Against a Hindu God: Buddhist Philosophy of Religion in India (review) Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad Philosophy East and West, Volume 61, Number 3, July 2011, pp. 560-564 (Article) Published by University of Hawai'i Press DOI: 10.1353/pew.2011.0040 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pew/summary/v061/61.3.ram-prasad.html Access provided by National Taiwan University (17 Jul 2013 04:20 GMT)
BOOK REVIEWS Against a Hindu God: Buddhist Philosophy of Religion in India. By Parimal Patil. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Pp. 406. Reviewed by Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad Lancaster University The dramatic title Against a Hindu God: Buddhist Philosophy of Religion in India, while accurate enough in some respects, does not do justice to this subtle, densely argued, technically demanding, and often astonishingly wide-ranging book by Parimal Patil. The traces of the doctoral thesis that it was in a previous life are still there, evident in the concern to explain methodology to inquisitorial examiners and the reluctance to let any footnote go by if it can possibly be included. That said, it is a powerfully realized book. Against a Hindu God is structured in such a way as to gradually focus in on the subject of the core third chapter that gives the book its name, Ratnakīrti s argument in the Ratnakīrtinibandhāvali, from a broadly Yogācāra Buddhist perspective, against the concept of īśvara roughly, God in the Hindu system of Nyāya. After zooming in on this issue, the book then pulls back again to an ever-widening scope. The first chapter demonstrating Patil s highly self-conscious articulation of his methodological commitments is a defense of the disciplinary combination that constitutes the book: Indological textual analysis, Buddhology, the historical and comparative study of religion, and philosophy. Patil s ultimate commitment is to a philosophical study of the critique of theism, but he elaborately defends his commitment to the close study of Sanskrit in its historical context. It is as if he is constantly aware of, if not outright anxious about, the vehement dismissal of Indian philosophy by those who take themselves to be proper philologists, and who have dismissed Indian philosophy as a serious endeavor unless philologically driven. Patil is determined not to be so dismissed, and demonstrates repeatedly his mastery of the Sanskrit and the apparatus of its study, setting out his stall in this programmatic chapter. Those of us impatient with any particular effort at appeasing the self-styled defenders of textual analysis might find this chapter beside the point, but it is also a serious declaration of Patil s comprehensive methodological intent. The second chapter provides what is claimed to be an interpretation of Nyāya epistemology, pointing to how the Naiyāyikas would defend the existence of īśvara. The argument goes thus: 1. The object under discussion earth or anything like it has been constructed by an intelligent maker [who would be the instrumental, although not material cause]. 2. For it is an effect. 3. Each and every effect has been constructed by an intelligent maker, just like a pot [but not like an atom, which is not an effect]. 4. The earth is an effect. 560 Philosophy East & West Volume 61, Number 3 July 2011 560 564 2011 by University of Hawai i Press
5. Therefore, it has been constructed by an intelligent maker [i.e., it has an instrumental cause]. The second stage of the argument, of course, is that the intelligent maker is īśvara ( God ), for there is no better candidate or explanation. Patil notes that this God of Nyāya is not omnipotent, since the basic stuff of the world, including atoms and individual selves (ātmans) is eternal. But God is omniscient, knowing all that is to be known about the constituents of the world and being sufficiently powerful to organize them into the structured world that we find. Drawing on modern scholarship, Patil s core point about this defense is that, from a Western perspective, it is a hybrid of the cosmological and teleological arguments. Like the first, it argues from the world to a designer of the world; like the latter, it does so by saying that it is the design of the world (consisting in its being made of parts) that warrants an inference to a God. It thus does more than a cosmological argument, because it is not just that there is a world that motivates the inference, but that the world has a particular structure; but it is less than the argument from design, because the design does not pertain to the world s having any complexity but merely that it has parts. In order to explore the technical nature of this argument, Patil first provides his version of the pramāṇa theory, which he labels a causal theory of warranted awareness, which leads, he says, to a bivalent epistemology for Nyāya. In a strategy evident throughout the book, Patil shows that he derives a good deal of his terminology from contemporary Western philosophy, through copious use of extended footnotes. Sometimes, as here, this leads to a great deal of compression and some confusion. An example is where he tethers his use of the word luminous in Timothy Williamson s usage, where mental states are luminous if one is in a position to know that one is in such states. But, apart from the difficulties with relating contemporary talk of mental states with anything comparable in Indian thought, this footnote indicates a serious conflation of two distinct svataḥ/parataḥ pramāṇa and svataḥ/parataḥ prakāśa debates. The former concerns how epistemic states are known to their subject, but because prakāśa means luminous there is a danger that the former debate (which Patil is talking about) will be misunderstood as being about the latter (which concerns not access to knowledge but the functional nature of consciousness). Patil in fact describes Nyāya as holding that a second-order awareness certifies that is, allows an awareness to count as knowledge by being selfluminous (p. 98). This is correct in terms of the Williamsonian vocabulary in that it needs no further awareness, but it is seriously disorienting to the student of the Indian debates, because Nyāya certainly holds no position that, in Sanskrit, could be called self-luminous. A perhaps more substantial worry with his constant effort to articulate the classical Indian position in terms of contemporary Western thought in footnotes comes with his claim that Nyāya adheres to a form of internal foundationalism, as found in Laurence BonJour. But BonJour s internal foundationalism says that a first-order awareness requires no further, aperceptive justification. This form of internalism is therefore much more like the Mīmāṃsā version of svataḥprāmāṇyavāda: the Book Reviews 561
constitutive awareness is infallible; there is nothing metaphysically distinct from it for it to be wrong about. In fact, BonJour explicitly argues that it is a mistake to think justification comes through a second-order aperceptive awareness, which latter is precisely Nyāya s strategy. In this chapter especially, Patil follows a curious pattern with regard to Nyāya: on the one hand he states clearly that the actual argument in defense of īśvara is only Ratnakīrti s version of the Nyāya position, but on the other hand he frequently refers to Keśava Miśra s Tarkabhāṣa, the thirteenth-century manual of the older Nyāya. So it is unclear how much this is an objective study of arguments between two sides and how much the exploration of one side s view (however balanced) of the other. The reader familiar with Nyāya is left wondering whether Ratnakīrti is always fair in his construal of his opponents theory of certification conditions, although it would take us too far from the boundaries of this review to explore this in any detail. Chapter 3 is a highly original and thoroughly demanding commentary on Ratnkakīrti s actual argument against the existence and nature of Nyāya s īśvara. Here one requires application to remember what U* and V are, as they keep company with C2.3a2 and H3a2. But one is rewarded with a ground-up construction and presentation of the precise way in which Ratnakīrti goes about blocking every move that he thinks the Naiyāyikas could possibly make. The core of Ratnakīrti s argument in response to the Nyāya inference laid out in the previous chapter is that all that can be known about the property to be proved the sādhya (target), namely the property having an intelligent maker is that it is somehow connected with the site (pakṣa) of the proof, namely earth (and other things like it). He points out that there are counterexamples to the Nyāya claim that the property that proves the argument the sādhana (reason), namely being an effect is pervaded by the target. The crucial counterexample is growing grass, which is an effect but does not have an intelligent maker. Ratnakīrti grants that Nyāya could respond by including growing grass in the phrase and anything like it (i.e., etc. ) within earth and anything like it in (1), so that the opponent cannot provide a counterexample from the site without begging the question, as we cannot know, before we make the actual inference, whether the site is qualified by the target. But Ratnakīrti argues back that growing grass can be included in etc. only if it were actually doubted whether it has an intelligent maker or not, that is, only if it came under the site of the inference. He maintains, at length, that there is no such doubt in contrast, say, to whether a pot has a potter. But if growing grass is not part of the site, then the Nyāya response does not go through. Crucially in a comparative context, Ratnakīrti s atheist argument, therefore, grants that the structure of the world was indeed created, but just not by the Naiyāyika s God. However, while Patil has made clear that what we have is only Ratnakīrti s own arguments and not those of his opponents, he is somewhat inconsistent in what he presents of Ratnakīrti s own words. Sometimes the complex and subtle commentary is derived from lucid translations (with the text in footnotes), but at crucial places we have to rely on Patil s exposition alone. This can be philosophically problematic; for 562 Philosophy East & West
example, it is hard to assess whether Ratnakīrti is really entering into an argument about modal necessity (pp. 178 180), given that there is very little ground to think that the classical Indian tradition had the idea of modality. While this chapter could have done with a more informal summary of the intricate technical sequence laid out in it, it is an enlightening read. The subsequent chapters, constituting part 2 of the book, zoom out from the anti-theistic argument in chapter 3. Patil has argued in the previous chapter that, for Ratnakīrti, the crucial failure of Nyāya concerns its reliance on extrapolation from known connections between reason (here, being an effect ) and target (here, having an intelligent maker ). For the Buddhist, extrapolation allows us to know too much; no new warrant is possible with it. The Buddhist, of course, has an alternative tool, the recondite apoha or exclusion theory. So Patil turns his attention in chapter 4 to a study of apoha, which he reads as a theory of similarity classes. Ratnakīrti comes at the end of several centuries of development of this theory, and Patil shows how this theory works by explaining how the meaning of a word is given by the formation of a positive entity in the conceptual content of awareness-events (such as produced in inference), through the exclusion of everything else. In this way, something is indeed referred to (a positive entity) but only through a conceptual exclusion of everything else rather than because such an entity exists mind-independently. The rejection of a realist metaphysics from which commitment the entire Nyāya worldview derives lies at the heart of the apoha theory. Chapter 5 opens out further into a general consideration of Ratnakīrti s own worldview. Of particular value here is Patil s demonstration that the apoha theory is not just about semantic value but also about mental content, ontology, and epistemology. It is a tour de force of this culminating account of Yogācāra constructivism. Again, it is an uncompromising read in which the author s long familiarity with his own material makes it difficult for us to know where we are in the argument and what we have missed. For example, a footnote on page 249 suddenly talks of objects O1 to O4, but these are defined in a blink-and-you-miss-it paragraph (of something that is going to be so important throughout the chapter) only on pages 252 253. And we have to keep in mind an increasingly complex typology if we are to grasp what Patil means when he says, O2e is a projection of an O2.1 or an O2.2 object (p. 264). Nevertheless, this typology is insightful and helps considerably in showing how coherent Ratnakīrti s metaphysics is, with O1 being direct and O2 being indirect objects of perception, and O3 direct and O4 indirect objects of inferential/verbal awareness, all constructed through the process of exclusion. Patil s explanation of how phenomenality and being objects of action are only secured indirectly (i.e., for O2 and O4 only) is one of the best accounts of a broadly non-realist, constructivist metaphysics I have read. In this chapter, Patil seeks to show how Ratnakīrti s arguments against īśvara are supposed to work not only within Nyāya s own terms but also because of the efficacy of his exclusion theory. The concluding chapter appears almost to be the outline of another book, examining the role that reasoning played in the religious practice of Dignāga, Dharmakīrti, Jñānaśrīmitra, and Ratnakīrti. But it is also a nice way to round off this complex work Book Reviews 563
by placing the philosophical arguments in the larger context of the value that these thinkers placed on such argument. Patil s book should be read with the perspectival nature of his study of Ratnakīrti very much in mind. He provides a rigorous philosophical reconstruction of Ratnakīrti, but that is not the same as providing a philosophical analysis of Ratnakīrti s arguments themselves, in that this is not a critical evaluation of the worth of these arguments. I will mention two examples. Patil has little to say about Ratnakīrti s reliance on the doctrine of momentariness and its various difficulties, despite aiming to provide the larger context of Ratnakīrti s worldview. More germane to this book is the structure of Ratnakīrti s argument against īśvara. Patil has a short concluding section in chapter 5 (pp. 309 310) on who the Buddhist thinks created the world, the answer being, in an idealist vein, the constructive activity of (our) awareness. This is, as far as I know, a unique argument against God in any tradition. But because he does not look more closely at the significance of this alternative view, he consequently does not note the tension between Ratnakīrti s argument for (1) all effects having makers (in his case, individual mental constructions) and (2) his argument that unseen makers of temples can be inferred but intuitively not makers of mountains (pp. 159 160), which is in effect a materialist argument more familiar in the West (and also something a non-theist Hindu like Kumārila Bhaṭṭa as well as, of course, the materialist Cārvāka school would accept). This is a brilliant, erudite, formidable, and intricately argued first book, which shows the arrival of an outstanding Indologist and philosopher. The book calls for concentration and an eye for detail, but it amply rewards the reader. I have, naturally, not been able to do justice either to the many different layers of argument or to their interlocking in this review. It is a model for how the Indian philosopher should work today: with close attention to and intimate knowledge of original texts, a fluent command of multiple philosophical traditions, and an analytic eye for the conceptual riches of the classical material. On the evidence of this book, Parimal Patil should come to be recognized as one of the foremost cross-cultural philosophers of his generation in the coming years. Note 1 I have benefited from reading a review of this work by Stephen Phillips at http://www. h-net.org /reviews/showrev.php?id=25550. Al-Ghazālī s Philosophical Theology. By Frank Griffel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xiii + 408. Hardcover $74.00. Reviewed by L.W.C. (Eric) van Lit McGill University As we near the nine-hundredth anniversary of the death of Abū Ḥāmid al-ghazālī, his writings remain as popular as ever. This is not surprising, not only because of these texts historical importance but also because aspects of them still feel relevant 564 Philosophy East & West Volume 61, Number 3 July 2011 564 567 2011 by University of Hawai i Press