Reason's Traces: Identity and Interpretation in Indian and Tibetan Buddhist Thought.

• Author: Siderits, Mark
• Position: Book review

Reason's Traces: Identity and Interpretation in Indian and Tibetan Buddhist Thought. By MATTHEW T. KAPSTEIN. Studies in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism. Boston: WISDOM PUBLICATIONS, 2001. Pp. xviii + 473. $34.95.

This is a collection of essays and translations, some previously published and some revised from the author's 1986 doctoral dissertation. More than half the work is taken up with Indian Buddhist discussions of the self and personal identity. But there are also essays on other topics in Indian and Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, as well as on tantrism in India and Tibet. There is an extensive bibliography, as well as useful indices, one of personal names and the other of subjects and technical terms.

According to the work's introduction, these essays are unified through thematizing the contested notion of "Buddhist philosophy." As Kapstein points out, both philosophers and Buddhologists have expressed skepticism that there could be such a thing as Buddhist philosophy. "Philosophy" is currently understood through a problems-and-arguments model: a text is philosophical to the extent that it employs clearly formulated arguments to address one or more members of a set of core problems. While recent studies have shown ample evidence that Buddhist texts meet this criterion (thereby putting to rest an older myth about the "mystic East"), there is still the difficulty that such texts generally place the use of philosophical rationality within a larger soteriological context. Does this preclude their being genuinely philosophical? Here Kapstein makes a useful comparison with ancient Greek philosophy. One might make his point by saying that suspicions about the very possibility of a Buddhist philosophical project tend to stem from unquestioned acceptance of a reason/faith dichotomy, an historically contingent product of the modern West. Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics all thought of the disciplined use of reason as a necessary means to self-transformation and salvation from life's ills. So apparently did Vasubandhu, Dharmakirti, and Nagarjuna.

For Kapstein to succeed in the task he sets himself, he must do two things: show that certain Buddhist texts contain recognizable arguments concerning problems from the core set deemed "philosophical," and show that reading the texts philosophically helps us understand the role they play in Buddhist soteriological projects. In some of the essays he succeeds at one task only to fall short on the other. For instance, in "Vasubandhu's 'Proof of Idealism'" he displays a Buddhist philosopher at work making just the sorts of moves, and treating just the sort of problem, that one finds in Plato, Descartes, or Russell. The topic of this essay is Vimsatika 11-15, where Vasubandhu attempts to refute theories concerning how physical objects might serve as the objects of perceptual cognition. Kapstein's treatment shows Vasubandhu to be an able dialectician (though he fails to credit Vasubandhu with proper appreciation of the realist options of a sense-data account of physical object, and of treating atoms as geometrical points). But he neglects to discuss how an argument for the non-existence of physical objects could connect up with Buddhist soteriological aims. Two such connections come to mind. As Kapstein points out, Vasubandhu makes crucial use of mereological reductionism, the principle that wholes such as the chariot or (crucially) the person are mere conceptual constructions that the mind builds up out of real parts when these fall into useful arrangements. This principle plays a crucial role in making sense of the Buddha's "middle path" between eternalism...