Partitioning the Intellectual Attention Space
Upon these slowly shifting social bases arose the long-term networks which
constituted the intellectual community in India. Let us envision this network
of intergenerational continuities and conflicting factions as the actor, and the
names of individual philosophers, famous or otherwise, as surges of intellectual
activity produced by the network. Why does creativity occur at particular times
and in particular conceptual regions? We may trace this process through three
major phases: (1) the early period of Buddhist domination, when Buddhism
underwent a large number of sectarian splits; (2) the period of challenge to
Buddhism by Hindu darshanas, an apex of creativity on both sides; and (3)
the struggles within Hindu philosophy after the demise of Buddhism.
The Victorious Proliferation of Buddhist Sectarian Philosophies
Buddhism rapidly expanded for its first 10 or 15 generations, first in northern
India, then throughout the subcontinent. During this time Buddhism under-
went numerous divisions, somewhat over-schematically attributed to a succes-
sion of seven schisms. Within 6 generations or so after the Buddha’s death,
there were 18 recognized sects; overall, scholars have assembled the names of
34 factions, and suggested that there may have been as many as 200.^32 The
pattern is in keeping with the principle that strong schools subdivide to fill
intellectual space (see Figure 5.3).
How can we account for fractionation on this scale, far beyond the upper
limits of the intellectual law of small numbers? Doctrinal differences among
most of these “schools” were minor. Some are organizational lineages of
monasteries; others are labels subsuming a variety of positions; some are
variant names for the same school or for its different generations over time.
Even allowing for this simplification, we are left with many more factions than
the half dozen which the law of small numbers says is the maximal number
of distinctively memorable positions which can sustain themselves across time.
The answer is that the law of small numbers applies to intellectual positions
rather than to the number of organizations per se. Organizations do not
compete if they find separate geographical bases or resource niches. But intel-
lectual factions, by their very nature, compete in the universal attention space;
if they become specialized or localized, they simply do not receive any wide
recognition, and are obscured behind those that do. That is what the intellec-
tual law of small numbers means. Buddhist fractionation reflects both kinds
of conditions. On one level were conditions external to intellectual life: issues
of monastic discipline, geographical dispersion, disciples of particular leaders.
On the second level intellectual differences emerge. It appears that organiza-
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