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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 145
LUIS O. GOMEZ
Unspoken Paradigms:
Meanderings through the Metaphors of a Field 183
TOM TILLEMANS
Remarks on Philology 269
C. W. HUNTINGTON, JR.
A Way of Reading 279
JAMIE HUBBARD
Upping the Ante:
budstud@millenium.end.edu 309
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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 Understand-
ing (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, Abhidharmakoabhii~ya i.2b
and ii.24 (prajiiii dharmapravicayaf:z), and PrajfHikaramati, Bodhicaryii-
vatiirapaiijikii 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.
RUEGG 149
II
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.
150 JIABS 18.2
III
IV
v
For my part, I am inclined to think that the approach to the understand-
ing and analysis of our sources must initially be what has been termed
"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 tra-
ditions. 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 intelli-
gently 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 ven-
tured that careful "ernic" analysis can provide as good a foundation as
any for generalizing and comparative study, one that will not superim-
pose 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 say-
ing that in proceeding along these channels it will always be necessary to
steer clear of the Scylla of radical relativism-which would wish hermet-
ically to enclose each culture in its own categories-as well as of the
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, histori-
cal, 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 philologi-
cal and non-philological issues in studies on eastern philosophies and reli-
gions," 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.
RUEGG 159
metaphor, one might evoke the idea of a (spiritual) "gene";23 and in ana-
lysing 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 mod-
ern 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.
160 JIABS 18.2
26. By speaking of a crude and inhibiting fonn of the hermeneutic circle ref-
erence is being made here to the negative, imprisoning effect of the circle, not
to the positive nature of the hermeneutic circle as understanding in contextu-
ality and historicality.
27. On the circle in philosophical hermeneutics, see e. g. H.-G. Gadamer,
Wahrheit und Methode 3 (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).
162 JIABS 18.2
VI
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.
RUEGG 163
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.3 o
VII
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.
164 JIABS 18.2
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 Tun-
huang 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
RUEGG 165
already accessible, these are materials that have often been neglected
when preparing editions of texts, something that is of course understand-
able in view of their very great abundance.
In sum, the textual transmission of fundamental works such as the Rat-
nagotravibhaga 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 Ratnagotra-
vibhiiga," 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 = vinirmuk-
taklesakosa in a sutra passage defining the relation between the tathiigata-
garbha 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 para-
canonical, 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 Madhyamakiivatara-
kiirikiis 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),
166 JIABS 18.2
(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 scrip-
tural sources of the Sravakayana.3 6 This search in turn raises the prob-
1em of continuities and discontinuities between the Mahayana and the
Sravakayana.
(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 par-
ticular the Prajiiaparamita sutras, and in the Abhisamayalaf!tkara-
another 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 heteroge-
neous, 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 differ-
ently, garbha being usually interpretable in the Indian and Tibetan tra-
ditions as Embryo or Seed, or as Essence (sfiin po), whereas in the
Sino-Japanese tradition the value of Womb (tsang) has become estab-
lished. 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 some-
times being done nowadays. This is, then, a difference that has often
been overlooked in modern discussions of the doctrine of buddha-
nature.
168 JIABS 18.2
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 be-
tween 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 un-
derstanding and evaluating religious, philosophical and hermeneutical ideas.
RUEGG 169
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]).
170 JIABS 18.2
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 buddhahood or the Fruit ('bras bu) (vaimalyavisuddhi / parisud-
dhi = 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 pen-
chiao 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 signifi-
cance 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 sys-
temic (rather than historical) exegesis of the philosophical and herme-
neutical 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).
RUEGG 171
43. See D. Seyfort Ruegg, op. cit., 393 ff. Gun than indeed composed a trea-
tise 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 fal-
lacy 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 ex-
pressed 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 dGe-
lugs-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 synchronic-
systemic 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 sectar-
ian likes and dislikes of investigators.
172 JIABS 18.2
VIII
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.
IX
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 them-
selves 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 uni-
versal monothetic essence throughout, its traditions show over arching
continuities and what may be called lattices of polythetic "family resem-
blances." 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.
XI
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 Bodhicaryiivatiira-
pafijikii 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 Maha-
yana," 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 bhaga-
vatii 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 pas-
sage 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 bud-
dhabhii~i[tam jfiiitavyam].
RUEGG 181
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) presupposi-
tions 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 rea-
sons 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
183
184 JIABS 18.2
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 mysti-
fication 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.
GOMEZ 185
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 tradi-
tional 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 Bud-
dhist Studies in the Academy, (2) a middle length survey of issues in con-
temporary 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 his-
tory of the canons of contemporary Buddhist Studies.4 The last unit
includes, furthermore, reflections on the way in which the scholarly con-
structs 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 acci-
dents in the encounter of the Western academy with Asian Buddhist tradi-
tions-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.
186 JIABS 18.2
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 prole-
gomena 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 appli-
cation 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
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 disci-
plines have suffered major transformations. A shift from art and avoca-
tion to profession has changed radically the meaning of the word
"philosophy," for instance. This same shift has changed humanistic dis-
course 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 sel-
dom, if ever, a single set of such modes. It may include a set of norms-
especially 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 sup-
port 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 dis-
cipline 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 audi-
ence, 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 hon-
estly 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-
188 JIABS 18.2
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 "audi-
ence" 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 aca-
demic 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 intellec-
tual traditions-depends not only on the processes and means of produc-
tion associated with it, or on its social context, or on the explicitly recog-
nized 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 illu-
sion: 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.
G6MEZ 189
Nevertheless, even within the very limited circle of that minority of privi-
leged 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 inge-
niously, 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 fos-
silized; 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).
192 JIABS 18.2
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.
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 commen-
taries. 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 con-
straints 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).1 0
Jerome McGann, offering a "critique of modern textual criticism"
(1983), reveals the limitations of a model of textual transmission that pre-
supposes 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).
GOMEZ 197
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 cre-
ator, and the ideas, and the words, and the book form some sort of coher-
ent whole, perhaps an unchanging unity. We live in the hope that what-
ever 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 sim-
ple 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 con-
text of the discourse they created. Buddhist words and works in particu-
lar, 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 lit-
erature 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 gen-
erally. 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
198 JIABS 18.2
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.
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.
200 JIABS 18.2
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 proselytiz-
ing 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 tradi-
tional 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 cen-
sorial 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 sepa-
rated 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 tradi-
tion 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-
GOMEZ 203
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).
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 ten-
dency and fashion, and inevitable blinds us to other perspectives. The net
effect on humanities and humanistic learning, and, what is more impor-
tant, 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 per-
ceive on first blush-after all, this degree of secularization and devalua-
tion 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 exagger-
ated inflation of the "field" approach to Buddhism that excludes the tex-
tual tradition and the canons that guided that tradition may work in sup-
port 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.1 2
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 communi-
ties 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 indus-
trialized world continues to be dominated by the ideals of European culture.
206 JIABS 18.2
all of which have not only theoretical interest but also practical con-
sequences.
"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, religious-
of 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 particu-
lar, the philosophical investigation of the process, the possibility, the
meaning, and the ends of scholarly investigation generally. By "criti-
cism" I mean primarily the last of these meanings, and include the inves-
tigation of comparative issues in doctrine, sociology, etc., as long as they
are conscious efforts to define the nature of our relationship to the mate-
rials, 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 com-
ing 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
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 self-
examination. 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).
14. I suggest the reader juxtapose this quotation with the passage from Saint
Bonaventura quoted below.
212 JIABS 18.2
[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 concep-
tion 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.1 5
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.
214 JIABS 18.2
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 contem-
porary English expression has it. I would venture more, even for those
who at one time or another have seen in some fragment of Buddhist tradi-
tion 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 expe-
rience 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" (Le6n-
Portilla 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 oth-
ers-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 pre-
sumptuous? 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
216 JIABS 18.2
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 dark-
ness and need much more light. Conversation and deliberation may be
the only tools at our disposal.
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230 JIABS 18.2
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 grati-
tude 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).
231
232 JIABS 18.2
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 Barabuur: 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 Misunder-
standing 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 Bud-
dhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), considers social prac-
tices, that is, "the actual thought and practice of most Buddhists," to be indis-
pensable to the understanding of "intellectual Buddhism": "I have tried to
show that the most abstract forms of its (Buddhismis) imaginative representa-
tions-what we call its 'ideas' -are intimately connected with, and inextrica-
ble from, the presuppositions and institutional framework of Buddhist culture
234 JIABS 18.2
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 bud-
dhologists based in North American institutions of higher education see them-
selves 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 dis-
tinctive North American school of Buddhist Studies, it is because geographi-
cally 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, self-
enclosed 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 Observa-
tions" p. 104, sees in the fact that Buddhist Studies draws on "philology, his-
tory, 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."
236 JIABS 18.2
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 histori-
cally. 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 'Enlighten-
ment' in Early Buddhism," eds. K. Bruhn and A. Wezler, Studien zum lainis-
mus und Buddhismus, Gedenkschrift fUr Ludwig Alsdorf, Alt- und Neu Indis-
che 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
CABEZON 239
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 prac-
tices and methods of textual criticism from De Man to the present day
that is virtually unknown to Buddhist Studies.1 6 The literature of this
Virginia Press, 1987); and E. J. Kenney, The Classical Text: Aspects of Edit-
ing 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 Stud-
ies 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.
CABEZON 241
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 Bud-
dhist 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 interd-
siciplinary 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
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 lan-
guages, 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 insuffi-
cient 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 say-
ing "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 pri-
ority. 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.
CABEZON 243
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
Now there are various ways of gleaning from these caricatures the dif-
ferent perspectives on methodological issues that today divide the field.
One such way consists of identifying the perspectives or vantage points
CABEZ6N 245
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 writ-
ten 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 implied 23-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.2 5 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 Per-
spectives," 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 fur-
ther 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 inter-
pretation. The goal of scholarship is to allow texts to speak for them-
selves. 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 anal-
ysis 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 'pro-
gramme' ... 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
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 fol-
lowing 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."
CABEZON 247
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 stu-
dent 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 see-
ing the texts purely as philological material and forgetting that for the Bud-
dhist they are sacred texts which proclaim a message of salvation" (p. 26).
Though never rejecting the importance of philology, it is clear from this pas-
sage that de Jong sees philology as incomplete and in need of being supple-
mented 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 dis-
cussion 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 criti-
cism 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 characteri-
zation of Foucault's view of authorial subjectivity in The Lives of Michel
Foucault (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993) xiv-xvi.
CABEZON 249
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 con-
cerning 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 philologi-
cal standards of accuracy and rigor. Hence, pure positivists and interpre-
tivists are fictions, but though fictions there are some heuristic advan-
tages in considering them. Their most important function for our pur-
poses 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?
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.
252 JIABS 18.2
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 mod-
ern 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 scho-
lar'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 stan-
dards 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 textu-
ality 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.
CABEZON 253
for what constitutes an acceptable doctoral dissertation topic, and for that
matter criteria for research funding evaluation and even tenure and pro-
motion 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 philologi-
cal 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 characteris-
tic of scholarly research. Ironically, this is due in large part to the pic-
ture that many philologists have themselves painted of their own spe-
cialty. Philological work is seen as lacking originality because it is
believed-falsely it seems to me-to consist of the mechanical reconsti-
tution of another author's work. Hence, the editing of texts, the compi-
lation 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
56. The dividing line between these three is not always very precise. For
example, some authors, ostensibly writing as philosophers, often exhibit theo-
logical 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 nor-
mative 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 Buddho-
logy (this is reiterated on p. 172 of his essay), implies that philosophical and
normative methodological treatment of issues in the field falls outside of Bud-
dhist Studies / Buddhology proper. Ironically, it implies that his own essay-
in large part normative~annot be considered a piece of buddhological schol-
arship. 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 par-
ticular work deals explicitly with the assessment and determination of the truth
258 JIABS 18.2
59. The work of Hakamaya Noriaki and Matsumoto Shiro might be consid-
ered 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 fig-
ures. 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. Interpenetra-
tion (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, Anal-
ysis and Reconstruction of Buddhism (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1993); and Anne Carolyn Klein, Meeting the Great Bliss Queen: Bud-
dhists, 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, phi-
losophy and methodology represents one way of conceptualizing the differ-
ences 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 dis-
course become more prevalent in Buddhist Studies, as I think they will, we
would do well to consider the latter literature in a serious manner.
260 JIABS 18.2
68. It is no accident, for example, that when J. W. de Jong wrote his master-
ful "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 schol-
arly 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 Bud-
dhist 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.
CABEZ6N 263
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 Dia-
logue: Tibetan Lamas and Gurung Shamans in Nepal (Madison: The Univer-
sity 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 tex-
tuallanguage ... cannot determine the meaning of these rites. Each time they
are enacted or commented upon they incorporate traces of local folk con-
sciousness 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).
264 JIABS 18.2
77. See Peter N. Gregory, ed., Sudden and Gradual: Approaches to Enlight-
enment 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
CABEZON 265
and literary criticism. 82 To give heed to these trends in the broader intel-
lectual 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 con-
versations that are taking place in the broader intellectual community.
The views just outlined clearly emerge out of an interpretivist frame-
work. The positivist response to this kind of scholarship is that it is fad-
dish and that it dilutes the scholarly worth of the discipline. It is suffi-
ciently difficult to gain the expertise necessary to engage in sound schol-
arship 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
area and time period is already pushing human limits to the extreme, how
can we expect worthwhile scholarship to emerge from the pens of bud-
dhologists who attempt broader forms even of intracultural contextual-
ization, 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 disci-
plines to buddhological ends? Is this not a form of methodological para-
sitism that shows little by way of innovation? If capitulation to the cur-
rent fads in theory is the price of admission into the broader conversa-
tion' then perhaps better to send one's regrets.
Although the- implications of this form of analysis are only now just
beginning to be felt in Buddhist Studies,85 its impact has had tremen-
dous-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 activi-
ties 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 theo-
rists 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 admis-
sion 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. Scholar-
ship 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 Let-
tres (Lausanne).
86. Consider the way in which Edward Said's Orientalism (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978) has already affected fields like contempo-
rary Indian and Islamic Studies, for example.
268 JIABS 18.2
Conclusion
What I have just described are some of the issues around which the criti-
cal 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 resolu-
tions (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-some-
thing 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 emerg-
ing critical literature in the field there already exists a tendency to char-
acterize each other's positions in these ways; (b) many of these character-
izations 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 solu-
tion-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
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 philolo-
gists when he recently said:
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 Dharma-
krrtis," Asiatica, Festschrift F. Weller (1954): 154. The passage was trans-
lated 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 Vada-
nyaya," Studies in the Buddhist Epistemological Tradition, ed. E. Steinkellner
(Vienna: Osterreichische Akadernie def Wissenschaften) 311.
TILLEMANS 271
lenged. Granted there probably are cases, like belief in rationality itself
or in the existence of other minds, etc., where, to adopt the Wittgen-
steinian 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 neo-
Kantian understanding of Dignaga and DharmakIrti's idea of svalak~al}a
is wrong, if we are staying close to the basic Kantian ideas, or meaning-
less 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 non-
sequitur 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 impor-
tant 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
terms and concepts which would have been unknown to the author him-
self-"unknown" in the sense that he didn't have anything at all like
equivalents to those terms in his vocabulary (and might well have con-
siderable 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 auc-
toris 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 subjec-
tively' and leans towards the position of Hirsch; Huntington, in embrac-
ing 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
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."
TILLEMANS 277
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 argu-
ments 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.l 2 While I'm certainly not in a position
to rule out a sophisticated pragmatism, what I would like to stress force-
fully 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-intel-
lectual 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 philol-
ogy 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.
A Way of Reading
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 sol-
diers, 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 com-
panion for years. Six hundred pages of Sanskrit grammar, six hundred
closely lined pages of declensions and conjugations that must be commit-
ted 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-
279
280 JIABS 18.2
or, more usually, to do something ... but [Huntington] does not pay suffi-
cient 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 theo-
rists are on firmer ground than Rorty (or Huntington)." (Griffiths 1991,
413-414)
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. Never-
theless, as text-critical scholars with an interest in Buddhist thought we
can scarcely avoid being drawn into a conversation between our col-
leagues 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 cul-
tivation 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
cal Inquiry between 1982 and 1985. The book takes its name from an
essay by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels titled "Against The-
ory," 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, includ-
ing Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish-both of whom were conunissioned
to write special pieces for this volume, which has attained, in some cir-
cles, 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 sev-
eral 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)
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-con-
sciously committed to defending some alternative form of theoretical dis-
course. 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" the-
ory, 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 theoreti-
cal because what it seeks is a method, a recipe with premeasured ingredi-
ents 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 antifounda-
tionalist theory in all its various guises is that in disposing of any objec-
288 JIABS 18.2
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 imagina-
tion. 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 confer-
ence 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:
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)
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)
290 JIABS 18.2
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
294 JIABS 18.2
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 meta-
physics 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)
knowledge on the foundation of a far more powerful will: the will to igno-
rance, 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 sensitiv-
ity to problems of morality and religion. What is required is a sophisti-
cated concept of religious discourse to which we could apply the analyti-
cal 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 par-
ticular.. .. Thus every living and healthy religion has a marked idiosyn-
crasy; 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 in-
whether we expect ever to pass wholly over into it or not-is what we mean
by having religion. (Cited in Zaleski 1987, 201-202)
One need not abandon the idea that there is an ultimate truth in order to rec-
ognize 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 the-
ology, for its proper task is not to describe the truth but to promote and
assist the quest for truth. (Zaleski 1987, 192-193)
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 Com-
edy to meet the need for orientation. .. they call on us to inhabit this cos-
mos, by overcoming the fear or forgetfulness that makes us insensible to life
as to death. (Zaleski 1987, 202-203)
IV
It's time to return to the problem with which this paper began: How
does Nagarjuna's apophatic language accomplish its philosophical / reli-
gious work? How are we to "make sense" of the Madhyamaka's uncom-
promising 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 interpre-
tation and of philosophy, both a theoretical problem of the source of tex-
tual 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
300 JIABS 18.2
this as well the New Pragmatists have borrowed from Wittgenstein, who
wrote:
Present-day academic philosophers are far more prone to challenge the cre-
dentials 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.
HUNTINGTON 303
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 sup-
pose 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)
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 his-
tory . .. 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
304 JIABS 18.2
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-
306 JIABS 18.2
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 chil-
dren! (Nietzsche 1966,57)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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 profes-
sors 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 in-
crease 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 knowl-
edge 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 discus-
sions 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?).
2. See also "Indra's Net and the Internet: Three Scholars Launch New Elec-
tronic Serial on Buddhist Ethics," Religious Studies News (1995): 14.
HUBBARD 313
3. Beyond its own publishing and conference activities, the Journal of Bud-
dhist 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 con-
tains links or pointers to over eighty other net sites, such as the Indology
gopher server (where you can get machine readable copies of the Maha-
bharata or Buddhacarita, Sanskrit fonts, and the like), Sakyadhita (the Inter-
national 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.
314 JIABS 18.2
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 dis-
cussion 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 biblio-
graphical 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 class-
room 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
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
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. Concor-
dances, for example, have always been an important tool of text research
but have rarely been produced in Buddhist studies due to the huge corpus
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 Lin-
guae Graecae project, as but one illustration, now includes over 57 mil-
lion 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.auIWWWVL-
Buddhism.html) and, growing out of Thurman's proposals, the various
canon input projects of Lew Lancaster's international Electronic Bud-
dhist 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).
318 JIABS 18.2
materials long ago) will soon be possible in the field of Buddhist studies
as well. Author attribution studies, stylistic inquiry, historical, institu-
tional 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 occur-
rences of a term, phrase, or textual variant in a given corpus can immedi-
ately be accessed and compared online the very notion of printed concor-
dances and even critical editions necessarily changes. Translator's lexi-
cons, dictionaries, and even human-assisted machine translation are like-
wise all on the horizon. to On top of this is the promise of greatly low-
ered 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 recogni-
tion 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 SG-
ML and TEl, as well as pointers to various sites that archive SGML software,
detail various text archive projects, and the like.
HUBBARD 319
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
320 JIABS 18.2
codex, code, after all, is code. To be sure, ink, palm1eaf, and the San-
skrit language are very different media from mouse, computer display,
and the Japanese Industrial Standard encoding system, but it is nonethe-
less 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.