Reviews the book Buddhism and Language

·期刊原文
Reviews the book 'Buddhism and Language:
A Study of Indo-Tibetan Scholasticism'

Jose Ignacio Cabezon
Philosophy East & West
Vol.46 No.2 Apr 1996
Pp.294-295
Copyright by University of Hawaii Press

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Buddhism and Language: A Study of Indo-Tibetan
Scholasticism. By Jose Ignacio Cabezon. Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1994. Pp. xiv + 299. Paper
$19.95.

The focus of Buddhism and Language is appropriately narrow
for its size, although the suggested implications of the
example that it sets are intriguingly broad. This monograph
focuses on the views of the dGe lugs pa school of Tibetan
Buddhism regarding the nature of language. This includes
issues regarding scripture--its authority, its relationship
to doctrine (dharma), its correct interpretation, and the
nature of the activity of writing commentary. It also
includes more generally philosophical issues such as the
relationship between language and reality, the nature (and
the point) of drawing inferences, the ways in which thoughts
and statements are validated, and the reason for the Buddha's
silence in response to certain metaphysical questions.
Because the dGe lugs pa school drew on and responded to a
variety of movements--not only in Tibet but also in
India--Indian schools (Vaibhasika, Sautrantika, Pramanika,
Prasangika, and Svatantrika) and their representatives
(Vasubandhu, Dharmakirti) are drawn into the discussion.
(Hence the "Indo-Tibetan" of the subtitle.) To maintain the
focus, the author presents the views of these (and of several
Tibetan) schools and representatives as they were understood
by the dGe lugs pa, and does not raise questions about the
accuracy or validity of their interpretations of others.

The broader implications are contained in the word
"scholasticism." For the author proposes that the
preoccupations characteristic of the Medieval schools in
Europe may be found elsewhere in the intellectual history of
the world--not only in movements generated in the "Buddhist
universities" of the fifth century C.E. and after but in
Jewish, Islamic, and Chinese (specifically Hui Shih, Kung-sun
Lung, and Mo Tzu) thought. In short "scholasticism," like
"religion," "tabu," and "Kadi-justice," is a term that can
usefully be detached from a specific historical context and
applied to an identifiable general phenomenon. We have in
"scholasticism" a name for certain preoccupations of a highly
literate (although the author is open to arguments to extend
his category to oral cultures) elite with the problems raised
by their reliance on language and texts and, as with the dGe
lugs pa, inclined to defend, to whatever extent they can,
what in the West is spoken of as the use of reason.