Text, History, and Philosophy

Bart Dessein, Ph.D. (1994) is Full Professor at the Department of Chinese Language and Culture of Ghent University, and member of the Ghent Centre for Buddhist Studies. He has mainly published on Sarvāstivāda and Mahāsāṃghika history and philosophy.Weijen Teng, Ph.D. (2011) Harvard University, is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts. His research interests are Chinese Buddhist intellectual history, Sanskrit grammar study in Medieval China and Abhidharma.

"In my own evaluation, the most important aspect of this collection is that it addresses an absolutely central issue about the study of Buddhist rational inquiry. The collection examines Buddhist rational inquiry as such, rather than in a context in which the concerns, categories, and concepts of Euro-American philosophy (or psychology) are uncritically assumed as a universal structure into which Buddhist thought is expected to fit. Only since about the beginning of the twenty-first century (a symbolic marker rather than an exact historical one) has the study of Buddhist thought, or as Dessein says “Buddhist 'philosophy' begun to move out of the colonialist mode of viewing Buddhist thought as a resource for pre-existing conversations in Euro-American philosophy. More directly relevant to scholars of religious studies, the same dynamic applies to the treatment of Buddhism as a 'religion'." – Richard K. Payne, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, in Reading Religion (February 2018)