THE DEVELOPMENT OF A BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE AND ITS CULMINATION IN TIBETAN MADHYAMIKA THOUGHT.

摘要

The work is in two parts. The first seeks to explore and identify the factors in the Indian and early Tibetan Buddhist tradition that influenced the development of a coherent and systematic Buddhist philosophy of language in the Tibetan dGe lugs pa school. This is undertaken by examining the different roles that language plays: as scripture, as the material for hermeneutical analysis, and as an epistemic source; also discussed is the relationship of language to ontological concerns.;The second part of the dissertation focusses on a work of mKhas grub dGe legs dpal bzang (1385-1438), the sTong thun chen mo, a synthetic and virtually encyclopedic work on Mahayana Buddhist thought. After a brief biographical sketch of the author and a discussion of text-critical questions, the bulk of the second part is devoted to an annotated translation of the sTong thun chen mo. Part I should be seen, therefore, as a contextualization of the translation (Part II) which not only provides source material for discussions in Part I but which perfectly exemplifies the unique dGe lugs pa scholastic synthesis which the dissertation seeks to examine.;It is the thesis of the work that the dGe lugs pa school, in its unique synthesis of the Madhyamika (Middle Way) and Pramanika (Logic) traditions, attempts to establish the importance and centrality of language in its various forms. This it accomplishes by demonstrating the need for reliance on and proper interpretation of scripture, by demonstrating the importance of preserving the validity of language and conceptual thought and by showing how language (as the basis for their nominalist ontological views) acts as the middle way between the extremes of realism and nihilism. The work examines relevant texts of the Indian Buddhist philosophical tradition in order to identify the historical basis for the dGe lugs pa views on language, unique in the history of Buddhism. Also examined are some of the relevant rival views that challenge the dGe lugs pa synthesis in an attempt to contextualize the latter's enterprise in terms of the response that it was to these views.