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Reading the Past: Texts and History
Bronkhorst: Systematic Philosophy berween the Empires
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at least the first centuries of the Common Era onward. There is, on the other hand, no evidence known to me that would allow us to conclude that these schools existed already before that period. The earlier Buddhist texts do not mention them, and not even Patanjali's voluminous Vyakarana-Mahabhasya contains any trace of awareness of them; being a Brahminical text, it might have been expected to do so (Bronkhorst forthcoming-d).
As stated above, a number of Buddhist philosophical texts have been preserved, and we do not therefore depend on textual archeology to find out what Buddhist thinkers thought. There is, on the other hand, a fair amount of uncertainty regarding the exact dates of many of those texts. We know that systematic thinking started early. first of all it seems in Sarvästivāda Buddhism. We have Chinese translations of systematizing texts that date from the first centuries CE. A manuscript dating from the first century has been found which, as Collett Cox informs me, contains a polemical Abhidharma text which criticizes the Sarvästivādins. All this shows that systematic philosophizing among the Sarvistividins began carly, probably well before the beginning of the Common Era. Further reflections about the period at which it began will be found below.
Jainism came to contribute to the philosophical debate at a rather late stage. This religious movement or rather one major branch of it: the Svetambarashas left us what it considers the original canon of Jainism. The authenticity of this canon is not accented by other Jainas. Even the Svetămbaras agree that part of their canon got irrevocably lost, and that what survived did not reach its final form until the fifth century of the Common Era; there are clear indications that at least some of its texts are not very old. What is more, there is nothing that one might call systematic philosophy in the canon. The first attempt to systematize traditional doctrine finds its expression in the Tattvärtha Sürra, a text which may belong to the third or fourth century (Dundas 1992: 61f., 74; 2002: 70f., 86; Bronkhorst 1985).
sciences in the classical age were dominated by systems of classification; the modem age is characterized by humanist philosophy and the invention of the human sciences, Foucault is of the opinion that two principles govem these cpistemes. The first of these states that each era can have only one episteme. As he puts it: "In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge." According to the second principle, each episteme is discontinuous with the next. As a result, in different eras "things are no longer perceived, described, expressed, characterized, classified, and known in the same way" (Foucault 1973: 168, 217; Windschuttle 2000: 137f.).
It is not necessary to side with Foucault in holding that cras are thus unambiguously defined cach by its own episteme. Nor is one required to accept that "in any given culture and at any given moment there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge." Also Foucault's claim that different eras have to be radically different from each other may legitimately be questioned. In spite of whatever objections one may have to some or all of Foucault's claims, it may yet be useful to be open to the possibility that intellectual life in different periods may be characterized or to some extent even determined by different preoccupations and presuppositions. This may not be quite what Foucault meant when he introduced the notion of cpisteme, yet has the undeniable advantage of drawing attention to what connects different manifestations of thought that occur during one and the same period of time in a specific culture, and to what distinguishes them from preceding and succeeding periods. One might, of course, prefer to use some such term as Zeitgeist instead, but this term is too little precise for our present purposes. It will become clear that an adjusted notion of episteme, which remains more specific than Zeitgeist, will be helpful in making sense of the early centuries of Indian systematic philosophy
For the period that interests us at present, two epistemes can be distinguished, two fundamental approaches to reality. These two epistemes succeed each oth time. This does not mean that at no point of time the two coexist. There is, as will become clear, considerable overlap. This overlap does not however remove the impression that the first of these epistemes really belongs to the earlier era, and continues into the second one, if not as a fossil, then at any rate as a survival from the past.
The first of the two epistemes to be considered is characterized by the belief that reality is thoroughly atomistic. Not only does the material world consist of identifiable ultimate constituents; also processes, w stretches of time, can be analyzed into successions of momentary occurrences. Whatever happens in the world can be reduced to the interaction of those ultimate constituents. In the case of processes, this interaction is strictly unidirectional: earlier momentary occurrences determine the immediately following ones.
The second episteme, which succeeds the first one and in some cases supplants it altogether, has as principal characteristic the conviction of a close and inseparable connection between language and reality. A belief of this kind, though in a weaker form, had already accompanied some of the philosophical developments of the preceding era. In the new era this belief, now extended in a fundamental manner, did not only become the shared conviction of all thinkers; it became a shared concem,
THE EARLY HISTORY OF INDIAN PHILOSOPHY IN OUTLINE
In spite of the limited source material at our disposal, a number of indications suggest that the period from the beginning of Indian systematic philosophy up to the time of the Gupta Empire can be divided into two distinct eras. During these two eras those who were intellectually active had altogether different preoccupations, and were driven by different fundamental assumptions about the nature of the world. This is true to the extent that it may be useful to borrow a concept from the French thinker Michel Foucault. In his book The Order of Things he introduces the concept of episteme. An episteme, as Foucault uses the term, is the structure of thought that defines mera. In the recent history of Europe, for example, the Renaissance could be defined by its assumption of the resemblance between words and things. Following periods--the classical age or Enlightenment, then the modem age are characterized differently:
2 Collett Cox has provided further information about this manuscript in a paper ("Reconsidering the Early Sarvistiv din in the Light of Gindhari Abhidharma Fragment") presented at the Thirteenth Conference of the International Association of Buddhist Studies held in Bangkok, December 2002.
