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Reviewed by:
  • Buddhists, Brahmins, and Belief: Epistemology in South Asian Philosophy of Religion
  • Richard P. Hayes
Buddhists, Brahmins, and Belief: Epistemology in South Asian Philosophy of Religion. By Dan Arnold. Columbia University Press, 2005. 328 pages. $49.50.

The debates on the limit of knowledge and the nature of logic between the Brahmanical and the Buddhist schools of Indian philosophy and religion have been the subject of investigation by scholars writing in European languages for the past 100 years. Most of those studies have focused on debates between the Nyāya school of Brahmanism and the Buddhist school of metaphysics, epistemology, and logic associated with Dignāga (sixth century) and Dharmakīrti (seventh century). Only a few studies have been devoted to the lively debates among Buddhists, especially between the Mādhyamika school and the followers of Dignāga, over the possibility of grounding belief. Fewer studies have explored [End Page 514] the critiques of Dharmakīrti's school made by Kumārila Bhat t a (sixth or seventh century) and other followers of the Mīmām sā school of Brahmanism. Dan Arnold's book takes into account both the Mādhyamika and Mīmām sāka critiques of the Buddhist epistemologists and in so doing makes a convincing case that there were significant weaknesses in the Indian Buddhist position that were intelligently criticized by its critics. Like a good many other scholars writing on classical and medieval Indian thought, Arnold makes ample use of modern philosophy, both of the analytic and of the continental traditions, and thus treats the classical Indian schools of thought as traditions that still have much life in them and still have things to say to contemporary philosophers and students of comparative religion. In what follows, the outline of the book will be described, and some of Arnold's reflections on the significance of his study for comparative religions will be reviewed.

Arnold's book is divided into three parts. In part 1, entitled Buddhist Foundationalism, he discusses Dignāga's indebtedness to classical Buddhist abhidharma and his redefinition of certain key terms, showing how Dignāga created a system of epistemology that privileged the sensation of unique particulars or what some philosophers have called sense data. This move results in a system that sees universals, the only things that can be expressed in language, as fictions, whereas inexpressible, private and non-repeating sensibilia are the sole realities. This unbridgeable gap between the sensible and the intellectible realms creates numerous problems, which Arnold discusses in the second chapter of part 1. The principal problem is what the role of reasoning can be in such a system of epistemology as that offered by the Buddhists. It is clear that what motivated Dignāga and his interpreters was a doctrinal need to undermine any candidate for being an enduring self (ātman) and to undermine also the authority of the Brahmanical scriptures, the Vedas, and the Upanis ads that were the basis of the belief in a self. Undermining scriptural authority can be achieved by replacing it entirely with empirical observation, but this alone is not rich enough to support key Buddhist doctrines such as the four noble truths (which are universal propositions) and dependent origination (which is a causal theory that cannot be sustained only by observations of sensations in the present moment). So empirical observation must be bolstered by reason, but reason for Dignāga is in the realm that has been declared fictitious. Arnold capably discusses this problem by drawing on the insights of Gottlob Frege and other modern thinkers, thus showing that the problem is not merely of historical interest but is still a living philosophical problem. Having done that, he moves on to showing how Dignāga's thought was criticized by Indian thinkers in the centuries closer to his own.

Part 2 of the book, entitled, The Reformed Epistemology of Pūrva Mīmām sā deals with the attempts of the philosopher Kumārila and his interpreters, Um veka (eighth century) and Pārthasārathimiśra (tenth century), to defend an ontology that allows for the reality of the universals and selves that had come under attack by the...

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