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