In the introduction to Speaking for Buddhas, Richard Nance commits himself to laying out the normative conventions that shaped the production of commentary in Indian Buddhism, and to coming to a better understanding of just what Indian Buddhist commentators thought they were doing in explaining and expanding upon the Buddha's teachings. He carries out this task through four chapters.
Chapter 1 shows, through investigations of Mātṛceta's Śatapañcaśatka and of the Prātimokṣasūtra, that for monks in ancient and medieval India, the conventions of proper ethical speaking posed real and enduring concerns. Speaking often meant speaking on behalf of Buddhas, and interpreting their words. Chapter 2 considers one of the most visible instances of this kind of speaking, the role of the dharmabhāṇaka or Dharma preacher. The dharmabhāṇaka sūtras imagined their preachers as noble and upstanding Buddhists, though not without recognizing that they often fell short. Nance points out that texts anticipating their own preachers also expected that they would possess four broad abilities in understanding and conveying the teachings. These capacities, or discriminations (pratisaṃvid), referred to the ability to apprehend dharmas as well as discern their meanings (artha), etymology (nirukti), and eloquence (pratibhāna). Through a close reading of the Arthaviniścaya and Akṣāyamatinirdeśa sūtras and their commentaries, Nance reveals the impact of the commentarial tradition on the meaning of dharmapratisaṃvid.
The deliberations of the pramāṇa school of Buddhist epistemologists—“questions of what, and how, we can know from words” (p. 82)—pose real problems for the efficacy of speaking, and Nance addresses these in chapter 3. Since scriptures ultimately depend on language and on their audiences learning how to act, through language, in a way that facilitates enlightenment, all the difficulties of the imperfections of language and knowing come to bear on the greater scriptural project. In particular, we cannot reliably establish an invariable concomitance between an utterance and what the speaker specifically desires to say, only that he desires to speak. Nance points to Kāmalaśīla and Śāntarakṣita's view that the possibility of valid cognition remains viable if “(1) the speaker is currently not erring and … (2) we are familiar with the linguistic conventions that structure the utterance” (p. 95). Because this is the case, the crux of the chapter is that the capacity to understand relies not merely on inferential ability, but on a number of other resources and conditions.
The fourth chapter takes as its focus the Vyākhyāyukti (The logic of explication) of Vasubandhu. Vasubandhu proposed that a complete commentary should address five aspects: “the purpose of the sūtra; the summary meaning; the meaning of the phrases; connections; and … objections and responses” (p. 105), all of which Nance elaborates and clarifies. In so doing, “Vasubandhu offers paradigms for speaking authoritatively of authoritative speech: models of teaching for the teaching of models” (p. 122).
The volume finishes with a conclusion and three appendices: translations of Book One of the Vyākhyāyukti and the Vivaraṇasaṃgrahaṇi section of the Yogācārabhūmi from Tibetan, and an excerpt from the Abhidharmasamuccayabhāṣya from Sanskrit.
As should be immediately evident, in Speaking for Buddhas Nance addresses a really phenomenal body of material, in terms of volume, complexity, and breadth of content. His translations of Pāli, Tibetan, and Sanskrit flow smoothly, even through the high weeds of terse and technical commentarial literature. Very few scholars and very few works effectively address a similar range of material, including history, literature (sūtra), epistemology and philosophy of language (pramāṇa), and commentary. We rarely hear the voices of the Buddha of the Pāli Canon, Mātṛceta, the Mahāyāna sūtras, Vasubandhu, Dharmakīrti, and Śantarakṣita in the same chorus, but Nance manages to bring them into harmony. As he convincingly demonstrates, the tension between the authority of tradition, the imperative to convey it effectively, and the difficulty of so doing remained concerns for quite nearly the entire history of Indian Buddhism.
However, I am left asking what difference this makes in what and how we know about Indian Buddhism. It hardly comes as a shock that Buddhists have always been concerned with understanding and transmitting the Buddha's words effectively. I would have been more swayed if Nance, as Tubb and Embree did with kāvya commentary, unlocked the secrets and intricacies of the systems and logic of Buddhist commentary, or demonstrated how commentaries had produced rifts in communities or polities, or real shifts in understandings of doctrine. On a more cosmetic note, Nance's otherwise fastidious scholarship is marred by the misnumbering of the footnotes in chapter 2 and appendix A, which produced real confusion.
Neither of these shortcomings should distract us from recognizing this as a work of truly excellent scholarship, and one that will open up lines of inquiry into the production of knowledge and authority in Indian Buddhism. While it is beyond the grasp of most undergraduates, graduate students and scholars of Sanskrit, Buddhism, and the history of ancient and medieval India should not overlook this important and insightful volume.
