The Problem of Ineffability
The narrative sequence of the Buddhaās enlightenment in the seminal work of the Buddhist yogatantras, the SarvatathÄgatatattvasaį¹graha (henceforth STTS), begins with the following question posited by the TathÄgatas to the Bodhisattva SarvÄrthasiddhi , the name by which the text refers to Buddha ÅÄkyamuni on the eve of his enlightenment:
Oh son of the lineage, how can you fully awaken
To the unsurpassed perfect complete awakening,
You who engage in austerities without having perceived
The ultimate reality of all of the tathÄgatas?
The passage raises a pivotal question in the tantric Buddhist formulation of the problem of ineffability āhow can one expect to attain the state of a Buddha without knowing the ultimate reality that a Buddha perceives? The questionās implications speak to the revelatory nature of Buddhist yogatantra works such as the STTS , a text that tells a new narrative of the Buddhaās awakening in which the TathÄgatas appear and reveal the nature of ultimate reality to SarvÄrthasiddhi by conveying upon him a series of mantras, visualizations, and instructions. It is a yogic narrative that affirms that enlightened beings and meditators can and do interact on the epistemic level, seeing, hearing, and perceiving one another. It also tells the reader that the ultimate reality (tattva) of all of the TathÄgatas can indeed be expressed both self-referentially and confirmed pragmatically between parties in dialogue. This textās reworking of one of the core components of Buddhist traditions, the narrative of the Buddhaās enlightenment has been argued to signal the emergence of a self-consciously tantric Buddhism in South Asia. 2 The narrative also signals, as the textual genre yoga-tantra might imply, a move toward a yogic epistemology that is specifically concerned with resolving the problem of ineffability. .
The same account of SarvÄrthasiddhiās enlightenment appears in chapter fifteen of IndrabhÅ«tiās JƱÄnasiddhiįø„, one of seven works in a corpus referred to in Tibetan Buddhist traditions as The Seven Siddhi Texts (Grub pa sde bdun). Here, the narrative from the STTS is just one of several sources IndrabhÅ«ti uses to argue his thesis of a fully effable yogic realization of gnosis that is grouned in an epistemology of pervasion. The Seven Siddhi Texts are identified in the KagyĆ¼ (Bkaā brgyud) tradition of Tibetan Buddhism as some of the oldest Indic sources for the meditative traditions of āthe great sealā or mahÄmudrÄ. They share this status with two other corpora, Advayavajra/MaitrÄ«paās Twenty-five AmanasikÄra Works (Yid la mi byed pa nyi shu rtsa lnga) and The Sixfold Corpus on the Essence (Snying po skor drug). Together, these three corpora are considered one of the oldest canons of so-called Indian MahÄmudrÄ Works (Phyag rgya chen poāi rgya gzhung). 3
This study of ineffability in the Indian MahÄmudrÄ Works focuses on The Seven Siddhi Texts. It begins by challenging a common dictum in the field of Buddhist Studies that the tantric literature of the Buddhist siddhas necessarily rejected, ignored, categorically dismissed, or were somehow hostile to the roughly contemporary discourse of Buddhist logicians and epistemologists. It argues that issues such as whether ultimate reality can be an object of perception and whether or not it can be accurately communicated are as important to these tantric authors as they are to the Buddhist epistemologist. The paper then turns to the issue of the basic epistemology that appears to be common throughout The Seven Siddhi Texts , a form of representationalism that transcends the epistemically bounded state of ordinary beings. 4 It then presents three examples of yogic epistemologies at work in The Seven Siddhi Texts that argue for an epistemically unbounded mental representationalism in their description of the ultimate reality that is attained and perceived by yogins and enlightened beings, the persistent rhetoric of ineffability in these works must be qualified. Here, it becomes evident that gnosis (jƱÄna), ultimate reality (tattva), and the innate (sahaja) are āineffableā with respect to the epistemically bounded state of ordinary beings, not with respect to the unbounded state of yogins and enlightened beings.
Tantric Epistemology and āEpistemological Posturingā
An enduring bias in the field of Buddhist Studies assuming a strong dialectic between institutional and anti-institutional Buddhisms in medieval India has led some scholars to exaggerate the opposition between Buddhist tantric and epistemological literature. Because the siddha authors of some of the earliest tantric commentarial works are assumed to be anti-scholastic and thus not concerned with the epistemological literature of their contemporaries, little has been written on the epistemological material that appears in their writing. There is certainly some truth to the argument that the literature of the pramÄį¹ikas or epistemologists and the literature of the Buddhist siddhas represent widely divergent modes of discourse, but the idea that siddha literature exhibits a total rejection of issues of epistemological concern takes the anti-institutionalism and anti-scholasticism argument too far. The literature of the siddhas reveals a parallel, extra-institutional Buddhist scholasticism primarily concerned with the practice of yoga and its integration with the ritual technology of consecration. Though not developed to the same degree of sophistication as in the literature of the Buddhist pramÄį¹ikas, logic and epistemology certainly play a part in this project.
The two groups, the Buddhist siddhas and pramÄį¹ikas , represent parallel early medieval Indian Buddhist scholastic movements. This scholastic parallelism likely helped to facilitate the eventual movement of tantric traditions to the center of institutional Buddhist life. The discourses on yoga from the Buddhist siddhas could later be integrated into more institutional forms of Buddhist scholasticism because they were extra-institutional, not anti-institutional, and contained a number of structures and intellectual strategies that were already properly scholastic in their own right. The tension between the revelatory discourse of the Buddhist tantras and their persistent employment of the language of ineffability required an epistemological response from the authors of The Seven Siddhi Texts , and that response drew elements from post-DignÄga Buddhist epistemological discourse as well as a more generalized discourse in ...