Buddhism and Language: A Study of Indo-Tibetan Scholasticism.

• Author: van der Kuijp, Leonard W.J.
• Position: Review

By JOSE IGNACIO CABEZON. Albany: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, 1994. Pp. xiii + 299.

This immensely ambitious study is somewhat of a disappointment. To be sure, the author is to be commended for having thought of this important enterprise and for having made an attempt at its execution, but the results are, unfortunately, not very convincing, and very often many of the judgments made are inadequate, premature, or questionable. Many scholars of Indian and Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies (as well as those concerned with the history of ideas in the Islamic world, the world of Judaism, and in China, to name but a few other areas of cognate scholarly concern) have used the term "scholasticism" in their writings without - what at first may have been to their peril - having adequately addressed the issue of whether this seemingly at once precise and yet rather vague term is a commensurate "cross-cultural category," one that can be lifted out of its intrinsic cultural context (pp. 11ff.) and placed in a prima facie radically different one. In the first chapter of his book (pp. 11-26), the author argues at some length, and often in tortuous prose, that it can be used as a hermeneutic category in his own area of scholarly interest, namely Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies, as well as elsewhere. But I must confess that a great deal of what he has to say in these pages strikes me a trifle Quixotic and, perhaps, even ultimately unnecessary and redundant, in that much of the substance of his argumentation virtually (if not actually) presupposes the pandemic essentialism of scholasticism and the scholastic method, with its attendant Eurocentrism (if not imperialism! [p. 13]). True, much of what has been written about scholasticism is predisposed to take the thirteenth century and Thomas Aquinas as the defining era of both scholasticism and its method. But this Procrustean view has been eroding through the publication of a number of recent studies in which opinions have come to diverge more and more widely, so much so that the consensus seems to be that both scholasticism and its method are of far greater conceptual fluidity than was suspected hithertofore. I therefore doubt very much whether, and not only for reasons that are political or sociological, anyone would still be inclined to argue seriously that their use and applicability make sense in a Thomistic or European medieval environment alone, regardless of the terminological genesis of scholasticus and its etymology. One of the best recent accounts of the numerous nuances of scholasticism and its method in the context of medieval philosophy may be found in L. M. de Rijk's Middeleeuwse wijsbegeerte: Traditie en verniewing (= Medieval Philosophy: Tradition and Innovation [Assen: Van Gorcum, 1977], 18-21, 25-27, 107-37. There is a [perhaps more useful?] French translation of the second Dutch edition [1981]: La Philosophie au moyen age [Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985], 15-17, 20-21, 82-105). But I fail to understand why Cabezon writes that "the Latin West's preoccupation with incorporating Aristotle into religious scholarship is obviously one of the idiosyncratic features of European scholasticism" (p. 25). Beginning with Boethius (480-526), though the origins may in fact be traced back to the Greeks, one of the most significant features of the scholastic enterprise was the gradual acceptance of a literary (and methodological) canon, especially in the form of Aristotle's oeuvre, and this "canon" received an enormous boost in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when more of his writings and the commentaries thereon became available in Western Europe through Greek and Arabic manuscripts (the story is told in summary form by B. G. Dod in "Aristoteles Latinus," in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. N. Kretzmann et al. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982], 45-79). The adjective "idiosyncratic," therefore, is hardly appropriate and, aside from the Bible and a series of other texts and chrestomathic compendia, the canonicity of Aristotle's oeuvre seems to me to be among the most important defining features of the intellectual life of at least the middle of Europe's medieval period. In fact, we find a similar, but by no means identical situation in Tibetan Buddhism, where the authority enjoyed by Dharmakirti's (ca. 600-660) writings is a given fact in virtually all quarters and schools. Of course, we can only speculate whether Dharmakirti's writings enjoyed the same canonicity in late, say post-eighth-century, Indian Buddhism - and the evidence that is out there suggests that they did not. But, unlike the temporary proscription of some of Aristotle's works from the Parisian academic scene in the early thirteenth...