Dialectical Practice in Tibetan Philosophical Culture: An Ethnomethodological Inquiry into Formal Reasoning

338 Pages·2004·11.06 MB·English

by  Kenneth Liberman

Dialectical Practice in Tibetan
Philosophical Culture
For a set of Interactive Debate Tutorials, including photographs of debates; a guide to the
participants; a grammar of Tibetan debating; the ethnomethods employed by debaters;
videos of illustrative debates; and an appendix comprising an interactive debate, glossary,
manual, and illustrations, please see the accompanying website.
http://www.thdl.org/DebateTutorials/
Dialectical Practice in Tibetan
Philosophical Culture
An Ethnomethodological Inquiry into
Formal Reasoning
KENNETH LIBERMAN
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
LANHAM• BOULDER• NEW YORK• TORONTO• PLYMOUTH, UK
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
Published in the United States of America
by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowmanlittlefield.com
Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom
Copyright© 2004 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
First paperback edition 2007
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
The hardback edition of this book was previously cataloged by the Library of
Congress as follows:
Liberman, Kenneth, 1948-
Dialectical practice in Tibetan philosophical culture : an ethnomethodological inquiry
into formal reasoning I Kenneth Liberman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
I. Philosophy, Tibetan. 2. Philosophy, Buddhist. I. Title.
B5233.T53L53 2004
I 84'. l-dc22
2004042703
ISBN-13 : 978-0-7425-2744-7 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-IO: 0-7425-2744-1 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN-13 : 978-0-7425-5612-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-IO: 0-7425-5612-6 (cloth: alk. paper)
Printed in the United States of America
8""T he paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-l 992.
Contents
Acknowledgments v11
Foreword
Harold Garfinkel 1x
Part I:A PostcoloInniqaulii rnytT oi betDaina lectics
1 OrientaalnidTs imb etoloPgriacxails 3
2 Ethnomethodaonldot ghRyee trieovfOa rld inaSroyc iety 25
3 TheO rganizaotfRi eoans oniinnTg i betPahni losopDheibcaatle 5s1
Part IIP:h ilosopPhriacxaiilnst hTei betAanc ademy 79
4 OrganiztihnOegb jectiovfti htDeyi scourDsiea:l ecatnidc s
Communication 81
5 Reasoansa P ublAicct ivity 107
6 Rhymeasn dR easoRne:a soanst hIen Vivo, ConcerWtoerdk
ofT ibetPahni losophers 121
7 StrateigniT eisb etPahni losopDheibcaatle s 165
ParItI IA: S ocioloofgR ye asoning 235
8 UsinRge asonCsa:p abiloiftF ioersm aAln alysis 237
9 SomeB etrayoafFl osrm alA nalysis 273
Bibliography 309
Index
319

Acknowledgments
I acknowledge with lifelong gratitude the contributions of these fine teachers
who taught me the ways of the world. In chronological order, Eleanor Paola
Liberman, Dolores Martin Bielenson, Herbert Dodge, Prof. W. T. Jones, Prof.
Lee McDonald, Prof. W. Russell Ellis, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, Prof. Peter
Berger, Prof. Harold Garfinkel, Prof. Herbert Marcuse, Prof. Frederick Olafson,
Lama Thubten Yeshe, H. H. XIVth Dalai Lama, H. H. XVIth Gyalwa Karmapa,
Geshe Sonam Rinchen, Khenpo Aped, Swami Gitananda Giri, Sri Pattabi Jois,
Prof. Satyanarayana Shastry, Kensur Lobsang Tenzin, Geshe Lhundrup Sopa,
Khenpo Jhado Rinpoche, and my three best friends (two of whom are deceased)
Mark Casady, John Raser, and Jon Ewing.
It is one more sign of our degenerate age that I am incapable of replacing
any of my teachers who are listed here, whose brilliant insight and compassion­
ate energy will always exceed my own.
A project of this length requires not merely some financial assistance; the
occasional external expression of confidence of its worth was vital for sustaining
the researcher's own confidence and self-discipline. Such encouragement and
financial support for field research undertaken during the period 1984-1999 was
provided by the University of Oregon's Office of Research ( 1984 and 1988), the
Oregon Humanities Center (1995), the American Institute of Indian Studies
(1985 and 1995), the American Philosophical Society (1991 and 1997), and the
American Council of Learned Societies (1992). It is my hope that this study will
provide an enduring documentation of a most remarkable and ancient philoso­
phical practice that is part of humanity's legacy. If this record of that practice
endures for a time, then the confidence expressed by the aforementioned insti­
tutes and offices will have been justified.

Foreword
Harold Garfinkel
University of California, Los Angeles
What is so edifyingly sociological about Ken Liberman's description of debates
by Tibetan monks?
Although his book's central subject-the dialectical practice of formal
analysis in philosophical culture-is highly technical, background features of
this exceptional ethnography are relevantly distinctive in their own right. The
debates are exhibits of embodied work by Tibetan monks in immediately ob­
served choreographed details of correctly argued displays of reason. These dis­
plays are the local conversations of six hundred or more students and faculty,
who are gathered in the monastic university's courtyard, some as performers in
the philosophical debating and others (by turns) as the audience.
Needless to say, it is a noisy affair. The observers of each conversation are
noisily watching, against a background of others noisily watching other local
conversations, a succession of single pairs of debaters. Audience and judges are
examining each pair of debaters in its tum as a properly charitable but cutthroat
display of congregationally witnessed and judged technical issues of truth, rea­
son, rationality, errors, mistakes, confusion, hoax, fraud, imitation, reification,
theater effects, order, and methods made expertly arguable by each debating
pair. These issues, extracted from medieval texts in ancient words of Buddhist
philosophy, are made witnessable here-and-now as correctly disputed phenom­
ena of order in synesthesias of said/shown, listened to, listened for, heard, paced,
rhyming, rhythmic, enacted real-world details. Venerated Buddhist texts are the
sources of these debates, but not as texts from contemporary Wes tern academic
studies in Tibetology or Orientalism. These are the texts as Tibetans themselves
have them.
On one occasion, I was telling one of the first Ph.D.'s in ethnomethodology,
who was also an early author of ethnomethological studies, about Ken Liber­
man's study of debates by Tibetan monks of witnessed reason in its lived, em­
bodied, choreographed exhibits of organizational Things in their details. I