[Buddha-l] Realism, anti-realism and Buddhism

[Dan Lusthaus]

Now, briefly, some of the side issues.

> The profile of realism and anti-realism was based on observations made
> by Michael Dummett. I think the realist position he describes has a much
> longer ancestry than Frege's Sinn und Bedeutung. I think it goes back at
> least as far as Aristotle.

Not exactly, but this would take a long time to unravel. Aristotle's realism
wouldn't fulfil the criterion for several reasons, such as his form/matter
metaphysics, the distinction he makes between dialectic and analytic, etc.
Also he was not a propositional reductionist (though some current Analytics
prefer to read him that way).

>I find it is not always wise to
> accept people's descriptions of themselves. I am especially wary of
> Maadhyamikas.

Suspicion and critical evaluation is usually a good thing. For madhyamakas
(and many others), it is often more helpful to investigate *why* they say
what they do rather than merely take *what* they say at face value. As I
understand it, that itself is madhyamaka practice.

> I see not evidence that Dharmakirti was a Yogacara.

John Dunne, Dan Arnold and others today are comfortable thinking of him as a
Yogacara (in fact, they insist on that). Your reticence may have something
to do with what you think Yogacara is or is not. You have said on numerous
occasions that you don't really understand Yogacara, and, based on how you
sometimes characterize it, I believe you. (They weren't "idealists.") I have
recently been reading Dignaga in particular in the light of Asanga's
hetuvidyaa discussions, and the continuities and influence are stark and
significant (but virtually absent from the secondary literature since Tucci
back in the 1920s and early 30s). Yijing (they used to transliterate his
name I-tsing), who travelled to India a few decades after Xuanzang
(Hsuan-tsang), tells us about Dharmakirti -- that he revitalized
hetu-vidyaa, and that he was a Yogacara. Since, unlike Xuanzang, Yijing was
not a Yogacara, he had no reason to prejudicially lump Dharmakirti into a ca
mp into which he didn't belong, so we can conclude that in the late 7th c.,
Nalanda and other Buddhists considered Dharmakirti a Yogacara. Both Yijing
and Xuanzang tell us that Dignaga was a Yogacara. Later Indian commentators,
as you know, tend to read both of them as straddling Sautrantika and
Yogacara. People in Vienna these days tend to exaggerate that.

Actually not only is there a lot of Yogacara in Dignaga, there is a lot of
Abhidharma as well. The problem is

(1) part of what Dignaga and Dharmakirti did was to recast abhidharmic
positions in a newer, ecumenical framework, which took on a life of its own,
so that the later tradition read subsequent developments and implications
back into Dignaga and Dharmakirti, thus recontextualizing them and creating
novel understandings of what they were about; and

(2) the bulk of surviving abhidharmic literature is only extant in Chinese
(e.g., the Sarvastivada padas and Mahavibhasa, etc. -- the Kosa is NOT
typical of Sarvastivada literature), which most current scholars of
pramana-vada Buddhism don't read or read poorly (and even if they do read
Chinese, they have very little interest in abhidharma, imagining it to be
something it is not). If you can find a copy of Dhammajoti's _Sarvastivada
Abhidharma_ (hard to procure outside of Hong Kong), you will quickly
recognize many Dignaga antecdents.

> [Dharmakirti] is impossible to
> fit into any doctrinal pigeonhole. Mostly he was a polemical Buddhist
> who had tremendous confidence in the unique truth of a very minimalistic
> version of Buddhist dogma and a robust contempt for those who disagreed
> with him.

I somewhat agree with that, especially the minimalist characterization.

> I see [Dignaga] as a radical skeptic, far less dogmatic than Dharmakirti,
and
> perhaps even harder to put into a pigeonhole. There's not even a lot of
> what he says that sounds especially Buddhist. Maybe he was a kind of
> Emersonian freethinker.

I don't see him as a skeptic, but as an ecumenicalist, who tried to
de-sectarianize Buddhism sufficiently to encourage non-Buddhists to debate
on the basis of shared prasiddhas and neutral ground rules (hence, e.g., the
dispensing with sabda-pramana). His orientation came from a deep engagement
with (but not simply a reiteration of) Asanga. He also was deeply influenced
by contemporary Vaisesikas -- unfortunately none of their writings
pre-Prasastapada survive, and Prasastapada radically altered Vaisesika
fundamentals, at least in part in reaction to Dignaga. No pre-Vatsyayana
Nyaya literature survives either (V. was Dignaga's contemporary, or later).
Dignaga was so effective at laying down pramanic ground rules, that, with a
few exceptions (Vaisesika Sutra, the bulk of Nyaya Sutra, Bhartrhari, some
of the pramana sections of Caraka Samhita, Sabara-bhasya, etc.), all
pre-Dignaga non-Buddhist philosophical literature became obsolete almost
overnight. His impact was so powerful that even Madhyamakas (like
Bhavaviveka) adopted his "method."

Dan