The Sociology of Philosophies

to be the same as mindfulness itself. Furthermore, meditation arrives at a steady consciousness which is not momentary, but show ...

supra-mundane and trans-historical Buddhas, so that new sutras were attrib- uted not to the Shakyamuni Buddha of the Elders but ...

From the point of view of intellectual fractionation and the law of small numbers, we may regard the Mahayana-Hinayana split as ...

elements. But the nature of these items is indiscernible, an indexical “suchness.” Ashvagosha raised this “suchness” to the ulti ...

dle; it steers between the previous camps of the philosophical world, realism and nihilism, or rather rises above them. In one r ...

non-referential consciousness; the apparent world is merely “consciousness representing itself to itself” (Griffiths, 1986: 102) ...

and provided Mahayana with a metaphysical position on scholastic turf to supplement Madhyamika skepticism. Whereas Asanga was on ...

FIGURE 5.4. CONFLICT OF BUDDHIST AND HINDU SCHOOLS, 400–900 C.E. External and Internal Politics: India • 225 ...

Biographies from this period are full of stories of the philosophers traveling from center to center, debating and sometimes con ...

recitation.” Nalanda was a center for advanced teaching, and by the 600s pupils had to pass an entrance examination, perhaps to ...

an intellectual champion who commanded the respect of followers and rivals. Hindu “philosophy” was in the shade of Buddhist phil ...

invoked are sometimes a priori, but for the most part they are inductive; and in general the Nyayas emphasized sensory perceptio ...

by making a wholesale onslaught on the bases of the Nyaya system. From now on, Dignaga and his successor Dharmakirti were the re ...

Platonic universal; but ultimately meaning goes beyond language and distinc- tion. Only Brahman exists, the distinctionless ulti ...

are in the realm of post-sensory inference, and they are all universals. As in much traditional Buddhist doctrine, universals do ...

In the 600s, readjustments in the Nyaya and Mimamsa schools were bringing about developments which would culminate in the turnin ...

Vaisheshika Realism of Plural Substances. The Vaisheshika-sutras appeared sometime around 100 c.e.; their roots were earlier, bu ...

an identifiable intellectual faction emerged specializing in this kind of enumera- tion, apparently going through a number of ri ...

its mythological heritage. One of the ingredients it took over (found in con- temporary Mahayana as well) was the periodic creat ...

physical entities. Samkhya and Vaisheshika were almost reciprocal images of each other in their relations to Buddhist doctrines. ...