What happened to “Buddhist logic” in China? A look beyond hetu-vidyā.

Abstract

According to the common view, the study of the so-called “Buddhist logic” (S. hetu-vidyā, Ch. yinming 因明) in China was a brief and peripheral episode that had effectively ended in failure by the end of the Tang (618-907) period. This early demise has often been attributed to cultural and philosophical factors, such as a supposed lack of interest in Indian logic and epistemology among Chinese Buddhist monks, or the dominance of practical currents of Buddhism, such as Chan and Pure Land.  However, the modest “revival” of yinming studies that occurred in the late Ming (1368-1644) period suggests that late Imperial Chinese Buddhists were not uniformly indifferent or dismissive towards its subject matter. In my talk I will try to investigate this issue further and tentatively reconstruct the basic spectrum of assumptions which late Ming authors held with regard to the value and significance of reasoning and argumentation. While those assumptions were not always formulated explicitly, they can nonetheless be reconstructed from different textual sources: prefaces to the treatises written by yinming revivalists; theoretical reflections on Chan and Pure Land practice; and doctrinal debates with other Buddhists and with Jesuit critics of Buddhism. This ambiguous and diffused status of “Buddhist logic” in late Imperial China raises a more general question: namely, how to understand post-Tang Chinese Buddhist thought “on its own terms”, without relying on pre-conceived notions derived from contemporary philosophy or study of other Buddhist traditions.