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As one of the editors of the present volume recently argued, “the problem of how to make sense of texts” is “the lowest common denominator of philological practice.”1 And indeed, “[i]f we were to redefine philology [...] we would think of it most simply as the discipline of making sense of texts.”2 This is of course to say that interpretation has played a prominent role in the “reading practices” (Pollock 2015a: 12, 20) we are inclined to regard as cultural declensions of philology understood as a cross-cultural phenomenon calling for historical and comparative analysis. In this perspective, philological practices of the kind Pollock terms “hermeneutical philologies” (2015a: 14) can be expected to have even greater importance in cultures finding themselves in a “hermeneutic situation” (Bazán).3 This was obviously the case of western medieval Christianity and Indian Buddhism, where legal, moral and soteriological practice was largely dependent on the proper interpretation of a set of scriptures with varying degrees of authoritativeness. In the past decades, the scholarly and intellectual dispositifs of these two cultures have been referred to as “scholasticisms” with increasing frequency, scholasticism being characterized as a set of institution-based, self-conscious and highly sophisticated textual practices developed in order to study, appropriate, harmonize and often defend various types of auctoritates, and in which commentary played a central role in allowing for literal understanding, doctrinal amplification, and apologetics. Close scrutiny of the theory and practice of commentary in Latin medieval Europe and Buddhist India reveals interesting structural and functional similarities. Late medieval commentaries and their Buddhist counterparts (at least as far as normative commentarial technique and theory are concerned) (1) consciously make room for debate and dialectics by comprising, generally towards the end of a commentarial sequence, a section devoted to dispelling doubts and responding to objections. (2) Many of these contradictions are explicitly said to be motivated by at least apparent contradictions—whether internal inconsistencies, conflict between authorities, or contradiction with reason(ing). (3) Features (1) and (2) can certainly be regarded as points of mere technical interest. However, these concluding sections played an important role in the development of philosophy itself in the two contexts. For whereas the disputatio is generally considered to have emancipated itself from the commentary (lectio) via the quaestio disputata, Buddhist philosophy as we know it from the works of Dignāga (around 500) and especially Dharmakīrti (around 600) is structurally indebted to commentarial strategies formalized first in handbooks of exegetics composed slightly before and after 400 CE. Thus in addition to shedding comparative light on a particular aspect of commentarial technique, the present paper also attempts to follow one thread in the complex genealogy of philosophy in the Buddhist environment, viz. its indebtedness toward “reading practices.”

From Commentary to Philosophy, or Lectio and Disputatio in Indian Buddhist Commentarial Literature