[Buddha-l] Pudgalavada

[Richard Hayes]

On Thursday 30 November 2006 06:11, Dan Lusthaus wrote:

> Richard's replies are interesting, and I haven't been ignoring them.
> Rather, his persistent harping on Siderits and Duerlinger has driven me
> back to rummage through files to give especially the latter another look
> (it's been years since I read his articles).

Some of you might want to take a look at Duerlinger's book, <cite>Indian 
Buddhist Theories of Persons</cite>, which contains revised versions of all 
his articles and translations of the Sanskrit literature that he had earlier 
published in Journal of Indian Philosophy. There are several places where I 
would have translated the Sanskrit differently, but I like his observations 
and commentary. 

This past semester I have been reading the Sanskrit of Vasubandhu's 
ruminations on pudgalavaada with six graduate students here. We have also 
been reading Duerlinger's book, parts of Pirestley's book, Siderits's 
<cite>Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy</cite> and Thupten Jinpa's 
<Self, Reality and Reason in Tibetan Philosophy.</cite> Just for my own 
amusement I've been reviewing Locke, Hume and Parfit on personal identity, 
and going back over parts of Steve Collins's <cite>Selfless Persons.</cite>

> A full response to all of Richard's observations and complaints 

>From my perspective, I have not issued any complaints, but I have tried to 
make helpful observations.

> First, in looking through files (and seeking out some new ones), I came
> across one I hadn't read before. Siderits apparently reviewed Paul
> Williams' book _Altruism and Reality_, and in PEW 50, 3, 2000, 424-453,

I'm currently trying to write an article on "Saantideva from the perspective 
of virtue ethics. I find Williams's observations in the above-mentioned book 
interesting, and I also find Siderits's analysis of some of Williams's ideas 
interesting. My impression from Personal Identity is that he tends to agree 
with Williams that "Saantideva's version of reductionism of the person could 
very well undermine the practice of compassion. But by the time it's all 
over, Siderits seems to defend "Saantideva against Williams, and he clearly 
regards "Saantideva as a reductionist, not as an advocate pf non-reductionist 
supervenience theory (the category in which he places the pudgalavaadins). I 
find the discussion between Siderits and Williams thought-provoking, so I 
look forward to reading Siderits's review in PEW, which I have not read yet.

> Duerlinger's reading of Candrakirti and Vasubandhu never questions whether
> either of them are accurately portraying their opponents

Well, no. Philosophers rarely see it as their job to engage in that sort of 
textual historical work. They tend to be more interested in laying out 
possible positions to a problem and studying the various arguments. Whether 
anyone actually held any of the views presented is of secondary concern. 
Duerlinger is an excellent philosopher. One hopes that equally excellent 
historians will approach these same texts to shed more historical light on 
them.

> I mean we still remain largely naive about HOW Buddhists argued. They are
> misconstruing opponents all over the place 

This may well be because they are more interested in philosophy than in 
history. It may well be a little naive to expect a philosopher to 
recapitulate another thinker's view accurately. There are some philosophers 
who do that, but what most philosophers are more interested in is examining 
the many dimensions of an issue, and often this involves putting forth 
hypothetical positions and attributing them to real and imaginary opponents.
My impression is that Vasubandhu was an excellent philosopher in that sense.

> (one of the reasons that by the 
> time of Kumarila Bhatta and "Santaraksita they had taken to massively
> quoting opponents verbatim, to try to minimize this foolishness)

Why dismiss philosophizing as foolishness? It is just a different enterprise 
from that of encyclopedia writing and textual criticism and philology. 

The way in which many historians may be missing the point of some of the texts 
they read is that they assume that every disagreement is polemical in nature 
and represents some sort of battle over territory. To be sure, differences 
get magnified by philosophers, and positions are caricatured (often for the 
purpose of entertainment as anything else), and a great deal of blustery 
denunciation takes place in Indian philosophical literature. But it is a 
grave mistake to take all that as evidence of some kind of sectarian rivalry 
or verbal religious warfare.

> Rather than reject an opponent and his position simplicitur, the strategy
> is to indicate that they don't understand their own doctrines properly,
> since, if they did, they would agree with "me."

It has always seemed to me that quite a lot of that is probably tongue in 
cheek.

> Now Richard is also worried that if given a choice between getting the
> Pudgalavada position right, and making up a useful version that gets them
> wrong but provides fodder with which to play with Analytics, we should go
> for the latter. 

No, I am not at all saying what one should do. I am saying that to read a text 
as a piece of philosophy is one of the many legitimate ways to read texts, 
and I am saying that there are instances where some Indian philosophical 
literature bears some of the features of analytic philosophy. This is no more 
outrageous a claim than the claim that some Indian philosophical literature 
bears some features in common with phenomenology or pragmatism or 
hermeneutics.

> If Buddhism stops being Buddhism 

Was Buddhism ever Buddhism? Asking whether Buddhism has has stopped being 
Buddhism may be a little bit like asking someone whether he has stopped 
beating his wife. Perhaps I have this all wrong, but I like to see Buddhism 
as alive and dynamic and therefore always changing and evolving. I see what 
many contemporaries (such as Siderits and Duerlinger) are doing as part of 
the process of keeping Buddhism alive, rather than as dissecting the corpse 
and examining tissues under a microscope.

> and it won't go very far.

I do not pretend to be a prophet. I have no idea how far any approach will go, 
nor do I really care. What I am more interested in is whether an approach is 
interesting and fruitful while it lasts. On this I give Siderits high marks. 
To suggest that a philosopher's approach to Buddhism is bad textual 
historiography is as wrong-headed as suggesting that a baseball player is 
playing a miserable game of cricket.

-- 
Richard P. Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes