[Buddha-l] Fwd: H-NET BOOK REVIEW>Edelglass and Garfield, eds., Buddhist Philosophy: Essential Readings

[Franz Metcalf]

Gang,

Here's the H-Buddhism review of a new collection in which we find  
contributions from both Richard Hayes and Dan Lusthaus. The book  
sounds great, and I note that both Richard's and Dan's chapters come  
in for particular praise. Dan, I recall you pointing out errors in  
common Buddhist and Buddhologist views of Pudgalavāda years ago, and  
I'm glad to read that you've found a prominent place to make your  
points in print and in stand-alone fashion. Take that, non-personalists!

Cheers,

Franz

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dan Arnold <daarnold at MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU>
> Date: October 15, 2009 8:10:19 AM PDT
> To: H-BUDDHISM at H-NET.MSU.EDU
> Subject: H-NET BOOK REVIEW>Edelglass and Garfield, eds., Buddhist  
> Philosophy: Essential Readings (Nelson)
> Reply-To: h-buddhism at H-NET.MSU.EDU
>
> William Edelglass, Jay L. Garfield.  Buddhist Philosophy: Essential
> Readings.  Oxford  Oxford University Press, 2009.  xix + 457 pp.
> $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-19-532817-2; $99.00 (cloth), ISBN
> 978-0-19-532816-5.
>
> Reviewed by Eric S. Nelson (University of Massachusetts Lowell)
> Published on H-Buddhism (October, 2009)
> Commissioned by A. Charles Muller
>
> Buddhism as Philosophy?
>
> _Buddhist Philosophy: Essential Readings_ is a much-needed
> contribution to the teaching and study of Buddhism. It is a
> judiciously selected and excellently translated sourcebook of primary
> texts and--through the detailed, nuanced, and scholarly up-to-date
> systematic and historical introductions to each section--a valuable
> introduction to the rich variety of culturally and philosophically
> diverse Buddhist approaches to questions of existence, language,
> knowledge, mind, and ethics. The primary task and value of this
> anthology is to make the philosophical dimensions of Buddhist forms
> of thought more accessible to students and Western-oriented
> philosophers. By clearly and effectively presenting Buddhism as a
> varied and rigorous tradition of inquiry, of questioning and
> reflection, this book will encourage more care and precision in
> approaching Buddhism as philosophy.
>
> This collection is particularly significant given suspicions
> concerning the very idea of Buddhist philosophy, which at times is
> overly marginalized within philosophy (by restrictive definitions
> limiting philosophy to modern or Western thought stemming from
> Greece), within Buddhist practice (if practice is taken as inherently
> anti-intellectual), and within Buddhist studies (if questions of the
> validity and truth of argumentative and interpretive strategies and
> claims are excluded). This work balances such one-sided tendencies by
> revealing Buddhists themselves--from Buddhism's Indian beginnings
> through its Central and East Asian transformations to the
> contemporary world of cross-cultural encounters and pressing moral
> issues--to be engaged in reflection, argumentation, and
> interpretation (logic and hermeneutics) and attentive to issues
> concerning being (ontology or metaphysics), knowledge (epistemology),
> the mind and the person (philosophical psychology), and morality and
> society (ethics and social-political philosophy).
>
> As William Edelglass and Jay Garfield indicate in their introduction,
> Buddhist philosophy needs to be approached in its own terms as it has
> its own point of departure and concerns: the fact of the
> pervasiveness of suffering and the possibility of liberation through
> experientially knowing one's condition; the path of liberation
> proceeding through practice, meditation, and insight into the basic
> interdependence, non-identity, emptiness (of an unchanging inherent
> essence), and transience of existence. This shifting point of
> departure poses challenges that Buddhists have addressed in a variety
> of ways. These differences and contradictions have produced a rich
> history of lively dialogue and debate, attention to the logic of
> arguments, and the development of proposals of how things work and
> skepticism concerning them. The latter is an important issue that
> might lead some to begin with part 3 on epistemology.
>
> The editors prioritize Buddhist discourses about being by placing
> metaphysics at the beginning, and they and the contributors do not
> fully address Buddhist skeptical strategies that might be considered
> neutral to metaphysical claims or even anti-metaphysical. This issue
> is striking in Noa Ronkin's introduction to chapter 1, where the
> Buddha's hesitation about making ultimate metaphysical claims is
> described as process metaphysics and no-self (_anātman_) as a
> process self. Ronkin's introduction and selections show how the
> Buddha might be interpreted as a process metaphysician and
> Theravādin thought as being driven from an early process to a later
> event metaphysics. This portrayal is notable when contrasted with an
> alternative approach such as that offered by Peter Harvey in chapter
> 23. There the Buddha is seen as more of a skeptical and diagnostic
> experientialist and Theravāda Buddhism as being less ontologically
> motivated and more oriented by epistemic and empirical concerns.
>
> Opening up of different ways of interpreting Buddhist philosophies is
> possible not only by contrasting chapters by different contributors
> but in many of the introductions themselves. Garfield's introductions
> to Nāgārjuna and Vasubandhu concisely introduce the reader to the
> issues at stake in their writings and to alternate interpretations
> that they have generated. In considering Nāgārjuna's discussion of
> the two truths, the challenging question of the identity and
> non-identity of ordinary conventional and ultimate dharmic truth, we
> are asked to consider whether Nāgārjuna is employing _reductio_
> arguments without introducing a position or ontology of his own
> (_prasaṅgika_) or whether he is advocating a different kind of
> ontology through emptiness (_svātantrika_), i.e., whether emptiness
> is itself intrinsically empty or the ultimate truth. This becomes a
> contested issue for philosophical argumentation--involving
> ontological, logical, and epistemic questions--in the Indo-Tibetan
> tradition as seen in later chapters concerning Jñānagarbha's
> approach to two truths as two perspectives on one truth, Mipam
> Namgyel's argument for extrinsic in contrast with intrinsic
> emptiness, and Khedrupjey's argument concerning language and the
> ultimate that a positionless position is incoherent and reduces
> Madhyamaka to nothing.
>
> Garfield's account of Vasubandhu likewise--if less effectively given
> the partiality for the Yogācāra-as-idealism thesis--sets up the
> question of whether he is advocating idealist ontology or a more
> experience-driven phenomenology. The following chapters concern
> Śāntarakṣita's powerful arguments against reifying either the one
> or the many, and Dushun's Huayan interpretation of emptiness as the
> non-obstruction of overlapping interdependent perspectives that leads
> from (1) phenomena to (2) principle to (3) the non-obstruction of
> phenomena and principle and (4) the non-obstruction of phenomena and
> the phenomena (the four perspectives or realms of dharmas). Next
> Graham Parkes introduces Dōgen's "Mountains and Waters as Sutras,"
> where natural phenomena are seen as awakened exemplars teaching the
> dharma, and discusses the ecological implications of polycentric
> perspectivism. Chapter 8, on the twentieth-century Japanese thinker
> Nishitani's integration of Zen and Western philosophical categories,
> concludes part 1.
>
> Although Buddhists can be imagined to dwell in silence and the
> ineffable, Buddhists have relentlessly used language, logic, and
> hermeneutics and have also investigated how they occur and
> function--as the sections in part 2 make evident. This point applies
> to Chan and Zen, as Peter Gregory notes of the hermeneutical
> strategies of classification, argumentation, and polemic, and most
> skillfully in presenting the Buddhist path through gradients of truth
> in Zongmi (p. 140); Steven Heine in introducing the importance of
> language for Dōgen, for whom Zen is not only silence (the marrow)
> but equally the use of words (skin, flesh, bones) that are an
> indispensable element of awakening (p.149); and Michael Mohr
> concerning the use of language and kōans in Tōrei Enji, for whom
> "words and characters" are both the "source of bondage" and the
> "source of liberation" (p. 160). In addition to two chapters on
> language and the two truths, Richard Hayes deftly portrays the mutual
> irreducibility of sensation and reasoning in Dignāga and his theory
> of inferential signs. Any unit of language precludes or rules out
> (_apoha_) other states of affairs rather than making positive
> assertions that are generalizing and nominal about sensations that
> are singular.
>
> In Buddhist sources, knowledge is not restricted to theoretical or
> conceptual cognition and predication, much less to the certainty of a
> Cartesian subject. Yet it is not inappropriate to speak of
> epistemology given the empirical and phenomenological tendencies of
> Buddhism and its concern, which it shares with non-Buddhist Indian
> philosophy, with "the number and nature of _pramāna_s (authoritative
> cognitive instruments)" (p. 171). Whereas other Indian schools
> included or primarily relied upon scripture and testimony as sources
> of knowledge, Buddhists considered universals to be nominal,
> inference proceeding through universals to be at best an instrument,
> and only perception and first-person experiential verification to be
> ultimately valid (p. 172). The early Buddhist tradition can be
> characterized as promoting an empirically oriented inquiry in
> focusing on issues of perception, its epistemic primacy and
> non-conceptual character, efficient causality, and experientially
> verifying claims for oneself, as Peter Harvey and Dan Arnold indicate
> in their introductions to and selections from, respectively, the
> Theravāda Pali Canon and Dharmakīrti and his commentator
> Dharmottara. The latter not only comments but critically transforms
> in arguing that knowledge involves more than Dharmakīrti's
> efficient-causal portrayal. The subsequent Dharmakīrti chapter
> concerns causality in relation to the theory of inference, which here
> is the study of what conditions and states of affairs must obtain in
> order to accept a state of affairs.
>
> While the previous chapters elucidate what might be called the
> empiricist side of Buddhist epistemology, some of the following
> chapters develop its phenomenological side. This is evident in the
> chapters on Yogācāra by Dan Lusthaus, Tiantai by Brook Ziporyn, and
> Dōgen by Bret Davis, whereas chapters 19 and 20 concern the more
> pragmatic and realist tendencies of texts from the Tibetan schools of
> Ngog, Sakya, and Gelukpa. Lusthaus's section concerns the Yogācāra
> composite text, the _Buddhabhūmy-upadeśa_, which examines the
> perception of awakened beings and how they could "see things as they
> are" (p. 205). Davis interprets and translates Dōgen in a
> Heideggerian ontological language of the revealing and concealing of
> being and "the presencing of truth." The _Genjōkōan_ is arguably
> more about the priority of practice rather than the Western concern
> for the ontological event of being. Zen is zazen, which for Dōgen
> lets the fundamental issue of Buddhism be enacted and is itself the
> way. The Dōgen chapters by Parkes, Heine, and Davis are
> pedagogically advantageous in allowing readers to contrast different
> styles of reasoning and interpretation in contemporary Buddhist
> studies.
>
> Buddhist practitioners and thinkers have developed detailed, rich,
> and varied traditions of exploring the self, the mind, and the
> person. Based on its history, it appears that the Buddha taught the
> notion of _anātman_ not to eliminate but to further meditative,
> empirical-analytic (of "entities" into their aggregates), and
> phenomenological inquiry into the self and its conditions. For
> Theravāda Buddhism, as Peter Harvey discusses, the "I" is neither
> absolute nor nothing but rather its conditions or aggregates. Since
> the "no" of "no-self" is the emptiness of an absolute essence,
> constant presencing, or unchanging soul, the self is the aggregated,
> causally conditioned, suffering self. This basic non-identity creates
> the problem of how there is enough continuity to speak of basic
> Buddhist ideas such as karma and the merit and demerit of a person's
> actions.
>
> A number of chapters will be of special interest to Buddhist scholars
> as they correct previous misinterpretations based on recent
> scholarship. Most notably, Dan Lusthaus introduces and corrects the
> many misconceptions that Buddhists and scholars have had of the
> so-called Pudgalavāda, which is a polemical label applied to a
> number of distinct schools. These "personalists" are older and more
> mainstream than previously thought and the charge that they
> maintained an ontological self appears increasingly dubious. Whilst
> continuing to maintain the basic Buddhist claim of _anātman_, they
> nominally posited a more robust sense of being a person, which is
> both reducible and irreducible to the aggregates while not being
> something beyond them, in order to encourage practice by clarifying
> notions that "lead to knowledge," such as karma and the cultivation
> and pursuit of the Buddhist path.
>
> The following chapters include Vasubandhu's critique of the
> Pudgalavāda approach to the person, his critique of the idea of a
> permanent unchanging soul (as essence or immortal), Candrakīrti's
> critique of consciousness, and Śāntarakṣita's investigation of
> whether individuation requires a self or if the identity of a
> continuum associated with a causal series suffices. Other chapters
> concern Zhiyi's Tiantai mutuality of delusion and wisdom, profane and
> sacred, and the importance of _xin_ (heart-mind) as the source of
> delusion and wisdom and Chinul's response to the remark that mind is
> Buddha and Buddha is mind. The final chapter is on Nishida's
> reconceptualization of being a person in the context of Zen and
> Western philosophy. The first selection is of interest for exploring
> the relation of Buddhism and nationalism, as Nishida contrasts
> Japan's Zen-like third way with the overly "rational Indian" and
> "irrational Chinese" (p. 360).
>
> Even while it is contested whether ethics is a conditional means,
> integrally constitutive of the path, or simply unconditional, ethics
> is basic to Buddhist forms of life. Buddhists have lived, enacted,
> and reflectively considered a variety of moral practices and ethical
> principles in socially and culturally diverse circumstances, as the
> readings and comments in part 5 demonstrate. The reality of suffering
> is a point of departure for ethics, from ancient India to
> contemporary socially engaged Buddhism, in which the dharma is
> interpreted as confronting and answering current moral and
> social-political issues such as the environment, inequality, and
> violence. In part 5, chapters explore Theravāda ethics;
> Śāntideva's presentation of the bodhisattva path; the centrality of
> propriety and ethical self-cultivation, with engagement as a
> consequence rather than a direct object of concern, in Asaṅga's
> _Bodhisattvabhūmi_; Wŏnhyo's non-substantialist Bodhisattva ethics,
> which considers issues such as what is a vow, and what is violating
> it, if it has no essence? In Jin Park's second contribution on Korean
> Buddhism, Wŏnhyo dereifies ethics by showing the levels of
> interpretations and differentiation of contexts that require a
> contextual and interpretive yet responsive compassion.
>
> In the next sections, Edelglass considers the current import of
> Buddhism in the context of and in response to the moral and social
> problems of the contemporary world, aptly introducing texts by Thich
> Nhat Hahn on socially engaged Buddhism and Joanna Macy on the
> conditional as a non-anthropocenric, non-speciest, and ecological
> self. In the noteworthy final chapter, Karma Lekshe Tsoma considers
> the role of women in Buddhism and the paradox that there is a
> fundamental sense of equality and no theoretical basis for inequality
> in Buddhism and yet women actually experience subordination,
> inequity, marginalization, and violence in Buddhist societies and
> even at times in Buddhist institutions. She responds to this paradox
> by articulating the complementary roles of Buddhism and feminism in
> the critique of injustice, inequality, marginalization, and
> exclusion.
>
> This book is to be highly recommended as an introduction to and
> sourcebook in Buddhist philosophy, and the editors and contributors
> should be thanked for providing a valuable resource that exhibits the
> depth, sophistication, and diversity of Buddhist philosophies.
>
> Citation: Eric S. Nelson. Review of Edelglass, William; Garfield, Jay
> L., _Buddhist Philosophy: Essential Readings_. H-Buddhism, H-Net
> Reviews. October, 2009.
> URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24737
>
> This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
> Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
> License.