Abstract
This article explores how two influential 8th-century Indian philosophers, Śaṅkara and Kamalaśīla, treat the threefold scheme of learning, reasoning, and meditation in their spiritual path philosophies. They have differing institutional and ontological commitments: the former, who helped establish Advaita Vedānta as the religious philosophy of an elite Hindu monastic tradition, affirms an unchanging “self” (ātman) identical to the “world-essence” (brahman); the latter, who played a significant role in the development of Buddhist monasticism in Tibet, denies both self and essence. Yet, they share a concern with questions of truth and the means by which someone could gain access to it, such as what, if anything, meditation contributes to knowledge and its acquisition. By exploring their answers to this and related questions, including how discursive and conceptual practices like learning, reasoning, and meditation could generate nonconceptual knowledge or knowledge of the nonconceptual, this essay shows the difficulty of separating “philosophical” problems of truth from those related to self-transformation or “spirituality,” as Michel Foucault defines the terms. It also reassesses, as a framework for comparison, the well-known contrast between “gradual” and “sudden” approaches to the achievement of liberating knowledge and highlights them as tensions we still struggle to resolve today.
Highlights
Truth and Self-Transformation in Comparative PerspectiveFor much of the intellectual history of “the West,” epistemological or “philosophical”matters, as Michel Foucault describes them—questions about “the conditions and limits of the subject’s access to the truth”—were bound together with what Foucault calls “spirituality”: “the search, the practice, the experience by which the subject operates the transformations upon himself necessary to gain access to the truth.”1 In the opening of his 1981–1982 lectures, Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault distinguishes between “philosophy” and “spirituality” in order to decenter modern philosophy’s central concern with knowledge, that is, with epistemology
One may find exceptions—this is still a topic of debate—but as a question of historical record there appear to be many more examples in classical India than exceptions, just as there are in Western antiquity
Advaita Vedānta claims that each person possesses an essential nature, the self or ātman, which is both numerically and qualitatively identical to the essence of all things, brahman
Summary
For much of the intellectual history of “the West,” epistemological or “philosophical”. This is a point we must continually bear in mind: Context matters, and the institutional context here for an ostensibly epistemological debate about the implications of nondualism and the means of knowing it—continuity or independence—gives voice to a central concern about spiritual path theory It may or may not be historically accurate to say that Kamalaśıla wrote three treatises, each called The Stages of Cultivation (Bhāvanākrama), while living in Tibet and engaged in an officially sanctioned debate or a series of written correspondences with representatives of a nondualist Chan Buddhist tradition from China.. Kamalaśıla was the product of a long tradition in India where related questions of epistemology, ontology, and spiritual path theory were still being debated This becomes obvious when we trace the broader history and context for some of the concepts and arguments on which Kamalaśıla relies, such as the threefold scheme and nonconceptual meditation.. Śaṅkara and the early Vedānta tradition, which will receive the more detailed treatment here. As we will see, the comparison raises difficult questions that still resonate today
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