r0b’s Reviews > Empty Words: Buddhist Philosophy and Cross-Cultural Interpretation > Status Update

‘Contemporary Western philosophy, despite its roots as old as classical Greece, derives much of its contemporary problematic and professional profile from the European Enlightenment.’

‘Among Gadamer’s great achievements, he demonstrated that...in coming to understand our lives as meaningful, we apply the same hermeneutical considerations to ourselves that we apply to understanding texts.‘

More on hermeneutics:

‘A strictly Gadamerian-Heideggerian account of the circular and temporal structure of understanding and of writing presupposes the integrity and the unidimensionality of a tradition.

and...’Interrogating a text is always interrogation with interest. A decontextualized text is impossible to read.’

‘Madhyamika’s silence reflects the impossibility of expressing the truth about the conventional world. Yogācāra’s silence reflects the intuition that there is none.’

‘So while the mādhyamika’s emptiness is itself empty, and leaves things bereft of nature, even the nature of being empty, the Yogācārin’s emptiness is precisely the nature of things.’

‘There was a time when one could simply take it for granted that the Cittamāttra...is the school of Buddhist idealism. However academic fashions and imperatives are such that once a position is regarded as obvious, attacking it becomes mandatory. And so now we must defend the obvious.’

...and one that reveals this episode in the history of our tradition as a progressive approximation of Vasubandhu’s own analysis.’

‘I will argue that when we examine Western idealism (or this slice of it [Berkeley, Kant, and Schopenhauer]) from this classical Indian vantage point [Vasubandhu’s Trisvabhavanirdesa, the doctrine of the Three Natures that came to be called Cittamātra], we can discern a definite and somewhat surprising progressivity in the Western tradition, a progressivity invisible without that lens,...

On Vasubhandu’s Treatise on the Three Natures- ‘There certainly are briefer as well as, more detailed expositions of this system in the classical literature, but perhaps none so elegant and perspicuous.’

‘While Trisvabhānirdeśa is arguably the most philosophically detailed and comprehensive of the three short works on this topic composed by Vasubandhu, as well as the clearest, it is almost never read or taught in traditional Buddhist cultures or centres of learning...a great pity. It is a beautiful and deep philosophical essay and an unparalleled introduction to the Cittamātra system.’