Literacy And Rationality In Ancient India

Author(s): Johannes Bronkhorst
Publisher: Johannes Bronkhorst

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820
JOHANNES BRONKHORST
LITERACY AND RATIONALITY IN ANCIENT INDIA
821
Theravada text. What is more, the Theravadins felt no need to tighten up their own views and develop them into a coherent whole.
All this takes us back to the question of writing. One may not necessarily need to know writing in order to debate, nor for producing a well-constructed argument, or for seeing the weakness in the position of someone else. However, to destroy the position of one's opponent, one has to know that position. If the opponent belongs to a tradition altogether different from one's own as is the case in a confrontation between a Brahmin and a Buddhist--knowledge of the other's texts is unlikely to be part of one's own curriculum. In such cases the most obvious way of gaining access to the position and defensive arguments of one's opponent is to study the texts which the opponent himself has read. (Other ways are possible, but no doubt rare: according to legend, the Brahmanical thinker Kumarila had in his youth joined a Buddhist monastery in order to gain deep knowledge of the doctrines he was going to criticise; cp. Hulin, 2001.24.)
For much of the history of Indian philosophy there can be no doubt that the main participants in the ongoing debate read the writings of their opponents. Authors criticise each other and show considerable familiarity with the writings of their worst enemies. For this part of the history of Indian philosophy the importance of writing cannot be doubted.
To illustrate the extent to which at least certain philosophical authors were acquainted with the literature of their opponents, I refer to a passage in the Nyāyavärttika of Uddyotakara, a commentator who wrote around the year 600. In this passage Uddyotakara criticises the Buddhist doctrine of No-Self (an atman). One of the arguments he presents is that the Buddhists, by believing this, go against their own sacred texts. At this point Uddyotakara cites a text which it is not possible to locate in the surviving versions of Buddhist Sutras. But apparently the cited passage was not well-known to the Buddhists in Uddyotakara's time either, for he says: "Don't say that this is not Buddha word; it occurs in the Sarvabhisamaya Sutra" Apparently Uddyotakara had made extensive searches in the sacred literature of his opponents, so much so that he had unearthed a passage that few Buddhists knew.
little explicit attention to other philosophies. It seems safe to maintain that they had become interested in systematising their own position and removing inconsistencies because they felt threatened by other thinkers. But one can be criticised by others without knowing the details of their positions. What is more, one can criticise the positions of others without knowing those positions all that well.
We have seen that the Kathāvatthu illustrates this. It criticises other positions, but in the one case where we can check what it is doing we find that it had not at all understood the position it criticises. Not seeing the inner coherence of the views it criticises, the Theravada tradition apparently did not feel the need to increase the coherence of its own, as the Sarvāstivādins had done. There is a great temptation to conclude that the Theravādins had no access to the texts of their opponents. This in its tum might be interpreted to mean that they did not yet use writing at that period. But was the situation different for the contemporary Sarvāstivadins?
Unfortunately this is far from clear. It seems likely that the Vaiseșika philosophy arose under the influence of Sarvāstivada thought (Bronkhorst, 1992), but it is not clear how much in-depth knowledge of that Buddhist school was required in order to be familiar with its main theoretical presuppositions; the Vaiseșika Sutra (the oldest text of this school) may in any case be too young to be of importance in this discussion. The same may be true of the Nyaya Sutra. The early Sarvästivāda texts that have been preserved do not as a rule speak of the positions of others. However, a Gandhari manuscript fragment from the first century C.E. (which is being prepared for publication by Collett Cox) contains parts of a polemical, non-Sarvästivada, Abhidharma text which criticises alternative positions, most notably the Sarvastivada. Alterative views are also mentioned in he Mahāvibhāsā, a voluminous commentary which may have been composed, in its earliest form, in the first half of the second century C.E. This text does not only mention the deviating opinions of other Sarvästivādins, also rival schools of Buddhism receive coverage, as do a variety of non-Buddhist schools. Unfortunately it seems that the information we find in this text about non-Buddhist schools is minimal, so much so that no certain conclusions can be drawn about the acquaintance of its authors with the texts of their non-Buddhist rivals. This question is in need of further study as far as the Mahavibhäşā is concerned, but it is clear that other early Sarvästivada texts,
We have to address the question whether classical Indian philosophy came about as a result of acquaintance with writing. Is it possible that it would not have come about without it? Questions like these are difficult to answer. Most of the earliest surviving philosophical texts present their own system and pay
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For details, see Bronkhorst 1996.
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EIP VII, pp. 110-111 (R.E. Buswell and PS. Jaini). Cp Willemen, Dessein, Cox, 1998:299 (Samkhyas, Vaidesikas, Lokayatas, Sabdavadins).