Between Certainty and Finitude

Download or read book Between Certainty and Finitude written by Aucke Forsten and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2006 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book confronts two ways of approaching an Indo-Buddhist text with one another. The first is the historico-philological method, which takes the Cartesian ideal of certainty as its starting point. The second approach follows the lead of the philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer. This approach assumes that all human understanding is finite. In this light, it raises questions such as: what are the preliminary assumptions with which a buddhologist addresses a buddhist text? In analogy with these two ways of looking at a text, the book is divided into two parts. Part One is a historico-philological study of the Sanskrit compound sva-citta-dr'sya-matra as it is represented in the second chapter of the Indo-Buddhist text Lankavatarasutra (fifth century). Part Two then examines the unquestioned acceptances of this buddhological research from a philosophical point of view. The book opens up an entirely new perspective on methodological problems concerning any study of an alien culture.