Book Notes: Buddhism and Language: A Study of Indo-Tibetan Scholasticism

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Book Notes: Buddhism and Language: A Study of Indo-Tibetan Scholasticism

By Jose Ignacio Cabezon

Philosophy East and West

Vol. 46, No. 2 (April 1996), pp. 294-295

Copyright 1996 by University of Hawaii Press

Hawaii, USA

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p. 294 Buddhism and Language: A Study of Indo-Tibetan Scholasticism Philosophy East and West, Vol. 46, No. 2 (April 1996)

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 (Vaibhāṣika, Sautrāntika, Prāmāṇika, Prāsaṅgika, and Svātantrika) and their representatives (Vasubandhu, Dharmakīrti) 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

p. 295 Buddhism and Language: A Study of Indo-Tibetan Scholasticism Philosophy East and West, Vol. 46, No. 2 (April 1996)

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.