SUNY series, Toward a Comparative Philosophy of Religions – serie

Discourse and Practice strives to stretch the boundaries of commonly accepted notions of philosophical discourse in order to introduce comparative considerations. It is united by a concern to tease out the philosophical discourse and practices which inhere in seemingly unphilosophical "texts." These texts range from ethnographical materials to mythical and fictive narratives, and finally, to explicitly theoretical traditions. Each author, in attending to the details of his or her area study, strives to demonstrate the implicit and explicit philosophical agendas at play. The comparative examples offer valuable insights for how discourse can be redefined. One consistent assumption presented here is that the element of practice, which has long been posed in opposition to theory, must be treated as an integral aspect of the philosophical import of any tradition.Historical traditions covered include East Asia, Papua New Guinea, and Tibet as well as the more familiar territory of Western disciplinary fields.

Scharfstein describes the extraordinary powers that have been attributed to language everywhere, and then looks at ineffability as it has appeared in the thought of the great philosophical cultures: India, China, Japan, and the West. He argues that there is something of our prosaic, everyday difficulty with words in the ineffable reality of the philosophers and theologians, just as there is something unformulable, and finally mysterious in the prosaic, everyday successes and failures of words.

Scharfstein describes the extraordinary powers that have been attributed to language everywhere, and then looks at ineffability as it has appeared in the thought of the great philosophical cultures: India, China, Japan, and the West. He argues that there is something of our prosaic, everyday difficulty with words in the ineffable reality of the philosophers and theologians, just as there is something unformulable, and finally mysterious in the prosaic, everyday successes and failures of words.

Where Advaita Vedānta, sacred text, and comparative theology meet—truth emerges through the act of reading itself.What does it mean to read a sacred text so carefully that it changes the reader? In this ambitious and deeply learned work, Francis X. Clooney, S.J., offers an exploration of Advaita Vedānta not as a set of abstract doctrines, but as a disciplined practice of reading—one that forms truth, theology, and the theologian together within the texture of the text itself.Moving through the Upaniṣads, Śaṅkara’s commentaries, and the Uttara Mīmāṃsā Sūtras, Clooney reveals Advaita as a living, rigorously argued tradition in which meaning emerges through sustained engagement, debate, and commentary. Truth, he argues, is not grasped outside the text or prior to it, but arises after the text—through the transformative participation of a trained and desiring reader. By attending closely to textual structure, reasoning strategies, and interpretive practices, this book reorients how Advaita Vedānta is understood and studied.The final chapters extend this insight into a bold experiment in comparative theology, placing Advaita Vedānta and Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae into sustained conversation. Rejecting both superficial comparison and detached theory, Clooney models a form of theological "neighborliness" grounded in fidelity to texts and traditions. The result is a compelling vision of comparative theology as an educational, ethical, and spiritual practice—one that reshapes how truth, doctrine, and interreligious understanding are pursued today.

Taking language as its general theme, this book explores how the tradition of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist philosophical speculation exemplifies the character of scholasticism.Scholasticism, as an abstract and general category, is developed as a valuable theoretical tool for understanding a variety of intellectual movements in the history of philosophy of religion. The book investigates the Buddhist Scholastic theory and use of scripture, the nature of doctrine and its transcendence in experience, Mahayana Buddhist hermeneutics, the theory and practice of exegesis, and questions concerning the authority of sacred texts. It also deals with the Buddhist Scholastic theory of conceptual thought as the mirror of language, the Scholastic defense of logic and rationality as a method, as well as the role of language in the idealist and nominalist ontologies of the Mahayana. Finally, the author treats the question of ineffability and the silence of the Buddha from a new perspective.

What is it like to be a Buddha? Is there only one Buddha or are there many? What can Buddhas do and what do they know? Is there anything they cannot do and cannot know? These and associated questions were much discussed by Buddhist thinkers in India, and a complex and subtle set of doctrinal positions was developed to deal with them. This is the first book in a western language to treat these doctrines about Buddha from a philosophical and thoroughly critical viewpoint.The book shows that Buddhist thinkers were driven, when theorizing about Buddha, by a basic intuition that Buddha must be maximally perfect, and that pursuing the implications of this intuition led them into some conceptual dilemmas that show considerable similarity to some of those treated by western theists. The Indian Buddhist tradition of thought about these matters is presented here as thoroughly systematic, analytical, and doctrinal.The book's analysis is based almost entirely upon original sources in their original languages. All extracts discussed are translated into English and the book is accessible to nonspecialists, while still treating material that has not been much discussed by western scholars.

This book contains programmatic essays that focus on broad-ranging proposals for re-envisioning a discipline of comparative philosophy of religions. It also contains a number of case studies focussing on the interpretation of particular religio-historical data from comparatively oriented philosophical perspectives.

This book contains programmatic essays that focus on broad-ranging proposals for re-envisioning a discipline of comparative philosophy of religions. It also contains a number of case studies focussing on the interpretation of particular religio-historical data from comparatively oriented philosophical perspectives.

Embracing Illusion is an interdisciplinary study of a classic Korean novel. It argues that a work of narrative fiction can be taken seriously as Buddhist philosophical discourse. The capacity of fiction to speak on behalf of Buddhist truths is set in the larger context of how the literary imagination approaches the exploration of reality.

Argues how the notion of "canon" is used to authorize and maintain certain types of interpretive reasoning and the social institutions that employ them.Using examples from Islamic law, Ndembu divination, and Aranda religion, this book argues how the notion of "canon" is used to authorize and maintain certain types of interpretive reasoning and the social institutions that employ them. The bulk of the book outlines how the anafī school of Islamic law was able to legitimize itself by extending the canonical authority of the Qur'an to the sunnah of the prophet, the opinions of selected local authorities, and the scholarship of earlier generations. The anafī example shows that the application of canon is not about overcoming the limits of a "closed" text but rather about imposing limits on a range of interpretations made possible by a variegated and malleable textual corpus.

Examines texts and commentaries in the Tamil-language SArivastradition of South India; about the general issues of text, vision, and narrative that such texts raise, and about the implications of these for a particular style of comparative theology.Seeing through Texts invites us into the world of south Indian Hinduism through a study of 100 songs of the Tiruvāymoli, the great masterpiece of the ninth-century Hindu saint Saṭkōpan. These unique songs, dedicated to the Hindu god Viṣṇu/Kṛṣṇa, lead us through poetic and imaginative, philosophical and moral reflections on the nature of the self and the world, ancient myths and temple worship, and the mystical moods of longing, desire, and love in which one seeks, loses, and finds again the God who loves us first. The book is also a study of the interpretation of the Tiruvāymoli in the traditional Hindu Śrivaiṣṇava commentaries of the twelfth-fourteenth centuries, as well as a comparative theological study which explores the implication of the songs and their commentaries for readers from outside the Śrivaiṣṇava tradition.

Leading scholars in the field of religious studies show that scholasticism as a comparative category is useful in the analysis of a variety of religious and philosophical traditions and even in the task of cultural criticism.Leading religious studies scholars join forces in this book to show that scholasticism as a comparative category is a useful tool in the analysis of a variety of religious and philosophical traditions, and even in the task of cultural criticism. The discussions range from explorations of Latin, Jewish, and Muslim modes of scholastic thought to examinations of their counterparts in India, Tibet, China, and contemporary Euro-American academic culture.The contributors consider the heterogeneous nature of traditions generally, and of scholastic traditions in particular, by demonstrating the rich, internal texture that is the result of the historical interaction of different religious and philosophical schools. They also explore what it means to construct a comparative category like scholasticism by applying it sensitively and dialogically to a variety of religious and intellectual movements across cultures.Focusing thematically on scholasticism, the book offers detailed reflections regarding its relevance to a variety of traditions (Hindu, Confucian, Taoist, Buddhist, Jewish, Islamic, and Christian). But while grounded in the rich, historical particularity of these various religions and cultures, the volume also makes a considerable contribution to theory. The contributors are committed to a form of analysis that balances "similarities" with "differences," one that also does not disregard either the diachronic element or the relevance of the social-material evidence. By offering a nuanced and sophisticated treatment of the problematics of constructing a comparative category like scholasticism, this volume represents a major contribution to the comparative philosophy of religion. With its breadth of scope and its richness of both historical detail and theoretical insight, the book will interest a wide audience ranging from medievalists to historians of religion, from philosophers to cultural critics.

Provides a comparative philosophical study of the thought of the two principle theorists of monistic Kashmiri Shaivism, Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta, and also formulates a conception of the nature of philosophy as a means of intercultural and interreligious dialogue.Rediscovering God with Transcendental Argument provides a comparative philosophical study of the Pratyabhijña system of the medieval Kashmiri Śaiva thinkers Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta. Beginning with intensive descriptive and prescriptive reflections on the nature of philosophy itself, the book examines the special characteristics of the Pratyabhijña discourse as both philosophical apologetics and spiritual exercise. Lawrence situates the Pratyabhijña speculation within the larger context of Hindu and Buddhist deliberations about the role of interpretation in experience, and gives a groundbreaking exposition of the epistemology and ontology of Shiva's self-recognition. He observes the similarities and differences of the Pratyabhijña with Christian understandings of the divine logos, and argues that the Śaiva philosophy elucidates a cogent way of demonstrating the reality of God against contemporary relativism, deconstructionism and other forms of skepticism.