[Buddha-l] Re: Filtered Buddhism

[Richard Hayes]

On Thu, 2007-06-28 at 18:13 -0400, Dan Lusthaus wrote:

> > It is not a dodge provided that one adds, as Dharmakirti does, a
> qualifying
> > phrase. What he says is that the failure to observe something THAT WOULD
> BE
> > OBSERVED IF IT WERE PRESENT suffices to prove that it is absent.
> 
> That crucial qualifying phrase seems to be Dharmakirti's addition to
> Dignaga

Yes, I think it is. The phrase he used is upalabdhi-lak.sa.na-praapta,
and it occurs in most of Dharmakiirti's works. Ono's KWIK index to
Sanskrit terms in Dharmakirti shows 30 occurrences of the expression in
the extant Sanskrit texts of Mr Kirti, most in PVSV but several in
Nyaayabindu, Hetubindu and Vaadanyaaya.

> Allowing for non-observable "reals" would, as you observe, open the door to
> all sorts of unfalsifiable metaphysical and theological assertions, so if
> Dharmakirti is really opening that door here, that would curious.

Dharmakirti makes a number of questionable moves. It seems to me that at
least some of them derive from his being such a polemicist. He argued
stridently against the authority of the Vedas and then seemed to realize
that his arguments also undermined the authority of the Buddhist sutras.
So he had to find a way to defend them without also giving credence to
the scriptures of other schools. Most of his arguments against the
existence of God would also undermine belief in bodhisattvas. Most of
his arguments for the possibility of rebirth leave the door open for
belief in aatman, brahman, God and the tooth fairy. The poor guy was
always doing damage control. On my reading of Dignaaga, which is shared
by Claus Oetke and John Taber but strenuously criticized by my friend
and teacher Shoryu Katsura, Dignaaga created far fewer problems for
himself, because he was less interested in upholding Buddhist dogmas
than in exploring the limits of our knowledge about anything. 

Now that the Vienna circle have uncovered the Sanskrit of
Jinendrabudhi's commentary to Dignaaga's Pramaa.na-samuccaya and thereby
reconstructed big chunks of the PS, we'll be able to see how accurate
the translations produced by Hattori, Kitagawa and me were. I'm
expecting to be very thoroughly humbled by the discovery of innumerable
gaffes and blunders in my earlier work. But hell, that's the reason we
publish our work---to see it superseded by others. I would be a little
disappointed but not at all surprised if it should come to light that my
views on the relationship between Dignaaga and Dharmakiirti were
somewhere between dead wrong to slightly correct but quite exaggerated.
My view that Dignaaga was a subtle thinker who was ignored after a
philosophical hack named Dharmakiirti misinterpreted him may turn out to
be just another of my Romantic fantasies about geniuses being
overshadowed by dull-witted but very popular drones. 

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
Universiy of New Mexico