About¶

The name¶

This work is signed Dhammesana (Pali dhamma-esanā, one who seeks the Dhamma). It is a pen name.

The reason for not using a legal name is not concealment; it is what the method of this work requires. Whether an argument holds has nothing to do with who advances it, no reader should believe a sentence more or less firmly for knowing whose it is, and this work does not intend to put any identity behind its own judgements. What can be said: a software engineer living in North America; one who reveres the Buddha, a practitioner; a lover of philosophy. Where a citation requires an author's name, use Dhammesana.

This work has a standpoint¶

This work does not pretend to have no standpoint. Its judgements on the origins of the Mahāyāna and its assessment of Mahāyāna thought, its reading of the Theravāda historical narrative, and its position on Madhyamaka soteriology will all give offence to readers from one tradition or another — readers within the Mahāyāna may find parts of it uncomfortable, and so may readers within the Theravāda, and so may readers accustomed to one or another mainstream account in the academy.

What the Buddha called seeing things as they are (yathābhūtaṃ pajānāti) means knowing things as they are and not as we would wish them to be. This work holds to that attitude as a matter of method, without supposing that it fully attains it. Where to place this work, and where to place the Dharma, is a question left to the reader.

The full statement is in section two of the preface to Volume I.

History and judgement are marked off from each other¶

History and philosophy are two questions: whether an idea appeared in history, and was widely accepted there, cannot stand in for whether it holds philosophically, nor the reverse. The historical portions of this work aim at neutral statement; the philosophical portions set out the structure of an argument, and where a question matters the work states its own reading plainly.

Two marks run through the prose. Where a historical picture rests on sources plus reasonable inference, phrases of the type "from this it can be seen" and "on this basis it may be inferred" flag it as such, and mark it off from what the documents establish; where a judgement or a position is the work's own, it is marked as such. This is one of the compromises between readability and rigour that could not be avoided.

The part AI played¶

In the writing of this work, AI took part in generating first drafts of prose, in some of the searching and collation of source material, and in polishing the language of certain passages.

Every part of the body text has been read, checked, and rewritten word by word by the author. Wherever a historical judgement, a choice of position, or a philosophical reading is at stake, the author's judgement governs; anything supplied by AI that the author found inaccurate or unsuitable was altered or removed.

Citation is where error is easiest. Through repeated proofreading and by returning to the primary texts entry by entry, this work has brought the citation errors AI might introduce down to a level at least comparable with purely human writing. Even so, the author's capacities are limited and errors are inevitable; where a citation or a reading is mistaken, readers are asked to say so.

The use of AI is the use of a writing tool, no different in kind from using a dictionary, searching a database, or setting type with software. It is stated here plainly because readers have a right to know the fact — not so that the work should be credited or discredited on account of it. The credibility of this work should be tested on its content and its arguments.

Licence and contact¶

The whole work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. The licence is retained chiefly so that future readers can follow the chain of changes when the work is quoted or modified.

Corrections, objections, and disagreements are all welcome: seeker@ehipassa.com. Errors in citation and in reading are especially welcome — the one request this work makes of its readers is that they test it on the arguments themselves.