Reason and Experience in Buddhist Epistemology

As a specifi c domain of inquiry, “Buddhist epistemology” (sometimes designated in the specialist literature by the Sanskrit neologism pram āṇ av ā da , or the “theory of reliable sources of knowledge”) stands primarily for the dialogical-disputational context in which Buddhists advance their empirical claims to knowledge and articulate the principles of reason on the basis of which such claims may be defended. The main questions that we shall pursue here concern the tension between the notion that knowledge is ultimately a matter of direct experience – which the Buddhist considers as more normative than other, more indirect, modes of knowing – and the largely discursive and argumentative ways in which such experiential claims are advanced. The Sanskrit philosophical idiom, in which Buddhist epistemology fi nds its fi rst and perhaps most elaborate expression, contains one distinctive term, anubhava , for the concept of “experience” and several terms that closely approximate the concept of “reason.” For instance, tarka captures the notion of speculative or logical inquiry; nyā ya stands for the notion of rule or method for investigating objects by reliable means; yukti for the notion of ground, proof, or motive, or for something that is right, fi t, or appropriate; and hetu for the notion of means by which what was hitherto unproved is now proven. From this cursory terminological survey one may hastily conclude that, whereas the epistemic notion of experience is universal, reason and the corresponding notion of rationality (with their roots in the Latin ratio , which conveys the sense of “reckoning” or “giving an account of judgment,” as one might do in court) as a distinctive epistemic faculty or process is not. Of course, this observation assumes a Western frame of reference for examining the relation between reason and experience. An alternative project would be to explore the relation between experience and whatever it is that Buddhists mean when they examine, refl ect upon, or seek to prove a given thesis without any reference to Western concepts and ways of thinking. Given that this second 15