools (nikiiya) is being distinguished from, and opposed to, the Path of the bodhisattva and the buddha ideal of the Mahayana / Bodhisattvayana. When this is not the case, and in particular when it is the teachings of so~called Early Buddhism that are being referred to, the (non-pejorative) term Sravakayana is usually a more ~uitable term than the potentially pejorative Hinayana. Needless to say, Sravakayana is not coextensive with the narrower term Staviravada and the even more narrow term Theravada.

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(ii) It has been necessary to trace the interrelations between the forms of these concepts found in the Ratnagotravibhaga together with its direct sutra sources and those found in other Mahayana sutras, in par­ticular the Prajiiaparamita sutras, and in the Abhisamayalaf!tkara­another treatise traditionally regarded in Tibet as a Dharma of Maitreya. This in turn raises the question of a "Maitreya-tradition" in early Mahayanist thought. (iii) In connection with the concept of the tathagatagarbha-or the Buddha-Element (tathiigatad.hi1tu)-as empty (Sunya) of all heteroge­neous, extrinsic and relative factors, but as not empty (asunya) of its intrinsic, constitutive and informing (buddha- )dharmas, there arises the crucial and vexed question of the historical relationship between the principle of Emptiness of self-nature (ran ston, svabhdvasunyata) in the Madhyamaka and its sutra sources such as the Prajiiaparamita and the Ratnakuta, and the idea of Emptiness of the other (gzan ston, *para{bhava-]Sunya) in some of the tathagatagarbha literature. (iv) In connection with the concept of buddha-nature, there arises the complex question of the historical relation between the traditions of Buddhism in India and Tibet and those of East Asia. According to the former, only sentient beings (sattva = sems can)-the sattvaloka-have the capacity of becoming buddhas, whereas East Asian traditions have attributed the capacity for buddhahood also to the grasses, trees, mountains and rivers-i. e. to the so-called bhajanaloka. (v) In the Sanskrit expression tathagatagarbha, its Tibetan equivalent de bZin gsegs pa'i sfiin po and the Chinese term ju-lai-tsang, even the terms garbha / sfiin po / tsang have been understood somewhat differ­ently, garbha being usually interpretable in the Indian and Tibetan tra­ditions as Embryo or Seed, or as Essence (sfiin po), whereas in the Sino-Japanese tradition the value of Womb (tsang) has become estab­lished. This is not to say that the Sino-Japanese tradition's use of the word tsang to render garbha was wrong. But it has to be recognized that it has introduced a metaphor which is largely absent in the Indian and Tibetan sources, and that it is therefore quire inappropriate to import this new metaphor into the original Indian sources as is some­times being done nowadays. This is, then, a difference that has often been overlooked in modern discussions of the doctrine of buddha­nature.

168 JIABS 18.2

Philosophical and hermeneutical study On the level of philosophical interpretation and hermeneutics, the tathagatagarbha theory and the related problem of Emptiness of the other (gzan ston: *para[bhiivaJ-sunya) in relation to Emptiness of self­nature (ran ston: svabhdvasunya[taj) has given rise over recent years to a number of discussions among writers on the subject.

Thus, the doctrines of ran ston and gzan ston have tended to be repre­sented simply as opposed theories located on the same level of discourse,3? but with no investigation being made of the religio-philo­sophical question as to the extent to which they might be complementary (as part of the Tibetan tradition has indeed thought), or whether they might perhaps be considered as what is today termed incommensurable (that is, located on different levels, or within distinct universes, of reli­gious and philosophical discourse). What is needed in Buddhist studies is not enlistment in c'ampaigns and polemics with other schools of Buddhist thought, but careful descriptions and analyses of the various traditions establishing their sources and religio-philosophical problematics and identifying how each dealt with the philosophical and hermeneutical questions that arose in their respective schools.

In Tibet from the thirteenth century at the latest, the ran ston theory has been associated with dominant "majority" schools such as the "mainstream" Sa skya pas and dGa' ldan pas / dGe lugs pas, whilst the gzan ston theory has been adopted by "minority" schools such as the Jo nan pas and some currents within the rNin rna pa and bKa' brgyud pa schools,38 Then, in the seventeenth century during the reign of the Fifth Dalai Lama, the Jo nan pa school in Central Tibet was suppressed and its books sealed at the time of a conflict between on the one side the central authorities of the dGa' ldan pho bran, who were inseparably linked with the dGe lugs pas, and on the other side the king of gTsall, who was asso­ciated with the Zva dmar Karma pa hierarchs of the bKa' brgyud pa school. Here we have a case where considerations of state do appear to impinge on philosophical and religious ideas; and the question arises whether the Jo nan pas-whose center was in gTsan province and who

37. See for example S. Hookham, The Buddha Within (Albany: 1991), who regards the advocates of the ran ston as having denigrated and distorted the gzan stan, which she then sets out to defend. 38. The words "majority," "mainstream" and "minority" have been put be­tween inverted commas because they tend to be subjective descriptions with little scientific content or value-the more so when proper statistics are hard to come by-and cannot in any case constitute the decisive criterion for un­derstanding and evaluating religious, philosophical and hermeneutical ideas.

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were protected by the king of gTsan-were in fact suppressed for politi­calor for ideological reasons. Perhaps, however, it would be an error to opt exclusively for either of these explanations. Reasons of state may have predominated; but it is not impossible that the ideological and the political in fact reinforced each other. In any case, in a land such as Tibet where "church" and "state" were so closely interlinked, the modern dichotomy religious vs. political-or sacred vs. profane-loses much of its relevance. And an explanation that completely subordinates one of these concepts to the other might well be too culture-bound and reduc­tionist, and thus a travesty of the "etic" approach. The task of the histo­rian will surely be to take account of both factors in an "emie" under­standing of Tibetan Buddhist civilization-something that is admittedly not always an easy undertaking.

"Inherent Enlightenment" vs. "Critical Buddhism" as a philological. historical and hermeneutical undertaking In recent years it is in Japan that the most striking controversy revolving round the tathagatagarbha and buddha-nature theory has come to the fore in discussions on "Critical Buddhism." There two respected scholars in Tokyo-Professors Hakamaya Noriaki and Matsumoto Shiro-have characterized the buddha-nature doctrine as in some way non-Buddhist.39

According to them it represents what they have labeled by the newly coined Sanskrit term "dhatu-vada," i. e. the hongaku [shiso] (pen-chiao [hsing]) theory of "original/inherent" enlightenment in Chinese and Japanese Buddhism. And this doctrine they hold to be incompatible with the principle of pratttyasamutpada "origination in dependence." Now, origination in dependence is indeed a fundamental concept in Buddhist thought. And in their critique of the buddha-nature doctrine these two scholars may well be justified in reacting against a superficial or simplis­tic version of it current in Japan or elsewhere. But in totally rejecting this doctrine as non-Buddhist they seem to have overshot the mark by giving scant attention to the explications of the tathagatagarbha theory

39. See recently N. Hakamaya, Hongaku shisiJ hihan [Critique of the thought of inherent enlightenment] (Tokyo: 1989), and id., Hihan bukkyiJ [Critical Buddhism] (Tokyo: 1990); and S. Matsumoto, Engi to kii-nyiJraiziJ shisiJ hihan [Causality and emptiness-A critique of tathagatagarbha thought] (Tokyo: 1989; 3rd ed., 1993), and id., "The Madhyamika philosophy of Tsong-kha-pa," Memoirs of the Research Department of the Toyo Bunko 48 (1990) (English reworking of an article published in the TiJyiJ GakuhiJ 62 [1981]).

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by Buddhist thinkers who, outside Japan, have at the same time accepted pratltyasamutpada as basic. 40

In western reports on this recent Japanese debate, moreover, we find the Sanskrit term tathagatagarbha being translated as "womb of the Buddha"-a meaning which (as mentioned above) this expression simply does not have in the relevant Sanskrit texts, any more than does its Tibetan equivalent de bZin gsegs pa'i siiili po. And we find repeated the assertion that the Japanese technical term hongaku (Chinese pen-chiao) "original, inherent" has no Sanskrit correspondence.41 But in point of fact, in the Sanskrit and Tibetan terms prak.rtiviiuddhi / pariiuddhi = ran bzin gyis rnam par dag pa / yons su dag pa that are well attested in the Ratnagotravibhaga-Commentary and the related literature as expressions referring to the natural purity of ordinary beings on the level of the Ground (gzi)-as opposed to the purity that is actualized on the resultant level of buddha hood or the Fruit ('bras bu) (vaimalyavisuddhi / parisud­dhi = dri ma med pa'i rnam par dag pa / yons su dag pa)-, the word prak.rti (= ran bzin) is very near indeed to the Sino-Japanese term pen­chiao I hongaku "original, inherent."42

In sum, while acknowledging the contribution this debate has made to cultural and social criticism in Buddhism, it surely behoves students of Buddhist thought to refrain from carrying on a discussion of such signifi­cance for Buddhist studies as a whole on an overly narrow basis, and without paying due attention to what major Buddhist thinkers elsewhere have had to say on the philosophical and hermeneutical issues involved in the theory of the tathagatagarbha and buddha-nature. The whole topic of the significance of the buddha-nature theory cannot be investigated in a vacuum, as if it concerned only Japanese Buddhism or, at the most, the Sino-Japanese traditions of Buddhism.

In this regard, reference may be made to the thought-provoking sys­temic (rather than historical) exegesis of the philosophical and herme­neutical problem of the tathagatagarbha in relation to iunyata offered for example by Gun than dKon mchog bstan pa'i sgron me (1762-1823), an outstanding Tibetan scholar who built on earlier interpretations of it current in the Indo-Tibetan tradition, and who at the same time accepted

40. See below on the exegesis by Gun than dKon mchog bstan pa'i sgron me. 41. Cf. P. L. Swanson, "'Zen is not Buddhism': Recent Japanese critiques of 'Buddha-nature,'" Numen 40 (1993): 115-49. 42. See D. Seyfort Ruegg, Thiorie du tathagatagarbha et du gotra: Etudes sur la soteriologie et la gnoseologie du bouddhisme (Paris: 1969).

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the doctrine of pratityasamutpada (on which he also wrote) without con­sidering that it annuls the tathagatagarbha theory.43

It does not seem, then, that the tathagatagarbha doctrine can be repre­sented as blurred and undifferentiated mysticism issuing in uncritical syncretism or in indifferentism, much less in naturalism. And it is imperative carefully to distinguish superficial syncretism of incompatible positions-not to speak of coercive inclusivism of totally disparate ideas -from the philosopher's treatment of intellectual and spiritual tensions existing since early times between various strands of Buddhist thought and from his hermeneutical awareness of their possible complementarity (or, eventually, of their incommensurability). By fragmenting Buddhist studies-and in this case treating (Sino-)Japanese interpretations of bud­dha-nature in isolation from the history of the tathagatagarbha theory as a whole-we render ourselves no longer able clearly to discern the

43. See D. Seyfort Ruegg, op. cit., 393 ff. Gun than indeed composed a trea­tise on pratityasamutpiida (included in vol. ga of his gSun 'bum).

On the tathiigatagarbha and buddha-nature in the Chinese Madhyamaka thought of Chi-tsang, see M.-W. Liu, Madhyamaka Thought in China (Leiden: 1994) 86, 160 ff., 171 ff.

In his interesting article entitled "What is Buddhist logic?" in S. Goodman and R. Davidson, eds., Tibetan Buddhism: Reason and Revelation (Albany: 1992) 25-44, K. Lipman has rightly pointed to the historical-philological fal­lacy that is incurred in rejecting a given hermeneutical interpretation both because it is held to be "later" rather than "original" and because it is assumed to "favor" one Buddhist "harmonizing" exegetical tradition (objections ex­pressed by L. Schmithausen in his critique of the present writer's Theorie in WZKS 17 [1973]: 136-7). But concerning my observations of 1969 in Theorie, Dr. Lipman criticizes my having (supposedly) sought "the solution" where he apparently assumed I did, writing "I do not believe that the dGe­lugs-pa interpretation is the 'solution' Ruegg was seeking, and perhaps through the study of rNying-ma, Sa-skya, and bKa' -brgyud materials of the period, the dGe-Iugs-pa approach will be seen in a less adequate light"(p. 25). In fact, however, the point in my book was not that, e. g., the dGe lugs pas rGyal tshab Dar rna rin chen and Gun than had found the "solution" (and a fortiori the last word) to any contradiction there may be between the tathiigatagarbha and sunyatii theories-indeed I am not certain that there exists anyone single "solution" to this tension which is both synchronic­systemic and diachronic-but that they had something significant to say about it in terms of philosophical hermeneutics and Wirkungsgeschichte. This philosophically crucial point appears to have been overlooked. It should go without saying that, in philosophy and hermeneutics, the interest

and value of what an author has to say are not simply a function of whether the author is or is not a member of a certain school (e. g. the dGe lugs). It is most regrettable that this basic principle is becoming overshadowed by sectar­ian likes and dislikes of investigators.

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significance in the history of Buddhist thought of an overarching set of fundamental religious-philosophical issues.

VIII

The question of the relation between the traditions of Buddhism in South, Central and East Asia has also brought into the lime-light the issue of the transcendence vs. the immanence of buddha-nature and bud­dhahood (buddhata). In this context, it has been supposed that East Asian tradition has generally opted for immanence, with buddhahood being thought of as inborn, whereas more westerly traditions of Bud­dhism tended on the contrary to emphasize transcendence, with buddha­hood to be reached only through a progressive and protracted spiritual and mental training. This difference has furthermore been linked with the distinction between intellectual analysis and meditative non-conceptu­alization, and between Gradualism-a tendency also supposed to charac­terize most of Indian and a large part of Tibetan Buddhism-and Simul­taneism (or Subitism)-which has, by contrast, frequently been deemed a specific feature of East Asian Buddhism and of certain Tibetan traditions influenced by the latter.

Now, whether we look at these sets of contrasts only from the view point of the tathagatagarbha theory, or whether we additionally bring in the theme of the Great Debate of bSam yas in late eighth-century Tibet together with the subsequent Tibetan discussions of the issues involved, the theoretical problems have turned out to be highly complex and nuanced, perhaps even somewhat intractable. At all events, it is no longer possible in this connection simply to speak of some Sino-Indian cultural frontier, and of the Great Debate of bSam yas as a Sino-Indian controversy, as Paul Demieville once did in his great pioneering work on the subject. 44 This is so because the traditions of Buddhism in South, Central and East Asia are anything but monolithic, and each of them often embraces the ancient philosophical and religious polarities and ten­sions alluded to above.

The Buddhist traditions themselves have of course been very alive to the philosophical and religious issues involved even if, naturally enough, they have not used our categories and vocabularies.

44. See P. Demieville, Le concile de Lhasa (Paris: 1952).

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One old attempt at clarification was by way of developing a taxonomy of the scriptural teachings attributed to the Buddha which is based on distinguishing "Wheels" (chos kyi 'khor 10 =*dharma-cakra), i. e. phases, of the doctrine together with a system of textual exegesis and systemic scriptural hermeneutics founded on differentiating a definitive, deep­level meaning (the nitartha = nes don) from a provisional, surface-level one that requires to be further interpreted in a sense different from the prima facie one (the neyartha = dran don). This differentiation is some­times also expressed by saying that a given scriptural text is intentional (abhiprayika = dgons pa can)-or that it is non-literal (na yathiiruta- = sgraji bZin ma yin pa)-because (i) it has an intended ground or purport (dgons gzi) only alluded to by indirection in the Buddha's teaching, because (ii) it is determined by some special motivation (dgos pa = prayojana) on the part of the Buddha who uttered it, and because (iii) its meaning is incompatible with the true meaning (dnos la gnod byed = mukhyarthabadha) accepted as being the Buddha's final and definitive intention (abhipraya = dgons pa) within a given doctrinal system (or *dharma-cakra).45

This hermeneutical distinction may be used in a classificatory fashion, that is, as a taxonomy. But it has sometimes also been employed in order to subordinate one body of teachings to another, as in some Chinese p' an-chiao classifications;46 and this last use of the taxonomy may then include a polemical dimension.

But recourse to the distinction between neyartha and nitartha has not been the only possible approach to systematic hermeneutics in Buddhism. And it has been seen by some philosophically minded hermeneuticians that this division between a provisional "surface" neyartha-meaning and a definitive "deep" nitartha-meaning is not actually required to resolve every problem of conflicting meanings encountered by the philosopher­interpreter. Thus, it has been concluded that even when we take as nitartha the two doctrines of (svabhiiva)sunyata and the tathagata-

45. See recently D. Seyfort Ruegg, "Purport, implicature and presupposition: Sanskrit abhipriiya and Tibetan dg01is pa / dg01is gzi as hermeneutical con­cepts," JIP 13 (1985): 309-25; "An Indian Source for the Tibetan Her­meneutical Term dgons gzi 'Intentional Ground,'" JIPh 16 (1988): 1-4; and "Allusiveness and Obliqueness in Buddhist Texts: sa1Jldhii, sa1Jldhi, sa1Jldhya and ab-isa1Jldhi," Dialectes dans les litteratures indo-aryennes, ed. C. Caillat (Paris: 1989) 295-328. 46. See recently e. g. D. Lopez, ed., Buddhist Hermeneutics (Honolulu: 1988); and M. -W. Liu, Madhyamaka Thought in China, index s. v. "p'an­chiao."

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garbha it may still be possible to develop an interpretation-a "read­ing"-that allows both doctrines to be understood as congruent and com­patible, without there being any need to suppose that one or the other has to be neyartha and canceled by the other. This is what Gun than has done in his exegesis to which reference has already been made above (26). Although attention was drawn to it long ago, this very important line of traditional interpretation has received virtually no attention in most recent work on the tathagatagarbha and ran ston theories and on Buddhist hermeneutics.

IX

The matter of pramalJa mentioned already at the outset (p. 3) takes us on to a further point which is of both lexical and religious-philosophical in­terest. This is the study of some of the things in Buddhist thought which can be subsumed-more or less "etically"-under the idea of authority current in contemporary European languages, notwithstanding the fact that Buddhism is a tradition that has regularly placed great emphasis on people's own endeavor, on their karman and its ripening, and on their direct understanding of reality. Thus, in the old canon we read that one has to be one's own refuge (Skt. atmadvlpa), or one's own lamp (Pali attadipa). And we are repeatedly told that, in the final analysis, spiritual realization must be unmediated and independent of any communication received from another (aparapratyaya), in other words that ultimate reality is to be directly realized within oneself (pratyatmavedamya, sa~atkartavya). Furthermore, irrespective of whether Tathagatas appear or not, it is the principle of Origination in Dependence (praUtya­samutpada) that represents the timeless stability and fixedness of Dharma (dharmasthititii. dharmaniyamata).

Yet, at the same time, the Buddhist does take refuge in the Buddha and the Community (sar;tgha) as well as in the Teaching (dharma). And the Buddha's word (buddhavacana = sans rgyas kyi bka ')-agama ([un) or scripture-is regarded as trustworthy (apta = yid ches pa), even as a cog­nitive standard or norm (prami1lJa = tshad ma).47 Indeed, the Bhagavant or Buddha-the teacher (Sds(r = ston pa )-is himself described as pra­miiflabhuta (tshad mar gyur pa).48 So, in slltra Buddhism as well as in the Vajrayana, the teacher-indeed the entire line of teachers extending

47. See e. g. CandrakIrti, Prasannapadii xv.6, p. 268. 48. See Dignaga, Pramiiflasamuccaya i.I.

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back to the Buddha-play a central and crucial role in Buddhist theory and practise. The spiritual master-both the proximate "root" Guru (rtsa ba'i bla ma) who is one's immediate teacher and the more remote ones belonging to one's spiritual lineage (brgyud pa'i bla ma)-is accordingly no less important to a Buddhist than he is for example to a Hindu.

These two sets of propositions within Buddhist thought appear to belong to distinct levels of religio-philosophical discourse. Hence, although they would thus not be contradictory in the strict sense, they evidently do reflect a real tension in the idea of what we in modern par­lance call authority. This is accordingly a worthwhile and fruitful sub­ject for both lexical and religio-philosophical clarification. And the question of the function of pramdlJa in relation to authority proves to be of very considerable interest in attempting to demarcate what is essential to Buddhist thought intrinsically-and "emically"-from what we some­times import into Buddhism with our own conceptual baggage when we superimpose on it either our culture-bound categories, interpretative grids and terminologies or, alternatively, our comparatively arrived at "etic" categories.

In the Buddhist theory of knowledge, the term pramalJa-though often rendered by our word "authority"-basically denotes right / correct cog­nition / knowledge. In the first place, it may refer to direct perception (i. e. pratyak~a = miwn sum), a form of cognition which is defined as "congruent"-i. e. non-delusive and indefeasible / veridical (avisaf!tvad­aka = mi[blslu ba) and hence reliable-and also as free of conceptual construction (kalpandparjha = rtag pa dan bral ba); and its scope belongs to what is cognitively accessible immediately (pratyak~a = mnan gyur). Secondly, the term pramalJa may denote inferential knowledge (anu­mana = rjes dpag), i. e. that form of right cognition whose scope belongs to what is in part cognitively inaccessible ([l~atlparok~a: cun zad lkog gyur) to us because of epistemologically extrinsic obstacles such as dis­tance, as in the case of fire the presence of which on a distant hill can be inferred from observing smoke there, in accord with the homologous example (sapak~ad.r~.tiinta) of smoke regularly accompanying fire in a kitchen: "no smoke without fire." Now, according to the Buddhist PramaJ;la-school of Dignaga and DharmakIrti, PramalJa has only these two basic forms of direct perceptual knowledge and inferential knowl­edge. Even scriptural authority (agama = lun) as reliable testimony (apta = yid ches pa) is not regarded as a separate and independent means of correct knowledge, but is included under that form of inferential knowledge (anumana) the scope of which belongs to what is totally con-

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cealed (atyantaparok~a = sin tu lkog gyur) for epistemologically intrinsic reasons connected with the transcendent nature of its cognitive object.

Still, the Buddha-though a person-does function like a pramalJ-a, for he is stated to be pramalJ-abhuta in Dignaga's great treatise on epistemol­ogy and logic, the PramalJ-asamuccaya (i. 1). And a thoroughly competent teacher such as Nagarjuna is described as a * pramalJ-abhuta­puru~a (tshad mar gyur pa'i skyes bu) by the Madhyamaka master Candraklrti (MARh vi.2). For this and related reasons such as their com­passion, the Buddha and other trustworthy masters are then thought of as persons in whom one may place confidence, so that we may legitimately describe them as authorities. Thus the idea of the Teacher or Guru as an authority is not restricted to the Vajrayana form of Buddhism alone.

In the Buddhist concept of pramalJ-a we accordingly meet once again­this time in a perhaps somewhat unexpected context-the contrast between immediacy and mediacy already encountered in the quite differ­ent contexts already mentioned above of the theory of the tathagatagarbha and buddha-nature (on the level of Ground, gZi) and of the distinction between the Gradual and the Simultaneous (on the level of the Path, lam). For in the case of (pratyak~a)pramalJ-a the criterion is the immediacy of right knowledge free of conceptual construction (kalpanapo,rha). And one prerequisite for being a truly trustworthy­and thus authoritative-teacher is the possession of this immediate knowledge of reality. That is, if the Buddha or other reliable teachers are "authorities"-i. e. pramalJ-as, prama,!ika or pramalJ-abhuta, as they indeed are for Buddhists-, their being authoritative is in fact secondary and derivative in as much as it results from their having access to-even being so to say constituted by-right knowledge or prama,!a relating to ultimate reality. Hence, if pramalJ-a were to be understood as authority, this conception will inescapably involve indirectness and mediacy. For if a teacher is an authority for another cognizer, this necessarily makes the latter cognitively dependent on this outside authority (i. e. parapratyaya) as an external, and hence indirect, source for his own knowledge. On the contrary, being direct right / correct cognition / knowledge (pratyak~a) pramalJ-a is characterized precisely by its cognitive immediacy for the knower. For the Buddha, or another reliable teacher, the pramalJ-a in question is constituted by their direct awareness (sak~atkara) of reality.

Here we are thus confronted by a curious tension-even a certain lack of perfect fit-between the above-mentioned uses of the Sanskrit word pramalJ-a and its Tibetan equivalent tshad ma as (1) right / correct cogni­tion / knowledge and (2) authority. These two well-attested values of the

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word-which are in fact quite distinct-come verycleady to our atten­tion when we seek to translate pramiiJ!a into a language like English which, unlike Sanskrit and Tibetan, makes this religiously and philosoph­ically vital distinction by employing etymologically unrelatetl words to express the two values.49

In this way, concepts which we for our part might include under the idea of authority have in Buddhism distinct philosophical (i. e. epistemo­logical and gnoseological), religious, religio-social and sometimes even religio-political aspects. It is therefore necessary to reflect closely on the extent to which the contemporary "standard average" idea of authority is really adequate to embrace what, basically, is cognitively direct, imme­diate and (in the first place) free from conceptual construction like the (pratyalqa)pramiiJ!a-something that is epistemologically "normal" or "standard" rather than an "authority" in the usual sense of this word.

x

It has been argued that studies in Buddhist thought may be viewed as constituting a unitary discipline even if they are also, inevitably and legitimately, multidisciplinary and, one may hope, interdisciplinary.

When considering Buddhist traditions extending from South through Central to East Asia and beyond it has, however, often been customary to think in terms of national Buddhisms (conceived of sometimes as more or less uniform and even monolithic entities). In so doing we risk falling prey to modern preconceptions. It is of course true that Buddhists them­selves have not hesitated to engage very closely with and to absorb the various cultural traditions of different peoples as the Buddha-Dharma spread first within India and then further abroad. (The Buddha is in fact reported to have himself authorized his hearers to make use of their own particular languages.) Yet, even if Buddhism reveals no single and uni­versal monothetic essence throughout, its traditions show over arching continuities and what may be called lattices of polythetic "family resem­blances." And it is just this that makes it possible to speak of Buddhism at all, even while recognizing that it is not a single uniform entity on the horizontal plane of its geographical diffusion in space.

49. See D. Seyfort Ruegg, "Pramii"(Labhl1ta, *pramii"(La(bhl1ta)-puru~a, pratyak~adharman and siik~iitk.rtadharman as epithets of the fi~i, Aciirya and Tathiigata in grammatical, epistemological and Madhyamaka texts," BSOAS 57 (1994): 303-20; and "La notion du voyant et du 'connaisseur supreme' et la question de l'autorite epistemique," WZKS 38 (1994): 403-19.

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As for the vertical axis of chronology, when investigating the Buddhist traditions which have presented themselves in such diverse garb over the centuries, it has been customary for scholars to think in terms of layers of textual material where one stratum is set off from and supersedes another. Certainly, in many a case, this stratigraphical model for the his­tory of Buddhism is appropriate. But such a quasi geological paradigm should not be allowed to mislead. In the case of structurally contrastive oppositions-such as those between immediacy and mediacy, between inborn buddha-nature and progressively achieved buddhahood, between cataphaticism and apophaticism, between the non-analytically meditative and the analytically intellectual, between direct understanding by oneself and instruction communicated from outside by another-, there seem rather to exist intellectual and spiritual polarities and tensions which are not best understood as conditioned only by chronology, i. e. stratigraphi­cally. Not only have these been present in Buddhist thought from early times, but they may well be inherent to Buddhist thought throughout its history-indeed perhaps even to the Buddha's teaching as he gave it to his disciples of varying capacities and propensities.

Hence it does not seem possible simply to generalize the stratigraphical paradigm of higher criticism and to speak, in such cases, only of textual layers opposing, succeeding and eventually superseding each other in time. If a method of textual analysis based on the stratigraphical model loses sight of its own inherent limitations, it runs the risk of postulating diachronically successive strata while overlooking the complex systemic and synchronic philosophical processes and spiritual tensions involved in the history of Buddhism. Historicist positivism does not always make good history.

XI

This last point can have a bearing as much on postulated diachronic sequences in what has been termed Earliest Buddhism, and in the doc­trines of the early schools (nikaya), as it does on the later phases in the history of Buddhism with which the preceding remarks have been concerned.

When attempting to determine what may have constituted "original" or "earliest"-that is, "precanonical" or proto-canonical-Buddhism, let us then reflect on the circumstance that we sometimes find ourselves engag­ing in what may, no doubt unavoidably, be rather impressionistic infer­ences and atomistic reconstructions. Unless one is quite clear about the

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eventual role of systemically structured-and hence synchronic rather than exclusively diachronic-polarities and tensions in philosophical and religious thinking, the possibility will exist that any atomistic identifica­tion in the sources of (putative) doctrinal inconsistencies and contradic­tions in content-and also of formal incoherence in the textual peri­copes-can, per se, offer no sure and reliable guide to the reconstruction of doctrinal developments that could be datable absolutely, or even rela­tively. (The earliest attestation of a doctrine or other piece of evidence can of course be employed as a terminus a quo, provided the fallacy of argument from silence is avoided.) Hence many a reconstruction, inex­tricably bound up as it in practise is with theoretical presuppositions and prejudgments and with methodological options, may turn out to be as unfalsifiable as it is unverifiable in view of the very nature of the evi­dence available. And one must then carefully consider just what their scientific value and function can be. If, however, they are clearly recog­nized to be simply working hypotheses with a certain (albeit circum­scribed) heuristic value, there may be no harm in them. 50

Finally, an approach prepared to envisage the possible un answerability of the question as to what "original" Buddhism was because of the very nature of our documentation should not necessarily be thought to amount to agnosticism, to relativism or to indifferentist ahistoriscism.

By Buddhist tradition the crucial problem of the authenticity of a text or doctrine has been raised not so much in the form of the question whether Doctrine x is "original"-i. e., that the historical Buddha Gautama Sakyamuni taught it at such and such a time-as in that of the question whether a given teaching is attested in the corpora of sutra and Vinaya (as in the canonical mahapadesas),51 and whether it is both justifiable and intelligible in terms of the Buddha's soteriological purpose and his

50. At all events, recourse in such matters to arguments claiming to be based on what is rational, or plausible, will be of little avail, and often examples of methodologically naive question-begging, unless of course it has first been possible satisfactorily to establish what, in each case, is to be considered ratio­nal and plausible. The watch-word of rationality is hardly an open-sesame, a universal pass-key which can be used anywhere. Rather, in order to avoid cir­cularity, the relevant "rationale(s)" is (are) what has first to be discovered by investigation of the evidence in each individual case. 51. See E. Lamotte, "La critique d'authenticite dans Ie bouddhisme," India antiqua (J. Ph. Vogel Felicitation Volume, Leiden: 1947) 213-222. See also R. M. Davidson, "An introduction to the standards of scriptural authenticity in Indian Buddhism," Chinese Buddhist Apocrypha, ed. R. Buswell (Honolulu: 1990) 291-325.

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philosophical intention as expressed in his nztartha statements. In Buddhist tradition, it has been considered that if these last criteria are fulfilled a statement will be buddha-Word (buddhavacana).

In other words, the criterion has generally not been what the historical Buddha taught at a given time t in the 45 years said to have intervened between his A wakening and his ParinirVciI,la taking place n years before the present. 52 For, finally, the criterion of authenticity was the idea that what is Buddhistically well-formed (subha~ita) is buddhavacana / bud­dhabhii~ita "buddha-word." Conversely, buddha-word is subha~ita in the sense of being well-formed in the philosophical meaning of this term­i. e. correctly formulated-rather than just well-turned and eloquent in a literary sense. Then, in the last analysis, whatever is Buddhistically well­formed (i. e. dharmopasaf!1hita, arthopasaf!1hita, etc.) has-so to say by definition-become Buddha-word. 53

Needless to say, this will not have to be the point of view of the histor­ically minded modern student of Buddhist thought. Yet, in addition to being about identifying historical origins, religious or doctrinal develop-

52. Attempts to answer such questions do, however, exist within Buddhist tradition, for example in the Kalacakra system and (to a lesser degree) in the taxonomy of the three Wheels of the Dharma (*dharma-cakra). 53. See the Uttaravipattisutta in Anguttaranikaya IV, 164: evam eva,deviinam inda, yalJl kifici subhiisitalJl sabbalJl talJl tassa bhagavato vacan~1J1 arahato spmmiisambuddhassa; and the AdhyiisayasalJlcodanasutra cited in Santideva's Sik~iisamuccaya (ed. Bendall) 15, and in PrajiHikaramati's Bodhicaryiivatiira­pafijikii ix.43ab: yat kilJlcin maitreya subhii~italJl sarvalJl tad buddhabhii~itam. On the idea see E. Lamotte, Le traite de la Grande Vertu de Sagesse, i (Louvain: 1944) 80 n. 2; D. L. Snellgrove, BSOAS 21 (1958): 620-1; R. Davidson, op. cit., 310; S. Collins, "On the Very Idea of the Pali Canon," JPTS 15 (1990): 94-95; and D. Lopez, "Authority and Orality in the Maha­yana," Numen 42 (1995): 27.

The parallel idea that whatever the Buddha said is well-said is frequently attested. See e. g. the Subhiisitasutta in Suttanipiita iii.3 (p.78-79), with the Amagandhasutta in Suttanipiita ii.2.14 (verse 252, p. 45)and the KilJlsilasutta in ii.9.2 (verse 325, p. 56); Sarrtyuttanikaya IV, 188-9. The idea is attested also in Asoka's Bhabra inscription (ed. J. Bloch, 154): e keci bhalJlte bhaga­vatii buddhena bhiisite savve se subhiisitevii.

Although subhii~ita = legs (par) bsad (pa) has often been translated by "eloquent" or "eloquence," this rendering can be somewhat misleading. What is in the final analysis intended is the well-formulated, and well-formed, on the content-level (though the level of expression is, presumably, not entirely excluded in the view of the tradition; cf. F. Edgerton, BHSD s.v.). In the pas­sage just cited of the AdhyiisayasalJlcodanasutra, pratibhiina "intelligent / insightful I inspired expression" (rather than just "elocution")-one of the four pratisalJlvid-is also mentioned: caturbhiT:t kiiralJaiT:t pratibhiinalJl sarvalJl bud­dhabhii~i[tam jfiiitavyam].

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ments and successive textual strata, the study of Buddhist thought is also about understanding structurally and systemically the ideas we find in the sources together with the underlying (and often unexplicit) presupposi­tions with which the Buddhist traditions have operated in developing these ideas. For this purpose, Buddhist hermeneutics with its theory of a "deep" definitive meaning (nztartha)-as distinct from a provisional "surface" meaning requiring to be further interpreted in a sense other than the prima facie one (neyartha )-offers very considerable interest. In the philosophical study of Buddhist thought hermeneutics too can therefore assume a place of central importance.

LUIS O. GOMEZ

Unspoken Paradigms: Meanderings through the Metaphors of a Field

"People of the world say 'method, method,' what sort of thing is this method?"

"What do you think? Does it ever occur to the skillful user of method to think, 'I will use this method, I am now using this method, I have used this method'?"

"No, indeed this never occurs to the skillful user of method." "And why is it so? Because there is no dharma that can be called

method. This is why it is called method." -from a long-lost sutra-

"Method" has finally arrived in the land of Buddhist Studies. It makes its appearance belatedly, reluctantly, and haltingly. Our colleagues in other fields and our students now demand to know what our positions are regarding the questions of "method" and "theory." They expect from us a certain familiarity with the types of discourse that dominate the academy in what used to be the province of classical philology, or, at best, of New Criticism. What shall we, the "buddhologists," say to those who want to know about our "method"?

Even if we make allowances for all that is fashion and trend, even if we truly believe in the hallowed crafts of the philologist and the historian, and even if we suspect that "method" is often a front for a misreading of one sort or another (or for no reading at all!), the call to question our rea­sons and motives cannot be ignored, and should have been heeded earlier. Those with whom we would like to engage in some form of dialogue have been asking us similar questions for decades. We may have ignored them as long as our craft was shielded by the privileges of the overprotected' Academy, but more and more we are unable to keep turning our faces away from this clear call to understand, from this challenge to our goals and to the means leading to our goals. Moreover, those who would shrug

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off any consideration of the social and logical infrastructures of their scholarship do not thereby become magically divested of a method, a the­ory, and a particular choice of perspective. We may choose not to speak about why and how we do what we do, but such refusal does not erase the why and the how of what we do; and the refusal is often interpreted by others (correctly) as some sort of theoretical statement. The healthy sus­picion of what may lurch behind the abstruse language of "theory" is one thing, the pretense, against all reason, that one does not have a theory or a method, is another.

This paper is in part the fruit of attempts to engage graduate students in some form of reflection on "theory"-that is reflection on the reasons for doing what we do and on the art of choosing and judging arguments in what we do. The paper is a spin-off from a mini-course I offered a couple of years ago to a small group of Asian students and research associates at the University of Michigan. They had come to a North American uni­versity to "learn about Western methodologies."! Perhaps with only one exception, they were all' interested in "the application of these method­ologies to the study of Buddhism," not as a part ofa secular humanistic enterprise, but as a part of the study of a religion that was in fact an inte­gral part of their own cultural and religious belief systems.2 They were consequently baffled by what appeared to them as a pointless reduction­ism in the methods and conclusions of the work we were trying to pass by them as "Buddhist Studies," yet they were equally shocked to discover that writers on "theory" and "method" did not offer a viable alternative to forms of scholarship that failed to speak to them.

In the more recent, and expanded, incarnations of this course, the majority of my students have been North American graduate students in Buddhist Studies who need to learn of contemporary historical methods, methods of literary criticism, and contemporary critical theory, but who also need to learn about traditional Western methods of study and research, especially those which, in the last 100 years, in Europe, North

1. The choice of words seems to me significant, and suspect. The common use of the word "methodology" to mean "method" strikes me as betraying a mysti­fication of "theory" and "method." 2. This too strikes me as suspect: that we should assume that method is some neutral tool to be "applied" to Buddhism. Even if "methods" were "tools," the selection of a tool is not a trivial matter-even the most naive mechanic knows that you cannot use an Allen wrench on a Phillips head or on a machine bolt, or a metric socket on an English bolt-at least, not without causing major damage.

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America and Japan, have helped to form the logic of the forms of research and discourse that we call Buddhist Studies. These methods follow primarily two models: classical philology and historical positivism. These are the "older" methods that have also defined during those 100 odd years "the Canons" that we are expected to study-paradigmatic works of scholarship and representative Buddhist texts.3

But a need to understand what we do and why we do it has grown even as the skill and the willingness to carry out the close reading of the text have decreased, placing both student and teacher in a bind: any course in method can only be a preliminary to the acquisition and application of certain formal tools, but experience in the use of such tools is a prelimi- . nary to understanding method and theory.

Attempting to serve as a bridge to the uses and values of more tradi­tional tools and the pursuit of more traditional goals, the course has come to be roughly divided into three units of disparate length: (1) a short review of the history of the Western Academy and of the place of Bud­dhist Studies in the Academy, (2) a middle length survey of issues in con­temporary critical theory that are relevant to the study of Buddhism, and (3) a much longer historical and critical review of how we have come to privilege texts, certain texts, and certain methods-in other words, a his­tory of the canons of contemporary Buddhist Studies.4 The last unit includes, furthermore, reflections on the way in which the scholarly con­structs of traditional Buddhists combined with Western presuppositions about history and texts to shape the canons of modern Buddhist Studies.

I describe this class as a course that surveys, for the benefit of future scholars of Buddhism, (1) the position of Buddhist Studies and Buddhism in the Academy, (2) forms of critical discourse that have been used to speak about Buddhism and the study of Buddhism, (3) the critical and analytic traditions of Buddhism before the appearance and hegemony of

3. The content of these Canons has also been determined by historical acci­dents in the encounter of the Western academy with Asian Buddhist tradi­tions-including the early encounters with Tibetan scholasticism and the canons of particular Japanese denominations. 4. The influence of particular modes of Western learning, especially the ideals and presuppositions of philology as it developed from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, has been such that we can safely assert that these ideals of learning have become normative in Buddhist Studies. So far, Asian and Western Buddhists have not been able to free themselves completely from the spell of these ideals, even when their application is often ignored in practice.

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Western secular scholarship,5 and (4) critical discourse generally. But the central goal of the course is to encourage the young scholar to question the goals of our metier, the types of discourse we use, the audiences (real or imagined) to which we speak, and the constraints and limitations of the field.

The present paper is an exercise in reviewing and reordering the prole­gomena to such a course, and therefore touches on most of the issues addressed in the course, but polemically rather than descriptively. Although the plan of this paper calls for speculation and debate, it also calls for some schematics-after all, can there be generalizations without some type of classification and outline? The paper therefore belongs to the genre we sometimes call, with typical scholarly grandiosity and hubris, "the state of the field." Expressed more plainly and humbly, I would like to survey cursorily and examine critically some models of Buddhist Studies. These are the models that remain unspoken in the field, hidden behind metaphors of positivistic science in a discipline where the methods of the positive sciences are seldom, if ever, used.

A Discipline of Sorts Whatever our position may be on the appropriateness of speaking about Buddhist Studies as a discipline, we at least tend to agree that even a "Buddhist Studies" in quotation marks depends on, or is composed by, certain principles of research and discourse that belong to what we may call the academic disciplines. We assume that Buddhist Studies is in some way analogous to other disciplines, or, at least, defined by the appli­cation of well-established disciplines to a particular object of study. The putative foundation that sustains the academic disciplines guarantees the "results" of research in Buddhist Studies.

However, other forms of scholarly activity that we would regard as safely established in a disciplinary history, and therefore as a safe model for our projects in Buddhist Studies, have equally questionable or modern pedigrees. Even the "well-established" disciplines are relatively young, and have communities of participants and audiences that are ever shifting

5. In the process of developing these themes in class discussion, a meta-anal­ysis of the goals of the course leads inevitably to questions of authority and constraints on human knowledge and behavior. Although this paper addresses such issues only indirectly, their importance should become obvious to the reader as I develop my argument. I have attempted a more explicit discussion of issues of religious, textual, and scholarly authority in Buddhist Studies in two workshops I offered at Otani University in the summers of 1993 and 1994.

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and colliding. They are not defined by a core intellectual practice, but by a tradition of practice and by a community that is to a great extent a guild of craftsmen (only recently more open to craftswomen). All the disci­plines have suffered major transformations. A shift from art and avoca­tion to profession has changed radically the meaning of the word "philosophy," for instance. This same shift has changed humanistic dis­course in general, to the point that the term "Humanities," like "Liberal Arts," remains only as a convenient label for college administrators. Philology and history have suffered a similar professionalization and a specialization that has gradually created a class of scholars dedicated to a professional discourse of recondite jargon and erudition pure, with no sense of an audience outside the limited circle of the professional.

Of course, a discipline is also a set of modes of thinking. But it is sel­dom, if ever, a single set of such modes. It may include a set of norms­especially norms about which forms of discourse are acceptable and which are not. The norms, or rules of genre, however, are fluid, and the vitality of a discipline may depend on its capacity to tolerate and accept challenges to these norms.

The vitality of a discipline also depends on its capacity to garner sup­port from the community, and this is often accomplished by listening to a variety of voices. Beyond the voices of the academe there is another set of important voices: the voices of those upon whom the survival of the discipline within the established academe depends (government officials, students, students' parents, university officials, editors, the press). A dis­cipline is accountable to a number of audiences, and our colleagues within the guild are only one such audience. Disciplines respond to the needs and to the idealized self-image of particular communities and they are held accountable by those communities.

However, if a person of learning were only accountable to his or her Maecenas, responsible scholarship as we know it would not exist. The scholar is also responsible to a broad range of audiences, extending from the potential or occasional reader, to the members of the traditions to whom we owe the works that we study. Such a broad definition of audi­ence, of course, entails a broad definition of the role of the scholar. A single scholar cannot carry out all roles, but should aspire to serve hon­estly and with dedication at least some of the communities that justify the scholarly enterprise, and not just the communities or the individuals that support, or participate in, the scholarly enterprise.

Among the forgotten communities of readers that we often neglect are those of the person's who seek in Buddhism a humanistic model. Like-

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wise, we cannot forget the communities of the new believers in the West, for whom a secular non-sectarian Buddhist scholarship will probably become a necessity. But, above all, the most important neglected "audi­ence" is that of those who created the traditions we now study-those who, in a peculiar way provide us with a justification.

A tradition is also a set of practices and norms tracing their roots into the past. Here Buddhist Studies, for instance, depended for a long time on the traditions of European philology, and attempted to model itself on Classical Studies. The disciplines of Indology and Sinology are good examples of stepchildren to Classics. The youth of these disciplines is not only a chronological curiosity but an indicator of the extent to which aca­demic disciplines are specific to certain historical moments, and the degree to which disciplines are fragile. At least since the creation of the modern research institution, the life of disciplines has depended as much on discovery and paradigm shifts as it has on academic bureaucracies and scholarly guilds. Accordingly, the coexistence of competing voices and interests (within disciplines and among disciplines) is essential for the survival of tradition even as it is the very ground for the fragmentation and transformation of the tradition.

What is peculiar about discipline in the humanities, however, is that the avowed interests of the discipline and the values that may be derived from the cultural products studied by those disciplines do not have to coincide with the interests and values of the communities that support them. Often, the genre of the discipline is shaped as much by the norms of the tradition that it studies as by any conscious reflections on the goals and limitations of the discipline.

Buddhist Studies, for instance, has developed several identities that are in fact built around the focal points provided by the tradition itself. So that the nature of this discipline-like the nature of many other intellec­tual traditions-depends not only on the processes and means of produc­tion associated with it, or on its social context, or on the explicitly recog­nized interests of the classes that practice it, but depends likewise on idealized notions of what the subject is or was, and on abstract notions of its value, and what constitute truth values in the discipline's discourse. A similar illusion gives all intellectual enterprises the protection of an illu­sion: that it has a life of its own. Thus, it is possibly to do art criticism that imitates Vasari for an audience in New York City, in 1995, under the auspices of a state agency, and only a few hundred yards from a Arab, Jewish, Black or Hispanic neighborhoods.

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A scholarly discipline is not only a matter of disinterested intellectual effort, for it is evidently also a matter of the abstract application of intel­lectual curiosity through the medium of a discourse accessible, intelligi­ble, and valuable to an intellectual elite, yet supported by a community that is interested in the veneer of learning. Consider the irony of a Con­ference on Buddhism in the heart of Mexico City, or of Buddhist Studies in Ann Arbor, only some 65 kilometers from the heart of the "inner city" of Detroit. Consider the irony of Buddhist Studies in America in dialogue with Indology in Japan. Such ironies already raise some questions as to the nature, audience, and social role of the discipline.

Discipline Defined by Its Object But, as already noted, disciplines may also be defined by their objects. One could therefore argue that Buddhist Studies is only defined by con­tent, not method. This is at least partially true, and likely to become more than partly true as the old philological models are displaced by ethno­graphic and, one would hope, literary models. However, the study of Buddhism has still much to learn from other fields of study that define themselves by an object or a cultural sphere. Thus, Christian Studies, without laying any claim to a separate methodological discipline has made better use than Buddhist Studies of the ways of arguing used in so­called "established" academic disciplines.

Today, research in Christian Studies is no longer based only on texts, and is no longer concerned only with doctrine or history. Of course, unlike Buddhist Studies, Christian Studies has a clear place in Western communities at large-it may find itself cornered by secularism, but it is not the isolated hobby of a handful of gentleman scholars, for it is also based on a community presence. Christian scholars and scholars of Christianity have embraced an understanding of Christian traditions that makes ample and creative use of contemporary advances in criticism, see­ing, for instance, the religious text and religious discourse as literary and narrative events. A generous use of literary criticism, psychological anthropology, and history of religious approaches has not in the least compromised the textual disciplines. Consider for instance the rich range of possibilities open to a beginning Biblical scholar or an undergraduate interested in progressing beyond the "introductory" course-as illustrated by manuals such as Tucker, 1971, and Turner, 1982. Compare these sources with the limited understanding of what is Buddhist scholarship illustrated by some of the rare "manuals" of Buddhist Studies accessible to the modern reader, such as de Jong's history of Buddhist Studies or

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Hirakawa's Bukkyo-gaku Nyumon. 6 Only some rare manuals of Indology come close to providing anything close to what we find in the Christian Studies texts and manuals (e. g., Renou, and Bechert and von Simson).

The difference between Christian and Buddhist Studies is perhaps in part explained by the fact that Buddhist Studies continues to be a Western enterprise about a non-Western cultural product, a discourse about Bud­dhism taking place in a non-Buddhist context for a non-Buddhist audience of super-specialists, whose intellectual work persists in isolation from the mainstream of Western literature, art, and philosophy, and occasionally even from the mainstream of contemporary Buddhist doctrinal reflection. The audience to which Christian Studies speaks shares with the Judeo­Christian tradition a more or less common language. It is possible, if not natural, for members of this audience to accept the conceit that they belong to the tradition and the tradition belongs to them. Any attempt to show that we are in fact in a different universe from that of early Chris­tianity will not convince the audience of Christian Studies; because this audience has a cultural sense, an unshakable belief that creates meaning even where the tradition has lost its meaning. Buddhist Studies and its audience lack such a common language and such a conviction. In fact, even in Asia it is losing its capacity to maintain the myth of an unbroken tradition and a common, meaningful, language.

Furthermore, whereas Christianity and Christian Studies as we know them are the fruit of a continuous interaction with Western secularism, rationalism, and the modern and postmodern Western self, most of our Buddhist materials and many of our Asian informants belong to a very different cultural tradition. The methods and expectations of our scholar­ship and our audiences have been shaped by a cultural history very differ­ent from that of Buddhist traditions.7

6. Generally, I have abstained from discussing in any detail works or authors mentioned in this essay as models or examples of particular types of scholar­ship. Complete references to the works mentioned or to sample works of the authors mentioned have been provided in the bibliography. The bibliography also includes a selection from the bibliography of the course alluded to in this essay-readings the influence of which is behind the essay and its arguments. Not all of these titles have been referenced in the body of the article. 7. Because of these cultural differences, comparisons can be skewed. Con­sider, for instance, the way in which Luther is studied by Erikson (1958) and Ignatius of Loyola by Meissner (1992) with the difficulties one would face attempting a similar analysis of either earlier figures in Western tradition or many of the classical figures of Asian Buddhism. As social circumstances

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Nevertheless, even within the very limited circle of that minority of privi­leged individuals plying the trade of Buddhist Studies, there is a belief and a sense of continuity-it may not be shared by it audience and by the community that supports Buddhist Studies, but it is nevertheless a more or less effective mythology of continuity, legitimacy, and truth. This belief (that is, the belief that the scholar of Buddhism is somehow connected to, or "in tune with" the Buddhist tradition) is in part maintained by an unconscious return to imagined origins, a return that is accomplished by using some of the forms of traditional Buddhist learning as models for contemporary scholarly genres. We have to a certain extent adopted some of those classical models, and remained bound and constrained by some of the presuppositions of such models, especially those that appear to confirm on the surface our own preconceptions-our own Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment preconceptions.

The Buddhist tradition is itself rich in critical methods. Used inge­niously, some of these traditions of critical inquiry or of hermeneutic suspicion, could be used to help the modem scholar question the Buddhist tradition. But this is seldom done. Our failure to do so may be attributed in part to the fact that these traditions of critical inquiry have become fos­silized; but it is also true that such traditions were never traditions of free inquiry in any sense close to what the term has come to mean in recent Western history.

The rise of "criticism" in the West is based not on the same historical circumstances that produced Buddhist traditions of criticism. The latter were formed in debates that were largely within religious discourse or between divergent religious discourses. The multiple roots of Western criticism include debate between secular and religious forms of discourse, and among metaphysical speculation, scientific theory and empirical observation of types that were unknown in Asian tradition-and which are relatively young in Western tradition. In such encounters Western philosophers have confronted a long line of critiques of language (from the critique of Latin and the Vulgate to the linguistic theories of de Saussure and beyond), critiques of textual authority (from the critique of the Book and its authority to the death of the author, and the object of the work), and critiques of religious authority (from a critique of the deity

change, the potential for this type of analysis (and the potential for meaningful discourse of this type) also changes-consider for instances the possibility for psychological analyses of King's biography of Satomi Myodo (1987) or some ofthe materials in the life of Hakuin (Yampolsky, 1971).

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who spoke the text to a critique of the motives of the human authors and transmitters of sacred texts). For all its philosophical sophistication the Buddhist tradition never confronted (and has barely risen to confront) the full implication of such challenges.

Let us then pause briefly to reflect on some of our roots-on classical models for what one would characterize as "Buddhist Studies." I see a wide range of styles of scholarship. Some of these styles have deep roots in Asian as well as Western cultural conventions and assumptions about the nature of knowledge generally, about the nature of religion and reli­gious knowledge, and about the nature of Buddhism. Classical Buddhist assumptions in these areas have been transposed or displaced to apply them to the human sciences, thus confirming prejudices that are at the same time secular and religious.

Of course, other styles of Buddhist Scholarship have deep roots in Western paradigms that may be traced back to Greece and the Middle Ages, to the Reformation and the Enlightenment, to Western colonialism, to the development of the modern research university, and to the devel­opment of Western historical criticism. But in the present essay I wish to focus only on a few traditional Buddhist models that may have reinforced some of our own preconceived notions about the nature of evidence, dis­course, and text.

Four models of Buddhist scholarship are to a great extent defined by their subject matter-in other words, they emulate the assumptions and goals of the subject they study. These models or ideals are: (1) the true word, especially the written scriptural word, as the object and goal of Buddhist scholarship, (2) the doctrinal system as a prerequisite for truth, (3) the doctrinal word as the principal tool for understanding Buddhism, and (4) the sequential or chronological ordering of events and ideas as a necessary precondition for the truth of judgments about religion.

The definition by subject matter is only the surface of these genres. There is more to be said as to the cognitive styles and contexts that define and constrain each of these genres, but I will confine myself to a brief examination of how these genres of scholarship suggest the limits of our scholarly imagination. These are a few of the ways our object of study tends to shape our discourse, or how they become part of our discourse, rather than simply the object of our discourse.

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1. Words as the primary object: The strict, or classical, philological model This is one of the oldest "method" of Buddhist Studies-old in Asia as well as in Europe.8 It owes its strength and longevity to the virtues of close, grammatical reading. But it often assumes that "Buddhism" is pri­marily, if not exclusively, accessible through, or embodied in, texts, and that certain texts rather than others embody Buddhism in a more true or perfect form. In its most extreme forms this model obsesses over individ­ual words and syllables, almost as if meaning depended on the elucidation of single words.

Philology is, as the Greek roots of the English term suggest, a love for words-and in this love it betrays its magical origins. The philologist believes that words contain truth, and that their power derives from truth. The philologist also believes only he or she has access to "the true word." One may reject the notion that the true word is the word of God, that God's authorship is the ultimate guarantee of meaning, yet authorship, authority, and truth remain linked in the scholarly imagination.

Traditionally, this true word was the etymology, that is, the philologist assumed, against the evidence of living languages and historical linguis­tics, the existence of an ultimate, pure origin of words. The usual claim is to knowledge of an earlier or earliest "meaning" of the word, a meaning that somehow invalidates or supersedes any other meaning the word may have later in history. Thus, the Buddhist scholar may debate the "original" meaning of the name "Arnitabha," concluding that he can know the true meaning of the name of the Buddha Arnitabha, and that he can know this meaning better than those for whom the name is an integral part of a living language and a living universe of belief.

In its most extreme practical form, the clarification of etymologies and the proper choice of variants constituted the whole of the philological enterprise. The true word was the key to the true text, and the latter was the locus and the ground of meaning and authority. In its most extreme theoretical (or theological) formulations, the philologist claimed that he could understand the believer's belief better than the believers themselves by understanding the true meaning of the texts the believers claimed as

8. That is, if we consider Bumouf as the founding father of Buddhist Studies. But even Vassiliev, working "in the field," speaks of how his texts allowed him to correct the Buddhist teachings he received from his informants in China. If one traces the origins of Buddhist Studies to an even earlier stage, say to the groping researches of de Harlez or Abel Remusat, Buddhist Studies as "philology" is even more clearly a reverence for words, written words, above everything else.

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their ultimate authority. Such claims are indeed a rare combination of Protestant models of scripture-centered theology, colonialist presumptions of cultural privilege, and a misuse of rationality as a key to understanding the non-rational. This exotic combination creates a scholarly fundamen­talism that asserts that only texts, and only "old" or "primary" texts should have authority, that texts have fixed, immutable, "original" mean­ings which inhere in the text itself, and above all that there is a sharp dis­tinction between textual truth and the truth of daily superstition.

This form of scholarship is represented by the traditional editor and translator. The philological tradition seeks to "establish" a text (ironi­cally, this has been called "lower criticism" in other quarters) and then to convert this text by some type of grammatical algorithm into a text in another language, which is then presumed to be a true version of the original.

This hope or aspiration has Buddhist antecedents, for instance, in the Chinese Buddhist search for the original Indian text and the struggle to find the right translation method. But our ancestors had a better sense of mythic irony, for they often conceived of the original as an ideal, lost, inaccessible, and inexhaustible-as all pristine sources ought to be­serving perhaps as an antidote to the hubris of the editor-translator.

Among Buddhologists, the presumption of a single source lead to the once common practice of attempting to "establish" a text by conflating several versions, often from obviously divergent recensions, traditions, and regions. Thus was born the art of reading a Chinese-Tibetan-Sanskrit text, which in the hands of a skillful philologist could be used as an inge­nious control on the vagaries of textual transmission, but which could be overdone to create a hybrid text. When such a text was created, it was presented as a work of philology, with an almost naive pretense that it was not a creative work of literature, not a work of commentary, criticism, or theology. But this pretense is central to the survival of the myth of philological authority: there is not only the possibility of a perfect enunci­ate, but it has been in fact identified, the single true word is safeguarded by science, not tradition.

This critique of philology should not be taken to imply a rejection of the fundamental role of the discipline. It is a critique intended to restore per­spective in those of us who practice the discipline. The object of criti­cism are the tacit assumptions that allow us to present an edition as the true text, or the assumptions that make us confuse correctness or com­pleteness with historical accuracy or even truth. I am also questioning the assumption that the text, especially the text established by the philologist,

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is somehow a privileged voice, an authoritative source for judgments of truth in matters of Buddhist doctrine or history.

Accuracy does not guarantee much, especially when it is a matter of accuracy as the recovery of the text verbatim. For the verbatim reproduction of a text is only that, the reproduction of a text. This is the trap of the philologist, so well depicted in Borges's "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote" (Borges, 1944a). The true perfect exegesis, the true perfect edition, tells us nothing about the text-at best it is an echo of a text.

There is still room for, and an unquestionable need for accuracy and rigor. No one could quarrel with the thoroughness of texts such as the Udlinavarga constructed by Bernhard, which, although claiming to pre­sent the· correct text, is compiled with enough care to provide the next reader with the necessary tools to make his or her own decisions as to which text is to be read. Also worthy of being presented as a model of careful work to our students are works like Fujita's transcription of the Nepalese manuscripts of the Sukhlivattvyuha. My words of warning are not directed at thoroughness or at the need for some sort of grammatical and textual integrity, but rather at the presupposition that textual integrity and "neatness" are synonymous with truth, or with historical fact or his­torical understanding.

A critique of narrow philology is not a critique of philology, nor is it a defense of "higher criticism" and critical theory for their own sakes. It is more a warning against a neglect of the study of the text for what it may tell us about actual texts and actual human beings, about the situation that make the text a cultural product, a neglect of the cultural function, literary and moral merits of the text, and a loss of memory that leads to forgetting the study of the text for what its study may tell us about ourselves and our goals.9 These types of neglect allow us to ignore tradition, its value, its challenges and what we may need to challenge in tradition. Differences, meanings, and conflicts are glossed over.

The confusion that can arise from attempts to conflate meaning with verbatim reproductions of a text, text with single literal meaning, and total meaning with uncontested meanings, can be seen in a recent translation of Suttaniplita published by the Pali Text Society (Norman, et aI., 1984). In

9. The word "actual" is used advisedly to modify "text." Actual is not the same thing as real or true. The term is a shorthand for a perspective on the text that takes into account as wide a context as possible, considering the material­ity of the text, its intertextual parameters, the history of its uses and commen­taries, and the function of the text in the research, intellectual, and professional lives of modem scholars.

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this work an attempt is made to have the English reflect the grammar of the original (though not the poetic complexity, or the meter), whatever the pitfalls of this conceptions of the text, it should nevertheless be a challenge to the traditional readings of this text through late commen­taries. Yet the editor attempts a compromise with tradition avoiding an obvious confrontation. This strategy produces a strange hybrid that is neither one thing nor another, and creates confusion where the reader should have seen conflict.

Naturally, these last paragraphs are to a certain extent caricatures, but they are arguably "exaggerations in the direction of truth." Contemporary practitioners of the art have gradually moved-and I hope will continue to move-in the direction of a more critical view of their task. A "more critical view" means a scholarship that is aware of the difficult position of the textual scholar: between the risk of being another Pierre Menard and the risk of pure palimpsest, and between the risk of disregarding the con­straints of source and object, on the one hand, and becoming, on the other hand, paralyzed by the hope of gathering all the sources, of having every variant and every edition in "the Library of Babel" (Borges, 1944a).10

Jerome McGann, offering a "critique of modern textual criticism" (1983), reveals the limitations of a model of textual transmission that pre­supposes a single prototype or that asserts the ultimate authority of a putative "autograph." McGann's critique is especially illuminating for those of us who work with ancient Asian text because it is addressed at textual criticism in the study of texts composed after the introduction of the printing press-in other words, it is a critique applied to a literary context in which the concepts of autograph and faithful reproduction make some sense. One need not look at the complexities of textual transmission in Asia to realize that the concepts of autograph, original, and accuracy in transmission are relative reference points, controls that are themselves shifting as information, interpretation, and goals shift.

Anyone who has experienced the trials and tribulations of writing and publishing knows how uncertain is the process and the ideal. One must

10. Ironically, Borges himself not only writes playfully with Buddhist ideas but also "seriously" writes about Buddhism. In the latter efforts one cannot avoid the feeling that he has allowed himself to get trapped more than once in the web of philological fantasy, when he attempts to understand the legend of the Buddha using 19th century demythologization (Borges, 1952). For all his attempts to penetrate the mystery of Buddhism Borges still does this through the eyes of European scholarship, which he barely imitates (Borges and Jurado, 1976, and 1980).

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negotiate with editors after spending long hours negotiating with oneself in an effort to craft a very preliminary object-the so-called "manuscript." We look in trepidation as this object is transformed into a different one, the book or the chapter. Throughout the process we are sustained by a belief, which we hold against all evidence, a faith that somehow the cre­ator, and the ideas, and the words, and the book form some sort of coher­ent whole, perhaps an unchanging unity. We live in the hope that what­ever comes out at the end will become an effective vehicle for what our imperfect memory makes us believe were or are our positions, or for what memory makes us believe are the true words about someone else's words and ideas. When the final work becomes the locus or the pretext for a plurality of foreign voices, what shall we conclude, that the work has been misunderstood by every other reader, or that maybe there were many works to start with?

The emptiness of author and authorship is both a cultural event of our time and a subjective experience. This event and this experience are sim­ple reminders that any text lives only in a context created by other texts, other events, other persons-there is no such thing as erasing the "errors" of our predecessors, since our "discoveries" only make sense in the con­text of the discourse they created. Buddhist words and works in particu­lar, if presented as the texts "as they are," as "what the texts say before any interpretation," or as the truly original source, without precedent, would be context-less. In a paper that has been unfortunately neglected, Paul Griffiths gave us the convenient term "Buddhist Hybrid English" to designate that form of English we have created in an attempt to translate Buddhist jargon into English. But this attempt seems to fail only because it is an attempt to convey Buddhist discourse apart from a community of believers, "free of interpretation" and free of the biases that are built into the English language-in other words, as if it could exist outside the actual world of English language users. Griffiths also pointed out the absurdity of a translation without a context, and seemed to privilege the contemporary interpretive study over the translation, arguing that the Western scholar should only do the former. In doing so, he was pointing not at a problem inherent to Buddhist texts but inherent to transmitting lit­erature into a culture that still lacks the audience for that literature.

My perception of the problem differs from Griffiths's, insofar as the Buddhist case is only an extreme case of the problem of translation gen­erally. Like other translations, translations of Buddhist texts must have an opportunity to enter the shifting terrain of the international language of English, and there compete for meanings. One must, therefore, come to

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the defense of a modicum of Hybrid English. Unamuno's criticism of the those who expect proper Spanish translations ("traducciones castizas") of Hegel and Kierkegaard seems applicable in this context. No one among us can predict, much less legislate, the future of appropriate or meaningful language-to do so would be to claim individual property rights over something that is useful and valuable only because it cannot be owned by individuals. Like the single true text, the single appropriate expression is only a fiction, a fantasy created by our desire to control the authority of the sacred word.

An excursus: The lexicon An extreme manifestation of the cult of the word is the belief in the power of the glossary, the lexicon, and the word index. Again, the Buddhist tradition has provided us with a model to follow. We can call this the Mahiivyutpatti tradition-which originates in the West with an early attempt to translate a derivative of the great Tibetan glossary, an attempt that is one of the earliest pieces of Buddhist scholarship in Europe. As an exaggerated appeal to the authority of words, this tradition would have meanings encoded in lists of polyglot equivalents. It is also assumed that "the underlying meaning" is a Sanskritic meaning. In this form, the lexi­cographic tradition has been considerably undermined by the growth of independent Sinological and Japanological branches of Buddhist Studies, and of late, has also been weakened by the growing independence of Tibetan Studies. But here too the tradition still retains a place of impor­tance in the training of Buddhist scholars, because Buddhism itself relied on and turned towards the Sanskritic meaning of words as a corner stone for the construction of theological meaning.

A close relation to the tradition of the word-list is the index tradition. In Buddhist studies the distinction between the index and the concordance has failed to develop as it has in other disciplines. Critical indexing (as we see, e. g., in Weller's index to the Bodhicaryiivatiira) is rare; so are indexes that serve a heuristic function, be it grammatical (as in Nobel's index to the Tibetan text of the SuvarlJaprabhii) or thematic-exegetical (of which only some rare indexes of similes and metaphors exist). Word lists are of some use, especially when they are comprehensive-see Ejima's index to the SaddharmapulJ¢arlkaslltra (1985), the fruit of ten years of work. But generally it is not easy to tell if a work of this nature is meant as a tool or as a collection of sacred words.

I allude to this confusion between tool and collection of sacred words, but I do not mean this facetiously or sarcastically. It may be that the

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index does serve a sacred purpose worth investigating. It is also true that indexes are still of some value in the absence of comprehensive critical dictionaries.

2. "Systems of thought": The scholastic model Asia, however, did not only give us the slltra, and the translator, or the lexicographer, it also gave us the creator of systems, the scholastic as commentator and abhidharrnist. Thus it gave us a second model of Bud­dhist scholarship. Many of us, trained in the hallowed philological tradi­tion were also trained in an abhidharrnic tradition. The recognized need (and I would argue the justifiable requirement) that our students under­stand traditional systematizations often bred modern abhidharrnists. Fig­ures like Rosenberg, Vassiliev, Stcherbatsky, and their Indian, Tibetan, and Japanese sources played a major role in the formation of early West­ern models of Buddhist scholarship and conceptions of Buddhism. They tended to create a Buddhism that was disembodied, abstract, and, above all, deceptively elegant, antiseptic, and orderly.

This is not meant to deny the importance of the careful study of native scholastic traditions. Among the many reasons why Buddhist cultures and literatures should be part of a university curriculum, I would list first the fact that Buddhism offers a mature and sophisticated critical tradition that can be used in the classroom as a model of what is alternative. My warnings are more against two other, dangerously overlapping, uses of the tradition: (1) to create the illusion that Buddhism is a closed system, im­penetrable or unchallengeable, and thereby, (2) to reinforce the Western preconception of Buddhism as the wholly other and incommensurable.

The scholastic systems should be the subject of some sort of social cri­tique, of a critique of genre, etc. But, at the same time, they should retain some role as part of the backdrop for our pedagogical narratives of Bud­dhist history and doctrine. They should also be the object of philosophi­cal criticism. A fine example of this approach is the work of Paul Griffiths (1991, 1994), which illustrates well an imaginative use of this tradition, in his case concerned not only with contexts but with what we may call etic validity. 11 He has been one of the few scholars of Buddhism

11. I am not sure how Griffith's interests and approaches in this latter work would agree or disagree with his earlier statements about Buddhist Hybrid English. But it would be unfair to make much of disagreements I may see today without first hearing what disagreements he would see, because the two sets of opinions represent two different Griffiths at two different points in time.

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to recognize that underlying our historical and textual research-and per­haps ultimately providing or denying its justification-is a struggle for truth, and that generally the Buddhist scholar is philosophically timid in this area.

I would add, in a more contemporary tone, that "truth" comes in many forms and shapes, and that the struggle for authority and its accouterments (prestige, power, influence, self-satisfaction, and a sense of security and control), can take place in the restricted and isolated environment of an academic guild, around issues of syllable count and epigraphic dating. One should not assume that the scholar who denies any interest in philo­sophical truth is in fact renouncing all claims on truth.

"Truth" in the abstract is never enough. It is in the nature of philosophy and theology to thirst for systems and order, to crave for some type of clo­sure. But this is only achievable in a didactic mode, in the mode of the catechism. In other socio-political contexts, the press for ideational clo­sure and neatness unravels. This closure may be reduced to an ultimate appeal to what is wrongly conceived as a "Madhyarnika mystical silence." It may be established with an appeal to a non-Buddhist authority (though this is now less common). But the most common is for the closure to be constructed-very much like the illusion created by Borges with his Dr. Brodie, and his Hervert Quain-out of the presumed order and internal consistency of the system.

The illusion of completeness is a traditional Buddhist value so that it seeps into modem scholarship from traditional models as well as from our natural compulsion to have it all. It is therefore possible to see these styles of scholarship as a modem response (or, rather, correspondence) to the authority of the Buddhist tradition itself, but they also may be the result of the Western scholars discovering himself in the Indian scholastic. One may use knowledge not as self-discovery or discovery but as self­confirmation or as a way of knowing in order not to know.

Buddhist scholastic traditions deserve of course our attention as docu­ments of Buddhist ideology and polemics. But they cannot contain the last words in matters of doctrine, much less of history. The question is how they are to be read, the degree of suspicion that we must bring to a genre that is peculiarly multivocal and therefore cannot be seen as nor­mative. One needs to understand its multivocality and its position relative to other sets of voices, including those that are presented as the source for scholastic authority, their opposites or so-called "low" traditions, and the traditions of the contemporary world.

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A specially silent, but egregious, gap in the construction of scholastic normative pictures of Buddhism is created precisely by the absence of the alternative voice and the alternative genre, by silence regarding the social setting and the religious function of those alternative voices. One does not have to advocate any extreme left-wing position to see that important segments of the religious life of a tradition are ignored by the systems approach to religion and ideology of religion. Even a conservative, albeit idiosyncratic, thinker like Miguel de Unamuno saw the difference between the voice of a John of the Cross and the voice of a Teresa of Avila, understanding that the issue was not one of differences in doctrines or systems (John of the Cross's strength), but of personal and gender styles, and of expressive force (Teresa's strength). In other words, the topic of theological writing, like the topic of all other writing, is the per­son and his or her position in a world of culture and materiality (St. Teresa's "pots and pans," in Unamuno's language). Teresa's idiosyn­cratic and messy style has, for a given culture and a given subculture (Unamuno is thinking of Spanish women) the same force, power, and importance as the Critique of Pure Reason has for a different subculture (male, Northern European). The system is therefore only the veneer of other realities, which, of course are many of them social, but which I would argue, with Unamuno, can be at the same time "spiritual" and "philosophical" but of a kind different from the illusion of order created by the sanitizing, prophylactic effect of scholastic systematization.

3. Doctrine and truth: The doctrinal tradition In our field, perhaps more than in any other, there is a constant struggle to bring in or keep out questions of truth. Susumu Yamaguchi is said to have gently persuaded Louis de la Vallee Poussin to wonder aloud about his motives for studying Buddhism: the practice of this metier-strange indeed in Western societies-must hold some clue to the secret (perhaps unconscious) workings of the mind of this particular and peculiar type of scholar.

We may ask what attracts a scholar to a field where "doctrine" and "truth" are clearly being contested, and what makes one type of person into a defender of Buddhist truth claims, another into a detractor (a type that is surprisingly rare, at least in the scholar's public persona), another into remaining evasive and hiding behind the shield of "scholarly neutrality."

Committed scholarship is a style of Buddhist learning for which the tradition provides a variety of models. In fact, the presence of such mod-

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els may be part of the reason that reactions to the issue of doctrinal truth can be so strong-the Buddhist tradition, though generally less assertive and aggressive than other religious traditions, is nevertheless a proselytiz­ing tradition, and as a religion demands some sort of commitment.

How sensitive this topic can be becomes obvious to me even as I write these lines and hesitate: most of the contemporary examples that come to mind result in such poor scholarship (and often work against the tradition in strange ways) that I move with trepidation. Nevertheless, the tradi­tional model of scholarship with commitment can produce elegant and responsible scholarship even today. One can think of the work (or I should say the life-time dedication and creativity) of Gadjin Nagao as perhaps the quintessential model of quality for this tradition.

Likewise, it is possible still to find intelligent criticism (that is, in the sense of polemics, not in the sense of critical theory) following traditional doctrinal lines. The recent work of Hakamaya and Matsumoto (their cen­sorial term "hihan" sometimes misconstrued as if it meant "critical" in the contemporary Western sense). Needless to say, I would take exception with their use of concepts of history and origin, but as I have already noted, the tradition accepts these models, and a criticism coming from within the tradition is justified in appealing to such notions of history. In the same breath I add, however, it is justified, but it must also be ready to be challenged by more contemporary notions of history and authority.

More common than these two types is the attempt to make "silent statements about truth"-that is, the presentation of doctrinal claims as part of simple "reporting" tradition. This refers to the scholar whose leanings and preferences are hidden behind the persona of the "objective reporter" (alas, a true oxymoron). This is doxography's rich cousin-the modern scholar replicates or imitates the classical doxographer with the advantage of some modern tools. At one time this was a common genre (perhaps a method of sorts, insofar as genre and method cannot be sepa­rated in practice). But its main weakness (talking about systems of truth while ignoring everything that is outside the system) is now too well known. Regrettably, neglect of doxography may bring with it neglect of the broader issues of "systems" and their religious and social functions.

On the positive end, the attempt to appear "objective," if accompanied by the understanding and practice of accounting for negative evidence, can lead to preservation and highlighting of particular strata of the tradi­tion that would otherwise be neglected by the scholar who has shed all pretense of "objectivity." On the negative end, the objective accountant, like the doxographer, can turn into a professional claiming his or her pro-

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ductions as independent entities called facts, discoveries, and the end and all of science. Then this scholar is dangerously close to so many other ways of knowing in order not to know (and confess without confessing). Or, at best, scholarship has then the beauty and joys of butterfly collecting (admiration that depends on the death of the object).

4. Doctrine and time: Textual histories The construction of history based on the logic of textual evidence (that is on a "rational" ordering or stratification of the sources) is especially common in the study of Indian Buddhism and may be due in part to scarcity of historical documents. But the general tendency to understand history as a movement in a single, orderly, and rational direction is not only due to the need to rely on too much literary sources. Here too truth values and judgments of value generally are reduced to a certain precon­ception of what is order, and the more fundamental preconception that order must exist in history. This is compounded by the existence of so­called Buddhist "hermeneutics" of stratified truth, or the hierarchy of truths. The modem scholar therefore finds himself or herself reproducing, consciously or unconsciously a type of p' an-chiao.

History then becomes not the history of common belief systems and local variations, but the story of how a system of beliefs either devolves away from its pristine origins (decay) or evolves towards a culmination or recovery (growth). Buddhist traditions lend us models for both metaphors of history. Decay is the theme of the so-called "prophecies of the decay of Dharma." Culminationism is at the root of the so-called "hermeneutics of the three turnings."

The concept of historical decay, so common in the days of Spencer and Spengler, has fallen into disrepute. But culminationism is still very much alive and often shapes our teaching, because our courses are often orga­nized according to some type of chronological grid. It is possible to combine both models by conceiving of "life" as culminating in old age. Thus, a recent book on Buddhist art states in its preface that the books is "a panoramic survey of the history of Buddhist art from its origins in India to its final efflorescence in Japan" (Yamamoto, 1990).

Many of us are trying to move away from the chronological template in class and in research. The challenge of the future, however, will be to find a way to retain the obvious pedagogical advantages of a chronologi­cal matrix while we replace the implicit universal linear narrative with a narrative that is neither culminationistic nor atomistic. At this point in time, it appears that the abandonment of hegemonic and universalisitc

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conceptions of history is leading to the fragmenting of knowledge, his­tory, and identity. The flourishing of the Festschrift and the conference volume may be a silent academic reflection of the general fragmentation within and among societies that comes with the loss of a sense of univer­sal history, the loss of self, and the loss of object.

The Development of Critical Awareness There is no need to review the traditional roots of the problematic assumptions behind these four approaches to Buddhist Studies. One can­not imagine that anyone would quarrel with the notion that traditional Buddhist's in Asia have assumed a single voice, the pure and pristine source, cloaked in the mythologies of gradual revelation, culmination, and the last word. But, much culminationist polemics (sometimes mistakenly called "hermeneutics" in contemporary writings on Buddhism) have had as their astutely implied consequence the existence of a "latter teaching" that is in fact the final teaching and by implication the true and pure teaching. Buddhist scholars and believers are not, after all, immune to the fever of wanting to be "the last man."

Nevertheless, apologetic moves like Buddhist culminationist doctrines bear witness to an awareness of the multivocal nature of a tradition. Such an awareness or unconscious intuition can also be seen in the traditional histories of the schools and doxographies. The, intuition appears occa­sionally in the reports of pilgrims, in the religious travelogue. The latter genre might be seen as an early forerunner or distant relative of the mod­ern ethnography. Ethnography, of course, is not necessarily critical-its various roots in the goals and habits of the wealthy traveler, the colonial officer, and the missionary are well known and need not be reviewed here.

Nevertheless, ethnographic and anthropological research occupy a dominant position among those methods that attempt to avoid some of the pitfalls of the traditional modes of doing Buddhist Studies (Lewis 1989, 1992, 1994). Yet anthropological thinking sometimes seems to only exaggerate the gap between present forms of Buddhism and ancient Bud­dhism that had been posited already by the ideal image of the inviolate past presented by the philologist (the human Buddha who could not have taught the "superstitions" of real-life Buddhists). The philologist may be reluctant to accept what we observe in the field, or what the believer reports to us in the field, but the anthropologist should not accept the assumptions of this reluctance. The converse of this is the tendency,

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noticeable in some recent studies to assume that the textual study is not only in need of revision, but fundamentally flawed.

A healthy critique of the uses and misuses of the textual tradition needs to stay with us, especially with those of us devoted to textual study. A refocusing of our narratives on the wider field of practice (as observable behavior in the field) can give us refreshing presentations of the tradition (witness some of the more recent books of wide appeal, such as Swearer). However, any good criticism can be abused. Three words of caution are therefore in order.

First, we are reaching the saturation point, at which the critique can become trite, predictable. When this happens the critique turns into ten­dency and fashion, and inevitable blinds us to other perspectives. The net effect on humanities and humanistic learning, and, what is more impor­tant, humanistic education, is not easy to access. The presentation of Buddhism in the classroom as something occurring only in a practice without canonical benchmarks may be more corrosive that one can per­ceive on first blush-after all, this degree of secularization and devalua­tion of the book is not accompanied by a parallel secularization and devaluation of the Great Books of our own culture. Granted that in major research universities this may not be the case, still I would argue that, in a society dominated by Western models of truth and authority, an exagger­ated inflation of the "field" approach to Buddhism that excludes the tex­tual tradition and the canons that guided that tradition may work in sup­port of the exoticization of Buddhism, reinforce its alterity, and reinforce the perception among our students and the public at large that Buddhism is only a curiosity, and certainly not comparable to the well ordered and well-demonstrated products of our own culture.12

Second, by the time Buddhist Studies came to appreciate fully the value of ethnographic observation, ethnography itself was under attack and in crisis. Ethnographic studies on Buddhist cultures or Buddhist communi­ties have yet to make full and effective use of contemporary critiques of ethnography. It is too early to predict, for instance, how these critiques will affect the way we understand the interconnection between oral and

12. This opinion may very well reflect my experiences teaching in a university in the heartland of North America. But I cannot imagine there are many places where Buddhist canonical ideals and concepts of rationality compete without a handicap against Western canonical ideals and notions of rationality. The challenge to the canons is paradoxically after all a notion that is very white, very European, very middle class. Additionally, higher education in the indus­trialized world continues to be dominated by the ideals of European culture.

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textual traditions in Buddhism, or the way we will come to understand the stratification of authority across a field of Buddhist practices.

Third, a simplistic or "methodological" exclusion of the textual tradition leads to two errors of perspective. This perspective may tum into fact the questionable assumption that textual traditions and textual elites are enti­ties separate from the living traditions and the non-elite groups with which they obviously interact. Additionally, it may lead to further neglecting an important field of research: the location and function of the text in the praxis of a religious community.

We would be well advised, therefore, to open the field to alternative models, but to do so with constant watchfulness (which is not the same as being timid or unduly cautious). There is no single alternative method that will solve our problems. To assume that there is would be a return to the assumption of the single true word. The present climate of scholar­ship in other fields is already having a salutary effect on our field-the methods we may want to emulate are under constant attack and revision, to the benefit of all of us. Hence, lest I give the impression that Buddhist Studies is mired in ancient scholasticism and surreptitious dogmatism, I rush to note that as the second century of Buddhist Studies approaches its middle point, scholars are struggling more and more with the question of what is it that we are doing and why.

The process must continue. Buddhist Studies will have to come to grips with these questions soon or else continue its isolated existence. It may very well be that Buddhist Studies will remain marginalized even if it faces up to this challenge-after all there are forces greater than scholarly honesty and clarity. It may even come to pass that Buddhist Studies will disappear as a result of facing up to the challenge, destroyed by its own self-doubting; but I for one cannot imagine the field going in any other direction but the examination of its own assumptions, roles, and claims.

The training of Buddhist Studies scholars excludes serious reflections on the position and value of the scholarly enterprise, particularly that of the buddhologist. Such reflections may be avoided for reasons of effi­ciency, that is, oftime. But they are also reflective of a general tendency to work as if the rest of the world were not relevant. Not only do we fail to examine the location of the discourse of Buddhist scholarship in schol­arship and education generally, or its roots in the past (including the re­cent past of contemporary scholarship on Buddhism), we also miss, as a consequence, the opportunity to examine the role of Buddhist scholarship as a competing discourse, and above all the role of Buddhist discourse as a competing discourse. These are, in fact, the key functions of criticism,

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all of which have not only theoretical interest but also practical con­sequences.

"Criticism" is a concept with a wide range of meanings (and therefore a wide range of claims). In Buddhist Studies, however, the dominant and normative model has been that of the curator, not the critic. Hence we have not enriched the field as we could have if we were more open to the full range of criticism that we find in other fields in the humanities. I am referring to the acceptance of judgments and evaluations (needless to say educated and discriminating) about the value-artistic, social, religious­of our sources, the application of so-called "lower-criticism with a clear view of its presuppositions and its implications for "higher criticism." An active and live debate on how we make the above judgments, in particu­lar, the philosophical investigation of the process, the possibility, the meaning, and the ends of scholarly investigation generally. By "criti­cism" I mean primarily the last of these meanings, and include the inves­tigation of comparative issues in doctrine, sociology, etc., as long as they are conscious efforts to define the nature of our relationship to the mate­rials, subjects, or texts that we are investigating.

Efforts of this kind have already appeared, in works that received some initial celebratory reviews but were soon forgotten,or criticized not for the issues they raise, but for the Ubiquitous "errors" in textual scholarship (the trump card is noting how the author is not familiar with "the original languages"). Such criticism is not surprising, since until recently some of the best criticism came from outside the field. Thus the work of Gudmunsen and Tuck fell prey to the most obvious defense of the guild. More recent work, it is to be hoped, will be more robust, since it is com­ing from within the guild. It remains to be seen how (or if) we will be able to make good use of the rhetorical criticism of Faure (1991, 1993) or the cultural criticism of Lopez (1995).13

It is neither necessary nor advisable to steer our students away from classical philology. But we in Buddhist Studies must practice a healthy detachment, an application of skillful means, with respect to its ancient

13. The reception of Huntington's radical rhetorical criticism is much more problematic, since it also raises the specter of borrowing surreptitiously Nagarjuna's cloak of invulnerability. A different type of criticism, which I would call evidential criticism, has been presented in action more than in the­ory by G. Schopen. I believe Schopen is also doing a special kind of cultural criticism, although I have not seen him state anything like this publicly. Even his paper on "Protestant presuppositions" shies away from the implicit cultural criticism.

208 JIABS 18.2

attachment to Enlightenment models of grammatical clarification and· psychological divination it la Schleiermacher. The question of how (or if) it is possible to "divine" the other and his, or her, or their intentionality needs to be an integral part of our discussion. The degree to which such "educated guessing" can reflect the scholar and his community's script­ing (Tomkins), or the degree to which it is a truncated dialogue (Tedlock) must be considered.

I do not present these imaginings as a way of undermining our profes­sion or declaring our task absurd. But our task, if viewed with rigidity and grandiosity as a quest for the truth, is indeed an impossible task. On this I side with the more radical critical theorists. With de Man, I believe translation is impossible, and with Foucault I regard interpretation as the insertion into a text of a new and foreign voice-hence, "a displacement of authority." But this stance is only a reaction to what I view as the fun­damentalism of traditional Buddhist scholarship. When I say that transla­tion is impossible and interpretation is fraudulent, I refer to-certain ideals of translation and interpretation. That is to say, a translation that repre­sents the original accurately is impossible. The only perfect translation there can be is the original itself-which, of course, is not a translation, only Menard's Quijote. A "critical apparatus" that gives us the true and original social and psychological reality of the text's meaning is absurd, by virtue of the gulf to which the "apparatus" bears witness, and by virtue of the fact that no one can represent accurately and thoroughly the social and psychological reality of anything-not even his or her own reality.

Such ideals are only possible in a mythical discourse in which science is conceived in theological terms: that is, not as probabilistic reasoning and the testing of hypotheses, but as the establishment of authoritative truth. It is important that the scientific model be mentioned here, although the human sciences should be well advised to avoid using this model as the ultimate and absolute judge of scholarly integrity. For the concept of probabilistic reasoning offers a useful analogy for a crucial distinction often neglected in human sciences: the difference between syllogistic certainty and "likelihood."

A moderately experienced reader of Sanskrit can usually determine with a very high degree of confidence whether a given form in a given Sanskrit text is or is not a finite verb. This reader can also assume with almost absolute certainty that this verb forms the kernel of a clause. But, as the reader moves into the grammatical function of this partiCUlar verb in this particular clause, or into the relationship of the clause to broader and broader segments of discourse, confidence must by necessity decrease.

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As certainty decreases, it becomes appropriate to talk of the likelihood of an interpretation.

This is not the same thing as denying all possibility of distinguishing right from wrong, as long as "right" and "wrong" mean, respectively, plausible and implausible. My criticism is also an affirmation of the probability that the right and wrong we advocate at a given moment may be undermined and denied at the next moment. Right and wrong of tex­tual and cultural analysis are a matter of degrees of confidence. Yet these are not the same as probabilistic confidence intervals, because "probability" (or, rather, "likelihood") in the human sciences cannot be quantified, and depends on experienced intuition and linguistic skill in a manner that probability estimates do not in the social and natural sciences.

Likelihood in the literary sciences remains nevertheless the object of discriminating and educated judgments that constrain interpretive dis­course. The actual constraints set by scholarly experience and convention are the "tools" of the trade. They are the limits to imagination set by the object and its medium (be it the limits of grammar or the limits of per­formance, for instance), and the limitations imposed upon us by the con­stricted range of our own discourse, audience, and social setting.

In the end, constraints make differences and meanings, because "constraint" is what determines the possibility of meaningful discourse. It guarantees a common language, and therefore a common set of values. It is one way to make sure that scholarship is not a narcissistic enterprise of talking to ourselves in an empty room.

But, in what sense could we say that the constraints of discourse ulti­mately make no difference? In the sense that the parameters of such con­straints are to a certain degree in flux, or, as the fashionable jargon would have it, "they are contested horizons"-withoutjargon: intelligent, honest, human beings will disagree and argue about these constraints (and so will less intelligent, honest, or even less civil and benevolent human beings). Furthermore, those horizon's of meaning that affect judgments of right and wrong will always be dictated by communities and by the needs of communities. Our choice of the right or the wrong is only relevant insofar as a community will listen and pass judgment. And that the constraints are always open to new conceptions of what the applicability of our notions is. Thus, although the possible readings of a given passage may vary little in a period of a quarter or half a century, the limits of reading can easily expand or contract with the changing of culture, especially across many years of cultural history. Doctrinal readings may be dis­placed by metrical studies, edition, or etymological studies, which may

210 JIABS 18.2

give way to form-critical studies, to be followed by a feminist critique. One does not necessarily preclude the other, but each new perspective changes the constraints that we accept as normal limitations on judgments of value.

There is consequently no specific method to most humanistic disci­plines-and Buddhist Studies is no exception. There is no specifically Buddhist hermeneutics-unless one really believes in a single way of being Buddhist, in which case we are not talking of hermeneutics but of exegetical and apologetic strategies, at best. But there are a plurality of interfaces between Buddhist traditions (forms of discourse, and social contexts) and the social and discourse contexts of the scholar and the scholar's culture. The number of interfaces is perhaps finite, but it is not closed, not foreordained.

The scholar still retains a certain normative role as the interpreter of the rules of discourse of a given culture or subculture (France, India, the West, the quasi-Western culture of "world scholarship," the North American academy, the guild of Buddhist scholars, the guild of the tibetologists, etc.). But, as I have argued above, the object itself is also the object of this normative investigation-Indian scholastics still retain a certain normative role in Buddhist Studies, and that is as it should be, with certain caveats.

The caveats have to do with the second role of the scholar: that of negotiating normative authorities. The scholar has the difficult task of listening to the voice of Buddhism (or of the plurality of Buddhist voices), listening to the voice of Western cultures (even as they transform before our very eyes like so many clouds), listening to the voice of his or her own subculture (the academy, for instance), and yet retaining the capacity to assume a critical stance of skepticism, of inquiry, a willingness to test beliefs and values.

Texts and meanings are fragile because they are multivocal, and the scholar's position is precarious because it is always dialogic (even when we act as if it were not). But multivocality is something more than a social or literary phenomenon-it is also linguistic and psychological. Multivocality is built into language, and, I would argue, in our narratives and fantasies about subjectivity, intentionality, and authorship.

Roman Iakobson (quoted in Ginzburg 1986, 159) recognizes "two cardinal and complementary traits of verbal behavior": that "inner speech is in its essence a dialogue, and that any reported speech is appropriated and remolded by the quoter, whether it is a quotation from an alter or

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from an earlier phase of the ego (said 1)."14 One would have to add, if in dialogue, then in conflict, if in conflict then precarious.

1 trust my audience's familiarity with Buddhist notions of change and causality will make them more receptive to a description of the discipline as groundless and a prescription for opening the discipline to radical self­examination. We will not be destroying or betraying the tradition by opening ourselves to a revision of our view of the field. The fact that there is no substance (svabhiiva) to Buddhist Studies is good news, but it requires that we abandon our persistent thought habits (abhiniveSa).

Roles and Methods The future of Buddhist Studies is very much in its past (meaning, of course, both the past of Buddhism and the past of the Western academy), not in the sense that we will return or that we must return to the past, but in the sense that the past reveals both the flaws and the strengths of the scholar's many roles. Our weaknesses are those of our genres, our guilds, and ultimately of what we call our method, and how we imagine it through the metaphors of our discourse ("definitive," "accurate," "ground breaking," etc.). Method, as 1 have argued, is to a great extent the formu­lation of the limitations of certain genres and the formulation of roles and skills, and of guild interests as constraints on what can be said. What are these roles which allow us to form societies of craftsmen? What have they been traditionally in the humanities, and, by extension, in Buddhist Studies?

We hear much talk about methods as if they were somehow theoreti­cally based, or based on ultimately absolute philosophical reasoning. Such talk overlooks the extent to which a method is a posturing or the expected behavior of a role. The academic student of Buddhism, for instance, may appear in the guise of the "scholar" as "curator" or "diviner." The first is the scholar who understands his or her role as the custodian of a cultural object, or an idea, perhaps a "truth" Often the object that is being guarded has been "restored" by a process of divination that, the scholar would argue, guarantees that what is now in the curator's show case is the genuine object.

This role of course overlaps with that of the "cleric," the custodian of standards, values, truths. The cleric is no longer charged with the cure of souls but serves as a true "clerk," the custodian of grammar and the

14. I suggest the reader juxtapose this quotation with the passage from Saint Bonaventura quoted below.

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proper genres of scholarship. Perhaps, if this clerk is up to date he or she will also be the custodian of "method" (constraints).

But scholars can still be "priests" in the sense that they can assume the role of the theologian and the mystifier. Carefully avoiding the external trappings of the priest, the scholars can nevertheless declare, for our bene­fit, what the truth of Nagarjuna' s "mystical" experience is (or was?).

More common among contemporary scholars is the role of the anti­priest: the guardian of "secular authority." I do not refer here to the common iconoclasm directed at the consecrated work of other scholars, rather, I refer to the scholar's interest in undermining the authority of the tradition he or she studies. Seldom is this role part of the scholars public role. The motives remain a mystery to me, but it is clear that it is polite to pretend that scholarship is perfectly neutral. We would advance consider­ably in both the goals of scholarship and (paradoxically) the goals of belief and practice if we stopped once and for all the pretense that our scholarship is never inimical to Buddhist belief and practice. It often is, as it should be. It is also a competing authority.

The scholar's avowed neutrality is supposed to be a sign that he or she is a scientist. This role allows us to avoid the dangers of a public recog­nition of our role as critics. It also places us in the safe position of those who can claim that the ideas they explore are not their own. Interestingly enough this myth reinforces the idea that the scholar is not an author, that the scholars role is totally other than that of the creative artist. Yet, the scholar is supposed to be "original"-hence the inappropriate use of the metaphors of science: "data" and "discovery."

This is ironic, for here we have, as in the case of philology, a conception of truth that remains only vaguely articulated but has the potential for problematic contradictions. On the one hand, the scholar denies his roles as literary creator and craftsman, on the other hand he or she claims to be "original." On the one hand, the scholar elevates his role to that of the primary creator (devaluating the standpoint of the voices he is claiming to report), on the other, he or she skirts the responsibilities that come with usurping the primary voice.

The contemporary emphasis on "originality" which is held as an ideal even as we presume that the scholar is not adding anything to his or her sources, the emphasis on discovery in humanistic disciplines, and the denial that the scholar is a creator like a writer is not only ironic, it is a fundamental contradiction that hides the knotty problem of what is authorship and whose is the authoritative voice. The complex industry of producing books has many dimensions that we choose to ignore in our

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public discourse-although they are often the object of much discussion during our private conversations. Central to this is the myth of the author as creator and the scholar as scientist.

In the 13th century, Saint Bonaventura debated the questions of what is an author and whether or not anyone other than God could be an author. The Seraphic Doctor wrote:

[The] ways in which one writes a book are four. Someone may write down the works of others, adding and changing nothing; and this person is simply called "scribe" (scriptor). Another one may write down the works of others adding elements that are not his own; and he is called a "compiler" (compilator). Another one may write down both others' work and his own, but in what is essentially the work of others, adding his own for purposes of clarification (evidentia); and he is called a "commentator" (commentator), not an "author." Another one may write down both his own work and that of others', but in what is essentially his own work, adding the work of others' for purposes of confirmation; and such a one should be called an "author" (auctor). (Bonaventura 1882, 14-15)

John Burrow, quoting this very same passage (1976, 615) notes how Bonaventura assumes that a thoroughly original composition, which is for us the mark of the true writer, is not possible. The passage is emblematic of the medieval conception of authorship, in which "a writer is a man who 'makes books' with a pen, just as a cobbler ... makes shoes on a last" (Burrow, 1976). But we may learn much from this conception (a concep­tion which was after all only displaced by the printing press, which may itself be soon displaced by the electronic medium). This is a conception of human agency and individual creativity very different from our own conceptions, but this is most likely a conception very similar to that of classical Buddhist sources.15

We cannot expect anyone among us to simply jettison his or her cultural baggage and return to a Medieval conception of individuality and human agency, but we can increase our awareness of the role of the scholar as craftsman and writer. We can come to understand that our task is neither the creation of something wholly new nor the accurate reflection of solid

15. And I note, in order to highlight the ironies that nuance my arguments, that I quote Bonaventura's text from the Quaracchi edition, a true monument of 19th century text criticism.

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"facts." We cannot pretend that humanistic scholarship is the gathering of accurate data (which, of course, is only the accountant's view of science) where there is in fact very little measurable data. Rather we have to understand our roles as different degrees of balance between writing one's own work and adding the work of others, or the work of others, adding one's own.

It is in the quest for this balance that issues of "method" and criticism become relevant. Theory and method are propaedeutic, pedagogic, and corrective. They are part of the ways by which we prepare scholars, transmit values, and keep ourselves honest. There is, therefore, an ele­ment of preparation, an element of transmission, and an element of integrity. One way of viewing these three is to conceive of them as three different forms of controlling for self-deception. Another way is to imagine them as dimensions of the investigation of knowledge itself. In these roles the scholar is a critic of his or her own metier.

Our critical goals, however, include unveiling the role of our audiences. These audiences, real or imagined, include the power-base of our dis­course: the university, the religious institutions of our cities, town and nations, and the presence of our own individual communities of friends and acquaintances whose suspicion of our work shapes the caution with which we perform it (to say nothing of those parts of the world or the academy where speaking freely can cost position or advancement, if not life itself).

I would add, moreover, yet another audience (imagined yes, but all important): the audience as source, or the source as audience. Our images ("scholarly scenarios") of who the audiences of our sources were or of how these audiences may have used and understood our texts and objects are in fact part of the Buddhism that acts as a control or constraint on our scholarship.

But, "Buddhists" as audience are not always a silent or imagined audi­ence. Contemporary Buddhists, wherever they may be, are also an audi­ence for our scholarship. This neglected audience, which I am sure never­theless affects our discourse, exists in three different roles. They can be audience in the most common meaning of the term-that is, they read our books. They are audience as target of the suasive power of our discourse (we try to influence their way of thinking). They can be a source (however maligned and deprived of authority they may sometimes appear), because, inevitably, they speak to us and make demands on us.

The object of our study, like the object of any other science worth pur­suing, is ever present and shifting. But in our field the object is also a

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voice that speaks to us and hears us. It is present not only as object but as a set of voices that demands something from us. In fact our "object" has had a biographic presence in all of our lives-especially on those of us who can remember moments in our life narratives in which we have "felt Buddhists" or "have been Buddhists" or have "practiced," as the contem­porary English expression has it. I would venture more, even for those who at one time or another have seen in some fragment of Buddhist tradi­tion a particle of inspiration or an atom of insight, Buddhism is an object that makes claims on their lives. For those who have failed even to expe­rience this last form of interaction with the object, there must have been at least moments of minimal encounters with seeking students or, after a dry and erudite lecture, one of those emotional questions from the audience that make all scholars nervous.

The plurality and complexity of our audience can also be imagined in terms of the diversity of our pedagogical goals. The didactic dimension of our work is something that involves not only our colleagues, not only our younger colleagues (graduate students), but also our younger students, and the public at large. All of these ultimately become colleagues insofar as they shape in one manner or another our work, our expectations as to what an audience wants or does not want to hear, and even our mental models of what Buddhists may have desired, practiced, or imagined.

Among the ancient Mexicas, the metier of the scholar was the province of the tlamatinime, the wise men among the nahuas, who Bernardino de Sahagun called "sabios 6 fiI6sophos," but who were also the custodians of oral and written texts. A true tlamatini, according to the C6dice Matritense, "lifts up a mirror in front of others, making them persons of sound judgment and circumspection, and giving them a face" (Le6n­Portilla 1993, 65).

It would be presumptuous to compare the scholar with the wise man, but the scholar's knowledge nevertheless should serve as a mirror to oth­ers-and serve as the foundation for good judgment and circumspection. Good judgment in matters of scholarship is the domain of the scholar, but such good judgment should extend to other domains. Scholarship also may (and we hope will) serve the humanistic purpose of helping to shape persons, helping to shape a more humane being, a more humane face in all of us, thus giving us a face.

But, why should I say that comparing the scholar to the sage is pre­sumptuous? Or with what effect in mind have I said this? First there is a "technical" difference: the scholar is open to a plurality of methods, the

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plurality advocated in this paper. Second there is a social difference: the scholar, we would hope, has no aspirations to a position of authority com­parable to that of the ancient sages. Third, there is a spiritual difference: in principle the respectability and validity of our efforts should not increase or diminish with our personal spiritual and moral growth or decay (which is not to say that there are no moral constraints to the intel­lectual enterprise).

These differences notwithstanding, we have a mirror to hold up. We would do well to remember that we must hold this mirror up in front of ourselves and that the face we thus form will have to be a changing face-not necessarily changing by spiritual growth, but changing by criti­cal growth. The mirror is also held up in front of our audience. We pro­vide our audience, in fact, with a variety of mirrors. This is the service of scholarship. Part of the message of this paper is a reminder that we must consider the services that we can render. these are services rendered by the field of Buddhist Studies to a broader field-responding to needs derived from our own cultural experiences, and responding to distinct cultural "choices."

We render a service to the Academy. First, to present and preserve another voice or another family of voices (what we call, in shorthand, "Buddhist traditions"). Second, to model a style of evidence.

We render a service to Buddhists and their ideals. First, by understand­ing their perspective on their traditions, their sense of continuity, and their sense of belonging. Second, by helping preserve their traditions. Third, by keeping a critical eye on criticism, seeing clearly when an arrogant eagerness to censure and ridicule appears under the guise of critical thought.

We render a service to criticism and its role in contemporary Western culture. First, by the mere fact that we help preserve alternative voices. Second, by insuring the preservation of alternative voices within Bud­dhism. Third, by questioning the same limitations and constraints that we believe are established by previous moments of critical reflection.

Humanistic scholarship stands in a no-man's land between tradition and criticism, between community and individual preferences. It cannot seek and cannot lead to agreement. The greatest mistake we can make is to try to be the fabled "last man" who has "the last word" (the "defInitive" this or that). Our role vis a vis community is not one of deciding the issues once and for all but one of keeping more than one voice alive. Recog­nizing the power of voice, we must be careful not to seek to establish a single voice.

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As in other myths of creation, the Popol-Yuh tells us that the creators created by naming, but they did so only after two creators had spoken to each other:

Then came the word, Tepeu and Gucumatz came together, in darkness, in the night, and they spoke among themselves Tepeu and Gucumatz. They therefore spoke consulting each other, and meditating, they agreed among themselves and combined their words and their minds ....

Then Tepeu and Gucumatz came together; then they held council on life and light, what should be done so that dawn and daybreak would come, and who would produce food nourishment. (Popol Yuh 1994, 23-24)

Of course we are not Tepeu and Gucumatz, but we have a small world of our own to preserve and maintain, if not create, and we are still in dark­ness and need much more light. Conversation and deliberation may be the only tools at our disposal.

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Sutherland, Stuart. 1992. Irrationality: Why We don't Think Straight. Constable and Company Limited. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994.

Tanabe, George Joji. 1992. Myoe the Dreamkeeper: Fantasy and Knowledge in Early Kamakura Buddhism. Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University; distributed by the Harvard University Press.

Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New Yark and London: Routledge.

Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Tedlock, Dennis, and Bruce Mannheim. 1995. The Dialogic Emergence of Culture. Urbana and Chicago: The University Of Illinois Press

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JOSE IGNACIO CABEZON

Buddhist Studies as a Discipline and the Role of Theory

Is Buddhist Studies a discipline, or is it still in a proto-disciplinary phase in its evolution? Or is it rather a super-disciplinary entity that serves as a home for disciplines? What is the relationship of Buddhist Studies to the (sub)disciplines from which it draws? Does Buddhist Studies require homogeneity for its coherence and perpetuation as a field of academic inquiry? Does it in fact have such homogeneity? The last decade has been witness to the rise of a body of theoretical literature whose purpose it is to explore the notion of disciplinarity.! How do disciplines arise? What social, institutional and rhetorical practices are employed in the construction of their sense of coherence and unity? What are their natu­ral subdivisions? How do disciplines change, and how do they respond to changes in the intellectual climate? How do they interact with one an­other? These are just some of the questions raised in the field that has come to be known as "disciplinary studies," and the first goal of this

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Institut ftir Kultur und Geschichte Indiens und Tibets, Universitlit Hamburg in the summer of 1994; it has benefited from the comments of colleagues and students alike; I would especially like to thank Prof. D. Jackson for his close reading, and Mr. B. Quessel and Dr. F.-K. Ehrhard for their valuable bibliographical suggestions. It was also presented as a keynote address at the meeting of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, Mexico City (November, 1994), in response to which I must acknowledge not only the comments of the various colleagues who heard the paper, but also the valuable bibliographical references supplied to me by Profs. T. Tillemans and J. Bronkhorst, by Dr. U. Pagels and by Prof. Jamie Hubbard. The paper was written during the tenure of an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship. The author wishes to express his grati­tude to the von Humboldt Stiftung (Bonn) for its generous financial support. l. The most recent study, with an extensive bibliography of previous work in the field, is Ellen Messer-Davidow, David R. Shumway and David J. Sylvan, eds., Knowledges: Historical and Critical Studies in Disciplinarity (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 1993).

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232 JIABS 18.2

essay is to reflect on Buddhist Studies in light of this recent body of literature.

The second goal derives from the first and is in a sense more urgent. If, as I think is clear, divergent methodological approaches to the study of Buddhism are emerging, then the time has come for us to seriously consider these alternative methodologies and to ask what role method­ological reflection should play in the field today. For the past several years different approaches to the study of Buddhism have emerged that challenge what they take to be the classical paradigm. How the latter is characterized, of course, determines the nature of the critique. In some instances classical Buddhology is portrayed as overly concerned with a specific geographical area (usually India). The domination of the field by the given area is said to have two consequences: (1) by equating the study of Buddhism with its study in the specific geographically hege­monic area, classical Buddhology has been charged with impairing the development of areas of research-Chinese, Tibetan and Southeast Asian Buddhist Studies, for example-as subdisciplines in their own right, and (2) it makes of the study of the languages and civilizations of these other areas mere tools to the study of the dominant cultural region. 2 But the critique of the classical paradigm in Buddhist Studies can take other

2. That the study of Indian Buddhism is hegemonic in this regard-that scholars of the latter consider the study of Chinese texts as worthwhile only to the extent that it serves to elucidate Indian Buddhism-is a point made most recently by T. Griffith Foulk, "Issues in the Field of East Asian Buddhist Studies: An Extended Review of Sudden and Gradual: Approaches to Enlightenmeht in Chinese Thought," Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 16.1 (1993): 93-180. The point is also made by Lancaster; see note 18. It is not difficult to see why in reading Nagao Gadjin, for example, a scholar of Tibetan Buddhism should share Foulk's view con­cerning the dominance of Indian / Sanskritic based scholarship in the field. In Nagao's "Reflections on Tibetan Studies in Japan," Acta Asiatica: Bulletin of the Institute of Eastern Culture 29 (1975): 107-128, he states that "Tibetan is no more than a complement to Sanskrit Buddhist studies, though a very important complement" (p. 112). See also de Jong's remarks concerning the centrality of Indian Buddhist texts in Buddhist Studies in his "Recent Buddhist Studies in Europe and America: 1973-1983," Eastern Buddhist 17.1 (1981): 82. On the relationship of the study of Indian and Tibetan Buddhism in Japan, and the methodological shifts that have taken place in recent years see Matsumoto Shiro, Tibetan Studies in Japan: 1973-1983, Asian Studies in Japan, 1973-1983, Part II-18 (Tokyo: The Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies, 1986).

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forms as well. There are those who claim, for example, that the field focuses almost exclusively on written, doctrinal texts to the exclusion of other semiotic (that is, meaning-producing) forms (e. g., oral texts, epi-· graphical and archaeological data, rituals, institutions, art and social practices») In some instances the critique goes further, not only bemoan-

3. Many scholars in the history of the field have stressed the importance of considering more than written textual data. This has traditionally taken the form of advocating the study of epigraphy, art, ritual, culture, "Buddhist mentality," etc., alongside, or as supplements to, textual material. E. Burnouf, arguably the father of Buddhist Studies, himself used epigraphical material to shed light on the meaning of words and phrases in the texts he studied; see his extensive tenth appendix to Le Lotus de la Bonne Loi (Paris: Maissoneuve, 1825). On other studies of Buddhist inscriptions see J. W. de Jong, "A Brief History of Buddhist Studies in Europe and America," Eastern Buddhist 8.1: 88; and, by the same author, "Recent Buddhist Studies" p. 98. The most recent literature, however, dissatisfied with this more moderate stance, criticizes the hegemony of the written text over other semiotic forms and attempts to show how a serious engagement with the latter undermines many of the traditional-written-text-based-presuppositions of the field. Paradigmatic of this approach is the work of Gregory Schopen. See especially his "Two Problems in the History of Indian Buddhism: The Layman / Monk Distinction and the Doctrines of the Transference of Merit," Studien zur Indologie und lranistik 10 (1985); "The Stupa Cult and the Extant Pali Vinaya," Journal of the Pali Text Society 13 (1989); and "Burial 'ad Sanctos' and the Physical Presence of the Buddha in Early Indian Buddhism," Religion 17 (1987): 193-225. Of course, as Schopen himself acknowledges, there are earlier instances of such a critique, most notably Paul Mus's classic study Barabu¢ur: esquisse d'une histoire du Bouddhisme fondee sur la critique archeologique des textes (Hanoi: Ecole Fram;:aise d'Extreme-Orient, 1935; New York: Arno Press, 1978; Paris: Arma Artis, 1990). Schopen's critique is not limited, however, to the use of epigraphical and archaeological data, as can be seen from his "Monks and the Relic Cult in the Mahaparinibiinnasutta: An Old Misunder­standing in Regard to Monastic Buddhism," Koichi Shinohara and Gregory Schopen, eds., From Beijing to Benares: Essays on Buddhism and Chinese Religion (Oakville: Mosaic Press, 1991) 187-201, where he utilizes written texts themselves to undermine the received wisdom of classical Buddhology. Steven Collins, Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravada Bud­dhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), considers social prac­tices, that is, "the actual thought and practice of most Buddhists," to be indis­pensable to the understanding of "intellectual Buddhism": "I have tried to show that the most abstract forms of its (Buddhismis) imaginative representa­tions-what we call its 'ideas' -are intimately connected with, and inextrica­ble from, the presuppositions and institutional framework of Buddhist culture

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ing the narrowness of the data traditionally considered (a critique of con­tent) but also attacking the traditional means of studying the data that is considered (a critique of method). The latter often takes the form of a repudiation of classical Buddhist philology, seen by its detractors as a naive and scientistic approach to the study of written texts. 4 In other instances, traditional Buddhology is seen as overly narrow in its scope­in its hyperspecialization, unconcerned with broader, comparative ques­tions and unable to enter into dialogue with the wider intellectual community. 5

and society" (p. 265-266). 4. Examples include C. W. Huntington with Geshe Namgyal Wangchen, The Emptiness of Emptiness: An Introduction to Early Indian Miidhyamika (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989), and Andrew P. Tuck, Com­parative Philosophy and the Philosophy of Scholarship: On the Western Inter­pretation of Niigiirjuna (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). For a brief critique of specific methodological principles used in the philological analysis of Buddhist texts see Paul Griffiths' review of Lambert Schmithausen's Alayavijftiina, in the Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 12.1 (1989): 170-177. See also John C. Holt, Buddha in the Crown: Avalokitesvara in the Buddhist Traditions of Sri Lanka (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) viii. 5. See, for example, Paul J. Griffiths, "Buddhist Hybrid English: Some Notes on Philology and Hermeneutics for Buddhologists," Journal of the Interna­tional Association of Buddhist Studies 4.2 (1981): 18, for example, where he states that "there is absolutely no reason why Buddhology should become an hermetic tradition, sealed off from the uninitiate and passed down from master to pupil by mystical abhi~eka; in that way lies extinction, or at least a self­banishment from the wider academic community." Griffiths goes on to assert that the understanding of Buddhism "goes far beyond philology" (p. 18), involving as it does the hermeneutical task, which requires that scholars restate the meaning of texts in words other than those of the texts themselves. This he perceives as leading to "some very positive results in the area of inter-disci­plinary and inter-cultural thinking" (p. 21). Consider also Steven Collins' remarks in Selfless Persons p. 1, "I think that a great deal of contemporary philosophy, particularly in the English-language tradition, suffers from a lack of historical and social self-awareness. I want to argue that philosophical reflection should not proceed in abstraction from intellectual history and anthropology, from the investigation and comparison of cultures." David Seyfort Ruegg, "Some Observations on the Present and Future of Buddhist Studies," Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 15.1 (1992): 105, encourages not only interdisciplinarity, "the need to foster con­tacts with specialists from other disciplines," but also "a closing of the ancient and entrenched divide between 'town' and 'gown' by attracting and holding

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Reaction to this challenge has varied. In some cases, it has been ignored: a North American,6 postmodern ripple on the otherwise calm sea, one that will dissipate with time. In others, it has brought scorn and fear: what will become of "serious" scholarship in light of these recent developments? The second goal of this essay is to explore these methodological differences and to suggest not a means of achieving re­conciliation (none, I think, is forthcoming), but a way of living with these differences that averts an impending-and possibly irreparable­rift within the field.

It may be inappropriate to call Buddhist Studies a discipline, especially if we take disciplines to be exemplified by such fields as history, anthro­pology, art history and so forth. Analogous to the Buddhist argument concerning the self and the aggregates, it might be contended that Bud­dhist Studies is not a discipline because it contains disciplines as parts. 7

This, however, could simply be a question of historical evolution, for there was a time when even the classical disciplines did not seem particu­lady disciplinary-like. The fact that Buddhist Studies today seems a

the educated attention, interest and support of persons who are not full-time professional academics"; see also the latter's remarks concerning specialization and interdisciplinarity in "A propos of a recent contribution to Tibetan and Buddhist Studies," Journal of the American Oriental Society 82 (1962): 322, n.4. 6. That the critique emerges primarily out of North America can be gleaned from the sources cited in the previous four notes. Increasingly, many bud­dhologists based in North American institutions of higher education see them­selves as having a distinctive style-a method of scholarship that is different from that which is represented by the parent discipline. Increasingly, North American scholars seek to create a self-identity by contrasting their work with that of their European and Asian colleagues. If there has yet to emerge a dis­tinctive North American school of Buddhist Studies, it is because geographi­cally bounded areas of specialty have yet to engage in serious conversation, so that subfields the likes of South Asian, East Asian, Southeast Asian and Himalayan Buddhist Studies remain for the most part relatively isolated, self­enclosed subunits. 7. See the distinctions made by Foulk, "Issues in the Field of East Asian Buddhist Studies" p. 112, who reserves the term disciplinary for fields like "anthropology, history of religions, etc." Seyfort Ruegg, "Some Observa­tions" p. 104, sees in the fact that Buddhist Studies draws on "philology, his­tory, archaeology, architecture, epigraphy, numismatics, philosophy, cultural and social anthropology, and the histories of religion and art" not evidence of the fact that Buddhist Studies is not disciplinary, but an indication "that our enterprise is at the same time a disciplinary and a multi-disciplinary one."

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strange, almost artificial and heterogeneous discipline may simply be an artifact of its relative youth. Although the academic study of Buddhism is much older than the International Association of Buddhist Studies and the journal to which it gave rise,8 the founding of the latter, which repre­sents a significant-perhaps pivotal-step in the institutionalization of the field, is something that occurred less than twenty years ago. Nonetheless, whether a true discipline or not-whether or not Buddhist Studies has already achieved disciplinary status, whether it is proto-dis­ciplinary or superdisciplinary-there is an apparent integrity to Buddhist Studies that at the very least calls for an analysis of the field in holistic terms.9 After all, we gather at meetings and international congresses in the name of that whole, however differently we may conceive of it.

Still, it must be granted that, whether due to its relative youth or not, Buddhist Studies today seems particularly hodge podge. This is due in part to the international composition of the Buddhist Studies community, and in part to the heterogeneous nature of the object of our study, Bud­dhism itself (on the latter, more in a moment).10 But there are other factors-institutional ones-that also contribute to the diversity that exists within the field. It is often the case that a common pattern of insti-

8. No comprehensive history of Buddhist Studies as a discipline exists. J. w. de Jong's essay, "A Brief History of Buddhist Studies in Europe and America," published in two parts, Eastern Buddhist 7.1: 55-106, and 7.2: 49-82, which is principally a history of Buddhist philology focused primarily on India, is an excellent, though by his own admission partial, overview of the history of the field. It contains substantial bibliographical references to other relevant studies, making it unnecessary to cite these here. See also his follow­up article, "Recent Buddhist Studies in Europe and America: 1973-1983," Eastern Buddhist 17.1 (1984): 79-107.

9. Not only the existence of chairs in Buddhist Studies at major universities worldwide and the fact that doctorates in the field are possible, but also the existence of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, and the fact that the latter publishes a scholarly journal, all point to the fact that buddho­logy is, at the very least, quasi-disciplinary in nature. 10. On the question of heterogeneity see Foulk, "Issues in the Field of East Asian Buddhist Studies" pp. 102-103. Foulk discusses the hitherto most natu­ral subdivisions of Buddhist Studies based on geographical and linguistic sub­specialties, but it is clear that there are other ways of envisioning the subdivi­sions of the discipline, e. g., on methodological lines. Hence, there are tex­tual-philological, anthropological, sociological, literary-critical, and art histor­ical approaches to the study of Buddhism, all of which form part of the broader field.

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tutional support provides a discipline with homogeneity. This is lacking in Buddhist Studies. True, in many Asian countries Buddhist Studies finds consistent institutional support from religious circles, but here sec­tarianism leads to heterogeneity of a different kind. Outside of Asia, moreover, a department of Buddhist Studies is rare. 11 Instead, buddho­logists find themselves with homes in area studies centers (South Asian, East Asian, Uralic-Altaic); in centers and institutes for the study of lan­guages, cultures, history or a combination of these (Asian, South Asian, Indian, Sanskrit, in order of ascending specificity, just to take one series of actually instantiated examples); in departments of religious studies, and even in schools of theology. 12 Unlike other disciplines-even ones that are structurally homologous to our own, like Judaic Studies-Bud­dhist Studies has few secular institutional homes that it can call its own.

This means that Buddhist Studies, though not unique in this regard, is in an institutionally symbiotic relationship with-perhaps even parasitic upon-other more established fields. We often still have to justify our existence by arguing for the fact that the study of Buddhism is essential to a full understanding of a phenomenon whose epistemological value (for historical, political or economic reasons) goes unquestioned. For example, we make the case that understanding Buddhism is essential to an understanding of Asia or some portion thereof 13 (in the United States the "Pacific Rim" has for some years now been the buzz-word), or that it is an essential part of the study of religion, or perhaps that it is a sine qua non to fathoming what is probably the most inclusive and least epistemi-

11. See Seyfort Ruegg, "Some Observations" p. 104. 12. Seyfort Ruegg, "Some Observations" pp. 106-107, discusses what he sees as some of the advantages and dangers of the varying institutional bases of support for the discipline. For example, he sees in the fact that scholars of Buddhist Studies find homes in departments of religion, philosophy and his­tory, a possible danger: that Buddhist Studies may become "distanced if not totally divorced from the historical and philological disciplines-Indology, Sinology, etc.," that Buddhism "might find itself being organized without due regard being accorded to its historical matrix and cultural context." 13 David Seyfort Ruegg, The Study of Indian and Tibetan Thought: Some Problems and Perspectives, Inaugural Lecture as Professor of Indian Philoso­phy, Buddhist Studies and Tibetan at the University of Leiden (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1967) 4, cites J. Ph. Vogel on the importance of Buddhist Studies to the understanding of India. This goes to show that this rhetorical move is neither uncommon nor particularly new. In a similar vein, Seyfort Ruegg justifies and legitimates the study of Tibetan texts on the basis of their importance to the study of Indian Buddhism (p. 43).

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cally questionable category, "humanity." But whatever the "host," Bud­dhist Studies remains the parasite, having in only the rarest of cases the status of unquestionable episteme. This means, of course, that many (perhaps most) of us have dual allegiances. Not only does the discipline become increasingly diverse as it cultivates a variety of institutional rela­tionships for its survival, but heterogeneity in the form of multiple alle­giances is something that we inherit as scholars of Buddhism. Part of the process of our becoming socialized as Buddhologists entails negotiating institutional homes for ourselves, and this means in part learning to wear hats other than the buddhological one.

The heterogeneity of Buddhist Studies is evident not only at the insti­tutionallevel but in other respects as well. Especially today we seem to share less and less by way of method, or even subject matter. As we have seen, in recent years the textual and philological ground upon which the discipline was implicitly based14 has been the subject of increasing critical scrutiny, and the perception exists-at least on the part of the challengers-that this has left the apparently once firm foundations of the disciplin~, if not teetering, at least in question. 15 Anthropologists, sociol-

14. That the discipline was (and perhaps still is) based on the philological study of Buddhist texts is a principle that we find repeatedly enunciated in the literature. To take just one example, see Jacques May's remarks in "Etudes Bouddhiques: Domaine, Disciplines, Perspectives," Etudes de Lettres (Lausanne), Serie III, Tome 6, no. 4 (1973): 10. 15. It might be argued that the depiction of classical Buddhist philology by its detractors is an inaccurate caricature which fails to come to terms with the way actual philological-historical work is done. This may be so, but it will have to be shown to be so by the proponents of the philological method. For example, critics of classical Buddhist philology often portray the latter as a unified and monothetic whole, something that is clearly not the case histori­cally. On different styles of Buddhist philology see Lambert Schmithausen, preface to Part I: Earliest Buddhism, in David Seyfort Ruegg and Lambert Schmithausen, eds., Earliest Buddhism and Madhyamaka, Panels of the VIIth World Sanskrit Conference, vol. 2 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990); many of the articles in the volume also touch, though at times only implicitly, on issues related to method. (For details regarding Schmithausen's own approach to the study of Buddhist texts [at least those of Early Buddhism], see his "On Some Aspects of Descriptions or Theories of 'Liberating Insight' and 'Enlighten­ment' in Early Buddhism," eds. K. Bruhn and A. Wezler, Studien zum lainis­mus und Buddhismus, Gedenkschrift fUr Ludwig Alsdorf, Alt- und Neu Indis­che Studien 23 [Hamburg] 200-202.) In addition, diversity in Buddhist philology is seen in the fact that philological controversies have existed, and continue to exist, in the field. On one such controversy, that begins seriously

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ogists, art historians and a new breed of textual critics, all of whom existed (or perhaps, better, subsisted) on the margins of the discipline a generation ago, are challenging the chirographic-textual-philological paradigm, and in doing so acquiring a voice that, now more central, can no longer be ignored.

In addition to the critique of philology that has emerged from within the discipline, there exists also a more general critique of editorial prac­tices and methods of textual criticism from De Man to the present day that is virtually unknown to Buddhist Studies.16 The literature of this

in the 1930's-the issue of whether or not there exists a precanonical Bud­dhism-see Seyfort Ruegg, The Study of Indian and Tibetan Thought pp. lO­ll. Other controversies, e. g., regarding the antiquity of the Pali canon, the use of Pali and Sanskrit materials in understanding the meaning of the Buddha as a religious figure, the relationship between Buddhism and Brahmanism, the characteristics of a Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit (if any), whether or not the Vinayas of the different schools derive from the Skandhaka-debates that are in large part philological in character-have been discussed by de Jong, "A Brief History of Buddhist Studies," pts. I and II. Whether or not the critics of classical Buddhist philology have accurately portrayed their opponents in this debate, and whether or not their arguments hit their mark, are questions that can only be decided within the methodological debate itself. At the very least, there does exist a widespread perception (at least on the part of challengers) that a gauntlet has been thrown. 16. To cite just a few of the more important sources (some critical of classical philology, some writing in its defense): Paul De Man, "The Rhetoric of Blindness," Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); Paul Bove, "Variations on Authority: Some Deconstructive Transformations of the New Criticism," The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America, eds. Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich and Wallace Martin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); G. Thomas Tanselle, "The Editing of Historical Documents," Selected Studies in Bibliography (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979); and by the same author, A Rationale of Textual Criticism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989); Jerome J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); and by the same author, The Textual Condition, Princeton Studies in Culture / Power / History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). Recent literature on the philological method not actually part of the afore­mentioned debate includes William Proctor Williams and Craig S. Abbott, An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies (New York: Modem Lan­guage Association of America, 1985); Peter L. Shillingsburg, Scholarly Edit­ing in the Computer Age (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986); Textual Criticism Since Greg: A Chronicle 1950-1985 (Charlottesville: University of

240 JIABS 18.2

broader critique, at once more extensive and subtler, is in many ways more devastating to classical Buddhist philology than that which arises from within the field itself. But this is not the place to rehearse these arguments. Suffice it to say that there is a growing perception that the critique of the chirographic-textual-philological paradigm upon which classical Buddhist Studies is based has meant that in the eyes of many scholars the discipline no longer has a common methodological base.

Given the lack of consensus in regard to method-in its general form a fairly recent phenomenon-it might seem natural to seek commonalty not in "how" we do what we do, but in "what" we do, that is, in the object of our study. Is not Buddhism our common concern, and does this fact not give the field its coherence? This is nominally true, but Bud­dhism is itself an artificial construct whose apparent unity and solidity begins to crumble almost immediately upon analysis. Is Buddhism text­based doctrine or behavior-based praxis? Is it what the clergy does or what lay people do? What was done then or what is done now? What happens in Tibet or in Japan? Of course, it is all of these things, but that is tantamount to admitting the multivalent character of our subject mat­ter. To say that we all work on Buddhism is not to point the finger at similarity but at difference.

Now it might be thought that I will be arguing here for the reconstitu­tion of Buddhist Studies around some new and as yet unperceived com­mon core.!7 But this is not my intention. The coherence of Buddhist Studies as a field of inquiry does not require consensus as to method or subject matter-just the opposite. Now that the cat of difference is out of the bag, what will guarantee the stability and longevity of the disci­pline is not the insistence on homogeneity, which in any case can now only be achieved through force, but instead by embracing heterogeneity. To embrace difference, moreover, implies more than the passive and irenic acceptance of the polarities that exist within the field. The superfi-

Virginia Press, 1987); and E. J. Kenney, The Classical Text: Aspects of Edit­ing in the Age of the Printed Book (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). 17. The heterogeneous and artificial nature of Buddhist Studies as a discipline is not something new. If it appears to be so, it is because of the new forms of criticism that have recently emerged. That there exists "a singular lack of coordination" and "seriously divergent attitudes" in the field of Tibetan Stud­ies is a point that was made by D. Seyfort Ruegg more than thirty years ago; see his "A propos of a Recent Contribution to Tibetan and Buddhist Studies," Journal of the American Oriental Society 82 (1962): 320.

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cial tolerance of other methods or areas of specialty is no longer suffi­cient. The embracing of difference that I see as being necessary entails more than the organization and promotion of interdisciplinary and cross­cultural panels at conferences like those of the International Association of Buddhist Studies. The investigation of specific Buddhist themes from different disciplinary, geographical and historical perspectives is a desideratum, to be sure, and even this much has yet to be fully realized in the field. IS More, however, is called for. Embracing difference involves as well a new mode of discourse within Buddhist Studies that focuses on method: a conversation that is critical, dialogical, and at times unabashedly polemical. For this to occur, however, two preconditions must be met: we must acknowledge (a) that the discipline has indeed changed, that it is no longer what it used to be,19 and (b) that what is different about it is something that is worth exploring, taking the chal­lenges seriously enough to make them the subject of conversation. This, of course, implies eschewing the kind of conservatism that considers

18. This is true despite a call for greater cross-cultural and interdisciplinary work in the field throughout the decades. Seyfort Ruegg, again more than thirty years ago, bemoaned the arbitrary compartmentalization of Tibetan Studies into "a 'philosopher's Tibetology'-or a historian'S, a sociologist's etc."; see "A propos of a Recent Contribution" pp. 320-321. The issue is taken up by him once again in his The Study of Indian and Tibetan Thought, p. 5, where he argues against the distinction between the philosophical, religious and sociological in Buddhism. In that same essay (p. 21) he stresses the importance of psychology, semiology, sociology and religious studies for a full understanding of Tantra. Michel Strickmann, "A Survey of Tibetan Bud­dhist Studies," Eastern Buddhist 10.1 (May, 1977): 141, argues, analogously, that it is impossible to fully understand the Buddhist Tantras in India "without considering the abundant Chinese sources and the work of Japanese scholars who know them well." Lewis Lancaster, "The Editing of Buddhist Texts," Buddhist Thought and Asian Civilization: Essays in Honor of Herbert V. Guenther on His Sixtieth Birthday (Emeryville, N.Y.: Dharma Publishing, 1977) 145-151, argues for the value of Chinese translations in the editing of Sanskrit texts. Examples of such calls for greater cross-cultural and interd­siciplinary work are, of course, plentiful in the literature, despite the fact that they have in large part gone unheeded. 19. In this regard, what Clifford Geertz has said of anthropology rings just as true of Buddhist Studies: "Something new having emerged both 'in the field' and 'in the academy,' something new must appear on the page ... if it [the discipline] is now to prosper, with that confidence shaken, it must become aware" (Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988] 148-149).

242 JIABS 18.2

ignoring methodological differences to be the most effective strategy for dealing with them. In its most insidious manifestation this ignorance of difference takes the form of a paternalism that simply refuses, through the sheer force of will or the exercise of power, to acknowledge the exis­tence of viable alternative methodological perspectives and styles of scholarship. A more palatable form, which nonetheless brings an end to the conversation just as effectively, we might term "isolationism." Here the existence of different theoretical perspectives is acknowledged but considered trivial, in that these views are seen as having little if any impact on one another. This latter solution to the problem of method-0logical heterogeneity consists simply of continuing to do what one has always done, while paying lip service to the fact that others may be doing things differently. A third obstacle to the emergence of a critical dia­logue on method is skepticism in regard to theory generally. From this perspective second-order reflection on theoretical and methodological issues is considered to fall outside of the purview of the field: a distrac­tion to the "real" work of the buddhologist. "When time20 is so precious, why waste it on speCUlation of this sort?" Each of these responses fails to take the challenge and implications of difference seriously. We exist today in an atmosphere where the methodological direction(s) of the field

20. The issue of "time" is quite central to the entire discussion of method. Many of the issues dealt with below can be reformulated in temporal terms, that is, as problems related to time (or lack of it). For example, lack of time is an often-cited justification for hyper-specialization (geographical, linguistic, methodological): "There is simply not enough time to gain expertise in more than one cultural area or historical period: to learn all of the necessary lan­guages, to be both a good philologist and a good anthropologist." Time (for training students, for doing research) is always limited, and this means that choices must always be made. Choosing one option excludes pursuing others. What this means, then, is that the rhetoric of time limitation is ultimately translatable into language concerning priorities. To say that there is insuffi­cient time to specialize in more than a single geographical area is tantamount to saying "I will give priority to India over China" (or vice versa); or to say­ing "It is more important to have greater knowledge of one geographical area than lesser knowledge of two (or more)." Likewise, using the rhetoric of time limitation as justification for avoiding methodological questions reduces to giving priority to nonmethodological, first-order discourse. Hence, the fact that there is not enough time for x translates into the fact that y must take pri­ority. In another, as yet unfinished, essay related to this issue I use Mikhail Bakhtin's notions of "chronotopes" as a way of periodizing the development of Buddhist Studies.

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are in contention. Not to speak to these issues by retreating in reac­tionary, isolationist or skeptical ways is in effect to give up one's vote: to forsake the opportunity of allowing one's voice to be heard.

The alternative, as I have mentioned, is to enter the methodological debate in a way that is both critical and dialogical. To do so is not only to accept the fact of methodological heterogeneity but also its implica­tions. The different theoretical approaches to the study of Buddhism challenge each other and demand not only mutual respect but mutual response.

Of course, such a dialogue must begin with an identification of the different perspectives. One of the best entrees into the identification of the variant styles of scholarship is not through their sympathetic depic­tion, but through their caricature in stereotypes. These stereotypes are often constructed in such a way that specific styles of scholarship are associated with specific raciaVethnic, national, religious and gender char­acteristics. Like all stereotypes, they are falsehoods: racist, sexist and generally exhibiting the type of intolerance to which we as human beings are unfortunately heir. But exist they do. My purpose in listing some of these now is not so much to directly criticize them, though this needs to be done, but to utilize them as a venue for identifying the different methodological perspectives on which they, in their grotesque way, are based. For better or for worse, let us proceed.

1. Critical distance from the object of intellectual analysis is necessary. Buddhists, by virtue of their religious commitment, lack such critical dis­tance from Buddhism. Hence, Buddhists are never good buddhologists. 21

Or, alternatively, those who take any aspect of Buddhist doctrine seri­ously (whether pro or con) are scientifically suspect by virtue of allowing their individual beliefs to affect their scholarship. Good scholarship is neutral as regards questions of truth. Hence, evaluative / normative scholarship falls outside of the purview of Buddhist Studies. 2. Interesting and / or serious Buddhist Studies only takes place in the northern hemisphere (and substitute for "northern hemisphere" anyone of a number of geographical areas: Europe, North America, Japan and so forth). 3. North Americans are poor philologists; when they rely on primary

21. For the opposite view, see May, "Etudes Bouddhiques" p. 18: "As for the practice of the religion itself, it can certainly be combined with academic erudition. This is frequently the case in Japan ... " (my trans.)

244 JIABS 18.2

textual material at all, they do so in an uninformed, extravagant and frivolous way as a means of substantiating overly broad hypotheses that are, in any case, of dubious scientific interest. Their philological naIvete makes them turn to questions of theory rather than substance, and this in turn makes them prone to the dogmatic acceptance of the latest method­ological fad. 4. German and earlier French scholarship is so obsessed with the minu tiae of textual criticism that it is incapable of achieving any kind of broad overview of the meaning of individual texts, much less an understanding of Buddhist doctrine / praxis in broad terms. Scholars from these tradi­tions often lack knowledge of modem Asian languages; their scholarship is usually of the arm-chair variety, devoid of any contact with living traditions. This leads them to dogmatically dismiss the value of oral traditions of textual transmission and to disregard the popular and nonlit­erary aspects of Buddhism. In their superficial treatment of texts they are uninterested in-and in any case incapable of --critically assessing the philosophical validity and broader implications of Buddhist doctrine. 5. Continuing east, Indian scholarship, encumbered by years of neo­Vedantist influence, is incapable of perceiving Buddhism as a distinct entity; and even in the rare instances when it does, it is neither system­atic, critical nor historical. 6. Chinese scholarship is, in its Taiwanese variety, pietistic, sectarian, at most only historical, and in any case consists primarily of the careless re­publishing of out-of-print editions. On the mainland, it is hostage to the imprimatur of Marxist-Maoist ideologues. 7. Japanese scholarship consists entirely of philological work of insignifi­cant worth, or, alternatively, of cataloguing, indexing and lexicography; in no instance do we find anything "creative" or "innovative" in Japanese scholarship. 8. Anthropologists, archaeologists, epigraphers and art historians are tex­tually' and often historically, uninformed. If they were not, they would be doing what the rest of us are doing. 9. And finally, feminist criticism (and some would say the scholarship of women generally) must be tolerated but, consisting chiefly of subjective evaluations and emotional appeals with no basis in rigorous scientific principles, is not to be taken seriously.

Now there are various ways of gleaning from these caricatures the dif­ferent perspectives on methodological issues that today divide the field. One such way consists of identifying the perspectives or vantage points

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from which the above stereotypes emerge by identifying the voices that speak them. Broadly, we encounter two schools of thought operative here. One we can call positivist, the other interpretivist.

Positivists conceive of texts-whether linguistic (written or oral), or cultural (behavioral, artistic, etc.)-as the beginning and end of the scholarly enterprise.22 In its philological variety, positivism sees a writ­ten text as complete and whole. It maintains that the purpose of scholarly textual investigation-and the use of science as a model for humanistic research here is always implied23-is to reconstruct the origina124 text (there is only one best reconstruction): to restore it and to contextualize it historically to the point where the author's original intention can be gleaned.25 The principles of textual criticism represent an established,

22. That the notion of text can be more broadly construed, as I have done here, to include oral material, religious behavior (e. g., ritual, pilgrimage, etc.) and art, should by now be a fairly familiar move. Critics often overlook the fact that written texts are not the only objects of the positivist enterprise. Positivist anthropology, for example, uses "texts" of a different sort (cultural artifacts such as rituals or kinship patterns) to similar ends as philological positivism. If our focus is on the latter in this essay, it is only because it is the positivism of the philological variety that has become the object of recent critical scrutiny, and not because philological positivism is the only form to be found in the academy, even in Buddhist Studies. 23. Seyfort Ruegg, "A propos" p. 320, is careful to use the word "science" in quotation marks when referring to work "guided by principles derived from the study of Tibetan sources." Others, however, continue to operate under the assumption that philology is wissenschatlich in very much of a positivist sense of the term. 24. The relationship between philology and the quest for origins goes beyond the search for the original ur-text, the autograph. In some instances philology has been seen as the key to recovering primitive or original Buddhism as a whole. E. Burnouf, for instance, believed that the latter could be reconstructed based on an analysis of the commonalties between Pali and Sanskrit texts; see his Introduction a l'histoire du Bouddhisme indien, Tome I (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1844) p. 11; and also de Jong, "A Brief History," pt. I, p. 73. 25. One of the clearest brief statements regarding the "methods of philology" to be found in the Buddhist Studies literature is Seyfort Ruegg's in "A propos of a Recent Contribution" p. 322. See also, J. W. de Jong, "De Studie van het Boeddhisme, Problemen an Perspectieven" (The Hague: Mouton and Co., 1956); in English translation, "The Study of Buddhism: Problems and Per­spectives," Buddhist Studies by l. W. de long, ed. Gregory Schopen (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1979) 15-28. The difference between the approach of Seyfort Ruegg and the extremist position being characterized here

246 JlABS 18.2

fixed and finely tuned scientific method; hence, there is no need for fur­ther methodological reflection. 26 To reconstitute the text in this way is to make it available in a neutral, untampered-with and pristine fashion. This is not only sufficient and worthwhile, it is in any case all that is achievable, even in principle. Once the text has been reconstituted in this way, its meaning unfolds from within itself, without any need for inter­pretation. The goal of scholarship is to allow texts to speak for them­selves. Scholars are not multifaceted prisms through which texts pass and refract. They are mirrors on which texts reflect and congeal into wholes. It is the text and at most its historical context that should be the sole concern of the scholar: the end-point of the scholarly enterprise. To

is that the former acknowledges the validity and worth of other forms of anal­ysis not philological. It is, however, true that Seyfort Ruegg in that same essay (p. 322) excludes "comparative and general studies" from Tibetology and Buddhology proper. The latter disciplines-"whose methods and 'pro­gramme' ... can in the last analysis be determined only by intrinsic criteria" (p. 321)-he perceives as "necessary prerequisites" for, but distinct from, the former type of work. Moreover, Seyfort Ruegg sees philology as providing "a vital nucleus in this diversified field" (that is, in Tibetology). From this it can be surmised that for Seyfort Ruegg-at least for the Seyfort Ruegg of 1962-Tibetology and Buddhology proper are philological disciplines, and that these philological disciplines form the basis and core for other methodological approaches to Tibetan civiliiation and Buddhism, respectively. A similar position is held by de Jong, "The Study of Buddhism" p. 16, where he sees philology, that is, the study of Buddhist literature, as being fundamental and

the most important source of knowledge of Buddhism. Buddhist art, inscriptions and coins have supplied us with useful data, but generally they cannot be fully understood without the support given by the texts. Consequently, the study of Buddhism needs first of all to be concentrated on the texts which have been transmitted, and, indeed, it [Buddhist Studies] only made good progress after Buddhist philology had been established on a sound basis.

De Jong, too, is more moderate than the extremist position being characterized here in that he sees other research strategies, e. g., direct contact with Buddhist cultures, as being necessary to an understanding of Buddhism. 26. Consider as an example of the rhetoric of the finality of method the fol­lowing words of Nagao Gadjin, "Reflections on Tibetan Studies in Japan" p. 112: "Since approximately fifty years ago, when Yamaguchi Susumu and others returned to Japan from study in Europe, the method of studying the combined Sanskrit-Tibetan-Chinese versions has been established, and is now generally accepted by scholars."

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go beyond them-and in most instances this means even considering the opinion of what later interpreters in the tradition have to say-is to go beyond the author's intention. It is to pollute scholarship with personal bias, either one's own or those of others. 27 In the words of Clifford Geertz, the role of the text positivist "dissolves into that of an honest bro­ker passing on the substance of things with only the most trivial of trans­action costs."28

Interpretivists believe that texts, though the starting point of scholar­ship, are not ends in themselves. They maintain that interpretation infuses every part of humanistic scholarship, even apparently "neutral" tasks such as textual criticism and lexicography. There is, for the inter­pretivist, no escape from subjective contamination, no preinterpretive moment. 29 Interpretivists eschew the notion that there is a single achiev-

27. What I am characterizing here as philological positivism is of course closely linked to the nineteenth century hermeneutical tradition as represented by Schleiermacher and Dilthey (what Gadamer calls "romantic hermeneu­tics"). See Andrew P. Tuck, Comparative Philosophy and the Philosophy of Scholarship: On the Western Interpretation of Niigiirjuna (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); and also Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd rev. edition (New York: Continuum, 1993) pt. 2. 28. Geertz, Works and Lives p. 145. 29. An interesting analysis of the way in which scholars' subjective method­ological and theoretical presuppositions have affected their results is to be found in de J ong' s historiographical discussion of the Western scholarly study of the Buddha "legend." In his "The Study of Buddhism," and more exten­sively in "A Brief History of Buddhist Studies," he shows how the interpretive strategies of figures like Senart, Kern and Oldenburg molded their conception of the Buddha as a mythical! historical figure. Not content simply to point out the variation in the perceptions concerning the Buddha, de Jong himself proposes a method for its resolution, namely greater reliance on the methods of historical criticism; in particular, he believes that comparison to non-Bud­dhist sources can yield the historical truths in the traditional accounts of the life of the Buddha. As in the former cases, it is likely that this method, rather than yielding new "facts" concerning the Buddha's life, is simply reflective of de Jong's own scholarly style and presuppositions. See his "The Study of Buddhism" pp. 25-26. Enigmatically, he ends this latter essay by claiming that no historical approach to the study of Buddhism is possible, "because in the spiritual life of India the historical dimension is of much less importance than it is in Western civilization" (p. 26). Implicit here is the presupposition that Western scholarly methods employed in the study of Buddhism must correspond to the world view in which Buddhism existed and evolved-an

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able text that represents an author's original intention. 3o Every move in the philological process represents an instance of personal choice, and these choices have their consequences. 31 Given the intensely subjective character of humanistic scholarship, we have no choice but to reflect methodologically on what we do, indicating to readers our theoretical presuppositions and providing them with reasons for why we have chosen certain methodological options over others. A scholar's signature must appear not only on the title page, but throughout the entire work through the manifest exposition of his or her subjectivity,32

Interpretivists are usually not content simply to engage in a negative critique of what they perceive to be the scientistic dogmas of positivists. They want to go further and to propose certain positive theses of their own. For example, interpretivists often wish to assert that texts, far from being the end-point of scholarly praxis, are the starting points for further

almost theological stance. Leading de Jong beyond pure philology as the sole method, he comes to the conclusion that "the most important task for the stu­dent of Buddhism is the study of Buddhist mentality. That is why contact with present-day Buddhism is so important, for this will guard us against see­ing the texts purely as philological material and forgetting that for the Bud­dhist they are sacred texts which proclaim a message of salvation" (p. 26). Though never rejecting the importance of philology, it is clear from this pas­sage that de Jong sees philology as incomplete and in need of being supple­mented by other methods. How easy-and how inaccurate-it would be, on the basis of his other writings, to characterize de Jong, the consummate philologist, as a positivist. If there is one lesson to be learned from this dis­cussion it is that the positivist / interpretivist distinction I am drawing here is only heuristically useful, and that methodological affiliation in the real life of practicing scholars is a more complex phenomenon than we have access to using such a simplified model. 30. For a devastating critique of the notion that the only goal of textual criti­cism is achieving a text that represents the author's intention, see McGann, The Textual Condition, ch. 3. 31. For an actual example of the choices that confront the editor of a text, and of the consequences of those choices on how the text is understood, see McGann, The Textual Condition, ch. 1. Although McGann would probably not want to be considered an interpretivist in some senses of the term, it is clear from his writings that he opposes the "editor-as-technical-functionary" model of textual scholarship that is paradigmatic of positivism, or what he calls "empiricism." 32. As an interesting counterpoint to this view, see David Macey's characteri­zation of Foucault's view of authorial subjectivity in The Lives of Michel Foucault (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993) xiv-xvi.

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reflection. The fact that a written text, a ritual or a work of art is (or was) meaningful is an indication of the fact that it can teach us broader lessons beyond itself: that it can, for example, be a source for developing more general principles, theories or laws that concern what people believe or how they behave)3 Some interpretivists would go so far as to claim that texts can even serve as sources of normative insight about the world by serving as sources for the evaluative assessment of claims con­cerning truth, beauty and human well-being,34 Given that all scholarship is "refractory," asks the interpretivist, why not admit to the creative role of the investigator and celebrate, as it were, this creativity and freedom in scholarship itself?

It should be clear from the way in wlJich I have characterized these two paradigms-the positivist and interpretivist-that they are themselves caricatures. They are, to borrow a phrase from Max Weber, "ideal types" that are rarely, if ever, instantiated in real life. For example, few philologists today consider their work to be completely objective 35; and few scholars with interpretivist leanings are willing to abandon philologi­cal standards of accuracy and rigor. Hence, pure positivists and interpre-

33. Collins, Selfless Persons, sees the comparative project in which he is engaged, for example, as capable of illuminating our own "inherent concerns and presuppositions, and perhaps the general nature of human thought (if such exists)" by "acting as a mirror to our own thinking" (pp. 2-3). And John C. Holt, Buddha in the Crown: Avalokite.svara in the Buddhist Traditions of Sri Lanka (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), suggests that the process of the transformation of religious symbols might be found in religious traditions other than Buddhism, so that he sees his work as uncovering "principles of religious assimilation generally." I myself make an analogous claim about scholasticism in Buddhism and Language: A Study of Indo-Tibetan Scholasticism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). 34. Seyfort Ruegg, "Some Observations" p. 105, for example, sees the Bud­dhist world view as making normative contributions to ethics; see his n. 1 for relevant bibliography concerning this issue. 35. Consider Lambert Schmithausen's remarks in Buddhism and Nature, Studia Philologica Buddhica Occasional Papers Series VII (Tokyo: The Inter­national Institute of Buddhist Studies, 1991) p. 2, sec. 2: "As a scholar I am expected to deal with my subject-matter in an objective way. If this were to mean without emotional concern, and without a personal standpoint, I have to admit failure in advance." Nonetheless, Schmithausen makes it clear that hav­ing a personal standpoint and being emotionally concerned does not prevent scholars from engaging in their task "as objectively as possible" (p. 2, sec. 3.1).

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tivists are fictions, but though fictions there are some heuristic advan­tages in considering them. Their most important function for our pur­poses is to serve as reagents that distill the attitudes of the previously mentioned stereotypes, bringing them down to their most basic forms. In addition-if I may be allowed to extend the chemical analogy a little further-they serve as foci around which to crystallize the fundamental methodological issues over which buddhologists today tend to differ. What are these issues?

The necessity o/methodological reflection36

This has already been dealt with above to a large extent. That there are fundamental issues in the discipline that have yet to be fully explored is, in any case, what much of this essay is about. The need for methodolog­ical debate in a discipline comes about when there emerges a critical mass of scholars who perceive themselves as engaging in research strategies that are substantively different from those that preceded them. This leads them to formulate their new method in more precise terms, distinguish­ing it from what came before; ultimately, it leads them to question the previous paradigm's hegemony, validity or both.37

Those familiar with the work of Thomas Kuhn may conclude, wrongly, that I am here predicting or advocating some kind of paradigm shift in Buddhist Studies. It is not my intention, however, to forecast, much less to argue for, an end to philology as a mode of scholarship. 38

This essay is rather a call for conversation and mutual understanding between different views on key issues that I perceive to be representative of different styles of contemporary scholarly praxis. Not to engage in methodological reflection and debate at this point, however, could indeed polarize the field, whether or not this inevitably results in a paradigm shift. In general, however, I do not believe that the Kuhnian model for

36. This is not, strictly speaking, a methodological, but rather a theoretical (or meta-methodological), issue. It is a claim about methodology (that it needs to be more fully discussed) rather than an issue in methodology proper. 37. To question the hegemony of a previous paradigm is to demand a voice alongside the latter; to question its validity is to demand an end to the previous mode of scholarly praxis altogether. 38. Indeed, I have argued in print for the importance of textual studies, and for the fact that methodological speculation should occur alongside such stud­ies and not replace them. See my "On Retreating to Method and Other Post­modern Turns: A Response to C. W. Huntington," Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 15.1 (1992): 134-144.

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change within disciplines-essentially agonistic, one mode of discourse defeating another-is the only viable one. An alternative is the critical­dialogical model I am setting forth here, the result of which is not the wholesale triumph of one view over another, but the mutual, albeit criti­cal, understanding of perspectives.

The question of objectivity At a previous meeting of the International Association of Buddhist Stud­ies in Paris I had the great fortune to have dined with a one of those rare colleagues who holds close to a positivist view on the issue of objectivity. In his characterization of it, it went something like this. In working with a Buddhist (or indeed any kind of classical) text, scholars can and should be devoid of-or rather, since this is something that must be cultivated, "void themselves of ' -all bias and prejudice, allowing the text to speak for itself. This critical distance, though difficult to achieve, is attainable through training and sustained effort. The result is the total eradication of all subjective elements in the scholarly enterprise, so that one becomes "the disinterested observer, wherein one strives to bracket one's own opinions and agendas and applies the methods of historical criticism." 39

This is essential if scholarship is to be scientifically sound. Religious commitment to the text one is studying necessarily clouds judgment and prevents the scholar from achieving the kind of neutrality that is neces­sary to presenting the text as it was originally written and understood. 40

When confronted with difficult philological decisions-for example, key textual emendations or questions of authorship that run counter to the doctrines of the tradition-allegiance to the religious world view one is investigating prevents the scholar with a faith commitment from making the appropriate decision. 41 Therefore, Buddhists can never achieve the kind of pure objectivity that is called for in scholarly research on Bud-

39. See, e. g., Foulk, "Issues in the Field of East Asian Buddhist Studies" p. 173. An attempt to come to terms with and to dispel some of the prejudices that have infiltrated the field of Indian Studies is found in Johannes Bronkhorst, "L'Indianisme et les prejuges occidentaux," Etudes de Lettres (Lausanne) (April/June 1989): 119-136. 40. On some of the tensions between being Buddhist and studying Buddhism in a Japanese context see Foulk, "Issues in the Field of East Asian Buddhist Studies" pp. 106-108. See also Paul J. Griffiths' caricature of the Buddhist buddhologist in "Buddhist Hybrid English" pp. 21-22. 41. See Paul Griffith's remarks in his review of Schmithausen's AZayavijfiiina, p. 173.

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dhist texts. 42 For this same reason scholars should refrain from relying on "native informants," lest scholarship become tainted by the bias that is endemic to traditional exegesis. 43 As a corollary, the study of the mod­ern spoken languages of Asia, if necessary at all, are to be given low priority.

At the other end of the spectrum from this view is what we might call the hyper-subjectivist or constructionist position. It claims that a scho­lar's own subjectivity infiltrates every aspect of his or her work. Texts cannot speak for themselves because they do not exist objectively. It is the reader that creates or constructs a text in the very act of reading. Versions of this view are to be found in the writings of Paul De Man,44 and more recently in a book by Jerome McGann. 45 A text exists only in the act of reading, and when scholars read a text, they do not glean an author's intention, but, as it were, only their own. Rather than a scholar being a mirror that reflects an author's original intention, it is the text that serves as a mirror for the scholars' own concerns: their personal and social situation. Objectivity is a myth, as is the notion of a set of stan­dards or criteria on the basis of which to arbitrate between competing interpretations. In De Man's words, "[reading] is an act of understanding that can never be observed, nor in any way prescribed or verified."46

42. It is sometimes maintained, as a corollary to this view, that even the mere exposure to living traditions is enough to contaminate the scholar's judgment, and should therefore be avoided. 43. It is interesting to note that despite the fact that Japanese Buddhist Studies has inherited many of the positivistic tendencies of its European counterpart, the Japanese do not exhibit this allergy to contact with the cultures they study. Tibetan Buddhist Studies in Japan, for example, began with the travels of Japanese scholars to Tibet; and Nagao Gadjin marks 1961, the year when three Tibetan informants came to Japan, as a tuming point in Tibetan Studies in that country. See his "Reflections on Tibetan Studies in Japan," Acta Asiatica: Bulletin of the Institute of Eastern Culture 29 (1975): 107-128. See also Matsumoto, Tibetan Studies in Japan p. 10. 44. See, for example, De Man, "The Rhetoric of Blindness." 45. Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition. McGann's version of textu­ality differs from De Man's in that it is less idealist and more materialist, emphasizing the social and historical dimensions of the act of reading. Both theorists, however, fall into the constructionist camp. 46. "The Rhetoric of Blindness" p. 107. For McGann (The Textual Condition p. 10) the fact of interpretational variety is due not only to the situational diversity of readers, but is something that inheres within texts themselves.

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The true subjectivist is a relativist. 47 My purpose here, and in this paper as whole, is not to suggest a resolu­

tion to the question of objectivity, or even a direction for a critical dia­logue on this or other issues. This is of course impossible both to predict and to prescribe. It is something that will instead evolve in response to the interests and needs of scholars. My goal is simply to point out that methodological differences on this question (and the others that follow) do exist, and to suggest that their discussion is an essential part of the critical dialogue on method that is needed in the discipline.

Interpretation and creativity To consider fully the disciplinarity of a field like Buddhist Studies, which this paper does not purport to do, requires an investigation of its intellec­tual sociology. What social processes are involved in becoming employed as a buddhologist, in the granting of tenure and in the making of reputations? What books and articles get published and how is this decided? How are students supported and trained48 ? In brief, what cri­teria are operative in deciding what constitutes knowledge, and how is this knowledge institutionally transmitted and disseminated, and to whom? These issues are too complex to treat here in their entirety. It is however possible to use the discussion of interpretation and creativity a<;

a venue--or perhaps "excuse"-for examining one somewhat contained issue: the nature of acceptable research.49 Guidelines-usually irnplicit-

47. A critique ofthe notion of the objectivism implicit in Western scholarship on Nagarjuna is to be found in Tuck, Comparative Philosophy. Though not as radical as the position outlined here, and though rhetorically repudiating rela­tivism, Tuck's view that all reading is isogetical leaves one with the impres­sion that the various Western interpretations of Nagarjuna that he analyzes are solely the result of the relative paradigmatic and psychological "site" of vari­ous scholars, making him effectively a relativist. See also Johannes Bronkhorst's review (and criticism) of Tuck on this very issue, "On the Method of Interpreting Philosophical Sanskrit Texts," Asiatische Studien / Etudes Asiatiques 67.3 (1993): 501-511, though it might be argued that Bronkhorst's rejection of the fact that knowledge is culturally embedded in fact goes too far, risking a fall into the extreme of positivism. 48. May's "Etudes Bouddhiques" is dedicated in large part to setting forth principles along the lines of which the training of students should be based. 49. An interesting attempt to prescribe what constitutes valid research, or in his words, "true progress of Tibetan Buddhist studies as a highly developed field of scholarly inquiry," is Michel Strickmann's bibliographical article, "A Survey of Tibetan Buddhist Studies," Eastern Buddhist 10.1 (May, 1977):

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for what constitutes an acceptable doctoral dissertation topic, and for that matter criteria for research funding evaluation and even tenure and pro­motion decisions, are often good indicators of the ethos of a field. A generation ago in the United States it may have been possible to submit as fulfillment of the research requirement for the doctorate, or as the subject of a postdoctoral research grant, work that was strictly philologi­cal in character: undertaking a critical edition of a text, say. If this was ever the case, it is even rarer today. In our time, such work is considered to lack a certain originality and creativity that is an essential characteris­tic of scholarly research. Ironically, this is due in large part to the pic­ture that many philologists have themselves painted of their own spe­cialty. Philological work is seen as lacking originality because it is believed-falsely it seems to me-to consist of the mechanical reconsti­tution of another author's work. Hence, the editing of texts, the compi­lation of anthologies, and even translations, are perceived by the most extreme critics to be just one step removed from plagiarism. 50

True research, so the story now goes, is creative. That is, it contains an element of novelty: the defense of a clear thesis that is not only new but significant. Hearkening back to our discussion of interpretivism, this requires the full involvement of the scholar not only in the text, but beyond it as well, utilizing the text as an object of interpretation with the goal of achieving results that are broad and general in scope. Ideally, the research should shake the field from within, and the waves from the "splash" should be felt outside of it as well. It is probably clear that this

128-149. Here Strickmann attempts to distinguish real scholarship from "gaudy productions" that, "hardly relevant to the study of Buddhism," are "tracts telling harassed Americans how to relax." Unfortunately, Strickmann never cites examples of the latter, nor does he ever disclose his criteria for including and excluding the works that he does. One is to surmise from his rhetoric that the list of "gaudy productions" consists of all those works to which he does not grant his imprimatur. What I find most interesting about Strickmann's article is not the actual scholarly canon he attempts to "catalogue," but the fact that it represents a prime locus for the investigation of the sociology of knowledge in one subfield of Buddhist Studies: a site for exploring one scholar's attempt at delineating what constitutes valid research, clouded in a rhetoric that makes it appear as though that scholar's own subjec­tivity has no part to play in the process. 50. In the United States, to take the example with which I am most familiar, it is almost inconceivable to imagine that tenure would be granted solely on the basis of text-critical work, or even on the basis of a well-received anno­tated translation.

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notion of creativity is modem,S! and-at least in the way I have charac­terized it here-particularly North American, based as it is on a kind of hyper-individualism. But it is also clear that such a model of what con­stitutes adequate research has been received warmly and is functionally normative in geographically diverse institutional settings outside of North America as well. 52

In the United States and Canada today53 we operate with this as the ideal of what constitutes real research in the field of Buddhist Studies. There are reasons for this that go beyond the realm of the merely intel­lectual. For about a decade or so, buddhologists in North America have found employment in increasing numbers in departments of religious studies and schools of theology. Often this has meant that we have had to expand our pedagogical repertoire beyond courses in Buddhist Studies to accommodate the curricular needs of these institutions. In addition, we increasingly find ourselves in conversations with colleagues whose specialty lies outside of the discipline of Buddhist Studies. Our de facto professional organization has become the American Academy of Reli­gion' an institution that stresses broad and interdisciplinary research. The editorial bodies of academic presses seek work that has "broad appeal," is "original," and "cutting-edge." And finally, it is in accordance with the standards (often only implicitly) set forth by these various institutional bodies that tenure and promotion decisions are made. All of these factors have contributed to what we might call the diversification of the bud­dhologist: a movement away from classical Buddhist Studies based on the philological study of written texts, and toward the investigation of more general, comparative and often theoretical issues that have implications (and audiences) outside of Buddhist Studies. Some colleagues have

51. On this point see my Buddhism and Language: A Study of Indo-Tibetan Scholasticism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994) 83-87. 52. To cite just one example, I know of several Tibetan scholars who have chosen not to seek doctorates at Indian universities precisely because of the requirement that they undertake research that is innovative, something they consider anathema-a betrayal of the tradition. 53. I am not unaware of the dangers of generalizing about the patterns of scholarship in large geographical areas. My goal here is not to speak for my colleagues in the United States and Canada; many will undoubtedly disagree with what I have to say. Nor is it my intention to imply that North American scholarship is homogeneous; it is certainly not. With these caveats, however, it does seem to me possible to venture upon some general remarks about pat­terns of scholarship, like the ones that follow.

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resigned themselves to this situation: a set of circumstances that must be tolerated for the sake of gainful employment. Others-and I count myself in this camp-have found the pressure to greater diversification intellectually stimulating, affording an opportunity to enter into broader conversations where Buddhist texts are one, but not the only, voice.

Be that as it may, it is clear that this latter model of what constitutes adequate research, based as it is on an interpretivist paradigm, represents a clear departure from a positivist program of exclusively textual scholar­ship. What kind of dialogue will arise as a result of these methodological differences concerning the nature of adequate research? This, of course, remains to be seen.

The question of normative discourse Related to the questions of objectivity and creativity, though not reducible to either one, is the issue of the appropriateness of normative discourse. 54 The classically positivist position that I have outlined above maintains of course that there is no room for evaluative assessment in Buddhist Studies. Perceiving its own discourse to be value-free and neu­tral, positivism operates under the assumption that the role of the scholar is to mirror, rather than to evaluate, textual meaning. 55 In addition, philosophical positivism-where all normative questions pertaining to religious matters are considered either meaningless, undecidable or

54. The question of objectivity has to do with self-identity and normative commitment rather than with discourse. It is possible, for example, that a scholar be a committed Buddhist and not write from an overtly theological perspective (although in the present context the question of objectivity deals precisely with whether or not there is always an implicit theological agenda even in such writing). The question of creativity is broader than that of nor­mative discourse, and in a sense contains it, since normative discourse can be considered one instance of interpretive creativity. 55. It is interesting that in his characterization of the scholarship of the 18th century Jesuit missionary Ippolito Desideri, de Jong ("A Brief History," pt. I, pp. 65-66), in his preoccupation with the philological and descriptive dimen­sions of Buddhist Studies, should have overlooked the fact that Desideri's chief interest in Buddhism was polemical, that is to say normative. It is moti­vated by a desire to engage Tibetan Buddhism philosophically and religiously that Desideri delved into the Buddhist religion and gained the expertise that he did. If, as Petech and Tucci state, Desideri managed to fathom the intricacies of Tibetan (principally dGe lugs pa) Buddhism in ways that even later scholars could not, it is not in spite of, but precisely because of, his interest in norma­tive issues.

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both-exerts a different kind of pressure in the direction of ignoring the implications of the normative claims of Buddhist texts. But even when the latter is not operative as an assumption, philological positivists con­sider the issue of the truth of religious claims, and even issues of aesthet­ics and literary worth-of texts, practices, art forms and methods-as necessarily clouding judgment, and as leading to the infiltration of per­sonal bias and prejudice into scholarship. By contrast, as we have seen, interpretivists believe that, far from meaningless, forms of discourse that bring to light the full significance of texts-as normative discourse, for example, does-represent the epitome of the scholarly enterprise: its fulfillment. Ascribing to the view that all scholarship is necessarily eval­uative, interpretivists claim that there is no escape from subjective assessment. Hence, all scholarship is normative; and those that admit to its normativity in exploring the philosophical implications of texts are simply being more candid.

At the very least three forms of discourse are objects of contention in this debate: religious or theological, philosophical, and methodologica1.56

56. The dividing line between these three is not always very precise. For example, some authors, ostensibly writing as philosophers, often exhibit theo­logical presuppositions in their writings. Be that as it may, the distinctions between the three forms of discourse I discuss below seem to me valuable. Foulk, "Issues in the Field of East Asian Buddhist Studies" p. 112, opts for another method of distinguishing theology from Buddhology (that is, from Buddhist Studies as an academic discipline). Buddhist theology, he states, is "the study of divine things or religious truth as it is carried on within a nor­mative tradition," while Buddhology is "'objective' (non-normative)." Such a definition, despite his use of quotation marks around the word objective, is problematic. As we saw from the discussion of objectivity above, scholars increasingly question the existence of "objective" scholarship. Buddhology, as the academic study of Buddhism, may have different presuppositions from Buddhist theology, but-so the critique goes-the former is based as much on subjective and normative presuppositions as the latter. Moreover, Foulk's distinction, by excluding overt forms of normative discourse from Buddho­logy (this is reiterated on p. 172 of his essay), implies that philosophical and normative methodological treatment of issues in the field falls outside of Bud­dhist Studies / Buddhology proper. Ironically, it implies that his own essay­in large part normative~annot be considered a piece of buddhological schol­arship. Rather than confiating normativity and subjectivity (and then defining the academic study of Buddhism in terms of its objectivity), it seems to me preferable to distinguish normative from descriptive forms of scholarship (historical, philological, etc.) discursively, that is, in terms of whether a par­ticular work deals explicitly with the assessment and determination of the truth

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In theological discourse the authorial subject speaks or writes from within a specific religious world view; that is, theological authors explic­itly situate themselves within a specific tradition. In its standard form, Buddhist theology presupposes-or, alternatively, argues for-the valid­ity of the doctrinal claims of Buddhism,5? the value and significance of its art58 and/or the efficacy of its practices; it also utilizes these as the essential raw materials of the discourse itself. Theological discourse need

value of doctrinal, more broadly religious, aesthetic or methodological claims. Normative discourse can then be further subdivided in terms of where autho­rial subjects situate themselves in such discussions: it is theological when authors locate themselves within a religious tradition, and philosophical when they either locate themselves outside of a specific religious world view or are rhetorically neutral on their religious location. Methodological reflection then becomes a specific kind of philosophical discourse that instead of focusing on primary Buddhist artifacts (doctrines, rituals, art, etc.) focuses on second­order issues pertaining to how these artifacts are to be studied. But again, the distinctions between the three modes of discourse is not always clear-cut. And it is frequently the case that a single work will shift between these different modes. A good example of this is a recent work of Anne C. Klein, Meeting the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists and the Art of the Self (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), in which she is self-consciously engaged in both methodological and theological reflection. Another example is Lambert Schmithausen's Buddhism and Nature. Though principally a philological and historical work, whose goal it is to "describe and analyze, as objectively as possible, the attitude of the Buddhist tradition toward nature" (p. 2, sec. 3.1, my emphasis), there are definite normative dimensions to Schmithausen's work, in that he sees Buddhist speculation on nature as contributing to the dis­cussion of the contemporary problem of environmental destruction and pollu­tion. Schmithausen also sees another goal of his work to be that of making "contemporary Buddhists aware of the multifacetedness and ambivalence of their tradition in order to have them lay stress, consciously, on those strands which favor a positive attitude toward nature consonant with present day requirements" (p. 56, sec. 63.1). 57. See, for example, Gunapala Dharmasiri, A Buddhist Critique of the Christian Concept of God (Antioch, CA: Golden Leavs, 1988 [rpt.]). 58. See Marilyn M. Rhie and Robert A. F. Thurman, Wisdom and Compas­sion: The Sacred Art of Tibet (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991). A critical review of the work exists in David Jackson's "Appropos a Recent Tibetan Art Catalogue," Wiener ZeitschriJt fur die Kunde sudasiens und Archiv flir indische Philosoph ie, Band 37 (1993): 109-130. The latter is in many ways a critique of the former's-sometimes overt, sometimes unacknowledged-theological (Jackson calls them "Geluk-centric" and "thoecratic"), myth-creating and idealizing agenda.

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not always be dogmatic, however, since it sometimes engages doctrines and practices in critical ways59; but whether dogmatic or critical, theol­ogy situates itself within a particular religious perspective.60

In contrast to theology, philosophical discourse does not situate itself within, say, the Buddhist tradition. Though concerned with the norm­ative evaluation of Buddhism, it is not grounded in a specifically Bud­dhist religious world view. 61 Finally, methodological discourse too can be normative. When it is so, it can be situated either within62 or out­side63 of a specific Buddhist religious world view, and rather than taking specific Buddhist artifacts (doctrines, rituals, etc.) as its direct subject matter, it is instead chiefly concerned with the assessment of options in their study. 64

59. The work of Hakamaya Noriaki and Matsumoto Shiro might be consid­ered paradigmatic of what I am here calling critical Buddhist theology. See Jamie Hubbard and Paul L. Swanson, eds., Critical Buddhism: A Critical Appraisal, a forthcoming anthology and study of the work of these two fig­ures. N. David Eckel's somewhat ambiguous remarks in "The Ghost at the Table: On the Study of Buddhism and the Study of Religion," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 62.4 (1994): 1099, might be interpreted as a call for the possibility of a critical Buddhist theology situated in the academy. 60. It is conceivable, however, that such a perspective be non-Buddhist. A critique of Buddhism that situates itself within a Christian perspective is equally theological. See, for example, Steve Odin, Process Metaphysics and Hua-yen Buddhism: A Critical Study of Mutual Penetration vs. Interpenetra­tion (Albany: SUNY Press, 1982). 61. Exemplary of this approach is the work of Paul Griffiths; see his On Being Mindless: Buddhist Meditation and the Mind-Body Problem (La Salle, II.: Open Court, 1986), and An Apology for Apologetics: A Study in the Logic of Interreligious Discourse (Maryknoll, N. Y.: Orbis Books, 1991). 62. See Rita M. Gross, Buddhism After Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Anal­ysis and Reconstruction of Buddhism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993); and Anne Carolyn Klein, Meeting the Great Bliss Queen: Bud­dhists, Feminists and the Art of the Self (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). 63. See, for example, Tuck, Comparative Philosophy. 64. Although the set of distinctions I have drawn here between theology, phi­losophy and methodology represents one way of conceptualizing the differ­ences between these three modes of discourse, it is not the only one. Christian theologians have discussed this issue for some time-in the context of the debate concerning whether or not theology belongs in the secular academy, to cite just one example. As all three of these underrepresented forms of dis­course become more prevalent in Buddhist Studies, as I think they will, we would do well to consider the latter literature in a serious manner.

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To summarize, from the positivist point of view, normative forms of discourse-like the three just outlined-fall outside of the scope of Bud­dhist Studies. From the interpretivist perspective, on the other hand, there does exist a place within the academy for these modes of analysis. 65

Normative forms of discourse are paradigmatic examples of creative scholarship in that they use texts as points of departure for the investiga­tion of broader issues-issues such as the truth or falsity of various claims, or their implications.

The question o/the author's original intention An ancient Buddhist painting, !low in a museum, is "restored" using the latest technology; a ritual never before performed in public is enacted before cameras so that the scholar may film it and preserve it "before the tradition is lost"; the textual scholar publishes the definitive critical edi­tion of a tantric manuscript based on all known recensions and utilizing all known fragments. Do we have in these various enterprises the preser­vation and presentation of the various authors' original intentions? The question is not so easily answered. As the narrator in one of Guenther Grass's recent books says, there is the finest of lines between restoration and forgery.

The positivist will want to argue that every text has a single definitive and final meaning, and that this represents the author's original intention. Recapturing this is the goal of textual scholarship. Interpretivists will respond variously. Some will want to repudiate the notion of authorial intention altogether. What authors intend, if they intend anything at all, is rarely static and monothetic: authors frequently change their minds, even in the very process of writing. And even if authorial intention were capturable in principle, it is doubtful whether an academic, scholarly format of presentation is what Buddhist authors had in mind. The repu­diation of authorial intention will be seen by some pessimistically-we are forever doomed to living within the closed world of our own inter­pretations; and by others optimistically-this gives us license to manipu­late texts in creative ways. Interpretivists of another ilk will want to grant the possibility of multiple interpretations, while rejecting the notion that anything goes. For the latter there must exist ways to arbitrate

65. Of course classical Buddhist texts are themselves theological in their mode of discourse. Contemporary examples by Western scholars are more difficult to identify. Some of the writings of Anne Klein, Stephen Batchelor, Robert Thurman, and Rita Gross come to mind.

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between competing interpretations; here authorial intention may be one, though not the only, factor in judging adequacy.

In principle, a critical dialogue on authorial intention could of course lead to some kind of resolution or consensus on the issue; but, as with most complex issues of method, if this occurs at all it will most likely occur only locally-in the context of individual self-contained conversa­tions. But the point of a critical dialogue on questions of method is not of course to reach final and universal consensus. Rather, it is to con­verse, and in so doing to clarify our own and others' positions on impor­tant issues, for ourselves and others.

Beyond written texts It is interesting that disciplines that pride themselves on critical distance from their object of study often implicitly incorporate many of its assumptions and presuppositions without being aware of the fact that this is the case. Buddhist Studies is no exception here, uncritically recapitu­lating in its scholarly literature many traditional Buddhist presupposi­tions.66 Nowhere is this more evident than in the discipline's focus on the written, doctrinal text as the principal object of investigation. 67 This

66. In Indian / Tibetan Buddhist Studies a prime example is to be found in the adoption of the fourfold siddhanta schema as an explanatory mechanism. In the academic study of Indian philosophy the same can be said to be true of the classical "six systems." On the former see my "The Canonization of Phi­losophy and the Rhetoric of Siddhanta in Tibetan Buddhism," Buddha Nature: A Festschrift in Honor of Minoru Kiyota, eds. Paul J. Griffiths and John P. Keenan (San Francisco: Buddhist Books International, 1990) 7-26; and on the implications of adopting the six darsana framework as normative see Tuck, Comparative Philosophy pp. 16-30. Strickmann, "A Survey of Tibetan Bud­dhist Studies" pp. 140-141, discusses the implications of Western scholars uncritically adopting a fourfold division of the Tantras as found in later tradi­tional exegesis. Foulk, "Issues in the Field of East Asian Buddhist Studies" p. 108, speaks of the recapitulation in Western scholarship of sectarian Japanese interests, and (p. 113) of the ways in which "conclusions reached in Japanese Buddhist theology are carried over into ostensibly critical Western scholarship without being recognized and tagged as coming from a normative tradition"; see also pp. 136 and 145 of that same essay for yet other examples of the phenomenon being described here. 67. That the written text is not an entity that can be isolated and considered separate from other semiotic forms is a point that was made as early as P. Mus's classic study, Barabufjur. More recently, the same point has been made by Steven Collins and Gregory Schopen (see note 3).

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emphasis on the conceptual, chirographic and doctrinal seems to be in large part inherited from monastic Buddhism itself, where we often find a rhetoric that emphasizes the study of texts and the doctrines found in them over the study of other semiotic forms. Be that as it may, it is indisputable that written texts and the doctrines they teach have received a disproportionate amount of attention in the scholarly literature of the field. There may be good scholarly reasons for this, but these will have to be given, and no longer simply assumed, in the critical dialogue on method that I envision. This is especially true given the fact that critics have, from within the discipline itself, begun to challenge what they per­ceive to be the monopolization of the field by the written text, and espe­cially by doctrinally oriented scholarship.68 There is today a call for the increased investigation of alternative semiotic forms-oral and vernacu­lar traditions,69 epigraphy, 70 ritual,71 patterns of social and institutional

68. It is no accident, for example, that when J. W. de Jong wrote his master­ful "A Brief History of Buddhist Studies in Europe and America," he should have put the "main emphasis ... on philological studies." 69. Recently, Anne C. Klein has explored the importance of "oral genres" in one school of Tibetan Buddhism in her Path to the Middle: Oral Madhyamika Philosophy in Tibet, the Spoken Scholarship of Kensur Yeshey Tupden (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). On the rise and fall of vernacular texts of the Theravada tradition as the objects of European schol­arly study see Charles Hallisey, "Roads Taken and Not Taken in the Study of Theravada Buddhism," in Donald S. Lopez, ed., Curators of the Buddha. 70. See note 3. 71. What Michel Strickmann sees as essential to the understanding of the Buddhist Tantras, others have seen as essential to Buddhist Studies as a whole. "To make their bare bones live will require a powerful supplement drawn from both Tibetan scholastic and ritual literature and from direct observation (or, indeed, participation). Until Tibetan philology has been durably wed to Mercury in a series of such studies, it would be unwise to imagine that we understand the real import of the later Tantras." "A Survey of Tibetan Bud­dhist Studies," Eastern Buddhist 10.1 (May, 1977): 139; see also p. 141, where he sees the study of iconography as essential to an understanding of the Tantric tradition. On the importance of ritual in Ch' an Buddhism see Robert H. Sharf, "The Idolization of Enlightenment: On the Mummification of Ch' an Masters in Medieval China," History of Religions 32.1 (1992): 1-31; and T. Griffith Foulk and Robert H. Sharf, "On the Ritual Use of Ch'an Portraiture in Medieval China," Cahiers d'Extreme-Asie 7 (1993-94): 149-219.

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evolution,72 gender,?3 lay and folk traditions, 7 4 art, archaeology and architecture. Moreover, many of the critics who push for greater schol­arly emphasis on the nondoctrinal are asking for more than merely a voice, since part of the critique is that the study of alternative semiotic forms directly impinges on, and challenges, the validity of the strictly chirographic-doctrinal paradigm. The claim is not simply that the inves­tigation of other semiotic forms should exist alongside the study of doc­trine as it is found in written texts, but that doctrine itself cannot be fully understood independently of culture in the broad sense of the term. 75

The critique is really a call for greater balance and holism within the field; it is not only a demand that equal recognition be given to new areas of research, but a call for an integrated and mutually interpenetrating research program aimed at the understanding of Buddhism as a multi­faceted entity. It is, in effect, a critique of methodological isolationism.76

72. See note 3; also, Hallisey, "Roads Taken and Not Taken" p. 5l. 73. See note 79. 74. Consider the words of the anthropologist Stan Mumford, Himalayan Dia­logue: Tibetan Lamas and Gurung Shamans in Nepal (Madison: The Univer­sity of Wis"consin Press, 1989): "Tibetan Lamaism, as one of the world's great ritual traditions, could then be understood as a process that emerges through dialogue with the more ancient folk layer that it confronts, rather than as a completed cultural entity represented in the texts" (p. 2); or again, "The tex­tuallanguage ... cannot determine the meaning of these rites. Each time they are enacted or commented upon they incorporate traces of local folk con­sciousness that are embedded in the lived experience of the valley" (p. 12). See also, S. J. Tambiah, The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets, Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology 49 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Richard Gombrich and Gananath Obeyesekere, Buddhism Transformed: Religious Change in Sri Lanka (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), and the review of the latter by Vijitha Rajapakse, Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 13.2: 139-151; George D. Bond, The Buddhist Revival in Sri Lanka: Religious Tradition, Reinterpretation and Response (Columbia, S. C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1988). 75. For a description of what such a holistic approach might look like in the study of "a single temple or monastic complex," see Michel Strickmann, "A Survey of Tibetan Buddhist Studies" p. 142. 76. For a discussion of this issue in regard to Tibetan Buddhist philosophical studies see my "On the sGra pa Shes rab rin chen pa'i rtsod Ian of Pal). chen bLo bzang chos rgyan," Asiatische Studien / Etudes Asiatiques 49.4 (1995).

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The relationship of Buddhist Studies to the larger academic community In much contemporary critical literature in the field we increasingly find Buddhology characterized as a provincial discipline-ignorant of emerg­ing theoretical developments in related fields, and reluctant to enter into conversation even with the most natural of dialogue partners (e. g., Indology, Sino logy etc.). The perceived isolationist tendencies of the discipline are seen as fostering a kind of intellectual hermeticism that makes buddhological scholarship increasingly less relevant to the larger academic community. Two types of remedies are called for. On the one hand, we find a call for greater cultural contextualization, where the objects of study of the field (written texts, institutions, art, rituals etc.) are investigated not only against a particular Buddhist background, but vis a vis the larger cultural context in which those objects-and Bud­dhism itself-exist; hence, for example, the attempt to consider classic questions of Chinese Buddhism in the broader context of Chinese intel­lectual history,77 or the attempt on the part of anthropologists to situate Buddhism as "part of a large social and cultural system."78

On the other hand, we find in the recent critical literature an insistence on the fact that buddhologists need to become more conversant with the-0ries, methods and forms of analysis current in the academy. This has led to studies (and to calls for studies) that emphasize, for example, com­parative, cross-cultural analysis,79 feminist criticism, 80 deconstruction, 81

77. See Peter N. Gregory, ed., Sudden and Gradual: Approaches to Enlight­enment in Chinese Thought, Kuroda Institute Studies in East Asian Buddhism 5 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987); and the review by Foulk, "Issues in the Field of East Asian Buddhist Studies." Bernard Faure, La volonte d'othodoxie dans le bouddhisme chino is (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1988) 11, also sees the importance of "placing Ch'an in its political-religious context," of discussing its relationship with other Buddhist schools, and "with other currents in Chinese religions" (my trans.), although the latter gets dealt with only marginally by him in that particular work. See also Richard Gombrich, "Recovering the Buddha's message," in Ruegg and Schrnithausen, eds., Earliest Madhyamaka p. 20. 78. Anthropologists have in fact emphasized this direction in scholarship early on. See, for example, Manning Nash, et. aI., Anthropological Studies in Theravada Buddhism, Cultural Report Series 13 (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Area Studies, 1966). For a more recent study that attempts to do this in the Tibetan cultural area see Stan Mumford, Himalayan Dialogue. 79. Much of this work is to be found in the area of comparative philosophy in, for example, the pages of Philosophy East and West. See also the volumes in the recent series from SUNY Press, Toward a Comparative Philosophy of

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and literary criticism. 82 To give heed to these trends in the broader intel­lectual sphere is seen as being profitable to Buddhist Studies in two ways. Intellectually, it is said to bring life to the discipline by suggesting new problems, and new perspectives on old ones; it is also said to give the discipline a voice in current debates and ultimately to help the field by demonstrating that the data from Buddhist cultures is relevant to the con­versations that are taking place in the broader intellectual community.

The views just outlined clearly emerge out of an interpretivist frame­work. The positivist response to this kind of scholarship is that it is fad­dish and that it dilutes the scholarly worth of the discipline. It is suffi­ciently difficult to gain the expertise necessary to engage in sound schol­arship on Buddhist texts, and to impart that knowledge, without requiring of the buddhologist forays into new and unproven areas of investigation. Given that buddhological expertise confined to a narrow geographical

Religion. Other works with this emphasis include Chris Gudmunsen, Wittgenstein and Buddhism (New York: Harper and Row, 1977); C. W. Huntington's introduction to The Emptiness of Emptiness; Robert A. F. Thurman's introduction to Tsong kha pa's Speech of Gold in the Essence of True Eloquence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); and Steven Collins, Selfless Persons. 80. See the work of Anne Carolyn Klein, Diana Paul, Nancy Schuster, and Rita Gross; for more complete bibliographical references see the volume of essays edited by me, Buddhism, Sexuality and Gender (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992). 81. See Anne Carolyn Klein, Meeting the Great Bliss Queen; Roger Jackson, "Matching Concepts: Deconstructionist and Foundationalist Tendencies in Buddhist Thought," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 52.3 (1989): 561-589; Bernard Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 82. The methods of literary criticism are implicit in a variety of studies that employ and analyze categories such as orality, narrativity and rhetoric. In addition to previous references (Klein and Faure) see also Paula Richman, "Gender and Persuasion: The Portrayal of Beauty, Anguish and Nurturance in an Account of a Tamil Nun," and Miriam L. Levering, "Lin-chi (Rinzai) Ch' an and Gender: The Rhetoric of Equality and the Rhetoric of Heroism," in Jose Ignacio Cabez6n, ed., Buddhism, Sexuality and Gender; also Robert E. Buswell, Jr., "The 'Short Cut' Approach of K'an-hua Meditation: The Evolu­tion of a Practical Subitism in Chinese Ch'an Buddhism," in Peter N. Gregory, ed., Sudden and Gradual. Stan Mumford's Himalayan Dialogue relies heavily on the work of the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. See also William R. LaFleur, The Karma of Words: Buddhism and the Arts in Medieval Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

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area and time period is already pushing human limits to the extreme, how can we expect worthwhile scholarship to emerge from the pens of bud­dhologists who attempt broader forms even of intracultural contextual­ization, not to speak of cross-cultural comparative analysis. Underlying these generally pragmatic arguments, however, is the positivist's general skepticism concerning methodological novelty. Even if they were to accede to the practical possibility of these forms of analysis, positivists would reject them on principle, for interpretive methodologies of this kind distort the objects being studied, forcing them into preconceived theoretical molds. Moreover, what is so truly creative and original, asks the positivist, about appropriating the theories developed in other disci­plines to buddhological ends? Is this not a form of methodological para­sitism that shows little by way of innovation? If capitulation to the cur­rent fads in theory is the price of admission into the broader conversa­tion' then perhaps better to send one's regrets.

Politics and the study of Buddhism In addition to the challenges already mentioned, there has emerged in recent years another category of criticism not yet discussed, one that insists on the fact that politics (and, perhaps more generally, the analysis of power) is relevant to the study of Buddhism in a variety of ways. Most of these works are founded on one or both of the following methodological presuppositions: (1) that cultures are political entities, and (2) that scholarship (for example, the scholarship that takes a Bud­dhist culture as its object) is never politically neutral, either in its consti­tution or in its repercussions. The scholarly study of another culture-or of a specific aspect within a culture, e. g., Buddhism-should therefore (a) take into account "the features of asymmetry, inequality and domina­tion"83 that exist within that culture, (b) reflect on the fact that the schol­ar's work is affected by the power differential that exists between the two societies interacting (that of scholars and that of the society that is the object of their study), and (c) become aware of the fact that scholarship can itself affect subsequent societal attitudes and political policies.84

83. Sherry B. Ortner, High Religion: A Cultural and Political History of Sherpa Buddhism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989) 12. 84. In this regard it is no accident that the first lines of Stan Mumford's Himalayan Dialogue should read, "A Highly reflexive mode of cultural inter­pretation is emerging, as cultural anthropologists recognize the impact they have on the societies they study and in tum find themselves being transformed internally by their informants" (p. 11).

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Although the- implications of this form of analysis are only now just beginning to be felt in Buddhist Studies,85 its impact has had tremen­dous-and often devastating-consequences in other fields of study.86 Like the study of most of Asia, the academic study of Buddhism as we know it is the heritage of a colonialist and missionary past. These activi­ties have utilized scholarship as a means of consolidating power over other peoples, and although scholarly praxis has come a long way since the time when it was an overt instrument of such activities, critical theo­rists of the political sort often maintain that scholarly analysis continues to recapitulate its colonialist past. Some would go so far as to claim that it can never fully be divested of this heritage.

The nature of the relationship between a scholar and the culture that he or she studies may be different today, but economic and political power gradients still exist, and these must be taken into account in the very act of scholarly analysis. Scholarship in its widest sense (including admis­sion to, or exclusion from, scholarly organizations; the publication and dissemination of information about religious liberty, or lack of it, etc.) can have tremendous consequences in the socio-political realm. Scholar­ship is a powerful mode of legitimation that can influence political events. At the same time, political institutions influence scholarship: by granting or refusing visas, allocating or withholding research funds, and so forth.

In short, the critiques of colonialism, neocolonialism, orientalism, and those that explore more broadly the relationship between power and knowledge, are beginning to challenge Buddhist Studies in new ways. If their claims are valid, it will mean not only reassessing the present of the field in terms of its political past, but also considering the future moral implications of its present.

As is the case with other fields, the response of buddhologists to such a challenge will undoubtedly vary. Some will maintain that socio-political analysis of this sort is reductionistic. In its preoccupation with power and control as motivating forces, it leaves no room for other human motivations, and in any case denies in a naive fashion the possibility of

85. See Lopez, ed., Curators of the Buddha; Christopher Queen and Sally King, eds., Engaged Buddhism (Albany: SUNY Press, forthcoming); T. Tillemans, "Oii va la Philologie Bouddhique?" forthcoming in Etudes de Let­tres (Lausanne). 86. Consider the way in which Edward Said's Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978) has already affected fields like contempo­rary Indian and Islamic Studies, for example.

268 JIABS 18.2

objectivity. Others will maintain that politics has no place in the academy; that scholars simply report what is true. Scholarship may be used for political ends, but that is beyond the control of scholars; and in any case, is it not better that political bodies give support to and utilize fact rather than propagandist fiction?

Conclusion What I have just described are some of the issues around which the criti­cal dialogue on method will, I believe, take place. This list, however, is more impressionistic than complete. As I have already mentioned, it is of course impossible to predict, much less to prescribe, the agenda of this conversation or the turns that it will take. The issues and their resolu­tions (if any) are not predetermined. It is for this reason that I have refrained from couching the above discussion in a rhetoric that makes it appear as though the answers are there on the surface, just waiting to be had. I do not believe this to be so, and although I myself have formed some rather strong opinions in regard to many of these questions-some­thing that has probably not gone unnoticed-I still remain baffled by others. Moreover, if I have chosen to frame these issues using extremist positivist and interpretivist views as foils, it is because (a) in the emerg­ing critical literature in the field there already exists a tendency to char­acterize each other's positions in these ways; (b) many of these character­izations are the result of the ways in which we caricature and stereotype each other; and (c) the use of extremes to frame issues is heuristically useful, a very Buddhist device. If I have not opted for the Buddhist solu­tion-by suggesting that the middle way is the way to go in each of these cases-it is because I believe these issues are complex enough that they are unamenable to moderate, middle-way types of solutions in all cases. Be that as it may, this is something that only future conversation itself can determine. But as Bakhtin has noted, a conversation can begin only when a monologue has ended, and so I end mine here with the hope that whether or not everything I have said is true, it is nonetheless provocative enough to act as the impetus for such a conversation.

TOM J. F. TILLEMANS

Remarks on Philology

To begin with a disclaimer: In what follows I do not intend to offer any­thing like a unified or detailed position on how to do philology, nor on the soundness and feasibility of certain methods for providing relative chronologies for texts or text-strata via philological analysis, but only a series of remarks on what I perceive to be some of the recurring and fun­damental philosophical issues which do and should come up, in one way or another, in reflecting upon what we do in the disciple of Buddhist Studies. My remarks are broadly inspired by an extensive exchange of views between Jose Cabez6n and C. W. Huntington, Jr. in earlier issues of this journal, as well as by their present contributions to this volume. Contrary to what Jose Cabez6n seems to advocate, however, I do not think that we can advance matters this complex through polemical argu­ments in defense of rigidified traditional "methodological positions." The danger is that these positions, once formulated in adversarial debate, become caricatural and without actual adherents. An honest, and useful approach, might be to look at some of the complex features of how peo­ple who call themselves philologists ( and I count myself as being one) do read texts, and to make methodological remarks on the basis of what we actually do, rather than referring primarily to nineteenth century thinkers or their philosophical avatars.!

The important feature of most working philologists' approach is the conviction that by understanding in real depth the Buddhist languages, and the history, institutions, context and preoccupations of an author and his milieu, progress can be made towards understanding that author's thought and better grasping his world. This much is clearly close to essential aspects of traditional hermeneutics. And it is hard to imagine philology not having at least the above-described basic stance. Now granted, some would phrase things differently. Paul Griffiths, for exam-

1. The present article is a sequel to my lecture at the University of Lausanne entitled "OU va la philologie bouddhique?" and appearing in Etudes de Lettres, Universite de Lausanne 1996.

269

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pIe, speaks of linguistic competence and mastery of the historical context as being preconditions to understanding a text.2 But the transition to talk about understanding an author's thought is a natural one for a philol­ogist, and, I would maintain, it probably should remain so. Take an example of a historico-philological program which unabashedly seeks authorial intent, namely what Erich Frauwallner and Ernst Steinkellner have attempted to do in deciphering how and when Dharmakirti's principal philosophical developments took place. Frauwallner sums it up in the deceptively simple-looking penultimate sentence of his famous article "Die Reihenfolge und Entstehung der Werke DharmakIrti's":

Es wird eine anziehende Aufgabe sein, dariiber hinaus die Entstehung und allmiihliche Weiterbildung seiner Gedanken im einzelnen zu verfolgen.3

And I don't think that Steinkellner, for example, was atypical of philolo­gists when he recently said:

As soon as we start reading Dharmakirti on his own terms we find ourselves participating in his philosophical workshop. And the philological situation in his case is luckily such that we can literally observe him at work, taking up a theme again and again, adapting it, fitting it together with other themes he has taken up again, and welding them together so that they seem never to have been separate.4

Of course, one could say that this is always just a quaint illusion, but I think that many working philologists or historians of philosophy at a particular point do have the feeling that Steinkellner referred to of almost being able to observe their favorite philosopher at work.

Is there any real reason to say that a sentiment like what Steinkellner is speaking about is always just plain wrong? Or perhaps we should turn things another way: if we admit that, inspite of some quite considerable

2. See his article "Buddhist Hybrid English: Some Notes on Philology and Hermeneutics for Buddhologists," Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 4.2 (1981): 17-32. 3. E. Frauwallner, "Die Reihenfolge und Entstehung der Werke Dharma­krrtis," Asiatica, Festschrift F. Weller (1954): 154. The passage was trans­lated by Steinkellner as: "It will be a fascinating task to trace the origin and gradual development of his thought in detail." 4. E. Steinkellner, "The Logic of the Svabhavahetu in Dharmakirti's Vada­nyaya," Studies in the Buddhist Epistemological Tradition, ed. E. Steinkellner (Vienna: Osterreichische Akadernie def Wissenschaften) 311.

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difficulties, we often can understand the mind of one of our contempo­raries or that of someone who lived in the same decade, or even the mind of someone who lived in another culture in the same century, then is there anything in principle all that different in the case of understanding the mind of a historical figure like Dharmakirti? No doubt, it's harder and our rate of success is much lower. But perhaps opponents of philol­ogy underestimate just how far someone can get by spending most of his lifetime delving into texts, seeking to better understand them in their context, and thus coming to form a picture of the minds of the authors. Consider, for example, what Lambert Schmithausen has done in his his­torical-philological study on the Buddhist concept of iilayavijiiiina­Schmithausen is, by his own admission, "enmeshed in the historico­philological method." 5 This study is, I think, a success, and I also think that the fact that it is successful supports the view that we can go at least a significant distance in understanding how the Buddhists themselves conceived of a notion like iilayavijiiiina. To put the argument a bit more bluntly: if it were otherwise, then what was Schmithausen doing, and what could he have accomplished?

There is a tendency to characterize philologists as adhering to an impossible program of understanding the meaning of a text by "emptying" themselves of all preconceived notions, biases, prejudices, etc. We are frequently told by critics that as getting rid of prejudices is impossible, the goal must be to become "self-conscious" of them. 6 Alas, it is not at all clear why we can only become self-conscious of our pre­judices (as if we were condemned to doing only a kind of therapy), and not refute or come to reject them, albeit not all of them all at once. Get­ting rid of prejudices would indeed be impossible if we had to be free of all at some given time. Now, some philologists perhaps still do say that this is desirable and possible. But I doubt that many would want to have to defend such an extreme version of their approach. It strikes me that a reasonable position for a philologist would be to say that, at any given time, one will always have some such prejudices, but that none, or at least very few, are so intractable that they cannot in principle be chal-

5. See his Alayavijiiiina: On the Origin and Early Development of a Central Concept of Yogiiciira Philosophy (Tokyo: 1987) vii. See also the review by Paul J. Griffiths in the Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 12.1 (1989). 6. This is stated repeatedly in A. Tuck, Comparative Philosophy and the Phi­losophy of Scholarship. On the Western Interpretation of Niigiirjuna (Oxford: 1990).

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lenged. Granted there probably are cases, like belief in rationality itself or in the existence of other minds, etc., where, to adopt the Wittgen­steinian phrase, the chain of reasons must come to an end. But accepting these types of constituent elements of our "form of life" is relatively harmless and will not, as far as I can see, in any significant way preclude our understanding what an author meant.

The fact remains that we can often get rid of mistaken ideas about what texts and authors thought by means of rational argumentation and by meticulous analysis, so that it just won't do to say baldly that we read our own baggage of cultural prejudices into a text. (For example, we can, I believe, show by textually based argumentation that Stcherbatsky's neo­Kantian understanding of Dignaga and DharmakIrti's idea of svalak~al}a is wrong, if we are staying close to the basic Kantian ideas, or meaning­less if we adapt Kant to fit the Buddhist perspective.) Surely, the onus must be on the skeptic to prove his point, if he wishes to say that progress in eliminating prejudices, preconceived or mistaken notions, etc. is in principle impossible. I won't dwell on this, except to say that we could invoke the famous analogy of mariners at sea repairing their boat, an analogy which Quine so often used for describing how we can change anything in our conceptual schemes: one can replace the planks (i. e. prejudices, etc.) one at a time, but never all of them all at once. At any rate, the fact of the interpreter always having prejudices does not itself lead to the conclusion that we can never come closer to the "world of the author," nor should it lead to a relativism where all our subjective ideas as to what is meant are as good or bad as any other ideas. Although we might not be able to empty our minds so that we have a pristine tabula rasa and thus a kind of unadulterated pure vision, it's surely a bad non­sequitur to think that this implies that any interpretation, being subject to some prejudices, is as good as any another. Prejudices can be gross or subtle, and some are seen to be quite obviously wrong. Fortunately, we can and do rationally challenge our own ideas, sometimes even the most deep-seated ones, and (as epistemologists of a Popperian bent recognize) acceptance does not exclude acknowledging fallibility.

My colleague Johannes Bronkhorst, in a review of Andrew Tuck's book on the history of Western interpretations of Nagarjuna, 7 made an impor­tant remark which I should mention in this context, namely, that Nagarjuna, about whom we all seem to write when it comes to hermeneutics, represents a quite exceptional case, where indeed we do

7. In Asiatische Studien / Etudes Asiatiques 3 (1993).

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seem to "find" virtually anything we're looking for. Nagarjuna is thus a case where arguably our interpretations are to a very large degree a func­tion of our initial baggage of biases. But, stresses Bronkhorst, not every Indian philosopher is as maddeningly obscure as Nagarjuna: there are philosophers where we can come much closer to understanding their intent and there are texts where we can eliminate a lot of seductive inter­pretations to which we might otherwise be led by our current mind-set or by our cultural baggage. In short, Nagarjuna is a bit of a loaded exam­ple, and we wouldn't want to say that we are in the same situation in try­ing to understand DharmakIrti, the Nirukta or the Nyayasutras as we are in understanding Nagarjuna. We're often stumped because of our inade­quate knowledge, bad texts, unsolvable historical problems, etc., but for­tunately there are degrees of incomprehension, so that sometimes we do get somewhere. Let's go back to the situation of DharmakIrti studies: I think that after some decades of following Frauwallner's philological program, the scholarly world understands DharmakIrti' s thought much better than did Stcherbatsky, and not just differently.

So much for what I take to be the important and inescapable preoccu­pation which we, as philologists, have wjth authorial intent. While all this has been, I hope, a reasonable depiction of how philologists proceed, it is also I think important to stress that, if we take a narrowly restricted sense of "intent," nobody limits himself to only that. Indeed, what makes a good theory of interpretation so difficult to come up with are a number of tensions in our practice, tensions which unfortunately we try to eliminate by choosing one or another side in current philosophical polemics. As I argued earlier, most of us quite naturally feel that we try to understand authorial intent, that we try to see how, when and why an author came up with his ideas and that we have to try to understand the author's own thought processes, "what was going on in his head," and this in his historical context and in terms of philosophical concepts which would nave been basically familiar and acceptable to him. Not only do we try, but we sometimes really do seem to have some success. On the other hand, we are not content, or perhaps better, we should not be con­tent to understand a philosopher merely in this way. Failure to interpret in terms other than those mirroring the internal discourse of the author, is a fast track to translations and studies written in that rather hermetic idiom which Paul Griffiths has so aptly called "Buddhist Hybrid English."8 We can and should defend textual interpretations which use

8. See Griffiths, op. cit.

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terms and concepts which would have been unknown to the author him­self-"unknown" in the sense that he didn't have anything at all like equivalents to those terms in his vocabulary (and might well have con­siderable reluctance in accepting what we are attributing to him). And when we do· this, we like to think that we're not modifying or adapting our philosopher's thought so that it becomes palatable, chic or relevant to our contemporaries. We like to think that we're doing more than just useful falsifications or pleasant half-truths: our new characterization in author-alien terms is (in some sense), after all, what he himself thought.

Arguably, this tension, or something quite like it, is what is at the root of people's feeling that they have to choose between the traditional idea of philologists, now defended by E. D. Hirsch et al. (i. e. the mens auc­toris is the objective meaning of the text, all the other contemporary stuff just has to do with the text's "significance" for us) and more radical approaches, like so-called "textualism," which happily dismisses authorial intent altogether as depending upon a "metaphysics of presence." Jose Cabez6n, in a recent article in this journal, seems to speaks of a dilemma between accepting "objective meaning" or just inventing meaning subjec­tively' and leans towards the position of Hirsch; Huntington, in embrac­ing Richard Rorty's position, is closer to textualism It la Jacques Derrida.9

I think that some of the black-white starkness of this dilemma, at least amongst orientalists, may well be due to an insufficient analysis of what we mean by "thought of an author," and, in general, may be due to an

9. See J. Cabez6n, "On Retreating to Method and Other Postmodern Turns: A response to C. W. Huntington, Jr.," Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 15.1 (1992): 141-142:

As an aside, it is interesting that much of E. D. Hirsch's critique of Derrida has focused on this very issue: what I am calling hermeneutical relativism, and what others have called subjectivism. In his American Reli­gious Empiricism, William Dean paraphrases Hirsch's criticism as follows. He says that if Derrida is right, and "the objective meaning of a text is gone, the text is meaningless--'-Or, to say the same thing, the meaning of the text is simply invented in the subjectivity of the reader." It should be obvious that Huntington sides with Derrida on this issue, and I with Hirsch, and that the debate is by no means a new one.

Cabez6n's article is a response to one by Huntington in the same issue of JIABS. See also the introduction to C. W. Huntington, The Emptiness of Emptiness (Hawaii: 1989).

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insufficiently clear picture of the logic of "knows," "believes," "thinks," "intends" and other such propositional attitudes which have two types of uses. Something similar to the medieval distinction between de dicta and de re modalities applies to contexts with the verbs "know," "accept," "thinks," etc., so that we have cases where "John knows a proposition P" demands that P is in terms familiar to John, and others where this is not needed at all. This is also very well-worn ground in modem logic, but it is probably worth repeating. Let me give an unoriginal presentation.

There are indeed many epistemic statements which we accept as true, but which cannot be taken in anything but the second way, that is, as saying something unfamiliar, unknown, or even completely unacceptable, to the thinker himself. For example:

a) Boris thinks his yacht is longer than it is. b) Boris thinks that his pregnant girlfriend is a virgin.

To put things more exactly, a statement like b) may be true if analyzed along the lines of "There is someone who is Boris' pregnant girlfriend and Boris thinks she is a virgin." It is no doubt false if we take it as: "Boris thinks that there is someone who is his pregnant girlfriend and is a virgin." (De re / de dicta, "transparent" / "opaque," tum on where one puts the quantifier "there is ... ," either outside the scope of "believes" / "thinks," or within it.) For our purposes, instead of speaking of de re / de dicta or using the Quinean terms "referentially transparent" / "opaque," let's just speak of taking belief-statements in author-alien modes and in modes which are author-familiar, all the while understand­ing the fundamental logical differences at stake. The point of all this is that it is an ordinary feature of "thinks ... ," "believes ... ," "accepts .. . ," "knows ... ," "wishes ... ," "intends ... ," "hopes ... ," and all other propositional attitudes, that both modes exist.

So obviously what is going in a) and b) is that we are phrasing Boris' thoughts in ways which he would not: indeed he will vehemently contest our formulation of what he thinks about his girlfriend. Nonetheless, the statement that he thinks his pregnant girlfriend is a virgin may well be true, and we can certainly argue about its truth or falsity. Now, some­thing similar to a) and b) in logical structure is going on when we make statements like "Nagarjuna accepted inference rules like modus ponens and modus tolens," or "Buddhists thought that logical quantification applied to existent and nonexistent items." These too tum on the author­alien mode of "accept" and "think." In brief: we do of course try to

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understand what a philosopher thinks, but the words "think," "know," etc. involve two approaches inherent in the logic of belief, thought and propositional attitudes in general. When it comes to understanding Dharmakirti, Dignaga, Nagarjuna and co., I think we can say that we should pursue both. When contemporary writers speak of "understanding an author on his own terms" or "being truthful to the original mean­ing,"!O I, of course, have no opposition to these formulae, but the nag­ging doubt remains that they have been rather insufficiently clear slogans generating more heat than light. The same ambiguities as those which I have discussed remain here, for it should be obvious that it's a short step from "understanding him on his own terms" or "being true to the original meaning" to "understanding what the author himself thought or intended."

A final remark. There is probably nothing particularly surprising in the fact that philologists, like other human beings, will make author-alien attributions of thoughts, that is to say, they will attribute thoughts to a person which in a certain sense never entered the fellow's head and which he might himself vociferously disavow. Indeed, this is not a prac­tice which a thinking philologist should banish in dealing with Nagarjuna or Dharmakirti any more than in dealing with his friend Boris. The real difficulty is how to evaluate these types of attributions'!! This is gen­uinely difficult and will admit of no algorithm-like criteria, but nonethe­less whatever we attribute will have to be confrontable with textual evi­dence. Can we then even speak of correctness or incorrectness, truth or falsity, or should we just adopt a pragmatism along the lines of Richard Rorty, as C. W. Huntington would seem to suggest in his book The Emptiness of Emptiness? To put things another way, if we don't go along with the idea that there is just one correct interpretation of a text-i. e. correspondence with authorial intent taken in, I suppose, the author­familiar mode-, then do we have to accept that "anything goes," or at least that "anything useful or interesting goes"? I personally don't think

10. Cf. Steinkellner's use of "on his own terms" in the passage which I quoted above. Cf. also Steinkellner's review of M. Sprung in the Journal of the American Oriental Society 102.2 (1982): 412: "A translator has to present the original in his chosen language in a manner which is at once truthful to its original meaning, and dear to its new readers. That is all." 11. Cf. Cabez6n's remarks on page 153 of his review of Huntington's The Emptiness of Emptiness (JIABS 13.2 [1990]): " ... I do believe that there are evaluative criteria that can be employed to decide questions of authorial intent."

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so. But equally it has to be said that this is a hard, and even a highly technical, issue about theories of truth which has challenged some of the best minds in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. It would be out of place and presumptuous to argue for a position on these issues here. Suffice it to say that the general thrust of Hilary Putnam's argu­ments with Rorty is that our practice of interpretation involves notions of true, false, correct and incorrect, and not just usefulness or interest. The technical part of Putnam's and Nelson Goodman's philosophies consists largely in showing that "true," "false" etc. can be applicable only in a determined context or "version": other "versions" with truth criteria internal to them remain possible.l2 While I'm certainly not in a position to rule out a sophisticated pragmatism, what I would like to stress force­fully here is that Rorty's rhetoric, like that of Derrida with whom he is in sympathy, has an obvious potential for being taken in a very anti-intel­lectual way by people who wish to seek primarily to maximize the importance of their own ideologies. (Let me add that this remark is of a general nature-I do not think that C. W. Huntington should be accused ofthis at all.) Hopefully, if we opt for Rorty's pragmatism it will be in a sophisticated version which accommodates philological rigor, and not in one which dishonestly exploits Rorty's provocative phrases about "beating texts into shape" and "systematic misreadings" as being a license to bypass learning Buddhist languages properly or to avoid the difficult enterprise of reading texts in their historical context. Buddhist Studies insufficiently grounded upon, lacking, or even contemptuous of philol­ogy is an unpalatable, albeit increasingly likely, prospect for the future. It would add insult to injury if mediocre scholars justified or hastened this unfortunate tum of events by invoking postmodern buzzwords.

12. To take a favorite example of Putnam, if we have x, y, z on a page, we can get right or wrong answers to the question "How many things are there?," but only if we know whether we are accepting sum individuals or not. If not, then the answer is three; if so, then we have seven things viz. x; y, z, x + y, y + z, x + z, x + y + z. For Putnam's internal realism, see e. g. Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge University Press, 1981), and, more recently, Realism with a Human Face (Harvard University Press, 1990). Goodman's classic ac­count is in his slim but all-encompassing Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978). Quine himself admitted affinities with Goodman's account, but with some significant reservations. See e. g. his informal article on Goodman in the New York Review of Books 23 November, 1978.

c. W. HUNTINGTON, JR.

A Way of Reading

When the realm of thought is extinguished there is nothing to be named. Like nirval)a, the essential nature of things neither arises nor passes away.

Nor is there the slightest difference between nirval)a and the everyday world. N or is there the slightest difference between the everyday world and nirviil)a.

-Madhyamakasastra, XVIII.7 and XXV. 19

I I remember-as if it were only yesterday-stretching out on the upper bunk of a second-class bogie on the Kashi-Vishvanath Express that runs back and forth between New Delhi and Benares, between the capital city of this world, of politics and commerce, and the capital city of another, quite separate realm, the world of spirituality and unchanging truth. It's late August, and in the stifling monsoon heat our compartment has become an oven, the air saturated with human sweat and a haze of smoke. Below me the wooden benches are packed with uniformed sol­diers, each one of them puffing on a beedie. The card game has been in progress non-stop for some ten hours. Only a meter above the fray I lie safely ensconced on the narrow platform, my head resting against an olive green canvas bag, my eyes focused on a small, pale yellow book. The cover is worn, the Devanagarl title barely legible under a coat of accumulated grime: Rt1pacandrikii. The book has been my constant com­panion for years. Six hundred pages of Sanskrit grammar, six hundred closely lined pages of declensions and conjugations that must be commit­ted to memory. This is the map by which I plot my journey into the mysteries of Indian Buddhism.

The setting varies, as do the characters on the page, but nevertheless for most of us the activity is a familiar one. Whether Sanskrit or Tibetan, Chinese or Mongolian, or any of half a dozen other classical Asian lan-

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guages, these are the terms of our apprenticeship as text-critical scholars. Hundreds of hours of memorization, thousands of hours of consulting grammars and dictionaries, an endless succession of mornings and after­noons and nights spent nodding over pages of print, deciphering the code, submitting to the ritual of training that will guarantee passage into the inner-sanctum of the text. And yet, as each of us would acknowl­edge, grammar and vocabulary are in themselves not enough. One may read the words without understanding. Far worse, however, is the pos­sibility that even our most considered interpretation might tum out to be entirely spurious. A peculiar loss of faith is common to anyone who has ever substantially revised his initial understanding of a passage. Here's the rub: We may well know what a single line or, for that matter, what an entire text means, but how could we ever know that we know? How indeed. The truth is that we can not even be sure what might constitute knowledge in this case, as opposed to belief. Precisely this is the funda­mental uncertainty in which we, as text-critical scholars, become abruptly self-conscious; here is the sort of radical doubt that drives us away from the texts and back into an eccentric, introspective space where we begin, for the first time, to frame questions of method.

To become critically self-conscious can be a rewarding experience. It is also, more often than not, a painful one. A sort of profound discom­fort arises along with our growing awareness of the extent to which the conclusions of our research are inevitably molded by presuppositions embodied in the conceptual tools that permit that same research to get underway in the first place. The desire for certainty is not easily uprooted. We would like very much to know something and to know that we know it. Or, at the very least, to know that such a possibility exists, and that not every act of knowing is contaminated by belief. Moreover, the search for correct (valid I accurate) interpretation is (like all theoretical impulses) part and parcel of a much broader philosophical project, and so we quite naturally find our own craving for certainty mirrored in the Indian sources. All of this is clearly registered in the way we have traditionally gone about the business of interpreting Bud­dhist philosophical texts. An example might help to illustrate the point.

Not so long ago Paul Griffiths published a review of The Emptiness of Emptiness. Commenting on my characterization of Madhyamaka as philosophical propaganda, he pointed out that

the very notion of propaganda carries with it an interest in persuasion: the propagandist, by definition, wants to persuade his audience of something,

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or, more usually, to do something ... but [Huntington] does not pay suffi­cient attention to the close connections between the act of persuasion and the need for argument.. .. If, as he suggests, we are to regard Madhyamika as a 'justified prejudice' there need to be (and are) arguments to ground the use of the adjective.. .. I am inclined to think ... that the Madhyamika theo­rists are on firmer ground than Rorty (or Huntington)." (Griffiths 1991, 413-414)

Look closely, for a moment, at the network of associations triggered by the use of the words "persuasion," "argument," "grounds," "theory": To engage in persuasion is to construct deductive arguments; to argue in this way is to furnish grounds; to stand on firm ground is to be a successful theorist. The philosophical notion of "firm ground" has a long and ven­erable history and is itself embedded in a wide range of associations bound up with the search for first principles bracketed from all extrane­ous interests, goals, agendas, or lines of authority. Notice how such a vocabulary expresses certain assumptions about the way language must do its work in Madhyamaka texts. According to these assumptions, Nagarjuna's words are to be read as a proposed universal lexicon for non-mythical, objective truth, knowledge of which would reflect the presence of an equally non-mythical, objective reality-another world, so to speak, a transcendent realm beyond suffering and decay and all forms of historical contingency; the "other shore" from which Nagarjuna speaks. Our job as interpreters of these texts is, then, to evaluate the validity of the Madhyamaka's arguments in terms of whether or not they succeed in providing convincing theoretical proof ("grounds") for the existence of this other world. It ought to be possible, in principle at least, to peel back from Nagarjuna's writing the layers of cultural bag­gage (everything that has to do with the period and place in which these texts were composed) and uncover a core of timeless philosophical truth. Either the "Madhyamika theorist" successfully furnishes conceptual access to (proof of / grounds for) ultimate reality, or the realm of the transcendent conjured up by his words is merely a product of the Indian religious imagination. Either these texts contain arguments that prove something, or they don't. It is our job-our interpretive task-to con­struct an accurate representation of those arguments and to evaluate their success or failure by this standard. If the texts fail to establish conclusive theoretical grounds for the existence of this other world of transcendent truth and reality, then they may still, of course, hold a great deal of interest for the cultural or intellectual historian, but it is difficult to see

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how they could have any compelling philosophical or religious value except as rather exotic artifacts of a distant place and time, the record of what was, ultimately, an unsubstantiated claim.

All of this is, I think, a fairly accurate sketch of the interpretive strat­egy that has been routinely applied to the study of early Indian Madhya­maka by European and American scholars working in shadow of T. R. V. Murti, Richard Robinson and Edward Conze. To read in this way is to understand that one is reading what Griffiths refers to, elsewhere, as "denaturalized discourse":

... denaturalized discourse is almost always (perhaps always) linked with an attempt to clean up the messy ambiguity of ordinary language used in ordinary contexts. Polysemy, multivalence, the stuff of poetry and the lan­guage of love: these are not values for a user of denaturalized discourse. This is usually because the contexts within which such discourses are devel­oped and applied are judged to be unreal, consisting in apparent or con­structed objects rather than real ones. The lebenswelt, the constructed world of lived experience in which we have our being is, of course, exceedingly messy. We always say more than we mean and less than we hope; we use language to evoke sentiment, to inspire action, to manipulate, and to medi­tate. All of this is discourse in context, naturalized discourse that glories in specificity, growing from and shaping particular human needs in particular cultural contexts. (Griffiths 1990, 64-65)

Nor is it difficult to appreciate why early Madhyamaka texts have been read the way Griffiths wants to read them, as instantiations of an essen­tially ahistorical, "denaturalized" discourse. There are more than enough places where it certainly seems as if Nagarjuna is arguing for something of universal significance, where it certainly seems as if he wants to prove something objectively. And if this is not the case, then what exactly is going on?

The hermeneutical problem raised by Griffiths' criticism is a real one. It is not so much that there are no options to reading Early Indian Mad­hyamaka in this way; it is simply that in this context the model of denat­uralized discourse seems so, well, natural, that we almost forget we're looking out at the text through a set of rather thick theoretical specta­cles-a prescription inherited not only from later Indian and Tibetan commentaries but from our own deeply embedded preconceptions about what constitutes legitimately "philosophical" language. There is, how­ever, a very real alternative, with a pedigree that goes back, in the West, to Plotinus, who shaped certain scattered elements of an ancient language

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of mysticism into a powerful new form of discourse. Some three-hun­dred years later a companion of Saint Paul, known to us only under the pseudonym Dionysus, wrote of a "mystical theology" in which the Greek word kataphasis (affirmation, saying, speaking-with) is juxtaposed with apophasis (negation, unsaying, speaking-away). During the ISO-year period from about the mid-twelfth through to the start of the mid-four­teenth century apophatic mysticism reappeared in a series of virtuoso performances by Christian, Jewish and Islamic writers including Ibn , Arabi, Rumi, Abraham Abulafia, Moses de Leon, Hadewijch, Marguerite Porete, and the comparatively well known Meister Eckhart. In the East apophasis has been identified as characteristic of certain early Taoist writings and, of course, of the Madhyamaka tradition in general and Nagarjuna in particular. The two verses from the Madhyamaka­§astra cited in the epigraph to this paper are a perfect illustration of apophatic discourse, which displays, in the words of Michael Sells, "a distinctive dialectic of transcendence and immanence in which the utterly transcendent is revealed as the utterly immanent" (Sells 1994, 6). Else­where he calls this "the refusal to resolve the apophatic dilemma by pos­ing a distinction between two kinds of names"; or simply "the letting go of the generic name" (ibid., 189-190).

At the center of apophatic discourse is the effort to speak about a sub­ject that can not be named. The suspension of the logic of non-contra­diction necessary to accomplish this aim means, as Sells has shown, that apophasis has much more in common with poetry, narrative fiction, drama, and other forms of non-discursive writing than it does with tradi­tiona1 philosophical and theological texts. This is not to say that apo­phasis is devoid of deductive argument; however the appearance of argument and grounds in apophatic writing has generated a great deal of confusion among philosophers, theologians and critics who fail to appre­ciate that even the most rigorous logical form can be exploited for a variety of literary and rhetorical effects. For instance, the same argu­ment might appear in Aquinas' Questiones Disputatae and in a novel by Dostoyevsky, but no critic would be naive enough to apply to both pas­sages the same hermeneutical tools. And yet all too often this is just what happens in the interpretation of apophatic writing. "Apophatic texts," Sells tells us, "have suffered in a particularly acute manner from the urge to paraphrase the meaning in non-apophatic language or to fill in the open referent-to say what the text really meant to say, but didn't" (Sells 1994, 4). Or, in other words, ... to read this literature as an ex­ample of denaturalized discourse.

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If the Madhyamaka's arguments are not to be evaluated as "genuine" arguments, but rather as a species of apophasis, then we require some other coherent interpretive model, some other way of understanding that would allow us to make sense of these texts as either philosophical or religious discourse. The model I shall propose here takes seriously the similarities traced by Sells and others between apophatic writing, poetry and narrative.

Like poetry, apophasis is not a discourse that everyone will appreciate immediately. Like poetry, apophasis resists paraphrase into other linguistic modes; paraphrases can only be partial. When we write about a poem, we do not attempt to express the meaning of the poem-if the meaning could be expressed discursively, it would not have required a poem. In trying to understand how the poetry works, we are led more deeply into the event of reading the poem. What that event means to different readers may well dif­fer strongly from one to another. Yet what has been commonly accepted for poetic discourse-a resistance to semantic reduction-is frequently viewed as a form of mystification in apophasis. (Sells 1994,216)

My project in what follows may be viewed as a contribution to a con­versation already in progress, for Griffiths' original paper on denatural­ized discourse provoked an insightful response from Francisca Cho Bantly. In an essay titled "Buddhist Philosophy in Fiction," Bantly pointed out that "the insistence that universal truth claims about reality are best made through philosophy, or denaturalized discourse, itself makes tacit assumptions about that reality .... Behind this drama, how­ever, it is not too difficult to glimpse a cultural bias, itself rather tempo­ral and limited ih scope, which responds in terror to the suspicion that our truth-concepts are only masks for our embedded interests" (Bantly 1992, 85 and 87). Interests-whatever they might be-are always em­bedded in an ontology, and "the means by which one can best express ontological truths depends significantly on the structure of that ontology itself' (ibid., 101). Like fiction, the subject of Bantly's article, apo­phatic writing has the capacity to express, or embody, an ontology that radically destabilizes traditional philosophical and religious assumptions about wisdom and ignorance, sacred and profane, mundane and tran­scendent, reality and illusion, error and truth. But to make the shift between alternative ontologies demands an alternative way of reading. This is, as well, a point forcefully made by Bantly, when she asks: "How far are we willing to go in undermining some of our own ontological

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grounding for the sake of casting new molds for our understanding of cultural discourse?" (ibid., 85).

Whatever this alternative way of reading and understanding might be, we need to recognize, first, that it will necessarily entail a certain set of methodological presuppositions, and second, that the effects of those presuppositions will reverberate throughout the conclusions of our research. Any discussion of Indian Buddhist philosophy is also, by implication, a discussion of critical theory. Which is to say, for us there can be no other form of early Indian Madhyamaka than the one we retrieve from the texts, and what we find there ("the Madhyamaka's philosophical and religious project") will necessarily bear the indelible stamp of the critical theory that powers our interpretive work. This will no doubt come as a great disappointment to those among us who hoped to uncover some form of pure Madhyamaka untainted by a context which includes the reader's interest and all the vicissitudes of history. Never­theless, as text-critical scholars with an interest in Buddhist thought we can scarcely avoid being drawn into a conversation between our col­leagues in literary criticism and philosophy that has been in progress for some twenty years now. This has nothing to do with any anxious cry for relevance-though, for the record, I see no great merit in the willful cul­tivation of irrelevance. What is required of us, as a discipline, is only that we make the effort to articulate the principles of our critical theory and so infuse the practice of textual interpretation with a greater level of self-awareness.

II

For many of those involved in the discussion of critical theory, the decade of the eighties was a time of "revisionary madness" (O'Hara, 1985). Structuralism, semiotics, hermeneutics, deconstruction, speech­act theory, reception theory, psychoanalytic theory, feminism and Marx­ism were only some of the various interpretive schemes that vied for attention in literature departments. As W. J. T. Mitchell wrote in 1985, "The general assumption is that everyone has a theory that governs his or her practice, and the only issue is whether one is self-conscious about that theory. Not to be aware of one's theory is to be a mere practitioner, slogging along in the routines of scholarship and interpretation." (Mitchell 1985, 2) Mitchell made these comments in the context of his introduction to a collection of papers he edited for The University of Chicago Press, a series of articles that had appeared in the journal Criti-

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cal Inquiry between 1982 and 1985. The book takes its name from an essay by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels titled "Against The­ory," and it is, in fact, the record of a heated debate provoked by their work. The controversy stimulated by Knapp and Michaels elicited responses from several of the most prominent critics of the time, includ­ing Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish-both of whom were conunissioned to write special pieces for this volume, which has attained, in some cir­cles, the status of a kind of intellectual cult classic, in that the views exchanged there became emblematic of an influential approach to textual interpretation called pragmatic theory. Over the course of the next sev­eral pages I shall draw on the rhetoric of this debate and on the central concerns of pragmatic theory as the initial step in offering what seems to me to be a powerful alternative hermeneutic for the interpretation of early Indian Madhyamaka.

"Pragmatic theory" could be construed as an unfortunate misnomer for a form of critical discourse that defined itself largely in terms of its antitheoretical stance. Knapp and Michaels are certainly the most extreme of the New Pragmatists in their notorious appeal for an end to the "career option of writing and teaching theory" (Knapp and Michaels 1985, 105), but all of the central players are in one way or another opposed to the theoretical enterprise as it is traditionally conceived. To appreciate what is involved in being against theory it is necessary, first of all, to have some clear idea of just what theory is in its orthodox form.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, theory is "a looking at, viewing, contemplation, speculation; also a sight, spectacle." "There is," as Mitchell observes,

a tacit contrast here between the visual as the 'noblest' sense and the lower, more practical senses, particularly hearing, the conduit of the oral tradition, of stories rather than systems, sententiae rather schematisms.. .. Theory is monotheistic, in love with simplicity, scope, and coherence. It aspires to explain the many in terms of the one, and the greater the gap between the unitary simplicity of theory and the infinite multiplicity of things in its domain, the more powerful the theory.. .. Theory always places itself at the beginning or the end of thought, providing first principles from which hypotheses, laws, and methods may be deduced. (Mitchell 1985, 6-7)

For Indologists the etymology of the word immediately suggests associa­tions to the Sanskrit d.r~ti, especially as it is used by Nagarjuna, who himself took great pains to reject "the ocular metaphor." All of this sug­gests in turn certain interesting parallels between Knapp and Michaels'

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similar rejection of theory; the fact that they are unanimously perceived by their colleagues to have failed in this effort (to have "out-theorized the theorists") makes the parallels appear even more intriguing. For as it turns out, everyone of the "antitheoretical" New Pragmatists is self-con­sciously committed to defending some alternative form of theoretical dis­course. To see why this is so, and in the process perhaps to discover some previously unexplored routes for deepening our appreciation of Nagarjuna's own antitheoretical rhetoric, I want to take just a moment to review the familiar distinction between positive, or "foundationalist" the­ory, and negative, or "antifoundationalist" theory.

Foundationalist theory is concerned with formalizable rules, that is, rules that can be applied across the board to generate predictable, methodologically invariable results. It is in this sense that Stanley Fish contrasts a "rule" with a "rule of thumb." Of course mathematics is the paradigmatic model for theory as a collection of rules, and Chomsky's generative grammar is a prime example of how this model can be applied to virtually any theoretical enterprise: "The Chomsky project is theoreti­cal because what it seeks is a method, a recipe with premeasured ingredi­ents which when ordered and combined according to absolutely explicit instructions ... will produce the desired result. In linguistics that result would be the assigning of correct descriptions to sentences; in literary studies the result would be the assigning of valid interpretations to works of literature" (Fish 1985, 110). This understanding of theory sees it as a determined effort to govern practice, "to guide practice from a position above or outside it" and "to refonn practice by neutralizing interest" (ibid., 110). The argument against theory is, briefly, that the project so described by theory can never succeed: "It can not help but borrow its terms and its content from that which it claims to transcend, the mutable world of practice, belief, assumptions, point of view, and so forth" (ibid., 111). It is in this sense that "theory hope"-defined by Fish as "the hope that our claims to knowledge can be 'justified on the basis of some objective method of assessing such claims' rather than on the basis of the individual beliefs that have been derived from the accidents of education and experience" (ibid., 112)-is in vain. Antifoundationalist theory (whether Kuhnian, Derridean, Marxist, pragmatic or any other) insists that the search for justification of our claims to knowledge through some kind of objective method is bound to fail primarily because we will never be able to trace belief back to its source in something that is other than belief. Of course the great fear inspired by antifounda­tionalist theory in all its various guises is that in disposing of any objec-

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tive criteria for rational inquiry, it is turning back the theoretical clock to some forbidding pre-Enlightenment era when practice was governed by nothing more than the individual's own perverse, unprincipled imagina­tion. Evidence of this fear is not difficult to come by. One need look no further than a recent edition of the Ann Arbor News, where an article titled "Scientists deplore flight from reason" describes a recent confer­ence in New York attended by some two-hundred professionals who had gathered together from around the country to express their communal anguish over the escalating intellectual assault on rationality:

... participants at the meeting aimed their barbs at "post-modernist" critics of science who contend that truth in science depends on one's point of view, not on any absolute content. Participants deplored what they see as a growing trend toward the exploitation of scientific ideas to attack science. They cited the physics of relativity and quantum mechanics as pillars of 20th-century thought that are sometimes distorted by critics of science into arguments that nothing in science is certain and that mystery and magic have an equal claim to belief.. . . Dr. Paul Kurtz, a professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, contended that post-modernists of both the political left and right denied that scientific knowledge was possi­ble. The result, he said, was an "erosion of the cognitive process which may undermine democracy." (Ann Arbor News, 8 June 1995, D5; from a syn­dicated article by Malcolm W. Browne in the New York Times)

Fish's response to this fear is to point out that antifoundationalism is not an argument for unbridled SUbjectivity, but rather for "the situated sub­ject" (Fish 1985, 113), by which he means the individual who is always already situated in an interpretive community which provides contextual constraints on his or her judgment. Antifoundationalism is, in this respect as well as in others, invariably historicist, for as a form of theo­retical discourse it can only reject assertions of "absolute content" based on an authority located outside of any particular place and time. What we have here is in effect a theoretical affirmation of contingency, and in particular, the radical contingency of knowledge, for any claim to knowledge must inevitably rest on belief. Insofar as antifoundationalism is theoretical, however, it is a peculiarly self-defeating kind of theory, for like all theory, it too finds its origin in belief:

A theory is a special achievement of consciousness; a belief is a prerequisite for being conscious at all. Beliefs are not what you think about but what you think with, and it is within the space provided by their articulations that mental activity-including the activity of theorizing-goes on. Theories are

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something you can have-you can wield them and hold them at a distance; beliefs have you, in the sense that there can be no distance between them and the acts they enable. In order to make even the simplest of assertions or perform the most elementary action, I must already be proceeding in the context of innumerable beliefs which can not be the object of my attention, because they are the content of my attention ... (Fish 1985, 116)

A final curious upshot of Fish's brand of antifoundationalism is that, according to him, it generates absolutely no practical consequences: "The fact that we now have a new explanation of how we got our beliefs-the fact, in short, that we now have a new belief-does not free us from our other beliefs or cause us to doubt them" (ibid., 114). To say that theory in itself has no practical consequences is equivalent to saying that theory is incapable of dictating practice, that no theory can carry within itself the rules for its application. Here, as elsewhere, Fish betrays his debt to Wittgenstein (cf. Wittgenstein 1968, Part I, §292). The rules for application of theory are always supplied by the particular contin­gencies of a given situation. Some course of action is already in progress and it is this action-in-progress that supplies the context in which theory acquires whatever significance it has. The consequences of theory are, then, a function not of theory itself, but rather of the total environment in which theory abides. Allegiance to a particular theoretical position can still be highly significant-though not because the theory informs a characteristic practice, but rather because certain people declare alle­giance to certain theories, and to do so is to align oneself with a particu­lar ideology. Fish's position in this regard does not find unqualified support among all pragmatic theorists. The work of Edward Said, for example, suggests to some that even antifoundationalist theory is capable of generating real and direct consequences:

I do not mean to suggest that a "real" Islam exists somewhere out there that the media, acting out of base motives, have perverted. Not at all. For Muslims as for non-Muslims, Islam is an objective and also a subjective fact, because people create that fact in their faith, in their societies, histories, and traditions, or, in the case of non-Muslim outsiders, because they must in a sense fix, personify, stamp the identity of that which they feel confronts them collectively or individually. This is to say that the media's Islam, the Western scholar's Islam, the Western reporter's Islam, and the Muslim's Islam are all acts of will and interpretation that take place in history, and can only be dealt with in history as acts of will and interpretation. (Said 1981,41)

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One could not hope for a more radical statement of antifoundationalism, and yet Steven Mailloux points out that Said's theoretical assumptions have generated, via his analyses of Orientalism, very real consequences for the practice of U. S. foreign policy. Even more significant, in Mailloux's eyes, is the fact that Said's work has been taken up by Orien­talism's victims as an objective justification for what is, in effect, their own self-interpretation. "These appropriations of Said's discourse can occur because a demonstration that others' asserted truth is actually inter­ested belief always counts as a critique of their assertions in the present arena of critical and political discussion. In such an arena, to expose asserted truth as 'mere' belief is to have the effect of undermining that truth even though the debunker elsewhere insists that all truth is perspec­tival belief' (Mailloux 1985, 70). Once again I am reminded of the dif­ficulty so many commentators have had, down through the centuries, in understanding how the Madhyamaka's antitheoretical theory is able to accomplish its aim when it is an argument without grounds, and there­fore, apparently, no argument at all. Recall, for example, the objection raised against CandrakIrti in Madhyamakiivatiira 171: "When you speak like this you only defeat your own position, and this being the case, you are incapable of refuting [the position of an opponent]" (Huntington 1995, 178). As Mailloux explains, "In fact, theory is a kind of practice, a peculiar kind because it claims to escape practice. But the impossibility of achieving this goal does not prevent theory from continuing, nor does it negate the effects it has as persuasion" (Mailloux 1985, 70-71). And here we have, I think, a cogent response not only to Candraklrti's inter­locutor, but to Griffiths, perhaps, and to so many others who see persua­sion only as a matter of deductive argument and "firm grounds."

Throughout this paper I have been interested in stressing the connec­tions between philosophy and critical theory. Every idea of theory­what it is, what it can be-comes with its philosophical (ontological, epistemological) analog, just as every philosophical agenda has its theo­retical implications for the way we read and interpret texts. If we expect to find arguments and grounds in Nagarjuna, for example, then it is important to realize that this expectation is bound up with a certain inter­pretive strategy based on notions of accuracy and correctness. Adena Rosmarin unveils the philosophical origins of foundationalist theory:

As their definition of "epistemology" and "ontology" reveal, Knapp and Michaels take their notion of theory from philosophy as it was institutional­ized by Kant's followers in the nineteenth century: a project whose business

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is the grounding and adjudicating of claims to knowledge, where "knowledge" is defined as the accurate representation of what is known. In this they are right. Our discipline has envisioned itself as the progressive acquisition of knowledge about literary texts, and literary theory has assumed the grounding and adjudicating role of philosophy. It asks: Where is the essence (ground) of literary meaning located? How do we most accu­rately represent it? Which interpretations are the most accurate representa­tions? (Rosmarin 1985, 81)

There is no objective reason why either philosophy or literary criticism needs to rest forever in this model. Which raises the question of alterna­tive theories. Based on Rorty's suggestion that we substitute conversation for confrontation (a groundless give and take for deductive argument) in our definition of the context in which knowledge is both generated and understood, Rosmarin develops the rudiments of a theoretical approach that would avoid the limitations of the representational model, which depends on its capacity to reduce textual meaning to a formula that can grasped in generalized rules and methods ("to say what the text really meant to say, but didn't" [cf. Sells 1994, 4, cited above]). This alterna­tive theory would rejoice in the very features of textuality that are most difficult to represent: polysemy, multivalence, change, ineffability, complexity, uniqueness.. .. It would no longer be bound by a compul­sive need to postulate objective, extra-textual standards against which we might judge the accuracy or correctness of our interpretations. Equally important, a nonrepresentational theory would make it possible to treat the relationship between belief and knowledge from a whole different perspective, it would reveal a world where the need for certainty no longer dominates us the way it has in the past, a world where the primacy of belief is no longer cause for alarm. This is the world that poetry and literature has always occupied and evoked, it is world that can be dis­cussed, felt, entered into and lived, but not re-presented from the outside in the kind of schematic formulas characteristic of denaturalized dis­course. Here a semblance of argument and rule may be called upon to achieve certain metaphorical or literary effects, but these effects take place in a world entirely beyond the grasp of reason and logic, a world where one can know without believing and believe without knowing. Shakespeare's sonnet 138 speaks to us, like Nagarjuna's writing, from "the other shore," where there really is nothing outside the text (cf. Rosmarin 1985, 88):

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When my love swears that she is made of truth I do believe her, though I know she lies.

But Nagarjuna was not writing poetry, nor is a Shakespearean sonnet philosophy. Shakespeare's writing may have philosophical implications, but it would not normally occur to us to read a sonnet in the same way we read a philosophical text. One might come up with all sorts of good reasons why this is so, but at the moment I am not interested in reasons. For behind or underneath the reasons hides a powerful intuition-almost a conviction-that there are, or ought to be, rules to prevent such a per­version of genres. Philosophy is one thing, literature and poetry quite another; and even if we concede that they all may simply be styles of writing, still to conflate them is to lose sight of the fact that philosophy is anchored not in the free play of language, but in argument and grounds.

To lose sight of the fact . .. And yet it can be done. What is required is not another argument­

though arguments might come in handy-but an act of imagination, an exercise of that most subversive, anti-authoritarian and eminently human faculty. Rorty, among others, has recommended just this kind of imagi­native leap into a realm where one need have no fear of hitting ground:

If one thinks of philosophy as entirely a matter of deductive argument, then this game of mirrors will, indeed, be one's only recourse. But one can also think of philosophy in other ways-in particular, as a matter of telling stories: stories about why we talk as we do and how we might avoid con­tinuing to talk that way.. .. The notion of "rational grounds" is not in place once one adopts a narrative strategy .... For if we ever did get rid of all the jargon of the tradition, we should not even be able to state the real­ist's position, much less argue against it. The enemy would have been for­gotten rather than refuted. If Derrida ever got his "new logic," he would not be able to use it to out-argue his opponents. Whatever a "graphematics of iterability" might be good for, it would be of no use in polemic. The metaphysics of presence was designed precisely to facilitate argument, to make questions like "How do you know?" seem natural, and to make a search for first principles and natural resting-places seem obligatory. It assumes that all of us can tell such a resting-place when we see it and that at least some of our thoughts are already there. You can't argue against that assumption by using the vocabulary of the tradition, but neither can you argue that the tradition is wrong in its choice of vocabulary. You can argue only against a proposition, not against a vocabulary. Vocabularies get dis­carded after looking bad in comparison with other vocabularies, not as a

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result of an appeal to overarching metavocabularies in which criteria for vocabulary choice can be formulated.

This means that narrative philosophy should not be expected to fill gaps left vacant by argumentative philosophy. Rather, the importance of narra­tive philosophy is that persuasion is as frequently a matter of getting people to drop a vocabulary (and the questions they phrase within it) as of deduc­tive argument ...

One can still have philosophy even after one stops arguing deductively and ceases to ask where the first principles are coming from, ceases to think of there being a special corner of the world-or the library-where they are found. In particular, I take "literary theory," as the term is currently used in America, to be a species of philosophy, an attempt to weave together some texts traditionally labeled "philosophical" with other texts not so labeled. It names the practice of splicing together your favorite critics, novelists, poets, and such, and your favorite philosophers.. .. Thinking of it this way helps one get rid of the idea that philosophy is somehow on another level. It lets one think of "philosophical" and "literary" texts as grist for the same mill. (Rorty 1985, 134-136)

III

Having now dispensed with the need for reason, argument and grounds in my effort to develop a new way of reading Nagarjuna, I want to own up to some very serious qualms. In a commencement address delivered at Denison University, where I was teaching at the time, the journalist Anna Quindlen referred to a comment made by one of her critics: "I don't believe her," the fellow had written. "She may be the only happy person in New York, but somehow I doubt it" (Quindlen 1995, 50). I can't help feeling that something similar could be said about Rorty, Fish and most of the other New Pragmatists. Their willingness simply to shake off the dust of traditional philosophical claims to truth strikes me as a tad cavalier-especially insofar as they seem prepared almost casually to embrace the lack of objectivity as if it were itself a more profound form of truth. Perhaps it is, but here I find myself more inclined to trust Nietzsche's cryptic, almost mystical reserve, when he warns us that "something might be true while being harmful and dangerous in the highest degree. Indeed, it may be a basic characteristic of existence that those who would know it completely would perish" (Nietzsche 1966, 39). In any case, one suspects that a problem which has occupied the attention of philosophers and religious thinkers in the East and the West for thousands of years is not going to evaporate at the wave of the pragmatic wand. In fact Rorty has been criticized for over-simplifying

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deconstruction's complex relationship to the whole problem of meta­physics (e. g. Norris 1987, 150 ff.), and indeed, a close reading of Derrida reveals that he does not envision any final escape from tradi­tional forms of logocentric discourse. For example, consider what he has to say in Writing and Difference:

But all these destructive discourses and all their analogs are trapped in a kind of circle. This circle is unique. It describes the form of the relation between the history of metaphysics and the destruction of the history of metaphysics. There is no sense in doing without the concepts of meta­physics in order to shake metaphysics. We have no language-no syntax and no lexicon-which is foreign to this history; we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest. (Derrida 1978, 280-281)

In what is perhaps the most comprehensive and nuanced exposition yet to be published of deconstruction's philosophical implications, Rodolfe GascM explains how Derrida's concept of "metaphoricity" (the metaphor of metaphor) "names the 'origin' of an unavoidable illusion, the illusion of an origin" (GascM 1986, 314):

In short, whether discussing Hegel, Hussed, or Heidegger, Derrida is pri­marily engaged in a debate with the main philosophical question regarding the ultimate foundation of what is. Contrary to those philosophers who naively negate and thus remain closely and uncontrollably bound up with this issue, Derrida confronts the philosophical quest for the ultimate foun­dation as a necessity. Yet his faithfulness to intrinsic philosophical demands is paired with an inquiry into the inner limits of these demands themselves, as well as of their unquestionable necessity. (Gasche 1986,7)

But of all modem philosophers, it is Nietzsche who appears to have pushed this particular issue to its ultimate, dramatic conclusion. "The falseness of a judgment is not for us necessarily an objection to a judg­ment.. .. The question is to what extent it is life-promoting, life-pre­serving ... " (Nietzsche 1966, 4). Nietzsche alone has the temerity baldly to declare "untruth as a condition of life" (Nietzsche 1966,4):

From the beginning we have contrived to retain our ignorance in order to enjoy an almost inconceivable freedom, lack of scruple and caution, hearti­ness and gaiety of life-in order to enjoy life. And only on this solid, granite foundation of ignorance could knowledge rise so far-the will to

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knowledge on the foundation of a far more powerful will: the will to igno­rance, to the uncertain, to the untrue. Not as its opposite, but-as its refinement. (Nietzsche 1966, 24)

If Rorty, Fish and the other New Pragmatists seem a bit shallow alongside Nietzsche it may be because they lack his finely tuned sensitiv­ity to problems of morality and religion. What is required is a sophisti­cated concept of religious discourse to which we could apply the analyti­cal framework of pragmatic theory. Nor must the project begin at ground zero, for as it turns out we already have a compelling example of what might be accomplished along these lines in a recent book by Carol Zaleski.

Zaleski's book, Otherworld Journeys, is built around a comparative study of near-death narratives drawn from two quite disparate sources: medieval Christendom and contemporary American society. She has attempted, in her own words, "to meet the problem of interpretation head-on" (Zaleski 1987, 7), and it is this dimension of her work that I want to review here. Perhaps the best place to begin is with Santayana's famous definition of religion, which was presumably the catalyst for Zaleski's title:

Any attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no religion in par­ticular.. .. Thus every living and healthy religion has a marked idiosyn­crasy; its power consists in its special and surprising message and in the bias which that revelation gives to life. The vistas it opens and the mysteries it propounds are another world to live in; and another world to live in­whether we expect ever to pass wholly over into it or not-is what we mean by having religion. (Cited in Zaleski 1987, 201-202)

In the case of accounts of near-death experience this message is delivered in the form of narrative descriptions brought back from actual visits to a realm beyond the world of the living. Reports of these experiences­whether medieval or modern-are cast in the rhetoric of objective truth. Although these accounts are structured as narratives and not as a series of deductive arguments, they nonetheless function, for those who take them at face value, as conclusive evidence of the existence of a reality every bit as real as any described in the language of empirical science. There are, however, two major obstacles to accepting such reports on their own terms: First, as Zaleski's comparative study shows, despite their remark­able similarities, medieval and modem accounts of this other world differ

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in significant ways-ways that frustrate any hope of finding in them a universal lexicon for the near death experience. In all their various renditions, the stories brought back from the other world are infused with the by-products of cultural and social conditioning. Second, even the striking similarities in descriptions of these experiences have been subject to a plethora of naturalistic explanations based on neural wiring, physio­logical mechanisms of dying, repressed memories of birth, and common psychological responses to the threat of death. Although no single theory is presently capable of accounting for all the medical, psychological, philosophical, historical, social, literary, and logical dimensions of the experience, skeptics are convinced that it is only a matter of time before the scientific community will be able to put together an entirely mecha­nistic explanation that will strip near-death reports of any shred of revelatory power. Zaleski's theological task is, then, to find "a middle path" between the extremes of scientific reductionism and naive affirmation. Her solution lies in a return to William James, and to his suggestion that religious testimony be evaluated not on the basis of its origin, but rather on the basis of its "fruits for life."

In order to harness pragmatic theory to her theological project, Zaleski proposes a concept of religious discourse based on an understanding of symbolism taken over from Coleridge, Tillich, Cassierer, Langer and Ricoeur: The object or image that functions symbolically does so not only by representing some reality beyond itself, but also by simultane­ously participating in what it represents. A symbol neither fully contains nor copies the transcendent, but it has the potential to communicate some share of the power inherent in that realm. This understanding of symbol­ism is linked to a definition of religious imagination as "the capacity to create or to appreciate religious symbols" (Zaleski 1987, 191). In this sense, although religious discourse may deal in theory, its does not aim to satisfy one's curiosity about theoretical questions. "When we think theo­retically," Zaleski explains, "we must guard against spatializing and hypostatizing our ideas; perhaps we could not think creatively at all, however, if we lacked the capacity to imagine, though only subliminally, a realm in which our ideas can act" (Zaleski 1987, 193). This realm of religious symbols-the realm governed by the religious imagination-is what we encounter in reading any religious writing; consequently the task of the theological critic is to interpret the significance of such language not as a function of whether it is true or false, but rather to seek to uncover the vitality of the text as a vehicle for religious transformation. Any and all of the powers of language may be recruited for this aim, and

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so the rhetorical devices one encounters in religious discourse run a gamut from poetry, narrative and didactic prose on through the overtly argumentative style of abstract philosophical theology. Which brings us to Zaleski's central claim, in which she identifies the real strength of her pragmatic method:

One need not abandon the idea that there is an ultimate truth in order to rec­ognize that for now, at least, pragmatic criteria must be used. If we have no direct sensory or conceptual access to the reality for which we aim, then we must judge those images and ideas valld that serve a remedial function, healing the intellect and the will. In this sense, all theology is pastoral the­ology, for its proper task is not to describe the truth but to promote and assist the quest for truth. (Zaleski 1987, 192-193)

Every genre of religious literature has its audience and a language appropriate to that audience; but regardless of the shape of the language, it serves, in every instance, a therapeutic end. It can not accomplish this end, however, unless we are willing to surrender the conviction that there is, or ought to be, some form of original, authentic religious truth that can be pried away from language, myth, history and culture. We need consciously to recognize and affirm not only that religious discourse is always the discourse of a particular place and time, but that to remain vital it must be constantly reshaped in the imagination of the reader. According to Zaleski, "The advantage of this position is that it calls on religious thinkers to acknowledge and take responsibility for their own reflective and creative work in framing ideas of the universe and of God" (Zaleski 1987, 195). This ongoing, creative (re-)framing of the text has a particular significance in the interpretation of apophatic discourse, where "the habits of language pull the writer and reader toward reifying the last proposition as a meaningful utterance. To prevent such reifica­tion, ever-new correcting propositions must be advanced" (Sells 1994, 207).

As we have already seen above, our willingness to accept the creative role that we as interpreters play in the understanding of any text is a direct fallout of pragmatic (anti-) theory. But as adapted by Zaleski to the interpretation of religious discourse, pragmatic theory becomes much less hostile to the claims of traditionallogocentric philosophy and meta­physics. The power of the text no longer hinges on the success of its arguments in accurately representing truth or reality, for what appears as argument is equally capable of being interpreted as religious symbol-as

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a tool of the religious imagination designed not so much to prove as to heal. In this respect logic and deductive argument can be made to work for religious purposes in just the same way as does the language of a near-death narrative-by shifting the grounds for ultimate truth from the realm of knowledge to the realm of the imagination, or, to say what amounts to the same thing, by making it possible to believe.

Against the pull of scientific reductionism, which seeks, in the arena of near death testimony, to undermine the credibility of these stories by explaining away the central experience as a composite of individual physical, psychological, and social data, Zaleski reminds us, signifi­cantly, that the same case could be brought against the experience of love-a state that can be accounted for as the composite effect of neuro­chemical and social mechanisms including everything from advertising to pheromones. The truth-the objective, scientific truth-is, of course, that every normal state of consciousness is a composite effect of electrical and chemical events in brain, hormones, inherited drives and various forms of social and cultural conditioning. If we were to apply reduction­ist principles across the board nothing would survive, for all of our experience is in one way or another a composite whole assembled by the imagination out of threads of sensation, perception, language, memory, and on and on. Similarly the meaning of a text, whether that meaning is conceived to lie in its capacity to prove or to heal, is the cumulative effect of an enormous variety of context-bound elements including rhetorical style, appeals to authority, ideological associations, an inter­pretive community and so forth. The integrity of experience, like the meaning of a text, is only problematized when for some reason our imagination can no longer do its work and we cease to be captivated by the effect of the whole.

But let me return to the question of the aim of religious discourse, and to Santayana's definition of religion cited just above. His work indicates that all the various components of advanced religious life could be referred back to a primitive view of the other world as an actual place-a view that continues to exert its influence on the religious imagination even where it has been sublimated into a variety of epistemological and ontological claims about "truth" and "reality." But it is Zaleski who gives Santayana's ruminations their real force in her suggestion that the primary value of the human inclination to conceive of another world lies in its potential to furnish us with "a sense of orientation in this world, through which we would otherwise wander without direction ... "

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This has not always been formulated in terms of life after death. Even the contemplation of death, unadorned by images of the beyond, can have this orienting effect insofar as it makes us place ourselves, with greater urgency and purpose, in the midst of life; and a sense of the mystery of existence, of infinite presence or surrounding emptiness, can have the same value as a graphic depiction of the steps to paradise and hell. Buddhist evocations of the inexhaustibly productive void are as well suited as Dante's Divine Com­edy to meet the need for orientation. .. they call on us to inhabit this cos­mos, by overcoming the fear or forgetfulness that makes us insensible to life as to death. (Zaleski 1987, 202-203)

Descriptions of the after-effects of near-death experience seem to bear this out: "greater zest for life, less concern for material things, greater self-confidence, independence and sense of purpose, attraction to solitary and contemplative pursuits, delight in the natural world, tolerance, and compassion toward others" (Zaleski 1987, 142). Zaleski stresses through­out her study that the presence of the other world has these same effects not only on those who actually make the journey, but also on the audi­ence who hears and accepts their message. In the words of an Australian woman who wrote to Anabiosis, a regular digest of news for the mem­bership of the Association for the Scientific Study of Near-Death Phe­nomena: "I don't fear death now, nor do I fear life" (Zaleski 1987, 143).

IV

It's time to return to the problem with which this paper began: How does Nagarjuna's apophatic language accomplish its philosophical / reli­gious work? How are we to "make sense" of the Madhyamaka's uncom­promising effort to overturn even the slightest suggestion that there is another, transcendent world of absolute truth and reality with equally frequent assertions to the effect that the realm beyond thought, "the essential nature of things"-dharmata, tattva-"neither arises nor passes away"? I have done my best to ensnare this question in a number of other issues, to demonstrate how it is both a problem of textual interpre­tation and of philosophy, both a theoretical problem of the source of tex­tual meaning and a philosophical or religious question of the distinction between knowledge and belief and the nature of their objects.

We have seen how, in its antitheoretical polemic, pragmatic theory incorporates a notion of the primacy of belief over knowledge. As Fish puts it, "Theories are something you can have ... beliefs have you." In

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this as well the New Pragmatists have borrowed from Wittgenstein, who wrote:

All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments; no, it belongs to the nature of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which arguments have their life." (Wittgenstein 1972, 105)

In Wittgenstein's vocabulary "system" is synonymous with "language game;" both expressions refer to the framework of formal and informal education, social, cultural, and interpersonal conditioning within which we express doubts, engage in reflection and inquiry, and arrive at con­clusions. "A language game is only possible if one trusts something ... [it] is not based on grounds. It is there-like our life" (Wittgenstein 1972, §509 and §559). Justification, argument, evidence, explanation, grounds, proof, reason, judgments of accuracy and inaccuracy-all of this takes place within systems, and not between them.

In a wonderful essay called "The Groundlessness of Belief," Norman Malcolm observes that a language game may be said to be groundless, "not in the sense of a groundless opinion, but in the sense that we accept it, we live it. We can say, 'This is what we do. This is how we are.'" (Malcolm 1977, 208). I am reminded once again of Stanley Fish: "Someone who declares himself committed to the promotion of individ­ual freedom does not have a theory; he has a belief. He believes that something is more important than something else-and if you were to inquire into the grounds of his belief, you would discover not a theory but other beliefs that at once support and are supported by the belief to which he is currently testifying. Now, to be sure, these clustered beliefs affect behavior-not because they are consulted when a problem presents itself, however, but because it is within the world they deliver that the problem and its possible solutions take shape" (Fish 1985, 117). Accord­ing to Wittgenstein, what is true for the promotion of individual freedom is equally true for the practice of chemistry, where the Law of Induction, for instance, is regularly employed without any concern for theoretical evidence of its validity. It simply would not occur to a chemist to insist that he knows that the Law of Induction is true. ("Imagine such a state­ment made in a law court.") On the other hand, if he were to reflect on the matter at all it would be most appropriate for him to say, "I believe in

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the Law of Induction." (Wittgenstein 1972,500). And here we reach the bedrock of what is, ultimately, "religious" belief, defined as "an accep­tance which is not conjecture or surmise and for which there is no rea­son" (Malcolm 1977, 209).

"Reason," "argument," ')ustification" and all the rest of it is a function of what a person lodged in a particular system of belief finds satisfying. Curiously enough the impulse to locate rational, objective justification for belief is nowhere stronger than in the philosophy of religion. "The obsessive concern with [proofs of the existence of God] reveals the assumption that in order for religious belief to be intellectually respectable it ought to have a rational justification. That is the misunder­standing. It is like the idea that we are not justified in relying on mem­ory until memory has been proved reliable" (Malcolm 1977, 211). It is Malcolm's opinion, based on his reading of Wittgenstein, both that peo­ple do not seek grounds for religious belief, and moreover, that there could be no such grounds. "When you are describing a language-game, a system of thought and action, you are describing concepts, and yet also describing what certain people do-how they think, react, live" (ibid., 214-15). His point is that religion, like every other system of belief, is a value-seeking enterprise, a groundless viewpoint (Weltbild) from which

. the significance of events and ideas and experiences is judged and assigned. Religious belief is a particular way of viewing or construing "the world," embedded-as are all perspectives-in a form of life (the action-in-progress that Fish mentions in his appropriation of Wittgenstein). I think of yet another of Nagarjuna' s kiirika-s:

That which is in the process of being born and passing on, when taken as causal or dependent, is, taken as non-causal and independent, declared to be nirval).a. (Madhyamakasiistra XV.9)

All of this finds a good deal of support in no less authoritative a source than the present Dalai Lama, who explains the significance of Madhya­maka in terms of a fundamental transformation of one's attitude or view:

We all want happiness and do not want suffering. Moreover, achieving happiness and eliminating suffering depend upon the deeds of body, speech and mind. As the deeds of body and speech depend upon the mind, we must therefore constructively transform the mind.. .. Many such different methods of transforming the mind have been taught by the many great teachers of this world, in accordance with individual times and places and in

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accordance with the minds of individual trainees. Among these, many methods of taming the mind have been taught in the books of the Buddhists. From among these, a little will be said here about the view of emptiness. (Gyatso 1975,51-52)

And so the question of how to read Madhyamaka texts becomes at once extremely pragmatic, after all, for the meaning of Nagarjuna's writing must be located not in "the view from nowhere," but rather in its capac­ity for transforming one's perspective, for shifting one's existential hermeneutic from one groundless system of belief to another.

But this does not account for the way such a transformation is effected. We may dispense with the notion of grounds, but still to believe is to believe in something, and that something is, for Nagarjuna, ultimate meaning (paramartha), reality beyond the realm of thought and names (anabhidhfitavyatattva, dharmata), and nirva~a. Can we find a way to make text-critical, historical sense of this language that will not reduce Buddhism's religious message to an intellectual artifact, to yet another failed claim of an exotic form of denaturalized discourse? For at least some of us in the field this remains an engaging question. And so it should, for the question of whether religious belief is necessarily naive or uncritical deserves to be taken seriously. Which brings me back, one last time, to Zaleski, and to some remarks that appear near the close of her study of near-death narratives:

It is one thing to acknowledge in general terms the orienting value of oth­erworld visions; it is quite another to decide whether their specific content might be relevant to our own view of life and death. In order to understand the conditions, both cultural and natural, that shape near-death experience, we have assumed the role of spectators and can not easily divest ourselves of that role. In comparing medieval and modern visions, we seem to have stepped outside our own cultural context and may feel at a loss as to how to step back into it and make judgments. Such incapacity for wholehearted participation is the intellectual's occupational disease; among scholars engaged in the comparative study of religion it can produce a sense of nos­talgia for days of innocence or for some idealized form of archaic or tradi­tional religiosity. (Zaleski 1987,203-204)

Malcolm makes the same point more bluntly:

Present-day academic philosophers are far more prone to challenge the cre­dentials of religion than of science. This is probably due to a number of things. One may be the illusion that science can justify its own framework.

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Another is the fact that science is a vastly greater force in our culture. Still another reason may be the fact that by and large religion is to university people an alien form of life. They do not participate in it and do not understand what it is all about. This non-understanding is of an interesting nature. It derives, at least in part, from the inclination of academics to sup­pose that their employment as scholars demands of them the most severe objectivity and dispassionateness. For an academic philosopher to become a religious believer would be a stain on his professional competence! (Malcolm 1977, 212)

I would like to respond to Zaleski and Malcolm by taking another look at the lines from Shakespeare that were cited in Section II, above, and by reading them from what I take to be a "Madhyamaka perspective." This time I will supply the text of the entire sonnet:

When my love swears that she is made of truth I do believe her, though I know she lies, That she might think me some untutored youth, Unlearned in the world's false subtleties. Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young, Although she knows my days are past the best, Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue; On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed. But wherefore says she not she is unjust? And wherefore say not I that I am old? 0, love's best habit is in seeming trust, And age in love loves not to have years told.

Therefore I lie with her and she with me, And in our faults by lies we flattered be.

That there is some kind of truth or reality that transcends what we take for granted in everyday experience is more than a message brought back by those who claim to have journeyed beyond death, more than a series of "denaturalized" epistemological and ontological arguments-it is an intuition, one might almost say a conviction, that seems to be built into human language and thought. But when we tum the light of historical method on that intuition it quickly fades into a collection of indefensible propositions, for I can not seem to understand myself completely outside the identity that has been constructed around and within me by the place and time where I live. I am unwilling-unable-to step outside of his­tory . .. Unless, perhaps, in order to love and be loved. For in some sense all love is illicit love, and the demands it places on us are always

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exceptional. The middle-aged gentleman who speaks to us from Shakespeare's sonnet knows that the love he gives and receives is depen­dent on a lie, and not only on a lie, but on his ability joyfully to take the part of the naive, ignorant youth, "unlearned in the world's false sub­tleties." And so he does not feignbe1ief, for the game simply doesn't work by those rules. He does not pretend to believe; he believes. (Wittgenstein writes: "A language-game is only possible if one trusts something." Malcolm comments: "Not can, but does trust something" [Malcolm 1977,204]). His lover reciprocates, and the act is complete­an unqualified affirmation of this life and this world that simultaneously incorporates and transcends "simple truth." Argument works at the level of discursive, expository prose and rule-governed theory; apophatic dis­course works best in the vertiginous, slippery world of poetry and narra­tive fiction, where, even in the midst of argument, knowledge and belief are conflated ("I do believe, though 1 know ... "), where a promise may be a curse ("she swears"), and love is indistinguishable from artful untruth ("I lie with her and she with me"). Wisdom and skillful means are inseparable.

"Wisdom" is, in this classically apophatic sense, the facility to believe in untruth. To know that one's belief has no grounds, and yet to believe. Like the journey of the prodigal son, the path leads through another, exotic terrain and back home again. But unlike the Biblical pilgrimage this quest has no end. It is the reality of the other world, and the contin­uous' circular journey between here and there-a journey of perpetual transformation-that makes all the difference. Wisdom is the facility to believe, then, not in any sort of nonsense, but in a particular kind of soteriologically efficacious nonsense. Wisdom is to know that stories about a transhistorical, absolute truth, and the realm in which that truth comes alive, can not be objectively valid. To know this, and yet to believe. It is wise to believe because familiarity with the other world of absolute truth and reality orients us here in this world (a mysteriously textualized world of unlimited interpretive possibilities) by making it possible to affirm our present existence even in the midst of change and uncertainty: "I don't fear death now, nor do I fear life." One must first see this world as false, by leaving it behind; this is the life of reason, the beginning of the philosophical, religious journey that we find registered in denaturalized discourse. One must then see the other world as no more or less real than this one. Two worlds standing across from each other, face to face like two polished mirrors, the reality of each a quasi­illusion supported by the other in an endless series of reflected images

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falling away into infinity, a groundless vortex of belief. "The affirma­tion of transcendence-when taken up with full apophatic seriousness­then turns back upon itself' (Sells 1994,212).

The pilgrim begins where he finds himself, in this world, with argu­ment and grounds. He moves from here to the other world, and back again (and again and again ... ), to the appearance of argument and grounds. Antifoundationalism can be used to undermine any claim to knowledge or objective truth; it can clear away the grounds for certainty, but in doing away with grounds it also does away with any possibility of asserting value-free, a priori necessity-that is, any form of ultimately binding ontological or epistemological relativism-for its own conclu­sions. The point is that we can not know anything for sure: including this. Antifoundationalism can not be expected to make good on the bro­ken promise of denaturalized discourse and foundationalist theory. For the pilgrim whose travels are never over, belief is no longer justified on the basis of its proposed origin in rational grounds, but rather in terms of its "fruits for life."

How, then, do we learn to find meaning in a semblance of reasoned argument? How do we learn to feel at home in a homeless world of rad­ical uncertainty and change, of suffering and death? Perhaps the most immediately relevant question is the one that Francisca Cho Bantly asked in her response to Griffiths: "How far are we willing to go in undermin­ing some of our own ontological grounding for the sake of casting new molds for our understanding of cultural discourse?" To give up search­ing for what the text really means to say, to know that the object of belief is a lie and yet to believe, to let go of fear and love life uncondi­tionally . .. all of this requires something quite outside the realm of logic and rule-governed theory. There must be some other bridge to understanding, some kind of hermeneutical perspective from which we might finally begin to pull all of this together into a meaningful, com­posite whole. I shall, indeed, make one last suggestion. Or rather, I shall quote from Nietzsche (again!), for though I am in less than perfect agreement with Rorty in other ways, I have taken to heart his proposal that literary criticism, philosophy, and-I would add-Buddhist Studies as well can "name the practice of splicing together your favorite critics, novelists, poets, and such, and your favorite philosophers."

With the strength of their spiritual eye and insight grows distance and, as it were, the space around human beings: their world becomes more profound; ever new stars, ever new riddles and images become visible to them. Per-

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haps everything on which the spirit's eye has exercised it acuteness and truthfulness was nothing but an occasion for this exercise, something for children and those who are childish. Perhaps the day will come when the most solemn concepts which have caused the most fights and suffering, the concepts "God" and "sin," will seem no more important to us than a child's toy and a child's pain seem to the old-and perhaps "the old" will then be in need of another toy and another pain-still children enough, eternal chil­dren! (Nietzsche 1966,57)

It seems to me that Nietzsche's words may offer guidance for those of us interested in developing some genuinely alternative way of reading Nagarjuna, those who, having grown weary of "simple truths," are searching for a middle path out of the extremes of, on the one hand, compulsive ideological commitment to a reductionistic concept of methodological objectivity, and, on the other, naive affirmation of some kind of dogmatic Buddhist absolutism. Perhaps the new toy (and the new pain) Nietzsche alludes to in this passage has something to do with symbol and metaphor, with "the 'origin' of an unavoidable illusion, the illusion of an origin." Perhaps it has to do with the realm of poetry and narrative fiction (which Plato ironically condemned), and with what Carol Zaleski calls "religious imagination"-the capacity to imagine "a realm in which our ideas can act" (cf. Nehamas 1985). If so, then surely this is no call to unconstrained subjectivity-which has at any rate never existed. Like any hermeneutical tool the religIous imagination has always been subject to the constraints of time and place, to the constraints of the community in which it functions, and to those of the grammar and vocabulary of the text from which one must begin the journey of inter­pretation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bantly, Francisca Cho. 1992. "Buddhist Philosophy in the Art of Fiction." Discourse and Practice. Eds. Frank Reynolds and David Tracy. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and Difference. Trans. A. Bass. Chicago: Uni­versity of Chicago Press.

Fish, Stanley. 1985. "Consequences." Against Theory: Literary Studies in the New Pragmatism. Ed. W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1985. 106-131.

Gasche, Rodolphe. 1986. The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Griffiths, Paul. 1990. "Denaturalizing Discourse: Abhidharmikas, Proposi­tionalists, and the Comparative Study of Religion." Myth and Philosophy. Eds. Frank Reynolds and David Tracy. Albany: State University of New York Press.

----. 1991. "Rev. of The Emptiness of Emptiness: An Introduction to Early Indian Madhyamika." Journal of the American Oriental Society 111 .2: 414-415.

Gyatso, Tenzin. 1975. The Buddhism of Tibet and The Key to the Middle Way. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd.

Huntington, C. W. 1995. The Emptiness of Emptiness: An Introduction to Early Indian Madhyamika. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Paper­back edition.

Knapp, Steven, and Walter Benn Michaels. 1985. "Against Theory." Against Theory: Literary Studies in the New Pragmatism. Ed. W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1985. 11-30.

Mailloux, Steven 1985. "Truth or Consequences: On Being Against Theory." Against Theory: Literary Studies in the New Pragmatism. Ed. W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1985.65-71.

Malcolm, Norman 1977. Thought and Knowledge: Essays by Norman Malcolm. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Mitchell, W. J. T., ed. 1985. Against Theory: Literary Studies in the New Pragmatism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Nagarjuna. Madhyamakasastra. Commentary Prasannapada by Candrakirti. Ed. P. L. Vaidya. Darbhanga: The Mithila Institute of Post-Graduate Studies and Research in Sanskrit Learning.

Nehamas, Alexander. 1985. Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1966. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Press.

Norris, Christopher. 1987. Derrida. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press. O'Hara, Daniel T. 1985. "Revisionary Madness: The Prospects of American

Literary Theory at the Present Time." Against Theory: Literary Studies in the New Pragmatism. Ed. W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1985.31-47.

Quindlen, Anna. 1995. "First Person." Commencement Address. 154th Commencement 7 May 1995. Denison Magazine, Spring (1995).

Rorty, Richard. 1985. "Philosophy without Principles." Against Theory: Literary Studies in the New Pragmatism. Ed. W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1985. 132-138.

Rosmarin, Adena. 1985. "On the Theory of 'Against Theory'." Against Theory: Literary Studies in the New Pragmatism. Ed. W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1985. 80-88.

Said, Edward. 1981. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts De­termine How We See the Rest of the World. New York: Pantheon Books.

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Sells, Michael A. 1994. Mystical Languages of Unsaying. Chicago: The Uni­versity of Chicago Press.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1972. On Certainty. New York: Harper and Row. ----,. 1968. Philosophical Investigations. New York: Macmillan Pub­

lishing Co., Inc. Zaleski, Carol. 1987. Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experi­

ence in Medieval and Modern Times. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

JAMIE HUBBARD

Upping the Ante: budstud@milleniuID.end.edu

Cyborg: a human-machine hybrid; the Bionic Woman; Robocop; the 21st century Buddhologist.

Profound changes in intellectual culture are heralded by pundits every­where now that the use of computers is taken for granted throughout the academic community. Of course, from the point of view of the sociology of knowledge the cybernetic fact of knowledge production is old news, dating at least as far back as the first time human communication skills were augmented by any form of pictorial or writing technology. Still, it does seem true that we are on the threshold of great changes, even if not quite as great as proclaimed by the pundits and computer evangelists. At the same time, the academy has rarely been as self-conscious about its own role in this production of knowledge as in its (somewhat self-con­sciously postured) postmodern present, so it seems appropriate to ask whether or not the "computer revolution" has had any particular effect on the way Buddhologists do their work. What, if anything, has changed about the way we do our research, our teaching, and our unsung life as administrators to both salary-granting institution and professional discipline?

The three major aspects of computer technology that most visibly have taken over older technologies are word processing, electronic communi­cation, and the development of large scale archives of both text and visual materials. These in tum have led to many other changes that raise interesting questions about our professional life, including aspects of pedagogy (using computers in the classroom for everything from interac­tive exploration of manuscripts to the creation of virtual classrooms), intellectual community (the wired society of electronic discussion groups and conferences), economics (the access to these technologies and their relation to the publishing field, the tenure and promotion process, and other aspects of institutional life), ownership of our work and our texts

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(copyright and intellectual property issues), and, perhaps most impor­tantly, the quality of our work. A Committee on Buddhist Studies and Computers was formed at the 1983 meeting of the lABS in Tokyo, and so it seems appropriate to ask, more than a decade later, what sort of impact technology has had on our work of studying Buddhism. With this in mind, then, I would like to take this opportunity to think about some of these larger questions while meandering over some of the terrain (virtual and otherwise) that we have traversed so far.

Text and document processing I still vividly remember when, back in 1980, my colleague Bill Kirtz showed me how he used his Apple II to write his Ph. D. examination, for I was appropriately envious of the time he saved editing and preparing his answers. Of course, getting the dots underneath the vocalic-r's in Sanskrit romanization was not so easy, but I was immediately taken by the soul of this new machine, and before long I too had become totally dependent on my word processor. Now I cannot imagine writing any­thing much longer than a shopping list by hand, and in hindsight it often seems that the most worthwhile course from my highschool days was the typing course that I took in order to escape calculus. Indeed, the manip­ulation of text is easier than ever, idea processors help at both the heuris­tic and the organizing stage of writing, Chinese and Japanese characters are readily mixed with English and French (though the damn dot under the vocalic-r is still giving me problems), spell checkers fix our mistakes, grammar analysis tells us just how impossibly complex our prose is, tem­plates mold our writing into the format of either the MLA or Chicago style sheet as we wish and a new recension of an article is but a few key­presses away. It is hard to even imagine the dark days of typewriters and carbon paper, much less be nostalgic for them. It is also hard to imagine where this will all lead.

Some say that this new relationship to our written work indicates a profound epistemic shift, a shift in the way that we "know" our work, though not unlike other shifts and drifts in the relationship between thought, language, reality, and representation that were occasioned by the advent of woodblock printing, moveable type, and broadcast media. 1

1. See, for example, Michael Heim, Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), esp. ch. 2 ,and 3; Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), esp. ch. 8, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century";

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This may all be true. For me, however, it sometimes seems that the most noticeable difference that word processing has brought to my day to day activity is to have "upped the ante." That is, it is now expected that a scholar's work is beautifully formatted, not using Chinese characters bespeaks a lack of tech savvy, and don't even think about leaving out the Sanskrit diacritics (especially that vocalic-r). Publishers expect disks in one format or another, and sometimes even camera-ready copy is demanded-so forget dot-matrix printing, and 300 dpi laser output already seems rather old-fashioned. Students, ever ahead of their profes­sors in the technology game, have been especially quick to make the switch (perhaps thinking that the very slickness of the product will enhance their grades), and so I haven't seen a hand-written assignment in . almost a decade. Thus the expectation for our written word has increased in a way related more to the presentation of information than to the information itself. Why do I even know what a font is, much less how to

design one that incorporates Sanskrit diacritics? I am sure that I am not the only one to have spent inordinate amounts of time wrestling some new piece of software or hardware into shape, and in fact studies indicate that if training and implementation time are calculated, the purchase cost of new technology is only about 20% of the total cost. But even after this learning curve is left behind, the expectation of a productivity in­crease is not.

Indeed, in the corporate world it goes without saying that the entire raison d'etre for the huge investment in computer technology is increased production, and although some would like to think that the humanities are immune to such a commodified view of scholarship and the knowl­edge it produces, such is hardly the case. Just as the ability to churn out correspondence faster doesn't mean that the secretary gets to go home any earlier (he just has to be more productive, i. e., write more letters), so too the advent of word processing hasn't necessarily meant that the academic suddenly has more time on his hands to think about things. Whether articles, books, e-mail, administrative memos, or on-line discus­sions with students, it is hard to escape the increased expectations for greater productivity, including those new expectations about the visual appearance of that product (what does your home page on the Web look like?).

for a wider view of these issues consult Arturo Escobar, "Welcome to Cyberia: Notes on the Anthropology of Cyberculture," Current Anthropology 35.3 (1994): 211-231.

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The Jeweled Net of Indra Nowhere is this huge increase more evident than in the daily deluge of electronic communications-I am greeted every day bye-mail, electronic conferences, discussion lists, administration memos, student questions, correspondence with colleagues and publishers, grant proposals, weather reports from Mexico City, the latest electronic version of the Mahii­bharata or Heart Sutra, and even tips on how to get the dot under the vocalic-r! In spite of severely limiting my participation in electronic discussion groups, my day usually begins with the perfunctory yet para­lyzing salutation from my computer, "you have forty unread mail mes­sages queued;" if I am gone for a week I despair of ever digging my way out.

Many techno-elites like smugly to assert that 90% or more of this effluence is garbage best handled with the delete key, but I don't find this to be true (at least not always). There is, in fact, a lot of very high quality information available on the net, and this connectivity within our field also has implications for the academic community. Although at present many of the senior members of our field are not part of this vir­tual community, this will necessarily change over time, just as the entire area of electronic discussions has grown exponentially in the past four or five years. About ten years ago, for example, the International Associa­tion of Buddhist Studies sponsored IndraNet, an online discussion forum co-sysoped by myself and Bruce Burrill (the name was proposed by Alan Sponberg). Bruce donated all of the equipment and a good amount of his time to the running of the system, but, with the exception of a hand­ful of dedicated callers, nobody was interested and it folded after about two years. Ten years later, BUDDHA-L (buddha-l@ulkyvm.louisville. edu) has over 600 subscribers from some forty different countries, and has generated over fifty messages per week this year (all of those glow­ing computer screens, like the jewels in Indra's net, infinitely and instantly reflecting the thoughts of scholars everywhere). Of course, and this is the punch line, just because the information is interesting and often of high scholarly caliber it still doesn't mean that 90% of it should not be deleted without reading.

One example of the benefits that the online community of scholars enjoy is the Journal of Buddhist Ethics (http://www.psu.edu/jbe/jbe. html).2 Established a little over one year ago, the journal has already

2. See also "Indra's Net and the Internet: Three Scholars Launch New Elec­tronic Serial on Buddhist Ethics," Religious Studies News (1995): 14.

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published more than a dozen refereed articles, freely available online within mere weeks of being submitted (and once online they are but a few seconds from residing fully formatted on your desktop). In addition to articles, the Journal of Buddhist Ethics has also hosted an electronic conference, spread out over a two week period, with paper presentations, panelists, and discussions. With over 700 participants world-wide, this experiment in electronic publishing and conferencing, the first of its kind in the field of religious studies, heralds new directions for our field. This form of virtual scholarly community is perhaps especially important for colleagues in more remote locations or otherwise without access to the intellectual stimulation of one's peers in the field)

The network explosion is nowhere more visible than in the growth of the "cybersangha," the online communities of Buddhist practitioners. Sometimes representative of one or another traditional communities but more often than not virtual communities existing only in cyberspace, most every sort of discussion group and resource can now be located on­line, from the "alt.buddha.short.fat.guy" usenet group and "#technozen" Internet Relay Chat line (real-time conversation channel), to the Tiger Team Buddhist Information Network (info@tigerteam.org), and various electronic journals (Gassho and CyberSangha, to name but two). These groups generate an immense amount of discussion, polemic, and infor­mation about contemporary Buddhism. Because these online communi­ties are almost exclusively Euro-American in constitution and provide a forum for Buddhists outside of the academy, they are also immensely fascinating to anybody interested in the transmission of Buddhism to the West (though of course the highly selective demographics of these com­munities should not be forgotten).

3. Beyond its own publishing and conference activities, the Journal of Bud­dhist Ethics is also designed as a jumping off point fQr further exploration of network resources related to the study of Buddhism, and so its Web page con­tains links or pointers to over eighty other net sites, such as the Indology gopher server (where you can get machine readable copies of the Maha­bharata or Buddhacarita, Sanskrit fonts, and the like), Sakyadhita (the Inter­national Organization of Buddhist Women), the Asynchronous School of Buddhist Dialectics and many more. All of this makes the Web a bit easier to navigate, and the Journal of Buddhist Ethics is the recommended first stop for the Buddhist scholar just beginning to explore the net.

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The classroom Another area in which electronic communication is changing the way we do things is in the classroom. Many instructors now make regular use of netnews, lists, simple e-mail, the Web, and other such resources in order to extend the class well beyond the physical walls of the classroom.4 The most common tactic is simply to create a virtual discussion group which, like BUDDHA-L and other lists, allow participation at any time of day or night and from most any location. In addition to allowing more dis­cussion than classroom time permits, this medium also can get students who don't often contribute in class into the discussion (particularly useful if your student body includes many non-native speakers). I have also used programs that allow electronic discussions in real time, which, although somewhat chaotic and counter-intuitive (why have a group of students sitting in a room in front of computers typing at each other instead of talking?), actually do produce more discussion and involve more students. These virtual classrooms can also be combined with peer writing review, in which students post their shorter writing assignments to the entire class for comment and discussion.

In addition to the discussion group, another way that computers and the net are used in the classroom is to get the students "out there" into the real world of religious communities and religious studies as an academic discipline. Students can browse the hundreds of Web sites devoted to topics relevant to the class, make contact with other students, get biblio­graphical information from far-flung libraries, take field trips to "virtual sanghas" of most every sort of Buddhist practice, and even ask questions of the authors whose books they read. There are numerous other class­room uses of computers as well-my students have played the roles of shamans, empresses, and monks in a role simulation program written for a Japanese religions class, and years ago Dr. Robert Miller worked on the

4. See, for example, John McRae, "Closing report on ASREL-L," posted to the Buddhist Academic Discussion Forum (buddha-l@ulkyvm.louisville.edu) 25 May 1994; Charles T. Tart (cttart@ucdavis.edu), "Web Uses for Teaching Religion," posted to the Buddhist Academic Discussion Forum (buddha-l @ulkyvm.louisville.edu) 26 September 1995; Elizabeth S. Burr, Mary Ann Clark, and Edith Wyschogrod, "Integrating the Net into the Religion Class­room: Some Notes from the Field," Religious Studies News (May 1995): 24; Jay Greco, Jamie Hubbard, and Hugh Burns, "Building Collaborative Spaces: Software Tools for On-Line Collaborative Writing," The Proceedings of 1994 National Conference on Problem Solving Across the Curriculum (Hobart / William Smith, June 1994).

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computer simulation of Central Asian monastic institutional life. Another interesting development is "demand publishing," in which cus­tom textbooks are immediately created from full text databanks of jour­nal articles and specialized research materials. This approach can also be used to produce CD-ROMs that incorporate video and audio into the course materials as well. With the addition of links within the material and the naturally serendipitous process of text searches and browsing, this latter technology can become a particularly powerful addition to the instructor's toolbox, able to wean students away from a passive and lin­ear approach to their assignments and inculcate more of the dynamic engagement-heurisis-that scholars bring to their research.

Of course, there is a price to pay for all of this, especially in terms of one's time. Giving over any significant amount of time to discussion, for example (even electronic discussions pursued outside of the class­room), takes time that could be used to other purpose. While many might think the worth of discussion beyond question, the matter is never so simple, in either pedagogical or practical terms. Another difficulty is the entirely chaotic nature of the net and the experience it provides. Again, while to some this is precisely the "decentered'.' postmodern experience that they desire in students initial encounter with Asian reli­gions' the practical effect of hoisting the sail while pulling both rudder and keel can be overwhelming for the student trying to navigate that first encounter (the oft-heard comparison likens the vast resources of the net to a huge library with its card catalog dumped on the floor). For these and other reasons I have found that the best way to bring, for example, the net into the classroom is to actually schedule "lab" sessions in addi­tion to the regular lecture, colloquium, or seminar meetings. The ante is upped a bit more.

Indeed, the issue of the instructor's time commitment for all of this is not trivial. My experience is that using one or another form of electronic discussion in the classroom increases my time obligation almost 40% or more. Keeping up with the online discussions, commenting on electronic paper submissions (it is rather hard to "mark up" electronic copy as you would paper), helping students as they learn the technology, negotiating with your local academic computer support staff, perhaps learning the vagaries of listserve management or even a programming language-all this takes a significant amount of time and planning over and beyond that required for a traditional class. In many quarters, however, it seems that such vigorous commitment to the latest trends in educational technology is now expected of faculty, especially as institutions fight for the tuition

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dollars of their students and against the image fostered by politicians and the media of a higher education that is elitist, overpriced, and out of touch with the needs of their students and vocational realities. I have no doubt whatsoever that state-of-the-art computer facilities and faculty who deploy technology in the classroom are very important in the planning of educational marketeers. Over 25 years ago Newt Gingrich understood this well: "We must design our campus to be computer-rich," Gingrich wrote, for

we must train our students so they can function in an increasingly computer­ized world .... Any steps toward a new library ought to consider the incred­ible speed of development in this field. It might be cheaper to keep our pre­sent building and spend any new building funds on the development of campus-or even community-wide communications systems .... The communications revolution has made isolation impossible .... West Georgia College cannot expect to prosper simply because it is the only college in town ... students can move to the college of their choice or away from a college that displeases them.5

As with the expectation of a productivity increase discussed above, there is definitely a commodity and sales value attached to the use of technol­ogy in the classroom. Computers might have snuck in through the back door of the liberal arts as fancy typewriters, but with very little attention to pedagogical and institutional implications they have quickly come to be showcased as front-page items in the promotional literature.

Text archives The aspect of computer use that promises to have the most impact on our work as research scholars is the development of large archives of machine readable materials that may be searched, collated, and otherwise manipulated in ways unimaginable even a few decades earlier. Concor­dances, for example, have always been an important tool of text research but have rarely been produced in Buddhist studies due to the huge corpus

5. From a report written by Newt Gingrich in 1971 as an assistant professor at West Georgia College, published in "Friend and Foe: The Wired Inter­view," Wired 3.08 (1995): 111 and 162; also available at http://www. hotwired.comlLiblWiredl). Related to this is the equally undeniable fact that many administrators have become enamored of technology as a possible way to control faculty costs wherever possible. This seems especially true of language instruction, which has traditionally made heavy use of temporary and part-time staff and TA's, but it is not limited to those fields.

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that we work with, funding priorities, and other factors. Back in the early 1970's, for example, Robert Thurman wrote an NEH proposal to begin a collective project to input Buddhist materials, but, as with several later proposals to begin the input of scriptural canons, it was never funded. Thus this most promising aspect of computer use has been rather slow in getting off the ground, especially when compared to the progress made in other fields similarly concerned with texts-the Thesaurus Lin­guae Graecae project, as but one illustration, now includes over 57 mil­lion words of ancient Greek text material on CD-ROM.6 Fortunately, this is beginning to change and several large projects are beginning to bear fruit, most notably the Asian Classics Input Project begun by Michael Roach (http://acip.princeton.edu),7 the text input projects of Urs App at the International Research Institute for Zen Buddhism (detailed information can be had at The Electronic Bodhidharma Web site, http: //iijnet.or.jp/iriz/irizhtml/irizhome.htm), the Coombspapers collections of the Australian National University (start with their Buddhist Studies World Wide Web Virtual Library, http://coombs.anu.edu.auIWWWVL­Buddhism.html) and, growing out of Thurman's proposals, the various canon input projects of Lew Lancaster's international Electronic Bud­dhist Text Initiative. 8 One particular success of Professor Lancaster's efforts is that Mahidol University's textbase of the entire Thai edition of the Pali scriptures is now available on CD-ROM from Scholar's Press, and other canon input projects are underway in Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Japan.9

The sort of philological analysis and other studies that these archives will for the first time allow means that the extensive application of the methods of higher criticism (applied to the vastly more compact Biblical

6. For rough comparison, the Thai edition of the Pali canon contains over six million "morphological words," and an average Taisho volume contains approximately 1.2 million Chinese characters. 7. See also "A Diamond-Cutter Like No Other: The Many Facets of Michael Roach," Tricycle 3.4 (1994): 64-69. 8. For descriptions of all of the various input projects and much more check the resources at The Electronic Bodhidharma site (http://iijnet.or.jp/iriz/ irizhtmllirizhome.htm). 9. Professor Lancaster is also chair of the Electronic Publications Committee of the American Academy of Religion which, through Scholar's Press, has published the Multimedia Dictionary of Shinto and Japanese Life: Interactive Introduction to Japanese Culture and Classics by Shigeru Handa (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994).

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materials long ago) will soon be possible in the field of Buddhist studies as well. Author attribution studies, stylistic inquiry, historical, institu­tional and demographic analysis-research that used to require a lifetime of familiarity with a single text or author's ouevre will indeed be accomplished with almost the press of a single key, and when all occur­rences of a term, phrase, or textual variant in a given corpus can immedi­ately be accessed and compared online the very notion of printed concor­dances and even critical editions necessarily changes. Translator's lexi­cons, dictionaries, and even human-assisted machine translation are like­wise all on the horizon. to On top of this is the promise of greatly low­ered costs associated with electronic distribution-after all, there are tremendous savings to be had when a sixty volume set of books can be reproduced on CD-ROM for a dollar or so (and with the quad density CD-ROM, terabyte storage systems, and fractal compression algorithms of next year's technology revolution it is not unreasonable to contemplate all known canons of Buddhist materials online and portable).

One important aspect of the input of texts is the wide-spread recogni­tion of the need to "mark" or tag texts as part of the input process. "Markup" means to mark the text for content and structural elements, elements as basic as title, author, page, and paragraph or as complex and detailed as morphological and syntactic (e. g., Sanskrit sa1JUlhi). As a simple illustration of how helpful this could be, imagine that you have a full text database of all epigraphical records from the T' ang dynasty. A lot could be done with the plain text alone in such a database, but you would still have no way of searching for, say, all of the donors, or all of the calligraphers, or even all of the sites of the monuments unless each of these elements were somehow tagged within the text itself; this is what a "markup" language provides. II The most common markup language at present is SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), while the related Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEl) provide specific standards for literary and humanities markup. 12

10. See, for example, the online dictionary of Buddhist Chinese terms at http: Ilwww2.gol.comlusers/acmuller/. 11. Markup can also be used with visual or graphic materials, and I, for one, think that the inclusion of images of the original texts should be an integral part of the archival process. 12. Cf. http://www.sil.org/sgml/sgml.html for full descriptions of both SG­ML and TEl, as well as pointers to various sites that archive SGML software, detail various text archive projects, and the like.

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Still, the process of making machine-readable archives of texts avail­able is slow and filled with pitfalls for the unwary, often involving thorny and divisive copyright issues as well as technological challenge and traditional editorial wisdom. l3 Flaunting many of these conventions, I was able to publish electronic versions of the Sanskrit and Tibetan editions of the Prajfiaparamita-h.rdaya-siUra a number of years ago 14 but many other projects (including the CD-ROM edition of the Pali Text Society corpus) have run into considerable snags on this front. Further, it is often hard to make publishers realize that electronic distribution of texts is significantly different than printed books, conceptually closer to licensing than to outright sales and resembling video and audio produc­tion and distribution rather than book publishing. So, for example, because of the great cost of inputting text materials and the ease with which they can be copied, publishers often resort to protection schemes or exorbitant fees to guard their investment. As but one illustration, recent reports put the impending electronic version of the Taisho canon at almost $300.00 per volume, exactly the opposite of the reduced-cost benefit that technology is supposed to confer. In this regard the Asian Classics Input Project and the International Research Institute for Zen Buddhism should be praised for their commitment to the free distribution of their work.

The technological hurdles involved in the creation of these archives are also formidable.1 5 Questions of coding, for example (the format the computer uses internally to store the text) have long been among the most intractable in the field of Asian studies generally, due in large part to the many and competing national and market standards.16 How will

l3. See the Electronic Bodhidharma site mentioned above for discussion of some of these issues. 14. Included on the Packard Humanities Institute / Center for the Computer Analysis of Texts CD-ROM (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1989); the Tibetan text was supplied by Bill Kirtz. 15. The Rutgers I Princeton Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities maintains information on all aspects of this endeavor; they may be reached at http://cethmac.princeton.edu/CETHIceth.html 16. See The Electronic Bodhidharma (http://www.iijnet.or.jp/iriz/irizhtml/ multilin.htm) for a discussion of different formats and the importance of retaining as much information as possible in the master data set, the solution implemented at their institute, and various tools for converting among the Chinese and Japanese standards; see also the files on the Indology gopher (start from http://www.ucl.ac.ukl-ucgadkw/indology.html) for a description of the

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Japanese publishers encode Chinese texts? How will mainland Chinese scholars read texts input with the Taiwanese standards? Although new standards such as Unicode promise to solve these questions (and eventu­ally they will be solved), the situation at present is still a mess. In an International Association of Buddhist Studies presentation over ten years ago I noted that "the internal storage of CJK [i. e., Chinese, Japanese, and Korean] characters is an issue that is difficult but one whose solution is essential to the wide-spread use of computers in all fields of Asian studies."17 It amazes me that so little has changed on this front, even with regard to the vastly easier problem of Sanskrit diacritics: if I move a text from my PC to my Mac, the latter still cannot handle the dot under the vocalic-r without significant effort on my part!

We have a long way to go before the promised fruits of the technology revolution are fully realized, for until the technology is truly transparent and does not require a separate study in its own right it will remain more of an impediment than a boon; it is therefore understandable that many scholars complain that time spent learning technology is time detracted from the business at hand and are hence suspicious of the extravagant claims made by the savants of the future. There are also, as I have tried to indicate, numerous issues related to the commodification of knowledge that demand our attention, because those same savants are no doubt cor­rect in predicting that every aspect of our life will indeed be affected by computers (if it isn't already). It is an interesting fact that in spite of the importance of technology to the corporate, industrial, and military world, it is the academy that is pushing the edge forward, particularly in the realm of electronic communications. How we harness the power of net­worked resources and how it affects the quality of our life, therefore, is something that we definitely need to think about. The International Association for Buddhist Studies, for example, is a global network of Buddhologists, yet as I write these words I wonder if my survey of com­puter technology is equally relevant to all, or if we too are ending up as part of a global culture of technology haves and have-nots? What role do we as scholars play in the changing face of knowledge production, and how does that role interface with our institutional and educational responsibilities? After serving for many years on my college's advisory

Classical Sanskrit and Classical Sanskrit Extended (CS / CSX) standards adopted at the 8th World Sanskrit Congress (Vienna, 1990). 17. "Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Language Processing: The Present and Future of the Electronic Buddho1ogist," Seventh Conference of the Interna­tional Association of Buddhist Studies, Bologna, 1984.

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committee for academic computing I am convinced that while these are neither easy questions nor solely of interest to Buddhologists, neither are they matters that we can safely ignore. As Richard Hayes put it, c:yberspace "is not a karma-free zone."18 And so I think it important that as we harness technology to the needs of our field we in fact resist the simple rhetoric of product and commodity and instead remember that as educators, research scholars, and yes, even as administrators, we have a deep responsiblity to critical thinking and learning, regardless of how that fits into the assembly-line procedures of technology implementation advocated by politicians and cost-cutting administrators alike. The cost of playing the game-the ante-needs to be considered.

Where, then, does all of this lead? Although we don't yet have the wetware version of the tripitika (the DNA-encoded "canon on a strand"), we do have the software version of at least one Buddhist canon-but has anything really changed about the way Buddhologists go about their business because of it? In a very important sense, of course, the answer is "no." Whether we peruse ancient manuscripts, xerox copies, microfiche, or CD-ROMs, the method of investigation stays basically the same, though technology will hopefully provide new tools to make some of our chores easier. Perhaps it won't be so far off that some of the text­critical research that has eluded our field will be undertaken, but this is more a matter of depth of coverage or analysis than a different method altogether. Indeed, I have always thought that one of the reasons that I am so enamored of computers is because they enhance the excitement of being very close to the text itself, for the virtual reality of online text has its own physical reality as well-whether ASCII code or an ancient

18. "[The Internet] is anything but environmentally friendly, economical, democratic and egalitarian. Much delusion surrounds this toy of the rich. When I occasionally rail against the Internet, the main thing I am trying to do is to make people a little more aware of the fact that this is not a karma-free zone. Even here in cyberspace we have to think carefully about the conse­quences of our actions." Richard Hayes, "The Perception of 'Karma-Free' Cyberzones" CyberSangha 6 (summer, 1995): 17. Lest anybody mistake Pro­fessor Hayes for one of the so-called "neo-Luddites" that are gathering head­lines these days (ct. "Return of the Luddites," Wired, 3.06 [June, 1995]: 162 ft, and "Interview with the Luddite," ibid.: 166 ff), it should be noted that he has been a long-time moderator of the BUDDHA-L discussion list (and one of the most frequent contributors to both BUDDHA-L and BUDDHIST), is on the editorial board of the electronic Journal of Buddhist Ethics, and is a mem­ber of his university's committee for computer policy (which prompted the above remarks).

322 JIABS 18.2

codex, code, after all, is code. To be sure, ink, palm1eaf, and the San­skrit language are very different media from mouse, computer display, and the Japanese Industrial Standard encoding system, but it is nonethe­less equally true that working with fonts, diacritics, archives, and text markup is quintessentially the work of the textual scholar, and I, for one, look forward to more of it in the years to come.