Meier's Historicity Criteria

Historians of Buddhism face a difficult task, since the further we go back in time the sketchier the evidence of Buddhism is. Before about 500 CE there are few certainties and this is ostensibly a millennium after the life of the Buddha. Let me give an apposite example. It is widely asserted that the Pāli suttas are the oldest Buddhist texts we possess. This is largely based on a tradition found in the Dīpavaṃsa (a religious text) that the suttas were written down in Sri Lanka around the beginning of the Common Era. That is to say, the idea that Pāli texts were being written down at that time comes from a Pāli text; it comes from within a religious tradition and has not been corroborated.

When we turn to archaeology, however, we get a very different story. The oldest extant Pāli document is from the sixth century CE, while the oldest complete sutta is from the ninth century CE. By contrast, we have a partial and damaged manuscript of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā from the first century CE. The oldest extant Prajñāpāramitā text is some 500 years older than the oldest Pāli text. Moreover, Prajñāpāramitā was also likely an oral tradition at first and, in my opinion, its origins lie in the pre-Buddhist forms of meditation leading to the cessation of sensory experience.

So which literature is really older? Which evidence is more reliable when it comes to history, religious tradition or archaeology? These are the kinds of questions that historians of religion seek answers to. The efforts broadly fall into two main processes: hermeneutics and criticism. Hermeneutics seeks to establish the authority of the text, based on its history, sources, and relations with tradition. Criticism, sometimes "higher criticism", seeks to establish the authenticity of the text based on the language and interpretation of the text.

Unfortunately, when historians of Buddhism write about this, each of them takes an ad hoc approach, eschewing formalised methods of evaluation and interpretation. This can rise to the level of a rejection of the concept of "methodology". My mentor Richard Gombrich, for example, likes to rail against methodology and says that his method is simply "conjecture and refutation". (The young Gombrich is credited as a proof-reader in Karl Popper's 1963 book Conjectures and Refutations). There's nothing wrong with this, per se, but it is too general to be useful in defining methods. In dealing with, say, the historicity of a given person we are often commenting on individual phrases and even words.

In the typical Buddhism Studies history, each piece of evidence, each relevant phrase, is presented and evaluated on an ad hoc basis. In some cases the reader faces a veritable avalanche of "facts" that are supposed to persuade the reader of the authenticity and authority of the words in question. Since each data point is assessed on a unique basis, the critical reader has the extremely laborious task of addressing each point individually. The idea here is to overwhelm the reader with evidence that is difficult to assess.

The ad hoc nature of hermeneutics in Buddhism Studies can be juxtaposed with the highly formalised and structured approach found in Christian Studies. This is partly due to the Protestant doctrine that everyone should read and interpret the Bible for themselves, and partly to the very strong feeling that everyone should come to more or less the same conclusions about the Bible. One way to accomplish both is to specify what methods are valid.

There are some works on Buddhist hermeneutics, but, as far as I can see, these relate to how ancient Buddhists practiced hermeneutics, not to how we as Buddhists and/or scholars should evaluate the historicity of Buddhist texts in the present. Moreover, it has become fashionable for Theravādin monks to write apologia for the authenticity of the Pāli texts. These efforts are quasi-scholarly. The authors have massive, unacknowledged bias in favour of traditional Theravāda beliefs, but beyond this proceed in a scholarly fashion to produce quasi-scholarly works that confirm their most cherished beliefs.

We see the same lack of insight in Nāgārjuna studies where apologist scholars uncritically adopt Nāgārjuna's worldview and then argue for the modern relevance of his conclusions. We almost never see a Nāgārjuna scholar doing the basic philosophical work of identifying the underlying assumptions of Nāgārjuna and putting them to the test. Nāgārjuna's definition of "real", for example, insists that real objects are permanent and unchanging. Since no object of any kind is permanent or unchanging, no objects are real. What we think of as "the real world" is, in fact, merely an illusion or a delusion, or perhaps both but, anyway, nothing really exists, since everything is contingent on something else. As a definition of "real" or "reality" this is completely incoherent, since it assumes from the outset that "real" is a meaningless category. Those who claim that Nāgārjuna "has no view" are simply blind to the axioms of Nāgārjunian thought because they have internalised the dogma and no one ever talks about it. No one ever talks about the way that Nāgārjuna distorts Buddhist thought away from established norms of the time or what might have prompted this.

The point is that there are no formal hermeneutics for Buddhists or scholars to apply. The only attempt to articulate something like this can be found in Jan Nattier's (2003) book A Few Good Men. However, Nattier provides no references for her "hermeneutic principles" meaning that the task of finding out about them is left to the reader. While I have found it very useful to have Nattier's articulation of these principles, I now want to use them in my work. Citing Nattier would probably satisfy most Buddhism Studies scholars, but I wanted to know more about where they came from.

To cut a long story short, the ideas like "the principle of embarrassment" come from Christian theology, especially from Protestant New Testament scholars concerned with the historicity of Jesus. Once I gave up searching for this ideas in a Buddhism studies context, things got a lot easier. One source in particular was repeatedly cited by authors who write on this topic:

Meier, John P. (1991). A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. 4 Vol. New York: Doubleday.

In Meier we find a clear exposition and evaluation of the most common and/or useful criteria by which theologians have applied to the idea of an historical Jesus. While the obvious comparison might be the historicity of the Buddha, at present I'm more interested in Xuanzang as an historical character. The history of Xuanzang is typically—in a book like Sally Wriggins' (2004) The Silk Road Journey with Xuanzang—based on naïve readings of a narrow range of sources. I have been reading and making notes on a whole series of articles by Max Deeg critiquing the naïve use of historical sources for the life of Xuanzang. I'm also thinking about Jeffrey Kotyk's (2019) article that compares Buddhist and state histories and argues that, at the very least, we cannot understand Xuanzang as an historical character without considering all of the evidence. And into this mix has dropped the fascinating book chapter by Liu Shufen which argues for a very different picture of Xuanzang's later years under Emperor Gaozong.

Briefly, Liu (2022) argues that Xuanzang was held under house arrest by Gaozong for a number of years, and that during this time he was denied qualified assistants to help with translations. Indeed, his translation output dropped precipitously after the death of Emperor Taizong in 649. Moreover, Gaozong appointed a board of censors empowered to change Xuanzang's translations as they saw fit. These observations are based mainly on passages in the hagiography of Xuanzang attributed to Yancong (T 2053).

What I eventually want to do is write an article in which I analyse the historicity of Xuanzang according to criteria that I will state at the outset and apply even-handedly. To this end, I will here articulate Meier's hermeneutic criteria and give examples from my own published works or closely related publications. Meier articulates five primary and five secondary criteria which are tuned to recovering reliable historical information about Jesus from the Bible (and thus will require some tweaking for use in a Buddhist context).

Meier's Criteria

Primary criteria

1. the criterion of embarrassment
2. the criterion of discontinuity
3. the criterion of multiple attestation [aka corroboration]
4. the criterion of coherence
5. the criterion of rejection and execution [specifically related to reports of Jesus violent death]

Secondary criteria

1. the criterion of traces of Aramaic
2. the criterion of Palestinian environment
3. the criterion of vividness of narration
4. the criterion of tendencies of developing synoptic tradition
5. the criterion of historical presumption.

Primary Criteria

1. Embarrassment

When religieux write about their religion, they quite naturally portray it in the best possible light. Accounts of historical figures become hagiographies (from the Greek hagios "sacred, saintly"), that is, they are idealised accounts in which the characters become idealised vehicles for the values of the author. Thus in many Buddhist texts the Buddha is unfailingly good. He is not simply good, but his behaviour in the stories defines for Buddhists what good behaviour is. Scholars call this aspect of texts normative; it defines the norms of behaviour for Buddhists. This does not mean that Buddhists ever behaved the way the Buddha is portrayed as behaving. Indeed, there is ample evidence in the Vinaya to suggest that Buddhist monks were every bit as problematic as other human beings (I'll come back to this).

So, for example, when we read (per my 2004 article on the attitudes to suicide in Pāli suttas) that the Buddha taught a group of monks to meditate on death before going on retreat. On returning from retreat the Buddha finds that the monks have all committed suicide. Whoops. This reflects badly on the Buddha. It is an embarrassment. As a commentator, Buddhaghosa was obviously embarrassed, for example, and concocts a fanciful story in which it is secretly a good thing that the Buddha taught those monks the practice that drove them to suicide.

Another example of this is the story from the Ambaṭṭa Sutta in which the Sakya tribe are revealed to have practiced sibling incest marriages in the past (see Attwood 2012). Across Indian culture there are very strong social prohibitions on sibling incest (though in some parts of India first cousin marriages were and are common). This story doesn't simply reflect badly on the Buddha's tribe. It is one of the most taboo of all social conventions. "Sister-fucker" (Hindi bhenchod) is a very heinous insult for a man in modern India. So no one is going to simply make up a story about their ancestors practising sibling incest.

The criterion of embarrassment applied here makes the idea that Sakya's practiced sibling-incest marriages seem plausibly historical. In my article, I contrasted the strength of the incest taboo in India with the practice of sibling-incest marriages amongst Persian royalty as a way of consolidating power. Persian kings marrying their sisters may well have been following the example of Egyptian royalty who also practiced this.

However, this criterion has limitations. Clear cut cases of embarrassment are rare in religious literature for obvious reasons. Even if the embarrassing fact is true, there is no need to blurt it out. There are things that we simply don't talk about. So while we think this criterion is useful, there are not that many times we can apply it.

Moreover, what seems embarrassing for us may not have been embarrassing for the author. It is common to see people who encounter the myths of Buddhism to see the going forth of the Buddha in the standard account of his life (according to say the Lalitavistara or the Mahāvastu) in a negative way; the Buddha is seen to abandon his wife and baby to go off and become a wandering mendicant. This is sometimes seen as an indictment of his moral character. Even if we grant historicity to the myth of the Buddha we have to see the leaving home in context. In that version of the story, the Buddha lives with his family in a palace. The wife naturally, according to millennia old practice, goes to live with her husband's family. In that palace, Yasodharā lacks for nothing. She lives in luxury. Later, in this version of the story, the Buddha returns home and teaches Yasodharā and Rahula how to be liberated themselves. So it all turns out well in the end and there is no "embarrassment". We might go further and point out that other sources of biography, notably the Ariyapariyesanā Sutta, make no mention of the wife and baby, the Buddha appears to be an unmarried youth and, what's more, his mother lives to see him leave home rather than dying in the first week of his life." It is unlikely that the authors of either account thought of these details as embarrassing. It is only modern sensibilities that make it so.

2. Discontinuity

The idea here is to identify words or deeds attributed to an historical character that cannot be derived from their milieu or from later development of their religion. If we could identify such speech or actions in Buddhist texts, we might feel justified in supposing these to be attributable to the authors of the texts.

The problem for Buddhism is that its not a linear development from an existing culture. The authors of the texts attribute authorship to the Buddha. We only know the Buddha from normative Buddhist texts, since there are no contemporary records from other traditions that mention Buddhism or Buddhists.

The early Buddhist texts are the "Old Testament" of Buddhism, so, unlike New Testament scholars arguing about Jesus, there is no clear backdrop from which the Buddha emerged. That said, it is obvious that early Buddhists did draw on existing culture in formulating Buddhism. The presence of deva and asura figures is clear evidence of Brahmanical influence. The Buddhist doctrine of karma is likely an adaptation of an existing Jain doctrine. Mythic figures such as Yakkha and Nāga seem to be non-Indo-European and borrowed from some pre-existing chthonic animistic tradition. As I have noted (along with Anālayo), it seems very likely that key Buddhist meditation practices (leading to the āyatana states and to śūnyatā-samādhi) were also borrowed from a pre-existing tradition. There is also Michael Witzel's idea, articulated in my article (2012), that Buddhists borrowed from Iranian tradition.

This criterion will be much more difficult to apply in a Buddhist context, simply because the relations between Buddhists and their milieu were complex, but reliable sources don't exist. We are guessing a lot of the time. Moreover, the literature that later traditions produced was huge compared to the Bible.

A potential example is the word paṭiccasamuppāda. This word does not derive from existing traditions, so far as we have evidence of them. Such evidence as we have is extremely sketchy, however, and arguments from absence are weak. However, what about this word insists that the Buddha rather than the followers of the Buddha coined it?

Another problem that I don't think theologians face is that the first literature we meet is already translated, edited, and organised. In other words, the early Buddhist texts are the product of considerable literary effort on the part of early Buddhists. As already noted, the actual dates of the composition of the Pāli sutta are simply guesses based on normative traditions. The archaeology of Pāli texts does not begin until the 6th century CE.

3. Multiple Attestation or Corroboration

This criterion seems fairly self-evident: a historical event is more plausible if it is mentioned in two or more different sources.

A feature of Liu's (2022) thesis about Xuanzang is that the Yancong Biography contains numerous "facts" about him that are not recorded elsewhere. Liu appears to argue that in these cases the Biography is more valuable as an historical source. The criterion of multiple attestation, or what Nattier calls the "principle of corroboration", tells us the opposite. Where details are included in the Yancong Biography but not corroborated by other sources we must judge such details to be less plausible. This is is also Jeffrey Kotyk's (2019) criticism of the use that scholars have made of the Biography.

On the other hand, Kotyk (2019) notes the existence of another source for an event that is recorded in the Biography, namely the gift of a Heart Sutra in gold ink, accompanied by a presentation case (dated 26 Dec 656). This event occurs in a letter (often referred to by Sinologists as a "memorial") sent by Xuanzang to Gaozong to celebrate the first month of life of a royal prince born to Wu Zhao. The same letter is preserved as part of a collection of Xuanzang's letters preserved independently in Japan (seemingly not extant in China). Since this constitutes corroboration, Kotyk is minded to accept this event as plausibly historical. I agree. Furthermore, this is the earliest reliably dated attestation of the Heart Sutra anywhere in the world. The earliest artefact is from a few years later in the form of an Chinese inscription commissioned on 13 March 661.

4. The Criterion of Coherence

This criterion only comes into play after at least a first pass using the first three criteria. The aim is to establish a baseline of style or behaviour that allows us to compare a new passage with our existing understanding and judge how well it fits into the existing whole.

In a sense, this is a particular case of what Hans-Georg Gadamer calls the hermeneutic circle. Understanding the whole requires us to first understand the parts. But in order to fully understand each part, we have to know what contribution it makes to the whole. Each iteration clarifies our understanding of how it all fits together and what contribution each part makes.

The problem for Buddhists is, again, the complexity of Buddhist sources.

5. The Criterion of Rejection and Execution

This one is clearly specific to Christianity. The idea here is that the Jewish and Roman authorities would not have condemned and executed Jesus if they did not have cause. However, I'm not entirely sympathetic to this one. The Romans in Palestine are an example of authoritarian control by an foreign occupying power. Authoritarian regimes don't need logical reasons to persecute groups or individuals. As we know, such regimes routinely carry out show trials in which innocent individuals are convicted of crimes and punished. The idea that the Romans executed Jesus for cause is part of Christian mythology, but it's not corroborated by Roman sources. Tacitus is often mentioned as a source, but his mention of Jesus being executed by Pilate was written in 116 CE, a century after the fact. And Tacitus does not mention his sources.

A parallel here might be discerned in Buddhist discussions of the Buddha's last meal. The Parinibbāna Sutta appears to show him eating some dish which gave him food poisoning and led to his death. The criterion of embarrassment makes this detail seem a little more plausible, since being killed off by food poisoning is a rather ignominious death for a saint.

Secondary Criteria

1. Traces of Aramaic

The New Testament was written in koine Greek. Thus when we see traces of Aramaic, supposedly the language spoken by Jesus, this makes a given statement seem more authentic. As Meier immediately says, there are "serious problems" (178) with this criterion.

We see a similar analysis of Pāli, in which we often see evidence of another Prakrit which is close to the language used for the Asoka edicts in Magadha and for this reason called Magadhī. We see examples of Magadhī case endings in particular.

As in the case of Aramaic features in the Greek New Testament, the occurrence of Magadhī case endings in Pāli has been interpreted as evidence of the antiquity and therefore authenticity of the texts where they occur.

2. Palestinian environment

The idea here is that details in stories about Jesus that reflect the known customs, beliefs, and practices associated with Palestine in the first century, are more likely to be authentic. But it is easy for an author to interpolate such details from their own memory, from oral tradition, or from other sources.

The problem here, for Buddhism, is that we only have normative Buddhist sources for this. There is no contemporary literature that we can draw on. All we have for comparison is scant and fragmentary evidence from archaeology. Buddhist Stories are, for example, set in real cities. We know these cities existed because we have the remains of them. We can still visit the ruins (as I have done).

This criterion is more useful negatively. For example, we may say that the appearance of foreign ideas and customs should make us sceptical. As noted above, some of my speculations about the possibility that certain details of Buddhism might be explained if the Sakya tribe had originally come from Iran. Note that this is not the same as relating the Sakya tribe to the Iranian Saka tribe (no, the Sakya were not Scythians).

3. Vividness of narration

This criterion supposes that the kinds of vivid descriptions that we see of Palestine in some Biblical stories indicate an eyewitness account.

The problem here is that supplying vivid details is something that any competent storyteller does to make their account seem more plausible. The example that immediately comes to mind is the fact that Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street, Marylebone, London. This address was not real at the time, although the road has since been extended and now does have a 221. The Sherlock Holmes Museum can be found at 239 Baker St. Again, museums are generally the place where we store and display historical artefacts. But Sherlock Holmes is ahistorical, he's a fictional character.

In his paper Has Xuanzang ever been in Mathura?, Max Deeg notes that a number of vivid accounts in Xuanzang's Record of the Western Regions, are not based on first hand accounts. Xuanzang did not go to Mathura, despite providing a vivid description of it.

4. Tendencies of developing synoptic tradition

Maier Considers this principle "highly questionable". This is because it involves subjective opinions about the internal development of the gospel literature. There were, for example, more Aramaic expressions and syntax in the earlier gospel by Mark, that were gradually eliminated in Matthew and Luke.

There is an exact parallel with Buddhist literature featuring Prakrits gradually being Sanskritised. Early Buddhist texts were composed in various Prakrits, but these tended to become standardised and increasingly Sanskritised. In some texts there is an argument as to whether they reflect a Sanskritised Prakrit, or a Sanskrit with some Prakrit features. And of course there are, by the fourth century, texts composed in Pāṇinian Sanskrit. And after this, Buddhists once again began to use Prakrit. Notably, many dhāraṇī appear to have been composed in a Sanskritised Prakrit, i.e. they have Sanskrit words, with an archaic Prakrit case ending in -e. A good example is the dhāraṇī in the Heart Sutra which uses the Prakrit masculine nominative singular -e ending: gate gate pārasaṃgate bodhi svhāhā. Note that bodhi is also in the nominative singular and svāhā is now considered indeclinable.

The problem for Buddhists, as for Christians, is that constructing such internal chronologies that have no corroboration from external sources is speculative and subjective. All too often Buddhists work on the axiom "older is more authentic" and the people claiming to have discovered internal structures and developments are apologists for a sectarian tradition whose identity and livelihood are tightly bound to the outcome of the inquiry. No Theravādin bhikkhu, for example, is going to undermine Theravāda orthodoxy, since in doing so they risk expulsion from their order or worse, they risk talking themselves into apostasy.

So, for example, some Pāli texts contain elements of a living Prakrit that is similar to the language of the Asoka edicts from Magadha. We call that language Māgadhī. This is the Prakrit that emerged south of the Ganga around the kingdom of Rājagāha, then based in what is now Southern Bihar. We get many hints that there was considerably more linguistic diversity in the second urbanisation period ca. 600 BCE - 200 BCE. Arguments are made that the persistence of elements of Māgadhī in Pāli is evidence of antiquity amongst texts. These are combined with other speculative ideas, such as the idea that the use of certain poetic meters was prevalent in older material.

The problem is that the Pāli that has come down to us is the product of both translation (from various Prakrits into Pāli) and repeated editing (which is inevitable in the process of compilation). The Pāli suttas, for example, may well have relied on older traditions in some form, but they reflect Buddhism at the time the suttas were compiled and, even more than this, they reflect Buddhism at the time the suttas were written down. The trouble is that we don't know when Pāli was written down because the only evidence we have is from normative religious texts that have not been assessed using standardised hermeneutic principles.

5. Historical presumption

The last criterion that Meier considers concerns opinions about where the burden of proof lies. One of the things that Richard Gombrich has said about this issue was: "We have no reason to doubt the traditional accounts." For Gombrich the burden of proof lies with those who distrust the normative sources. But this is problematic. If, for example, we take Gombrich's assertion that the Buddha was an historical person, how can we prove that he was not? We cannot prove a negative. Many religieux take a similar position to the historicity of the Buddha, claiming, for example, that the very existence of Buddhism or the literature of Buddhism, is all the proof we need that someone called Buddha lived.

However, Meier notes the standard objection to this approach: "The burden of proof is simply on anyone who tries to prove something" (183). For example, anyone who wishes to assert that the Buddha was an historical person bears the burden of proof.

And, on the contrary, we have the argument by David Drewes that the Buddha has never been linked to any historical fact or event. There is no archaeology associated with the Buddha, and precious little even from that time beyond some sherds of pottery. The argument David Drewes makes is not that the Buddha was not historical. You cannot prove a negative. Drewes argues that there is simply no basis on which to make a conjecture because he does not consider the Pāli suttas to be a source of historical information. The suttas are normative religious documents that primarily reflect the religious ideas and ideals of the authors of the stories. If they are supposed to reflect the religious ideas of someone other than the author, then let us see that evidence. And let us evaluate the plausibility of that evidence according to standardised criteria.

Conclusions

While not all of Meier's criteria are directly applicable to reading Buddhist texts, we have here a coherent account of how some scholars have tried to work with the literature of early Christianity to divine the historical Jesus. In most cases I can see how I would apply such criteria to working with Buddhist normative texts. And have given examples.

These essays of mine are really just my notes typed up into a coherent form. The field of New Testament hermeneutics has thrown up many different lists of criteria and many arguments about which is applicable and to what extent.

The benefits of standardising our evaluations of the historical value of our sources have obvious advantages for scholars amateur and professional, because we have a common basis of evaluation. To date, a lot of the work on historicity is piecemeal; each fact is presented and justified in an isolated fashion so that a refutation of the whole requires a refutation of each fact individually. This makes the arguments for the historicity of the Buddha or the Pāli suttas very arduous and it makes the claims for "authenticity" sketchy, at best. This is the principle advantage of eschewing methods.

The rejection of standardised methods seems to be a conscious thing in Buddhist Studies as though our methods are value-free. A key social studies criticism of science, which also purports to be value-free, or at least value-neutral, is that it is theory laden. Science proceeds from certain axioms and we cannot pretend that those axioms don't matter. This criticism is entirely fair and identifying those axioms has helped to improve the scientific process and make scientific inquiry more rigorous.

It's hard to imagine a more theory-laden scenario, however, than a religious (often one who has given up sex for their religion) writing an apologia for one of the central tenets of their religion. The idea that their writing is value-free or that it is not theory-laden is simply laughable. As Upton Sinclair said: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” How much more so when that person, on the basis of their religious convictions, lives in extreme self-denial, is accorded exalted social status, and is praised sycophantically by followers.

And this is the problem that hermeneutic criteria were meant to solve. How can we be confident that anything we read in a religious text has any connection to history in the complete absence of any contemporary archaeology that might shed light on the situation. We examine claims, weighing them against our stated criteria, and then highlight what seems to be the most plausible explanation or narrative.

Such a procedure does not produce certainty, however. We have to treat it in a Bayesian way: using information gleaned from sources to assign finite probabilities to each scenario, and then adjusting the probabilities as new information comes in. Meier emphasises that no single criterion used in isolation would be useful. Rather, we have to view each new piece of information in relation to all the criteria.

Again, this process of going from part to whole and back to the parts in an iterative cycle was identified by Gadamer as the historiographical process par excellence. This is our best way forward in trying to reconstruct history from partial and fragmentary information produced by a community of religieux. And this process is never finished. New information is emerging all the time. And very often this means that we have to weigh up everything anew.

For example, the Chinese origins of the Heart Sutra now seems certain because there is a mountain of evidence for the Sanskrit text being a back-translation from Chinese. How does this knowledge affect other conclusions that we have about the Heart Sutra? If the text is not authenticated as a genuine, Indian, Buddhist text, then on what basis can it be authenticated? Or if we are being more provocative, we might ask, Is the Heart Sutra an authentic Buddhist text at all? If we don't have clear and agreed upon criteria for having such a discussion, then it tends to be a waste of time.

Of course, even within New Testament scholarship the criteria themselves are contentious and contended. Meier's work is widely cited in their literature. Meier values some principles (embarrassment, discontinuity, corroboration) and devalues others (historical presumption). Other authors come to different conclusions. But at least they know which argument they are having and what is at stake. My sense is that parallel discussions in Buddhism and Buddhism Studies are largely incoherent and slaved to sectarian orthodoxy. I think we can do better than a series of disconnected, idiosyncratic asseverations of faith. Certainly, in amateur and professional Buddhism Studies we need to pay more attention to methods and methodology (the study of methods).

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Attwood, J. 2004. "Suicide as a response to suffering." Western Buddhist Review, 4.

Attwood, J. 2012. "Possible Iranian Origins for Sākyas and Aspects of Buddhism." Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, 3, 47-69.

Liu, Shufen. (2022). “The Waning Years of the Eminent Monk Xuanzang and his Deification in China and Japan.” In Chinese Buddhism and the Scholarship of Erik Zürcher. Edited by Jonathan A. Silk and Stefano Zacchetti, 255–289. Leiden: Brill.

Meier, John P. (1991). A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. 4 Vol. New York: Doubleday.

Nattier, Jan. (2003). A Few Good Men: The Bodhisattva Path according to The Inquiry of Ugra (Ugraparipṛcchā). Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Does Buddhism Provide Good Explanations?

This is my 600th essay on this blog. Thanks to all my readers over the last 17 years. Although I've slowed down in order to focus on publishing in academic journals, I still enjoy writing these less formal essays.

~~oOo~~

What is an explanation? And more to the point, what is a good explanation? To answer these questions we have to formulate a "good" explanation of "explanation" along with an  explanation of what constitutes "good" in this context. There is a whole branch of the philosophy of science concerned with characterising scientific explanation. We can draw on this to outline such an explanation. In a classic article, Jan Faye (2007) outlines three modes of scientific explanation. These will form the basis for an exploration of what kinds of explanations that Buddhism offers.

Formal-Logical Mode of Explanation

In this approach, A and B are both (logical) propositions. We may say that A explains B if B can be inferred from A using deduction. This approach involves some idealisation because both A and B are propositions rather than brute facts. Moreover, if A explains B according to this definition, then A is ipso facto a good explanation. Here a "good explanation" is one that follows the rules of logic. Formal-logical explanations are thus prescriptive rather than descriptive.

The problem with this mode of explanation is that in applying deduction we inevitably seem to reproduce our starting assumptions. All exercises in logic involve axioms or propositions that we hold to be true but cannot substantiate. For example, many Buddhists assume that the Buddha was an historical character. We can't prove this, since there is no direct evidence of the Buddha, but the proposition has very broad appeal and most people uncritically accept it as true. The problem, then, is how this unevidenced commitment affects the outcome of deductions from circumstantial evidence. 

If we were simply to begin with known facts then we might deduce new facts. But in all cases of applying logic to the real world we cannot avoid axioms, or at least propositions that we take to be axiomatically valid. If we set out to prove that the Buddha was an historical character when we have a prior intellectual commitment to that proposition, i.e. if we treat the Buddha's historicity as axiomatic, then the details of the logical argument are irrelevant. There will always come a point when we deduce that the Buddha was an historical character and we will judge this to be a valid deduction precisely because it concurs with our axiomatic presupposition. In other words, if our axiom is "the Buddha was an historical character" then any sequence of deductions that reproduces the axiom will automatically be accepted as valid. This boils down to Aristotle's law of identity: A is A. 

Recently, David Drewes (2022) challenged the axiom of the historical Buddha by arguing that the basic definition of an historical character is that they can be connected to an historical event or fact. If this is our criterion then the Buddha is not an historical person since he cannot be connected to any historical event or fact. Drewes concludes that it does not make sense (at least for academic historians) to speak of an "historical Buddha". Indeed, the same can be said of all the characters in early Buddhist texts, including the kings. Usually, if anyone can be associated with history, it is kings. Lāja Piyadasi (aka  Emperor Asoka whose name means "remorseless") is the first historical character in Indian history. He left artefacts that we can definitely link to him. 

This mode of explanation has long been out of fashion in science, but it still holds sway in theology, including Buddhist theology.

Ontological Mode of Explanation

Ontological explanations seek to identify and understand causes. The idea here is that facts, events, and states explain observations by revealing law-like casual relations between them. This mode of explanation is familiar to anyone who has studied science. In this mode, A explains B if A is the cause of B: where A and B are facts, events, or states. 

In a classical scientific explanation we might say, for example, that a force applied to a mass causes it to accelerate (i.e. undergo a change in speed and/or direction). The size of this effect is given by Newton's second law of motion: F = ma; where F is force, m is mass (kg) and a is acceleration (m/s²). From this we can say that the magnitude of the change in acceleration is equal to the force applied divided by the mass. It also allows us to define a unit of force: one Newton of force (N) is 1 kg⋅m/s² (i.e. mass multiplied by acceleration). However, note that there is no term in the equation that corresponds to "causation". We assume that the applied force is the cause of the acceleration, but we don't need to encode that in the descriptive law. 

As Faye says, in this mode, "An explanation is both true and relevant if, and only if, it discloses the causal structure behind the given phenomena." (I'm referring to an unpaginated preprint). As another commentator, Sam Wilkinson puts it, "events explain other events, and they do so by standing in predictable law-like relations" (2014: 2)

Causation is a very tricky subject since, as David Hume observed some 300 years ago, we never observe causation, we only ever observe sequences of events. Immanuel Kant went further with this and asserted that causation and other metaphysical notions, like space and time, are actually structures imposed on experience by our minds in order to make sense of them. This basic insight seems to have stood the test of time. The explanations of causation I have seen tend to be rather abstract. In my view, our understanding of causation is related to learning how to use our own limbs and especially our hands. The archetype of causation, then, is action initiated by desire. This is why the concept of causation seems so intuitive but also why it is so confusing. Desire is an emotion and is not present outside of animal life. It's not present at all in most sequences of events in the universe, and as far as we know the only agents in the entire universe all live on earth. Thus our internal model for causation is not typical of causation generally. The conscious initiation of an action is an anomaly, not a model. 

Moreover, most events have multiple causes and we tend to highlight one or a small number from amongst them. The real world is far too complex for single causes to give rise to single effects, so most causal explanations introduce simplifications: for example, we often ignore gravity when it is perpendicular to the plane of interest. Our perception of initiating movements is biased because we are simply not aware of the complexity involved in making our limbs move: our kinesthetic sense, for example, is very coarse grained compared to our physiology. We don't sense, in any way, the nerve impulses involved, or the muscle fibres contracting and relaxing. We just have a broad sense of the limb moving. 

Thus, causal explanations are also fraught with uncertainty because the basic concept of causation is ill-defined and our understanding of it is based on a local anomaly. 

This leaves us with the third mode of scientific explanation. 

The Pragmatic Mode of Explanation

"Pragmatic" here is a technical or jargon term that refers to a particular approach to philosophy that is mainly focussed on speech and "speech acts". A speech act is an utterance that is intended to do something. This approach is contrasted with semantics, which is focussed on what words mean. It is not that pragmatists deny the meaning of words, but they do see meaning as secondary to doing. A classic example is irony, when we say one thing, but mean another, and do so "for effect". Semantics struggles to explain irony, though semantic explanations of irony have been proposed. Irony is simple for pragmatics since the effect of irony is to highlight the gap between expectation and reality. This is what the ironic utterance does. 

A question, in this view, is a speech act with the intention of seeking information. According to Faye, an explanation begins with a question. A pragmatic explanation, then, is a response to a question. As such, then, the purpose of an explanation is to satisfy the questioner. And an explanation is "good" to the extent that it does this. 

This may seem like a slippery slope to "relativism". Pragmatist philosophers address this by requiring that the questioner not be delusional and thus the answer only has to satisfy the rational requirements of a questioner and not their irrational requirements. Different philosophers have addressed this in different ways. For some, it requires a metaphysical turn, that is, linking "good" to being "true". 

Less problematic is the idea of accuracy: the closeness of an observed value to the true value. A good explanation has to attain a somewhat arbitrary level of accuracy. In physics, for example, scientists look for a confidence level of 5-sigma (5 σ). This means that there is a one in two million chance that your measurement is a statistical fluke that can be explained by some alternative route such as measurement error. So when, for example, someone announced that they had measured neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light, the first reaction was to look for some problem in the measurement rather than an immediate overturning of general relativity. And sure enough, a loose wire in the measurement device was fixed and the neutrinos "slowed down" to subluminal speeds.

Note that all measurements have an inherent level of error due to the limitations of our methods. Real science will always state what level of error the scientists have identified in their measurements. If you see a measurement that is not followed by the ± sign, then you should be on alert because someone is, at best, oversimplifying things and, at worst, attempting to deceive. 

An explanation that matches observations with a 5 σ level of accuracy is taken to be a good explanation in science. General relativity is a good explanation to certain questions asked by scientists. What is gravity? "Gravity is the geometry of spacetime". Why does the orbit of Mercury precess at the rate it does? Because at perihelion the curvature of spacetime caused by the sun is much greater than at aphelion, causing the planet to get ahead of where its orbit is expected to go under classical descriptions. And so on. 

Other philosophers try to apply criteria like "usefulness" a good explanation is one that is "useful", though usefulness is itself a nebulous concept: Useful for what? Useful to whom? 

In the pragmatic view, a good explanation entails the person asking the question understanding the answer that addresses their rational concerns. And if it does this, then it is a good explanation for that situation. For example, it remains to be seen whether my explanation of this is good from the reader's point of view. It gets interesting when authors raise questions that readers have never thought to ask, a situation I meet everyday as an author. 

Incidentally, this is consistent with Mercier & Sperbers contention that reasons are post hoc explanations that we produce in response to questions about motivations. Humans don't act for reasons, we act and then produce ad hoc reasons as required. Our deliberations on whether to act or how to act are generally handled by inferential processes below the threshold of awareness. Moreover, we tend to adopt the first plausible explanation for our actions that comes to mind. A striking demonstration of this can be seen in people with neurological damage who cannot form new memories. Oliver Sacks reports one such case in his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985). The patient is in hospital but cannot remember why. Asked to account for why he is there, the man confabulates a story that seems plausible to himself. He's there for a check up, he's waiting for someone, and so on. Each time it's different because he can't remember his previous answers. One of the functions of memory is to put limits on our speculations about how we got here. 

By this criterion, if a five-year old asks me why the sky is blue, and I respond by explaining how the scattering of incident sun light by atoms in the atmosphere is dependent on the type of atom and the wavelength of the light; blue light is scattered by more nitrogen gas than other frequencies, so we see more blue light than other colours in any direction in the sky away from the sun itself. The answer is objectively true, to the best of my knowledge, and accurate to some arbitrary level. However, I have still failed to give a good answer because my five-year old interlocutor is unlikely to understand it. This is not relativism, since we can still say that some answers are better than others. The sky is not blue because that is God's favourite colour, for example. Rather there is a limit on the "goodness" of an explanation that is dependent on the knowledge and capabilities of the questioner. Similarly, if a scientist asks why the sky is blue and I give a mythological answer that would satisfy the people of, say, Iron Age India, it would not be a good explanation in that circumstance.

So a good explanation, in this mode, is an utterance that addresses a particular question, asked by a particular person whose rational needs (especially for understanding) must be satisfied by the answer. This means that explanations in this mode are not universal, they have to fit the requirements of the question/questioner. In this mode, contrary to the others, the explanation is not inherent in nature, not a fixed thing, but changes dependent on who is asking and why. An explanation has to do more than simply reveal a pre-existing truth, it has to communicate something to a specific audience. And as such, an unmitigated scientific explanation is seldom the best explanation except to other scientists. 

Other Modes?

These modes are how philosophers of science explain explanation to each other. I was alerted to this by reading Sam Wilkinson's (2014) application of Faye's schema to a problem in neuroscience. One mode that is not included, though it was the primary mode of explanation for ancient Buddhists is, explanation by analogy. In this mode, one can explain an unknown event or process by analogy to some known process. One of the best examples of this from ancient Buddhism is the niyāma doctrine that we find in Pāli commentaries attributed to Buddhaghosa. 

In this view, for example, we can explain karma by reference to the way a seed grows into a plant (bīja-niyāma). Indeed, we refer to the results of karma as phala "fruit" and vipāka "ripening, maturing" (from √pac "to cook"). This also explains the like-for-like specificity of karma: good actions (kusala, puṇya) lead to a good rebirth (sugati); bad actions (pāpa, akusala, apuṇya) lead to a bad rebirth (duggati). The analogy here is that a rice seed can only grow into a rice plant. On the other hand, karma also has to be timely, i.e. to ripen at the appropriate time. The analogy for this is the way that plants bloom and fruit in season, or the way the monsoon rains (mostly) come at the same time each year (utu-niyāma).

However, sometimes ancient Buddhists could find no analogy. And in these cases they often resorted to theological arguments. Taking another example from the doctrine of pañcavidha niyāma, Kamma-niyāma itself refers to the inevitability of consequences. Karma must ripen. There is no good analogy for the inevitability of this, since it is not true that real fruit must ripen. In nature, crops may fail to ripen for many reasons. Some unripe fruit fall from the tree, some are consumed by birds, insects, or fungus, some are affected by draught, etc. Where they could find no analogy from nature, Buddhists would resort to an appeal to authority. In the case of kamma-niyāma Buddhaghosa opted to cite a verse from the Dhammapada (127) which describes inevitability. 

In my articles on karma I have noted that the early belief in the inevitability of karma is overridden in  later Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna texts that allow for religious practices to mitigate karmic consequences. The epitome of this is the Vajrasatva mantra, the chanting of which is said to eliminate even the most negative forms of karma, such as that from killing a buddha. This alone suggests that argument from authority is less successful than argument from analogy.

Doctrine as Explanation

Buddhist explanations are typically codified as "doctrine", a word derived from Latin that means "teaching", but is also used to refer to the official body of teachings that are core to a particular religious community. Some religieux, notably Christians and Muslims, define membership of their group by acceptance of certain doctrines. Modern Buddhists will often ape this practice, setting out a Buddhist catechism, but ancient Buddhists seem to have defined membership in terms of behaviour rather than belief. And after all, a person can profess belief, but if their behaviour is not consistent with that belief such profession is meaningless. 

Doctrines are not necessarily arbitrary, but can reflect a considered position on a particular question or problem. That is to say, a doctrine can (and often does) function as an explanation. For example, in response to the question, "How should we live as Buddhists?", Buddhists codified sets of training rules or śikṣapāda, the best known of which are the pratimokṣa and the five precepts for lay Buddhists.  These constitute different levels of explanation for different people. Lay people were not expected to live according to the pratimokṣa, though they often knew the rules and reported monks who broke them. 

However, Buddhists seldom codified the questions or problems that gave rise to the doctrines. And thus we have to be careful. We do not know, for example, why anyone believed in rebirth in India. Vedic speakers were originally from a milieu that did not believe in rebirth. They seem to have embraced it when they encountered it in India (traces of the process are found in the Ṛgveda stories about Yama as the discoverer of the way to the pitṛloka). We know a good deal about the content of what various communities believed about life after death, and we know how they responded to the belief, but we don't know why they found rebirth a more compelling version of the afterlife than the one they arrived in Indian with (every culture has a view about this). Nor do we fully understand how rebirth happened, since even within Buddhism there was no general agreement on this. 

There are times when we can attempt to reverse engineer the problem that gave rise to a doctrine, but since we have no way to go back in time and confirm this directly, such reconstructions are always speculative. 

According to many Buddhist texts, the most fundamental thing that Buddhism seeks to explain is suffering. In Christianity, for example, suffering must be explained with reference to the creator and is often referred to as the problem of theodicy or "God's justice"; or simply the problem of evil. If God created the world with evil in it, was he compelled, complicit, or indifferent? Christians have addressed this problem in different ways. Evil is not God's fault because he gave humans free will (evil is our fault; or worse, evil is women's fault). Evil is part of God's plan and not being omnipotent we simply cannot understand it. Many of us now say that the explanations of evil offered by Christians are not good explanations because all of the answers implicate God as the creator of evil. 

Buddhists, free of the scourge of a personified creator, had a number of approaches to explaining suffering. One of the most important reasons offered is the belief that we are repeatedly reborn in one or other of the realms of saṃsāra. To be reborn is to suffer. In response, all ancient Buddhists sought an end to rebirth as their primary goal. Arguably all modern Buddhists do also, but they seldom couch it in these terms. Modern Buddhists often try to explain evil from the point of view of individual psychology (often with a psychoanalytic perspective): evil is a result of an individual's desire, since it is desire that fuels rebirth. 

However, in this example, rebirth is a given. The belief in rebirth seems to have been ubiquitous in pre-modern India. Rebirth is not a conclusion, it is an axiom. That we are reborn is never in question for Buddhists (and when it is questioned, many Buddhists throw up their hands and declare that without rebirth Buddhism is meaningless). There are early Buddhist references to non-believers, but we don't know if they actually existed, because they did not leave their own records and where we have external confirmation (as through archaeology) we find Buddhist texts are quite unreliable witnesses to history. As we know, none of the characters in the Pāli stories can be linked to historical events. Indian history begins with writing and writing in India begins with Asoka's inscriptions. Before that, we have archaeological evidence, such as potsherds or stupas, but this tends to shed light only on material culture, not on individuals or mores.

As Sue Hamilton (2000) says repeatedly, early Buddhists were interested in how certain things worked; they did not have much to say about whether or not anything existed. This is also true for Prajñāpāramitā.

Is Dependent Origination a Causal Explanation?

Recall that the causal mode of explanation aims to explain something by showing a causal relation with something else. X explains Y, if X is the cause of Y. Superficially, the formula of dependent arising resembles a causal explanation, so much so that many modern Buddhists speak of dependent arising as a "theory of causality". This is inaccurate. Dependent arising tells us when causation happens, i.e. when the condition is present; it does not explain how causation happens. Moreover, the relations between the twelve nidānas are extremely varied: ignorance is the condition for volitions, for example, but birth is the condition for death. In the latter we get a dramatic example of why this is not a theory of causation. If X causes Y, then we are left stating the proposition that "birth causes death". This is obviously false. 

Of course one cannot die without first being born, but it would be ridiculous to say that birth is the cause of death. Such a causal explanation fails to satisfy any rational question about death. Take the case of a person who dies at age 100. Their birth was 100 years prior. Just as Buddhists insisted on the presence of the condition, we too think of causation as happening locally, both physically and temporally. A cause with a 100 year delay in fruition doesn't work as a causal explanation because we don't perceived widely separated moments in time as being present to each other (note that in English we almost always discuss time using spatial metaphors). We are constantly interacting with the world and its living creatures; constantly experiencing causation at various levels. A 100 year delay opens the door to uncountable causal relations that would smother any causal connection between two events. 

Leading up to bhava the nidānas can, at a stretch, be understood as relating to experience. But bhava means "existence". It may be that this was the end of the sequence at some point, because bhava here implies a series of rebirths driven by karma. This raises larger questions about whether the nidānas are an explanation at all. Many would say that the nidānas are not an ontology (not an explanation of what exists), but merely a framework for reflecting on the nature of experience in the pursuit of ending rebirth. The whole thing is predicated on axiomatic rebirth. 

Conclusion

I started with an overview of different modes of explanation as understood by philosophers of science:  the formal logical mode, the ontological mode, and the pragmatic mode. Philosophers of religion have to add a few more modes of explanation that scientists don't accept, such as explanation through analogy and appeals to doctrine. This looks like a fruitful approach to exploring Buddhism. For example, it would be useful to identify what kinds of questions Buddhists were asking. We get some idea of this from the work of people like Richard Gombrich who have identified where Buddhists were in dialogue with Brahmins or people of other faiths. For example, it seems that everyone in ancient India who believed in rebirth looked for an explanation of rebirth. Just saying we are reborn again and again is not satisfying, especially in a culture that sees birth as a misfortune. Ancient Buddhists wanted to know why we are repeatedly reborn into misery because the idea of being reborn into misery was taken to be axiomatic true. And the doctrine of karma seeks to explain rebirth rather than the belief in rebirth. Buddhists never sought to explain their belief in rebirth because everyone took it to be axiomatically true. Background beliefs are almost never explained, which is why we still need philosophers. 

What other kinds of questions were Buddhists trying to answer in their myriad doctrines? And why do those doctrines compete? We tend not to even think in these terms so the answers are not forthcoming.

Then there is the question of why doctrines change. I have been interested, for example, by changes in the doctrine of karma over time, especially where we get oddities like the sarvāsti doctrine or the pudgala doctrine. What caused such changes? Buddhists themselves are uninterested in such questions. They are more concerned with the question of authenticity. For example, there is now a regular stream of articles saying that secular mindfulness is not authentic because the suite of practices under that  rubric have been removed from their "spiritual" context (see for example White 2023). 

What does this word "spiritual" mean any more? What question is "spiritual" the answer to and for whom? Moreover, there is no word in the Buddhist technical lexicon that can legitimately be translated as "spiritual"? The word has no meaning in modern English anymore, but it never had any meaning in a Buddhist context. 

In the end, what do the Iron Age doctrines of Buddhism explain and for whom? For example, the intended audience for many texts is monastics, living a life that has almost no parallel in modern Buddhism, i.e. mendicant monasticism: living rough, depending on begging, mostly engaged in meditation. Do answers for this community constitute a good explanation of anything for someone living in the 21st century? Many modern Buddhists require us to believe that not only are the Iron Age doctrines still apt, but that they are the acme of all explanations: Buddhists purport to explain reality itself. 

But these explanations strike few of us as salient or good. And by "us" here, I mean modern Europeans and people living in European colonies. Traditional explanations are still popular where Buddhist traditions thrive. But they clearly do not relate to the majority. If we look at the statistics, Buddhists are typically less that 1% of the population of European states. 200 years after the first Buddhist monks arrived in the UK we are still less than half of 1% of the population. The fact is that, while many Europeans are sympathetic to and tolerant of Buddhism, they have no interest in becoming Buddhist. The largest and fastest growing category of religion in the 2021 UK census was "no religion". Religious explanations are not winning people over, secular explanations are. 

Moreover, I don't find the Buddhist account of reality convincing anymore, either. I'm not sure I was ever wholly convinced, but I did take on a lot of doctrine in order to facilitate a sense of belonging. Now I find the metaphysics of Buddhism quite dull and uninteresting, especially in the light of Sue Hamilton's heuristic of treating the Buddha of the Pāli canon as addressing issues of phenomenology and knowledge, and not as addressing metaphysical problems. Indeed, the Buddha famously avoids answering  questions framed as "Does X exist or not exist?" And this attitude persists into the Prajñāpāramitā literature that I have spent the last ten years studying. 

Buddhist metaphysics leads to paradoxes and contradictions; to philosophical kludges like the two truth doctrine (dvisatyavāda) or the momentary doctrine (kṣanavāda). One paradox, for example, is that dependent arising forbids action at a temporal distance while karma demands it: conditionality requires the presence of the condition, while some karmic actions only mature (vipāka) into consequences many lifetimes later. We cannot have both and ancient Buddhists produced all kinds of fudges to try to overcome this, with simple denial being at the forefront. For example, one academic journal editor, who is a Theravādin Buddhist, refused to publish an article of mine because he refused to admit that dependent arising requires the presence of the condition. We need to be clear about this: causation in the absence of a cause is totally incoherent, even in Buddhism. Causation in which the cause and effect appear at arbitrary times doesn't even meet the requirement of being a repeating sequence of events. It is not a sequence at all since any number of other events intervene and are implicated in conditionality generally. 

The internal contradictions of Buddhist doctrine are a sign that something has gone wrong. Moreover, ancient Buddhists must have been aware of this, since all Buddhist sects introduced doctrinal innovations and this still goes on today. Some of the explanations, such as sarvāstivāda and pudgalavāda, make clear that they introduced innovations to deal with  perceived problems in doctrine, but most never acknowledge the motivations for innovations. Changes in the doctrine of karma are never justified. Later Buddhists simply adopted a different definition and did not acknowledge the older one. 

The modern Buddhists' use of ancient Buddhist texts as justification for a belief is not a good explanation for me, as it doesn't answer any question that I have posed about Buddhist doctrines. Moreover, not even ancient Buddhists could cite textual justification for changing the doctrine of karma, because that would mean admitting that the Buddhavācana had mistakes in it. 

What Buddhism does explain is this: there is a real state of contentless awareness that a human being can reach by withdrawing attention from sensory experience and enduring the resultant sensory deprivation (often accompanied by hallucinations). 

In terms of conditionality we have to leave dependent arising behind in explaining contentless awareness. This is the state that occurs when all conditions for sensory experience have been eliminated through the practice of nonapprehension of sensory experiences. Philosophers would refer to it as a non-intentional conscious state. That is to say, a conscious mental state that is not "aimed at" anything. 

However, the vast majority of Buddhists reify this state and talk about it as "reality". The word may be explicit (especially in English language publications) or it may be implicit. And this is ironic for several reasons. There is no word in Indic languages that quite covers the same semantic field as the abstract noun "reality". Reality is never explicit in Pāḷi, for example, because there is no such term in Pāḷi. The same applies for Sanskrit and Chinese. Buddhist accounts of reality are often merely silly, like the common claim that "mind creates matter". It doesn't. Moreover, Buddhist texts don't claim that it does, because they almost never discuss "matter" (dravya) in relation to mind; they discuss phenomena (dharma) which they clearly distinguish from objects. 

My conclusion is that traditional Buddhism does not provide me with good general explanations. Modern Buddhism does little better since it subordinates all knowledge to the claims of the traditional buddhist: where a Buddhist acknowledges the validity of a scientific explanation, for example, they almost always assert that the Buddha got there first. For Buddhists, science or any foreign body of knowledge can only ever be a handmaiden to Buddhism. In this all too common scenario Buddhists co-opt the explanatory power of science to assuage their anxieties over orthodoxy and to bolster metaphysical claims (that are otherwise unreasonable).  Buddhism does not provide me with good explanations of reality, truth, or any other metaphysical issue. Buddhists have no explanation whatever of morality, just a bunch of lists of moral rules. As Damien Keown long ago noted, there are no ethical treatises in traditional Buddhist literature. 

Buddhism can do a decent job of explaining the state of contentless awareness that follows the cessation of sensory experience. And yet I know that scientists are now exploring this phenomenon and are likely to do a better job of explaining it, just as they do for other events and states. 

We have an interlocking network of good explanations of reality in science (in the form of theories that satisfy many levels of questioning). Science gives us extremely accurate and precise values for some of the physical properties of changing systems. However, even science is not a complete description of the world as it stands because the vast majority of scientists are committed to a reductionist explanatory paradigm: any event or state is best explained in terms of events and states at a lower order of structure and/or complexity: the parts explain the whole. Only... bricks and mortar don't explain architecture. I don't accept reductionism as a complete metaphysics. Rather, I hold that structure is equally important to substance, and that in order to have knowledge of structures we cannot employ the destructive analysis of reductionism (which destroys structures). Any good explanation will explain both substance and structure and privilege neither. So, while I am critical of Buddhist explanations, I'm not advocating scientism as an alternative. As useful as reductionist science undoubtedly is, we have a long way to go understanding the place and role of structure. 

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Faye, Jan.(2007). "The Pragmatic-Rhetorical Theory of Explanation." In Rethinking Explanation. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science. 43-68. Edited by J. Persson and P. Yikoski. Dordrecht: Springer.

White, Curtis. (2023). "How Corporations Attempt to Co-opt Buddhism." Yes Magazine. Jan 24, 2023. https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/2023/01/24/corporate-buddhism

Wilkinson, Sam. (2014). "Levels and Kinds of Explanation: Lessons from Neuropsychiatry." Frontiers in Psychology 5 (article 373): 1-9. 

If You Meet Conze on the Road, Set Fire To Him

Edward Conze is still considered by many to be the doyen of the field of Prajñāpāramitā Studies. He is still described in superlative terms and draws effusive praise verging on adoration from some scholars and religieux. I argued in my recent article (Attwood 2020) that this might not be wholly deserved and that we need to reconsider Conze's contributions (and his character). In that article, I gave some examples of Conze's character and his work on the Heart Sutra that I hoped would make people rethink their attitude to him.

In this essay, I will consider some aspects of Conze's philosophical work prior to his turn to mysticism (ca 1937); in particular, I will consider Conze's attitude to Aristotle's law of noncontradiction. This was the subject of Conze's postgraduate research after earning a German doctorate in philosophy (at the time equivalent to a British Master of Arts degree). Conze himself said that all his later ideas were contained in the book that would have constituted his PhD thesis or Habilitationsschrift, i.e. Der Satz vom Widerspruch "The Principle of Contradiction" (1932). To be clear, he is talking about the same Aristotelian principle, that most modern sources refer to as the law or principle of noncontradiction. The term "noncontradiction" seems to more clearly convey Aristotle's intent. 

Not long after it was printed, Der Satz vom Widerspruch was burned by the Nazis along with other books by communists. As Holger Heine (who recently translated the work into English) tells the story, "almost all of the five hundred copies of the first edition were destroyed [and] Conze's hopes for an academic career in Germany had come to naught" (xiv). There was an unauthorised reprint of 600 copies in 1976, produced by the German Socialist Students Association, however a literature review reveals very few citations of Conze's book or other work from the period up to 1937 when his midlife crisis began. It is safe to say that even Heine's enthusiastic attempts to resuscitate Conze's corpse have not led to signs of life. For someone who gets the kind of sycophantic praise that Heine and others heap on him, Conze remains a very minor figure in the history of early 20th Century Marxist philosophy, let alone philosophy generally. Still, given his elevated status in Prajñāpāramitā studies, those few of us who work in this field ought to at least make an effort to engage with Conze's earlier philosophy, given the influence it had on his later work.

In brief, the law of noncontradiction says that if logical contradictions were allowed, we could not make sense of the world. If I state that a proposition is true, the contrary of that proposition must be false. For example, if it is true that Conze was born in Germany, the contrary, that Conze was not born in Germany must be false. At face value this is trivial, but it has profound implications. In this essay I will explore the law of noncontradiction and Conze's attempt to invalidate it. 

Law of Noncontradiction

For Aristotle, the law of noncontradiction was the most fundamental axiom on which rational thought was based. It is what must be known if anything is to be known. It was not something that could be derived from first principles, but had to be true a priori for rational thinking to work at all. In his Metaphysics Aristotle states the law in at least three ways, which Gottlieb describes as ontological, doxastic, semantic.

“It is impossible for the same attribute at once to belong and not to belong to the same thing and in the same relation” (Metaphysics IV 3 1005b19–20).

“it is impossible for anyone to suppose that the same thing is and is not” (Metaphysics IV 3 1005b24 cf.1005b29–30. Emphasis added).”

“And since the contradiction of a statement cannot be true at the same time of the same thing, it is obvious that contraries cannot apply at the same time to the same thing.” (Metaphysics IV 6 1011b13–20).

Quotes are from the Tredennick translation (1933) as found on the Perseus Website.

The law of noncontradiction has to apply at the level of ontology. An object that exists and has certain attributes is not non-existent and lacking those attributes. As Conze puts it:

"We cannot judge that the same man is learned and is also not learned at the same time and in relation to the same group of facts, because in fact he is learned and cannot be not learned at the same time and in relation to the same group of facts" (1934: 207. Emphasis in the original).

At the level of belief, if one rejected it, one's thoughts would be disordered. I cannot logically believe that God exists and that God does not exist, though of course I can be undecided for various reasons. Aristotle notably makes a distinction between what someone says and what they believe. He is thinking of the latter, since lies are eminently possible.

And it must apply at the level of assertion because if it is not true then no communication would be possible. Communication depends on agreements amongst a language using community on what linguistic signs mean. If the law of noncontradiction does not hold then no such agreement is possible. 

The principle goes deeper than this. Being fundamental, it must apply to all things and the commonality of all things is their existence. This principle can be stated as "Being is not and cannot be non-being" (Conze 1934: 208). Although, as we will see, Conze never accepted the universal validity of this and states the opposite in his Heart Sutra commentary using a reduction of Suzuki's logic of sokuhi, i.e. "A is not-A" (on which see Suzuki, Negation, and Bad Buddhist Philosophy). 

Although we cannot argue for the law of noncontradiction on first principles, there are some approaches to justifying it.

Arguments for the Law of Noncontradiction

As evidence for the applicability of the axiom, we can cite the fact that reality is somewhat comprehensible, our thoughts are somewhat ordered, and communication is somewhat possible. Unlike traditional transcendental arguments I am hedging here (using "somewhat") and I will get into this shortly. The point is that with effort we can attain a very high degree of comprehensibility as represented in a vast body of mathematical formulae used in science to describe patterns of regularity we experience when we examine the universe. The intricate web of computers and communications networks that we call the Internet is one physical manifestation of this. If the principle of noncontradiction did not hold, something like the internet would be impossible. Some level of order is required, and though in practical terms this need not be absolute, it must be substantial.

Now let's address the issue of hedging. Aristotelian logic is the foundation of modern logic, it is not the whole of modern logic. The problem with reality is that our knowledge of it is necessarily indirect and incomplete. Aristotle sets out the ideal case in which we have perfect knowledge and reason infallibly. This is useful because it is a model for how things work under ideal conditions. If we did solve problems using reasoning, this is what it would look like. Of course we have known since the mid 1960s that this is not how we solve problems and that 90% of us routinely fall for simple logical fallacies. 

We always operate at some remove from the ideal. Our knowledge is inevitably partial, and there is always the possibility of unknown unknowns (aka the black swan effect). Still, the fact that reality is comprehensible at all is a sign that Aristotle's ideal is relevant to our world. The better our knowledge of the world, the closer we can come to this ideal.

Aristotle dismisses the idea that this axiom requires proof. It cannot be proved because it has to be in place in order for the notion of proving something to mean anything. However, what we can do is refute the opposite. Consider the contrary, i.e. the case where logical contradiction is the norm, i.e. A is not-A. In this case, whatever is true is also false. And whatever is false is also true. One could never know anything because whatever one knew would ipso facto also be unknown. One could not get out of bed in the morning because neither "bed" nor "morning" would stand for anything. Bed and not-bed are indistinguishable. If contradiction is the norm, then one is in a realm of utter nihilism. If what I said could mean literally anything at all, then utterances would convey no information. A lie would be true and a truth would be a lie; "turn left in 200m" would be indistinguishable from "eat a peach while the sun is out" or "the yellow flower is wilting".

Refuting the contrary does not prove the proposition. All we can say is that any scenario in which the law does not hold would be incomprehensible. And since our world is comprehensible, we have to assume that the law holds. 

In his rejection of the law of noncontradiction, Conze takes an exclusively logical approach and in particular his argument against the law of noncontradiction rests on the absolute validity of the law of noncontradiction. Aristotle warned against exactly this: "You cannot engage in argument unless you rely on [the law of noncontradiction]. Anyone who claims to reject [the law of noncontradiction] 'for the sake of argument' is similarly misguided." ‒ Gottlieb (2019).

Another reason that we might hedge on noncontradiction in the modern world is quantum physics. In this branch of physics we describe the state of a subatomic entity using the Schrödinger equation, and this gives us the probability of, for example, finding a given particle at any point in space at any given time. Unfortunately, the Schrödinger equation usually has more than one valid answer. Physicists typically take this to have an ontological counterpart in which the particle is in multiple locations (or states) called a superposition. However, once the particle (or the system of interest) interacts with its environment, then the possibilities collapse to one state with 100% certainty. Again this is interpreted as an ontology in which the interaction causes the cloud of possibilities to collapse down to one, also known as the collapse of the "wave function". This term "wave function" is confusingly used both for the abstract mathematics that describes the state of the particle and for the corresponding physical reality. In this view, the wave function is the particle or, more importantly, the particle is a wave function. The nature of subatomic entities is wave functions in fields.

In the famous thought experiment, Schrödinger's cat is alive and dead at the same time, breaking the law of noncontradiction. This was intended as a criticism of the idea that "observation" caused the collapse of the wave function. Eugene Wigner went further and suggested that the observation had to be made by a sentient being, that somehow "consciousness" caused the collapse of wave functions. Not only was Wigner's wrinkle nonsense, but it is generally considered that the whole idea of observation is poorly defined, discussed in vague terms, and doesn't qualify as science. Still, we are left with the fact that, in quantum metaphysics, reality behaves in counterintuitive ways that apparently break the law of noncontradiction.

Think about a visual observation. A photon leaves the system of interest and strikes the retina, and causes an electrochemical cascade partly shaped by the frequency of the photon and what kind of cell it hit. This cascade arrives in the visual cortex and is interpreted as a visual stimulus. At no point does the eye or brain physically interact with the system. The eye is a passive receiver. Wigner wanted to say, and many people wanted to believe, that looking at something (or perceiving it) changes it. In reality the causality is the other way around. Changes in the system, resulting in the emission or reflection of photons, cause us to observe the system. Without that change our eye receives no photons. So observation by a human being cannot be the cause of anything. 

Conze was certainly ignorant of quantum physics and did not invoke it in his work. On the other hand, Aristotle was concerned only with the visible world and with the functioning of human reasoning as understood in his time. Which brings us to Conze's views on Aristotle.

Conze's Rejection of the Principle of Noncontradiction

Conze has said that all of his later thinking is contained in Der Satz vom Widerspruch. The book purports to be a Marxist critique of Aristotle. Typically, Marxists eschew the mechanical materialism of the nineteenth century and replace it with a materialism inspired by Hegel. In Hegel's dialectic, opposites (thesis and antithesis) clash and this leads to a resolution in which the extremes are unified (synthesis).

Marx and Engels "stressed the dialectical development of human knowledge, socially acquired in the course of practical activity [and] social practice alone provides the test of the correspondence of idea with reality—i.e., of truth." Britannica. This aspect of their thought is distinct from historical materialism and class struggle.

Conze attempts to explain human knowledge as a clash between magic and logic. However, rather than casting them in a dialectical relationship, which would see the triumph of a synthesis of the two, Conze sees the clash of thesis and antithesis as leading to the hegemony of one or the other. And as a result Conze is caught in a cleft stick. On one side is the hegemony of logic, which Conze loathes but relies on to make his point; on the other is the hegemony of magic, something he believes in but cannot use to make his argument (since magical arguments are not persuasive). Conze makes no bones about his view that magic is superior to logic. He outspokenly asserted this superiority in his Prajñāpāramitā work, despite continuing to tacitly use logic throughout. Using logic to show how logic doesn't work is not a very convincing rhetorical strategy.

Thus, also though the idea that truth is socially defined might have some merit, the argument that this leads us to necessarily abandoning the law of noncontradiction is still nonsensical. Rather, noncontradiction becomes even more important as a yardstick for truth. In the most extreme version of this approach, truth is that which does not contradict social norms. Even if we accept the full-on relativism of Conze's Marxism, the social nature of logic does not eliminate the need for the law of noncontradiction. The hardcore relativist imagines that they stand outside any system and can see the merits of each. This God's eye view is a nonsense however. Despite being a refugee, Conze was very much a man of his time, culture, and class, i.e. a minor German aristocrat of the early 20th Century. Conze's views on truth are just as socially conditioned as anyone else's. 

Unfortunately, Conze's antipathy to science has blinded him to the possibility that some observations are not culturally defined. Everyone experiences gravity, for example, and if they took the time to measure it, everyone would find that the acceleration due to gravity is ~ 9.8 ms^-2. We may have different accounts of gravity, but some are more accurate than others. As I pointed out in my article on Conze, the historian Carl R. Trueman makes the salient point that objectivity is not neutral or unbiased (2010: 27ff). Objectivity by its very nature excludes the majority of explanations. Objectively, magic is not real; astrology does not describe the influence of the planets on human beings, and "A is not-A" is nonsense.

Marxist ideas about materialism assert an objective world existing independently of the mind with the corollary that mind can exist independently of matter. The latter idea has long been disproved, but in the 1930s there may well have been educated people who sincerely believed in it. Conze, rejected the idea of an objective world, and instead substituted a magical world. To Conze, such ideas were axiomatic and he made no attempt to defend them. He simply asserted the existence of magic and of a magical reality. Citing my essay on Conze's place in Prajñāpāramitā research:

As he says, his “life-long acceptance of magic... has not been so much due to theoretical considerations as to the early acquired intuitive certainty that beyond, or behind, the veil of the deceptive sensory appearances, there lies a reality of magical, or occult, forces” ( Conze 1979: I 32). And in his view science “…has little cognitive value, but is rather a bag of tricks invented by God-defying people to make life increasingly unbearable on Earth and finally to destroy it” (1979: I 32).

These words were written at the end of his life, but they do appear to reflect an attitude that is apparent in his early philosophical work (1934, 1935, 1937).

It is true that magical thinking exists even today. I know many people who sincerely believe that the Heart Sutra is magical and who assume that by studying it some of that magic will rub off on me. And when I shrug and say, "magic isn't real", they are genuinely dismayed. Just because some people are attracted to the idea does not mean that magic is real or the magical thinking is appropriate to decision making. Generally speaking, magical thinking leads to poor decisions. 

Seeing Conze's work on Prajñāpāramitā in the light of his earlier work, as he suggested, is instructive. He is already using the terms "God", "the One", and "the Absolute" as synonyms when talking about mysticism in his 1934 presentation to the Aristotelian Society. Clearly he is drawing on several different traditions: Christianity, Neoplatonism, German idealism, and Theosophy. He even cites Mahāyāna Buddhism in passing. It is useful to read this paper since it helps us understand Conze's turn to Buddhism in terms of his earlier embrace of mysticism, which he defines as a state of "complete union with God, with the One". One can see much of his later attitude to Prajñāpāramitā in these earlier works. In another early essay, Conze notes, for example, the tendency of Mahāyāna Buddhism (amongst other ideologies) to what he calls mystical pantheism:

"Mysticism develops into mystical pantheism under two conditions, namely, that the state of ecstasy is considered to give a true, the only true image of reality, and further that the one object of ecstasy is expressly stated to include all reality." (1935: 212)

He also says:

"Generally mystical pantheists do not devote much attention to the consequences of their ideas on logical thinking, its categories and laws." (1935: 212)

This describes the later Conze and the way he writes about the Heart Sutra in 1946. For Conze, the mystical pantheist, "nothing except the One and infinite Absolute" exists and:

"All differences are then absolutely reduced to nought. Since contradictions are not possible without differences, the [law of noncontradiction] is meaningless and inapplicable." (1935: 212)

In effect, Conze shoehorns the epistemic rhetoric of Prajñāpāramitā into his own idiosyncratic mystical metaphysics. In my article I called this Conze's idiodoxy. Behind all of Conze's meandering thought is a conviction that reality is magical.

Now I could work through Conze's argument, taking it point by point. But we can short circuit this discussion by taking a step back. Conze's argument is, in immortal words of Michael Palin, "a series of connected statements intended to establish a definite proposition". Conze's aim is to discredit logic itself and to propose magic as the viable alternative, but in doing so he used a logical argument. Moreover, his target is specifically the principle of noncontradiction. "The validity of thought has a social origin and meaning... the delusion that a supersocial validity can be reached [using logic] has its social roots" (1934: 42).

In Conze's view, validity is merely a matter of belief. And belief is a matter of social convention. In his view if we all decided that logic was not valid, then it would not be. And this is how he imagines the world working prior to the systematisation of reasoning in ancient Athens. He argues that before logic, people lived by magical thinking rather than using reason. And moreover logic is inimical to magic:

Magic and logic are irreconcilable and unintelligible in terms of one another... this mutual hostility between them makes it impossible to regard magic as a form of logic or logic as a form of magic. (1934: 33)

In other words, there is a contradiction between magic and logic. And this concrete contradiction is central to Conze's argument that the principle of contradiction is not valid. Worse, if we say that the principle of noncontradiction does not hold, then it is equally valid to say that it does hold. If we allow contradiction, the result is nonsense. Conze wants to distinguish magical thinking from logical thinking, but a consequence of his conclusion is that logical thinking is magical thinking. In other words Conze is deeply confused about logic. And as noted there is nothing dialectical about this approach. Conze is not interested in synthesis, he is interested in defending magic.

Some will say that in jumping to the end I have misrepresented Conze's argument. So, even though the conclusion is self-defeating and based on false assumptions, I want to loop back for a brief look at that argument. There is some merit in locating logic or at least reasoning in the social sphere. Long time readers of mine will recall my enthusiasm for the work of Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber (2011, 2017). Like Conze, Mercier and Sperber attack the classical understanding of reasoning. However, they do not share Conze's ulterior motive.

Classically, reason is a faculty of pure logic, free from external influences such as emotions, beliefs, or social conditions. Mercier and Sperber show that evidence has been accumulating from the mid 1960s decisively showing that this faculty doesn't exist. We can use logic, but most of us do not use it routinely. What we call reasoning has two aspects in their thought. In their earlier work (2011) they made the case that reasoning evolved to assist group decision making. Members of a group will propose different courses of action and then the group will use reason to weigh the relative merits of each proposition. In this view reasoning is social and even argumentative. By contrast, individual problem-solving tends to be based on "on intuitions of relevance." (Mercier & Sperber 2017: 43). The later work (2017) characterises reasoning as a process of producing reasons for actions after the fact. The evidence on reasoning shows that our decision making is based on many unconscious inferential processes. We decide and then, if need be, we produce reasons that seem to plausibly account for our behaviour. 

This critique by Mercier and Sperber is compelling but it is a critique of the classical view of reason. It is not, as I understand it, a critique of logic per se. Logic is affected by fuzziness and quantum uncertainty or indeterminacy but it is more or less intact as a way of validating reasoning processes. It is simply that people don't actually use logic that much unless trained to do so and then mostly in formal situations: e.g. when presented with a syllogism in a logic class. Mercier and Sperber are not interested, per Conze, in eliminating logic in favour of magic. Logic, in its modern guise, is intact. Rather it is the idea of humans as logic users that comes into question. The inferential processes we do use are not magic, they are heuristic. They are rules of thumb for surviving in the wild.

Conclusion

When we take Conze seriously as a philosopher we rapidly encounter all kinds of problems. It is no wonder, therefore, that his later works on Prajñāpāramitā were so confused and misleading. It is not simply that Conze did not pay attention to detail (by his own admission) with the result that his editions are faulty. It is not that his translations are execrable, barely qualify as English, and misrepresent the source texts in numerous ways. All of this is true. But taking into account his earlier work we can see Conze as pursuing an agenda that preceded and guided all his work on Buddhist texts and his interpretation of Mahāyāna Buddhism. 

His agenda is anachronistic. Conze imagines a golden age of magical thought and pines for it though he missed it by at least 2500 years. Worse, there is simply no evidence for his assertion that before logic was formalised in Athens people relied on magical thinking. Moreover, the argument is based on a now discredited understanding of what reasoning is. We evolved the capacity for speech, reasoning and inferential decision-making processes as part of becoming anatomically modern humans in Africa ca 200,000 years ago. These attributes didn't suddenly appear in Athens in 500 BC.

Magical thinking was undoubtedly present in the human intellect before the modern era and indeed well beyond it. Some people still childishly want magic to be real (and want Buddhism to be magical). An intellectual who rejects logic in favour of magical thinking now looks quaintly ridiculous. So does a Marxist who rejects materialism and dialectical arguments, nor less a Marxist who was bourgeoisie in his bones and never lost the attitudes and values of the German upper classes.

The eleventh century Persian polymath, Avicenna (aka Ibn Sina) had a plan for dealing with people who share Conze's rejection of Aristotle's law of noncontradiction, i.e.

“The obdurate one must be subjected to the conflagration of fire, since ‘fire’ and ‘not fire’ are one. Pain must be inflicted on him through beating, since ‘pain’ and ‘no pain’ are one. And he must be denied food and drink, since eating and drinking and the abstention from both are one and the same.”—Avicenna (2005: 43).

It was this that inspired my paraphrase of the easily misunderstood old Zen maxim "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." If you meet Conze on the road burn him, beat him, and starve him until he admits that burning is different from not burning, beating is different from not-beating, and starving is different from not starving. 

Unfortunately, we cannot put Conze the man through the ordeal of fire. We can, however, read and critically evaluate his oeuvre. If, as his acolytes say, Conze is a scholar of the highest rank, a veritable genius, with insight into the true nature of reality, then this critical examination can only further glorify His presence amongst us. However, if I am right then critical evaluation will topple Conze and the pedestal that devotees have placed him on. Very few people ever take the time to read Conze at all, let alone critically. Which means that his mistakes go unnoticed by the majority even when they have been pointed out in print. I have searched in vain for any mention of his philosophical works, any attempt to compare his earlier and later phases, or any critical evaluation of his contribution.

In writing critically about Conze, I see two main responses. One from scholars who work in or near Prajñāpāramitā, which is "about time someone said this". However, for the most part people are unwilling to openly criticise Conze. A few examples exist of people listing faults in his editions or translations, but these are almost inevitably accompanied by supplication and homage to Conze. I don't bow before false idols. 

The other response is from Conze acolytes who see my critical reflections as mere "hostility". This group appear to be shocked to discover a dissenting voice and view it as an expression of emotion rather than intellect. For true believers it seems to be difficult to imagine anyone who refuses to assent to Conze's self-confessed greatness. And this means that they don't engage with the content of my literary and philosophical criticism. In this sense, support for Conze has a cult-like quality to it. In the light of this, I have begun to see this aspect of my work as an attempt to normalise criticism of Conze so that we can get it all out in the open. 

In reality, I'm not particularly interested in Conze, Mahāyāna, or the Heart Sutra. These are simply vehicles for writing. My personal approach to Buddhism is far more rooted in Pāli texts and my understanding of early Buddhism gained through exploring ideas on those texts. Until discovering Conze's mistakes in the Heart Sutra, unnoticed by all and sundry for 70 years, I saw myself as following in the footsteps of Richard Gombrich and Sue Hamilton (Richard having been an informal mentor since we met in 2006). I have a certain amount of animus towards bullies but I'm mostly just shocked by the disparity between the poor quality of Conze's work and the superlatives that continue to be heaped on him. I'm more motivated by trying to resolve the cognitive dissonance created by this disparity than about hatred of Conze. 

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Aristotle. 1933. Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vols.17, 18, translated by Hugh Tredennick. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. Reprinted 1989. As found on the Perseus Website.

Avicenna. 2005. The Metaphysics of The Healing. Translated by Michael E. Marmura. Provo, Utah. Brigham Young University Press.

Attwood, J. 2020. "Edward Conze: A Call to Reassess the Man and his Contribution to Prajñāpāramitā Studies." JOCBS 19: 22–51. http://jocbs.org/index.php/jocbs/article/view/223

Conze, E. 1932. Der Satz vom Widerspruch: Zur Theorie des Dialektischen Materialism. Hamburg. Reprinted 1976 by Frankfurt: Neue Kritik.

———. 1934. "Social Implications of Logical Thinking". Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 35, 23-44. Retrieved February 4, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/4544248

———. 1935. "The Objective Validity of the Principle of Contradiction." Philosophy, 10(38): 205-218.

———. 1937" Social Origins of Nominalism ," Marxist Quarterly (January-March, 1937), pp. 115-124. Reprinted in Further Buddhist Studies.

———. 1953. “The Ontology of the Prajñāpāramitā.” Philosophy East and West 3(2): 117-129.

———. 1979. Memoires of a Modern Gnostic. Parts I and II. Privately Published.

———. 2016. The Principle of Contradiction. Translated by Holger Heine. Lanham MD: Lexington Books.

Gottlieb, Paula. 2019. "Aristotle on Non-contradiction", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edited by Edward N. Zalta https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/aristotle-noncontradiction

Heine, Holger. 2016. "Aristotle, Marx, Buddha: Edward Conze's Critique of the Principle of Contradiction." In Conze (2016: xiii-lxiii).

Mercier, Hugo & Sperber, Dan. (2011) 'Why Do Humans Reason. Arguments for an Argumentative Theory.' Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 34: 57 – 111. doi:10.1017/S0140525X10000968. Available from Dan Sperber's website.

Mercier, Hugo & Sperber, Dan. (2017) The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding. Allen Lane.

Trueman, Carl R. 2010. Histories and Fallacies: Problems Faced in the Writing of History. Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway.