Against a Hindu God: Buddhist Philosophy of Religion in India by Parimal G. Patil

Abstract

Reviewed by: Against a Hindu God: Buddhist Philosophy of Religion in India by Parimal G. Patil Douglas L. Berger Review of Parimal G. Patil, Against a Hindu God: Buddhist Philosophy of Religion in India New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. 406 pp. + xi. Parimal patil’s voluminous study Against a Hindu God delivers on its promise to make the arguments of the eleventh-century Buddhist philosophical genius Ratnakīrti pertinent for modern academic discussions of “the nature of rationality, the metaphysics of epistemology, and the relevance of philosophy to the practice of religion” (4). The study takes us through an in-depth examination of the tools and purposes of classical Indian philosophical debate, Ratnakīrti’s refutations of one of the prominent Naiyāyika proofs of God’s existence (the “Îṡvara-inference”), Ratnakīrti’s expansive account of mental content and the soteriological importance the seminal scholastic Buddhist attached to philosophy. After a hermeneutically creative opening chapter that models the foci and goals of Patil’s work upon the classical model of “grammatical events” (kārakas) (8), chapters 2 and 3 rehearse the Nyāya argument purporting to demonstrate that Îṡvara created the world and those of Ratnakīrti in rebuttal. The Nyāya proof posits that, since “each and every effect has been constructed by an intelligent agent—like a pot,” and since the world [End Page 235] is an effect, the world must have an intelligent creator, who is later independently argued to be God, since any being who could have created such a temporally expansive and complex world must possess omniscience (59). After reviewing some earlier Buddhist objections and Naiyāyika defenses of this proof, Ratnakīrti takes several lines of attack against both the instant argument and the very epistemological assumptions that support it. He begins assailing the particular inference by arguing that no pervasion (vyāpti) can be found between effects in general and their having an intelligent maker. No one, for example, has ever observed an intelligent maker produce great mountains, and, assuming on the other hand that Îṡvara is not observable, it is not possible to prove on the basis of the nonobservation of Îṡvara his presence at the creation of the world (144-46). In addition, we know of many examples of effects, “such as a drying and cracking lump of clay,” that have no intelligent producer (155). However, even more fundamentally, the whole Nyāya conception of inference-warranting pervasion is fatally flawed. This is because no finite number of previous perceptions can leave us absolutely certain that a dissimilar case, for instance of an effect that has no intelligent maker, will not be discovered in the future, and so no inference can avoid “epistemically significant” doubt (150). Even in the cases of inferences that “satisfy” the conditions required by the Naiyāyika pervasion theory, in the absence of being able to point to a set of fixed natural relations, Nyāya inferences are little more than “convenient fictions” (179-80). Chapter 4 of the work deals first with Ratnakīrti’s specific defense of the Buddhist theory of exclusion (apoha) in explaining both how perceptual particulars are determined as well as how semantic meaning is generated. The chapter details how the process of exclusion functions in the phenomenological determination of a “positive” perceptual “entity,” which, given the works of most of his Yogācāra-Sautrāntika predecessors, was relatively novel. Chapter 5 then offers an extensive treatment of his catalogue of mental content. For him, mental objects can be divided into four classes. First are mental perceptual images that are momentary “manifest” objects that are “complex and dynamic” but yet grasped by a nondual awareness (234). On the basis of this manifest, complex content, a second kind of perceptual object is “constructed” and “determined,” as above, through a phenomenological process of exclusion that we take to be an “individual” thing, which we associate with a “universal” (236-39). Correspondingly, there are two kinds of inferential “objects.” The first of these is the directly “manifest’” content that results from the inferential process or verbal testimony, a “universal” which serves as the basis for the last kind of image (280...