________________
920
JOHANNES BRONKHORST
Why indeed are we so interested in the origins of the Mahayana? Well, the fascination with origins, beginnings or sources does appear to be a kind of scholarly universal. Part of this and this much is clear enough is the idea that if we can understand the beginnings of something, we are better placed to understand the whole thing, as if its essential character were somehow fixed and readable in the genetic encoding of its conception. There is no doubt that such a view is problematic, i.e., it may not be the case that understanding the beginnings of the Mahāyāna (or even the beginnings of Buddhism as a whole) will give us privileged access to the mysteries of the later tradition, but I think the idea is still suffi ciently compelling to result in a kind of methodological cliché.
Harrison next emphasizes the personal and private need for knowing origins. He may be right in all this, but I have the impression that he overlooks one crucial point. Scholarship is not only concerned with collecting data, but also with understanding them. Beside the question "what?" there are the equally important questions "why?" and "how?". Scholarship can for example establish that there were Christians in India before the arrival of the Europeans; this is a fact. To explain this fact only one type of answer can satisfy us: information as to how they got there. No other kind of answer would work, and this has nothing to do with European influence on scholarship. More generally, human institutions of all kinds are characterized by the fact that many of their features (or at least some) are there simply because they were there earlier and no one bothered, or dared, to change them. Some of these features may have played a different role in earlier situations, and they may have been introduced at first for again different reasons. This does not mean that only history allows us to understand human institutions, but it does mean that, in order to reach as good an understanding as possible, at least some questions have to be addressed that involve the history of the institution concerned,10
10
9 Harrison sums up his ideas on this matter in the following words (1995:50): "As I see it, then, our fascination with the origins and early development of the Mahayana can be explained in terms of all these factors. That is to say, understanding this topic successfully will indeed help us to understand Buddhism better, it will help us grasp the lineage of East Asian Buddhism, and our own personal religious ancestry, if we happen to follow an East Asian Buddhist tradition; it will no doubt be productive of academic 'merit'; and it will yield considerable intellectual satisfaction. Yet these factors do not exhaust the question; there is always something left, some seductive magic that the subject holds for us as individuals."
For a critical discussion of this issue with special reference to early Vaiseșika, see Houben, 1995.
3.
INDOLOGY AND RATIONALITY
921
Let us now return to rationality. Rationality in the sense described above is not only found in Europe in the centuries preceding the present globalisation of science and scholarship. More in particular, it is not a foreign product that was introduced into India with modern scholarship. India has had a long rational tradition which has not, in my opinion, received the attention which it deserves." I am aware that the history of Indian thought is a rich field of research, with many specialists, some of them focusing on the history of logic, others on other aspects of critical thought. But how many researchers have ever expressed surprise about the fact that India has a rational tradition at all? Yet this may be far from self-evident. Do all cultures have rational traditions? Is it self-evident that people enter into debate rather than ignoring, or aggressing, each other? I have the impression that rational traditions may be the exception rather than the rule. Even major cultures can survive for centuries, nay millennia, without them. The most striking example may be China. Sinologists such as A.C. Graham and François Jullien have commented upon the absence, or disappearance, of a rational tradition in China. 12 We know of course, thanks to the researches of Joseph Needham and others, that China has made many important discoveries in the field of technology, but evidently this was possible without the presence of a strong tradition of rationality.
The fact that scholars have not expressed surprise at the discovery of a strong rational tradition in India may be due, ironically, to the Western background of modern scholarship. The European rational tradition, as is widely known, goes back to ancient Greece, and has continued-with more or less serious interruptions until today. European scholars, and those influenced by them, may have found it self-evident to find something similar in India. If this is indeed the case, we may have here an example of how scholarship can be limited, and indeed prejudiced, by its historical background. It also suggests that
11
An exception is an article by Martha C. Nussbaum and Amartya Sen (1989), which emphasizes the presence of rational traditions in India. The authors conclude (p. 321): "Our general conclusion regarding the often-aired conservationist worries about the 'undermining' of Indian culture due to the spread of modern science and technology is that they may well be, to a great extent, seriously misleading. It is arguable that these worries are based on drawing alarmist inferences from an overly narrow and biased view of the nature of Indian culture, and also on ignoring the legitimacy, power, and reach of possible internal criticism of parts of the old tradition in the light of new information and understanding."
12 Cp. Graham, 1989:142; Jullien, 1995; and my publication mentioned in note 5 above. For a recent discussion of the issue of rationality, see Goody, 1996:26f.
