What is it like to be a Buddha? Is there ony one uddha or are there many? What can Buddha do and what do they kow? Is there anything the cannot do an cannot know? These and associated questions were much discussed by Buddhist thinkers in India, and a complex and subtle set of doctrinal postitions was developed to deal with them. This is the first book in a western languages to treat these doctrines about Buddha from a philosophical and throloughly critical viewpoints.
The book shows that Buddhistthinker were driven when theorizing about Buddha, by a basic intuition that Buddha must be maximally perfect and that pursuing the implications of this intuition led them into some conceptual dilemmas that show considerable similarity to some of tose treated by western theists. The Indian Buddhist tradition of thought about these matters is presented here as throughly systematic, analytical, and doctrinal.
The book’s analysis is based alost entirely upon original sources in their original languages. All extracts discussed are translated into English and the book is accessible to nonspecialists, while still treating material that has not been much discussed by western scholars.
The book raises fundamental issues concerning not obnly Buddhist ways of conceptualizing divinity but human ways in general of doing so. It provides remarkable new insights in both of those domains, The book is of unquestionable importance.
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