[Buddha-l] Schools

[Richard Hayes]

Almost from the first exposure I had to Indian philosophy some forty-plus years ago, I was dissatisfied with the tendency to present Indian philosophers as members of schools. Like everyone else, I was taught a highly artificial schema of exactly six systems of "orthodox" (āstika) schools of Brahmanical thought and learned to wring my hands over which school Vācaspatimiśra belonged to. What is one to do with someone who wrote commentaries—really good ones—on texts from many of the so-called schools? Are we to conclude that Vācaspati was indecisive? Insincere? Suffering from multiple personality syndrome?
 
My impatience grew to uncontrollable proportions when I began to study Vasubandhu and kept encountering claims that he wrote the Abhidharmakośa kārikās as a Vaibhāṣika, then wrote the bhāṣya as a Sautrāntika, then converted to Yogācāra in his senile years. Why not just regard Vasubandhu as a guy who read a lot and thought carefully? Why the feverish rush to put him in the right folder in the filing cabinet? Impatience continued as I studied Dignāga and Dharmakīrti. Why did so many Europeans and Americans feel a need to put them into the right school? What was served by doing so? How is our understanding of the subtle arguments of Śāntarakṣita aided by putting him into a school called Sautrāntika-Yogācāra-Svātantrika-Mādhyamika? Why not just study Śāntarakṣita as a clever fellow who really knew his philosophy and constructed good arguments and offered intelligent critiques of the arguments others had made? Why diminish him by forcing him into a tiny box with a long name? Why make him the member of a school with a name that he would surely not have recognized as something to which he belonged? 

There is an excellent book by Andrew J. Nicholson, entitled <title>Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History</title> that grapples with the interesting question of whether there really is, or ever has been, such a thing as Hinduism. At one extreme we find modern historians who argue that Hinduism was the invention of the British Rāj and Christian missionaries who had an imperialistic need to put a whole bunch of diverse beliefs and practices into a single box that could then be disdained as inferior. At another extreme we find some nationalists who claim that "Hinduism" is just a new name for the oldest religion in the world and that this religion has always had an essential unity of core beliefs and values. Nicholson argues that neither story is accurate. He argues that was not the British or other Europeans who sought to put the diversity of Indian beliefs and practices into a single category but certain Indian commentators in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. It was they who invented the notion of schools and classified six schools as āstika and others (bauddhas and jainas and cārvākas) as nāstika. It was because of their work that Uddyotakara was no longer just good old Uddyotakara but a staunch defender of the Nyāya school of philosophy against the godless Buddhists. I recommend Nicholson's book. It is fun to read, well written and learned, and on almost every page I learn something that makes me feel a little ashamed that I had not known it before.

Taking the problematic of Nicholson's project a step further, I find myself once again really questioning the value of distinguishing "Hinduism" from "Buddhism", as we are encouraged to do when teaching Religion 101. What good does that do? How does it help anyone visiting a "Theravādin" temple in Bagan understand why there are images there not only of Amitābha Buddha but also of Ganeśa and Śīva? Didn't the people in Bagan understand that Amitābha was a Mahāyānī and that those other two fellows were Hindu devas? Golly, if they were that confused, no wonder their empire fell. Didn't they have prophets, the counterparts of Jeremiah and his ilk, warning them that if they placed foreign gods in their temples or on their hearths at home, they would surely be enslaved by Babylonians?

Maybe it's just me—a religious mishmash is my favorite spiritual mush—but I rejoice when scholars like Nicholson come along and take a long and careful look at the labels and categories we have been indoctrinated to take for granted and to identity some of the consequences of being too eager to put everyone into neatly labeled museum displays.


Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM