A popular view holds that religion necessarily involves a strong, 'non-rational' element. According to this view, which the present study calls the 'transcendent' interpretation of religion, in the heart of religion is the unknowable Transcendent which is ineffable (indescribable or unanalysable by means of linguistic concepts). This view holds that transcendence and ineffability are the key characteristics of any religious experience.
The problem with this interpretation of religion is that, it undermines the uniqueness of individual religions, and it attributes a uniform philosophy of reality and language to all religions. The present study suggests that such a universal characterization of religion is fundamentally flawed.
The study develops what may be called the Buddhist 'naturalist' explanation of reality which is based on the Buddhist non-theism and the doctrine of dependent origination, and shows that early Buddhism explains naturalistically not only reality in general but also the religious reality or nirvana. Subsequently, with the assumption that one's conception of reality precedes one's philosophy of language, the study develops what can be called a non-transcendent philosophy of language in early Buddhism. The absence of ineffability is one of the most outstanding characteristics of this philosophy of language.
This study does not neglect the strong, transcendent interpretation of the Buddhist religious experience that has been proposed by some of the eminent Buddhist scholars on the basis of such matters as the Buddhist four-cornered logic (catuskoti), the 'unanswered questions' (avyakrta) and the 'direct and indirect' discourses (niyattha and netattha desana). But this study questions the soundness of that interpretation and shows how these selfsame issues allow a non-transcendent interpretation.
