North, John David. Stonehenge: A New Interpretation of Prehistoric
Man and the Cosmos. New York, 1996.
SERINITY YOUNG (1987)
Revised Bibliography
STCHERBATSKY, THEODORE (1866–1942),
was a Russian Buddhologist and Indologist. Fedor Ippoli-
tovich Shcherbatskii, who signed his non-Russian writings
“Th. Stcherbatsky,” was born in Kielce, Poland, and died in
Borovoi, Kazakhstan. He studied philology and Indology in
Saint Petersburg under I. P. Minaev, Sanskrit poetics in Vi-
enna with Georg Bühler, Indian philosophy in Berlin with
Hermann Jacobi, and Sanskrit and Tibetan logic with pan-
dits in India and lamas in Mongolia. From 1900 to 1941,
Stcherbatsky taught at Saint Petersburg (later Leningrad)
State University. His students included O. O. Rozenberg, E.
E. Obermiller, and A. I. Vostrikov. The Russian Academy
of Sciences named Stcherbatsky corresponding member
(1910), academician (1918), director of the Institute of Bud-
dhist Culture (1928–1930), and head of the Indo-Tibetan
section of the Institute of Oriental Studies (1930–1942). He
helped S. F. OlDdenberg produce the academy’s “Bibliotheca
Buddhica” series of texts, translations, and monographs
(1897–), which included several of Stcherbatsky’s own
works.
Although Stcherbatsky wrote widely on Indology and
philology, his works on Buddhist philosophy were most in-
fluential. Stcherbatsky relied on Sanskrit and Tibetan, not
Pali, sources and preferred ́sa ̄stras (scholastic treatises) to
su ̄tras (canonical texts), considering them to be, respectively,
technical and popular works, differing in style, not doctrine.
Skeptical of the search for “original Buddhism,” he investi-
gated pluralist, monist, and idealist phases of Buddhism.
Early Buddhist “pluralism” replaces substances (soul, God,
matter) with innumerable, interdependent, momentary
dharmas, which attain cessation in nirva ̄n:a. Stcherbatsky saw
in later abhidharma literature, especially Vasubandhu’s
Abhidharmako ́sa, the epitome of early Buddhist philosophy.
(Stcherbatsky’s works emphasized traditional Buddhist
scholarship and Tibetan sources but neglected modern his-
torical criticism.) He began publishing the Abhidharmako ́sa
and its commentaries in the “Bibliotheca Buddhica,” sum-
marized it in The Central Conception of Buddhism and the
Meaning of the Word “Dharma” (1923), and translated its
final section as “The Soul Theory of the Buddhists” (Izvestiia
Rossiiskoi Akademii nauk, ser. 6, vol. 13, 1920, nos. 15,
pp. 823–854, and 18, pp. 937–958).
According to Stcherbatsky, Ma ̄dhyamika “monism”
sees interdependent, momentary dharmas as unreal or
empty. Emptiness ( ́su ̄nyata ̄) and interdependence (prat ̄ıtya-
samutpa ̄da) are identified as “relativity.” Nirva ̄n:a is the real-
ization of this one reality underlying an unreal plurality. St-
cherbatsky’s main work on Ma ̄dhyamika, The Conception of
Buddhist Nirva ̄n:a (1927), was a rejoinder to Nirva ̄n:a (1925)
by Louis de La Vallée Poussin (see Guy R. Welbon’s The
Buddhist Nirva ̄n:a and Its Western Interpreters, 1968).
Stcherbatsky later reinterpreted Ma ̄dhyamika as “relativism,”
reserving “monism” for the Yogacara (see the preface to
Madhya ̄nta-Vibhan ̄ ga: Discourse on Discrimination between
Middle and Extremes, 1936).
Yoga ̄ca ̄ra “idealism” rejects pluralism and relativism.
Subject and object, separately unreal, are really inseparable.
Everything exists relatively, yet relativity really exists as the
true nature of consciousness. This “idealism” led to the epis-
temology of Digna ̄ga and Dharmak ̄ırti (Stcherbatsky’s
“Buddhist logic”), which admits only two modes of valid
cognition: non-conceptual “perception,” and conceptual
“inference.” Stcherbatsky is best known for his work on this
school: his earlier Theory of Knowledge and Logic According
to the Doctrine of the Later Buddhists, and his magnum opus,
Buddhist Logic (2 vols., 1930–1932). Stcherbatsky, admiring
both philosophers, called Dharmakirti “the Indian Kant.”
This comparison, and the Kantian language of Buddhist
Logic, should be taken cautiously.
Stcherbatsky lacked sympathy for Buddhism as religion
but admired Indian philosophy as rigorous philosophy. Re-
futing the common misconception of Indian thought as
vague mysticism, his works challenge Western philosophers
to acknowledge their Buddhist and Indian colleagues.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Stcherbatsky’s Teoriia poznaniia i logika po ucheniiu pozdneishikh
buddistov (Theory of Knowledge and Logic according to the
Doctrine of the Later Buddhists), 2 vols. (Saint Petersburg,
1903–1909), has been translated into German as Erkenntnis-
theorie und Logik, nach der Lehre der späteren Buddhisten
(Munich, 1924) and into French as La théorie de la connais-
sance et la logique chez les bouddhistes tardifs (Paris, 1926).
Buddhist Logic, 2 vols. (Leningrad, 1930–1932), is available
in two reprint editions; other English works cited in the text
are available in Indian reprint editions. The complete “Bib-
liotheca Buddhica” has been reprinted in Germany (1970)
and in Japan (1971). For shorter Russian works in English
translation, see two books edited by Debiprasad Chattopad-
hyaya and translated by Harish Chandra Gupta: Papers of
Th. Stcherbatsky, “Soviet Indology Series,” no. 2 (Calcutta,
1969), and Further Papers of Stcherbatsky, “Soviet Indology
Series,” no. 6 (Calcutta, 1971). The former contains biblio-
graphical and biographical information from Russian
sources, partially contradicting the obituary in the Journal of
the Royal Asiatic Society (1943): 118–119.
New Sources
Shcherbatskoi, F. I., and V. N. Toporov, Izbrannye trudy po bud-
dizmu. Moscow, 1988.
Shokhin, V. K., and Institut filosofii (Rossiiskaia akademiia
nauk). F.I. Shcherbatskoi i ego komparativistskaia filosofiia.
Moscow, 1998.
Woo, Jeson. “Oneness and Manyness: Vacaspatimisra and Rat-
nakirti on an Aspect of Causality.” Journal of Indian Philoso-
phy 28, no. 2 (2000): 225–231.
BRUCE CAMERON HALL (1987)
Revised BibliographySTCHERBATSKY, THEODORE 8737