Honest to 'God' and Grammar in Medieval India
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HONEST TO ‘GOD’ AND GRAMMAR IN MEDIEVAL INDIA: RECOVERING THE IMPORT OF A NEGLECTED BUDDHIST LECTURE by SONAM KACHRU (Under the Direction of Glenn Wallis) ABSTRACT This thesis is a translation and study of a medieval Buddhist manuscript that has been taken to provide, in the context of a lecture, an argument for the non-existence of God understood as a sentient agent. This study situates and reconstructs the argument by appealing to canonical Indian arguments for and against God and attempts to show that while the strategy employed is unique in the context of late philosophical Buddhism, it is anticipated by particular strategies employed by the Buddha in Buddhist canonical literature; the argument shows signs of synthesizing some independent arguments offered in early scholastic Buddhism into a single strategy in line with a canonical motivation. The thesis further claims that the strategy employed in this neglected manuscript has the virtue of not indulging strong metaphysical principles and enjoys a better fit with diagnostic strategies arguably central to the Early Buddhist movement. Significantly, the claim that the argument is designed to argue the non-existence of God must be refined to read that the argument attempts to show the semantic emptiness of either an affirmation or denial of a God identified as the sentient agent intentionally responsible for the creation of the world. INDEX WORDS: The Buddha, God, Indian Theories of Inference, Philosophical Grammar, Creative Acts, Limit Effects, World Construction, The Critical and The Clinical, Negation, Exclusion, Tweedledum and Tweedledee. HONEST TO ‘GOD’ AND GRAMMAR IN MEDIEVAL INDIA: RECOVERING THE IMPORT OF A NEGLECTED BUDDHIST LECTURE by SONAM KACHRU AB, The University of Georgia, 2002 A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS ATHENS, GEORGIA © 2004 Sonam Kachru All Rights Reserved HONEST TO ‘GOD’ AND GRAMMAR IN MEDIEVAL INDIA: RECOVERING THE IMPORT OF A NEGLECTED BUDDHIST LECTURE by SONAM KACHRU Major Professor: Glenn Wallis Committee: O. Bradley Bassler Caroline Medine Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia iv DEDICATION — to the vāsanas of Bibhuti S. Yadav, …yo’antadvaya vāsa˙ vidhËta vāsa˙…, for the gift of his all too short study of the Buddha’s many silences. This work was written with Dr. Trilokinath Malla in mind, in whose house I first learnt to walk, and then to read; the books, I believe, were his, as were the first annotations I can remember encountering. May their memories remain a blessing — v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I recognize what little merit there is in this work to be the result of a manifold citta, or the many emotive and cognitive vectors that somehow have proved compossible as an influence in this essay. I also recognize, however, that there might be those who would rather I was not so generous. Some might disclaim credit on grounds of modesty, some perhaps truthfully, and others for lack of wishing to take on the charge of being guilty for what may very well be a flawed product. If there are any such cases, I can only apologize for any errors of attribution—all such errors are decidedly my own. What little poetry there may be is not my fault; Kapil Kachru tells me that he is probably to blame. I think it entirely possible that he is correct (I will not distinguish the personal from the academic; footnotes are entirely sufficient for that much). Glenn Wallis has been indispensable, not only for the chance to think through Buddhism for Buddhist reasons, or the opportunities to benefit from his advice and friendship, but also for the example of clarity he has set in his own work. If I have fallen short of his example it is for no lack of trying on his part. Although not directly at hand for this essay, I would like to acknowledge my teachers on matters Dharmic; without Shanta Ratnayaka, Dan Lusthaus, Lou Mitsunen Nordstrom, and S. N. Goenka, it is quite probable that this thesis would not have been written; without them, it is certain that it would not have had the flavor it does. Dan and Hiromi Lusthaus went out of their way to make me feel welcome; for that, I am deeply grateful. Dan Lusthaus through his own work provided an example of what still needed to be said about the work of Buddhism. My work is a simple and humble extension. I would also like to acknowledge that gentleman whose well preserved copy of Aßvagho∑a’s Buddhacarita lay carefully concealed in a chest in a room often opaque and always dusty. For the key to this flat, and candles with which to read by, I am grateful to Írimati Kaul: sabbadånaµ dhammadånaµ jinåti, indeed. I vi would like to thank Caroline Medine for her patience and support; To Russell Kirkland: for my first introduction to the discipline required of the American pundit, and for my first glimpse of American menchlichkeit, I remain deeply indebted; Thomas Cerbu, without whom, I may have never thought about learning to read in any serious sense of this word; Victoria Kamsler, for all the encouragement. Without the expert help of the good people at inter-library loan, a resource Tom Cerbu in particular habituated me to, this work would have been, in a word, impractical. I do not know how to thank O. Bradley Bassler. The Buddha is once said to have corrected Ananda’s opinion on the role of friendship by saying that a friend [kalyåˆa-mitta] is not simply a prerequisite to the authentic life; friendship just is that life. I flatter myself in thinking that with the person of Brad Bassler I have indeed encountered an exemplification of that insight. Condition is most definitively on. Dr. Saroj Malla and Dr. Shiban Kachru provided the right environment for this sort of work at a very early age; this essay is their fruit. In many ways, it is also Lisa’s. This simply would not have happened without her. <Ciao> The customary appropriation of any errors is something of a closing ritual. Some errors I have to say may not be my own; on the other hand, it is certain that the faults of not always inquiring closer, of being so often too tired to think anew and of having taking too much at face value, remain entirely my own. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS......................................................................................................................... v CHAPTER 1 PREFACE.....................................................................................................................................1 2 INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………...18 3 BETWEEN A POT AND GOD, THE WORLD?...............................................................47 4 CANONCIAL ANTECEDENTS..........................................................................................73 5 INTRODUCING A TEXT AND AN ARGUMENT....................................................110 6 THE ARGUMENT IN TRANSLITERATION AND TRANSLATION....................137 7 TWEEDLE AND TWEEDLE-DUM………………………………………………148 8 TWEEDLE-DEE AND TWEEDLE……………………………………………….191 REFERENCES………………………………………………………………………………….211 1 CHAPTER ONE: PREFACE If one traffics in talk about [means and referents of valid cognition in the absence of true criteria], one may as well trade in talk about colors in the soul, or about the peace-of-mind experienced by a pot, and so on.1 — Jayaråßi, Eighth Century CE Historian Romila Thappar once suggested that “a fundamental sanity in Indian Civilization has been due to an absence of Satan.”2 If we speak in the singular, either of the divine office named by that title or, when in a nominative mood, of the singular agent involved, then this seems to me an insightful, plausibly true and yet misleading thesis. The famed prosecutor of Hebraic literature [hasså ån]3 may indeed have been absent, but it may be argued that his work—the cross examination of piety—was rather successfully prosecuted by a number of historical agents in India for much of its most celebrated periods of development. And in contrast to what is sometimes maintained about the Christian incarnation of ‘the prosecutor,’ diabolos, it does seem to be the case that an absence of sustained commitment to such an office has rendered the execution of the cross-examination of the many forms of Indian religiosity lamentably impotent. I am, of course, speaking of the long-standing tradition of philosophical interrogation, of the many years of conjectures and refutations in classical India; while unbelief in the existence of—or more pressingly, unbelief in the need for—active interrogation may be ascribed to diabolos as his victory, the same cannot be said for the arising of the 1 The fragment reads: “atha … na ba …vyavahåra˙ kriyate, tadåtmani rËpåstitvavyavahåro gha ådau ca sukhåstitvyavahåra˙ pravartayitavya˙.” I follow Eli Franco’s reconstruction and modify the translation offered in his Perception, Knowledge and Disbelief, (Motilal Banarsidass Press, Delhi, second print, 1994), p71. 2 Romila Thappar, Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300, (Oxford University Press, 2000), xvii. 3 Square brackets in the main body of the text are used to specify the Sanskrit that grounds the discussion in the text. When employed in the function of quotations, however, square brackets perform their customary duty to alert the reader as to the presence of interpolations or material extrinsic to the quoted material. 2 belief, with the demise of the philosophers and the disappearance in India of the sustained and instituted demand for piety to live up to the ‘covert’ inferences that supported it, that such prosecution was not necessary.4 In such a tradition, while it lasted, even the Buddha’s silence had become a conclusion of sorts to an argument, no longer either dogmatic abstinence or only therapeutic skill; it is significant that such care for what may be termed philosophical ‘normalization’ was taken with the teachings of a man of whom it is has not been said, to borrow a phrase from Candrakīrti, that he was ever ‘infatuated with argumentation’ [tarka priyā].5 In one of the chapters below I characterize this thesis as one oriented by an interest in an argument rather than a text.