It is Quentin Skinner who criticizes textualism and demonstrates that the recovery of the context is essential to understanding a text. According to Skinner’s historical method, we can investigate the biography of Tipo (提婆 Aryadeva) in Taisho Tripitaka to understand the general cultural and social circumstances within which Buddhist philosophers compose their text. ‘A non-Buddhist was a complete failure in his debate with Tipo. He converts to Buddhism with inward wrath and says to Tipo “you win by the knife of śūnya, but I’ll win through the real knife.’” Although the end of this story might be thought to be mythical, we cannot ignore the fact that religious conversion in India was still been an ongoing affair. We therefore can presuppose that the original form of Buddhist epistemology and logic are constructed to debate between various Indian systems. This paper examines the questions pertaining to the transformation of Buddhist epistemology (Pramāṇa-vāda) on the third pramāṇa (非量 feiliang) in Chinese texts and context. First I should like to discover whether and in what way the interest and stress in the practice of logic and epistemological analysis is different between two scholastic traditions. And second, I should like to determine whether Chinese Buddhism not only preserves but also further develops a Buddhist hermeneutics of reading and practice. In responding to the first question I expect to explicate how Chinese Buddhism shows itself more in favour of hermeneutic exegesis than argumentation, and of the implication of cultivation than the appearance of epistemology. As for the second question, I will illustrate how Chinese scholar-monks proceed with Gadamer's Concept of ‘Fusion of Horizons’ to concerns with the relationship between consciousness and pramāṇa.
