Against a Hindu God: Buddhist Philosophy of Religion in India. By Parimal G. Patil. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-0-231-14222-9, pp. xi, 406. $50 (cloth).
Author Affiliations: Institute for the Cultural and Intellectual History of Asia Austrian Academy of Sciences
摘要
The book’s primary aim is to capture and interpret the arguments appearing in the Īśvarasādhanadūṣaṇa, ‘The Refutation of Arguments for Establishing Īśvara’ (p. 11, fn. 18), a text by the 11th-century Indian Buddhist thinker Ratnakīrti, in which he presents and refutes arguments of the Nyāya school of thought for the ‘existence of a God-like being called “Īśvara” ’ (p. 3). The secondary aim is to provide an example of a transdisciplinary study ‘[…] that in part undermines the traditional disciplinary boundaries between the study of religion, philosophy, and South Asian studies’ (p. 5; cf. pp. 5–24).
The bulk of the book falls into two parts. The first, ‘Epistemology’, centres on the Īśvara-proof proper, and its discussion by Ratnakīrti. As is typical of Ratnakīrti’s writings, the proof and the discussion proceed along strictly logical lines. In order to show that this is not merely a formal device, Patil gives an in-depth introduction to Nyāya epistemology (‘Nyāya’ because the Buddhist Ratnakīrti presents the inference on its terms in this section), its resources of logical reasoning, and an exposition of how these background theories apply to the Īśvara-inference. On this basis, the reader is in a position to fully appreciate the intricacies of Ratnakīrti’s attacks on the Īśvara-inference, which Patil guides us through in the third chapter.
