[Buddha-l] Are we sick of dogma yet? (1st of 2)

[Dan Lusthaus]

(this message has been cut into two posts to get under the 15k server limit)

Richard, your previous message was so conciliatory that I thought I'd be
generously conciliatory in response, but apparently you are itching for some
conflict, so let's have at it.

> > Ah, Franz! You seem to have picked up on something Richard intimated --
> > which is that the Santideva-type Madhyamaka is merely repackaged
> > Pudgalavada.
>
> I could not possibly have intimated such a thing, for it is not a thought
I
> have ever had. And now that the idea has been suggested to me, I think
it's
> almost perfectly ridiculous.

That you placed the Siderits book in the same context as the Priestley book,
and as a consequence of that pairing sought a neo-pudgalavada school in New
Mexico led some of us to that conclusion. I have recently heard Mark do his
Santideva ethics paper, and I can assure you that his reading of Santideva's
Madhyamaka thought is indistinguishable -- in countless details -- from what
the Sammitiya (= Pudgalavada) texts themselves say. Like you, many would see
such a comparison as ridiculous. That's because they have never carefully
worked through any Pudgalavadin texts, and have only bought into the
disparaging and distorted characterizations of "pudgalavada" that their
opponents constructed. Priestley's treatment was the beginning of a
corrective, but, since actual Pudgalavadin literature only survives in
Chinese translation, the resources on which he could draw was limited.

The book mentioned in an earlier message, viz. Bhikshu Thich Thien Chau,
_The Literature of the Personalists of Early Buddhism_. tr. from the French
by Sara Boin-Webb, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1999, offers careful readings
and partial translations of four pudgalavada texts preserved in Chinese:

1. T.25.1506. Sanfa du lun ("Three Dharmas Paramita Treatise," a
Vaatsiputriiya text) authored by Vasubhadra, translated by Gautama
Saṅghadeva in 391.
2. T.25.1505 Si ahanmu chao jie ("Commentary on the four Agamas"),
translated by Kumārabuddhi in 382
3. T.32.1649 Sanmidi bu lun ("Sammitiya school Treatise"), unknown
translator, sometime between 350-431.
4. T.24.1461 Lü ershi'er mingliao lun ("Precepts of the Twenty-two Vidyas"),
by Buddhatrāta, tr. in 568 by Paramārtha.

The last two are Sammitiya texts.

We are much in the Bhikshu's debt, since these are very difficult texts in
Chinese, all but the last in problematic translations Fourth century
translations pose many difficulties. Even Paramartha's translation has its
challenges. Thich does a superb job of sorting out the problems (and
admitting the difficulties). What emerges is that while each of the four
texts has its differences from the other, a consistent underlying philosophy
is explicitly and intelligently argued by each. And each begins with the
insistence that pudgala is not a dravya, but a praj~napti, a position they
ground in very germane Nikaya passages. One might recall that the title of
one of the Theravadin Abhidhamma canonical texts is Puggala-pa~n~nati
(Sanskritized: Pudgala-praj~napti; in the PTS English translation by B.C.
Law titled _Human Types_). They consistently argue that while it is merely a
heuristic, it is necessary in order to make sense of karma, transmigration,
ethics, and most Buddhist doctrine. In fact their concerns are virtually
isomorphic with Siderits'.

> > For Pudgalavadins, the pudgala (person) is a praj~napti, a heuristic
> > reductionism, though indispensible for doing Buddhism.
>
> Aha, so they were phenomenalists. Funny how every thinker than Herr Doktor
> Lusthaus touches becomes a phenomenalist.

I have no idea whether it would be helpful to think of them as
phenomenologists, and have never called anyone -- much less myself -- a
phenomenalist (a term used by Analytic Ango-American philosophers for
epistemologists lacking the desire or guts to make ontological commitments,
or who are too reticent to let their ontological commitments interfere with
their philosophizing).

Dan Lusthaus

[to be continue]