A while ago I discussed how Janet Gyatso had objected to my approach of assuming authorial coherence and single authorship in my dissertation on Śāntideva (and in other works). I said there that “there’s an issue here much bigger than the interpretation of any one thinker: should one even try to find the coherent views of an individual author?” I answered yes and I stand by that. I remain firmly in agreement with Thomas Kuhn’s dictum that [w]hen reading the works of an important thinker” one should look for the apparent absurdities and ask how it could make sense that “a sensible person could have written them”. But I didn’t go back to what I implied was the “smaller” issue – which may not in fact be so small.

In the case of Śāntideva, the historical evidence suggests that his most famous work, the Bodhicaryāvatāra, is composite: there is a version of it discovered relatively recently at Dunhuang which seems to be significantly earlier than, and substantially different from, the version known to Indian and Tibetan Buddhist tradition. It would seem that the text as we know it is the work of at least two composers. And that, in turn, poses a problem for someone wanting to use Kuhn’s approach as he states it: what if this text is not the work of an important thinker or a sensible person, but multiple ones? Are we not then entitled to treat the text as incoherent because of all the different minds that went into it? Continue reading →