Against a Hindu God: Buddhist Philosophy of Religion in India

AGAINST A HINDU GOD

Against a Hindu God

BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION IN INDIA

Parimal G. Patil

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS     NEW YORK

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

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NEW YORK    CHICHESTER, WEST SUSSEX

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Copyright © 2009 Columbia University Press

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-51307-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Patil, Parimal G.

Against a Hindu god : Buddhist philosophy of religion in India / Parimal G. Patil.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-14222-9 (cloth : alk. paper)—

ISBN 978-0-231-51307-4 (ebook)

1. Knowledge, Theory of (Buddhism) 2. God (Hinduism) 3. Ratnakirti. 4. Nyaya. 5. Religion—Philosophy. I. Title.

BQ4440.P38 2009

210—dc22

2008047445

A Columbia University Press E-book.

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References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

For A, B, and M, and all those who have called Konark home

CONTENTS

ABBREVIATIONS

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

Comparative Philosophy of Religions

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT THE PHILOSOPHICAL CONTENT of an interreligious debate between Buddhist and Hindu intellectuals in premodern India. Its central concern is the range of arguments that an eleventh-century Buddhist intellectual named Ratnak ī rti employed to criticize the beliefs of his non-Buddhist, Ny ā ya, interlocutors regarding the existence of a God-like being called Ī ś vara. ¹ What is so exciting about these arguments is that they provide a window into Buddhist, Hindu, and Jaina intellectual practices and serve as concrete examples of one way in which the philosophy and intellectual history of religions was practiced in premodern South Asia. ² In interpreting and critically explaining these arguments, I am moving beyond the usual historical and philological task of restating, in English, complex arguments formulated in Sanskrit. I am committed to viewing these arguments not just as historical artifacts from someone else’s intellectual past but as an interculturally available source from which we can learn today. What is at stake for Ratnakīrti (and I hope for some of us) in these arguments is nothing less than the nature of rationality, the metaphysics of epistemology, and the relevance of philosophy to the practice of religion. Written during the final phase of Buddhism in India, Ratnakīrti’s work also provides us with a unique perspective on the centuries-long series of debates among Buddhist and Hindu philosophers of religion and shows us what was intellectually important to one of the famed gate-keepers at the international Buddhist university of Vikramaśīla. ³ As I hope to show, work like Ratnakīrti’s effectively challenges the widespread notion that the intellectual world of premodern India is irrelevant to more contemporary concerns in the study of religion, philosophy, and South Asian studies.

Given that scholarship on Ratnakīrti and his Nyāya interlocutors is still in its very early stages, I have tried in this book to balance the historical and philological methods that are necessary for accurately interpreting Sanskrit texts with the philosophical concerns that motivate Ratnakīrti’s (and my own) interest in the material. I have also tried to support my interpretations by citing and translating in the notes the texts on which they are based and to explain my use of technical terms by providing extended definitions of them, also in the notes. This book will not be successful if either Ratnakīrti’s arguments are misinterpreted or their significance for him, and for us, is not brought into view.

In introducing this book, I want to begin by situating my project within the contemporary academy, in order to argue that what is needed to properly accommodate it is a specifically comparative approach to the philosophy of religions. While such methodological remarks are often thought to be unnecessary, for projects such as mine, which tend to disappear into the gaps between existing disciplinary frameworks, a methodological introduction is helpful for establishing an intellectual context and indeed for justifying their very existence.⁴ For those who do not share my methodological interests or disciplinary concerns it may be helpful to skip ahead to section 4, where I provide an outline of the book and briefly discuss its central arguments.

1. Disciplinary Challenges

I consider this book to be transdisciplinary. Unlike inter- and multidisciplinary works, which often do not have a proper academic home, I intend this study to fit, even if uncomfortably, within the three disciplinary frameworks mentioned above. In this introduction I will argue that in order to create a transdisciplinary space for work such as this what is needed is a properly comparative approach to the philosophy of religions that in part undermines the traditional disciplinary boundaries between the study of religion, philosophy, and South Asian studies. In my view, it is only through a rethinking of these disciplinary boundaries that the study of South Asian intellectual practices will be able to occupy its proper place in the academy, and to be taken seriously by those who do not specialize in South Asian texts and textual traditions.⁵ In providing a specific example of how this can be done, this book argues for a new kind of philosophy of religions.⁶ Before I attempt to define this intellectual space, it may be helpful to outline some of the reasons for the project’s somewhat uncomfortable fit within current disciplinary frameworks.

The religious studies subfields of South Asian religions and Buddhist studies are currently suffering from what may be called a tyranny of social and cultural history, and a closely related distrust of philosophy.⁷ The idea that it is only the social, cultural, and political outsides of texts that are of real relevance to the study of religions has resulted in a decades-long shift away from the study of intellectual practices and/or their histories.⁸ While this may have been a necessary corrective to previous scholarship, the pendulum has swung too far in this direction and there has been a systematic neglect of Buddhist, Hindu, and Jaina thought. Projects such as mine, which focus on arguments, are often dismissed as being irrelevant to a field which has rightly committed itself to the lived outsides of texts and text traditions. In contrast, philosophy departments have, for the most, ignored the study of Indian philosophy.⁹ This is sometimes due to an accident of history, but more often to the still widespread belief that Indian philosophy is too soft, and either is not really philosophy at all or is at best a part of someone else’s philosophical past and therefore irrelevant to us.¹⁰ Compounding this fact is the relative neglect of philosophy of religions, which itself is often viewed as not being properly or interestingly philosophical.¹¹ Projects such as this, which focus on the philosophical work of Buddhist and Hindu intellectuals, are therefore routinely dismissed as being beyond the scope of philosophy proper, and ironically are thought to belong to religious studies or South Asian studies. Many South Asian studies programs, however, are presentist in orientation and align themselves with recent trends in the social sciences and humanities, in which the importance of premodern intellectual contexts and the textual production of elites (especially religious elites) is devalued, when considered at all. Others, particularly in Europe and Japan, are informed by classical Indology, where what is privileged is the literal, in the form of critical editions of texts and very specific studies of topics that all too often are accessible only to other specialists who have knowledge of the primary languages. While the intellectual values that inform each of these versions of South Asian studies are crucial to the field and its future, they are incomplete, and leave almost no room for the kind of work that I am trying to do.

One way of describing this project with respect to these contemporary disciplinary frameworks is to suggest that its specific subject matter, and the language and style in which it is discussed, belongs primarily to philosophy, and more specifically to the subfield of epistemology; its texts primarily to South Asian studies and Indology; and its overall intellectual context to religious studies, especially the subfields of Buddhist studies, South Asian religions, and philosophy of religions.¹² This description is, of course, a contingent feature of the contemporary Euro-American academy, which is based upon a conception of these disciplinary frameworks that this project seeks to undermine. By constructing a transdisciplinary space for a properly comparative approach to the philosophy of religions, I hope to be able to draw from and contribute to each of these disciplinary frameworks, without having to choose any one of them. More specifically, I hope that by self-consciously situating this project within such a transdisciplinary framework I will enable it to find a home in all three, even as it challenges their self-conceptions. Central to my conception of this transdisciplinary space is its comparative aspect.

2. A Grammar for Comparison

One way to envision the comparative philosophy of religions is to first think of comparative work more generally. In my view, it is instructive to think of such work on the model of a grammatical event, and more specifically one that can be analyzed in the vocabulary of the Sanskrit grammatical theory of event-makers (kāraka)¹³ The theory of event-makers identifies six semantic relations between the components of a given sentence and the event that is expressed by the main verb of that sentence. In so doing, it provides a conceptual vocabulary for analyzing the event. Through an understanding of these semantic relations in the sentence, it is possible to understand the semantic structure of the sentence as a whole. For example, in the sentence, In the kitchen, Rāma cooks food for Sītā with firewood from the forest, the event is cooking.¹⁴ According to the theory, this cooking event can be analyzed in terms of the other sentence-components’ relations to it. More specifically, the event can be understood through its agent, Rāma; patient, rice; instrument, firewood; source, forest; beneficiary, Sītā; and location, kitchen. It is through these relational components that the event itself is individuated, and thereby defined. For our purposes, the vocabulary provided by this theory can help us to understand the various components of comparative projects and thereby develop a more sophisticated notion of in exactly what sense(s) a given project is comparative. Given the vocabulary of the theory of event-makers, in describing the structure of a comparative project it is necessary to identify its various components; describe how they are related to one another; and specify the ways in which the comparison is supposed to be of value and for whom. In this section, I will describe the various components of my comparative project and some of the ways in which they are related to one another. In section 3, I will discuss its value.

2.1. Event

It is helpful to think of the event in question as being to study comparatively, even though precisely what this means and why it is different from the event of studying more generally will not be clear until section 3, once the framework has been developed a bit further.

2.2. Agent

The agent of this particular study is, of course, me. There are, however, other agents that are relevant for this book—most notably, Ratnakīrti and his interlocutors. Each of them is an agent of an event that can also be analyzed in terms of the theory of event-makers. For example, as a result of his engagement with the work of his Nyāya opponents and Buddhist predecessors, Ratnakīrti himself can be understood as the agent of his own comparative project. In addition, it is worth noting that Ratnakīrti’s texts can be helpfully thought of as complex agents in their own right.¹⁵

2.3. Patient

The patient, or primary object of study, is Ratnakīrti and his Nyāya interlocutors’ arguments regarding the existence of a God-like being called Īśvara. In this work, I will argue that these arguments are best understood on a continuum, from those that are explicit, and obviously present in the texts, to those that are at best implicit, but as I will show also present in the texts. It is the arguments themselves and their philosophical significance both for him and for us that comprise the subject matter of this book.

Of course, the patient of this book could have been very different, even given my specific interest in the work of Ratnakīrti and his interlocutors. For example, the patient could have been the more focused philological context of Ratnakīrti’s texts themselves; the much broader South Asian intellectual context leading up to Ratnakīrti’s work; the sociopolitical context in which Ratnakīrti’s work was produced and consumed; or Ratnakīrti’s critique of Nyāya theism as it relates to Euro-American arguments against the existence of God, etc. While each of these projects is interesting, important, and not entirely unrelated to my own, my specific interest in this book is in Ratnakīrti’s arguments and what I am calling their philosophical significance for him and for us.¹⁶

2.4. Instrument

The instruments for this study are the conceptual and disciplinary resources that I use to study Ratnakīrti’s arguments. There are three sets of such conceptual resources: (1) those that Ratnakīrti himself identifies and/or uses, such as his Nyāya opponents’ epistemology and his own theory of mental content; (2) those to which he himself does not appeal, though he could do so, such as the theory of event-makers; and (3) those to which he could not appeal, such as those of contemporary philosophy. There are also two sets of disciplinary resources: (1) those associated with the historical and philological study of Sanskrit texts; and (2) those associated with the study of Euro-American philosophy. Instruments belonging to each of these categories and disciplines will be used, to varying degrees, in each chapter of this book. The instrument, like the patient, can be multivalent.¹⁷

2.5. Source

The source is where the instrument(s) come from. There are both textual and disciplinary sources. The textual sources for this work can be divided into four groups: source I consists of Ratnakīrti’s written work, and more specifically seven of Ratnakīrti’s ten extant texts;¹⁸ source II consists of the texts directly referred to by him, most notably those of his teacher, Jñānaśrīmitra, and those of his (primarily) Nyāya opponents;¹⁹ source III consists of texts, commentaries, and secondary sources to which Ratnakīrti does not refer (although much of this work postdates his work, it is nevertheless helpful for understanding and interpreting Ratnakīrti’s arguments and those of his opponents);²⁰ and source IV, which consists of contemporary philosophical literature that I have found helpful in interpreting and writing about Ratnakīrti’s arguments and their philosophical significance. The disciplinary sources are the disciplinary resources of religious studies, philosophy, and South Asian studies/Indology.

Given these sources, it may be helpful to briefly think back on the instruments and some of the ways in which they are related. Some of the instruments, such as those in (1), can be thought of as being inherited by me from source I, in the sense that I am making use of instruments that Ratnakīrti himself makes use of. Others, such as those in (2), may be thought of as being discovered by me in texts from source groups II and III, in the sense that I am identifying and using as instruments conceptual resources that Ratnakīrti could have used, but did not. Still others, such as those in (3), may be thought of as being constructed by me from source IV, in the sense that I am using conceptual resources that Ratnakīrti not only did not use but could not have used.

2.6. Beneficiary

The beneficiary is the intended audience of this work. As I will discuss further below, I intend this work to be of interest and use to readers who locate themselves in one or more of the three disciplinary frameworks referred to above. Such beneficiaries can be individuated and identified through the specific features of the multivalent patient, instrument, and source that are of greatest interest to them. In my view, disciplinary frameworks can also be beneficiaries. Attention to the beneficiaries of comparative projects—regardless of whether they are types of individuals or disciplines—is of particular importance in determining the value, or ends, of comparison.²¹ The various forms of comparative analysis used in this book should make it possible for each of the attendant beneficiaries to derive some value/benefit from it.

For example, I hope first that my focused attention on the philosophical content and significance of Ratnakīrti’s arguments will remind historians of religion of the importance of intellectual contexts to the study of religion. All too often, intellectual and intertextual contexts are not recognized as being legitimate contexts of study in their own right, and instead are thought to be of interest only insofar as they help us better understand the sociopolitical contexts of which they are thought to be artifacts. In such a framework, it is only the outsides of texts that are taken to be relevant to a historian of religion. I hope that this book will help to remind those of us situated in religious studies that intellectual and intertextual contexts are also contexts, and that the content of philosophical texts cannot be so easily reduced to, or explained merely in terms of, social, cultural, or political contexts. Both the outsides of texts and their insides should be of importance. This book attempts to illustrate the benefit of studying the insides of South Asian texts, and in so doing gestures to the need to create a space in religious studies for the intellectual history of religions, as well as for the historicist approach to the philosophy of religions that is being described here, and will be described in greater detail below.

Second, I hope that my focus on the Īśvara-inference will remind philosophers of religion—in both religious studies and philosophy—of the relevance of Buddhist, Hindu, and Jaina intellectual practices to the field.²² For too long the philosophy of religions has been defined by questions and concerns that are drawn almost exclusively from Christian texts and textual traditions.²³ While there is an increasing openness to the work of non-Christian philosophers, there is still very little work that is accessible to philosophers of religion who are interested in thinking about the relevance of Sanskrit philosophy to the field. By analyzing the Īśvara-inference through the religious epistemology that is used to defend and critique it, I hope to contribute to a description and understanding of the philosophy of religion in the final phase of Buddhism in India, and in so doing to introduce to the field questions and concerns that are drawn from Sanskrit texts and text traditions. This is, I hope, a preliminary step in re-envisioning what the philosophy of religions can (and should) be.

Third, I hope that this book will make it possible for professional philosophers unfamiliar with Sanskrit philosophical material to develop a more accurate conception of Indian philosophy—a conception that I trust will force us all to confront the troubling (and embarrassing) question of why the history of philosophy in India is not a proper part of philosophy.

Fourth, I hope that this book will provide my colleagues in South Asian studies with a new model for thinking about the relevance of the field. For many, what makes South Asian studies relevant is what it can tell us about South Asia and/or South Asians today. It is worth noting, however, that one does not have to be interested in Europe or Europeans, from any time period, to find the work of Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Foucault, or even Shakespeare to be relevant and of value. Why then is it so often thought that the work of premodern South Asian intellectuals can only be of relevance to those interested in premodern South Asia? There are metrics of relevance that are, in my view, all but ignored by so many in the field. In treating Ratnakīrti and his interlocutors as philosophers in their own right, I want to suggest that even those who have no interest in South Asia can find relevance in the content and quality of the thought of Sanskrit intellectuals.²⁴ Like the work of Euro-American intellectuals, the work of Sanskrit intellectuals can be a source of genuine theoretical insight that may be of transhistorical and trans-cultural value.

Finally, I hope that my colleagues on the Indological side of South Asian studies will come to see value in a work that tries to come to terms with the thought of a Sanskrit philosopher long before what they take to be the necessary prerequisites for such work have been completed. While critical editions, translations, and very specialized studies of individual concepts and texts are absolutely essential to the study of South Asian philosophers and their intellectual practices, there is a desperate need for new models of how to present this work in a manner that will be useful to others without such philological skills. In my view, it is our responsibility to encourage and create space for such work while still maintaining our standards. This book attempts to strike this balance and to provide an example of how to study the work of a Sanskrit philosopher in a manner that is historically and philologically responsible and yet accessible and meaningful to those outside the field.

2.7. Location

The locations for my particular study of Ratnakīrti’s arguments are the intellectual contexts in which, and with respect to which, his arguments will be studied, interpreted, and/or written about.²⁵ Often these contexts are associated with a particular disciplinary framework (and, alternatively, the transdisciplinary space that I am seeking to create). The locations for this study are therefore multiple, and necessarily so. The following three locations, in descending order of significance, are relevant for this particular project. It is the relative importance of the first of these locations that led me to describe this work earlier as an example of a historicist approach to the philosophy of religions.²⁶

LOCATION 1 AND ITS INSTRUMENTS

The primary location for this study is the intellectual world in which Ratnakīrti’s work was produced. This includes not only the world of Buddhist scholasticism, but also the worlds of Ratnakīrti’s primarily Nyāya interlocutors.²⁷ More specifically, this location is defined by the texts to which Ratnakīrti explicitly and implicitly refers—that is, by the texts that make up the first two groups of source texts described above (see section 2.5). The effort to interpret Ratnakīrti’s arguments as a part of this intellectual and intertextual context recognizes the importance of trying to understand these arguments as Ratnakīrti and the other Sanskrit philosophers of his time did. This requires training oneself to think, along with Ratnakīrti and his interlocutors, in the technical vocabulary and style of Sanskrit philosophy; understanding the intellectual and intertextual space in which they produced their work; and trying to identify their own philosophical concerns.²⁸ This is primarily a historical and philological mode of inquiry.²⁹

In studying Ratnakīrti’s arguments in this location, and to these ends, the primary instruments will be those conceptual resources inherited from Ratnakīrti’s own work and sources, and those methodological resources inherited from classical Indology.³⁰ In my view, careful historical and philological work is absolutely necessary if we are to understand what Ratnakīrti’s arguments meant to him and his peers.³¹ In recognition of this necessity, I have tried to provide philological support for my interpretation of Ratnakīrti’s arguments by providing translations of, and detailed references to, the texts being interpreted. Since my primary interest in this work is Ratnakīrti’s arguments (the patient of this work is, as I explained earlier, Ratnakīrti’s arguments and not the historical context in which they were produced), I have noted to a lesser extent the historical precedents of the arguments being considered, and have virtually ignored any discussion of the broader historical context and background of Ratnakīrti’s debate with the Naiyāyikas.³² Rather than beginning my analysis of his arguments with a discussion of previous Buddhist and Nyāya debates about the nature and existence of Īśvara, for example, I have chosen to begin chapter 2 by directly introducing the Naiyāyikas’ inferential argument, as Ratnakīrti himself does.³³

It is equally important to recognize that while Ratnakīrti’s work may be of historical interest to many, it is certainly not the case that it was merely of historical interest to him or his interlocutors. As works of philosophy, Ratnakīrti’s texts and the arguments that constitute them were intended to be much more than just historical artifacts.³⁴ As a result, when they are studied in this location it is not sufficient to treat them as such. The danger in doing so is that lively and important philosophical and theological arguments will be reduced to conversations about the meanings of technical terms and concepts, and that the diverse and varied history of these arguments will be reduced to exercises in intellectual archaeology, where one’s primary task is to uncover layers of argument and counterargument until their origin is discovered. As mentioned above, such work is necessary, but far from sufficient.³⁵ Acknowledging this recognizes and takes seriously the normative dimensions of Ratnakīrti’s work.³⁶

As this book will make clear, Ratnakīrti’s texts (and those of his interlocutors) are characterized by philosophical arguments that were supposed to be both valid and sound. Moreover, Ratnakīrti and his interlocutors considered themselves to be arguing for positions that could be supported by persuasive if not demonstrative arguments. We do his work and the Sanskrit philosophical tradition more generally a great disservice if we do not consider these arguments with the same philosophical seriousness with which they were offered.³⁷ Acknowledging this requires that we also study the arguments made by both Ratnakīrti and his interlocutors philosophically; that is, with instruments—conceptual resources and methodologies—from sources I–IV (see section 2.5) and, more important, the discipline of philosophy. Such philosophical work is a necessary part of the more historical and philological task of accurately understanding and interpreting Ratnakīrti’s texts even in his world, since it is through such work that the normative dimensions and significance of his arguments can be understood.³⁸ With these instruments, new perspectives on Ratnakīrti’s arguments emerge and it becomes possible to see more clearly what is at stake in them, and to better appreciate the consequences of his views.³⁹ Conceptual and methodological instruments constructed from source IV are particularly important, since it is almost impossible to accurately describe Sanskrit philosophical arguments in English without an awareness of philosophical vocabulary in English. If for no other reason, it is because of this that those of us who are interested in Sanskrit philosophical texts are justified in using contemporary philosophical vocabulary to describe and think about Sanskrit philosophy. In making use of such vocabulary in nearly every chapter of this book, my intention is to bring out the philosophical structure of the arguments being considered, irrespective of whether these arguments have contemporary parallels. As will become clear in what follows, some arguments have such parallels while others do not.

LOCATION 2 AND ITS INSTRUMENTS

In addition to the intellectual world in which Ratnakīrti’s work was produced, a second location for this study is the contemporary Euro-American academy, and more specifically the three disciplinary frameworks referred to in this introduction. While the first location informs my understanding of Ratnakīrti’s arguments and their significance, this second location shapes the ways in which I write about both. To some extent, it also determines the project’s beneficiaries. The instruments used to write about (and study) Ratnakīrti’s arguments in this multidisciplinary location are based on the genre conventions of contemporary academic discourse; the conceptual and methodological expectations of each discipline (including my own, insofar as I am formally located in the disciplines of religious studies and South Asian studies/Indology and subject to their disciplinary demands); and my transdisciplinary goals.

In attending to this location, I have chosen to present Ratnakīrti’s work by reconstructing and highlighting those features of his texts that are the most relevant to his critique of the Nyāya argument for the existence of Īśvara. In some cases, this requires bringing together arguments from texts that are topically distant from each other, and selecting and highlighting only some of Ratnakīrti’s arguments while ignoring others. For example, while Ratnakīrti’s remarks on inference-warranting relations are directly related by him to his critique of the Naiyāyikas’ argument, his remarks on exclusion and mental content are discussed more fully in other contexts and are, at best, only indirectly applied by him to this problem. In my work, however, these remarks will be brought together in order to explain dimensions of Ratnakīrti’s critique of the Nyāya arguments that he himself does not choose to discuss explicitly. This kind of constructive representation of Ratnakīrti’s views is designed to facilitate a description of Ratnakīrti’s arguments that is faithful to his texts and intellectual concerns, and yet meaningful to those who do not have a detailed knowledge of Sanskrit philosophy. It is worth noting that such a rational reconstruction is not unprecedented in Sanskrit philosophy itself. In fact, the style of Sanskrit philosophy is such that the sort of rational reconstruction described here is pervasive.⁴⁰ In an important sense, this method also claims sources I and II (i.e., texts from Ratnakīrti’s world) as its own.

The disciplinary expectations that come from studying Ratnakīrti’s arguments in this location are reflected in the content of some of the chapters: for example, this introduction, which addresses the disciplinary expectation that projects in religious studies be methodologically self-conscious, and many of the footnotes, in which the disciplinary expectations of classical Indology are addressed. The multidisciplinary location that I am describing here is also closely related to the transdisciplinary space that I am seeking to create, in that this space is constructed out of religious studies, philosophy, and South Asian studies. It is the demands and expectations of this transdisciplinary location, as I understand it, that guide how the body of the text has been written.⁴¹

LOCATION 3 AND ITS INSTRUMENTS

In addition to the two locations just described, there is a third location in which my study of Ratnakīrti’s arguments should take place. This location is one that I imagine myself to share with Ratnakīrti and his interlocutors. As such, it is neither my context, location 2, nor their context, location 1, but an imagined our context. In this location, my understanding and interpretation of Ratnakīrti’s arguments become vulnerable to an imagined critique by him. It is also here that his arguments and counterarguments place demands on me by requiring, for example, that I respond to them.⁴² In my view, studying Ratnakīrti’s arguments in such a location is necessary for properly situating his work (and that of Sanskrit intellectuals more generally) in the life of the academy, since it is here that a normative context is recognized in which it becomes possible to learn from Sanskrit philosophers in some of the same ways in which we currently learn from Euro-American ones.⁴³ As mentioned above, this book takes only a few preliminary steps toward studying Ratnakīrti’s arguments in such a location. Although while reading and writing about Ratnakīrti’s work I have participated in his philosophical project, by taking his arguments and conclusions seriously and making judgments as to their success and failure, I have chosen not to include these judgments in this work. I have, however, tried to make explicit the philosophical issues on which the success and failure of his arguments depend. A final evaluation of Ratnakīrti’s arguments and the constructive work that I believe should accompany such evaluations is, unfortunately, beyond the scope of this more historicist project. What is presented here, however, is a necessary part of such a project and one that I hope will contribute to such work in the future.⁴⁴

3. Comparative Philosophy of Religions

In identifying the six components through which this study is defined, I have not yet described why this work is comparative, as there is nothing in the structure of the theory of event-makers that requires that it be so. What makes this project specifically comparative, in my view, is the self-conscious bringing together of two or more components that are generally taken to be different.⁴⁵ This bringing together can be understood either as the bringing together of different components (e.g., two different patients or a patient with a different instrument) or as the bringing together of different features of a single, multivalent component, or both.⁴⁶ More specifically, what brings these different elements together is the fact that they are all related by an agent to a single event, which in such a context becomes, by definition, a comparative one.⁴⁷ The self-consciousness of this process is also significant, since what counts as different in such contexts is contingent: what is different for one agent may not be different, and therefore comparative, for another. In fact, if this project is fully successful, it will someday no longer be viewed as one in the comparative philosophy of religions, but rather as one in the philosophy of religions without qualification. Most simply, what is compared in this book—that is, self-consciously brought together—are different instruments, sources, and locations in relation to a single patient (Ratnakīrti’s arguments) and a single comparative event.⁴⁸

There are three features of this comparative framework that are worth noting. The first is that it allows for both narrow and broad comparisons. By narrow comparisons I mean comparisons in which the elements that are brought together touch one another historically; for example, concepts, methods, or texts from sources I and II. That they touch one another historically means simply that there is a known (or plausible) historical connection between the elements in question. By broad comparison I mean comparisons in which the elements that are brought together have nothing to do with one another historically; for example, concepts, methods, and texts from source I and source IV.⁴⁹ Both kinds of comparison will be used in this book. A second feature of this comparative framework is the diversity in what can be compared, that is, the exempla.⁵⁰ The exempla need not be merely religious traditions, practices, phenomena, ideas, texts/text-traditions, or individuals. Rather, the framework allows for comparisons between, and within, any component or set of components, regardless of what they are. Thus, not only can patients be compared with one another, but patients can be compared with instruments, and instruments with other instruments, beneficiaries, locations, etc.⁵¹ From this it should be clear that the framework allows for a comparison not only of components but also of processes.⁵² In each chapter of this book, different exempla are brought together with respect to the same patient. Thus, each chapter can be understood to exemplify a different form of comparison in what is still a single comparative study.⁵³ Finally, this framework allows for a complex metric for assessing the value of a comparative study, in that the beneficiaries, whether groups of individuals or disciplinary frameworks, may be multiple.⁵⁴

While I have devoted a considerable amount of space in this introduction to developing a framework of comparison, and to explaining how and why this particular project should be thought of as one in the comparative philosophy of religions, I will not discuss these issues explicitly in the chapters that follow. Instead, as I will explain below, these chapters are intended as examples of this framework at work. I hope that their success and/or failure will speak to the success and/or failure of this method and the desirability of the transdisciplinary space that I am trying to create. In the final section of this introduction, I want to turn to the structure of this book, its central arguments, and some of the ways in which its various chapters exemplify the comparative framework outlined here.

4. Content, Structure, and Arguments

In addition to this introductory chapter, this book is divided into two parts, each containing two chapters, and a conclusion. In part 1 I focus on Ratnakīrti’s interpretation and critique of his Hindu opponents’—the Naiyāyikas’—most important argument for the existence of Iśvara. In chapter 2 I provide an introduction to religious epistemology in classical India. More specifically, I introduce the technical vocabulary on the basis of which all Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain theories of inferential reasoning were developed and provide an interpretation of specifically Nyāya epistemology. Particular attention is paid to the extremely sophisticated theory of defeaters, which has not yet received the attention that it deserves. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a relatively detailed yet accessible introduction to the epistemological framework within which Ratnakīrti and his opponents debate the inferential argument for the existence of Īśvara (and nearly every other topic of philosophical interest). The patient of this specific chapter is the Naiyāyikas’ Īśvara-inference, as it is understood by Ratnakīrti. The location with respect to which it will be studied is, primarily, location 1—Ratnakīrti’s intellectual world. The instruments used, however, will include those that I have inherited from source I—Ratnakīrti’s texts, and especially his conceptual vocabulary—but also those that I have discovered and constructed in sources II and IV—that is, both the texts to which Ratnakīrti directly refers and contemporary sources to which he could not. As with the chapters that follow, a scale of beneficiaries is intended, ranging from those who are most interested in the specific (and literal) details of Ratnakīrti’s work, to those who are interested in its significance for him and those who are concerned with its significance for us.

In chapter 3 I discuss Ratnakīrti’s critique of the Naiyāyikas’ inferential argument. Here the patient is Ratnakīrti’s most important arguments against the Īśvara-inference, as it was understood by Ratnakīrti himself. As in chapter 2, location 1 is primary, and I appeal to a wide range of instruments, sources, and beneficiaries. For most of this chapter it is instruments from source I that are of primary importance. Near the end of the chapter, however, and especially in section 5, the location shifts to location 2 (our intellectual world), and the instruments to those that I have constructed from source IV (contemporary Euro-American philosophy). Taken together, chapter 2 and chapter 3 argue that in addition to the Naiyāyikas’ specific argument for the nature and existence of Īśvara, the target of Ratnakīrti’s critique is the epistemological theory that supports nearly all forms of Nyāya religious reasoning.

Although Ratnakīrti’s argument is presented as an internal critique of the Naiyāyikas’ arguments, it is actually supported by specifically Buddhist philosophical principles. In part 1 of this book I focus on the Buddhist philosophical theories that underlie Ratnakīrti’s critique of Nyāya epistemology. Through this I am able to provide a more comprehensive account of Ratnakīrti’s thought and to illustrate the very close connection between Buddhist theories of mind, language, and epistemology. In chapter 4 I discuss the Buddhist theory of exclusion and argue that it is best understood as a theory of conceptual content, that is, as a theory of what our thoughts are about. I also show that it is the basis for Ratnakīrti’s views of epistemic necessity, inference-warranting relations, and the problem of negative existential statements, central themes in his critique of the Īśvara-inference. In this chapter the patient is a theory that is neither obviously nor directly related by Ratnakīrti himself to his discussion of the Īśvara-inference. As in chapters 2 and 3, in studying this patient—that is, the theory of exclusion—I appeal to a wide range of instruments, sources, and beneficiaries. Like in chapter 3, it is instruments inherited from source I and those constructed from source IV that are the most significant. In this chapter, however, the location is defined more narrowly, by a single text from source I, namely, Ratnakīrti’s Demonstration of Exclusion. What is different about this chapter (and also the next two) is that its specific patient is transformed from being the subject of a specific chapter to being an instrument for studying Ratnakīrti and his Nyāya interlocutors’ arguments about the Īśvara-inference, that is, the patient of the work as a whole.

While the process of transforming the theory of exclusion from a patient to an instrument begins in chapter 4, it is completed in the next chapter. In chapter 5, I show how Ratnakīrti uses ten key concepts to construct his view of the world and the kinds of entities in it. On the basis of this, I argue that Ratnakīrti’s overall philosophical (and religious) project is to show how mind, language, and world together create mind, language, and world. The theory of exclusion is central to this. Ratnakīrti’s worldview is fundamentally different from that of his Nyāya opponents, and in this chapter I try to show how (and why) there is no room in it for the Naiyāyikas’ Īśvara. Chapter 5 also describes the metaphysics of modality (and epistemology) in a way that directly relates this issue to Ratnakīrti’s arguments in part 1. As in chapter 4, the specific subject of this chapter—Ratnakīrti’s account of mental images (ākāra)—is neither obviously nor directly related by Ratnakīrti (or his interlocutors) to his discussion of the Īśvara-inference. Unlike in chapter 4, however, where the location is defined by a single text from source I, here the location is Ratnakīrti’s corpus as a whole. The instruments used to study Ratnakīrti’s account of mental images in this location are primarily those inherited from source I and those constructed from source IV. It is in the concluding sections of this chapter (sections 5 and 6) that the transformation of Ratnakīrti’s theory of exclusion and account of mental images from patient to instrument is complete, and its significance for studying the Īśvara-inference becomes apparent.

In chapter 6, the concluding chapter of the book, I argue for the religious significance of Buddhist logic and epistemology. Although there has been considerable interest in the relationship (or lack thereof) between Buddhist philosophy and Buddhist forms of religious practice, theories of liberation, etc., very little work has been done on the ways in which Buddhists like Ratnakīrti considered Buddhist philosophy to be of religious significance. In this chapter I provide an extended account of how Ratnakīrti’s view of its soteriological significance relates to those of his predecessors. Based on Ratnakīrti’s work, and that of his teacher, Jñānaśrīmitra, I also show how Buddhist logic and epistemology can itself be viewed as a kind of religious practice, and more specifically why it was believed by Ratnakīrti and his predecessors to be of soteriological value.⁵⁵

1. For what little historical information is known about Ratnakīrti (ca. 1000–1050 C.E.), and for more on his dates and those of his contemporaries, see Thakur 1975, Bühneman 1980, Kajiyama 1965, Lasic 2000b, Mimaki 1976, Woo 1999, and the references contained therein. The term Nyāya refers to a Hindu philosophical system that is based on the Nyāya-sūtra and its commentaries. Philosophers working within this text tradition are referred to as Naiyāyikas. Throughout this book the terms Nyāya and Naiyāyikas will be used to refer to the intellectuals whom Ratnakīrti considers to be his interlocutors. Moreover, whenever phrases such as according to the Naiyāyikas are used, what is referred to is the Nyāya viewpoint as reported by Ratnakīrti. Although Ratnakīrti’s characterizations of Nyāya philosophy are generally fair and accurate, this work will not concern itself with demonstrating that this is so. Instead, it will concern itself with Ratnakīrti’s Naiyāyikas and their arguments.

2. For a brief discussion of why I think Buddhist intellectuals like Ratnakīrti could be considered intellectual historians see McCrea and Patil 2006 and Patil