________________
THE SPIRITUAL PLACE OF THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL TRADITION
IN BUDDHISM
By E.Steinkellner, Vienna
It is now just about a hundred years since the Buddhist tradition of epistemology and logic (pramayavada) entered, as such, the view of the scholarly work. After the serious research-efforts of roughly speaking three generations of scholars, we are slowly entering into a new phase of research, which I wishfully think of as the phase when the great remaining philological tasks will be taken up, and when the individual theoretical achievements of the tradition's masters will finally be understood and judged in their value as contributions to the finding and solving of the relevant philosophical problems in detail. This, then, is a suitable moment, not only to survey and put in good order work done so far and organize and prepare for future enterprises, but also to reflect in a more general sense on the validity and correctness of the hitherto gained concepts regarding this particular tradition's meaning within the context of Buddhist and Asian culture.
My following remarks are an example of such a reflection. The question I shall use as a leitmotiv - the question for the "spiritual place” — has already been answered, I think; but the scholarly development of this answer (the difficulties in seeing what was always there, the sometimes forcible misinterpretations etc.), it "prehistory" is a dramatic diagram showing the course of the reaction of the so-called "Western", or as I prefer to say "modern", scholar to a specific Buddhist cultura phenomenon.
Within its relatively smaller cultural significance for the history of modern scholarly emancipation, this case-history is certainly comparable to the only othe one that has been studied so far, i.e. the history of understanding the concept(s) of nirvana in Western scholarship(2)
- 1 -
