Buddhism and Language: A Study of Indo-Tibetan Scholasticism, by CABEZON, JOSE IGNACIO
Reviewed by Leonard W.J. van der Kuijp
The Journal of the American Oriental Society Vol.118 No.4 Oct 1998 pp.563-567
COPYRIGHT @ 1998 American Oriental Society
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This immensely ambitious study is somewhat of a disappointment. To
be sure, the author is to be commended for having thought of this
important enterprise and for having made an attempt at its
execution, but the results are, unfortunately, not very convincing,
and very often many of the judgments made are inadequate, premature,
or questionable. Many scholars of Indian and Indo-Tibetan Buddhist
studies (as well as those concerned with the history of ideas in the
Islamic world, the world of Judaism, and in China, to name but a few
other areas of cognate scholarly concern) have used the term
"scholasticism" in their writings without - what at first may have
been to their peril - having adequately addressed the issue of
whether this seemingly at once precise and yet rather vague term is
a commensurate "cross-cultural category," one that can be lifted out
of its intrinsic cultural context (pp. 11ff.) and placed in a prima
facie radically different one. In the first chapter of his book (pp.
11-26), the author argues at some length, and often in tortuous
prose, that it can be used as a hermeneutic category in his own area
of scholarly interest, namely Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies, as well
as elsewhere. But I must confess that a great deal of what he has to
say in these pages strikes me a trifle Quixotic and, perhaps, even
ultimately unnecessary and redundant, in that much of the substance
of his argumentation virtually (if not actually) presupposes the
pandemic essentialism of scholasticism and the scholastic method,
with its attendant Eurocentrism (if not imperialism! [p. 13]). True,
much of what has been written about scholasticism is predisposed to
take the thirteenth century and Thomas Aquinas as the defining era
of both scholasticism and its method. But this Procrustean view has
been eroding through the publication of a number of recent studies
in which opinions have come to diverge more and more widely, so much
so that the consensus seems to be that both scholasticism and its
method are of far greater conceptual fluidity than was suspected
hithertofore. I therefore doubt very much whether, and not only for
reasons that are political or sociological, anyone would still be
inclined to argue seriously that their use and applicability make
sense in a Thomistic or European medieval environment alone,
regardless of the terminological genesis of scholasticus and its
etymology. One of the best recent accounts of the numerous nuances
of scholasticism and its method in the context of medieval
philosophy may be found in L. M. de Rijk's Middeleeuwse
wijsbegeerte: Traditie en verniewing (= Medieval Philosophy:
Tradition and Innovation [Assen: Van Gorcum, 1977], 18-21, 25-27,
107-37. There is a [perhaps more useful?] French translation of the
second Dutch edition [1981]: La Philosophie au moyen age [Leiden: E.
J. Brill, 1985], 15-17, 20-21, 82-105). But I fail to understand why
Cabezon writes that "the Latin West's preoccupation with
incorporating Aristotle into religious scholarship is obviously one
of the idiosyncratic features of European scholasticism" (p. 25).
Beginning with Boethius (480-526), though the origins may in fact be
traced back to the Greeks, one of the most significant features of
the scholastic enterprise was the gradual acceptance of a literary
(and methodological) canon, especially in the form of Aristotle's
oeuvre, and this "canon" received an enormous boost in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries, when more of his writings and the
commentaries thereon became available in Western Europe through
Greek and Arabic manuscripts (the story is told in summary form by
B. G. Dod in "Aristoteles Latinus," in The Cambridge History of
Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. N. Kretzmann et al. [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982], 45-79). The adjective
"idiosyncratic," therefore, is hardly appropriate and, aside from
the Bible and a series of other texts and chrestomathic compendia,
the canonicity of Aristotle's oeuvre seems to me to be among the
most important defining features of the intellectual life of at
least the middle of Europe's medieval period. In fact, we find a
similar, but by no means identical situation in Tibetan Buddhism,
where the authority enjoyed by Dharmakirti's (ca. 600-660) writings
is a given fact in virtually all quarters and schools. Of course, we
can only speculate whether Dharmakirti's writings enjoyed the same
canonicity in late, say post-eighth-century, Indian Buddhism - and
the evidence that is out there suggests that they did not. But,
unlike the temporary proscription of some of Aristotle's works from
the Parisian academic scene in the early thirteenth century,
Dharmakirti's writings enjoyed fairly continuous study, first in
India until at least the fifteenth century and, with a minimum of
friction, in translation in the Tibetan cultural area from the
eleventh century to the present.
We read in the introduction (p. 1) that "it was customary in
classical Buddhist India to introduce a text by identifying its
'purpose' and its 'ultimate purpose.' Traditionally, the purpose was
considered to be the elucidation (literally, 'the making known') of
any one of a number of religio-philosophical subjects, and the
ultimate purpose (sometimes called the purpose of the purpose) was
usually identified as the attainment of the state of human
perfection known as enlightenment (bodhi)." Speaking scholastically,
on one level, we may query the terms "classical" and "traditionally"
in the sense of what kinds of temporal and conceptual boundaries
Cabezon is working with when he uses such expressions as "classical
Buddhist India" and its "tradition" as well as the wherefore of the
author's gloss for "elucidation," which certainly has nothing to do
with its Latin origins; also scholium, on p. 71, does not mean
"textual commentary" in general, but is more specifically used in
the sense of "(marginal) gloss." To be sure, these glosses could
then be turned into a bona fide commentary on a text when they
achieved a certain critical mass. An inquiry into the genesis of
exegesis, the factors that played a role in the "production" of a
commentary as well as its typology in the area of Indo-Tibetan
Buddhism remains an important desideratum. The goal - the Sanskrit
term prayojana (Tib.: dgos pa), rendered by Cabezon as "purpose,"
can also mean "goal, aim," so that prayojanaprayojana may also be
translated as "goal of the goal, aim of the aim" - of his book is
twofold: its purpose is to describe "one tradition of Indo-Tibetan
scholasticism" and its "ultimate purpose" is not to bring the reader
to an enlightening epiphany, but, rather more modestly, to make "a
case for the fact that scholasticism. . . can. . . as an abstract,
decontextualized notion, profitably serve as a topos in the
comparative philosophy of religion." (I think it preferable to
substitute theme for the potential topolatry of topos.) We then
learn that "its two purposes will have been fulfilled, if. . . the
reader (a) will have gained some understanding of the nature and
concerns of the scholastic philosophy of Buddhist India and Tibet,
(b) will come to accept that it is meaningful and insightful to
speak of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist philosophy as 'scholastic' in
character, and will agree that scholasticism . . . is a useful
theoretical construct in the cross-cultural study of philosophy."
Presumably, those familiar with forms of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist
thinking that come close to what is generally called "philosophy"
would neither be willing to dispute the suggestion that there is
such an entity as "Indo-Tibetan Buddhist scholasticism," nor find an
argumentation for it to be particularly "meaningful and insightful."
Arguably, the horse has already been dead for quite a while, or,
perhaps there was no horse to be flogged in the first place.
Moreover, the attentive reader will rightly want to ask when the
hermeneutics of "purpose" and "ultimate purpose" first appears in
the literature on a discursive and theoretical level, and what kind
of developments in orality and textuality these presuppose for
(Buddhist) India. Remarkably, the author is silent on this score,
even in the third and fourth chapters, where he ostensibly deals
with the nature of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist interpretation of scripture
and exegesis (pp. 53-87). Both categories appear in a hermeneutic
pentad that is usually referred to in Tibet by the expression dgos
'brel and occur, as was pointed on by E. Broido ("A Note on dgos
'brel," The Journal of the Tibet Society 3 [1983]: 5-19) in the
context of the exegesis of scripture qua (anonymous and
nonanonymous) tantric literature (and scientific, sastraic
commentarial literature, as well). Broido's paper is not referred to
in this book, but it notes that Tsong kha pa (1357-1419), the
"founder" and scholarch par excellence of the Dge lugs pa school
uses dgos pa (*prayojana) in the context of supreme buddhahood,
enlightenment, and therewith calls into question Cabezon's
characterization of both "purpose" and "ultimate purpose."
Vasubandhu's (fourth or fifth century) Vyakhyayukti (Logic of
Explanation), a work with which the author is quite familiar, having
been among the first to publish on it, describes yet another pentad
for the exegesis of scripture qua sutra without which a sutra cannot
be correctly explained, in which the first category is also
prayojana but where that of prayojanaprayojana is absent; see J. D.
Schoening, "Sutra Commentaries in Tibetan Translation," Tibetan
Literature: Studies in Genre, ed. J. I. Cabezon and R. R. Jackson
(Ithaca: Snow Lion, 1996), 118ff.
What is even more problematic in my opinion is the arbitrary role
Cabezon assigns in a disturbingly partisan fashion to the Dge lugs
pa school of Tibetan Buddhism. In his unsubstantiated and, indeed,
difficult to substantiate, view, this school embodies "arguably the
most sophisticated expression of Buddhist speculation regarding
language" (p. 4). Later, he declares less ambiguously that "this
school . . . represents the apex of a long tradition of Buddhist
scholasticism . . ." (p. 206, n. 13). Unless this is in fact argued
for (and of course it is not and cannot be - his "arguably" falls by
the wayside), the status ascribed to this school of thought is
purely imaginary - not to mention the fact that, "arguably," such a
value judgment ought to be wholly out of place in a study of this
kind. It is for this reason that this reader, at least, fails to
respond to Cabezon's lukewarm attempt at ecumenism by nonchalantly
dropping the names of a few philosophers belonging to other schools
of Tibetan Buddhism, the manner of which is both embarrassing and
gratuitous. Indeed, much, but not all, of what informs Cabezon's
sections on Dge lugs pa doctrine is already found elsewhere and
earlier in the Indo-Tibetan tradition, and is therefore hardly
specifically Dge lugs pa at all!
I indicated at the outset of this review that several key judgments
made in this book were premature or questionable, and a case in
point is surely the author's emphatic insistence that the ". . . Dge
lugs pa . . . have a strong commitment to logic as a method. . ."
and that ". . . this is an outgrowth of the fact that much of their
work is directed at creating a synthesis of the Madhyamaka and
Pramanika schools" (p. 147; see also pp. 117-18). Lest this undue
singling out of the merits of the Dge lugs pa lead the unsuspecting
reader astray, we may point out that we find analyses of central way
- Madhyamaka concepts to a significant extent already in late Indian
Buddhism, through the application of Dharmakirti's thinking, and, as
a result, also in what are so far the few available Tibetan texts on
Madhyamaka philosophy (written by scholars of especially the Bka'
gdams pa and Sa skya pa schools) that date from the eleventh to
fourteenth centuries. In other words, there is (again) nothing here
that is specific to Dge lugs pa. It is also strange, to say the
least, that the statement on p. 5, "in the works of the Dge lugs pa
school we. . . find one of the most complete and sophisticated
elucidations of language in all of Buddhist philosophical
literature," is substantiated only by a citation of Mkhas grub Dge
legs dpal bzang po's (1385-1438) Stong thun chen mo as a textual
instance (p. 207, n. 15). Cabezon then simply informs the reader
later on in the book (p. 158), in the middle of his argument, that
the point of the relevant passage "is obscure"! (see also p. 254, n.
19). The question the reader might then rightly ask is: obscure for
whom? And, if the meaning of the passage is opaque, how "meaningful
and insightful" can its citation be? In fact, the index of his own
published translation and study of this long and difficult treatise,
A Dose of Emptiness (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1992), has no entry for "language" and the one for "linguistic
symbols" (Tib.: brda; consistently spelled wrongly as rda) has but
three, and not one of these designates the passages addressed by the
author in this book. It also comes as a surprise that Cabezon has
not made use of, at a minimum, Mkhas grub's fairly substantial
deliberations on conceptual thought and language in, for example,
the Tshad ma sde bdun gyi rgyan yid kyi mun sel (Collected Works
[Zhol print], vol. tha [Dharamsala: Library of Tibetan Works and
Archives, 1981], 71-88, 114-19, 432-40). In any event, the book's
discussions of language, conceptual thought and religion never
really take off, and the argument's level of sophistication often
fails to transcend the platitudinous: "In any case, whether or not
religion or language is essential to human experience, both are
nonetheless extremely important to much of it" (p. 204, n. 3).
The main body of the text, a distant echo of the author's University
of Wisconsin doctoral dissertation of 1987, is divided into two
sections: "Language and Scripture" (pp. 29-112) and "Language and
Philosophy" (pp. 113-87), each of which is divided into four
chapters. It ends with a conclusion (pp. 189-99), a list of
abbreviations (pp. 201-2), notes (pp. 203-63), selected bibliography
(pp. 265-89), and indexes (pp. 291-99). Not only does the "Tibetan
and Sanskrit Sources" section of his bibliography (pp. 285-89)
suffer from more than a dozen spelling errors and omissions, not
counting the ubiquitous gsungs 'bum (read: gsung 'bum), khabs (read:
skabs; see also pp. 42, 201, 219, n. 37, etc.), and also Rtog dka'i
snang ba (read: Rtogs dka'i snang ba; see also pp. 201, 218, n. 28,
etc.), all of which may be due to the automaton in the
word-processor, but also in the text itself there are a substantial
number of misspellings of technical terms: e.g., p. 36, 'khrims and
bslabs pa should read khrims and bslab pa; p. 39, the Sanskrit and
Tibetan equivalents for "the thirty-seven limbs(?) conducive to
enlightenment" would yield something like
saptatrimsadbodhipaksadharmah and byang chub kyi phyogs dang mthun
pa sum cu rtsa bdun, not bodhipaksadharma and byang chub kyi yan
lag; p. 40, dhatarah, vaktarah and pratipattarah ought to read
dhatarah, vaktarah and pratipattarah (had he checked the Tibetan
text, the author would have found that the equivalents of the first
two are not 'dzin pa po and smra ba po, but 'dzin byed pa and smra
byed [pa]; for metrical reasons, the Tibetan expressions are
singular nouns as opposed to the plurals of the original); p. 43,
rnam par rigs pa should read rnam par rig pa, etc., etc.; on p. 168,
the Tibetan translation of lokavyavahara in Candrakarti is 'jig rten
gyi tha snyad and not 'jig rten pa'i tha snyad - for which the
Sanskrit would be laukikavyavahara. We get the uneasy feeling that
Cabezon does not always sufficiently control his sources on p. 215,
n. 10, anent the meanings of the term dharma; on p. 34, at the very
beginning of his discussions of Indo-Tibetan scholasticism, he
states that "it is a pan-Tibetan opinion that the root text [scil.,
of Vasubandhu's Abhidharmakosa], which consists of verses,
represents the philosophically realist position of the Vaibhasika
(sic) . . . school, whereas in his commentary Vasubandhu frequently
adopts the position of a Sautrantika, a rival realist philosophical
movement." This is simply not true. No such "pan-Tibetan opinion"
exists. And it would be most irregular if it did, since Vasubandhu
composed a good number of verses contra the Vaibhasika (and others),
which he tagged in no uncertain linguistic fashion (for which, see,
e.g., the Abhidharmakola's first chapter, verses 3, 26 and 28) by
making unambiguous use of the Sanskrit adverb kiln and pronoun eke,
paralleled in the Tibetan translation by lo and zer. What I also
find quite surprising in Cabezon's study as a whole is the absence
of any references to those works of Sa skya Pandita (1182-1251) and
the Dge lugs pa scholar Ngag dbang bstan dar (1759-ca. 1840) that
focus expressly on what can only be called, now decontextually,
scholasticism and its method; see, respectively, D. P. Jackson, The
Entrance Gate for the Wise (Section III): Sa skya Pandita on Indian
and Tibetan Tradition of Pramana and Philosophical Debate, 2 vols.,
Wiener Studien zur Tibetologie und Buddhismuskunde, 17.1 and 2
(Wien, Arbeitskreis fur Tibetische und Buddhistische Studien
Universitat Wien, 1987); and the 'Chad rtsod rtsom gsum gyi rnam
gzhag (Collected Works, vol. Kha [New Delhi, 1971], 115-54. Both are
insightful and inform the Tibetan, if not the Indo-Tibetan,
discourse on the subject in a self-reflexive way.
Reading this book, one cannot easily shrug off the feeling that
Cabezon plays ducks and drakes with his sources, or does not play
them out to the full. Ironically, an extreme form of scholasticism
appears to have overtaken him in this book, for the reader is
bludgeoned with a plethora of citations of and references to
virtually everything under the sun, from Dante to the Mohist canons
in pre-Han and Han China, the Zohar, the medieval (another
cross-cultural category?) Islamic scholar Al-Hilli, etc., etc. And
not a few of these add nothing that is at first glance essential or
tangible to the arguments presented. We learn on p. xii of the
foreword that "Cabezon chooses to focus the main body of his text on
what Joachim Wach would have described as a 'classical example,'"
whereafter the origin of this phrase is annotated. This kind of
annotational gratuitousness and overkill really fails to get the job
done. Moreover, is it really necessary to gloss, in a scholarly
work, a translation from the French as "my own" (pp. 212, n. 11ff.)?
Has a basic knowledge of French become such a rarity in our time?
And is any conceptual or scholarly mileage gained from the now
precious use of lege instead of "read" or "i.e." - for instance,
"stage (lege realization)" or "worthwhile (lege orthodox)" on pp. 36
and 194? Less successful, but similarly literose, are "commentary ad
literam" (sic), whatever that may be; and "questiones" and
"sophismata," which we encounter on p. 71 as ahistorical
counterparts of a Buddhist commentarial style. Yes, something like
the quaestio, the quaestio disputata to be more precise, is found in
the tradition, but only in Tibetan writings, specifically in those
texts belonging to the rtsod yig genre in which a public disputation
between two scholars is reproduced as accurately as possible;
sometimes these appear to be similar to the so-called quaestiones
quodlibetales. No records of such texts are available from Indian
Buddhism, however, and I have no knowledge of the existence of even
an allusion to one in the Indian Buddhist literature. The
"sophismata" - for a translation of a collection of such puzzling
sentences (and commentaries), see, for example, N. and B. Kretzmann,
The Sophismata of Richard Kilvington (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1990) - have no counterpart in either Indian or Tibetan
Buddhism; no sophismata of the likes of "Gautama is blacker than
Dharmakirti begins to be black" or "Gautama moves two times faster
than Dharmakirti" are recorded anywhere in the literature of India
or Tibet (or anywhere else in the known universe) for consideration
and discussion.
Usually, it is in the footnotes that one looks for further
information or to find some clarification of a claim being made. A
case in point is the passage on p. 158 that occurs in what is
ostensibly a comparative discussion of the differences in the
approach to language and the ontological commitments of the
Sautrantikas and the Yogacarins (emphasis mine, even though I do not
once believe there are such doctrinal entities out there). I say
"ostensibly," because the author never really gets down to doing so,
is content with letting what he considers to have been the opinions
of Tsong kha pa and Mkhas grub decide what is involved here, without
one independent reference to the relevant Indian Buddhist dossier,
and informs us in passing on p. 156 that "finally, it is Mkhas grub
. . .'s assertion that the exegesis of his master, Tsong kha pa, on
this point [!] is the first native Tibetan exposition, both of the
linguistic interpretation and of its equivalence to the traditional
ontological one (nonduality)." In a footnote to this on p. 254 (n.
15), he refers the reader to pp. 52-53 of his A Dose of Emptiness,
where, however, I looked in vain for an assertion to this effect by
Mkhas grub. We also learn (on p. 158) that "according to Mkhas grub
rje [= Mkhas grub], and this is disputed by other Dge lugs pa
scholars, in the Sautrantika system for something to be a svalaksana
(rang mtshan) is for that thing to exist by virtue of its own
characteristic (rang gi mtshan nyid kyis grub pa) and vice versa."
Like so many, too many, other assertions, this statement is not at
all developed, and the annotation to this sentence (p. 255, n. 19)
is superfluous, uninformative and of no consequence.
Methodologically, it is important, nay, absolutely crucial, to be
aware of the philosophical context and aim of a treatise, that is to
say, from what angle the author writes or deals with a specific
problem. For example, in the Stong thun chen mo, Mkhas grub wears
the hat of a Madhyamaka specialist, whereas in his writings on logic
and epistemology he dons that of a logician and speculative
philosopher. Thus, if we wish to get a firmer grasp on Mkhas grub's
analysis of a Sautrantika view on the particular svalaksana, and not
merely on how he, as commentator of Madhyamaka doctrine, interpreted
the Indian (and Tibetan) Buddhist critique of a Sautrantika
ontology, then it is incumbent upon us to examine the appropriate
sources, in this case his Tshad ma sde bdun gyi rgyan yid kyi mun
sel (pp. 42-71) mentioned earlier, or the relevant passages of his
later Pramanavarttika exegesis, in which we cannot help but notice
that he has changed his mind on several issues.
Historians of Indo-Tibetan intellectual and cultural history will
find much in Cabezon's book that is both challenging and
interesting, but even more that is either not altogether immediately
relevant and convincing or that is too superficially treated. It is
precisely the book's absence of scholarly balance and conceptual
clarity which, in spite of the opening paragraphs of each chapter
that, with great fanfare, promise so much, result in it delivering
so little. At the end of the day, this foray makes an uneasy and
uncomforting read.
LEONARD W. J. VAN DER KUIJP HARVARD UNIVERSITY