Disputed Dharmas: Early Buddhist Theories on Existence; An Annotated Translation of the Section on Factors Dissociated from Thought from Sanghabhadra's Nyayanusara.

• Author: Davidson, Ronald M.
• Position: Review

By COLLETT COX. Studia Philologica Buddhica Monograph Series XI. Tokyo: THE INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR BUDDHIST STUDIES, 1995. Pp. xxiii, 479.

Collett Cox has given us one of those books that every specialist in Indian Buddhism will need to possess but seldom will read, by virtue of the subject matter's inherent opacity. A reworking of her 1982 doctoral dissertation from Columbia University, Disputed Dharmas is a fine piece of philological scholarship which investigates the questions and controversies of phenomena dissociated from thought (viprayukta-samskara-dharmah). This category of events (dharmas, which Cox calls factors) was developed by the Abhidharma doctors partly in response to philosophical challenges from their Brahmanical antagonists, partly to gloss over internal doctrinal difficulties. Incredibly, this category was at one time among the sexiest of topics within the Abhidharma schools of Buddhist intellectuals in monastic India. As an arena of disputation, the category brought into fine focus the disparity between the two leading factions of Abhidharma advocates in north India. Cox has done yeoman's service by patiently outlining the circumstances and ideas of the two major disputants - Vasubandhu for the Sautrantikas and Sanghabhadra for the Vaibhasikas - and translating relevant portions from Xuanzang's Chinese rendering (T.29.1562) of the lost Sanskrit of Sanghabhadra's Nyayanusara. Executing this strategy, Disputed Dharmas is divided into three principal sections: "Historical Introduction" (pp. 1-63), "Introductory Commentaries" (pp. 65-171), and "Translation" (pp. 173-411), followed by an abbreviated list of Chinese characters, bibliography, and a very useful index (pp. 413-79).(1)

The "Historical Introduction" is an excellent summation of the received wisdom of philological enquiry on the corpus of Abhidharma literature, although modern Abhidharmikas will inevitably quibble over some of the representations given. Cox presents the two standard hermeneutical etymologies of the term abhidharma and discusses the methods of exegesis found in this variety of literature, including differences of opinion on how the form began. Moving to the background of the controversy at hand, she delineates the circumstances surrounding the formation of the orthodox Kashmiri Vaibhasika tradition from the larger corpus of Sarvastivada texts and the challenges to the Vaibhasika doctrines by the Sautrantikas. She finally specifies the debate in...