Afterword¶

When I began writing this book, it was one book. By the time I finished, it had become the first of three. In writing a history of philosophy, two kinds of questions repeatedly exceeded the genre's boundaries. One asked whether these systems actually fulfilled their promises; the other asked how they came to take the forms they did. The first requires judging efficacy, the second investigating origins. Neither fits within a philosophical history striving for evenhandedness. Forcing them into it would destroy the fairness of the exposition. The project therefore became three volumes. Volume I asks what Buddhism said. Volume II, A Critique of Buddhist Soteriology, asks what it delivered. Volume III, A History of Buddhist Transformation, asks what it became. The three questions are three faces of one problem.

The division of volumes is a division of labor. Volume I is a map, attempting to draw the terrain accurately according to each tradition's own account and to suspend judgment. Volume II is an inspection, testing each tradition against the criterion of suffering's cessation. Volume III is an archive of transformation, examining how this body of thought was manufactured, declared at the border, modified, and transported over twenty-five hundred years. Readers who find a passage in Volume I merely descriptive rather than evaluative should treat it as a marker: its evaluation is in Volume II, its genealogy in Volume III. Each volume stands as a book of its own, yet leaves doors open to the others.

There is more than one way to read them. One can proceed from map to inspection to archive, or enter through Volume III's stories and then return to consult Volume I's map. Cross-references identify volume, part, and chapter.

The preface quoted Weber in saying that this book has a position, as it inevitably must. With all three volumes completed, that position can be stated more fully. This book's respect for Buddhism consists in treating it as an object robust enough to withstand honest examination: before the severest criticism, present the strongest version of the opposing case; whenever an inference goes beyond the evidence, mark it explicitly as inference. Volume III's conclusion asks readers to discount that volume by half. The same request applies to all three.

The volumes were written in sequence. During the process, artificial-intelligence tools performed a great deal of searching, drafting, and enforcement of editorial form. Responsibility for selecting the material, directing the arguments, and making every judgment belongs to the author.

One final word about the original motive. There was really only one thing I wanted to understand: what a tradition centered on the cessation of suffering said, what it delivered, and what it became. All three answers have now been submitted. The reader grades them.

At the end of this afterword, three expressions of gratitude remain. To Bhikkhu Bodhi: most of the English translations of the Nikāyas cited in this book are his; the author learned from him only through books and the internet, but the benefit was real. To the lectures hosted by Dhamma Rain: they too came through the internet, and the benefit was equally real. After these two comes the weightiest: to the teacher who lived twenty-five hundred years ago, the most heartfelt gratitude. He himself said that the Tathāgata had no “teacher’s closed fist” with respect to the Dhamma—nothing held back in a closed hand as a secret teaching. From beginning to end, this book has been a beneficiary of those words.