tary to a famous text, one’s own work can be assured of wide circulation. The
great works of Chinese philosophy are to a large extent commentaries on
earlier classics, from the Yi Ching appendices and the Great Learning attached
to the Book of Rites, through the “Dark Learning” attached to the Tao Te
Ching and the Confucian classics. The works of the Neo-Confucian school are
largely in the form of compilations and commentaries on classic texts.
We see much the same thing in India. The great work of the Nyaya school
is Vatsyayana’s commentary on the Nyaya-sutras, and an analogous position
for the Vaisheshika is held by Prashastapada’s commentary on the Vaisheshika-
sutra. Among the Buddhists, the growth of the scholasticizing Abhidharma
literature occurs simultaneously with the development of new philosophical
positions: it is a vehicle for creativity from the early Sarvastivada realists
through the Yogacara Idealists; schools which transcended the Abhidharma
compilations replaced them with accretions of commentaries on other texts,
such as the logic treatises which were vehicles for the metaphysical systems of
Dignaga and Dharmakirti.^1 Composition of commentaries should be regarded
as a mode of publication, in the absence of an open market for books, and
where religious education provided the main place where texts could be physi-
cally reproduced. What was propagated in this way was determined not by the
mode of publication, but by the general conditions of opposition and synthesis
within the intellectual networks.
The Christian “scholastics” of the medieval universities, whose name was
given to this style, used the commentary mode of publication, but they were
not predominantly traditionalistic in the content of their work. The university
scholars from Abelard to Scotus constituted one of the most intensely creative
periods in the history of world philosophy, exemplary of the abstraction
sequence at its most dynamic. The pejorative connotation of “scholastic” was
applied to them by their enemies and successors, the Renaissance Humanists.
Ironically, the latter were more “scholastic” in the narrow sense of the term,
adulators of past classics, attempting to recover original meanings rather than
innovating on abstract philosophical terrain.
In the Confucian, Buddhist, and Hindu networks, textual scholasticism was
supported by an ideology that venerated ancient texts and denigrated depar-
tures from them. The effect was not necessarily to stifle innovation; new
high-status texts, in order to be regarded as religiously inspired, were produced
anonymously or pseudonymously and attributed to as great antiquity as pos-
sible. The Tao Te Ching, probably written around 240 b.c.e., was projected
backwards to a mythical sage antedating Confucius, no doubt to claim rank
over contemporary Confucian rivals. Successive Mahayana sutras, like their
Jaina sutra contemporaries, were attributed to earlier incarnations of their
respective religious lineage heads; competition over “more ancient than thou”
794 •^ Meta-reflections