^[1] After reading this book one can only imagine that the author is a lively teacher of undergraduate philosophy students. Taking an idea and seeing where it goes is a wonderful teaching technique, sharpening our students’ abilities at critical thinking through ‘thought experiments’ [scare-quotes]. I am skeptical, however, that this volume deepens our contemporary understanding of Buddhist worldviews, or suggests a fruitful direction. The author does not set out to prove that knowledge is the central causal condition for Buddhist liberation he simply assumes that it is. From this starting point Burton explores the inconsistencies and self-contradictions that arise. Most of these self-contradictions, however, belong to Burton rather than to Buddhism, in the opinion of this reviewer.

^[2] In the book’s first chapter the author identifies himself not only as a ‘cross-cultural’ philosopher, but also as a ‘Western’ Buddhist practitioner. He expresses his intention to offer a creative continuation of Buddhist philosophy, rather than to ‘slavishly stick to reports of Buddhist writings about these matters.’ This background and intention sets up an expectation that, by the end of the book, remains unfulfilled. From his highly selective use of sources, relying most heavily on early Buddhist thought (I would call it Hinayana, and not Theravada as the author does), from his inclusion of sources from Indian Mahayana, Vajrayana, and even a few East Asian and contemporary sources, from his persistent presupposition of a generic Buddhism that valorizes knowledge, emerges a very strange Buddhism indeed: a gnostic soteriology that is a form of anti-realism or at the very least rather similar to Kant. It’s a dog’s dinner; but it may suggest, inadvertently perhaps, why Buddhism died in India while going on to flourish in Tibet and East Asia.

^[3] Although there were schools within early Buddhism that valorized an elitist goal of liberation through knowledge of ‘things as they really are,’ i.e., as impermanent, sorrowful, and with no-self, this characterization serves poorly as a generic high Buddhism. After all, according to the Vajrayana there were three turnings of the wheel of Dharma. Burton is indebted only to the first: Hinayana. A rigid fixation on the Abhidharma conceptualization of reality was a problem for the developing traditions within early Buddhism, but this should not be surprising, rooted as they were in a pan-Indian view of language where words represented ideas, rather than representing the things in the world as with the Chinese.

^[4] What the subsequent tradition showed was that suffering in samsara was not the result of an attachment to an erroneous metaphysical view; it was the result of attachment to any view whatsoever. This was the brilliant contribution of thinkers like Nagarjuna and Candrakirti. To examine Madyamkika as anti-realism, as skepticism, or as a proto-Kantianism, as Burton does, is to miss the point. Madyamika, and Buddhism in general, must be approached in the context of karuna and upaya, compassion and skillful means. Out of compassion for suffering beings, buddhas teach variously that there is a self, that there is no self, that there both is and is not, and that there neither is nor is not. Unlike an appropriate remedy applied in the case of a particular illness, the teaching of an enlightened being will become an impediment when it is asserted as a universal metaphysical claim. That’s the big problem for Shariputra in Vimalakirtinirdesa.

^[5] Unlike Advaita Vedanta’s valorization of Knowledge, Buddhism seeks freedom from entrapping metaphysical claims that erroneously reify a distinction between appearance and reality, between samsara and nirvana or between you and me, for that matter. This freedom emerges in a wise, skillful and compassionate response to the ever-changing circumstances arising moment by moment, not through ‘knowledge’ no matter how subtle or praiseworthy. Logic, discursive analysis, and critical thinking are certainly present and part of the process in varying degrees throughout the various traditions; the goal, however, is quite beyond any knowledge arising through discursive reasoning, as is vividly shown by the Zen koan practice, a practice quite maddening to most philosophers, I would imagine.

^[6] Each month, it seems, more and more books are published exploring Buddhism from various perspectives, especially the philosophical. If you have time to read only a few, this probably should not be one of them. Then again, taken as a skillful means, it may be just what the doctor ordered. How can I say?