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  • Is Moonshadows Lunacy?The Cowherds Respond
  • The Cowherds

We thank Amy Donahue for her attention to our work, and we thank the editors of Philosophy East and West for an opportunity to reply. We confess that we were not sure whether to reply. On the one hand we believe that her critique is so misguided that it needs no reply; on the other hand, we were worried that others might take our silence as conceding her point. On reflection, we decided that the larger issue she raises is important enough to restate our position on it: cross-cultural philosophy demands respect for our interlocutors; respect demands serious philosophical engagement, not reflexive deference.

We agree with Donahue that those who are trained in the current techniques of their discipline but use those techniques to study elements of a culture that is far from them in space or time must be careful not to objectify illegitimately the subject of their investigations. Donahue, however, appears not to have grasped the extent to which the Cowherds’ enterprise is precisely the way to avoid doing this. We engage philologically and philosophically with the Madhyamaka tradition not as curators or as acolytes but as interlocutors. That is how to respect, and not to objectify, one’s [End Page 617] conversational partner. The most egregious Orientalism is that which regards those who pursue philosophy in different garb and in different idioms as so different from us that we have no right to take their views seriously or to engage in critical dialogue. We fear that that is what is represented in Donahue’s critique. We begin by discussing some specific charges Donahue levels against us. We then turn to the larger irony: she is riding the horse she charges us with having stolen.

I. On Grasping the Snake

It is far from clear precisely what Donahue would have us do differently. One way in which projects of this sort sometimes go astray is by anachronistically imposing a problematic taken from the current philosophical conversation onto another context where it has no place. Hegel and Schopenhauer can be accused of doing this in their treatments of the Indian tradition, but not the Cowherds. Indeed our project runs in quite the opposite direction, taking its guidance from debates among actual Mādhyamikas.

Mādhyamikas, like other Buddhists, distinguish between what they call conventional truth and what they call ultimate truth. By conventional truth most (though perhaps not all) mean roughly what philosophers nowadays call common sense or the folk theory of the world. And by ultimate truth they mean what is left standing (if anything) after conventional truth has been subjected to rigorous philosophical analysis. Madhyamaka is distinctive in its (at least apparent) contention that nothing can stand up to rigorous philosophical analysis, so that no statements are ultimately true, that nothing exists ultimately.

In Moonshadows, we took this commitment to emptiness, and to a distinction that appears both to disparage conventional truth and to take it as the only truth there is, as a philosophical starting point. We explored some of the important canonical sources for these views, and investigated their consequences. The most obvious apparent consequence is that the only truths there can be are conventional truths, the commonsense beliefs that are largely taken for granted by most people most of the time. Donahue contends that some Cowherds exhibit neo-imperialist bias by presupposing a monolithic common sense, presumably that of some oppressor class to which we either belong or owe ideological allegiance—more on this below. But this is simply wrong: we made no assumptions whatsoever as to what constitutes common sense. For all we say it may be universal across times, cultures, and classes, or it may vary widely over all these indices and others as well. There are of course famous instances of variability, like “The earth is flat,” that may have been accepted by most people at one time but are widely rejected today. Indeed, in some of our chapters, we specifically wonder about what its domain ought to be, given Madhyamaka commitments, and we consider the consequences of various views. This criticism simply reflects her misreading of our text, and of its...

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