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Hermeneutics in a Buddhist Perspective

Cristian Coşeru

I would like to begin with what I consider tobe the paradox understanding to a quest for non-relative truths. Putin slightly
of al! thinking that claims to be an objective reflection of different terms, human understanding is seen as being no
human experience. By objective reflection I mean any form longer primarily concerned with understanding humans as
of reasoning that seeks to interpret pastor present events and cultural beings with their heritage, customs and mentalities,
ideas în such a way as to imply that the interpreter does not but with judging al! humanity against objective and rational
enter în the event. The paradox is that, while claiming a norms. Human understanding has become concerned
position of detached awareness, an interpreter also claims a primarily with rationality itself and with howto remain criticai
position of truth. Indirectly, this amounts to saying that no în a world ful! of irrational phenomena and behavior.
experience can be accounted for unless it is mediated through Yet one of the many paradoxes of rationality îs that it can
rationality, and that only such mediation gives us a true picture justify types ofthinking that, although destructive, can make
ofthings. Truth, in this view, is not tobe found in the creative perfect sense, such as, as severa! recent examples show,
manifestations of history as an experience of bringing forth a
world but in the consistency with which historical phenomena
can be interpreted. Thus, the distance from the object of
investigation, rather then indicating a loss of true perspective
is seen, on the contrary, as the very precondition of true
understanding. It is further argued that direct involvement
with, or experience of one's own object of inquiry, carries
within it the risk of altering one's perception leading thus to
a distorted view of how things really are.
As these introductory remarks suggest indirectly, this is
with approximation the paradox inherent in the paradigm of
scientific knowledge, which has been behind much of the
thrust in natural and human sciences în the 2Q'h century. Its
roots can be traced back to Kant's fascination with the
discovery made by Copernicus that the universe was
heliocentric. Kant spent the greater part of his life in an effort
to formulate the principles that would enable pure reason to
achieve the same results in thinking that Copernicus achieved
in nature through direct observation and experiment. By mid
l 9'h century, this idea that criticai thinking could account for
anything had moved beyond both the Romantic quest for an
ideal world and beyond Hegel's absolutist philosophy that
saw dialectics as the key to understanding the historical
process. With the foundation of logica! positivism early this © Mihai Ţenovici
century by members of the Vienna circle including bombing people for their own good. In other words, rationality
mathematicians, physicists and philosophers such as Ernst conflicts with ethics, which îs not concerned with justifying
Mach, Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap, the paradigm of things în themselves but with the moral principles that control
objective and criticai investigation became the established and regulate the relations among humans and between humans
methodological framework of research in natural and social and the natural world. White rationality claims objectivity,
sciences. ethics, on account of cultural diversity, is grounded on the
It is not clear however how and why this paradigm was very impossibility of having an objective stand (a significant
adopted within humanities and by those disciplines like exception here is the Kantian tradition of ethics established
history, psychology, linguistics and philosophy which claim on the notion that rational imperatives should control and
tobe concerned with human understanding. As a direct resuit regulate moral judgment and behavior). If rational thinking
of this importation, the study of history and of human societies gives us the impression that we can arrive at a true
and cultures had gradually subordinated the process of representation of reality, ethics denies that possibility by
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showing that thinking is indissociable from behavior and from
the unconscious or unaccounted presuppositions inherent in
that behavior. Put briefly it could be said that rationality's
claimtoobjectivityisanillusionbasedonthebeliefthatone
can think outside ethics, that one can formulate value free
judgments and act without moral consequences.
This brings me to the theme of this article: what forms of
rationality and what hermeneutica! strategies have been
developed in other traditions that historically fall outside the
sphere of Western cultural influence? More specifically how
did a tradition like Buddhism develop its exegetical principles
© Mihai Ţcnovici
and how are we to interpret that tradition without disregarding
its own assumptions but from within a contemporary
viewpoint that is largely dominated by the paradigm of
enlightenment rationalism? Before Igo any further, I would
like to remind that these questions are not asked outside a
historical frame of reference. They are asked within a western
academic setting, which bears strongly the imprints of early
scholarship. In other words, it both presumes and assumes
the arguments that have been put forward by early Buddhist
scholars. This is another way of saying that no understanding
can escape history, that the types of questions that we ask
and the answers that we seek to give are simultaneously a
reflection and a continuation of the historical process. I hope
to have made clear by now that I will not be making objective
or ahistorical observations. History is our best record of
change and it is the privileged locus for witnessing what the
Buddha called dependent arising or arising due to causes and
conditions. History is our collective memory. Figuratively, it
could be said to be the story of our own dreaming. It is a
memory continuously refreshed in the waking experience,
yet a memory that extends beyond reflection in giving us an
overarching sense of all knowing and familiarity with the
world.
Hence, what are the theoretical conundrums that one
encounters in approaching Buddhism within a Western
intellectual setting? Perhaps the first and the most problematic
aspect of this encounter is the tendency to draw a distinction
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between explanation or description and understanding. There
seems tobe a perceived difference between the explanation
of a particular text or doctrine or religious behavior and its
understanding. Explanation is seen as precluding
understanding and as either requiring or attempting to bridge
a temporal distance. The distance is between what various
Buddhists claim to be the truth of what the Buddha taught
and what we can infer that he taught based on an impartial
explanation and evaluation of his teachings. It is further
argued that the exegetical process demands that we al so
distinguish between the meaning of a particular text in its
own context and the significance that that text or event may
have acquired throughout history. This distinction does not
appear to have been formulated within the Buddhist tradition
historically but it can serve instead as a good illustration of
the different modalities in which Buddhism has been
interpreted in the West from the l 9th century onward.
Indeed it can be shown that most western interpretations
have been concemed more with the significance that Buddhist
texts and ritual practices have acquired in the modern context
than with what they meant in their own historical time and
place. One of the consequences of this approach has been
the general tendency to disregard contemporary Buddhist
practices in their traditional setting as having any bearing on
the manner in which its classical doctrines should be
interpreted. This situation is no doubt due to the fact that
Buddhist texts and material have preceded in their arrival
order the living manifestation of its traditions. If we as modern
interpreters have been superimposing our philosophical and
cultural presuppositions onto an ongoing living tradition much
like we did with other forms of social, economical and
ideological dominance how are we going to escape this
conditioning in an attempt to state our claim of truth? How
are we going to convince anyone, including ourselves, that
we are advancing the understanding ofBuddhism and not of
our own subjective propensities and cultural idiosyncrasies?
It should be obvious by now that the problem !ies not with
the unsatisfactory nature of early presentations and with any
form of cultural or intellectual bias per se but with the process
of understanding itself.
In the field of Buddhist studies just like elsewhere in the
humanities understanding is mediated by a science or a theory
of understanding, called hermeneutics, that itself has its own
history. Before I introduce some of its peculiarities I would
like to pause for a moment and recall briefly the development
of hermeneutics as a historical discipline in the West.
Hermeneutics or the theory of interpretation was originally a
specialized discipline, a science for codifying the exegetic
rules relative to an autonomous group of texts, in particular
the Christian gospels, various apocrypha, the Talmud and
the works of classical antiquity. It was only in the l 9th century
largely under the influence of Schleiermacher that
hermeneutics became a general theory applicable to all texts .
The important aspect to remember here is that Schleiermacher
conceived hermeneutics as an analysis of the human
understanding, more precisely of the comprehension of
language seen as an expression of thought. By the end of the
19'h century, Dilthey had introduced a further distinction
between Geisteswissenschaften (human sciences) and
Naturwissenschaften (natural sciences). With Heidegger in
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the 20'h century, hermeneutics underwent an ontological
acknowledgment of the otherness of the other, which makes
radicalization in which the process of understanding was
removed from its traditional context of textual exegesis to
become an understanding of the fundamental condition of
the Dasein (literally, being here or the human condition).
It was in 1828 that Schleiermacher attempted to broaden
the scape of hermeneutics. He said: "Hermeneutics in a
general manner, is the art of correctly understanding the
discourse of the other, specially the written discourse, and
the criticai theory, the art of goodjudgment of the authenticity
of works and writers . 1
Wolf, a professor of encyclopedic philology at Halle,
wrote around the same time that hermeneutics was to be
understood as the "art of expiai ning all sorts of signs, the art
of understanding all that is designated by signs, i.e. grasping
the ideas that someone has conveyed through signs" 2 •
Elsewhere he said that: "Hermeneutics, as the art of
explanation, teaches us to understand and to explain the
thoughts of another from his signs. We understand signs
manifested by someone only when these signs generate in us
the same thoughts, representations and feelings as those
present in the soul ofthe author." 3
It is not hard to imagine that hermeneutics understood in
this manner, even outside the context of a direct involvement
with the other, did however entail some sort of direct
participation in order to experience the subjective content of
these signs and symbols. What would this participation mean
in the context of understanding the Buddhist tradition with
all its complex ramifications? Our proposed answer is to
regard it as meaning that if one either involves oneself in the
tradition or maintains a certain distance from it the
hermeneutic task is participatory. In other words, the
understanding process contributes respectively either to the
history of the tradition itself or to the history of hermeneutics.
That this may be the case it is of course a reason of great
concern for those who have engaged in the hermeneutica!
project unaware of its presuppositions. One answer to this
inescapable dilemma has been to present the Buddhist textual
materials în its own context and from a purely philological
perspective, without any attempt to draw conclusions or to
seek understanding. This alleged impartiality characterizes
many of the works of major Buddhist scholars reared in the
philological tradition . Yet, while it has been claimed that
linguistic and historical analysis was the only route of escape
from metaphysical conditioning, it has become evident that
the text-criticai approach could achieve this only by ignoring
the creative aspect of language and our ability as conscious
interpreters to continuously generate new meaning. What is
more dramatic is that this thrust for impartiality and for
placing texts in their own historical context, while claiming
to do justice to the tradition indirectly succeeds in neutralizing
its voice .
Referring to this situation in his Truth and Method,
Gadamer observes: ''The text that îs understood historically
is forced to abandon its claim that it îs uttering something
true. We think we understand when we see the past from a
historical standpoint, i.e. place ourselves in the historical
situation and seek to reconstruct the historical horizon. In
fact, however, we have given up the claim to find, in the past,
any truth valid and intelligible for ourselves. Thus this
him the object of objective knowledge, involves the
fundamental suspension of his claim to truth." 4
I would like to mention that in response or perhaps as a
resuit ofthe unprecedented encounter between cultures on a
global scale in the second half of the 2Qth century, the western
academic discourse has been operating in a decentered and
dislocated manner. The loss of a central goal or purpose (teios)
has resulted in a fragmentation of knowledge and the
continuous birth of new disciplines and sub-disciplines
operating in a loosely connected fashion . To illustrate this
point, I will refer to what the French philosopher Jacques
Derrida had observed regarding the origin of the science of
ethnology: "ethnology could have been born as a science only
at the moment when a decentering had come about: at the
moment when European culture - andin consequence, the
history of metaphysics and of its concepts (such as eidos,
arche, teios, energeis, ousia, essence, existence, substance,
seif) - had been dislocated, driven from its locus, and forced
to stop considering itself as the cui ture of reference." 5
Yet the development of new sciences had taken place in
the same cultural milieu. This means that in order to
communicate their results, these new sciences, and here one
could include Buddhist studies itself, had to employ the system
of symbols and concepts that have come tobe accepted by
that cui ture. Thus the critique of European ethnocentrism can
make sense only in a western context, where the categories
that one operates with have been accepted as central.
Similarly, in the case of Buddhist hermeneutics, the process
of criticizing previous interpretations and proposing new ones
is simply a process whereby one decentralizes one concept
and puts another one at the center. There is no escape from
this run around understanding. In other words, language is
self-referential and the hermeneutica! ci rele is nothing but a
circle. While irremediably caught in this circle all we can do
to free ourselves is to develop a certain awareness of the
hermeneutica! process itself.
If hermeneutics can teach us anything at all it îs, to quote
Gadamer again: "to see through the dogmatism of asserting
an opposition and separation between the ongoing, natural
'tradition' and the reflective appropriation ofit. For behind
this assertion stands a dogmatic objectivism that distorts the
very concept of hermeneutica! reflection itself. In this
objectivism the understander is seen not in relationship to
the hermeneutica! situation and the constant operativeness
of history în his own consciousness, but in such a way as to
imply that his own understanding does not enter into the
event." 6
This objectivism has informed a considerable portion of
modern Buddhist scholarship. More recently however, we
have seen the example of a number of Buddhist scholars
becoming Buddhists and beginning to articulate their
understanding from within a traditional perspective. This
represents a major shift in the field pushing even further the
process of dislocation and decentering of the conceptual
framework of western metaphysics mentioned earlier.
One of the characteristics of this more participatory or
enactive approach is to have revealed that, just as opposing
doctrines and practices have existed side by side in the
Buddhist tradition, a similar situation could arise and indeed
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has arisen in modern scholarship. Within the Buddhist
tradition various hermeneutica! strategies were devised not
in order to rrierely refute earlier or opposing views but often
with the aim ofincorporating them into a specific hierarchy
of levels of understanding. Texts were classified as being
either of provisory (neyârtha) or of definite (nîtârtha)
meaning. Further distinctions were made between special
intentions (af.hiprâya) and hidden intentions (abhisarhdhi) .
It is true that each school placed at its center a particular text
to which it ascribed ultimate authority. As the Buddhist
scholar Etienne Lamotte observed: "Each school tends to take
literally the doctrinal texts which conform to its theses and to
consider those which cause dilemmas as being of provisional
meaning."7 Yet, arguments on the convenient selection of texts
did not always settle the issue of authority. The practice of
meditation with all its complexities and levels of realization
was seen, and it still seen today, as the deciding factor in the
formulation of a truth claim. Canonically enjoined in many
texts, one of the clearest formulations in which meditation is
assigned the highest role in settling exegetic disputations is
to be found in the Sa rhdhinirmocanasutra or the Sutra
explaining the Hidden Meanings :
"Through a wisdom arisen from meditation, Bodhisattvas
either base themselves on the words or do not, either take the
text literally or do not, but they understand the intention,
manifested through the images which are the object of the
samâdhi that accords with the nature of things." 8
This aspect is becoming increasingly more obvious to
those scholars who have had a long exposure to Buddhist
practice in its traditional setting. If, in a Buddhist context,
understanding requires that we rely on wisdom derived from
meditative cultivation (f.hâvanâmayî-prajfiâ) and not merely
on textual study and reflection based on our ordinary
consciousness (srntamayî- and cintâmayî- prajfiâ) then the
final validity of the teaching is to be sought in replicating
Buddha's enlightenment.
This form of spiritual exegesis became the main focus of
interest within a continuously evolving Buddhist tradition,
which saw the continuous composition of new sutras more
then a millenium after Buddha's passage into nirvâ1Jf1. As a
resuit of the diversification of the original teaching a need
was felt to explain and account for this diversity. Once such
explanation is found the Sarhdhinirmocana-sutra (orthe Sutra
Explaining the Hidden Meanings). Init, the idea is professed
that hearing the doctrine or reading the words literally, is not
enough to understand the intention of the text. Further
reflection and thinking is required. But even this does not
reveal the intention. As the sutra suggests , only through a
wisdom that arises from meditation is the intention of a text
revealed. Yet the conclusion does not stop here. The sutra
also says that this final understanding occurs regardless of
whether one relies on the text or one does not.
That the type ofunderstanding grounded on meditational
experience may be seen as superseding textual analysis and
comprehension indicates perhaps that in the absence of this
direct realization, exegesis can neither lead to any definite
resuit not reveal the intention ofthe author. In other words, a
text can lend itself to various and even contradictory
interpretations and the preferred or perhaps only manner of
settling its true meaning requires a process of spiritual
exegesis.
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It is interesting .to observe at this point that through
different means and in an altogether different context the
Swiss psychoanalyst C. G. Jung arrived at a similar conclusion
in the first half of this century. Jung observed that
metaphysical statements like any other conscious uses of
language were statements of the psyche and were thus
psychological in nature. 9 To understand them one needed to
understand the inner workings of the psyche for which
language in itself held no great promise. Jung set out to
experiment with his own mind and spent some fifteen years
studying mystical and alchemical Iiterature seeking answers
to the bewildering range of psychological phenomena he was
host to. What he discovered was that below the surface of the
conscious seif Iay a rich world of collective psychological
structures which he called archetypes that could be
communicated only through integral symbols and direct
experience.
It may be said that what Jung achieved in the realm of the
psyche, Derrida has succeeded in doing for language and
writing. Most of Derrida's critique of the metaphysical use
of language is not really a critique at al!. It is a game played
mindful of the deceptive nature of language. Thus the most
central of Derrida's concepts, that of trace, is also the concept
that is the most undermining. The concept of writing as a
trace has accompanied western metaphysics from Aristotle
right down to Heidegger. For Derrida, however, writing as a
trace, as a perpetually supplanted presence, is no longer seen
to converge in any definite way toward meaning or referent.
Writing is primai in the sense that it anticipates and it
supplements at the same time any intended meaning. It is not
the expression of a conscious intra-subjectivity. On the
contrary, it is the manifestation of an infinite chain of signifiers
without any signified . This is what Derrida calls
dissemination, "seed cast wastefully outside" 10 and not
plenitude or convergence of meaning. Language, in other
words, is no Ion ger said to be unable to capture or to mean
the truth. Rather, the whole quest for valid knowledge is
shown tobe a play of signifiers always pointing away from
themselves and to the other, always differing and deferring
their intended meaning. Language, both as speech and writing
has been revealed tobe nothing but a veil, an empty construct
projected by those who are afraid of facing the ultimate
emptiness of linguistic meaning.
That linguistic meaning may be in some way empty in
the sense that words and language in general do not attain
their object was a thoroughly debated topic among the Indian
grammarians. Generally, with later grammarian pragmatics
dominated the view on language with the resuit that linguistic
theories gave primary emphasis to usage. As Kunjuni Raja
noted in his study on the Indian theories of meaning: "Many
of the problems in the study of meaning in language are based
on the primary assumption that words are the counters of
thought. However, once this assumption is set aside an.d words
are given their place in language as unreal abstractions just
like roots and suffixes, many of these problems fade away.
The words have reality only at the pragmatic levei, only in
the context ofusing the language." 11
Kunjuni Raja draws his ideas from the findings of early
Indian grammarians, like Păi:iini, Katyâyana and Pataiijali.
INDICA•-------------· ~ CAIEIESiL\'ANE
That these ideas are also cogent with certain developments
seen as an indication of the pragmatic contents of language
in Buddhism is an indication that Buddhist philosophers were
not unaware of the speculations on the function of natural
language advanced by the grammarians . As Radhika
Herzberger observes in her study on the relation between the
Brahmanica! and the Buddhist theories of language, in India
the vocabulary of grammatical analysis appears to have been
modeled very consciously after the vocabulary of ritual
practices. Ritual practices consisted in the performance of
certain complicated rites laid down by the Vedas. These rituals
were conceived of teleologically as an event to be brought
about through a set of well-orchestrated means (sâdhana)
consisting of material objects such as animals, stakes and
utensils of various sorts. And while the means, which have
the characteristics of finished products , were described as
having accomplished natures (siddhasvabhâva), action
(kriyâ), an incomplete entity, was described as having a to-
be-accomplished nature (sâdhyasvachâva). "Grammarians
found an analogy between this description of ritual and, within
the context of sentences, the ro Ies of nouns and the principal
verb. Nouns are the means of bringing about the action
signified by the principal verb; nouns have accomplished
natures, verbs have a to-be-established nature." 12
Further developments indicated that nouns as well as
suffixes and prefixes defined word and sentence meanings
by both accomplishing and constraining the action designated
by the principal verb. Notwithstanding the difference of
opinion within the grammatical tradition, most of the
developments were based on this early insight that a word
could signify anything and that it was only through inflection,
declension and insertion in a sentential context that it could
convey one singular meaning.
I would like to conclude this brief sketch by quoting a
Mahâyâna Buddhist sutra, which, I think, not only bears
directly on the insights of the grammarians, but gives a true
perspective on the paradoxical character of Buddhist
exegetica! practices in their ingenuous attempt to expand and
diversify their methods în response to a constantly evolving
canon. It is called Ekâkţarîprajnâpâramitâ-sutra or The
Perfection of Wisdom in One Letter. It is the shortest sutra în
the entire corpus of Buddhist literature and perhaps the
shortest Buddhist text outside the development of koans in
Far Eastern Buddhism. The text reads:
"Thus I have heard atone time. The Lord was sitting on
Vulture Peak with a great assembly of 1250 monks and many
billions of bodhisattvas. At that time, the Lord said to the
venerable Ananda: «Ananda, keep this perfection of wisdom
in one letter for the benefit and happiness of sentient beings.
It is thus, a.» So said the Lord and everyone - Ananda, the
monks, and the great bodhisattvas - having understood and
admired the perfection of wisdom, praised what the Lord had
said." 13
What this sutra aims perhaps to say îs that the entire
content of language resides în the potentiality of the first sound
and letter of the alphabet. Yet Buddhism records an even more
radical statement. It is said that from the night that he attained
enlightenment to the night that he passed into nirvâ?a the
Tathâgata did not utter a single word. In the Jight ofthe same
analysis ofthe Sanskrit grammarians this statement may be
and ofBuddha's teachings as recorded in the early sutras. In
other words, that all the Pâli sutras were an expression of
expedient or skilful means and that no definite meaning was
to be found in them. The words left behind in the vast and
still growing Buddhist canons are only traces of that
potentiality of which linguistic expression îs butan imperfect
form.
© Mihai Ţenovici.
1
Fr. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik, ed. H. Kimmerle, Heidelberg,
1974, p. 85.
1
Fr. A. Wolf, Vorle .rnngen uber die Altertumswi.1·senschaft, ed.
J. D. Gurtler, Voi. I, Lehnhold, Leipzig, 1831 , p. 64.
3
Ibidem, p. 83.
4
G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, tr. David E. Linge, Berkeley,
1976, p. 85.
5
J. Derrida, Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse <~f the
Human Sciences, tr. Alan Bass, 1970, p. 86 .
6
G. Gadamer, On the Scope and Function <4 Hermeneutica/
Reflection, in Philosophical Hermeneutic.\', tr. David E. Linge,
Berkeley, 1976, p. 28.
7
E. Lamotte, La critique d'interpretation dans le bouddhisme,
in: Annuaire de !'Institut de Philologie et d'Histoire Orientales
et Slaves, voi. 9, Brussels, 1949, tr. Sara Boin-Webb in: Buddhist
Studies Review, 2, no. 1-2, 1985 and reprinted in Buddhist
Hermeneutic.I', ed. D. Lopez, Kuroda Institute, I 988, p. 19.
8
E . Lamotte, Samdhinirmocana-sutra: L'Explication des
Mysteres, Adrien Maisonneuve, Paris, 1935, p. 105.
9
C . G . Jung, The structure and dynamics of the psyche, 2nd ed.,
tr. R.F.C. Huli, Bollingen Series XX, voi. 8, Princeton, 1969.
10
J. Derrida, La Pharmacie de Platon, in La Dissemination, Seuil,
Paris, 1972.
11
K. Kunjuni Raja, Indian Theories of Meaning, Adyar Libary,
Madras, 1963, p. 88 .
11
R. Herzberger, Bhartrhari and the Buddhists, Reidel Publishing
Company, Dordrecht, 1986, p 19.
13
P 741, voi. 21 , 257 .4.3-8, quoted in D. Lopez, lnterpretation
of the Mahâyana Sutras, in Buddhi.1·t Hermeneutic.I', ed. D. Lopez,
Kuroda Institute, 1988, p. 47.
149