Omniscience and the Rhetoric of Reason

Santaraksita and Kamalasila on Rationality, Argumentation, and Religious Authority

Sara L. McClintock

• Publisher: Wisdom Publications
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780861716616
• eBook ISBN: 9780861719310
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy

The great Buddhist scholars Santaraksita (725 - 88 CE.) and his disciple Kamalasila were among the most influential thinkers in classical India. They debated ideas not only within the Buddhist tradition but also with exegetes of other Indian religions, and they both traveled to Tibet during Buddhism's infancy there. Their views, however, have been notoriously hard to classify. The present volume examines Santaraksita's Tattvasamgraha and Kamalasila's extensive commentary on it, works that cover all conceivable problems in Buddhist thought and portray Buddhism as a supremely rational faith.

One hotly debated topic of their time was omniscience - whether it is possible and whether a rational person may justifiably claim it as a quality of the Buddha. Santaraksita and Kamalasila affirm both claims, but in their argumentation they employ divergent rhetorical strategies in different passages, advancing what appear to be contradictory positions. McClintock's investigation of the complex strategies these authors use in defense of omniscience sheds light on the rhetorical nature of their enterprise, one that shadows their own personal views as they advance the arguments they deem most effective to convince the audiences at hand.

1. Introduction

OMNISCIENCE—THE QUALITY or state of infinite, all-encompassing knowledge—has proved a vexing notion for philosophers who proclaim a commitment to reason. Problems with the conception abound, not the least of which is how an ordinary person possessing limited knowledge could ever verify the omniscience of some allegedly omniscient being. However many things a being may appear to know, it nonetheless remains conceivable that there exist still other things of which that being is ignorant. In the face of this recognition, is it not simply folly for a philosopher to attempt to defend omniscience? This thorny issue lies at the heart of the present book, since Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla, the Buddhist authors whose arguments in defense of omniscience we examine here, are not only aware of the conundrum, they fully endorse its basic premise. That is, these philosophers fully accept that the omniscience of one being cannot be verified by another who is not omniscient. Yet they also emphatically maintain that the doctrine that the Buddha is (or was) omniscient can be entirely justified through rational means.

This book aims to discover how this can be, at least with regard to the myriad arguments concerning omniscience in two Indian Buddhist texts of the eighth century: the Tattvasaṃgraha written by the Buddhist monk Śāntarakṣita, and its commentary, the Tattvasaṃgrahapañjikā, written by Śāntarakṣita’s direct disciple, the monk Kamalaśīla.¹ Śāntarakṣita’s work is an encyclopedic verse composition consisting in 3,645 metered stanzas, while Kamalaśīla’s prose commentary, to which I will refer simply as the Pañjikā, runs to more than 1,000 pages in modern printed editions. Although the extant Sanskrit manuscripts² and Tibetan translations³ preserve the two works separately, the modern editions display them together, with the verses of the so-called “root text” inserted interlinearly in accord with the commentary’s explicit and pervasive “indications” (pratīka). The presence of these indications attests to the close commentarial nature of Kamalaśīla’s work, and I take them, together with the near certainty that Kamalaśīla was indeed Śāntarakṣita’s disciple, as a warrant for referring occasionally (mainly in the notes) to the two texts as a single, though admittedly bipartite, work.⁴ Taken as a whole, these two massive works comprise a sustained apology for the rationality of Buddhism, including the ultimate Buddhist goal of attaining omniscience.

Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla’s arguments in defense of omniscience in these works are in many ways bewildering.⁵ First, the arguments are complex, and they are found in several locations, not all of which are included in the lengthy final chapter explicitly devoted to the topic. Second, the arguments are generally expressed in the highly technical idioms of Indian epistemological discourse, thus requiring solid grounding in that elaborate style of reasoning. Third, and most confusing, the authors present what seem to be contradictory visions of omniscience in different parts of the works. Sorting out the nuances of these various positions is pretty tough. On the one hand, it requires a careful examination of a large number of complex arguments scattered throughout the texts. On the other hand, it also requires a more general investigation into the authors’ understanding of the nature of rationality, argumentation, and religious authority, since all three of these are profoundly implicated in their arguments concerning omniscience. But this challenging task turns out to have an unexpected reward, for by attending to the broader conceptions of rationality, argumentation, and religious authority that inform the reasoning about omniscience in these works, we come to discern a rhetoric of reason in the argumentation overall. It is insight into this rhetoric of reason that is the true fruit of the labor in this book. For it is only once we have understood the deeply rhetorical nature of reason for these Buddhist thinkers that their arguments about omniscience—arguments that are in some respects the pinnacle of all rational inquiry in their philosophical system—begin to make sense.

The Rhetoric of Reason

I first developed the idea of a rhetoric of reason as a result of my encounter with Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s theory of argumentation known as the New Rhetoric. A fundamental tenet of this theory, which the authors articulate in their groundbreaking work, La nouvelle rhétorique: traité de l’argumentation, is that central to all forms of argumentation is the enactment of a dialectical process in which some speaker or author seeks to win over an audience.⁶ Whether an argument is formal or informal, concerned with facts or with values, coldly calculating or hotly impassioned, it always involves a speaker or author who, through discourse, tries to make an audience accede to a particular point of view. An argument’s audience thus holds enormous power over the argument’s author, since to persuade or convince an audience, the author must present arguments to which that audience can be made to accede. The centrality of the audience in argumentation thus can never be negated, even in the case of highly rational or rationalized discourse. To reflect this idea of the centrality of the audience, which I felt was essential to Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla’s own theories of rationality and argumentation, I coined the term the “rhetoric of reason” and used it in the title of my doctoral thesis.⁷

Later, I discovered the work of James Crosswhite, a philosopher and professor of English, who also draws on the New Rhetoric and who argues persuasively in his book The Rhetoric of Reason: Writing and the Attractions of Argument for the rhetorical nature of all forms of human reasoning. I found that Crosswhite’s understanding of rhetoric as “the only viable way to explain the possibility of reason itself ”⁸ resonated strongly with my reading of the premises underlying certain Buddhist approaches to rationality and reasoning, and that it bolstered my reading of Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla as embracing a rhetoric of reason in the Tattvasaṃgraha and the Pañjikā. In making his claim about rhetoric, Crosswhite begins from the premise that rhetoric “is different from any other field because rhetoric is concerned with the way discursive authority operates wherever it is found.”⁹ As such, the study of rhetoric has a kind of priority among all fields and disciplines, insofar as rhetoric always plays a critical role in the production of knowledge, no matter the field or the discipline. But rhetoric is not somehow foundational, since rhetoric is neither impervious to critique nor epistemologically prior to the construction of discursive authority. In short, rhetoric, like all forms of discourse, is also rhetorically constructed. Crosswhite compares his understanding of rhetoric to Habermas’s view of philosophy as simultaneously interpreting and acting within communicative practices. Likewise, rhetoric involves both the study of discursive authority and the simultaneous participation in the rules of such authority at particular times and places. It thus can never be absolute.

The notion of a rhetoric of reason, then, points primarily to the ways in which philosophy and philosophical argumentation, both of which put a premium on rationality and truth, are nonetheless themselves also circumscribed by particular norms of authority and particular discursive practices which have themselves been rhetorically constructed. A rhetoric of reason does not reject reason as unattainable, but neither does it futilely attempt to cordon reason off from the rest of human discourse. Instead, a rhetoric of reason attempts, as precisely as possible, to attend to the question of discursive authority in relation to questions about such things as what is reasonable, rational, justified, true, or right in a variety of contexts. Crosswhite sums up as follows:

A rhetoric of reason does not understand itself as describing the necessary a priori features of all reasoning, to which the rhetorician has some kind of priviledged incontestable access. Rather, in its attempt to offer a general account of what happens when people argue, it understands itself as offering an account which is better for particular purposes, and more convincing in the context in which it is offered, than are competing accounts. That’s all.

On my reading of these Buddhist thinkers, Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla would definitely assent to this characterization of their philosophical enterprise, though they would also be likely to emphasize their feeling that their own accounts are indeed better and more convincing for particular purposes than are rival accounts. But by itself, this high degree of confidence in their own analysis does not mitigate their commitment to an account of the authority of reason as a contextual product of particular discursive practices. While their frequent talk of certainty (niścaya) lends a veneer of absolutism to their work, there is good reason to hold that for Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla, certainty, like all conceptual constructs, is primarily of pragmatic and not absolute value. For these reasons, which we will explore further below, I maintain that these thinkers engage in a rhetoric of reason, even if they do not explicitly claim to do so.

Specifically, I see two ways in which Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla may be said to employ a rhetoric of reason in the Tattvasaṃgraha and the Pañjikā. The first way corresponds closely to Crosswhite’s understanding outlined above. Here, the idea of a rhetoric of reason depends on a reading of the term rhetoric as signifying the contextual aspect of all communicative discourse—including discourses concerning what counts as a rational argument. The term rhetoric in this instance draws attention to the fact that there is no neutral playing field upon which arguments may be advanced, but rather that the field of discourse is always being negotiated by the speaker or author and the audience for any given argument. In the works under study in this book, we find Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla continually adjusting their premises, reasoning, and language to accord with the premises, reasoning, and language of a wide variety of audiences. In part, they do so to increase their chances of winning over these diverse addressees. As such, their practice can appear to be a kind of sophistry. But contrary to this, I argue that Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla do not engage in this behavior solely in order to win debates. Rather, they do so because they understand reason and truth to be highly conventional affairs that emerge only in contexts created mutually by author and audience. This philosophical insight not only justifies their method of shifting premises, it actually requires it for reason to function. The indispensability of the author-audience relationship for the very existence of rationality is the first and most important element in Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla’s rhetoric of reason.

The second way in which Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla may be said to embrace a rhetoric of reason corresponds to a more common connotion of the term rhetoric—one thatis perhaps more familiar than is the study and construction of discursive authority. On this reading, the term rhetoric points to what Crosswhite calls the “different protocols and styles of reasoning [that] hold sway in different disciplines.”¹⁰ That is, we regularly speak of the rhetoric of a given group, discipline, or profession and, when we do so, we mean the ways in which that group, discipline, or profession attempts to shape and define a particular field of discourse through its use of particular forms of language and argument. Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla engage in a rhetoric of reason insofar as they make consistent appeal to reason ( yukti) as the highest arbiter of belief, and they do so within a context of a style of formal reasoning (nyāya) that places extremely high value on reason and rational analysis. Whatever the particular argument being advanced, whomever the particular audience being addressed, the authors’ underlying premises always seem to include the idea that reason justifies their arguments and their conclusions. To emphasize this, the authors regularly supplement their general argumentation with formal proof statements, using a highly stylized and prestigious style of reasoning for presenting arguments.¹¹ This prestigious style of reasoning is based in their understanding of the pramāṇas, the instruments or means by which reliable knowledge may be attained. In this book, I use the translation “means of trustworthy awareness” to refer to the pramāṇas; other common translations include “valid cognition,” “means of valid cognition,” “instrumental awareness,” “instrument for warranted awareness,” and so on.

In utilizing the technical idioms of this prestigious form of reasoning rooted in the pramāṇas, the authors appear to enter a kind of denaturalized field of discourse in which arguments and conclusions attain an aura of self-evidence and objectivity.¹² We will have occasion to examine quite a few such arguments in the book, but our general purpose will not be to evaluate the soundness or validity of these formal proof statements per se. Rather, we will focus instead on how the authors use such formal proof statements as part of a larger rhetorical strategy aimed at convincing others of the overall rationality of the doctrines they endorse. The authors thus engage in a rhetoric of reason through their insistence on the privileged status of reason, especially when it is encoded in highly stylized proof statements.

These two ways of reading the notion of a rhetoric of reason—one with an emphasis on the conventional nature of rhetoric, the other with an emphasis on the certainty produced by reason—appear in some ways to be in tension. The first reading, that of a rhetoric of reason, involves the understanding that reason, like all forms of communicative discourse, is neither self-evident nor absolute, but is rather contigent on a context created mutually by author and audience. The second reading, that of a rhetoric of reason, involves the idea that reason is the highest and best arbiter of belief, and also that it is possible to demonstrate which beliefs reason justifies through the presentation of formal, seemingly self-evident, objective proof statements. Are Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla aware of this tension, and if so, do they attempt to resolve it? I do think that Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla are aware of the tension, but I hold that they see the tension as more apparent than real. This is so because they understand the apparent self-evidence of the formal proof statements of their rational discourse as rooted in the mutual conditioning of author and audience. Describing how language functions, Śāntarakṣita says:

Indeed, we hold all verbal transactions to be similar to the statement “There are two moons” uttered by a person with eyes distorted by cataracts to another person who is like himself.¹³

In other words, all discourse—including fo...

Table of contents

• Studies in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Rhetorical Complexity of the Texts
• 3. Dogmas, Connotations, and Contexts
• 4. Omniscience Is Possible: The General Demonstration
• 5. Omniscience Is Actual: The Specific Demonstration
• 6. Motives for the Two Demonstrations
• 7. Spontaneous Omniscience and the Perfection of Reason
• Bibliography
• Index of Translated Passages
• General Index
• About the Author
• About Wisdom
• Studies in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism
• Copyright Page