Recognizing Reality: Dharmakirti and His Tibetan Interpreters.

• Author: Wedemeyer, Christian K.
• Position: Reviews of Books

Recognizing Reality: Dharmakirti and His Tibetan Interpreters. By GEORGES B. J. DREYFUS. Albany: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, 1997. Pp. xxi + 622.

Roughly once a decade a work is published which revolutionizes its area of study and brings its discourse to a new level of sophistication and subtlety. In the 1990s the study of the Buddhist philosophical traditions witnessed such a book in Georges Dreyfus' Recognizing Reality. This work represents a great advance in research on Buddhist (and broader Indian) views on ontology and epistemology. It further contributes mightily to scholarship on such topics as the Tibetan assimilation and interpretation of the Indian intellectual legacy, the nature of the commentarial style of philosophy, and the methodology of comparative philosophy and Buddhist studies. In so doing, it provides a model which one hopes will be widely emulated.

This book is a most welcome corrective to the almost single-minded Madhyamaka-centrism that has characterized much of the scholarly work on Buddhist philosophy in recent decades. Rather than rehash (and re-re-re-translate) the texts and issues familiar from the Nagarjunian tradition so fetishized by modern scholarship, Dreyfus undertakes instead to explicate the epistemological and ontological issues confronted in the works of the (so-called Sautrantika or Yogacara) traditions of Dharmakirti, his predecessor Dignaga, and their followers in India and Tibet. Indeed, one significant aim of the book is to "contribute to undermining the reified view of Buddhism as a tradition unified in its rejection of essentialism," claiming that this "does not represent the view of the majority of Indian thinkers, who often adopted a systematic and constructive approach" (p. 19).

This work also signals (one hopes) a decisive move away from the excessive reliance of much of contemporary Buddhist studies on Tibetan doxographical works. While there is much that can be gleaned from such sources, they are intended merely as introductory surveys for young and unsophisticated students and thus gloss over the many nuances to be found in the various authors who represent the "schools" of Buddhist thought. Rather than represent Dharmakirti and his followers according to these ideal types, Dreyfus undertakes to explore the writings of these Buddhist thinkers with the respect and sensitivity one finds (and expects to find) in works on the history of Western philosophy. That is, while well conscious...