Attributed to the great Sarvāstivādin thinker Vasubandhu, the fifth-century Buddhist text The Logic of Explication (Vyākhyāyukti) is perhaps best known today for the philosophical arguments it offers against dismissing Mahāyāna traditions as insufficiently Buddhist. But to narrowly focus on these arguments is to risk missing both the text’s broader agenda and its imbrication with two additional texts that make up what has sometimes been called “the Vyākhyāyukti literature.” The effort to read these three texts together generates intriguing philological and hermeneutic puzzles. I will present a few of these puzzles, offer tentative suggestions as to how each might be (dis)solved, and highlight some implications that such work carries for how we might think about these texts, their authors, their transmission across the centuries, and our own roles as interpreters.

Hosted by the Philosophy of Religions Workshop at the University of Chicago.

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