pt. 1. Text -- pt. 2. Notes, bibliography and indices.

This book is a defence of a form of realism which stands closest to that upheld by the Nyãya-Vaid'sesika school in classical India. The author presents the Nyãya view and critically examines it against that of its traditional opponent, the Buddhist version of phenomenalism and idealism. His reconstruction of Nyãya arguments meets not only traditional Buddhist objections but also those of modern sense-data representationalists.

Of the many translators who carried the Buddhist doctrine to China, Paramartha, a missionary-monk who arrived in China in AD 546, ranks as the translator par excellence of the sixth century. Introducing philosophical ideas that would subsequently excite the Chinese imagination to develop the great schools of Sui and T'ang Buddhism, Paramartha's translations are almost exclusively of Yogacara Buddhist texts on the nature of the mind and consciousness. This first study of Paramartha in a Western language focuses on the Chuan (...) shih lun (Evolution of Consciousness), a text that reveals the outline of Paramartha's Yogacara thought. The study begins with a discussion of Paramartha's life, the historical and political context of the time in India and south China, and the roles of his main disciples in disseminating his work. It then describes Paramartha's treatment of Yogacarin views on language and the process of cognition, both central to this system of thought. The final chapter analyzes the history and content of the Chuan shih lun, and the book concludes with a new translation of the text, with extensive annotations. (shrink)

The Disinterested Witness is a detailed, contextual, and interpretive study of the concept of saksin (or that which directly or immediately perceives) in Advaita Vedanta, and a fascinating and significant comparison of the philosophies of ...

In this book, Mohanty develops a new interpretation of the nature of Indian philsophical thinking. Using the original Sanskrit sources, he examines the concepts of consciousness and subjectivity, theories of language and logic, and meaning and truth, and explicates the concept of theoretical rationality which underlies the Indian philosophies. Mohanty brings to bear insights from modern western analytical and phenomenological philosophies, not so much for comparative purposes, but rather to interpret Indian thinking and to highlight its distinctive features.

This book is a defence of a form of realism which stands closest to that upheld by the Nyãya-Vaid'sesika school in classical India. The author presents the Nyãya view and critically examines it against that of its traditional opponent, the Buddhist version of phenomenalism and idealism. His reconstruction of Nyãya arguments meets not only traditional Buddhist objections but also those of modern sense-data representationalists.

Yogacara Buddhism has frequently been mislabelled by scholars as a form of philosophical idealism. Hence it is usually asserted that Yogacara claims that mind or consciousness is the only reality and that the aim of Yogacara practice is the transformation of a defiled, empirical mind/consciousness into a true mind. This interpretation totally distorts Yogacara's actual intent, which is summarized in the Sanskrit term vijnapti-matra . I seek to demonstrate that vijnapti-matra does not mean that mind alone is real, but rather (...) that all human problematics are produced by and in the closure of psycho-linguistic conditioning; mind is the problem, not the solution. ;Since proper understanding of Yogacara depends on correctly contextualizing its doctrines, the evolution of key concepts--such as karma, the privileging of the cognitive domain , the 'closured-actuality' and 'exceeding-reference-actuality' , etc.--has been traced from early Buddhism through the development of Mahayana, to the interpretation given these notions in the Yogacara schools. A strong epistemological affinity between Yogacara and the Phenomenologies of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty is also discussed and analyzed. ;When, during the seventh century, Hsuan-tsang composed the Ch'eng Wei-shih lun, a compilation and translation into Chinese of ten Sanskrit commentaries on Vasubandhu's Trimsika , he intended it as a corrective on the errant interpretations of Yogacara then prevalent in China. In order to recover the authentic Yogacara position, sections of the text have been translated and analyzed. Appendices include charts of the seventy-five and one-hundred dharmas, and a translation of the first chapter of the Madhyanta Vibhaga. (shrink)