113bC4l

introduction: a plethora of premises ⁄ 7
ties, ideas, doctrines, rituals, and behaviors arose in the context of early medieval
India, it would seem important to provide a frame story for the vehicle
of these interesting and influential Indian masters.
habits of the heart, deductive premises,
and buddhist inhibitions
Such an attempt at religious history is not without difficulties. The documentation
available is elusive, difficult, incomplete, and highly charged in metaphysical
presuppositions. Modeling the genesis, development, efflorescence,
and success of the esoteric system will challenge our understanding at virtually
every level. However, some of our best tools have been called into question
through a variety of factors. Three categories of theoretical obstacles have impeded
our understanding of esoteric Buddhist history. The first might be
called a habit of scholarship, the way that Buddhist studies research has tended
to avoid the historical evaluation of early medieval Buddhism, despite a
plethora of sources and evidence. Second, the rhetorical statements of some
modern theoreticians, especially those questioning the epistemological or ethical
validity of historical inquiry, have disquieted classical Indology. Finally,
the epistemological claims to exclusivity by the Buddhist tradition itself have
caused some serious scholars to pause in their inquiry, often in hopes that the
tradition will respond to the challenge of critical method with an indigenous
alternative. These three factors appear to have cast a pall over the historiography
of medieval Indian Buddhist traditions generally. As a result, I would like
to employ the balance of the introduction to discuss a few observations on
both theory and methodology. The purpose of this analysis is simply to suggest
the strengths of the humanist historical methods generated during the
Florentine Renaissance of the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries and their bearing
on the contemporary study of other cultures.
Scholarly habits, once ingrained, are difficult to modify, especially when
they have yielded such apparent treasures in the study of Indian and Buddhist
history: edited texts, linguistic descriptions, lexicons, and the like. One of the
most pervasive habits is the search for origins, however these origins are identified
or articulated. Source privileging is perhaps an outgrowth of the Judaic
heritage and the position of Genesis in religious literature. It may also be the result
of a similar fascination found in Greek literature, at least since the Theogony
of Hesiod. Beyond these, the emphasis on beginnings in Indian historiography
was fueled by the curious assessment of India as essentially “unchanging” since