sphairos wrote:Dear Sylvester,
There is no problem at all. "uttaritara" is of course a comparative of "uttara". So: "he knows what's higher" ("transcend" means "be superior or better than some standard"). That means that he transcends what is lower. There is really no problem, just possible word-choices for the same meaning. That "transcends" etc. is perfectly justified he proves masterfully throughout his book and articles. But it's not Fuller alone. Many scholars and Buddhist teachers have roughly the same "views" on this.
Hi sphairos
Might you be able to offer some passages where this comparative adjective uttaritara is not adnominal but can be read verbally?
I think treated logically and grammatically, the object in the sentence which the Buddha knows as something superior is alluded to in the next clause as "taṃ pajānanaṃ" (that understanding). This understanding is contrasted to "ime diṭṭhiṭṭhānā" (these bases for views) criticised in the preceding analyses of each specific view. If the object of the Buddha's knowing is taṃ pajānanaṃ in the Pali, then Fuller's interpretation of uttaritara as the verb "transcends" introduces a totally different object, namely the inferior diṭṭhiṭṭhānā. I am quite unconvinced that we can take liberties like this with the text.
OK, let's dispense with my over-scrupulous grammatical analysis and accept that the phrase can be translated and interpreted as Fuller suggests of "transcends". Does the text actually support Fuller in saying that view/diṭṭhi is transcended or to be transcended? Actually, this is one of the most common mistakes made in reading DN 1. The standard reading implies that DN 1 sets out 62 views. This is incorrect. There are actually only about 10 * groups of views/diṭṭhi but 62 bases for views/diṭṭhiṭṭhānā that are used to construct the total of 10 types of diṭṭhi.
* using the organisation into 10 classes employed in BB‘s translation.
And nowhere does Fuller slip more spectacularly on this than in Chap 4. Despite noting that -
1. the Stream-Enterer is diṭṭhisampanna (accomplished in views) by having Right View; and
2. the Stream-Enterer is diṭṭhiṭṭhānappahāyina (free from the bases of views),
he goes on to introduce the transcending of views as normative of Right View, when the texts simply point to the giving up of the bases of views. And this is confirmed by a more careful reading of DN 1, where the Buddha rejects the 62 bases for views, in favour of knowledge. If you look at the types of views in DN 1 (discounting the dreadful eel-wrigglers), you can see the underlying epistemological methods used to arrive at views from the bases of views. Those views depend on a mixture of Induction and synthetic a priori reasoning (borrowing from Kant for the latter). None of these methods, in Western logic, guarantee truth, and it's something that the Buddha was zooming in for criticism.
If Fuller had not slipped up and had instead argued that the texts actually advocate knowledge over bases of views, I would have little to quarrel with his otherwise magisterial work.
