Qualities of Wisdom, the eightfold Noble Path, and so on. It is tempting to
interpret these rubrics as simply mnemonic devices from the period of oral
recitation; but the list motif continues into the period of written texts as well.
Moreover the lists keep expanding in both periods, making the mnemonic task
even more difficult. The classificatory mode is pervasive in Indian scholar-
ship, through the Hindu darshanas as well as the period of the Buddhist
metaphysical systems. The major Hindu cosmological systems, Samkhya and
Vaisheshika, derive from names for “classification” or “making distinctions.”
The number of the various kinds of things becomes the topic of dispute, the
frame in which philosophical issues are raised. The Hindu schools are con-
cerned with how many kinds of knowledge there are, and in the Nyaya school,
which specializes in rules of debate, how many kinds of fallacies and how many
parts of the syllogism.
This is the pathway toward the sub-discipline of logic. This “scholastic”
impulse within Greek philosophy, as early as Aristotle’s school, leads to a
classification of types of predicate and of the figures and moods of the syllo-
gism, just as it is scholasticism within Greek mathematics that leads to the
axiomatic classification system culminating in Euclid’s geometry. This clas-
sification game is a goal displacement in the abstraction-reflexivity sequence,
turning away from the substance of arguments to the formal rules of the
argumentation process; nevertheless, it opens an arena in which creativity can
take place, if in a technical guise difficult for outsiders to penetrate. We are
inclined to view the classificatory activities of the Hellenistic and the later
Islamic logicians as mere droning scholasticism; and indeed this was the view
of many philosophers nearer to them in time. Creative activity sometimes went
on within the technical schools of logic in these times, but such work does not
travel well, nor does it propagate its intellectual energy widely. Avoiding value
judgments, we may say merely that the classificatory mode is generally looked
down on by intellectuals who work on more widely appealing ethical and
metaphysical issues. The long-term attention that constitutes the historical
self-image of the community drops the technical classifiers into the background
in favor of more spectacular moves in the abstraction sequence, labeling as
stagnant the periods in which the technicians dominate.
The classificatory mode can also take the form of hierarchic classifications.
This was especially prominent in medieval Chinese Buddhism. The most suc-
cessful schools, T’ien-t’ai and Hua-yen, engaged in the practice called p’an-
chiao, arranging the various Buddhist doctrines in ordered lists from the most
naive up through the most sophisticated. Classification served several purposes.
It introduced bibliographic order, important for Chinese Buddhism as a for-
eign-based religion subservient to the importation and translation of texts from
a morass of sects formulated in India. Classification also constituted a turf in
Sequence and Branch in the Social Production of Ideas^ •^797