Monastic Debate in Tibet: A Study on the History and Structures of Bsdus Grwa Logic.

• Author: Schwabland, Peter

It is regrettable that, even today, the vast quantity of painstaking Japanese scholarship that is carried out in nearly every field within Buddhist Studies remains largely inaccessible to the majority of Western scholars. As a case in point, although Onoda has published regularly on the topic of Tibetan monastic debate since 1978, only his more recent contributions in English have gained significant attention among Western scholars, while his earlier contributions in Japanese remain relatively unknown. It is therefore with the stated intent of making his earlier findings more accessible that Onoda has written the present book (p. 9).

The subject of Tibetan Buddhist epistemology and logic has become increasingly popular over the last decades, producing a number of works that may be divided, not too inaccurately, into those that deal primarily with the logical structures and practices of monastic debate as presented in the Dge lugs pa tradition, often relying on personal training in the traditional Tibetan educational system, and those that have favored an historical and historiographical approach and have primarily treated the earlier traditions deriving from Rngog lo tsa ba Blo Idan shes rab (1059-1109) and Sa skya Pandita (1182-1251). The first approach is best exemplified by a two-part article by Goldberg (1985), which sought to explain the system of Dge lugs pa logic based on the bsdus grwa texts of 'Jam dbyangs Mchog lha' od zer (1429-1500) and Yongs 'dzin Phur bu lcog Byams pa tshul khrims rgya mtsho (1825-1901) via modern Western logical theory. The second approach is best exemplified by several works by van der Kuijp (esp. 1979, 1983, and 1989) and Jackson (1987).(1) Onoda's book is one of the most detailed studies of bsdus grwa literature published to date in a Western language (see also D. Perdue, Debate in Tibetan Buddhism [Ithaca: Snow Lion, 1991] and presents an interesting and welcome amalgam of these two approaches, the logical and the historical. He not only examines particular logical theories and patterns of debate as explicated by the standard Dge lugs pa tradition, but also takes great pains to examine the historical background of the Dge lugs pa system of debate as well as analyze the original formulations of some of the logical concepts it incorporates.

The topic of Onoda's book is what he calls bsdus grwa logic, a term which, as he points out (p. 59), has two distinct senses. In general, it means the introductory course or classes in dialectics that form a basis from which a student advances in the Dge lugs pa tradition of scholasticism. More specifically, it also indicates the first of the three parts of this course, viz., bsdus grwa (ontology), blo rigs (epistemology) and rtags rigs (logic). Onoda primarily employs the term in the former sense, the sense that I adopt here. Yet one should be aware that he also frequently uses the term in a third and more expanded sense to indicate not only the Dge lugs pa introductory system of dialectics, but also the Tibetan historical precursors to this system, namely the "epistemological summaries" (tshad ma'i bsdus pa) which are said to originate with the highly creative Phya pa Chos kyi Seng ge...