Further Thoughts on Rāmakaṇṭha’s Relationship to Earlier Positions in the Buddhist-Brāhmaṇical Ātman Debate

Abstract

The present article is a continuation of my previous work on where precisely to place Rāmakaṇṭha’s self-theory (ātmavāda) in the nexus of other rival positions. I am delighted to have been included in this volume and in the conference which led to it, in honour of my former DPhil supervisor, Professor Alexis Sanderson, with whom I spent many hours reading Rāmakaṇṭha’s Nareśvaraparīkṣāprakāśa (as well as Kumārila’s Ślokavārttika, ātmavāda, and Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośabhāṣya, pudgalaviniścaya)—and indeed at whose suggestion I began working on Rāmakaṇṭha’s philosophical texts. A previous article of mine (Watson 2014) places Rāmakaṇṭha in the middle ground between Nyāya and Buddhism.What I would like to do here is present some considerations that run counter to that. I do not think they invalidatemy earlier contentions, but they do reveal them to be one-sided and incomplete. In section 1 I introduce key issues in the self debate betweenNyāya and Buddhism, in order to then be able to locate Rāmakaṇṭha in relation to these two. In section 2 I briefly explain my “middle ground” idea that was put forward in the 2014 article.1̀ In section 3 I present evidence for seeing Rāmakaṇṭha as just as extreme as Nyāya. In section 4 I present evidence for seeing him as being even more extreme than Nyāya, with Nyāya being the moderate position. In section 5 I present evidence for Nyāya not being so moderate after all. In the concluding section I ask where all of this leaves us.