A Yogacara Buddhist Theory of Metaphor.

• Author: Huntington, C.W., Jr.

A Yogacara Buddhist Theory of Metaphor. By ROY TZOHAR. Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2018. Pp. xvi + 296. $99 (cloth).

"Put simply," Roy Tzohar writes in the introduction to this provocative book, "according to the Buddhists, at the root of human suffering lies a deep discord between how we ordinarily conceive reality and how it truly is" (p. 1). Because of its innate tendency to reify the fluidity of events in experience, language and the conceptual schemes it articulates help to foster a false view of the self and its world. In this sense, language "is the metaphorical workshop in which entities are forged and, once produced, are erroneously believed to be real" (ibid.). To escape the grip of such erroneous beliefs is the ultimate, soteriological goal of all Buddhist thought and practice, a goal facilitated, in part, through the deployment of various forms of salvific discourse. In this respect, however, as Tzohar points out, language contributes both to the solution and to the problem: "Buddhist philosophical texts present a palpable tension that arises from the inherently paradoxical need to argue against words by using words, to devalue language through language" (ibid.). Tzohar rightly construes the need to resolve or contain this tension as a central task of Indian Buddhist thought. How this task is approached by early Indian Yogacara philosophers--and in particular, by the sixth-century Yogacara philosopher Sthiramati--is the principal subject of this meticulously researched study.

As interpreted by Tzohar, Sthiramati's remedy is grounded in a "pan-figurative" theory of meaning unique in the scope of its claim that all language use--both in Buddhist treatises and in quotidian affairs--is metaphorical. The essential features of this claim are set forth in Sthiramati's commentary to the first verse of Vasubandhu's Trimsika: "The metaphor (upacara) of 'things' (dharmah) and of 'self in its various forms, which is set in motion, that is to say in the world and in treatises, that is [with reference to] the transformation of consciousness" (p. 157). By "self" and "things" we are meant to understand all subjective and objective phenomena; none of which exist in the way they appear, namely, as substantive entities. Sthiramati's claim that entities only exist metaphorically relies on "a formulaic s"astric definition of metaphor, according to which a word is used figuratively when it indicates 'something that is not there,' or in more...