A History of Buddhist Philosophy¶

Volume I of Studies in Buddhist Thought. It follows twenty-five centuries along a single axis, from the Indian intellectual world before the Buddha to the present day: how the questions were first posed, what answers the schools gave, and what disputes those answers produced among themselves.

What this volume does¶

Its position lies between the scholarly monograph and the general introduction, and its method is to reconstruct arguments. What emptiness is, what non-self actually claims, why the store-consciousness was proposed, which steps Madhyamaka's reductio actually takes — reporting conclusions on such questions is of little use. This volume sets out each school's reasoning step by step, so that readers have a basis for their own judgment and can see where the tensions between positions lie.

History and philosophy are kept apart here. The historical narrative aims at neutral statement, and any picture reached by inference rather than documentation is marked as such. The philosophical sections give the structure of the argument, and where the volume takes a position of its own, it says so plainly. Sectarian legends are not treated as historical fact, but why they came to be shaped as they were, and what work they did in history, is itself material worth analysing. The full account of method is in the Preface.

Structure¶

The volume has two parts.

Part I — History of Philosophy, in twelve sections, follows the historical thread: the Indian background and the earliest teaching (the four truths, dependent arising, non-self, the five aggregates); the early sangha and the school divisions; the philosophy of the early schools (Sarvāstivāda, Sautrāntika, Theravāda Abhidhamma, the pudgala controversy); the rise of Mahāyāna; Madhyamaka; Yogācāra; tathāgatagarbha and buddha-nature; the logic and epistemology of late Indian Buddhism; and the separate developments of the southern, Chinese, and Tibetan traditions down to contemporary trends.

Part II — Philosophical Analysis steps out of the historical tempo and reads the systems that matter most to this volume closely, one at a time: the early teaching (cosmology, the undeclared questions), Theravāda Abhidhamma, Sarvāstivāda, the Mahāvibhāṣā and the Abhidharmakośa, the proofs of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, later Madhyamaka, Yogācāra, Tiantai, and Huayan. A topic given a single chapter in Part I may occupy a whole section in Part II.

A Terminology Concordance closes the volume, with Chinese, Sanskrit, Pali, and English equivalents and brief glosses.

How to read it¶

Reading straight through is one route. Readers who want only the philosophical thread may begin with Part I, section 1, chapter 5 (the earliest teaching), then take up section 3 on the early schools and section 5 on Madhyamaka; the Preface sets out a fuller path. Part II can also be entered directly.

In relation to the other volumes¶

This volume is history, and holds judgment in check. The judgment comes in Volume II, A Critique of Buddhist Soteriology, which proceeds from the facts established here. Volume III, A History of Buddhist Transformation, goes further still and asks who made each turn, and out of what. Each volume stands on its own; read in order, the thread is most complete.