paul j. griffiths - the limits of criticism - p. 145

7/31/2019 Paul J. GRIFFITHS - The Limits of Criticism - p. 145

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The Limits of Criticism

Paul J. GRIFFITHS

THE DEBATE OVERCritical Buddhism has been going on in Japanfor the last decade or so, and has begun to be widely known anddiscussed in Europe and the United States for the last four or ve

years. It has provoked some strikingly rhetorical and impassioned argu-ment, and it has shed light upon some dark but important issues inBuddhism and the study of Buddhism. Much of it, though, suffers froman oddly uncriticalgiven the emphasis upon criticism of the advocatesof Critical Buddhismblending of two issues that ought, on the concep-tual level, to be distinguished in order properly to be related. In this briefpaper I shall do what I can to separate these issues, and to show whatintellectual benets might be reaped from such a separation.

Before I begin that enterprise I should declare my own place in thedebate and the limits of my knowledge of it. Unlike the other Westerncontributors to this volume, I am not a Japanologist, nor a specialist in

East Asian Buddhism. What I know about Buddhism comes mainly fromreading its classical Indian texts, and my Japanese is sufciently bad that Ihave been able to read no more than a few of the large number of contri-butions to the debate available only in that language.

My direct exposure to the currents that have swirled around Haka-maya Noriaki and Matsumoto Shir at Komazawa University during thelast decade comes principally from the fact that the former was my teacherduring his lengthy visit to the University of WisconsinMadison in theearly 1980s. I read Sanskrit and Tibetan materials under his direction foralmost two years, came to know him well, and to admire and respect hisintellectual acuity and the depth and range of his knowledge of theBuddhist traditions. He has taught me more about Buddhism than any-

one else, and I continue to revere him and his work. So I write in somesense as Professor Hakamayas student. This does not mean that I do not


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feel free to criticize his ideas; indeed, given the nature of those ideas I

should criticize them, since they encourage criticism. But it does meanthat any criticism I might offer should be understood as an offering to aman who knows vastly more about almost everything than I, and who hasshaped my thinking not only about Buddhism, which is his religion, butalso about Christianity, which is mine. My own work in Christian theologyand philosophy of religion mirrors and is to some extent mirrored by hisin Buddhist theory; and when I argued, in a book published in 1991,1

that engaging in apologetics, either inter- or intrareligiously, is likely tohave signicant heuristic benets, I had in mind, among other things, thealready evident results of his work. All of us, evenperhaps especiallythose who think him wrong-headed, know more about Buddhism andabout the kinds of argument that can be offered for certain theses than wedid before he began to make the arguments he makes, and we know itprecisely because of the sharpness of his arguments and rhetoric.

What, then, are the two issues that have become inappropriatelymixed in this debate? As the materials collected elsewhere in this volumeshow, the rst is the question of what Buddhism is, of what criteria to useto distinguish properly Buddhist phenomena from phenomena that oughtnot merit the label Buddhist. This is a question in the end about theessence, the rdayaor the sra, to put it Sanskritically, of Buddhism. Thedebate about this matter, so far as I can tell, has focussed mainly uponbeliefsepistemological, ontological, axiological, and sometimes explicitlymetaphysicaland patterns of action and attitude that have ethical

signicance at both the individual and social level. First-order questionsunder this head include: Is it Buddhist to believe that all sentient beingsshare the common property is certain to become awakened? Or: Is itBuddhist to engage in aggressive warfare? Or to have racist attitudes andto defend racist policies? Such questions also imply second-order prob-lems, of which the most inclusive in this context is: What criteria shouldbe applied in order to determine whether some phenomenon is Buddhist?

The second issue is one of truth and rightness. Here too the debatehas been about beliefs, as well as about attitudes and actions that bearethical weight; but the question has not been Is this Buddhist? butrather Is this true? (in the case of a belief) or Is this right? (in thecase of an attitude or an action). So, in the case of the beliefs mentioned

in the preceding paragraph, you might ask whether the belief that all liv-ing beings are certain to become awakened is true; and in the case of

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engagement in warfare or the possession of racist attitudes, you might ask

Is this right? Questions about the truth or rightness of specic beliefsand patterns of action also imply broader second-order questions, suchas: How should you determine what is a true belief in some sphere? Or:How should you determine what is a right action in some sphere?

It remains unclear in most of the contributions to this debate knownto me just what the relationship between questions of the rst kindquestions, that is, about Buddhismand questions of the second kindabout truth and rightnessis supposed to be. There are a number ofpossibilities. First, it might be thought that answers to questions of thesecond kind are also answers to questions of the rst kind. In this view, alltrue beliefs and all right actions and attitudes are Buddhist just in virtue ofbeing true and right. There are certainly elements in the Buddhist tradi-tions that seem to suggest such a view, some of them very ancient.2 Butthis view is almost certainly stronger than any stated or implied by con-tributors to the Critical Buddhism debate, in part because it has entail-ments that are difcult to accept. Among these are that since all truebeliefs are ipso facto Buddhist, true beliefs about the win/loss record ofthe Chicago White Sox (among many other things) are also Buddhist.

A weaker position is that it is necessary for a belief to be true in orderfor it to be Buddhistor for actions and attitudes to be right in order forthem to be Buddhistbut that it is not sufcient. I strongly suspect thatat least this weaker view is implicit in much of the Critical Buddhismdebate. If Buddhism is the true religion, or at least one among the true

religions, then it will seem natural to assume that only true beliefs can bepart of it, and that only right actions and attitudes can be recommendedby it.3 Put differently: if there is good reason to believe that some belief isfalse or that some action or attitude is wrong, this will also be good rea-son to believe that the belief or the attitude/action is not Buddhist. Sucha view has been inuential, perhaps statistically dominant, in all long-livedtraditions of thought and practice. Such traditions are not likely, after all,to acknowledge that a false belief could be among their teachings or thata wrong action could be advocated by them. If this position is assumed bymost or all of the contributors to the debate, this goes a good way towardexplaining why the two kinds of questions have been merged, for in thisposition, showing that some belief is false is the same as showing it not to

be Buddhist; and showing some belief to be Buddhist is the same asshowing it not to be falsei.e., to be true.

THE LIMITS OF CRITICISM

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There are other positions on the relationship between questions

about Buddhism and questions about truth and rightness that could betaken. For instance, you might argue that there are no interesting con-nections of a logical kind between the two sets of questions: that, forinstance, answers to questions such as Is this Buddhist? can be given byappealing only to contingent historical information surrounding the phe-nomenon in question (such, perhaps, as that some action is said by those

who engage in it to be Buddhist; or that some claim made in a text islabeled in that text as a Buddhist claim). If this move is made then ofcourse it will immediately follow that some true beliefs are Buddhist andsome Buddhist beliefs are true; but equally that some false beliefs areBuddhist and that some Buddhist beliefs are false; and, what is the sameas the previous two claims, that there is no interesting connection betweenthe truth-value of a claim and its credentials as a Buddhist claim. But itseems reasonable to assume that none of the contributors to the CriticalBuddhism debate are taking this line. It is a line that appeals only to themore weak-minded among contemporary Western theorists of religion.4

Suppose, then, that contributors to the debate are likely to be assum-ingeven if they are not explicit about itthe view that truth (of beliefs)and rightness (of attitudes and actions) are necessary but not sufcientconditions for those beliefs and attitudes/actions to be Buddhist. Still,there are some important questions that need to be answered, questionsthat can only be handled by making distinctions that ow from separat-ingagain, in order later to show the proper relations betweenthe

question of truth/rightness from that of authenticity in the way that Ihave done. Principal among them is: Are the criteria for determiningwhether some belief is false, or some attitude/action wrong, drawn onlyfrom materials that on some other ground are taken to be Buddhist? Ormay they be drawn from elsewhere? This is a question about how knowl-edge about what is true or right is to be had. It is a question, in the end,of epistemology: how are you to arrive at and justify your opinions as to

what is true and right? It is here that the distinction between critical andtopical philosophy, made much of by Hakamaya and to a lesser extentMatsumoto, has its importance.

What, then, is this distinction? How are critical and topical philoso-phy to be understood?5 One important aspect of the distinction is episte-

mological: criticalists and topicalists have different views about howbeliefsclaims to knowledgeought to be acquired or xed, and about

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how they ought to be justied. There is much more to the distinction

between criticalism and topicalism than this, but it is this element uponwhich I shall focus in what follows. I shall say nothing about the interest-ing question of whether Hakamayas interpretation of Vico as a topicalist,or his reading of Descartes as a criticalist, are exegetically correct; Ill treatthe critical-topical distinction as one between ideal typesin the

Weberian sense, and in spite of Hakamayas dislike of Weber, to which Ishall return.6

For the topicalist, truths are uncovered, discovered, or revealed. Theyare always already present, prior to and independent of the knowing sub-

ject, inscribed eternally and changelessly in the fabric of the cosmos. Ourtask as knowing subjects, then, is to conform our opinions and beliefs tothe way things are, to see that our noetic structure coincides with andcorresponds to the ontological structure it is supposed to image. Meta-phors of nding or uncovering are important for topicalists in describingthe processes by which knowledge is arrived at; and metaphors of reec-tion or imaging are important in describing the noetic structure thatresults from the uncovering of truth. Our cognitive faculties are, in this

view, like a mirror, and they full their proper goal when they are in acondition perfectly to reect the nature of things.7 The goal of topicalism,as Hakamaya puts it, is verisimilitude; and its method is one of removingobstructions to what is already necessarily and changelessly present.

Two other closely associated themes are important to topicalists onthe question of how true beliefs ought to be arrived at. The rst is that of

authority; and the second is that of error. Hakamaya is consistent, lyricallyand forcefully so, in his rejection of appeals to authority as a proper basisfor the formation and justication of true beliefs, even when he recog-nizes within himself a tendency to make such appeals.8 Such appeals aretypical of topicalism. The conforming or homologizing of the individualsnoetic structure to reality typically occurs as a result of a self-validatingand authoritative revelationnot necessarily in the sense of a direct com-munication from God, but possibly also including thatof the way thingsare. The topicaor loci, the essential elements in the structure of reality,emerge from the depths of consciousness or are set forth by some author-itative source in such a way that they are luminously and self-validatinglyobvious. No questioning of them is possible or needed: error is not, as

Indian logicians would have it, located at the level ofpratyaka, or per-ception; the very occurrence of a perceptual act carries with it irrefragable


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guarantees that it accurately represents what is perceived.9 The mirror of

consciousness does not distort.And yet, obviously, topicalists must account for cognitive error, for it

is clear that not everyones consciousness is properly conformed to realityfrom a topicalist viewpoint, for instance, Hakamayas consciousness ispresumably not so conformed. So it seems that the mirror does some-times distort, to a greater or lesser extent. How can this be? A typical top-icalist explanation locates error at the accidental or adventitious level,making it the result of delements or distortions or obstructions that arenot intrinsic to you as a knowing subject, not part of what you essentiallyare, but that have instead accrued to you by some series of accidents,much as you might break your leg or your neck.10 In this view, a properlyordered noetic structure, a collection of beliefs that perfectly mirrors the

way things are, is intrinsic toan essential property ofyou as knowingsubject; error is a removable accident, removable ideally by nding theproperly self-validating revelation of what you really are, which is also the

way things really are.Hakamaya and Matsumoto identify topicalism construed in this way

with those strands of Buddhist thought usually called tathgata-garbhaor hongaku shis(these two expressions do not embrace ideas in everyrespect identical, but the differences between them need not be of con-cern here). They see, rightly, that such a view about how true beliefs arecome by and what they are like also carries with it a set of views about

justication: about how it is that you are warranted in having the beliefs

you have, what makes it reasonable for you to have those beliefs and notsome others, and how you ought, if challenged, show that your beliefsare the right ones, preferable to their competitors. Topicalist views aboutall these matters are easy to derive from what has been said so far: topi-calists justify their beliefs by displaying them, assuming that since they

were arrived at on the basis of the luminous self-evidence of what hasbeen revealed in the depths of consciousness, properly ornamented dis-play will sufce for justication. Hence the emphasis typically placed bytopicalists on rhetoric as an instrument of proper ornamentation.11

Topicalists will, as Hakamaya emphasizes again and again, reject the viewthat demonstrative argument based upon conceptual distinctions is eithernecessary or sufcient for the justication of belief: the ars inveniendiis

itself seen as a mode of justication, and the ars iudicandiis rejected. Or,to put the same matter Sanskritically, anumna is unnecessary for

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justication becausepratyakasufces.

So much for topicalism on the xation and justication of belief.Criticalism is treated less extensively than topicalism by Hakamaya. Theexigencies of his polemical situation no doubt require him to spend moreintellectual energy on explaining and refuting the errors of his opponentsthan on elucidating his own epistemology. This is unfortunate, for itleaves a number of pressing questions unanswered. It can at least be saidthat, for Hakamaya, criticalism is everything that topicalism is not: beliefs,for the criticalist, are neither xed nor justied by appeal to self-validatingsources of authority, whether experiential or external; demonstrativeargument based upon careful conceptual distinctions is essential for

justication; and the goal of the criticalist is not verisimilitudethehomologization of the noetic and the ontological orderso much astruth, the possession of beliefs that accurately, but correctably, expressthe way things are. Criticalism so understood is, for Hakamaya, true phi-losophy, true scholarship, and also true religion, for each of these enter-prises consists in large part in expressing beliefs in words based uponconceptual distinctions, and then in doing your best to assess the truth orfalsity of those beliefs by the use of argument.12

It is very important to see that Hakamayas goal is not to provide onemore apology for the rationalism of the Enlightenment, much less todefend a naive optimism about the capacities of unfettered critical reasonto arrive at truth. Descartes may be preferable to Vico for the adherents ofCritical Buddhism, it is true; but this is principally because of the formers

rejection of self-validating culture- or religion-specic sources of truth,and his concomitant avoidance of the dangers of nativism, racism, sexism,and the unbridled aggression against those of the wrong culture, sex,race, or religion made possible by these errors.13 Hakamaya is not inter-ested in afrming Descartes as the father of the dracinepositivist intel-lectual who has learned nothing and forgotten nothing in the centurysince Max Weber offered the most eloquent and familiar apology for thesense of vocation and self-congratulatory superiority so evident in the

works of Weber himself, as well as in those of his legions of disciples inWesternand Japanese, it seemsacademic institutions at present.14

Hakamayas critique of this essay makes the grounds of his disagreementwith it perfectly clear. He takes it to be one more representation of an

authoritative stance in epistemology; for Hakamaya, the Weberian view ofscholarship as a vocation implies the possibility of presenting or displaying


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facts without adopting a normative, or critical, stance toward them. It is,

that is to say, an ersatz and academic version ofhongaku shis, whose fun-damental commitment is to the view that there is a standpoint from

which claims can be made whose truth is self-evident, a standpoint fromwhich the only possibility of critical engagement is with those who alreadyaccept the axiomatic commitments informing the standpointin thiscase, the procedural and substantive commitments of nineteenth-centuryGerman Hochwissenschaftlichkeit.15

Hakamaya is therefore not defending criticalism as a form of posi-tivism, whether in academia or out of it. To do that would be to offer,from his viewpoint, and from mine, a peculiarly tasteless and ersatz formof religion. Hongaku shisat least has more avor than Weberian ratio-nalism, even if its practitioners are likely to be roughly equally dangerous,ethically and epistemologically speaking. Just how, then, is Hakamayasepistemological endorsement of Descartes over Vico to be taken, if not inthe now-traditional (in Europe and the United States) positivist sense? Iconfess that I am not sure of the answer, largely because Hakamaya ishimself less clear than I would wish about it. So I shall now sketch whatHakamayas criticalism ought to mean, epistemologically speaking, in thehope that he will agree with me; and will conclude by looking at hispolemical engagement with the German Buddhologist, Lambert Schmit-hausen, to see whether the epistemological reading of criticalism I offernds any support therein. This will also make possible a reconnection ofthe twin themes I disentangled at the beginning of this essay: the ques-

tion of what is properly Buddhist, on the one hand, and that of what istrue or right, on the other.Suppose we begin by using a distinction now standard in Anglo-

phone epistemology: I mean that between internalist and externalist epis-temologies, made clear in the recent work of Alvin Plantinga and William

Alston, but with much deeper roots in the epistemological traditions ofthe West.16 Epistemological theories are typically interested in distin-guishing between instances of belief that are not well-grounded, and thatas a result have no claim to be called knowledge, and instances of beliefthat are well-grounded and that therefore do have some such claim. Forinstance, I may believe that I can generate reliable beliefs about the futureperformance of the stock market by consulting the entrails of properly

sacriced goats. Most Western academicscertainly most Anglophoneepistemologistswould tend to say that beliefs about the course of future

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events generated in this way lack the property or properties that might

give them claim to be called knowledge. In contrast, I may believe that Ican generate reliable beliefs about what Boris Yeltsin said to Bill Clintonlast night, even though he speaks no English and I no Russian, by con-sulting a report of the conversation given in The New York Times. Many,perhaps most, Anglophone epistemologists would be likely to think thatbeliefs generated in this way are of a kind such that they should be con-sidered knowledge. The debate centers upon what account to give of theproperty or properties that distinguish beliefs of the rst kind from beliefsof the second kind.

Internalist epistemologies typically claim that the property in ques-tionit might be called warrant or justication or something simi-

laris internal to those who have the beliefs in question, something towhich they have special access: they have had the proper experience, say,or have constructed or understood the proper argument, and to both ofthese facts, and others like them, the subject is a better witness than any-one else. Internalism in epistemology goes nicely with deontology: I maybe justied (warranted) in believing that p (where p stands for someproposition or claim), if, and perhaps only if, I have fullled my epistemicduties or obligations. As Plantinga puts it:

justication, internalism, and epistemic deontology are properly seenas a closely related triumvirate: internalism ows from deontology and isunmotivated without it, and justication at bottom and originally adeontological notion.17

For the internalist, then, what counts is whether you have fullledyour epistemic duties or not; and you can tell whether you have by, para-digmatically, undertaking an act of introspection; an act that will, if done

with proper attention, tell you whether, as Locke puts it, you are likesomeone who believes or disbelieves according as Reason directs him,or whether you are like someone who transgresses against his own Light,and misuses those Faculties which were given him to no other end, but tosearch and follow the clearer Evidence.18 Internalism in epistemology is,then, evidentialist, deontological, and (usually) radically individualist: youcan tell whether you have fullled your epistemic duties or not simply by

virtue of possessing and using generically human intellectual equipment.

Externalist views are quite different. They claim that what makes aparticular instance of believing justied or warranted is something exter-


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nal to believers, typically some process or method of arriving at the belief

in question that is not internal to them, and may not be known, under-stood, or controlled by them. Perhaps the most common kind of exter-nalist epistemology is reliabilism: the view that you are warranted(justied) in believing that p if and only if a particular instance of sobelieving possesses the property of having been produced by a reliablebelief-forming practice or mechanism. Externalist views allow, indeedthey require, a distinction between a beliefs having been produced by areliable belief-forming mechanism, sometimes called a doxastic practicein the trade, and this fact being known to the believer. You may very wellhave beliefs that have been so produced, and yet not know this fact; or if

you do know it, you may notand need notbe able to give an accountof just what it is about the doxastic practice in question that makes it reli-able. It may be (though it is not) the case that consulting the entrails ofproperly-sacriced goats is a reliable way of arriving at beliefs about thecourse of future events; an externalist need not require of those who per-form such a practice that they know it to be reliable, much less that theyknow and be able to show why it is reliable (were, counterfactually, it tobe so) in order for it to produce (largely) true beliefs for them. Externalistepistemologies, then, are typically nonevidentialist, antideontological (ifbeing deontological requires not just that you have fullled your epis-temic duties but also that part of fullling them is that you know and areable to show that you have done so, as in the case of Locke), and non-individualist, since individuals need not be, and usually will not be, the

nal court of appeal on the question of whether and why particular beliefsare justied.Externalist epistemologies are generally to be preferred to internalist

ones, even though the latter have been dominant in Anglophone philos-ophy since the seventeenth century. There are many reasons for rejectinginternalist epistemologies; going into all of them would require a full-dress and very lengthy essay in epistemology, which I cannot give here.However, I can note the central reasons. First, internalists are almostinevitably committed to some version of foundationalism, according to

which a properly ordered noetic structure is founded upon beliefs ofwhose truth the believer can be convinced by introspection: they are per-haps, as Locke would have it, clear and distinct ideas; or they present

themselves with a luminous force that cannot be denied; or, in a commonversion, traceable in various forms to Descartes, Spinoza, and, again,

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Locke, they are self-evident or evident to the senses. Beliefs of this foun-

dationally obvious kind, once arrived at, support all other beliefs in aproperly ordered noetic structure. Beliefs that are not themselves in thefoundations will be derived from those that are by proper deployment ofevidence, or by patterns of deductive argument, or the like. But the prin-cipal and obvious difculty with this kind of epistemological foundation-alism is that its axioms do not meet the criteria they set forth, which leadsto the odd position that if you are an avowed internalist you cannot be

justied or warranted in being such precisely because of your internalism.Your epistemological theory sets up criteria for justication that it cannotitself meet. This is because the axioms of internalist epistemologies arenot themselves foundational to anyones noetic structure. (Are they self-evident or evident to the senses? Hardly. Do they force themselves uponus with the luminous power of the structure of the cosmos revealingitself? No.) Neither can they be derived from those foundations by evi-dence or reasoning in any way that is beyond dispute by reasonable peo-ple. Epistemological internalism, then, in so far as it is a form offoundationalism, sets up epistemic duties that it cannot itself meet (recallPlantingas words, quoted above, about the intrinsically deontologicalnature of internalism).

Internalism has another and closely connected problem. This is theunbearable burden of epistemic duty that it places upon the individual. Ifit is up to me to know in virtue of what I am justied in having the beliefsI have in order for me to be justied in having them, and if, moreover,

that to which I must appeal in coming to have such knowledge must befacts about the foundations of my own noetic structure as construed byinternalists, then it immediately follows that I will be justied in having

very few of the beliefs I have. For example, I have several beliefs aboutNewtons Laws of Motion and Fermats Last Theorem. But since all ofthe beliefs I have about these matters are based upon authoritative testi-monyI read them in books or was taught them in classand are neitherself-evident, nor evident to the senses, nor derived by me by patterns ofmore-or-less deductive or evidentialist reasoning from beliefs that are self-evident or evident to the senses (Is the truth of Newtons Laws self-evident or evident to the senses? No. Have I proved them for myself?No.), it follows from an internalist viewpoint that I am not justied in

having them. The same will follow for an enormous number of the beliefsI have: the vast majority of the interesting ones, I would say.


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Externalism in epistemology avoids these difculties, and for that rea-

son is to be preferred as an epistemological theoryor, better, family oftheories. Since it separates the fact of my being justied or warranted inbelieving thatpfrom my knowing that I am justied and from my beingable to show that I am justied, it makes it possible for me to be justiedin many of the beliefs I have, beliefs that epistemic internalism would not

judge to be part of a properly ordered noetic structure. Also, externalistepistemologies do not suffer from the same kinds of self-referentialdifculties with foundationalism that so bedevil internalisms. We oughtall, then, reject epistemic internalism in all its kinds and embrace someexternalist epistemology. Hume and Locke were wrong, and Augustine,Reid, and Newman were right.19

The point of this long (but not long enough to do the matter justice)excursion into epistemological theory has been to lay the groundwork forasking whether Hakamayas distinction between criticalism and topical-ism maps neatly, or at all, onto the distinction between externalism andinternalism. The answer is not quite clear to me. The topicalist emphasisupon experientalism, self-evidence, intuition, and so forth, places topical-ism very close to internalism. But the criticalist emphasis upon analyticalargument as necessary for the attainment of right judgment does thesame: for if the production of demonstrative arguments for the truth ofmy beliefsthe ars iudicandias Hakamaya understands itis a necessarycondition for my being justied in having them, then this too is a charac-teristic of internalism in epistemology. It is, for example, close to

Descartess view, and Hakamaya very often quotes Descartes as theuttarapakato Vicosprvapaka. But there are indications that point inthe other direction as well, suggestions that Hakamaya does not want astrong internalism. He claims, for example, that in order to establish atruly critical attitude toward Buddhism he cannot stand outside it;20 thatto attack wrong ideas as to what Buddhism is, he must do so from withinthe tradition. This is not something a hard-line internalist would say, forit suggests that certain beliefs can be justiedbeliefs in this case about

what Buddhism isonly by adopting a certain cognitive stance towardBuddhism to begin with: one of raddh, trust or condence thatBuddhism is a good thing,21 or that its deliverances, rightly construed,are such that you ought to give, or are warranted in giving, them epis-

temic weight; or that you ought to try to live by them. If Hakamayathinks this, and moreover thinks that criticalists can be warranted in think-

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ing this without having to show, critically, that they are so warranted

before thinking it, then criticalism moves closer to externalism. Insofar asit is an epistemological thesis, criticalism, in this case, does not assert thatallbelievers can be justied in their beliefs onlyby having and being ableto produce demonstrative arguments for their truththat would be aclassically internalist, a properly Cartesian, claim. It asserts the more lim-ited thesis that a systematic and complete rejection of criticism (reasonedargument) as a method for both belief-xation and belief-justicationarejection typical of topicalism as Hakamaya presents itis improper andindefensible. But, as I have said, I am not sure that this is what Hakamayameans, though I think it is what he ought to mean and what I hope hemeans. I shall press the question a little by looking now at an instance ofhis reasoning on a particular topic, to see whether this can help in eluci-dating with more precision just how criticalism is to be understood.

In 1985 Lambert Schmithausen published a paper called Buddhis-mus und Natur.22 The argument in this paper was later developed andpresented in lecture form at various venues in Asia during 1990. Late in1990, Hakamaya published a rejoinder to Schmithausens thoughts onthis matter, based in part on the 1985 article, in part on the 1990 lec-ture, and in part on personal discussions he had with Schmithausen in late1990 in Tokyo.23 Schmithausen then published (in 1991) a furtherrevised and expanded version of his 1990 lecture, part of which containsa response to Hakamayas 1990 article.24 This is a most interesting andrevealing debate, though one that operates in something of a conceptual

fog, due in part to the number of languages in which it has gone on(German, Japanese, English), and to the difference in assumptions andapproaches of its protagonists. To begin with, Schmithausen andHakamaya begin from quite different ideas as to what is meant by theterm nature (shizen, Natur). For Schmithausen, it means both eco-systems understood independently of human beings (wild nature) and,more generally, living beingssentient and otherwisewho are nothuman. For Hakamaya, it means what things really are, their naturaorphysis, that from which they come, their praktior ontological ground.

This difference in starting point naturally inuences the argument.Schmithausen wants to show that there are conceptual resources inBuddhism that can be used to ground decent treatment of both wild

nature and nonhuman living beings. Hakamaya wants to show thatBuddhists do, or should, reject the idea that there is an ontological


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ground or source of being for nature, just as they do or should reject the

idea that humans have an atman, an enduring source of identity. He thentakes this denial to extend to a denial of any and all claims as to the intrin-sic value of the natural order in both of Schmithausens senses. Schmit-hausen takes umbrage at what he sees as a possible implication ofHakamayas view, which is that living beings can be treated as if they hadno intrinsic value i.e., merely instrumentally.

Underlying this debate is a deep disagreement between Schmithausenand Hakamaya as to the signicance and reference of the term Buddhism.Schmithausen wants an inclusive sense:

I have good reason to regard as Buddhism the whole of the Buddhisttradition, i.e. all movements and groups claiming to be Buddhist, and all

ideas and attitudes occurring or documented to have occurred amongthem.25

But postulating a sense as inclusive as this gives him some uneasymoments. He is aware that such an open denition provides no room forcritical judgment, and that equating the meaning of the term Bud-dhism with the aggregate of its uses will yield a concept so internally dif-ferentiated and contradictory that it can be of no use for any critical orconstructive purposesnot even for those that Schmithausen himself is soconcerned about.26

By contrast, Hakamayas view of what Buddhism is, as Schmithausenclearly sees, is both restrictive and normative: Buddhism is criticism, based

upon the doctrines ofprattyasamutpdaand antma-vda.27

Buddhismis what goes against the stream (pratirotra), what is not found in otherstreams of thought, whether Jainism or Brahmanism in India, Taoism inChina, or Shinto in Japan. Schmithausen construes Hakamayas restric-tive/normative reading of Buddhism as being, at least in part, a set of his-torical claims: claims about what Gautama kyamuni taught, forexample. As such, he nds them implausible, even utterly arbitrary.28 Iam not sure, however, that this is how Hakamaya intends them. It is truethat he sometimes sounds as if this is what he means,29 and if he does heis on shaky ground.30 But the charitable and more likely reading is to takeHakamayas restrictive understanding of the meaning of the termBuddhism as being not principally a historical thesis, but rather a criti-

cally normative philosophical thesis. Hakamayas thought moves from acritical engagement with Buddhist sources to a set of decisions as to what

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is true and right, and then back to the tradition to determine what in it

best accords with these decisions as to what is true and right. Hakamayais a Buddhist philosopher rstwere he a Christian I would call him atheologiana philologist and an interpreter of texts second, and a

Weberian-positivist historian only a very distant third. This is entirely evi-dent in the essay on nature that Schmithausen criticizes; Hakamaya hasdecided, on the basis of a critical engagement with Buddhist texts coupled

with some philosophical decisions of his own, that it is proper to rejectany set of ideas that reies the natural order and gives it intrinsic weightand signicance. He then reads the Buddhist tradition in light of thesedecisions: any elements that accord with it may be properly Buddhist; anythat do not cannot be.

Schmithausen, by contrast, attempts a version of what Hakamaya,and I, would see as the Weberian fallacy: he wants to deploy a broadlyinternalist epistemology in the service of a broadly positivist historiogra-phy in order to show his readers wie es eigentlich gewesen istin regard toBuddhist thought about nature. But this will not work because it can-notand as I have noted, Schmithausen is himself uneasily aware that itcannot. Historiography is always driven by ideology, by a set of criticallyor, in a bad case, uncriticallynormative decisions about what it is forand how it should be done, decisions that are not themselves given or

justied historically. The advantage and virtue of Hakamayas positionand method is that it makes its broadly ideological commitments explicit;the disadvantage of Schmithausens is that, for the most part, its commit-

ments are hidden, tacit, even denied.31

None of this is to say that Hakamaya is right about the relationsbetween the human and the nonhuman order, sentient and otherwise,nor that Schmithausen is wrong. It is only to say that the way in whichHakamaya constructs his views on this matterand his views as to whatBuddhists think about itis vastly preferable to the way in whichSchmithausen constructs his. Schmithausen accuses Hakamayas views ofbeing Cartesianism in Buddhist garb;32 but this is not a correct reading.Hakamaya thinks and writes, as I have shown, and as Schmithausen him-self also admits, as a Buddhist, which suggests not so much the stronginternalism of a strict Cartesian as the moderate externalism of a man offaith (if I may be allowed a Christian interpretation ofraddh) in Buddhism,

critically construed, of course. There is a close link between Cartesian inter-nalism in epistemology and Weberian positivism in historiography; and


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this suggests that, in the end, Schmithausen is more the Cartesian than

Hakamaya.It is easy to see, in spite of all this, how the apologists for Critical

Buddhism can be seen as Cartesian internalists. Hakamayas often intem-perate rhetoric allows the impression that he gives an independent andfree-standing signicance to the unaided force of the human intellect. ButI do not think, nally, that this is the best way to read him. Criticism is,for him, a tool in the service of Buddhism; a tool to be used by Buddhistsfor the clarication, elucidation, and defense of the deliverances ofBuddhism; it is not a tool that independently provides those deliverances,nor is it a tool that, alone and unaided, can make a Buddhist of anyone or

justify anyones being such. It is, however, an indispensable tool forshowing the errors and incoherences of those who hold an indefensibleepistemology, an incoherent ontology, and a dubious ethicthe dhtu-vdina, as Matsumoto and Hakamaya call them, whose secular equiva-lents are the internalists and positivists of the academy. There is a deismof the academy just as there is a religious deism; and it is one of Haka-mayas great strengths to have pointed this out so trenchantly. If I readHakamaya aright, he is a Buddhist, a man for whom the clarity broughtby a properly externalist use of critical reason is an indispensable tool inthe struggle to construe Buddhism properly and to defend it, so con-strued, against its internalist and positivist despisers. I am no Buddhist,and can have nothing to say of a constructive kind about the proper con-strual of Buddhism; but as a Christian I can only agree with and applaudHakamayas arguments and his mode of procedure.

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paul j. griffiths - the limits of criticism - p. 145

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